Interview with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
blamebrampton
Mar. 5th, 2013 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitty_fic posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
hd_writersIt's time for another writer interview! It's been a while since we've posted one of these! Today we have some awesome tips to share from blamebrampton, author of For the Public Good and Beneath Boundless Skies.
Preamble: Whenkitty_fic asked me to fill this out, I was startled and flattered and pleased, and immediately told her I would be a while getting it back to her, because I had a lot on. I was right! But some of that delay was caused by these answers bringing about unexpected journeys.
I blather on at great length below about writers block, and briefly mention an anecdote about not being able to write after a traumatic head injury. I sincerely believed this to be a true statement until a few days ago, when one of my very best friends sent me an email saying that she had found the story I wrote for her daughter in the weeks after I was hit by a taxi. I had no recollection of this at all. She scanned it and sent it to me: it’s 14 pages of typescript, signed with my left hand and tells a complex tale of the vagaries of love and permanence of political power. I believe the recipient was aged seven or eight at the time … I plead head injury.
And while I have no recollection of it, it’s so clearly my voice – even a little vague and with several uncorrected typos due to only having my left hand and about 65% of my brain functional – that it made me realise that all those adages about being a writer if you write, and about needing to write if you are a writer, are in fact true.
So the short version of everything that follows is this: if you feel you have stories to tell, tell them. You can edit them, rework them, improve them or stick them in a drawer for two years once they’re written. Just start by getting them out into the world and worry less about whether or not they’re ‘perfect’.
I freely confess that I am terrible at this myself, but I am working on it. Because it is the difference between being a writer who is read and being someone who has a lot of great paragraphs hiding on their hard drive or in their notebook.
And if you are a reader, know that you are someone who brings joy. At the bottom of those pages was another name: the child I wrote the story for had also written hers, to show that it was one of her treasures, according to her mum. I instantly recalled meeting the author of my favourite book about hedgehogs when I was five and showing her that the front page of my copy had my name and address and a note saying that anyone who found it MUST return it because it was my favourite. She smiled so widely. Forty years later, so did I.
Approximately how many stories would you say you've written for fandom?
Finished: 19
WiP partially published: five
WiP unpublished: six
How long on average are your stories? Do you prefer to write shorter fics or longer? Why?
According to some of my cruel but accurate friends, I write 30,000 word stories. They may well have a point. I prefer to write longer fics, because I’m very story-focussed and I like to see how a narrative will play out if given some room, however, 30K is about all I can fit in around work commitments for fests, which is probably the only reason I don’t write 90,000-word fics. [Kitty had a change in her posting schedule for this interview, since writing the above I have also popped one 66K fic into a fest, but the basic principle stands: I would still have written more if I didn’t have to work!]
That said, I really enjoyed the discipline the time I wrote a 10,000-word fic, and a 500-word minific, and exactly one actual 100-word drabble.
My writing is focussed on constructing story, so whatever I write is ideally built organically around the story it’s telling. Alas, I often fall a bit short of my goals thanks to being crap at managing fest deadlines. I used to think that I would edit everything to perfection for reposting later, once I had spare time. Oh, the hilarity!
This is also the reason I don’t write long-form series that have ongoing and unresolved arcs. While I’m keen on the long novel form as well as the 30K novella, for me, every story needs a visible end point (as opposed to being an ongoing saga) and I write accordingly. This is definitely not The One True Way, but it is the way I read and write. This might be because I grew up reading a lot of plays, Russell Hoban, Jane Austen and Agatha Christie rather than watching soap operas and reading fantasy series or comics. A peripatetic childhood means that I could never be sure of the next instalment of any series: I need an end!
Where do you find your inspiration?
In terms of inspiration for wanting to write fanfic, it’s the breadth of the literary world that JK Rowling created, coupled with the necessarily narrow focus we actually see in canon. There are hundreds of important characters we know sod-all about, pivotal events that are referred to as brief asides. I was flicking through Deathly Hallows recently and read one line that absolutely horrified me, and yet that’s her only reference to a tremendously traumatising event (which I am being deliberately cagey about as it’s a focus in an upcoming story (er, not upcoming soon, you understand …)). The world JKR has drawn has sections that are only loosely sketched, but with outlines that provide excellent guidance to anyone who comes along wanting to do a spot of colouring-in.
In terms of being inspired to write, it’s just a thing that I do, like making up silly songs and talking to random animals, or gurning. I don’t believe in muses or Ta-Dah!Inspiration! I just see the world in terms of story in the same way that a composer friend of mine sees it in terms of tunes. We’re not very different from each other: he is a better raconteur than I, and I have perfect pitch where he needs to listen consciously, but the rhythm of the world resolves itself into notes for him and words for me, just as it does into numbers, or legislation, or finely engineered plans for others. It’s just the way our brains work.
Ideas for actual story making are often drawn from real life – mine or my observations of others. I confess that there is a lot of observing others in my life: random quotations from strangers pop up frequently in my notebooks and work diary.
I particularly love overhearing idiosyncratic language usage: a few years ago I was on the train with a two young people behind me chatting away about their lives and the complexities of being young with conservative parents. His parents were Chinese and she was wearing a hijab, but they were clearly good uni friends and from what they said it was clear their parents approved of them being friends. But this wasn’t true of all their friends, apparently: ‘Nah, didn’t you hear? She’s in heaps of trouble with her olds, she was out dancing and she hooked up with this boy from Engineering – nothing serious, just dancing and some snogging – but her cousin saw them and it all hit the fan.’
‘Oh, her olds are brutal. She’s going to be going straight home from uni until she gets married! What nash was he?’
‘The boy? Skippy.’
‘No wonder they’re fuming!’
I could barely contain my excitement! ‘Nash’ for nationality! Brilliant! I may never find a place to put it in a story, but little things like that make me happy. Taking in elements of how people actually talk is one of the ways my favourite writers convince me they are writing about real people. Oh, and if you’re wondering, a Skippy is an Australian of British or other Northern European heritage.
What's the first thing you do when an idea comes to you?
Open a new file and write down the bits that occur to me and the questions that spin off from them, along with any cunning solutions, little phrases or other elements that occur to me. If I am out and about, I will do this in a notebook and put it on the computer later. Fingers crossed.
Usually this marks the start of a WiP that will grow at a greater or lesser rate depending on my workload and whether or not it’s part of a fest. Sometimes that is the last I ever think of it until months or years later when I will open a random page or file and think: ‘Yer what? Where the hell did that come from?!’
Do you have to be in the zone to write or is it more about consistency and dicipline?
HEE! ‘Zone’! ‘Discipline’! Oh, I needed a good laugh!
Usually I have to be in the panicked last two weeks before a fic is due, at which point every editor in the country will decide that what they really want is for me to do some real life work for them and I end up begging with the mods who are very kind about supporting my desire to have money to live on.
But I do try to have a degree of discipline and do some work on a story, any story, most days. Or at least most days a week. Or most days in which I am not at the gym and knitting … I’m slowly improving. Raitala and jadzialove have both been very good at kindly and gently suggesting the inside of my head is not a helpful place for things I wish others to read. Raitala in particular has decided to bully me into completing both fic and original work. She has had some success with this: for a genteel and delightful young woman, she can be quite scary.
I work as a journalist and editor and so spend all day most days writing or editing someone else’s writing, or working out how I want someone else to write something. Some days this leaves me eager to play with words and stories I love, other days it leaves me wanting to do anything but. On those days, I give myself a break.
How many fics do you typically work on at a time?
Mostly on one, but with a few others in the background that may well find themselves with a sparkling new chapter when the main one is going badly. The advantage of being so crap at finishing works in progress is that there’s always something to procrastinate with!
How do you like to work? Quiet? Music? Where?
