How Do You Approach Writing

[Archerite]

Hi, everyone!

I have been away from this lovely board for a long time, but lately I've returned to a steadier writing schedule and I find myself in need of talking to other writers, so here I am.

I wanted to ask you how you approach your writing. How important is getting into the mood of the story that you wish to write? And where does technique come into play? I think technique should serve the atmosphere and message of the story, and the actual question is how do you keep yourself concentrated enough to produce that kind of writing? There are all sorts of distractions around, and I find that it's difficult to get back into the mood of a story when you want to resume work. The problem is that mood/atmosphere is such a fleeting, subjective thing, it's not something physical that you can place on your writing desk and miraculously draw inspiration from.

So what do you do to preserve the mindset of a certain story when you need to step away from it and deal with other responsibilities? I see there's a musical inspiration thread, which I can't wait to read. I use music as well and it does help. But do you also find help in things like plotting stories in advance or character biographies? Or just jutting out a piece of dialogue while it's fresh in your mind and edit later? For me, plotting sometimes ruins the momentum when I'm really feeling "inspired".

This is already a cliche, but for me at least it's essential that I love what I'm writing about - the characters and the situation. If I'm not invested emotionally with my characters, I just get bored and abandon the story. I suppose that's how it should be. After all, if I don't care about my story, why should I expect others to care? But another question arises: write for love or write for meaning? That is, should I write for my own pleasure and hope that others will draw pleasure from my writing as well, or should I write in order to convey a meaningful idea? Or does meaning come naturally if you just write what you love?

[Honeybee]

I really can't de-couple meaning or character. They all evolve together.

But my process is very specific. I'm working on an original piece that was built on some scenes that popped into my head. Although, I do love writing serialized fanfic because I get a boost/inspiration from comments and encouragement. However, I just got a breakthrough by coming up with a new scene that will be developed into a subplot.

But here's basically how I work. A scene or scenario pops into my head. Years ago, I got the idea the TnT's kid would grow up "different" and I had this idea of her getting involved in a star-crossed kidnapping scenario. It took awhile to gestate, but there came Seeing Angels.

In the history challenge years ago, I got The Tudors, and I was hung up on trying to place a story in the era of Henry VIII, but then an image of Archer as Sir Walter Raleigh in service to Elizabeth I and boom, the whole story evolved from there.

But basically, scenes form in my head and gestate until I cannot NOT write them, and there we go.

I am thinking of recruiting some betas for my original piece, though. I need encouragement/critique.

[EntAllat]

Good to see you again Archerite!

Great question, btw.

I wanted to ask you how you approach your writing. How important is getting into the mood of the story that you wish to write? And where does technique come into play?

Mood is very important and I find it's what starts and ends any successful attempt, on my part, to write a complete story. Technique, for me, comes in the middle of the process.

I think technique should serve the atmosphere and message of the story, and the actual question is how do you keep yourself concentrated enough to produce that kind of writing? There are all sorts of distractions around, and I find that it's difficult to get back into the mood of a story when you want to resume work. The problem is that mood/atmosphere is such a fleeting, subjective thing, it's not something physical that you can place on your writing desk and miraculously draw inspiration from.

So what do you do to preserve the mindset of a certain story when you need to step away from it and deal with other responsibilities? I see there's a musical inspiration thread, which I can't wait to read. I use music as well and it does help. But do you also find help in things like plotting stories in advance or character biographies? Or just jutting out a piece of dialogue while it's fresh in your mind and edit later? For me, plotting sometimes ruins the momentum when I'm really feeling "inspired".

Mood is what gets the idea percolating in my head first. (This is where musical inspiration comes in for me.) I'll let it stay there, in my head, for quite a while before committing anything to digital bits. It seems it's much easier to evoke a daydream-like state where the scenes and dialog and plot come to me if I don't write anything down right away.

At some point, it's become a scene or two or ten on repeat in my head. At that point I have to write it down or lose it. This might be hours later, days later or it might months later, depending on how big the idea is. Usually I find that I lose a LOT of the details this way, and it's my one frustration about my own process - only the bones of the idea remain and I feel like I'm grasping at straws to get everything down. I do try to get down as much as I can but it's essentially an inefficient brain dump. Sometimes what ends up written down is in the form of notes. Occasionally it's whole paragraphs and almost complete scenes and dialog. Sometimes it's a combination of both, plus a sort of outline to get the story from A -> B -> Z. I'll do whatever comes to me in the moment and edit later. I don't worry about plot, or details, etc. and in the end it always feel vaguely disappointing.

