i was in fandom for years and years before i ever wrote anything longer than a few hundred words, and had always assumed it was just not something i could do. (and i hate not being able to do something, and i refuse to do things i’m no good at.) and it’s funny, because it wasn’t practice that that got me over that hurdle. it was talking to someone else about their writing, so often that i started to understand the process of breaking an idea down enough so that you can build it back up into a story.
and it figures, because we’ve reached peak anti-discussion when it comes to the process of writing fic. there’s barely any meta these days, everyone’s too busy writing recaps for their tv blogs, let alone meta about how to write a character or a setting. i think i’ve seen about three posts this year where i’ve thought, oh hey, that’s helpful information put together expressly for being useful to people writing in a particular fandom.
i just think it’s sad. even a year later, and i would have never worked it out, and there are all these people writing drabbles and snippets out there who might never be any better than that because fic writing is such an isolating activity in fandom these days, unless you find friends who like to listen to you blabber on about whatever you’re working on at the moment, or even better, the ones who want to ask a million questions about it.
(in truth, i just recommend co-writing everything at this point. the only person who will ever care enough is someone else slapping their name on the product with you.)
co-writing is also fantastic for a number of other reasons:
- two minds are often better than one, so when you’re scratching around for ideas you can use each other as a soundboard
- you don’t worry so much about wordcount because you have someone else there who’s also writing and you’ll both be tapping away in a shared gdoc and next thing you know you look up and oh wow it’s already 4,000 words how the hell did that happeN???
- having someone else writing with you forces you to schedule times to actually sit and write (especially if you live in different timezones). Often the most difficult part of writing is purely getting into the habit of writing. Before I started collaborating, my writing was very sporadic. Now it’s like clockwork.
- mutual satisfaction as you and your co-author torture your readers A++ would recommend
- ????
- giggling like idiots when writing sex-scenes