Writing is fun

[Dr.Device]

I'm going to talk about my writing in this thread, but anyone should feel free to throw in their own anecdotes.

I managed to flip a switch in my head recently, and I'm writing again. I'm writing a lot. On my main project, I've written over 40k words this month, with a few thousand more that I've ditched or set aside for possible future use. This makes me very happy.

 

Quite a while back, I posted a link to the one novel I've completed. anyone who remembers that would be unsurprised to learn that my current project is about teens with super powers. The protagonist, Frank,  is a character who was the antagonist in a bunch of stories I used to tell my kids at bedtime (but aged up a little, and with the G rated filter removed). Her worst enemy is the protagonist from most of those stories, Emily. I'd tried to write stories with Emily in the past, but she's just too good. She's based on my second Champions character, altered to be what my kids wanted in a superhero (e.g. she always won). That image of her is too stuck in my head for me to tone her down, much, so she wasn't really workable as a protagonist. As an antagonist, or even supporting character, though, she's fine. So her nemesis Frank became the protagonist, and Emily is the thorn in her side.

 

Since I'm essentially writing fanfic (even if it is for a world that's only in my head), it's probably inevitable that Frank and Emily would get thrown together, and get, if not an enemies-to-lovers arc, at least an enemies-to-girlfriends arc. It turns out that that's a lot of fun to write. Of course, that requires a redemption arc for Frank, which is fine, because I'm a fan of redemption arcs.

 

If Emily had been the protagonist, these would have been flat out superhero stories. With Frank as protagonist, though, they're not so much that, at least not at first. She isn't looking to save anyone. They're more slice-of-life or adventure stories.

 

The story I'm currently working on has Emily and Frank thrown into a parallel universe where the event that led to superpowers in their universe never happened (essentially our world). I wanted a fight scene while they're stuck there, partially because I just wanted a fight scene, and partially to advance Frank's redemption arc. 

 

So I started this scene. Getting them to it was no problem; Emily is drawn toward places and times where someone will need protection. Truck crashes through a window, Emily deals with that while Frank teleports around being a bad-ass and dealing with the armed men charging in. It sucked.

 

Sure, Emily's been doing this crap since she was thirteen, but Frank hasn't been in any fight more serious that a high school tussle or a sparring match in her life. She's very competent at [martial art tbd], but that doesn't mean that she'd have any idea how to handle herself in fire fight. Plus, she could just teleport away and leave Emily to deal with things. Facing a bunch of nazis with rifles and handguns, Emily's biggest worry would be not killing them (and keeping innocents safe, of course). I scrapped those 700 words and started again.

 

Now Emily gets taken down by a sniper rifle* as the start to the combat, and Frank needs to deal with the sniper on her own, or a bunch of people are going to die. She chooses to fight, and it's a really hard fight for her. It was so much more satisfying to write than if she'd just been kicking ass and taking names.

 

* I'm open to suggestions as to an appropriate real world weapon to use for this. Emily is a flying brick, with an emphasis on the brick. Small arms fire is basically a minor nuisance to her, and even normal assault rifles can't usually do more than cause a bit of pain or minor bruising. Military grade is fine, as long as it's something that could be lugged by one person up fourteen flights of stairs.

 

 

 

 

[Cygnia]

Good luck.

 

I'm in a similar spot -- after 10+ years of writer's block, I'm getting that urge again.  Managed to write about a total of 2k words so far.  Mind you, it's fanfiction for an obscure RPG, but it's something.

 

(first chapter up here, btw ;))

[death tribble]

My fun at the moment is the Snowball Fight on Deviantart as it uses up the fragments that I have. It is time consuming and absorbing. And yet such fun.

 

But as for writing, I do a lot on the Create Villain and Create Hero threads in the Champions forum. Most of this is freehand, or offhand. But I have just this year completed putting the majority of the hero and villain teams into separate documents. And after a hiatus I suddenly got inspired to come up with new ideas based on what was done before on the Create threads and also things that had not been done before.

[Dr.Device]

Congrats on getting going!

 

The first trigger for me was deciding that it didn't matter what I wrote, as long as I wrote. Heck, I started this flood of words with a Baldur's Gate 3 isekai, which no eyes but mine will ever see, lest they be burned out by the horror.

3 minutes ago, death tribble said:

My fun at the moment is the Snowball Fight on Deviantart as it uses up the fragments that I have. It is time consuming and absorbing. And yet such fun.

 

I'd never heard of that. I'll have to take a look.

[Cancer]

I did a fair amount of intended-to-be-nonfiction writing while teaching, but now that I'm retired I've had six months of break from that, and slowly letting the urge to create regenerate.

