Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related how do you write?

do you see words and compose sentences/paragraphs first?

or do you see a movie and try to write what you see?

or a combination?

or something else?

I used to do words, long ago. now i see a movie, and try to write it. I think that's made it harder, but I don't know how to get away from the dark side. *cough* I'd like to go back to words first, but.... anyway. so what do you do?

For me...I see the scenes play out in my mind before I write them down. Whether those are "cliff notes" or a whole detailed scene, depend on how my Muse is working at the moment.

I tend to get most of my inspiration while in the shower. My Muse is running rampant and I've been tempted to buy a dry erase board to put up there so I can write all of my ideas down. lol

First off, the requisite links. We've had a few tangentially similar discussions over the years, which you may be interested in reading. I found them quite easily by searching this forum for keyword "timmy."

Writing to order, or ordered to write? a discussion of how and when ideas come.

Does this sound crazy/Is it just me? a discussion which actually started off with almost exactly the same question. Do you see movies and write them, or does something else happen?

How would you describe your muse? a discussion... which is actually kind of self-explanatory.

You may be wondering why I chose "timmy" as my search word. The reason is simple. "Timmy" is the name I've given to the part of my mind which does most of the work in writing. It feels to me like a curious and adventurous little boy, not unlike Lassie's friend or the frequently blown up and replaced lab assisstant of "Mr Lizard" in the sadly short-lived Henson creature sitcom, "Dinosaurs."

The way it generally works for me is that Timmy gets attacked by an idea, takes it home to his attic room (located somewhere in my sub-to-semi-conscious mind), plays around with it, and somehow turns it into a story, which he then writes out himself with as little interference from me as possible. (I'm a bad writer. Boring and stiff. When I interfere with or try to take over for Timmy, things always turn out badly and end up going much more slowly and clumsily.)

So... no movies for me. Just ideas that expand and form and then get turned into text. Sometimes, I can visualize a scene, and I'll use that as a tool to help me describe things. Some rare times, I'll get a movie clip as part of an idea, but it's usually extremely short and very vague (outside of the main focus objects).

That's the best answer I can give you.

Paul

I won't answer here, because I see I've pretty much set out how it works for me in those previous threads.

And aren't those fascinating to revisit - and fun, too! Thanks for searching out those links, Paul!

LabRat

I tend to see movies, which is why my fics are usually dialogue- or action-based.

Sometimes I find myself inside the head of a character, which usually leads to introspection pieces or first-person stories.

And there are some instances where a random line gets stuck in my head and I try to work it in a story. (This hardly ever works, though.)

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

veeeeeery inneresting..... because now that I think about it, I think long ago I decided that my writing had no description of the environment/surroundings, and that's why I started trying to see movies in my mind, in order to move it off of the dialogue and see what's going on around me. just very interesting that we went like the letter X--- started in opposite corners and raced across to the other side, meeting briefly in the middle!

For me... sometimes a line of dialogue will strike me or a turn of phrase. That will often times evolve into a whole scene. Typically, I see and hear stuff in my head (like a movie, as you said) and I'll write from that.

And since we're asking the "how do you write" question... I'm wondering if anyone else writes like I do... Not just the see the movie and write it method, but I actually find myself getting into character, if you will. As in... I'm so inside the head of whoever's POV I'm in that I feel what he or she is feeling. Sometimes to the point that I cry or give myself headaches.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else writes like that.

Sara

I do get into character as I write, but I do it at a distance. It feels kind of like being empathic would, I'd guess. I know what the feelings are, and I do feel them to some degree, but I know they're not mine. They don't affect me very deeply.

Paul

LOL, Sileas. I actually have trouble with describing the ambient in my stories. It might have to do with my non-native English speaker status, but I can never do the picture I have in my mind justice. So I usually end up just lining out the basics. (I have occasionally thought about illustrating my fics, but neither my hand is not really cooperative about that :rolleyes: )

Ditto there, Sara!! I always do that, it helps me a lot with heavily emotional scenes. And it affects me a lot... especially if the character is female, where I can relate to her more easily.