I rarely continue to write after a brain dump like that, right after I've got it all down. (Possibly because I'm disappointed with it?) It usually needs to sit for a while longer before I can come back to it and I'm not really sure why. I do know that it's harder for me to focus on technique if I try to write right away, and at this point I need technique to move forward. Given some time, I can write on it, whether I'm in the mood or not. I'm in a totally different sort of headspace for this part of my story writing process - one more akin to where I am if I'm writing nonfiction, or even just email. Basically, I'm just trying to clearly communicate something. Sometimes the story changes dramatically from what I initially had in my head but I don't worry too much about that. (Though I do, just a little.) This part is actually very easy and all I need is time. I can usually do it even with distractions around - like I said, it's kinda like writing email.

Then there's another pause, another time when I leave the story alone for a while. When I come back to it this time, I get down in the details, into the emotion and in the flow of it. Every little word matters. What is said and isn't said matters. For me as the writer, this is when mood really matters. And this is the hard part. If I don't have the time, quiet space and place to focus so that I'm actually feeling my story like that, I can't do this part. The upside is I always know I've finished with my story when I laugh or get teary eyed or feel the excitement of the action every time I read it. If I draw myself in, then I'm done. But I have to be in that mood to get it to that point and the mood sometimes even gets in the way of being able to write. During the technique phase I can get pages out in an hour. During this phase, I might be lucky to finish one paragraph in an hour.

This is already a cliche, but for me at least it's essential that I love what I'm writing about - the characters and the situation. If I'm not invested emotionally with my characters, I just get bored and abandon the story. I suppose that's how it should be. After all, if I don't care about my story, why should I expect others to care? But another question arises: write for love or write for meaning? That is, should I write for my own pleasure and hope that others will draw pleasure from my writing as well, or should I write in order to convey a meaningful idea? Or does meaning come naturally if you just write what you love?

I think the latter is true. If you love it, it has some sort of meaning for you.

Still, I find myself wrapping up some sort of meaning into a story during the technique phase. It can be deliberate, but it isn't always. Something may occur to me to be what the story is "really" about, and I end up doing a little research to address that, or making sure that the plot touches on that from time to time. Even when I don't do this deliberately, I'll look back at the finished piece and realize, oh, that's what that's all about. Often the title of the story hints at whatever meaning I found in it.

[lfvoy]

What a fantastic idea for a thread. Thanks, Archerite. (For the record folks, I've been reading, but it's kind of bad manners to post when all you really have to say is "yeah, me too.")

I wanted to ask you how you approach your writing. How important is getting into the mood of the story that you wish to write? And where does technique come into play? I think technique should serve the atmosphere and message of the story, and the actual question is how do you keep yourself concentrated enough to produce that kind of writing? There are all sorts of distractions around, and I find that it's difficult to get back into the mood of a story when you want to resume work. The problem is that mood/atmosphere is such a fleeting, subjective thing, it's not something physical that you can place on your writing desk and miraculously draw inspiration from.

I'm not entirely sure I agree that mood and technique are diametrically opposed. One of my own techniques -- and it is definitely an intentional technique -- is that, at the beginning of every writing session, I sit down and read the parts (no more than a couple of pages) that are going to come immediately before whatever section I'm writing. Almost invariably, that helps to draw me back into the atmosphere and mood of the piece, and figure out how to pick up where I left off.

Like you, I find it helpful to have a certain amount of discipline to the writing. For me that means I write at about the same time every morning, and an hour or so is built into my morning routine. It was not easy to get it started, but once I got the routine going I discovered that my mind and thoughts actually started switching into writer mode as soon as I got to that certain point in my morning routine each day, and that it was easier to "catch" the mood I'd left behind when I was in that mode.

So what do you do to preserve the mindset of a certain story when you need to step away from it and deal with other responsibilities? [...] But do you also find help in things like plotting stories in advance or character biographies? Or just jutting out a piece of dialogue while it's fresh in your mind and edit later? For me, plotting sometimes ruins the momentum when I'm really feeling "inspired".

I'm an outliner, but I'll admit that my outlines would probably make my high school English teacher shudder. They often start out as a jumble of random thoughts, dialogue that pops into my mind, and other things that fall into the "inspired" category. I save these original scratchpad notes as plain text files a lot of the time -- and add to them as things pop into my head -- and often refer back to them even after I'm done creating a chronological outline and am into writing the story in earnest.

I guess you could say that yeah, I get hit by spurts of inspiration, but what comes out of them rarely actually makes it into the story. It makes it into my notes instead, and the notes become the story. (Sometimes a piece of dialogue or a scrap of description will make it through verbatim, but it's not much.)

If I'm not invested emotionally with my characters, I just get bored and abandon the story. I suppose that's how it should be. After all, if I don't care about my story, why should I expect others to care?

I'm firmly convinced that they won't.

But another question arises: write for love or write for meaning? That is, should I write for my own pleasure and hope that others will draw pleasure from my writing as well, or should I write in order to convey a meaningful idea? Or does meaning come naturally if you just write what you love?