I’m good at tuning things out, so it doesn’t bother me what’s happening around me for the most part. I have a few CDs that I favour as writing music: they’re such old faves I don’t feel the need to stop for a singalong, dance or attack of playing the ukulele while listening. And sometimes I will also listen to the news at the same time, which can lead to blunders if I am writing politics from the 1990s, so I need to edit those pages carefully.
It’s important to get up and dance around for a bit every half hour. Or make a cuppa. Or both. Not only is this a good mental practice, but it is genuinely bad for the human body to sit still for stretches of more than 30 minutes at a time, so I shake it out regularly.
Most of my writing is done on the sofa. I had a nice desk, it is now Mr Brammers’ computer desk. I had a back-up desk in the sewing room, but it has been over-run with sewing and I have the indoor clothes drying rack there since it was such a crappy year for laundry, and I park my Lady Bike in that room now, so it’s awkward to get in and out. We need a bigger house …
Ideally I would write without having cats leaping into my lap and attempting to kick the laptop off, but that would involve well-behaved cats.
Do you have a writing schedule or routine? Everyday? Certain time of day? Certain number of words? Number of minutes?
I do for my work writing, but at the end of that, fandom writing and original fiction are fitted in around my work, riding, ukulele practise, gym and ‘doing things’ schedule. This is not ideal in terms of work practice, but it is in terms of my life balance.
When I first joined fandom I spent at least two hours a day on reading and writing, and at the end of that year I had gained weight, lost even more fitness than I had in the previous few years, and read very few books. Then I realised: the internet is not going away, I can get to it later. Doing more things with my life ultimately benefits my writing, and keeps me much healthier and less homicidal.
While I sometimes say to myself, ‘ARGH! Finish more things! Focus more on writing!’ the truth is that I gain a lot of enjoyment from sport, music, travel and so on, and all of my very favourite things to read have been written by middle aged or elderly people, who often took longer to finish books than even I do!
I also find that writing can become too insular a practice: some people’s work reads as though they spend very little time outside their own heads, and this is not ideal for communicating. Unless you’re writing Emily Dickinson fanfic, in which case, carry on! We already have politicians to deal with the urge to narrow focus, we don’t need writers doing the same thing.
What are your writing habits?
* Turn off the television, unless it’s news time and I have a very short deadline and am prepared to once again delude myself that I can multitask.
* Put on music if it seems like a good idea or if I have a new CD that will otherwise languish unlistened to. (Shhh, I’m from the ’60s, I still think CDs are cool tech!)
* Pull out the notebook currently being used for a story, otherwise, find a notebook with space to start scribbling as I go.
* Fire up the document. Write. Usually I start at the beginning and then go on towards the end, but often bits and pieces from later in the story appear along the way. I will sketch out these, sometimes with brief notes, other times with little bits of action or dialogue.
* Physically write down a character list with properly spelled names in the notebook as I go, also important bits of action or things that will need to be emphasised or reintroduced later.
* Set an alarm to go off every half hour and get up and do something to keep the blood flowing.
* Find my coloured pens so that I can make important and colour-coordinated annotations to my notes.
* Wonder what the hell I meant by some of those annotations 20 minutes later.
* Try to crack through a significant portion of a story at a sitting: if not a whole scene, at least a whole conversation or whole passage of movement.
* If the writing is akin to pulling teeth, edit earlier sections.
* At least every third session, reread all of the story so far to check for flow and consistency.
* Try to resist the lure of the internet for more than 30 minutes at a time. If it’s hard, allow myself an internet check after every movement break. Bewail the stories that will never be written because I have spent too much time Tweeting about Sydney cycle paths.
* Stop after (or sometimes during) writing action sequences and physically block out or sketch the action to make sure that it is both possible and likely. Sometimes there is better choreography that becomes obvious once you work your way through it and which works better in the written word, too.
* Wish that the Story Elves would come and just do all the actual typing for me.
* Have a cat demand to share my lap with the computer. Play complicated balancing game.
* Go to spin class in the belief that I will return invigorated and full of creative energy. Actually return exhausted and in desperate need of a shower.
* Fail to get anything done for the rest of that day and half the next, panic, return to step one, repeat until finished.
Do you force yourself to write even when you don't want to?
For work, yes, and it’s for the best because I like to have some money in the bank.
For fandom and original writing, it depends. If I have been producing a reasonable amount of work recently and feel like a night off listening to David Bowie and singing ‘Heroes’ to the cats and Mr B, then I take it (since originally writing this, I have learned to play it on the ukulele, too, so it’s more exciting!) But if I realise that it has been more time than it ought to be since I have worked on a story, then I do make myself sit down and write something, even if I may delete it all later, just to get my hand back in.
And if there is a deadline coming up, then I just forbid myself from reading anything, which means that I have to write something if I want to spend any time hanging out with narrative that week. Admittedly, my definition of ‘deadline’ and the definitions held by many mods have not always been identical …
Do you keep a handwritten journal?
Only an exercise journal, which includes such literary gems as: ‘Buy chain tool for bike. Clean and lube chain if OK’ (see! I DO write about lube sometimes!) And a work diary, which includes such gems as: ‘WRITE INVOICES IF YOU WISH TO EAT!’ and ‘Finish conifers story’.
My previous attempts at keeping a diary were always frustrated by the fact that I am terrible at introspection, so they contained entries like: ‘Claire was cruel to me at school today. She tried to make me feel really bad about myself. Fuck that, I’m off to slash her bike tyres …’
Also, as you’ve probably noticed by now, unless constrained by a required word count, I am incapable of brevity, so regular journalling would quickly take up many bookshelves and mean that I NEVER SLEPT AT ALL.
Do you plan or outline your stories in any way? Can you describe your process?
Oh, absolutely. In enormous detail. Especially for the crime and thriller stories.
That is a total lie. What actually happens is that I start with an idea, and then pile up ideas on top of that one in what seems to be an organic sequence. Often the idea is the beginning of the story, sometimes it’s the end, sometimes it’s a theme, or a mood, or a political question, sometimes it’s a line of narrative or dialogue. Whatever the idea is, it needs to be one that will generate questions that require action to answer them.
Things aren’t always thought of or written about sequentially, but I try not to do too much writing for the end of a story before I know how the narrative and characters will get to that point, because things change a lot along the way. The one time I had an end beautifully sorted and squared away at the beginning of writing, I had to bin the whole conclusion because it kept driving everything that came before it in such an artificial way that it showed. Happily, I was able to recycle the better lines elsewhere.
What I AM good at is taking detailed notes as I write and edit so that I can pause two thirds of the way through to check that I haven’t left out important twists or details. Sometimes when I am writing a story, I don’t know what happens until I am writing that part. Snatched was the first ‘thriller’ I had ever written and it just happened as it went along, with me having no idea how it was all going to work out, until it did. But this isn’t too obvious to the reader, because I kept the action very focussed on ‘If X happens, how will Y respond?’ all the way through, which both drove the narrative and made it very easy for me to work out a sequence of events that was plausible. And then I edited out any stuff-ups to tighten it up further. And I confess to shamelessly thanking everyone who said, ‘Oh, I can see all your planning!’ in their comments, because I am a terrible person.
What motivates you to keep writing?
There are so many untold stories in my head.
How do you stay excited about your writing?
By being really rubbish at planning, so I need to get down to doing the work or else I’ll never know how it all works out!
How do you stay focused while working on longer fics?
If it’s a story that requires space to tell, I have no problem at all staying focused. Or working in longer forms. In fact, the only reason this answer is short is that I hurt my wrist in Pilates, or I would be typing up another mini-essay here ;-)
(Since writing the above, I have changed things a little. Now I stay focus on longer fics by having raitala pop up on Gchat saying, ‘WHY ARE YOU NOT WRITING! WRITE MORE!’