I was writing an angsty scene a couple of weeks ago. I'm telling you the truth, I really needed a hug when I was done... And since there was nobody available around, I went to distract myself taking a test with questions like 'If you were a feeling/colour/song right now, what would you be?' Oy. You should have seen my answers. As if I were having a depression crisis.

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

I too like to get into the heads of my characters and like Anna, I can get affected by it...but I can see it from both the male and female perspective. I think that's one of the reason why people have said in that I'm good at writing dialoge.

i do *kinda* get into someone's head, but not quite that far. but it does take a while sometimes to "find" someone emotionally.

ok, el-cheapo shot story reference coming....

i'm doing a batman one (of course) where the mask is pulled off. I had one chance last fall (of 2004) to write the exact part where it comes off "officially", not the time when the paramedics remove it (they thought they had a fake). very emotional, confusing, angry scene, and for some dumb moronic reason I didn't write it then. now i've lost it. oh, I know i'll have to write it, and I will, but I won't capture it with the emotional clarity that I would have if I had written it when it was "hot". stuff goes stale, and usually it's emotions or dialogue, for me. I'll be laying in bed waiting to fall asleep and the movie will be playing crystal clear in my head, and I'll try to remember the dialogue for tomorrow. so the next day I get up, turn on the work computer, and work my job until 4:30 pm and rush over to my personal one, boot up, word perfect, right file, scroll to where that scene belongs, and.... only bits of the conversation is remembered. So I have to reconstruct it or re-imagine it, but it comes out about as well as a copy of the mona lisa reproduced by using a 2X4 dipped in highway striping paint. grrrr.....

also hate it mightily when characters steal the script. that's actually what's taking so long on the rewrite of the epilogue scene for steel knights. lois is *exceedingly* professional at filming stuff, and with her influence, clark usually behaves quite well, but I musta run to the bathroom at one point, and I come back and they're both flipping through the script and talking, and i'm going oh, nooooooooo....... thing is, they both had excellent suggetions, and it's difficult to say no to them, but I don't want a 3/4 page scene turned into a 3-page overboiled cabbage, good though it is. And then they leave ME to FINISH the thing! they don't make suggestions for closing it off. thanks a lot, guys! *sarcasm* Lois is usually a dream to work with, but i'm still pissed at clark and bruce for stealing the script from another one (what happened with The Car after the lakes were sent to prison in Don't Tug on S's duds) and turning it into a frigging comedy. bruce wayne, a COMEDY! grrrrrrr! what a couple of idiots. I finally had to threaten to have clark slag bruce's Other Car, The Black One, and turn it into a coral reef. they both shut up at that point, but I'm still not on speaking terms with those two on that story.

now this is turning into a rant.....I'll shuddup.

....hm....while we're at it....

waddya do when you get stuck? what works? get to the middle of the conversation and alla a' sudden..... dead silence.


can't think of what comes next. (or someone has stolen the script again.... ). or don't know how to begin a scene, or don't know how to close off a scene or conversation, etc. hm...I shoulda posted this in a separate topic, and get the topic hat trick---three topics in a row that have already been dealt with in past topics/posts!

When I get stuck, I'll back off and take a break. Do something completely different for a little while and let my subconscious work on the problem. That might be fifteen minutes, or as long as a few years When (if) I decide that I'm going to go on anyway, I figure out what *has* to happen in a scene (Lois leaves the room, Clark sees a clue, whatever) and then use however awful prose I need to get that done. Generally, once I force myself to start, I'll warm up and get into the flow of things.

Alternatively, I might decide that the reason I can't write a scene is that I shouldn't write the scene (taking the plot in the wrong direction), or should write it from a different angle. Then I scrap what I have and start over.

Okay, I don't actually *scrap* what I had -- I usually copy it over to another file, just in case I want it later. I never have, that I can recall, but you just never know. And moving it seems much less final than deleting, so I'm more likely to make the change. It's my safety net.