 

I tried to kickstart my intentional fiction writing for Nanowrimo last month, but stalled out after about 15k words in.  Got some good scenes committed to hard electrons, but got stalled out trying to scheme the mesoscale plot arc (that is, the plot arc for the one novel) and mesh it into the longstanding overarching tetrology plot.  I have long had the propensity of thinking in scenes and writing those intense nuggets in perhaps extended bursts of activity, and then being less adept at meshing those scenes together into a coherent story.  Yes, I am aware that it's possible to keep that sequence-of-scenes structure and shape a good story from that ... several of my favorite scifi works have that structure ... but I haven't developed that technique yet myself to my own satisfaction.

 

Presently I'm consumed in concocting a new RPG campaign and creating stuff going into that.  That's enough like creating the materials for a newly assigned college course that the writing part of it is no challenge; it's doing the thinking to make sure it'll be a good, playable, entertaining game for the players.  That latter is a process I've botched before.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I have always enjoyed writing, but at the moment everything is on hold because we moved my elderly mother into the house and I have to attend to her more or less all day long.  So no writing, no illustration, no publishing, and barely enough energy to finish a day.

 

CS Forrester, the author of Horatio Hornblower once wrote that he would come up with ideas, then let them go fallow in his head.  He likened it to lowering a log into the water of a sea and letting it build up plants and barnacles and such, then lifting it up after a time to see what grew while he was not paying it any attention.  And I find that happens for me as well. 

 

So while I am not writing, somewhere in the back of my head its still working on plots and characters and dialog and descriptions and story structures and such.  New things are coming up and I scribble them down because my memory isn't what it once was.  Some day I'll get back to it and hopefully be richer as a creator for my experiences and the delay.

[csyphrett]

I have been thinking about this, Doc. I used to be able to rotate through different stories every day, or every other day. Covid temporarily closed the place I used to write at after work, and by the time it reopened my schedule changed. I have lost touch with the rotational aspect of things so I have been writing slabs of one story while ignoring the rest.

I'm hoping to do better in the new year.

CES 

[Christopher R Taylor]

I always lock down to focus on one project at a time because I find I am too easily distracted and will shift around between 20 or so ideas and projects and get nothing really done.  I don't listen to any music either, so I can concentrate better.

[Rich McGee]

2 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I don't listen to any music either, so I can concentrate better.

That's interesting, I'm the exact opposite.  Have to keep something playing in the background - music, podcasts, whatever - to keep focused on the writing process.  I can come up with ideas while it's silent (usually while falling asleep - notepads by bedside mandatory) but not actually translate them into anything without noise.

[Pariah]

Just gonna drop this here...   

 

[Cancer]

I follow that advice.

 

Of course, a bunch of mine I shared with imposed upon my students, but such is the nature of concocting assignments.

[Cygnia]

This popped up on my FB feed this week...

 

[csyphrett]

Lee Child once said that he wrote 2k words a day, but started by rereading what he had already wrote before starting and just staying with it until he had the 2k done.

CES

[csyphrett]

Doctor Device, are you going to do the 50/12 in 2024?

CES 

[Dr.Device]

 

7 hours ago, csyphrett said:

Doctor Device, are you going to do the 50/12 in 2024?

CES 

 

I don't know. What is it?

[csyphrett]

15 hours ago, Dr.Device said:

 

 

I don't know. What is it?

50 thousand words every month for the year. I have tried the last 4-5 years and the most I have ever got was like 420k

CES

[Dr.Device]

19 hours ago, csyphrett said:

50 thousand words every month for the year. I have tried the last 4-5 years and the most I have ever got was like 420k

CES

Hmm, If I'm able to maintain my current trend, I'll manage it. I'm sitting at around 80k words for December, but I had some extra time off, so I doubt I can maintain that. 50k seems doable, though, unless this is a fluke.

 

I took a short (partial) break from my TSP (Teen Supers Project) and wrote an adult short story. I'd never done that before. It was fun.

[csyphrett]

I always seem to have problems in the summer time. This summer I was in the hospital for a week so I didn't get anything done. I am going to try to get back to where I am writing various things again like I used to do. The thing is I can always hit the quartermilly (unofficial challenge to get a quarter million words) but once I do that, I kind of stumble down the line.

CES 

[Michael Hopcroft]

My mother gave me the equivalent of a one-star review for my most recent novel Celia the Angel. She didn't like the genre, hated the title character, and really, really hated that it was written in first-person.

 

Then again, Mom also had great difficulty following the story of The Boy and the Heron, which made perfect sense to me, and was offended when I lent her a copy of Kiyohiko Azuma's popular comedy manga Yotsuba&!, and still hasn't told me why after nearly two decades. Then again, I don't know that I'm particularly keen on her poetry.

 

Right now, I am stuck on my third book, including even deciding which of the three projects in mind it will be.

 

My main concern, of course, now being whether I will benefit from my full-time job if I'm too tired to focus when I come home at night.

[Dr.Device]

I've started posting the main story I worked on during December's rush.

 

Just Super

 

NB - This story has lots of trans and other queer folks. If that's a problem for you, I recommend not reading it.