Do you find deadlines stressful or helpful?
Both. I have so many in real life that I am often really – look, I hesitate to say evil, but let’s say Cheney-esque about meeting them in fandom. If it were not for the kindness of mods fandom-wide, I would have been booted out years ago.
That said, I can also procrastinate for England (and WILL once I get organised enough to have it listed as an Olympic sport), so it’s very handy to have festival deadlines to make sure I actually publish at least one or two fics a year rather than just pottering around on WiPs at home.
What is your biggest challenge in writing and how do you overcome it?
The shortness of each day and the very many things I like to do. I partially overcome it by having not had enough sleep since about 1983, but am also becoming better at saying no to things so that I can concentrate on other things I will enjoy more or do better.
Do you have a system for organising your story ideas and notes?
I have lists. Lists of names, chronologies of important dates, lists of real world events that should be at least considered for the background, notes of story events of snatches of dialogue organised roughly into order, and anything else that seems relevant at the time. Much of this goes into whatever notebook is being used for a particular story, which has sometimes had its downside in me forgetting I had started in one notebook and later discovering really fabbo ideas that were sketched out and completely forgotten. Too many notebooks, not enough medium-term memory!
Canon elements and important real-world things are held in a set of separate folders, which receive additional notes every time I reread canon, and sometimes also from Pottermore and Rowling interviews (a big thank you tovaysh11 and oncelikeshari, without whom I would know sod-all about Pottermore!)
The real organisation comes in at the end where I make notes as I go through on my first edit and look for inconsistencies, loose ends, points of flagging pace and so on. You can always tell the stories that have been very late, as this step is omitted or managed with only cursory effort.
Do you write in a linear form, from beginning to end, or do you jump around as the muse strikes?
Mostly linear, but with a bit of jumping around as good ideas occur that are generated from the starting point but which will require a bit more story development before they will work in the story itself.
The muse never strikes because I am the least Romantic person on the face of the planet (top 50 at any rate) and so do not believe in muses. Unless we’re talking Richard Armitage. Who is less of a muse and more enormously pretty to look at and probably a really lovely person with a good brain, which would make me feel terribly guilty about objectifying him.
Raitala floated the idea that she is now my muse, but I prefer to think of her as a kindly sportsmistress who is handy with the netballs flung at the faces of the tardy.
What are your tips to overcoming writer's block/slump?
Oh, EPICALLY long answer alert, but it’s an issue that has affected me at times and which I have more often had to drag others through, so here’s what I have learned …
There are different types of writers block, with different solutions.
The first is the sudden block, when you are powering along and suddenly come to a full stop. This usually has one of two causes. Either your brain is full, or you’ve made a mistake. The first step to solving this one is the same: get up and do something else for a bit. Make a cup of hot chocolate, or go for a run or ride. Pat a cat, or do a little dance – whatever, just have a physical shake out so that you break the moment of the stop.
If your brain is full, your little break will have shown you that you are either exhausted or hyper, which are the two natural states of the brain-full. Take a nap, or take some exercise, depending on which suits. If you take exercise, take a pocket notebook with you so that you can jot down random bits that leap into your brain. And ‘exercise’ can mean wander down to the high street and try on cool shoes just as legitimately as it can mean leap on your bike and ride for 40km or potter up to the library and take out an armful of books.
If you’ve made a mistake, your little break will leave you feeling fresher, but won’t be the solution to your block. You now need to sit down and read back over what you’ve written. Possibly even from the beginning. At some point, you’ve done something wrong that your subconscious knows about and which your conscious mind needs to find. It could be as simple as changing the name of a character halfway through without noticing, or as complex as making a well-established character act outside the parameters you have set out for them in a way that doesn’t really convince you – so this is your brain flagging that it won’t convince your readers, either. If you’re like me, it’s your brain saying ‘You forgot to write that whole scene between these two events. Fix it you numpty!’
The second is anxiety block, where you either start to panic about your writing, or to distrust its worth. Usually this starts after an external event has caused you to have doubts. Maybe it was a bad review, or a bitchy comment, or a fest fic disappearing into the ether with practically no response.
One of the advantages of being appallingly arrogant is that I’m always able to stop my brain whenever it starts down the waily waily path of this sort of block and say, ‘Are you unhinged? That’s NONSENSE!’ but I have had to learn some of my rampant egomania. (Admittedly, I was starting from a strong natural aptitude.) I don’t think rampant egomania is necessarily a flaw if you can couple it with a realistic assessment of your actual flaws (such as the facts that I am the queen of procrastination, frequently take refuge in explosions rather than exploring the emotional lives of characters and could not write convincing porn if you paid me. In notes stuffed into my knickers. Also, I resort to gags too often. Let us not mention the lack of height.)
When you receive negative feedback on your work, the first step is to determine if it’s really negative. ‘I loved this, but you made these typos’ is not. It’s a letter of love and admiration from a pedant. Hurrah! ‘I loved most of this, but thought you resorted too often to explosions’ is a fair criticism if it’s a comment on one of my fics, but would be unfair as a comment on one ofpushdragon’s exquisitely drawn stories. And even then, it’s up to me to decide whether my love for explosions should be tempered by this reader’s preference for other narrative devices. Maybe I prefer to write for the Tom Clancy/HP crossover readership?
Then there are the critics who you should just ignore. If you ever hear me muttering that I loved the first 8 chapters of a fic but gave up on it when it became all romantic, ignore me! Unless you were writing a thriller, in which case, you should probably take some notice. But the fact is that I am a crap reader when it comes to romance, which makes me a crap critic of the genre. And then there are the poorly written text-speak-rich ‘Ur story is 2 hard!’ comments, which just go to show that 12 year olds will always lie about being old enough to read on certain archives.
And for the critical comments that seem both well-argued and fair, the person who made them did so because you seemed to them like a really good writer who had an issue with an aspect of your work. If they thought you were shit, they’d have buggered off without saying a word. The fact that they spent time saying ‘I think this story fell apart a bit in the final third because there were too many unresolved storylines’ means that they thought you were anything but shit, and that they believe you have it in you to be even better. So take the compliment of this sort of criticism and see if it can help you to write better work.
Similarly, fics that receive few comments can really shake your confidence, but I prefer to interpret it as people being so struck dumb by my genius that they feel it would be inappropriate to display their own clumsy prose in response. It’s possible that this is a belief completely without basis, but no-one is harmed by it and it cheers me up, so stuff it: I’m maintaining it!
If writing brings you joy, then reframe any negative experiences so that you can get back to the joy. That’s the glory at the heart of fanfic: it doesn’t actually matter what anyone else thinks of your work. You’re not being paid for this, it’s all about your reactions to canon, and the joy of creating your own fanworks. So don’t doubt yourself, or let others create doubts for you: you are the only audience you really need to satisfy at the end of the day. Take notice of feedback only when it’s worth taking notice of. And for the rest of it: treat it like the equivalent of sexist builder shoutings.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your voice isn’t worth being heard. That’s a lie. Even if you write only for yourself, you’re important enough to make that effort worthwhile.
Getting back to types of block, there’s also attitudinal block, where writing just becomes less important to you. Again, there are multiple causes. It could be as simple as the fact that you haven’t done anything fun or interesting lately, and your brain needs topping up with experience before it can create. Easily sorted: get out there and do something! (If you are in hospital with a broken leg, which DOES happen, read some books and invite your friends over to share their goss so you can have some vicarious living instead.)
