To be honest, it's a little easier than normal with this piece in particular; since it's a novelisation fanfic the basic outline was already there, and I just had to add, delete, and screw with certain parts until they were, well...more novel-ish.
With original fiction, I usually start out with a character, or a cool concept I'm not quite sure how to employ. Depending on the idea in question, I'll spend anywhere from five minutes to five weeks before my first 'scene' pops into my head. I'll then write it down as quickly as I can, although I'm not one of those people who carries their notebooks with them very often. I'll visualise the start of my scene, and the end, and just plough through it as quickly as I can. (When writing an opening chapter for a random original novel idea that popped into my head, my mantra was pretty much "Meeting in cyberspace to Donna getting shot.") After that, I either ask myself "So what's next?" or, if that doesn't work, brainstorm until another scene pops into my head and write that, even if it takes place six months after the first.
Internally, I do have a compulsion to edit as I go along, but most of the time it stops me writing more than a few sentences, and often leaves me feeling quite flat. (I have very low self-esteem when it comes to my own abilities) I feel the need to grab a thesaurus or start brainstorming in the hopes I can find a more eloquent way to describe someone jumping out of a second storey window, and it really just cripples my productivity.
And yeah, people's brains definitely vary, which is what makes writing advice so peculiar. There are so many different ways to do things and so many of them contradict each other completely. It can be pretty daunting. Somehow I feel that like you, very few of my original words will remain by the time I've polished this up to standard. I'm just hoping the words I replace them with can be somewhere near as good as my heart wasn't them to be. And good luck to you, too. =)
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Date: 2009-05-10 10:25 am (UTC)With original fiction, I usually start out with a character, or a cool concept I'm not quite sure how to employ. Depending on the idea in question, I'll spend anywhere from five minutes to five weeks before my first 'scene' pops into my head. I'll then write it down as quickly as I can, although I'm not one of those people who carries their notebooks with them very often. I'll visualise the start of my scene, and the end, and just plough through it as quickly as I can. (When writing an opening chapter for a random original novel idea that popped into my head, my mantra was pretty much "Meeting in cyberspace to Donna getting shot.") After that, I either ask myself "So what's next?" or, if that doesn't work, brainstorm until another scene pops into my head and write that, even if it takes place six months after the first.
Internally, I do have a compulsion to edit as I go along, but most of the time it stops me writing more than a few sentences, and often leaves me feeling quite flat. (I have very low self-esteem when it comes to my own abilities) I feel the need to grab a thesaurus or start brainstorming in the hopes I can find a more eloquent way to describe someone jumping out of a second storey window, and it really just cripples my productivity.
And yeah, people's brains definitely vary, which is what makes writing advice so peculiar. There are so many different ways to do things and so many of them contradict each other completely. It can be pretty daunting. Somehow I feel that like you, very few of my original words will remain by the time I've polished this up to standard. I'm just hoping the words I replace them with can be somewhere near as good as my heart wasn't them to be. And good luck to you, too. =)
Andf sorry for the teal deer, there.