Fandom Snowflake Challenge

[dragonyphoenix]

Day 3: In your own space, talk about your creative process - from what inspires you to what motivates you to how you manage to break through blocks. Does your process change depending on the type of creating you're doing? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

It's interesting timing for this question because just recently I was thinking of a system I used to have for generating stories. There were four columns, each with different labels, and different story ideas went into each column and then there was cross-referencing between them. That's about all I can recall. The last time I needed to generate a story idea, I set a five minute timer and wrote out story ideas until I had one I could work with.

Some of my more interesting ideas seem to pop up out of nowhere. When I was thinking about the story that came to be The Man for example. It was for a Remix and I'd been assigned aadler's stories, and I had no idea what to do with them so I just read a whole bunch of them in one afternoon and then that night, after I'd settled into bed, the idea of taking Critical Review and remixing the book it talked about as a movie just popped into my head.

The idea to rewrite BtVS episodes in a Dr. Seuss format came about in a similar manner. The prompt at Open on Sunday was any BtVS episode title. Limiting myself to season 2, I saw “Go Fish” and I think it sounded like a Dr. Seuss title, and there it was.

Sometimes I'm inspired by stories by other authors. And If My Love Had Never Let Me Go was based on the last chapter of Trekker's In Another Life. I did learn a valuable lesson with this story. Do not duplicate more than one character at a time! Having mutiple doubles is confusing and hard to follow. Really hard to follow, even for the writer. Note: apparently Trekker's website is now dust in the wind. If anyone has working links to those stories, I'd love to know.

As I've been rereading my stories, the one thing I wish I'd done, at least with the drabbles, is to have done more editing. Reading a number of them now, I think they could have been much better.

On This Side of Goodbye is a story that did get to – and possibly beyond – my satisfaction. It was originally much shorter. I thought I'd be finished with it weeks before I was. When I asked for advice, comments from a bunch of really helpful people kept giving me new and interesting ideas so I just kept writing and rewriting and rewriting. A lot of the awesomeness of this story is due to their input.

For longer stories, I tend to write the whole story before posting. Shanshu, on the other hand, I'm pretty much making up as I go along. In this way Shanshu works similarly to what I said about On This Side of Goodbye. I post a chapter, people comment, and those comments are incorporated into how the story moves forward. For example, one commenter was looking forward to Xander being antagonistic toward Spike, who goes by Will in this story. Another wanted to know why Xander had been so nasty and so now Xander has this whole backstory that I knew nothing about until that question was asked. Actually that's been rather fun.

And that was a lot more than I'd expected to say since I don't, as far as I know, have a process.

Comments

[snogged.livejournal.com]

It was fun reading about your process!

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I think I like reading the results of the process more than the process itself but it was interesting to take a look at my process. It's not something I generally give much thought to.

[velvetwhip.livejournal.com]

Shanshu is already a favorite of mine, just so you know.


Gabrielle

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's excellent to know.