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nym_wibbly
Since about 2008, I've severely limited the number of fanfics I start writing. I still get plotbunnies from the media I consume, sometimes to Biblical-plague proportions, but I know my limits. I can't do everything I want to do, and I've learned that if I try, I end up unable to do anything I want to do. Sometimes, that's really disheartening. Often, it's frustrating. As much as I love my long and involved stories, the fact that they take me so long to work on limits me to a narrow perspective on the canon for years at a time; I can't afford to step outside that headspace in case I'm unable to get back in. So, I beat new bunnies off with a stick and try not to think about the wasted opportunities, or how, in my early writing days between the ages of, say, 14 and 24, I'd have given up a body part for the opportunity to grab the kind of solid, workable inspiration that I'm now actively trying to dodge. Ideas are a gift, and a distillation of my love for the canon, of a lifetime of learning, and I hate wasting them.
I've never paid much attention to the length of my works, other than to meet a challenge or zine editor's specified wordcount. 10,000 words seems about right for a character study or an ep/scene reaction. 50,000 to 70,000 for a romance in which the participants are reasonably good at communicating to begin with. 90,000-150,000 and upwards if they really aren't, if the characters need establishing before they get together, or if they start out loathing one another.
I can only work with blocks of about 4000 words at a time without my brain giving out, so that's how I've worked for the past ten years or so - long stories, chaptered as near to 4000 words at a time as I can manage. My writing is better for it, I'm sure. It brings structure to a piece even when I don't have one in mind. It helps to set the pace and let the reader know what to expect - important with a publicly-posted WIP.
This week, I've let myself try something new, telling a story in as few words as I can get away with. It's something I stumbled across by accident when writing Antithesis, in which flashback scenes to the distant past, the early relationship of the Doctor and the Master, came out second-person POV, and somewhat out of sequence. After some initial 'WTF?', I eventually identified why my brain had gone down that road: to avoid using either of the characters' given names prior to the point where they don their Time Lordy asshats and big collars and proclaim themselves The Doctor and The Master.
I'm not a wild fan of the expanded universe and subsequent fanon that names them as youths on Gallifrey/has them use those names in the present in the sense of ongoing pet names. On the other hand, many potential readers are comfortably familiar with the Deca backstory and with the shorthand of "Theta" (yes, I know Theta Sigma is canon, at least as a familiar name) and "Koschei". Using alternative names would be jarring. I couldn't see a way of using those familiar labels without the pet-name-ishness colouring what I wrote - softening it with a layer of intimacy and ease that I didn't intend to include. In fact, it's an intimacy being eroded - even mourned - during the entirety of those flashback scenes. It's long, long gone in the present-day scenes, and I think one of them might resort to violence if the other tried anything as intimate as using a private name. So, they remain nameless in my long-ago flashbacks, and using second-person POV lets me dodge a lot of awkward linguistic gymnastics whenever they share a scene. (Every now and then, I also left it deliberately unclear which of them was which, something I couldn't easily have done in third-person at the same time as making them, for a fair whack of the backstory, opposite genders).
Writing that flashback material, I learned that second person - something I'd never really seen the use for, before, other than as reader-insert fun - can be incredibly economical with words, without losing the ability to pack an emotional punch when needed. I'd never realised that it can work as well as a stream-of-consciousness thing as it does as measured, "this is you and you are here" narrative. The downside is that the reader needs to be comfortable going with it; the very word on the page, "You, " is confrontational, and risks breaking the suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, it can be powerful if the reader is comfortable, if they do go along with it. Toss in an unreliable narrator (or two - alien asshats recommended) and there's a lot of scope for emotive characterisation, and for sketching out epic-scale events without a massive infodump.
Setting out this week to write something self-indulgently smutty that wouldn't end up being very long, something in short enough chunks that I can read it back and edit properly even on a bad brain-day, I've surprised myself by writing something extremely short. Like, way shorter than I meant to. It's not finished yet, and I'm a bit squirmy that AO3 calls each tiny bit a "chapter", but I'm learning a lot and having fun. For some reason, the second-person thing really suits the Thirteenth Doctor - the immediacy and vibrancy of her, I guess. It's a confident voice, and the Doctor is (usually, outwardly, verbally) confident.
