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The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby panyasan » Mon Feb 20, 2012 2:56 pm

Thanks for all your kind words! It was a small thing, but it sure stopped me from writing for a week.

Glory, I thought your post was very interesting. Thanks for sharing. One of the few things I regret living on this part of the world, is that Star Trek are hard to come by. I heard so good things about Spock's World that I would love to get my hands on this book. I have read a couple of Star Trek books, but they weren't anything special, except for one that had an alien captain on a Star Trek ship. I really liked that book. For me, books are part as canon and part of a broader ST universe with many sides and angles.
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Artisticmom2 » Tue Feb 21, 2012 8:05 am

Thanks for the love Panyasan! :hugs And FYI Spock's World is available as an e-book download from Amazon.

I've been watching this thread for a while and you all have brought some interesting points to the table. One of the things I have learned from writing fan fiction is that while it is harder then I thought, in some aspects, it is easier then I thought. I used to read other people's work and think "WOW, I could never do that. That is so creative - where did they come up with that idea?" Then I did. I still sit down and reread some of my stuff and think "I did that!" :o

In another vein (the one about profic and the Save Enterprise Profic)... I would love to see the same level of dedication from the publisher for Enterprise as there is for TOS, TNG, and DS9. All the ST fan fiction I read is for Enterprise and Voyager as those seem to be the ones left out in the cold. I know there is a bit out there for Voyager and have read some of it, but it is just lacking in some way. The Expanded Universe leaves something to be desired. I never feel that way when reading TNG, DS9, or Star Wars profic (I am just not into TOS profic) as there is so much out there and TPTB do a fine job expanding the characters and possible situations.

The last thing I wanted to throw out there was my response to EntAllat's suggestion on writing... most of the time I don't plan things out, I just start writing. I usually end up writing myself into a corner and have to find a plot hole to worm my way out. This is indicative of the way I operate the rest of my life unfortunately... I used to be SO Vulcan in my logical and methodical ways... The few times I have taken the time to write an outline my stories have come so much more easily! :facepalm
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Kathy Rose » Wed Feb 22, 2012 3:03 pm

Two things I learned while working on my Valentine's challenge story:

1. If you are working on a story that is based closely on an episode, transcripts are great, but make sure you watch the episode in any case. The particular transcript I was using had a line attributed to a character other than the one who said it!

2. Sometimes even dialogue in episodes can be incorrect. In my case, the voiceover of a character's log started out with "Feb. 14, 2152." I used that date in my story, then just before posting, as I was double-checking something else, I came across information that stated the date the character used should have been 2154!
Old enough to know better, but that's never stopped me before.
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Archerite » Wed Sep 11, 2013 3:35 pm

I wanted to share a little trick that I've discovered recently while working on a fan fic piece.

I was in the rewriting/editing/pruning stage and I wanted to "comb" the story for any unnecessary words. What I did was enlarge the font of each paragraph. There are a few predefined styles in Word, and I used one of the heading styles, with 26 font size. But whatever text processor you use, you can try this. Seeing my sentences blown out like that, each of them looking like a newspaper headline, made it much easier to spot the words that I could do without. It made me physically see that every word matters.
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby jespah » Wed Sep 11, 2013 5:47 pm

I learned to save everything.

Scenes that don't work for one story often work just fine for another.
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Archerite » Thu Sep 12, 2013 4:45 am

^Oh, yes! Definitely! I write down every idea or dialogue sequence that comes to me and save it. I'm also keeping the various drafts of a story. It's interesting to see how a story has changed over time.
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Artisticmom2 » Fri Dec 20, 2013 2:45 pm

Something new just occurred to me about writing. I am actually emotionally invested in the characters I am writing about. I just finished up a chapter where I killed off someone. I knew they were going to die, that was a foregone conclusion (this is Tiny Tim in my Christmas Carol, Enterprise Style story). But I was surprised to find myself weeping after writing up the scene. <shakes head> Go figure. :cry:
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Lillith » Sat Feb 01, 2014 8:55 pm

For me I've found some things I have to do and some I don't have to do based on the type of story I'm writing. One-shots including drabbles don't have to be planned unless the oneshot is really long. For example if the story needs to be writen, but doesn't fit a multi chapter format. In that case a simple time line of scenes, and what's going on helps a lot.

For longer stories, most likely multi-chapter works I can't really do much unless I have some structure. I can't free write a longer work. It just doesn't work out for me. I've got a Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter crossover thats dead in the water because of a lack of outline. Thankfully it's no longer up, but that story helped me learn some things about planning. I can however write scenes out of order if a particular scene grabs me as long as I know what chapter it's in.

So my list:
    1) Outlines are not the evil spawn of everything bad in the universe. They make writing much easier. Taking the unneeded guess work out, and leaving in just enough to help you write a good story.

    2)Research is your friend. If your using a word in Vulcan or Klingon with multiple sources of translation, it can give you a better grasp on the language to look up as many as you can find.

    3) Lists of things are ok. Make lists of your story ideas, or words you use that aren't human in origin.The same can be said for phrases as well.

    4) Write down everything that comes to mind, even if its just a writing prompt and save it. To echo the previous lesson learned, lists of writing prompts are nice to look at and helpful for sparking idea's.

    5) While you don't want to overwhelm your readers, you don't want to underwhelm them with information as well. A good example of this would be if you where dealing with a what if version of after the season one episode unexpected if Trip hadn't had the baby transfered to another host.You'd be able to go into more detail of his pregnancy, but it wouldn't be good to describe every little ache and pain.
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Lillith » Sat Feb 01, 2014 9:05 pm

This one is more for when writing more then a word in Klingon or Vulcan, or even Andorian:

Write what you want to say in gramaticly correct English , then the literal translation in English. After that you do that, translate it into the language your using.

I know this works with Vulcan for sure, because it makes you look up different forms and parts of things. Don't take my word for the Klingon though, it's just an inference.
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Re: The things I learned about writing while writing fan fic

Postby Lillith » Sun Dec 07, 2014 6:57 am

I did learn that I'm happy to write one-shot series out of order, and unless they're wildly so I am fine posting them when polished. The fact I don't write uber long one-shots is probably the reason I can do this though, and I keep a timeline! Timelines are pretty damn awesome as far I'm concerned when keeping track of when something happened.
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