It could be that you have other things happening in your life. Sometimes there’s a lot going on and it’s taking up so much of your brain that you haven’t any left over for writing. Put your writing down without guilt and wait until you have a little space. Not until life is wholly sorted, though – that’s never going to happen. Other times other things genuinely are the priority and you’re trying to write as a procrastination and it’s just coming out as blah. In those cases, it’s your brain saying ‘No, seriously, this is more urgent …’ and you should listen to it.
Sometimes it’s because fandom can be an odd place and you might need a break from it. Which is totally cool: we all need to mix it up a bit in life, even if everything’s otherwise lovely. And if you need to mix it up because the alternative is a mass-defriending and rant, some sort of break is even more important. Maybe it could be a mini-break, where you spend a weekend doing nothing in fandom. Maybe this would be a good time to try writing something else, and perhaps publishing it for real, or you could do a spot of drawing, or you could learn the ukulele, which is enormous fun and surprisingly easy. I’d like to pretend that we could act to make fandom a place of constant rationality and support, but a cure for the common cold is more likely. Take a break instead and you’ll remember the things you actually enjoyed.
And sometimes it’s because there is something genuinely wrong. I had several years where I wrote sod-all after I left a moderate amount of my brain on the corner of two major streets in a taxi-assisted bicycle dismount. Some of my friends have had similar experiences after they’ve divorced, or had major depressive episodes, or had terrible things happen in their lives. As one of them said to me when I moped that I would never again be creative, ‘You will. You’re still a creative person, you’re just a creative person who needs a bit of time to mend.’ And then she taught me how to knit. She was quite right, and now I am again a creative person who also owns a lot of natty little beanies.
In those situations, take whatever it is you need: time, professional help, a big change in your life … And if you think your block is a smaller version of this, arising out of many minor stresses rather than one big trauma, then start with just taking care of yourself. Even basic changes like eating more fruit and vegetables and getting up and dancing for half an hour have real and positive effects on your brain, which will help you to write.
What do you do if you lose interest in a fic? Especially if you are writing for a deadline?
I’ve never lost interest in a fic. I have one that I started right at the beginning of my time in fandom, and then put aside for something more pressing, and have added to in fits and starts but now have issues with it because I knew nothing about fandom when I started it and now know a moderate amount (though by no means a lot). But I’m still interested in it and have been working away at solving its problems without undermining its internal integrity.
I have tackled work stories that I never had any interest in, but people pay me for those, so I am perfectly willing to fake enthusiasm. I can imagine a similar situation in a fest where a prompt is so unexpected that you just can’t engage: my pro tip for that situation is to remember that there are fundamental formulae for stories that you can fall back on in times of emergency, and there is no shame in doing this when desperate, as your recipient will still receive a gift and it will still be decent, if not the breathtaking piece of staggering originality you had planned. I do the same thing for work: choose a voice, decide on a ‘genre’, sketch out the points that need to be included, then fill it in with as much wit and originality as possible.
I sometimes loathe the fics I am writing for a deadline, but it’s the love/hate sort of loathing and it’s all really just a by-product of the sleep-deprived state I often fall into thanks to poor time management. I have also been known to loathe complicated knitting projects.
As long as you are writing stories that you believe in, rather than what you think other people will want, I don’t think it’s possible to lose interest in your own stories. Fail to finish, put in a drawer for two years, and wish the Story Elves would take it out of your brain and put it onto paper in the perfect idealised form you envision: absolutely! But that’s not the same thing. (Caveat: some amount of writing for other people is absolutely fine, indeed necessary, for fest and request fics – I’m only against people who write solely for the market, such as the ‘scriptwriters’ for Michael Bay films.)
What sources or websites do you find helpful for writing tips and information?
I find the internet more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to actual writing, though I do love a good research and will cheerfully spend MONTHS tracking down fine details rather than finishing a chapter.
When it comes to writing tips, I find books more effective than sites. David Lodge, Strunk and White and Robert Graves have probably provided the best written advice, Joan Aiken and Dylan Thomas the best examples. Though all those writers who have said ‘The secret is in actually writing things!’ are right and I am slowly learning to heed their wisdom!
Do you share your writing process along the way with a support group of friends, betas or cheerleaders?
I have a few friends who I find essential. My earliest fandom friends include
norton_gale and calanthe_fics, and even though they are too busy shaping the minds of the next generation to be around much now, I still find myself encouraged by them and the brilliant examples they drummed into me.
Now it’s most oftenraitala who politely suggests that I might like to finish something before starting something new, and jadzialovewho emails to check if I am accidentally dead when I am quiet for a while. These two are both phenomenally talented and so the thought that I can interest them with my own work is a very cheering thought! They are also brilliant at giving feedback and helping me to nail down issues with the story early on by asking cunning questions designed to get more down on paper. Geniuses, the both of them. And if you’ve never read their stories or seen rai’s art, hie ye hence!
I have also had wonderful support fromtreacle_tartlet, chantefable, nursedarry and several others who have been brilliant emergency betas over the years, and a few readers/essayists including goddessriss, theodoraleft and suttonwriterwho consistently make me feel that every word is worth the effort (and who are also fascinating and erudite in their own right). Because even though I absolutely believe that you should write for yourself and not be hung up on your audience, having lovely readers is wonderful.
Have you ever co-written a story with someone?
I’ve started to cowrite an original piece with another person in fandom. On the upside, she is fabulously talented and has a wonderful ear for dialogue. On the downside, she’s as overstretched as I am, so this is the slowest cowrite in the world. So far we’re splitting the jokes, I’m doing most of the murdery plotting, she’s doing all of the romance. If we decide we need any explosions, I expect they’ll come to me. I’ll let you know how it goes!
How have you evolved as a writer over time?
I decided to write the things I want to write and not worry. Even when I started writing in fandom, I was still concerned with audience reaction. The beauty of fandom is that even a cursory examination will show that, as in published fiction, it’s impossible to predict what will be popular and what won’t. So there’s really no point worrying about it and you may as well write stories that interest you!
What is your favorite fic you've written and why is it your favorite?
Of Great Price, which is a Sirius Black/Remus Lupin fic and which illustrates the above point in that is one of my least-read works, but probably one of my best-written. It’s my favourite because it is the closest to how I write outside of fanfic, and so feels far more personal than most of my fic. Much of my H/D stuff is more mannered than my original writing thanks to the fact that it is a response to both the original novels and the canon of fanfiction written by others. It’s very hard to write a story that is strongly ‘mine’ with that level of intertextuality.
But for the two Marauder-era fics I’ve written, it’s much easier both because there are comparatively small textual hints about these characters in JKR’s work (though they are very rich and a wonderful source material) and because I have read very little Marauder-era fanfic.
And it was just such immense fun (in the bits that weren’t tragic) to write in Sirius’s voice:
McGonners stopped me in the hallway, and encouraged me to head to whatever devilry I was up to at a more decorous pace.
‘Independent research, professor!’ I chirped.
‘God save us all,’ she muttered darkly in reply.
Miss Pince was torn between delight that a student had come to work without an armful of homework, and horror that student was me.
What's the one thing you would recommend anyone can do to improve their writing?
