Snowflake challenge, day 8

[flo_nelja]

Talk about your creative process.

First I need to find an idea for a fanfic, and there are two options
* I need to read this fic. No one does it. Or they do it, but by reading them I realize we have completely different headcanons. Oh I need to write mine
* Writing prompts ! Exchange fic ! Gifts !
It has changes with times. Now it's more of the second one. It was initially more of the first one. I think I'm reading less fanfics (and more novels, but I don't write novels). It's still a fix. I remember writing bad smut for someone I was courting as a young women, ha ha, and it might have been my second fic ever.

I'm mostly writing short one-shots, so the next part it thinking up themes, ideal, lines, lines of dialogues, all that motivates me to write the fic. Sometimes some new themes or narrative parallels appear by themselves as i'm writing. It's good.

I'm so bad with long form. So many things I have started and never finished.

The last line is very important to me, it needs to be good!

I'm so bad at titles. half the time, my strategy for finding a title is crying to me beta or another friend that I can't find one, and they give me a half-hearted attemps, and ti's still better than all I could have found in hours. So I'm taking it shamelessly.

Comments

[flamingsword]

I take random titles that kind-of sort-of go along with my few tiny fics. And I totally agree that sometimes you just gotta write your headcanon for a character yourself.

[flo_nelja]

Ha ha yeah! What kind of random titles? One word? Expressions? Quotes of the fic? I'm having such a hard time...

[flamingsword]

Sometimes lines of poems, sometimes puns about things going on in the fic, one was just straight-up a three word summary of the fic in the vaguest prose. But any of the things you mentioned also work! People are not grading you on the titles, AO3 isn’t school.

*shudders in remembered horror*

[greetingsfrommaars]

agreed, a good last line can really linger in the mind! i try to come up with fic titles ahead of deadlines so i'm not scrambling for one right before posting, but it doesn't always work out lol.

[flo_nelja]

Ha ha it's even ahrder for me to find one if the fic isn't even finished!

[faitsu]

Making up the title in a panic is a part of writin'.

[flo_nelja]

And not the most pleasant part I tell you :D

[dreamersdare]

Oh, hey, dnap, I also have a folder full of part finished long form fic.

Titles are a headache. I use a lot of lyrics or quotes (thank you Google!) and sometimes I twist the quote or lyric to fit better.

But I do have a couple of never-ending prompt self-challenges going, which rely on single word prompts, and there I use the prompt word itself for the title.

Summaries, on the other hand, make me want to cry, hate writing those!

[flo_nelja]

Summaries are.. surprisingly alright to me. Of course they're often boring, but.
I think in published literature, I have seen a lot of very nice titles, while the existence of an actual summary, rather than a rec from another author or a list of tropes, is a luxury, so I have lower standards for the summary :D

Most of my unfinished long fics are only on ffnet, I know i'll never finish them so they don't get the right to be on AO3 ^^
And then there's the former NaNoWriMo type, where I ahve the full text, but it's a very bad first draft and I don't dare to reread and correct because it's long!

[dreamersdare]

I tend to end up with cryptic summaries, because I don't wanna share the whole story (and for a short story in particular, how do you summarise without just giving any twists away?). So yeah, I think mine tend to be more of a "here's a hook phrase, see how you feel about it"

I suppose the only thing about titles is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? I love punny titles (for example, there's a DC comics fic I read where one character had a crisis over the fact that the other's mugshot was hot as hell, and the author called it 'mugs hot'. I have never forgotten that title, because it made me laugh out loud). But I can see that other people might find them irritating. It is hard trying to find the right thing that works for you.

Ah, my wips were never published anywhere. I know myself way too well for that. And, yes, some of them do equally linger in the "I'm not sure I ever want to open this file again because that's terrifying" space.

[nonesensed]

Ah, that feeling of "I guess I have to write this because no one has written it yet (at least not the way I want it to be written)" is so very familiar! And writing gifts for others can be so creatively motivating 💖

It's so interesting to read about how other people experience writing, because it really shows how different we all are (and I think that's a good thing!) For example, I love thinking up titles for my stories but struggle to write short stories outside of fanfic - and also within fanfiction, to be honest. Not saying I'm good at titles, but it's not a part of the writing process I struggle with - but trying to think of ideas that actually work in short form stories is a huge struggle for me 😅

You say you don't write novels, but have you ever been inspired to write other non-fanfic stories? Like, short stories that weren't fanfic? No judgement either way, I'm just curious 😊

[flo_nelja]

I mean, I do write novels. I just don't finish them. Or I finish the first draft and abandon in the middle of the second draft.
I have aone novel-length story finished, though, but it was a long time ago!

I have a few original stories in short form, yeah, or in collection of short stories form. One of them is a fractured fairy tale about the son of a villain who wants to become a hero. Another series is a parody of my work problems through fantasy tropes. Most of the rest is fairy tales.

Ha ha good for you and titles <3

[nonesensed]

I haven't finished many novels either, but writing them is so much fun still 💖 Sounds like you've written a lot of interesting stories!

Do you write non-fanfic only in French or do you write in other languages as well? I've ended up basically only writing fiction in English since most of my writing friends are online and don't speak Swedish, and I feel kinda rusty whenever I try to write fiction in Swedish 😅

[flo_nelja]

Only in French, except one or two times when I was writing original smut for an exchange (i forgot to mention these ones)
I'm just better at French than English ^^