My mother's also a writer and in fact serves as my first beta reader for a lot of my work -- including, yes, my ENT fan fiction. We had an argument about this the last time I visited her, when I was beta-ing something in return and it became incredibly obvious that she was writing with an agenda in mind. It was turning her characters flat and her plot into a cliche because both of them were being forced into a mold where they didn't quite fit.

"Write for the story," I argued. "If the theme's true, it'll find its way in there all by itself." I also mentioned that I've been startled to go back and read things I've written for a story and realize that there's a very strong theme/meaning within them. It's happened so many times that I've finally quit writing for the theme/meaning/whatever you want to call it.

Her problem was that the theme wasn't in there when she wrote for the story. My response was a very gentle question about whether the meaning was a real one or if she was just trying to preach to her audience. She didn't like that very much and decided to go back and rework her characters by figuring out what kind of person would end up in the situation she wanted to illustrate, and how they'd get there.

It was a legitimate response even if I don't agree with it, and I'm not sure it would work in fan fiction where the characters are already defined for you. But your mileage may vary. In fact, I think this is a question that is going to be answered differently for every different writer.

The most important part is to write what's best for you, but I often remember a phrase I ran into in Honeybee's work: the opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference. Just because you love your characters doesn't mean you can't do bad things to them.

[paulinem]

This is very interesting.

Me? My method of writing is chaos. Truth. Especially lately. If anyone looked at my folders they'd probably do a facepalm, because I'm all over the place. I thought I had it down right, only to find myself getting lost with too many documents kept in too many places which causes me to be unfocussed.

I believe this is down to having too many stories going at once, and too many plot points that don't run concurrently, hence why I have a gazillion documents. As an example:

I've been trying to write an original piece, have been for probably 2 years now. This OP is important to me, and yes, I do have a message that I want to get across, but hopefully I won't be preaching. Anyhoo (sorry, for those who don't know, I'm Aussie, and this is a word we do use ), the story, basically, is told in a series of short stories, but the problem is that I'll have an idea but it's for a future story. So, my fix for that is to have a 'Randoms' document, which covers All of the series, but what was happening, is when I know what idea it relates to, I start another 'Random' document. LaSigh! This leads to chaos, because when I get to a certain part of the story I have NO idea which document I've saved it in and the hunt begins. Hours later, when I've finally found it, I've lost my focus and will to write. I am currently trying to change this behaviour.

Another issue is I am easily distracted which, believe it not, is a good thing. With this original piece I'm writing, I was getting to a point of how do I make this exciting, tense, yadda, yadda, yadda. I just couldn't find a plot that would work. Cue Facebook games. Yes. Facebook games (did I mention that I'm easily distracted!?). Yesterday I had another one of my bizarre dreams. It was about my two heroes in my OP, but what I found fascinating, once I remembered the whole dream later, is that there were these objects, round and spiky (exactly like puppy Belle's toys), that would mutate from just being yellow, to other colors, until they were multi colored, just like they way that cropsies would mutate in Farm Heroes Saga. This was the impetus for the blockage I was enduring to clear, and by the end of the day I had planned out the last 8 short stories. Isn't it funny where inspiration comes from!? Now it's a matter of finding the words.

Further on inspiration, I find word prompts, images, and music inspire. I'll often find myself when I'm listening, or watching something, creating a scene in my head for either for Enterprise or my OP, or both. I also find that fascinating.

In closing...

I really do hope that this all made sense?

[jespah]

It's a combo for me.

I have odd little snippets of paper (which are mostly enclosed in a Word doc now) for strange bits of inspiration that I want to save up for later.

One of them said (I've already written this) smart kangaroos. Another said Eriecho (also already written).

I also get a lot of inspiration from the natural world, from walking and interacting with my neighborhood, listening to music and just thinking elliptically. I get home, eat, and then usually write something out long hand, then I'll transcribe it, either that night or a few nights later. Then I'll edit and reread at night. Lather, rinse, repeat.

[EntAllat]

So what do you do to preserve the mindset of a certain story when you need to step away from it and deal with other responsibilities?

Something else that just came to mind - besides the fact that my process seems to preserve the mood and mindset for me until I can come back to a certain story, there's four things that help me recapture it after I have stepped away from the story for a while, for whatever else I have to deal with:

1) The original musical inspiration. Whatever song or instrumental piece brought on the idea in the first place, is what I'll turn to once again when I need to get back into the mindset of a specific story. It always works for me.

2) lfvoy's technique of reading the paragraphs before. Before I'll start writing on my story again, I'll read it. That usually works to bring me right back to where I was when I was writing it to begin with.

