Voluntary Madness

You know the feeling when you get a cute, funny idea for a short story which just flows, and you type it all up and finish, copy and paste into a relevant box, hit send, and watch the kudos roll in, while you cheerfully move on and start to work on all your other project and exams?

Yeah, me neither. It began with this post right here. If you frequent XMFC-related Tumblrs you've probably seen it fifty-seven times. So I had the cute idea, I typed it up in its 1.2k glory, pasted it into Tumblr reblog box, hit send, then continued typing for no apparent reason. I'm now sitting on over 6k of a depressing Beauty and the Beast retelling in which almost everything that can go wrong goes wrong, but Erik is a sad, ineffectual stalker whose addiction everyone indulges out of fondness, and its innate hilarity.

It's also threatening to become an 18th century procedural, in which the murderer stalks the halls while the heroes attempt to escape with their lives, except the more I think about it the more sympathy I have for the murderer and his tragedy, and gaaargh, why is writing so hard?

Well, having finished a longish fic, I have thoughts to share, about general writing and fanfic in particular. As usual, it is rather convoluted.

( So, let's start at the beginning. My writing process goes roughly like this: )

The point of the above is: stories, evenespecially sweet widdle one-shots, do not exist in a vacuum. Even if they are a sweet one-shot, they must have background and history and a bloody universe to back them up. A fic may not have substance (meh, plot. Who needs it?), but what it must have is background. In crazy metaphor land, a novel is a landscape, and a ficcy is a shrub. You want the shrub to look like it belongs in the landscape, you better water it properly, provide temperature and humidity and sunlight appropriate for the climate, and then rest assured that no one will appreciate the work that went into it.

On to recent endeavours, namely this Narnia fic that I have been writing. Indubitably, it was cute, when conceived. It had wine and stars and a tower and general cuteness.

Then arrived the continuation, and with it retroactive character development. Thankfully, it still holds together, better still, it makes even more sense now, so hey, who am I to complain?

Except with the retroactive character development I now have a plot on my hands and no ending in sight. Ploughing on bravely, there's an outline and everything and ZOMG, it still works! Even better than that - the source material is falling in line beautifully, because all of sudden it all makes sense! A conspiracy is afoot and it is biblical! Buahahahaha!

In other news, read The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman) on the train. It is awesome.