It's the first time in too long that I've just taken the plunge when I got a niggling plotbunny, trusting myself not to be distracted from my older WIPs. It feels really good - like a breath of fresh air.
I've never paid much attention to the length of my works, other than to meet a challenge or zine editor's specified wordcount. 10,000 words seems about right for a character study or an ep/scene reaction. 50,000 to 70,000 for a romance in which the participants are reasonably good at communicating to begin with. 90,000-150,000 and upwards if they really aren't, if the characters need establishing before they get together, or if they start out loathing one another.
I can only work with blocks of about 4000 words at a time without my brain giving out, so that's how I've worked for the past ten years or so - long stories, chaptered as near to 4000 words at a time as I can manage. My writing is better for it, I'm sure. It brings structure to a piece even when I don't have one in mind. It helps to set the pace and let the reader know what to expect - important with a publicly-posted WIP.
This week, I've let myself try something new, telling a story in as few words as I can get away with. It's something I stumbled across by accident when writing Antithesis, in which flashback scenes to the distant past, the early relationship of the Doctor and the Master, came out second-person POV, and somewhat out of sequence. After some initial 'WTF?', I eventually identified why my brain had gone down that road: to avoid using either of the characters' given names prior to the point where they don their Time Lordy asshats and big collars and proclaim themselves The Doctor and The Master.
I'm not a wild fan of the expanded universe and subsequent fanon that names them as youths on Gallifrey/has them use those names in the present in the sense of ongoing pet names. On the other hand, many potential readers are comfortably familiar with the Deca backstory and with the shorthand of "Theta" (yes, I know Theta Sigma is canon, at least as a familiar name) and "Koschei". Using alternative names would be jarring. I couldn't see a way of using those familiar labels without the pet-name-ishness colouring what I wrote - softening it with a layer of intimacy and ease that I didn't intend to include. In fact, it's an intimacy being eroded - even mourned - during the entirety of those flashback scenes. It's long, long gone in the present-day scenes, and I think one of them might resort to violence if the other tried anything as intimate as using a private name. So, they remain nameless in my long-ago flashbacks, and using second-person POV lets me dodge a lot of awkward linguistic gymnastics whenever they share a scene. (Every now and then, I also left it deliberately unclear which of them was which, something I couldn't easily have done in third-person at the same time as making them, for a fair whack of the backstory, opposite genders).
Writing that flashback material, I learned that second person - something I'd never really seen the use for, before, other than as reader-insert fun - can be incredibly economical with words, without losing the ability to pack an emotional punch when needed. I'd never realised that it can work as well as a stream-of-consciousness thing as it does as measured, "this is you and you are here" narrative. The downside is that the reader needs to be comfortable going with it; the very word on the page, "You, " is confrontational, and risks breaking the suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, it can be powerful if the reader is comfortable, if they do go along with it. Toss in an unreliable narrator (or two - alien asshats recommended) and there's a lot of scope for emotive characterisation, and for sketching out epic-scale events without a massive infodump.
Setting out this week to write something self-indulgently smutty that wouldn't end up being very long, something in short enough chunks that I can read it back and edit properly even on a bad brain-day, I've surprised myself by writing something extremely short. Like, way shorter than I meant to. It's not finished yet, and I'm a bit squirmy that AO3 calls each tiny bit a "chapter", but I'm learning a lot and having fun. For some reason, the second-person thing really suits the Thirteenth Doctor - the immediacy and vibrancy of her, I guess. It's a confident voice, and the Doctor is (usually, outwardly, verbally) confident.
It's the first time in too long that I've just taken the plunge when I got a niggling plotbunny, trusting myself not to be distracted from my older WIPs. It feels really good - like a breath of fresh air.
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Date: 2 Dec 2020 06:32 (UTC)