Get out of the house, get out of the car. Sit on buses and trains, ride a bicycle, walk through the park, sit in a cafe, visit your friends, lurk around your enemies, go to the forest or the sea. Just put yourself in the way of scents and sounds, weather and wind, wild birds and animals and people who are not you so that the worlds you are creating have building matter based in your rich experiences of the real world. Because unless you build up a library of experience, at some point, you will run out of what is in your head, and other people's stories will not be a substitute for your life, they will just be your retellings of other people's lives. And you are more interesting than that!
hugs
A HUGE thank you toblamebrampton for taking the time to share with us (and especially for her patience waiting for me to actually post this after she was so kind to fill it out)! <3 Much love
You can see her masterlist HERE.
blamebrampton, author of For the Public Good and Beneath Boundless Skies.Preamble: When
kitty_fic asked me to fill this out, I was startled and flattered and pleased, and immediately told her I would be a while getting it back to her, because I had a lot on. I was right! But some of that delay was caused by these answers bringing about unexpected journeys. I blather on at great length below about writers block, and briefly mention an anecdote about not being able to write after a traumatic head injury. I sincerely believed this to be a true statement until a few days ago, when one of my very best friends sent me an email saying that she had found the story I wrote for her daughter in the weeks after I was hit by a taxi. I had no recollection of this at all. She scanned it and sent it to me: it’s 14 pages of typescript, signed with my left hand and tells a complex tale of the vagaries of love and permanence of political power. I believe the recipient was aged seven or eight at the time … I plead head injury.
And while I have no recollection of it, it’s so clearly my voice – even a little vague and with several uncorrected typos due to only having my left hand and about 65% of my brain functional – that it made me realise that all those adages about being a writer if you write, and about needing to write if you are a writer, are in fact true.
So the short version of everything that follows is this: if you feel you have stories to tell, tell them. You can edit them, rework them, improve them or stick them in a drawer for two years once they’re written. Just start by getting them out into the world and worry less about whether or not they’re ‘perfect’.
I freely confess that I am terrible at this myself, but I am working on it. Because it is the difference between being a writer who is read and being someone who has a lot of great paragraphs hiding on their hard drive or in their notebook.
And if you are a reader, know that you are someone who brings joy. At the bottom of those pages was another name: the child I wrote the story for had also written hers, to show that it was one of her treasures, according to her mum. I instantly recalled meeting the author of my favourite book about hedgehogs when I was five and showing her that the front page of my copy had my name and address and a note saying that anyone who found it MUST return it because it was my favourite. She smiled so widely. Forty years later, so did I.
Approximately how many stories would you say you've written for fandom?
Finished: 19
WiP partially published: five
WiP unpublished: six
How long on average are your stories? Do you prefer to write shorter fics or longer? Why?
According to some of my cruel but accurate friends, I write 30,000 word stories. They may well have a point. I prefer to write longer fics, because I’m very story-focussed and I like to see how a narrative will play out if given some room, however, 30K is about all I can fit in around work commitments for fests, which is probably the only reason I don’t write 90,000-word fics. [Kitty had a change in her posting schedule for this interview, since writing the above I have also popped one 66K fic into a fest, but the basic principle stands: I would still have written more if I didn’t have to work!]
That said, I really enjoyed the discipline the time I wrote a 10,000-word fic, and a 500-word minific, and exactly one actual 100-word drabble.
My writing is focussed on constructing story, so whatever I write is ideally built organically around the story it’s telling. Alas, I often fall a bit short of my goals thanks to being crap at managing fest deadlines. I used to think that I would edit everything to perfection for reposting later, once I had spare time. Oh, the hilarity!
This is also the reason I don’t write long-form series that have ongoing and unresolved arcs. While I’m keen on the long novel form as well as the 30K novella, for me, every story needs a visible end point (as opposed to being an ongoing saga) and I write accordingly. This is definitely not The One True Way, but it is the way I read and write. This might be because I grew up reading a lot of plays, Russell Hoban, Jane Austen and Agatha Christie rather than watching soap operas and reading fantasy series or comics. A peripatetic childhood means that I could never be sure of the next instalment of any series: I need an end!
Where do you find your inspiration?
In terms of inspiration for wanting to write fanfic, it’s the breadth of the literary world that JK Rowling created, coupled with the necessarily narrow focus we actually see in canon. There are hundreds of important characters we know sod-all about, pivotal events that are referred to as brief asides. I was flicking through Deathly Hallows recently and read one line that absolutely horrified me, and yet that’s her only reference to a tremendously traumatising event (which I am being deliberately cagey about as it’s a focus in an upcoming story (er, not upcoming soon, you understand …)). The world JKR has drawn has sections that are only loosely sketched, but with outlines that provide excellent guidance to anyone who comes along wanting to do a spot of colouring-in.
In terms of being inspired to write, it’s just a thing that I do, like making up silly songs and talking to random animals, or gurning. I don’t believe in muses or Ta-Dah!Inspiration! I just see the world in terms of story in the same way that a composer friend of mine sees it in terms of tunes. We’re not very different from each other: he is a better raconteur than I, and I have perfect pitch where he needs to listen consciously, but the rhythm of the world resolves itself into notes for him and words for me, just as it does into numbers, or legislation, or finely engineered plans for others. It’s just the way our brains work.
Ideas for actual story making are often drawn from real life – mine or my observations of others. I confess that there is a lot of observing others in my life: random quotations from strangers pop up frequently in my notebooks and work diary.
I particularly love overhearing idiosyncratic language usage: a few years ago I was on the train with a two young people behind me chatting away about their lives and the complexities of being young with conservative parents. His parents were Chinese and she was wearing a hijab, but they were clearly good uni friends and from what they said it was clear their parents approved of them being friends. But this wasn’t true of all their friends, apparently: ‘Nah, didn’t you hear? She’s in heaps of trouble with her olds, she was out dancing and she hooked up with this boy from Engineering – nothing serious, just dancing and some snogging – but her cousin saw them and it all hit the fan.’
‘Oh, her olds are brutal. She’s going to be going straight home from uni until she gets married! What nash was he?’
‘The boy? Skippy.’
‘No wonder they’re fuming!’
I could barely contain my excitement! ‘Nash’ for nationality! Brilliant! I may never find a place to put it in a story, but little things like that make me happy. Taking in elements of how people actually talk is one of the ways my favourite writers convince me they are writing about real people. Oh, and if you’re wondering, a Skippy is an Australian of British or other Northern European heritage.
What's the first thing you do when an idea comes to you?
Open a new file and write down the bits that occur to me and the questions that spin off from them, along with any cunning solutions, little phrases or other elements that occur to me. If I am out and about, I will do this in a notebook and put it on the computer later. Fingers crossed.
Usually this marks the start of a WiP that will grow at a greater or lesser rate depending on my workload and whether or not it’s part of a fest. Sometimes that is the last I ever think of it until months or years later when I will open a random page or file and think: ‘Yer what? Where the hell did that come from?!’
Do you have to be in the zone to write or is it more about consistency and dicipline?
HEE! ‘Zone’! ‘Discipline’! Oh, I needed a good laugh!
Usually I have to be in the panicked last two weeks before a fic is due, at which point every editor in the country will decide that what they really want is for me to do some real life work for them and I end up begging with the mods who are very kind about supporting my desire to have money to live on.
But I do try to have a degree of discipline and do some work on a story, any story, most days. Or at least most days a week. Or most days in which I am not at the gym and knitting … I’m slowly improving. Raitala and jadzialove have both been very good at kindly and gently suggesting the inside of my head is not a helpful place for things I wish others to read. Raitala in particular has decided to bully me into completing both fic and original work. She has had some success with this: for a genteel and delightful young woman, she can be quite scary.
I work as a journalist and editor and so spend all day most days writing or editing someone else’s writing, or working out how I want someone else to write something. Some days this leaves me eager to play with words and stories I love, other days it leaves me wanting to do anything but. On those days, I give myself a break.
How many fics do you typically work on at a time?
Mostly on one, but with a few others in the background that may well find themselves with a sparkling new chapter when the main one is going badly. The advantage of being so crap at finishing works in progress is that there’s always something to procrastinate with!
How do you like to work? Quiet? Music? Where?
I’m good at tuning things out, so it doesn’t bother me what’s happening around me for the most part. I have a few CDs that I favour as writing music: they’re such old faves I don’t feel the need to stop for a singalong, dance or attack of playing the ukulele while listening. And sometimes I will also listen to the news at the same time, which can lead to blunders if I am writing politics from the 1990s, so I need to edit those pages carefully.
