Entry tags:
3 Day Novel Weekend - Post Mortem
It's 12:30, why am I not sleeping?
So, technically I still have a couple hours to cram some writing in, but I've kind of given up, so thought I'd take a moment to write about the experience.
So, when I first got started, I set a personal goal of writing 10K a day. Turns out that that was actually what I achieved over the whole weekend.
I've been in fandom for years and have spent most of that time convincing myself I can't write. I'm not saying what I wrote over this weekend is a master piece or anything, but I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of either.
I think mostly what held me back before was a combination of a couple factors:
-I haven't written anything since, like, elementary school (When I was feeling down about my word count this weekend![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
diurnal_lee pointed out that it's longer that anything else I've written, and it's true, that makes me feel a lot better about it). It's hard to convince yourself you can do something when you never do. Here's hoping I might change that.
-Half the story ideas I come up with have giant Mary Sues. I would never think to inflict people with that, so it was easier just not to try.
-Most of the fic ideas I have are rather epic. I can't tell you how epic this story is going to turn out if I write everything in my head. It's a daunting talk to try writing, but to do a 100K fic first time 'round?
-When I imagine these fics in my head, I pretty much just imagine the fun scene, and explain the rest. This works fine in my head, but is really boring for other people to read, especially if you don't properly explain your thought process to connect the various scenes.
As I wrote this weekend, I was finding it kind of hard to get the pacing right. I mean, I'm 10K into a John/Cameron fic and we haven't even met Cameron yet. I'm laying a lot of the ground work right now, setting up the political atmosphere, and working in characterization for the multi-fandom characters that are appearing (I want people unfamiliar with the other canons to be able to read those characters as OCs, so there's quite a bit of explaining to do).
But just having scene after scene of establishing the political atmosphere gets kind of boring, so I've been trying to add some personal scenes. One of my favourite scenes so far is one I wrote just so that there wouldn't be pages of solid meetings.
This writing thing is new to me, but I'm finding it really interesting none the less and am excited to see where it goes.
So, technically I still have a couple hours to cram some writing in, but I've kind of given up, so thought I'd take a moment to write about the experience.
So, when I first got started, I set a personal goal of writing 10K a day. Turns out that that was actually what I achieved over the whole weekend.
I've been in fandom for years and have spent most of that time convincing myself I can't write. I'm not saying what I wrote over this weekend is a master piece or anything, but I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of either.
I think mostly what held me back before was a combination of a couple factors:
-I haven't written anything since, like, elementary school (When I was feeling down about my word count this weekend
diurnal_lee pointed out that it's longer that anything else I've written, and it's true, that makes me feel a lot better about it). It's hard to convince yourself you can do something when you never do. Here's hoping I might change that.-Half the story ideas I come up with have giant Mary Sues. I would never think to inflict people with that, so it was easier just not to try.
-Most of the fic ideas I have are rather epic. I can't tell you how epic this story is going to turn out if I write everything in my head. It's a daunting talk to try writing, but to do a 100K fic first time 'round?
-When I imagine these fics in my head, I pretty much just imagine the fun scene, and explain the rest. This works fine in my head, but is really boring for other people to read, especially if you don't properly explain your thought process to connect the various scenes.
As I wrote this weekend, I was finding it kind of hard to get the pacing right. I mean, I'm 10K into a John/Cameron fic and we haven't even met Cameron yet. I'm laying a lot of the ground work right now, setting up the political atmosphere, and working in characterization for the multi-fandom characters that are appearing (I want people unfamiliar with the other canons to be able to read those characters as OCs, so there's quite a bit of explaining to do).
But just having scene after scene of establishing the political atmosphere gets kind of boring, so I've been trying to add some personal scenes. One of my favourite scenes so far is one I wrote just so that there wouldn't be pages of solid meetings.
This writing thing is new to me, but I'm finding it really interesting none the less and am excited to see where it goes.