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

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.