It’s important to get up and dance around for a bit every half hour. Or make a cuppa. Or both. Not only is this a good mental practice, but it is genuinely bad for the human body to sit still for stretches of more than 30 minutes at a time, so I shake it out regularly.
Most of my writing is done on the sofa. I had a nice desk, it is now Mr Brammers’ computer desk. I had a back-up desk in the sewing room, but it has been over-run with sewing and I have the indoor clothes drying rack there since it was such a crappy year for laundry, and I park my Lady Bike in that room now, so it’s awkward to get in and out. We need a bigger house …
Ideally I would write without having cats leaping into my lap and attempting to kick the laptop off, but that would involve well-behaved cats.
Do you have a writing schedule or routine? Everyday? Certain time of day? Certain number of words? Number of minutes?
I do for my work writing, but at the end of that, fandom writing and original fiction are fitted in around my work, riding, ukulele practise, gym and ‘doing things’ schedule. This is not ideal in terms of work practice, but it is in terms of my life balance.
When I first joined fandom I spent at least two hours a day on reading and writing, and at the end of that year I had gained weight, lost even more fitness than I had in the previous few years, and read very few books. Then I realised: the internet is not going away, I can get to it later. Doing more things with my life ultimately benefits my writing, and keeps me much healthier and less homicidal.
While I sometimes say to myself, ‘ARGH! Finish more things! Focus more on writing!’ the truth is that I gain a lot of enjoyment from sport, music, travel and so on, and all of my very favourite things to read have been written by middle aged or elderly people, who often took longer to finish books than even I do!
I also find that writing can become too insular a practice: some people’s work reads as though they spend very little time outside their own heads, and this is not ideal for communicating. Unless you’re writing Emily Dickinson fanfic, in which case, carry on! We already have politicians to deal with the urge to narrow focus, we don’t need writers doing the same thing.
What are your writing habits?
* Turn off the television, unless it’s news time and I have a very short deadline and am prepared to once again delude myself that I can multitask.
* Put on music if it seems like a good idea or if I have a new CD that will otherwise languish unlistened to. (Shhh, I’m from the ’60s, I still think CDs are cool tech!)
* Pull out the notebook currently being used for a story, otherwise, find a notebook with space to start scribbling as I go.
* Fire up the document. Write. Usually I start at the beginning and then go on towards the end, but often bits and pieces from later in the story appear along the way. I will sketch out these, sometimes with brief notes, other times with little bits of action or dialogue.
* Physically write down a character list with properly spelled names in the notebook as I go, also important bits of action or things that will need to be emphasised or reintroduced later.
* Set an alarm to go off every half hour and get up and do something to keep the blood flowing.
* Find my coloured pens so that I can make important and colour-coordinated annotations to my notes.
* Wonder what the hell I meant by some of those annotations 20 minutes later.
* Try to crack through a significant portion of a story at a sitting: if not a whole scene, at least a whole conversation or whole passage of movement.
* If the writing is akin to pulling teeth, edit earlier sections.
* At least every third session, reread all of the story so far to check for flow and consistency.
* Try to resist the lure of the internet for more than 30 minutes at a time. If it’s hard, allow myself an internet check after every movement break. Bewail the stories that will never be written because I have spent too much time Tweeting about Sydney cycle paths.
* Stop after (or sometimes during) writing action sequences and physically block out or sketch the action to make sure that it is both possible and likely. Sometimes there is better choreography that becomes obvious once you work your way through it and which works better in the written word, too.
* Wish that the Story Elves would come and just do all the actual typing for me.
* Have a cat demand to share my lap with the computer. Play complicated balancing game.
* Go to spin class in the belief that I will return invigorated and full of creative energy. Actually return exhausted and in desperate need of a shower.
* Fail to get anything done for the rest of that day and half the next, panic, return to step one, repeat until finished.
Do you force yourself to write even when you don't want to?
For work, yes, and it’s for the best because I like to have some money in the bank.
For fandom and original writing, it depends. If I have been producing a reasonable amount of work recently and feel like a night off listening to David Bowie and singing ‘Heroes’ to the cats and Mr B, then I take it (since originally writing this, I have learned to play it on the ukulele, too, so it’s more exciting!) But if I realise that it has been more time than it ought to be since I have worked on a story, then I do make myself sit down and write something, even if I may delete it all later, just to get my hand back in.
And if there is a deadline coming up, then I just forbid myself from reading anything, which means that I have to write something if I want to spend any time hanging out with narrative that week. Admittedly, my definition of ‘deadline’ and the definitions held by many mods have not always been identical …
Do you keep a handwritten journal?
Only an exercise journal, which includes such literary gems as: ‘Buy chain tool for bike. Clean and lube chain if OK’ (see! I DO write about lube sometimes!) And a work diary, which includes such gems as: ‘WRITE INVOICES IF YOU WISH TO EAT!’ and ‘Finish conifers story’.
My previous attempts at keeping a diary were always frustrated by the fact that I am terrible at introspection, so they contained entries like: ‘Claire was cruel to me at school today. She tried to make me feel really bad about myself. Fuck that, I’m off to slash her bike tyres …’
Also, as you’ve probably noticed by now, unless constrained by a required word count, I am incapable of brevity, so regular journalling would quickly take up many bookshelves and mean that I NEVER SLEPT AT ALL.
Do you plan or outline your stories in any way? Can you describe your process?
Oh, absolutely. In enormous detail. Especially for the crime and thriller stories.
That is a total lie. What actually happens is that I start with an idea, and then pile up ideas on top of that one in what seems to be an organic sequence. Often the idea is the beginning of the story, sometimes it’s the end, sometimes it’s a theme, or a mood, or a political question, sometimes it’s a line of narrative or dialogue. Whatever the idea is, it needs to be one that will generate questions that require action to answer them.
Things aren’t always thought of or written about sequentially, but I try not to do too much writing for the end of a story before I know how the narrative and characters will get to that point, because things change a lot along the way. The one time I had an end beautifully sorted and squared away at the beginning of writing, I had to bin the whole conclusion because it kept driving everything that came before it in such an artificial way that it showed. Happily, I was able to recycle the better lines elsewhere.
What I AM good at is taking detailed notes as I write and edit so that I can pause two thirds of the way through to check that I haven’t left out important twists or details. Sometimes when I am writing a story, I don’t know what happens until I am writing that part. Snatched was the first ‘thriller’ I had ever written and it just happened as it went along, with me having no idea how it was all going to work out, until it did. But this isn’t too obvious to the reader, because I kept the action very focussed on ‘If X happens, how will Y respond?’ all the way through, which both drove the narrative and made it very easy for me to work out a sequence of events that was plausible. And then I edited out any stuff-ups to tighten it up further. And I confess to shamelessly thanking everyone who said, ‘Oh, I can see all your planning!’ in their comments, because I am a terrible person.
What motivates you to keep writing?
There are so many untold stories in my head.
How do you stay excited about your writing?
By being really rubbish at planning, so I need to get down to doing the work or else I’ll never know how it all works out!
How do you stay focused while working on longer fics?
If it’s a story that requires space to tell, I have no problem at all staying focused. Or working in longer forms. In fact, the only reason this answer is short is that I hurt my wrist in Pilates, or I would be typing up another mini-essay here ;-)
(Since writing the above, I have changed things a little. Now I stay focus on longer fics by having raitala pop up on Gchat saying, ‘WHY ARE YOU NOT WRITING! WRITE MORE!’
Do you find deadlines stressful or helpful?
