ext_188875 ([identity profile] eggplantlady.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] luxken27 2010-07-30 09:32 pm (UTC)

I just have a problem of, if I don't use it, I'll lose it. I wish I could stockpile ideas, but I think that part of my brain is missing :P

That or I'm just a freak. I mean, really, who comes back to a story and writes the last chapter/epilogue after two years? other than me, obviously

Holy Christ. How the hell do you keep that all straight?!

Haha, I only play in three or four versions of the canon, and if there are major discrepancies from the "standard" (which would be the movie version, as it's the most widely available and easy to reference) in a given story, I try to disclaim where I'm getting the weirdness from. Though then you get the asshat kids who were in highschool productions of the show and decide that means they know every version of the canon better than you, even the ones you saw and they didn't. -facepalm- Coincidentally I don't really post in that fandom anymore because it's annoying to deal with. XD

Really, as long as you're satisfied with it, I think that's all that matters. We share to get feedback, yes, but we don't always need that to complete our fannish experience :)

Well, a lot of my "fannish experience" tends to involve writing small stories for a specific person (the person tends to change quite a bit but the motivation really doesn't). It's kind of rare for me to have that urge to write longer or more in depth things that I want to share on a larger scale. Mostly I just toss off whatever comes into my head that fulfills the "request" - or that I think the person will be interested in or like - and send it off and call it good enough. Like, if I know my sister's having a bad day, I'll write her up a little bit of fluff for one of her fandoms just because. That sort of thing.

I just...my experience is the complete opposite (which is probably why this is so fascinating to me!). I feel I have to turn one of them off to work on another, though sometimes a muse wakes up and just demands to be heard, no matter what I'm working on.

My lack of attention span, let me introduce you to it. :D Actually I also tend to have at least one chat and one video game running (plus tv or background music) when I'm writing, too. I need at least a little chaos to be productive. Sometimes I have to narrow it down to just one story and some suitable background music, but that's mostly when I'm getting down to the end of a story and actually want to focus and just finish the thing already.

when you have these moments, do you usually write a one-off, or do you write something big and multichaptery?

Oh, hell no. Writing "epic" length fanfic is way too much work. Most of what I write, period, is under 1,000 words. My big effort in the IY fandom was to change that... which pretty much failed, but oh well.

How much does it take for you to feel like you could write something 'epic', or do you even want to?

Sometimes not a lot... I wrote a ~30,000 word (as yet unfinished) fic for a challenge in the Cats fandom that was simply "write about an uncommonly used character" (I used Griddlebone, whom we know next to nothing about from the canon, since she is only in half a song, which is a flashback of an operatic version of her lover's story, at that)... and I wrote a one-shot of roughly the same length in the IY fandom based on a prompt at [livejournal.com profile] mirsan_fics... but most of the time it takes a damn lot to motivate me to write more than the bare minimum for anything. Because that takes work, and I am lazy.

It seems from the responses I've received so far that others start the exact opposite way - with character sketches or short pieces based on bits of the canon material, and then you work your way up.

For me, this boils down mostly to A) laziness and B) lack of desire to actually get involved.

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