Snowflake Challenge: Day 11
Jan. 11th, 2019 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quietmoonDay 11: In your own space, talk about your creative process(es) — anything from the initial inspiration to how you feel after something’s done. Do you struggle with motivation or is it a smooth process? Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to pull out when a fanwork isn’t cooperating? What is your level of planning to pantsing/winging it?
I've lost count of the number of words I've written over the years just talking about my 'creative process'; and would you believe not one of those posts line up with each other. I think at the end of the day I don't have much of a process, or not one I think consciously of. Maybe I just don't write regularly enough to recognise what my progress is, or maybe it changes faster than I can pick up on it — or maybe I genuinely just do every time differently. Who knows.
So instead of talking about the nitty-gritty 'how I get this done', I'll talk about a more universal pattern I've noticed in my creative endeavours across the board.
I ruminate.
Generally, my mindset is that of a pantser; if I write too much of an idea down, I'll feel like I've already written it so what's the point of turning it into fic for someone else to consume? Not enough to outweigh the effort of doing so. So I don't like to plan things detailed, at least not before I'm well stuck into any given project. But that doesn't mean I don't let myself think about an idea. On the contrary, especially for longer projects, it'll be in my head for a good long while (anywhere between a few months to years). The idea it starts out as is often worlds away from what I end up putting on paper — or perhaps it's that same exact initial scene I had in my mind, but supported with all these other scenes I thought of to give it structure and sense and thematic importance.
I used to write stories with a lot of imagery and implied meaning, and I absolutely still do that, but the length of my stories has skyrocketed, often over ten times the length they used to be, so these things need to be thought out more to make sense. In my mind, a good metaphor or piece of imagery is a circle, like a train line going round and round. You can cycle through it and stop off at the various stations, but in the end everything has to tie into one whole that can link infinitely. The ending can link to the beginning, and the middle has to feel like the best way to get to it.
I don't like putting pen to paper (or, to be more accurate, finger to keyboard) until it feels like I have enough 'juice' behind any given idea to fill the glass. Does that make sense? I can have the initial idea, but I never end up writing a finished project I'm satisfied with if I have to pull the rest of the story out of my ass. I need to pick at my brain for a while, pull out all the separated tatters of a story so that only once I have enough pieces to make the patched quilt do I start to sew.
These metaphors are getting out of hand. Essentially, I want to give my mind a chance to really figure out what story I want to tell before I try to tell it. In January I may know I want to write a story in which Todoroki and Bakugou meet each other on rainy days in a park, giving each other much needed companionship, but by October maybe I'll have figured out why they're lonely, how they feel about each other and why that's changing, and what they do with their time when the park is exhausted of entertainment (answer: they play Hyper Light Drifter). For example, this is an odd scene from what I refer to as my rainy wip, and I've been working on it for the better part of a year, and it still doesn't feel quite ready to be written.
I know there's a fear that the best parts of an idea might be lost, or the motivation for it might dim as the excitement of something new dims to embers. But I trust that if I care about an idea enough, if it's in touch with my soul enough that I really want to write it, need to write it, then it'll stay in my mind somewhere. Or at least find it's way back there if it goes missing for a bit.
So, yeah. I like to sit on ideas for a long time. I like to give them the time and space they need to grow before bringing them out into this stressful imperfect world and trying to strain all these words together and drain out something that resembles a coherent story.
God, the metaphors in this post are just all over the place. You see what talking about this does to me?
Before I forget — another utterly intrinsic part of coming up with ideas that I haven't mentioned in this post (although have sort of done in previous Snowflake Challenge posts) is music. All the scenes I mentioned above, the ones that fit together like a jigsaw in my mind, are slowly refined until it's the cut I want, come together to music. Soundtracks, songs, osts; everything is food for my hunger... My hunger for inspiration*!
* credit to Megatron
I've lost count of the number of words I've written over the years just talking about my 'creative process'; and would you believe not one of those posts line up with each other. I think at the end of the day I don't have much of a process, or not one I think consciously of. Maybe I just don't write regularly enough to recognise what my progress is, or maybe it changes faster than I can pick up on it — or maybe I genuinely just do every time differently. Who knows.
So instead of talking about the nitty-gritty 'how I get this done', I'll talk about a more universal pattern I've noticed in my creative endeavours across the board.
I ruminate.
Generally, my mindset is that of a pantser; if I write too much of an idea down, I'll feel like I've already written it so what's the point of turning it into fic for someone else to consume? Not enough to outweigh the effort of doing so. So I don't like to plan things detailed, at least not before I'm well stuck into any given project. But that doesn't mean I don't let myself think about an idea. On the contrary, especially for longer projects, it'll be in my head for a good long while (anywhere between a few months to years). The idea it starts out as is often worlds away from what I end up putting on paper — or perhaps it's that same exact initial scene I had in my mind, but supported with all these other scenes I thought of to give it structure and sense and thematic importance.
I used to write stories with a lot of imagery and implied meaning, and I absolutely still do that, but the length of my stories has skyrocketed, often over ten times the length they used to be, so these things need to be thought out more to make sense. In my mind, a good metaphor or piece of imagery is a circle, like a train line going round and round. You can cycle through it and stop off at the various stations, but in the end everything has to tie into one whole that can link infinitely. The ending can link to the beginning, and the middle has to feel like the best way to get to it.
I don't like putting pen to paper (or, to be more accurate, finger to keyboard) until it feels like I have enough 'juice' behind any given idea to fill the glass. Does that make sense? I can have the initial idea, but I never end up writing a finished project I'm satisfied with if I have to pull the rest of the story out of my ass. I need to pick at my brain for a while, pull out all the separated tatters of a story so that only once I have enough pieces to make the patched quilt do I start to sew.
These metaphors are getting out of hand. Essentially, I want to give my mind a chance to really figure out what story I want to tell before I try to tell it. In January I may know I want to write a story in which Todoroki and Bakugou meet each other on rainy days in a park, giving each other much needed companionship, but by October maybe I'll have figured out why they're lonely, how they feel about each other and why that's changing, and what they do with their time when the park is exhausted of entertainment (answer: they play Hyper Light Drifter). For example, this is an odd scene from what I refer to as my rainy wip, and I've been working on it for the better part of a year, and it still doesn't feel quite ready to be written.
I know there's a fear that the best parts of an idea might be lost, or the motivation for it might dim as the excitement of something new dims to embers. But I trust that if I care about an idea enough, if it's in touch with my soul enough that I really want to write it, need to write it, then it'll stay in my mind somewhere. Or at least find it's way back there if it goes missing for a bit.
So, yeah. I like to sit on ideas for a long time. I like to give them the time and space they need to grow before bringing them out into this stressful imperfect world and trying to strain all these words together and drain out something that resembles a coherent story.
God, the metaphors in this post are just all over the place. You see what talking about this does to me?
Before I forget — another utterly intrinsic part of coming up with ideas that I haven't mentioned in this post (although have sort of done in previous Snowflake Challenge posts) is music. All the scenes I mentioned above, the ones that fit together like a jigsaw in my mind, are slowly refined until it's the cut I want, come together to music. Soundtracks, songs, osts; everything is food for my hunger... My hunger for inspiration*!
* credit to Megatron