PJ
who should go interact with relatives now

fifteen minutes to a couple of years---i totally hear that one. it's weird, sometimes, bringing out the dinosaurs, but kinda fun. sometimes it even, happily, makes you wonder "why did i get stuck here?" as the fingers fly, filling in the gaps.

sometimes, forcing the movie to play works for me. i just used that to dig myself out of a block last night with a conversation among the Kents.

I think I'm discovering something to generate new scenes. shut down word perfect, turn off the computer, and resolve to spend the evening doing embroidery or finishing a drawing of dean cain. so then I sit there for a few minutes looking at a smashingly yummy looking picture of deano smiling his lil face off, and all of a sudden, a scene of superman being nasty and threatening comes to me....

....like, that actually just happened, in fact.

in general, it seems to be turning off the computer gets things going. rather peevish, if you ask me. how moronic would it be to wish for a laptop when you already have a perfectly functional computer at your disposal? just the idea of sitting in my comfy spot on the futon in my living room, pecking away merrily on the laptop in my lap, rather than coming to this other room that has computers and only computers (my work one is here too) in it.....i'd rather do it where it's more comfy!

Poorly.

My fics aren't long enough to really get inside someone's head. However, the way I write spins off of a 'what-if' scenario. I usually don't even rack my brains for story ideas, which probably explains why I only write a couple a year. I just go about my day-to-day routine, and sometimes something retarded happens, like I'll get that drunk feeling off NyQuil for example, and suddenly I'll think, 'what if this happened to Clark or Lois?' And my brain is off and running. Or I'll forget to feed my fish for a week (who finally died this summer), and I'll think, 'I wonder how Lois' fish survive?' Very rarely I'm inspired by challenge fic ideas, but those are also known to happen every couple of years.

My stories have always been short enough to write in one sitting. Fortunately they have been so far because if I get hooked on an idea, I will not let go of the keyboard until I write it all out. :p

JD

holy #%@( batman, I wish mine were that short....

we need a lil face that's green with envy.

i'm lucky if i finish something before i die of old age.

...and actually... (i'm going to hijack my own thread again.... )

paper or 'puter? I switched about.....oh...I guess 1990-1993 or so, getting done with college, finally getting to use a computer to write something fun, something other than cranking out endless history papers. (wait---come to think of it, I've got several legal pads full of writing from 1995-1998 or so.... hm.... stuff that I still haven't transferred to the computer. probably because I now think it's bad writing, and not worth wasting time on.)

but now I'm half wishing I could go back to paper, because I'm one of those people who has a compulsion to be reading something at the breakfast table, and last night's writing is the ticket. unfortunately, I don't have a printer, so I'd have to turn my computer on, but that's plugged into the same weanie power outlet that my work computer is plugged into, and the work one is going to have to come on in 10 or 15 minutes anyway. so no reading until after 4:30.

if it was on paper, I could not only read it at breakfast, I could read it and even work on it during breaks!

plus, paper seems so much less threatening to me. The computer uses electrical power, and has many parts to it, and makes sounds on occasion. it's very Official, and that intimidates someone small and easily frightened, like me.

Definitely computer.

Over the decades I've been writing, I've used most methods. Handwritten notes/scenes on paper, transferred to typewriter. Typexx! Carbon paper! Arrgggggh! <shudder>

I'm a bit of a Rewrite Queen when it comes to writing, I'm forever going over the previous sections I've written and tweaking endlessly till it's...Just. So.

Doing that on paper/typewriter was a nightmare. I felt I'd died and gone to heaven when Word Processors came along and cut and paste. Heaven! Whoever invented cut and paste (and spellcheck! I'm the world's lousiest speller, so that was like a gift from the gods) is my hero.

Although my very first WP wasn't that much of an improvement over the paper/typewriter it has to be said. A little Amstrad, it had the annoying habit of not telling you you'd run out of disk space until you tried to save the last 15 pages you'd written and then despite giving you three options to save it, you'd lose it entirely as none of them worked. And it had no way to move instantly to the end of a file, so if I was working on a fairly large WIP I'd often lose the will to live before I got to where I wanted to be to start writing.