Both. I have so many in real life that I am often really – look, I hesitate to say evil, but let’s say Cheney-esque about meeting them in fandom. If it were not for the kindness of mods fandom-wide, I would have been booted out years ago.
That said, I can also procrastinate for England (and WILL once I get organised enough to have it listed as an Olympic sport), so it’s very handy to have festival deadlines to make sure I actually publish at least one or two fics a year rather than just pottering around on WiPs at home.
What is your biggest challenge in writing and how do you overcome it?
The shortness of each day and the very many things I like to do. I partially overcome it by having not had enough sleep since about 1983, but am also becoming better at saying no to things so that I can concentrate on other things I will enjoy more or do better.
Do you have a system for organising your story ideas and notes?
I have lists. Lists of names, chronologies of important dates, lists of real world events that should be at least considered for the background, notes of story events of snatches of dialogue organised roughly into order, and anything else that seems relevant at the time. Much of this goes into whatever notebook is being used for a particular story, which has sometimes had its downside in me forgetting I had started in one notebook and later discovering really fabbo ideas that were sketched out and completely forgotten. Too many notebooks, not enough medium-term memory!
Canon elements and important real-world things are held in a set of separate folders, which receive additional notes every time I reread canon, and sometimes also from Pottermore and Rowling interviews (a big thank you to
vaysh11 and oncelikeshari, without whom I would know sod-all about Pottermore!)The real organisation comes in at the end where I make notes as I go through on my first edit and look for inconsistencies, loose ends, points of flagging pace and so on. You can always tell the stories that have been very late, as this step is omitted or managed with only cursory effort.
Do you write in a linear form, from beginning to end, or do you jump around as the muse strikes?
Mostly linear, but with a bit of jumping around as good ideas occur that are generated from the starting point but which will require a bit more story development before they will work in the story itself.
The muse never strikes because I am the least Romantic person on the face of the planet (top 50 at any rate) and so do not believe in muses. Unless we’re talking Richard Armitage. Who is less of a muse and more enormously pretty to look at and probably a really lovely person with a good brain, which would make me feel terribly guilty about objectifying him.
Raitala floated the idea that she is now my muse, but I prefer to think of her as a kindly sportsmistress who is handy with the netballs flung at the faces of the tardy.
What are your tips to overcoming writer's block/slump?
Oh, EPICALLY long answer alert, but it’s an issue that has affected me at times and which I have more often had to drag others through, so here’s what I have learned …
There are different types of writers block, with different solutions.
The first is the sudden block, when you are powering along and suddenly come to a full stop. This usually has one of two causes. Either your brain is full, or you’ve made a mistake. The first step to solving this one is the same: get up and do something else for a bit. Make a cup of hot chocolate, or go for a run or ride. Pat a cat, or do a little dance – whatever, just have a physical shake out so that you break the moment of the stop.
If your brain is full, your little break will have shown you that you are either exhausted or hyper, which are the two natural states of the brain-full. Take a nap, or take some exercise, depending on which suits. If you take exercise, take a pocket notebook with you so that you can jot down random bits that leap into your brain. And ‘exercise’ can mean wander down to the high street and try on cool shoes just as legitimately as it can mean leap on your bike and ride for 40km or potter up to the library and take out an armful of books.
If you’ve made a mistake, your little break will leave you feeling fresher, but won’t be the solution to your block. You now need to sit down and read back over what you’ve written. Possibly even from the beginning. At some point, you’ve done something wrong that your subconscious knows about and which your conscious mind needs to find. It could be as simple as changing the name of a character halfway through without noticing, or as complex as making a well-established character act outside the parameters you have set out for them in a way that doesn’t really convince you – so this is your brain flagging that it won’t convince your readers, either. If you’re like me, it’s your brain saying ‘You forgot to write that whole scene between these two events. Fix it you numpty!’
The second is anxiety block, where you either start to panic about your writing, or to distrust its worth. Usually this starts after an external event has caused you to have doubts. Maybe it was a bad review, or a bitchy comment, or a fest fic disappearing into the ether with practically no response.
One of the advantages of being appallingly arrogant is that I’m always able to stop my brain whenever it starts down the waily waily path of this sort of block and say, ‘Are you unhinged? That’s NONSENSE!’ but I have had to learn some of my rampant egomania. (Admittedly, I was starting from a strong natural aptitude.) I don’t think rampant egomania is necessarily a flaw if you can couple it with a realistic assessment of your actual flaws (such as the facts that I am the queen of procrastination, frequently take refuge in explosions rather than exploring the emotional lives of characters and could not write convincing porn if you paid me. In notes stuffed into my knickers. Also, I resort to gags too often. Let us not mention the lack of height.)
When you receive negative feedback on your work, the first step is to determine if it’s really negative. ‘I loved this, but you made these typos’ is not. It’s a letter of love and admiration from a pedant. Hurrah! ‘I loved most of this, but thought you resorted too often to explosions’ is a fair criticism if it’s a comment on one of my fics, but would be unfair as a comment on one of
pushdragon’s exquisitely drawn stories. And even then, it’s up to me to decide whether my love for explosions should be tempered by this reader’s preference for other narrative devices. Maybe I prefer to write for the Tom Clancy/HP crossover readership? Then there are the critics who you should just ignore. If you ever hear me muttering that I loved the first 8 chapters of a fic but gave up on it when it became all romantic, ignore me! Unless you were writing a thriller, in which case, you should probably take some notice. But the fact is that I am a crap reader when it comes to romance, which makes me a crap critic of the genre. And then there are the poorly written text-speak-rich ‘Ur story is 2 hard!’ comments, which just go to show that 12 year olds will always lie about being old enough to read on certain archives.
And for the critical comments that seem both well-argued and fair, the person who made them did so because you seemed to them like a really good writer who had an issue with an aspect of your work. If they thought you were shit, they’d have buggered off without saying a word. The fact that they spent time saying ‘I think this story fell apart a bit in the final third because there were too many unresolved storylines’ means that they thought you were anything but shit, and that they believe you have it in you to be even better. So take the compliment of this sort of criticism and see if it can help you to write better work.
Similarly, fics that receive few comments can really shake your confidence, but I prefer to interpret it as people being so struck dumb by my genius that they feel it would be inappropriate to display their own clumsy prose in response. It’s possible that this is a belief completely without basis, but no-one is harmed by it and it cheers me up, so stuff it: I’m maintaining it!
If writing brings you joy, then reframe any negative experiences so that you can get back to the joy. That’s the glory at the heart of fanfic: it doesn’t actually matter what anyone else thinks of your work. You’re not being paid for this, it’s all about your reactions to canon, and the joy of creating your own fanworks. So don’t doubt yourself, or let others create doubts for you: you are the only audience you really need to satisfy at the end of the day. Take notice of feedback only when it’s worth taking notice of. And for the rest of it: treat it like the equivalent of sexist builder shoutings.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your voice isn’t worth being heard. That’s a lie. Even if you write only for yourself, you’re important enough to make that effort worthwhile.
Getting back to types of block, there’s also attitudinal block, where writing just becomes less important to you. Again, there are multiple causes. It could be as simple as the fact that you haven’t done anything fun or interesting lately, and your brain needs topping up with experience before it can create. Easily sorted: get out there and do something! (If you are in hospital with a broken leg, which DOES happen, read some books and invite your friends over to share their goss so you can have some vicarious living instead.)
It could be that you have other things happening in your life. Sometimes there’s a lot going on and it’s taking up so much of your brain that you haven’t any left over for writing. Put your writing down without guilt and wait until you have a little space. Not until life is wholly sorted, though – that’s never going to happen. Other times other things genuinely are the priority and you’re trying to write as a procrastination and it’s just coming out as blah. In those cases, it’s your brain saying ‘No, seriously, this is more urgent …’ and you should listen to it.