3) Reading some OTHER story of mine. I know that doesn't make much sense if I'm trying to find the right mindset for the story I'm working on now, but if both are dramas, or both are angst, or both are funny - you get the idea - it gets me in the right mood for that sort of writing, if not exactly the specific circumstances of the new story.

4) Watching an episode. That frequently works to bring the characters back to life for me. The actor's voices are still ringing in my head, the colors of the ship, the little quirks and visual details all linger enough to get be back to the story.

[Mistress Euclid]

I am someone who has to hash out long story arcs in order for me to write. I do a lot of pre-planning, and I pretty much know how the story will go before I write a word. I do tweak and add subplots as I go along, but I generally know where I am going.

[lfvoy]

I get home, eat, and then usually write something out long hand, then I'll transcribe it, either that night or a few nights later. Then I'll edit and reread at night. Lather, rinse, repeat.

One other thing that has helped me a lot is paying attention to my body/mind's cues about the best times to write. I'm a definite non-morning person but I noticed that I tend to be more focused if I write in the morning before work, versus writing in the evening after work. It's also easier to catch mood, etc., if I'm fresh the way I am in the morning.

I fought this for a while but I finally just gave my muse a couple of really nasty looks and started getting up earlier than I "need" to in order to have time to write during that window that's best for me. It has meant moving my bedtime up as well, but to my surprise, making that sacrifice wasn't that hard given the reason I was doing it.

[Archerite]

Thank you so much for replying! I didn't expect such a generous offer of information. This is extremely helpful for me, and it is very much appreciated.

I am encouraged by the fact that most of your responses seem to confirm my own emerging "method". I can't in good conscience call it a method as I have yet to establish some sort of discipline. I'm more in a free writing stage at the moment, trying to focus more on feeling the writing rather than thinking about it. That includes schedule in that I don't really have one, which probably puts me closer to paulinem's chaotic way of doing things. I think it would be best to establish a schedule eventually - probably the morning ritual that Ifvoy describes would work best for me.

For now, strangely enough, I find that I write best when I'm working on something else. I recently managed to take a story from beginning to end (which hadn't happened in a while) during my working hours, while writing the usual boring tech documents that I have to churn out daily. Concentrating the rational part of my mind on one type of writing seemed to liberate the creative, intuitive part, and the story sort of evolved on its own. I'm amazed myself at how it happened. I just hope that I will be able to reproduce the process in a more organized fashion. Right now, however, if I just sit down at my home desk and decide that I am going to work on a story, it doesn't always yield any results. Perhaps I need time to adjust and make a habit out of it.

It's a beautiful process, really, that I've discovered by allowing myself the freedom to just write. I have a line of dialogue or an idea that I want to express, but I don't really know what comes next. I can't see past that idea if I just think about it. But if I start writing, if I take that idea out of my head and put it on paper or in a digital document, that seems to clear a mental path and the next idea comes out of nowhere and so on. It might not be the right idea, and many times I might not use it at all, but it moves the story forward, and somewhere along the way, the right scene or the right dialogue gets written. It probably has to do with knowing who your characters are, how they think, and not making them say or do things that are not in their nature. For me, what also helped was getting into my characters' heads and lending them my thought processes, allowing my mind to think from their point of view. It was easier to move the story forward once I got myself out of the way and let the characters take over. Er, I hope this makes sense.

Mood is what gets the idea percolating in my head first. (This is where musical inspiration comes in for me.) I'll let it stay there, in my head, for quite a while before committing anything to digital bits. It seems it's much easier to evoke a daydream-like state where the scenes and dialog and plot come to me if I don't write anything down right away.

Yes! That is what I want as well! To evoke a daydream-like state. As for many of you, things pop into my head, and I get a lot of inspiration from music or even from nature, as jespah says, anything with a strong emotional charge. I'm fascinated with the idea of eliciting emotion from the audience - whether it is through music, writing, painting, or film. That's what I want to do, to make readers feel. And that's why I think mood is important. You have to feel yourself in order to produce the kind of writing that will make people feel. And, now that I think about it, meaning follows naturally from that. I mean, when you start writing, you have something you want to say, right? Even if it's not readily apparent while you're doing it, you have a reason why you're writing a certain story in a certain way. And Ifvoy said something that cleared things up for me indefinitely:

Her problem was that the theme wasn't in there when she wrote for the story. My response was a very gentle question about whether the meaning was a real one or if she was just trying to preach to her audience.

Yeah, preaching is to be avoided.

EntAllat has already summed everything up nicely, so I won't do it again. For me, the main idea that I'm taking away from this discussion is that a story's atmosphere informs its technique and theme. And if you manage to get back into that atmosphere, you should end up with a consistent story from head to tail. I feel a thousand more questions blooming in my head. Thank you again.