LabRat

I like pens. I mean, I like the feel of them in my hand. A nice, good quality, antiquated fountain pen, for preference...

Seriously, I like jotting things down on paper. Usually these will be story fragments, or even fragments of a scene. Then I'll type them up. If I don't have a notepad to hand, I'll jot things down on paper napkins, on the backs of shopping lists, on the backs of envelopes, in the margins of newspapers...

At the moment I don't have a printer, otherwise I would print out my drafts, and work on them that way, marking up the manuscripts with a favourite pen.

These days, I find myself increasingly typing directly onto the computer, but it is still not my favourite way of working.

For one thing, by writing on paper, I end up adding an extra editing stage into my writing; quite often I will reword something between paper and keyboard.

So... Well. I'm a kind of half-and-half kind of person, I suppose.

Chris

While I sometimes feel the urge to grab a pen and start jotting down nonsense (that can range from my signature to God knows what), and I actually do that, I can't really work on a story unless I'm working on a computer. Okay, some scenes come out quite easily, but for the most part I need to try out a few different versions to decide how I like my story the best.

This year, I'm getting prepared for the final examinations that will allow me to enter the university. One of the subjects I'll be examined at is composition writing. I have a new teacher this year. When he handed me back the first composition I had given him to grade, we had this dialogue:

Teacher: You write without planning first, right?
Me: Well, I do have an outline in my head, but I don't take any notes.
Teacher: You should.

My composition was a mess: words smudged and replaced, words crumpled into small spaces with arrows, whole paragraphs crossed out, other paragraphs inserted with asterisks... it was the first time I realized that my compositions are always this messy.

Me: But sir, they say that the appearance of the composition doesn't matter, as long as everything else is all right.
Teacher: Maybe, but it predisposes the teacher who will grade it against you.

He tried to convince me to line out a plan before writing. It failed miserably; I CAN'T plan. I can follow a given plan, but I can't plan myself anything more than the specific instructions given in the subject. I started doing something else, though; when I'm having trouble with a sentence or paragraph, I start writing it on a spare piece of paper. If it looks right, I write it in the exam paper. If not, I work on the spare piece until it looks right.

Babbling? I just wanted to explain that I ended up doing what I do on the computer when writing fics. I type, and if it looks right it stays. If not, delete and start over. (Good thing I'm a fast typist.)

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

I do a little of both and usually it depends on what kind of writing I'm working on.

If I'm involved in an rpg type situation, the first draft of the post will usually be done on the computer.

I prefer to work with pen and paper when it comes to stories that I'm working on by myself. There's something so intimate about putting the pen to the paper while crossing out, writing in and scribbling darkly across things I want to rework and edit.

Images and dialog usually strike me at various times for different things i'm interested in (Buffy, etc) and then the writing just happens.

This is interesting!

It definitely depends on what I'm writing. When I'm writing about my opinion, the words fly out on the keyboard really quickly, usually in an acceptably organized way. If they're too messy, I just clean it up later. It's a very, very, natural self-expressive process.

When I'm writing about something I'm not interested in that I have to do, like a research paper, the words take forever to drag out, I have to formulate and organize all thoughts and facts in my head first, sometimes I will have to write some sort of outline on paper.

When I'm writing a story or a play, it's much different. For me to start writing a story or a play, I sort of vaguely decide what I want to happen, and usually, somehow the story writes itself. I sort of see everything happen in my mind, and I write it all down as it's "happening"...which is why a lot of the time I have a lot of little nitty details that aren't really necessary to the plot but I have to have there to capture exactly how I saw it in my head. The nice thing is, the story/play really writes itself this way, because as long as I provide a spark, I let the characters react accordingly.

And I used to be a strictly paper-only kind of girl but I've grown out of that...the computer's just so much better for me because I can type a lot faster than I can write and I can put things into paragraphs a few pages after I've written it, break things up, put things together, copy and paste...and there are no messy squiggles or symbols.