Sometimes it’s because fandom can be an odd place and you might need a break from it. Which is totally cool: we all need to mix it up a bit in life, even if everything’s otherwise lovely. And if you need to mix it up because the alternative is a mass-defriending and rant, some sort of break is even more important. Maybe it could be a mini-break, where you spend a weekend doing nothing in fandom. Maybe this would be a good time to try writing something else, and perhaps publishing it for real, or you could do a spot of drawing, or you could learn the ukulele, which is enormous fun and surprisingly easy. I’d like to pretend that we could act to make fandom a place of constant rationality and support, but a cure for the common cold is more likely. Take a break instead and you’ll remember the things you actually enjoyed.
And sometimes it’s because there is something genuinely wrong. I had several years where I wrote sod-all after I left a moderate amount of my brain on the corner of two major streets in a taxi-assisted bicycle dismount. Some of my friends have had similar experiences after they’ve divorced, or had major depressive episodes, or had terrible things happen in their lives. As one of them said to me when I moped that I would never again be creative, ‘You will. You’re still a creative person, you’re just a creative person who needs a bit of time to mend.’ And then she taught me how to knit. She was quite right, and now I am again a creative person who also owns a lot of natty little beanies.
In those situations, take whatever it is you need: time, professional help, a big change in your life … And if you think your block is a smaller version of this, arising out of many minor stresses rather than one big trauma, then start with just taking care of yourself. Even basic changes like eating more fruit and vegetables and getting up and dancing for half an hour have real and positive effects on your brain, which will help you to write.
What do you do if you lose interest in a fic? Especially if you are writing for a deadline?
I’ve never lost interest in a fic. I have one that I started right at the beginning of my time in fandom, and then put aside for something more pressing, and have added to in fits and starts but now have issues with it because I knew nothing about fandom when I started it and now know a moderate amount (though by no means a lot). But I’m still interested in it and have been working away at solving its problems without undermining its internal integrity.
I have tackled work stories that I never had any interest in, but people pay me for those, so I am perfectly willing to fake enthusiasm. I can imagine a similar situation in a fest where a prompt is so unexpected that you just can’t engage: my pro tip for that situation is to remember that there are fundamental formulae for stories that you can fall back on in times of emergency, and there is no shame in doing this when desperate, as your recipient will still receive a gift and it will still be decent, if not the breathtaking piece of staggering originality you had planned. I do the same thing for work: choose a voice, decide on a ‘genre’, sketch out the points that need to be included, then fill it in with as much wit and originality as possible.
I sometimes loathe the fics I am writing for a deadline, but it’s the love/hate sort of loathing and it’s all really just a by-product of the sleep-deprived state I often fall into thanks to poor time management. I have also been known to loathe complicated knitting projects.
As long as you are writing stories that you believe in, rather than what you think other people will want, I don’t think it’s possible to lose interest in your own stories. Fail to finish, put in a drawer for two years, and wish the Story Elves would take it out of your brain and put it onto paper in the perfect idealised form you envision: absolutely! But that’s not the same thing. (Caveat: some amount of writing for other people is absolutely fine, indeed necessary, for fest and request fics – I’m only against people who write solely for the market, such as the ‘scriptwriters’ for Michael Bay films.)
What sources or websites do you find helpful for writing tips and information?
I find the internet more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to actual writing, though I do love a good research and will cheerfully spend MONTHS tracking down fine details rather than finishing a chapter.
When it comes to writing tips, I find books more effective than sites. David Lodge, Strunk and White and Robert Graves have probably provided the best written advice, Joan Aiken and Dylan Thomas the best examples. Though all those writers who have said ‘The secret is in actually writing things!’ are right and I am slowly learning to heed their wisdom!
Do you share your writing process along the way with a support group of friends, betas or cheerleaders?
I have a few friends who I find essential. My earliest fandom friends include
norton_gale and calanthe_fics, and even though they are too busy shaping the minds of the next generation to be around much now, I still find myself encouraged by them and the brilliant examples they drummed into me.Now it’s most often
raitala who politely suggests that I might like to finish something before starting something new, and jadzialovewho emails to check if I am accidentally dead when I am quiet for a while. These two are both phenomenally talented and so the thought that I can interest them with my own work is a very cheering thought! They are also brilliant at giving feedback and helping me to nail down issues with the story early on by asking cunning questions designed to get more down on paper. Geniuses, the both of them. And if you’ve never read their stories or seen rai’s art, hie ye hence! I have also had wonderful support from
treacle_tartlet, chantefable, nursedarry and several others who have been brilliant emergency betas over the years, and a few readers/essayists including goddessriss, theodoraleft and suttonwriterwho consistently make me feel that every word is worth the effort (and who are also fascinating and erudite in their own right). Because even though I absolutely believe that you should write for yourself and not be hung up on your audience, having lovely readers is wonderful. Have you ever co-written a story with someone?
I’ve started to cowrite an original piece with another person in fandom. On the upside, she is fabulously talented and has a wonderful ear for dialogue. On the downside, she’s as overstretched as I am, so this is the slowest cowrite in the world. So far we’re splitting the jokes, I’m doing most of the murdery plotting, she’s doing all of the romance. If we decide we need any explosions, I expect they’ll come to me. I’ll let you know how it goes!
How have you evolved as a writer over time?
I decided to write the things I want to write and not worry. Even when I started writing in fandom, I was still concerned with audience reaction. The beauty of fandom is that even a cursory examination will show that, as in published fiction, it’s impossible to predict what will be popular and what won’t. So there’s really no point worrying about it and you may as well write stories that interest you!
What is your favorite fic you've written and why is it your favorite?
Of Great Price, which is a Sirius Black/Remus Lupin fic and which illustrates the above point in that is one of my least-read works, but probably one of my best-written. It’s my favourite because it is the closest to how I write outside of fanfic, and so feels far more personal than most of my fic. Much of my H/D stuff is more mannered than my original writing thanks to the fact that it is a response to both the original novels and the canon of fanfiction written by others. It’s very hard to write a story that is strongly ‘mine’ with that level of intertextuality.
But for the two Marauder-era fics I’ve written, it’s much easier both because there are comparatively small textual hints about these characters in JKR’s work (though they are very rich and a wonderful source material) and because I have read very little Marauder-era fanfic.
And it was just such immense fun (in the bits that weren’t tragic) to write in Sirius’s voice:
McGonners stopped me in the hallway, and encouraged me to head to whatever devilry I was up to at a more decorous pace.
‘Independent research, professor!’ I chirped.
‘God save us all,’ she muttered darkly in reply.
Miss Pince was torn between delight that a student had come to work without an armful of homework, and horror that student was me.
What's the one thing you would recommend anyone can do to improve their writing?
Get out of the house, get out of the car. Sit on buses and trains, ride a bicycle, walk through the park, sit in a cafe, visit your friends, lurk around your enemies, go to the forest or the sea. Just put yourself in the way of scents and sounds, weather and wind, wild birds and animals and people who are not you so that the worlds you are creating have building matter based in your rich experiences of the real world. Because unless you build up a library of experience, at some point, you will run out of what is in your head, and other people's stories will not be a substitute for your life, they will just be your retellings of other people's lives. And you are more interesting than that!
hugs
A HUGE thank you to
blamebrampton for taking the time to share with us (and especially for her patience waiting for me to actually post this after she was so kind to fill it out)! <3 Much loveYou can see her masterlist HERE.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-06 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 05:57 pm (UTC)DAMN, YES!!! This is the best and most important part of the entite (very lovely) interview. I just started doing that and it's SO GOOD!
no subject
Date: 2013-03-06 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-06 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-06 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-06 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 02:02 pm (UTC)