Discussion The Scribble Pad (Fanfic Writing Discussions)

Moved this here, as it's more appropriate.

No, thankfully. It's gross-out humour and apparently, I branded it as a "lost Clone Wars mission". I started a great deal of nonsense fics in March and April 2018, one of them features a particularly angry OC breaking the fourth wall, there's some genuine A/P crack! titled Wind God Helps Anakin Beat Math and one with a bunch of Lasat children tormenting Kallus who is given the title of a "honorary babysitter" on Lira San.

 

Tantalizing snippets, all ... and speaking of A/P, do you, or anyone reading this, think it's possible to write A/P without foreshadowing?

 

Possible? Yes. But that would take so much of the fun out of it I'm a sucker for tragedy too.

HAHAHA. I ran a few of mine and I got Agatha Christie every time, which is funny because sitting next to me is my cat... named Agatha Christie. I mean I've read and enjoyed a few Christie books over the years but - despite my cat's name - I never was a HUGE Christie fan [I like her writing but I never was a huge mystery person and now I feel like I have to explain my cat: my sister has a big ugly beast with a handle-bar mustache named Hercule Poirot (we watched the David Suchet series as kids), so naturally when I got my cat, she had to follow the theme, and Aggie just fit).

I'm not complaining about getting Christie at all. GGK is definetly goals too. For me, would it be too cliche to say Aaron Sorkin as a Sorkin fan-fic writer? Dude can write dialogue.

 

I apparently do not have a style. I pasted excerpts from four stories and got four different authors—Stephen King on the fluffy mush piece I’m working on, Arthur C. Clarke on the beginning of rom-com in space, Daniel Defoe on the opening of “Meet the Aliit”, and Agatha Christie on the first chapter of Wolf Brother.

I’m not sure what to make of this. I haven’t meant to emulate any of them (I’ve never actually read King, Clarke or Defoe ) . I’m not sure who I write like; I think there’s probably a dash of Douglas Adams in there somewhere but otherwise... Of the profic writers, I enjoy Claudia Gray and think she tells a good story.

 

I got Stephen King, a political and science journalist/writer and (to my horror) Stephanie Meyer.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

It's Ian Fleming for me. Yowza! I'm stopping at one entry while the going's good!

I would like to write like Hemingway and there used to be a contest for that in an in-flight magazine called American Way and maybe there is one still and if that is so then I would like to find it again because the first prize was a trip to Italy.

 

Wall to wall Agatha Christie.
Perhaps my stuff reads like a mid twentieth century elderly English lady trying to write the accent of a Belgian detective.

 

What. I'm with @Raissa Baiard here--I don't have a style, unless it's the gizkaspice style . Literally putting in different sections of a story gives me different results from Stephan King to Dan Brown. I don't like emulating any author's writing style though so that's probably the factor here.

 

I did this with several of my stories (got kind of carried away, TBH), and the results were all over the place.

 

I get Stephen King, regardless of genre. Curious what the other non-native speakers will get.

I don't want to emulate anyone's style myself, simply because I would not want something like that to limit me.-

I think it's pretty possible, too.

What is not possible, however, is writing Mace Windu and not thinking of Samuel L. Jackson.

...

OK, so I have been working on something - splitting a story that was well-received after 19 chapters and then I got stuck at the 20th mid-2018.

I revisited the story and its complexity, a three-digit number of chapters and whatnot and realised that I got stuck on the specific chapter because I needed the other characters in it and I felt like I was wasting a much better idea for the sake of having a campy subplot where two primitives are in for numerous culture shock in a far more advanced world.

Similarly, I decided that the said long!fic does not need the two characters that I was trying to shoehorn in it, because they would completely erase two others from the story and one cannot be a part of it with the other one never being seen. One of those two that would have been erased was probably the least notable of any characters I have ever written, she has not shown any major flaws and there has been zero character building so far. But the other one, I definitely need him in the story because he owns the object that advances the plot.

And then I realised that the characters I cannot shoehorn in it could have a completely different story going on and that they have the biggest potential for action/adventure type of stories that any other characters I have ever came up with.

I'm going to end up writing three stories instead of one. But it makes sense.

Anyway, the first one needs a title and I'm struggling. O_O

 

Got Dan Brown, Gertrude Stein, Anne Rice (twice), and Arthur Clarke

 

I got three different authors (Anne Rice, Stephen King, and I forget the third one) using three different stories. There's no one I try to write like anyway, so I guess it's not too surprising.

And now I just want to whine for a minute. I feel like I complain here a lot, and I feel bad about that, but there's nobody in real life I can talk to about this stuff and I just need to get it out of my head. Putting it behind spoiler tags so it's easy to skip if you don't want to read it, because it's just the same old rant about not being able to write that a lot of us have been experiencing and talking about.

Spoiler

So an update to this: spring is not the answer after all. I had a couple ideas that I was really, really excited about (which is huge in itself, because for the last few months I've hated everything I came up with). And I want to write these stories but I just can't. It's like there's a block between my brain and my fingers when I go to actually type it out and I end up just staring at it until I get so frustrated I go listen to music/rewatch my mindless comfort shows instead. I feel like my brain's just rotting away, but doing anything creative or intellectual to help with that takes more energy and brainpower than I have in the first place, which makes my brain feel even more useless, and so on. I'm trying to just go with it and practice self-compassion and all that, but it's hard. It's really hard. Anyway, that's today's version of The Rant™ and I'll shut up now.

 

My sympathies and I hope you gain equilibrium soon. I also am in the same boat re RL where I can discuss writing due to my job, but not fannish writing.

 

I'm sorry to hear this. Let me say first that I get it 'cause I've been there (very recently, too), and it's a super frustrating and icky feeling. I hope things get better for you soon.

I'm offering this as a general idea for people who are in this same situation, but I'm using your post as a springboard. And honestly I'm not sure if it'll even work because I've never tried it myself. For times when someone wants to write but the keyboard sucks all the motivation away for any reason, I wonder if recording it instead would help? As in, go for a walk and narrate the story into a voice recorder, or even the story idea or rough outline / events to hit. You'd still be creating the story without any of the "sit down and work at this, and FOR CRYING OUT LOUD DON'T PUT A COMMA THERE" mental aspects, and speaking it out loud might feel a bit more free and creative to keep the juices flowing. Plus it's saved for down the road when you're ready to pound it into a keyboard.

Like I said, I don't know if this would help because I hate the sound of my own voice on recorders and I know I'd never listen to the recording afterward so I haven't done it.

 

I was thinking something similar, but in my case, it's writing drafts by hand that I've found to be helpful. Don't know if that would be helpful for anyone else, but the majority of my first draft writing in the last several years has been by hand. It was especially helpful this past summer when I was getting back into writing for the first time in over two years. (As in, I didn't write a single word of fiction in those two years, and it was incredibly sparse for even a couple years before that... yeah, that hurts to think about now.) I think there's just something different about putting words to the page versus typing on a keyboard - sort of similar to the difference between recording yourself talking about your ideas versus typing those same ideas. (I need to try the voice recording some time, though. That's a really great idea.)

Anyway, I get a nice notebook and one of my favorite pens, and I tell myself I'm going to write even if it's crap, and then if it really is crap (which a lot of it is), I just draw a line through it or circle it so that I can ignore it later - but the words are still there, so I don't feel like a total failure. Unlike with a word document, where I end up deleting all the stuff that doesn't work, and then I feel worthless when I have almost nothing to show for my time. Plus, I have more freedom to take that notebook wherever I want and jot down ideas as they come, and I don't have to worry about sitting in front of the computer when I want to be creative.

I know this won't work for everyone, but I offer my own perspective, as someone who's gone through multiple years-long dry spells in the last decade and am now finally finding my words again.

 

Why a spoiler? The thing I spoilered in social was legit scary, this is a problem we all have and I more than sympathise. <3

And seriously, many people IRL would raise an eyebrow at what we're doing. I had one friend in the past who was into fanfics herself and that was it.

 

@amidalachick I really feel for you. I think I could just keep reposting the same rant, too. I had a brief spate of creativity after I unloaded my feelings and was all yay, I got my groove back! And then Real Life said “nope”. Again. For what seems like the thirty millionth time in the last year. And I started to write another rant, but it was a whiny teal deer, so suffice it to say life is hard and I would really like to finish my mushy mush story with my comfort characters for the MMM, but it’s looking unlikely.

I think that there are quite a few of us who really want to write but are so worn down by life, the universe and everything that it’s just not happening. I wish I had advice, but I can offer sympathy and virtual hugs. You’re not alone.

 

I'll just post the tl;dr version: same here, everything @Findswoman said, virtual hugs to everyone!

 

We're now all sitting in a circle, pondering. So, perhaps questions would solve it? Asking oneself what is causing it.

I'll go first. I'm kind of apathetic regarding everything at the moment, it's probably some form of atypical depression that most of us are experiencing after a year of a life we never thought we'd be living. And I think that instant gratification, something that I generally despise in other people after it reaches a certain threshold, plays a large part in writer's block. I have an idea for the story, but I kind of want it to write itself and I'd only get to post it and discuss it. Some people have Netflix in amounts too ridiculous to be able to grasp what one just watched, some have too much food, opiates, shopping for the sake of shopping... I have stories that don't exist.

 

This is me right now. Sometimes I will get very passionate to write a story and have everything planned out, and then the next day I second guess it or lose motivation and throw it all away and then forget what it's supposed to be about. So yeah, I dunno. I also kind of want things to write themselves now. I know I absolutely enjoy giving people positive vibes to continue writing things so I can read and admire them, but I'm also widely known to never take my own advice

 

I often broaden the scope to ask myself if I want to be a writer at all. It takes unleashing the imagination and at times I wish I didn't have any because it bleeds over into RL to make me imagine scenarios. I write copy which is pretty much buy this now because x with only a tad of poetic license.

 

@pronker - I feel your pain. I had clients who wanted me to do everything on a website, things far beyond my scope. And writing copy, especially on the web, with SEO in mind is a different type of creativity, BUT also a killer for real creativity. Now that you have to write that these are difficult times but blablablablabla we care and yakyakyakyakyak BUY THIS... O_O