Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2020-12-20 12:55 am
silveradept) wrote2020-12-20 12:55 am
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December Days 2020 #19: A Creative Process
[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
bladespark posted something of a fannish roundup or introduction set of things, although they're focused on output created and the processes thereof than more general fannishness, if that makes sense. Sort of the obverse of the coin that focuses on the things that one might request or says are the things they look for in content and fannish content. My brain is helpfully reminding me that there's a tiered hierarchy of sorts in fandoms, and depending on whether your focus in the fandom is primarily curative or creative, who occupies the levels of the hierarchy changes. At least in the transformative fandom and their audience, though, there does seem to be a fence between the people who primarily consume and the people who also create. I'd like to believe, especially in these halcyon days of the Archive of Our Own and all sorts of other sites where transformative fandom flourishes, that it's a very short fence, but it's still there, at least in the ways that these questionnaires seem to focus either on "what do you like to consume" or "what do you like to produce", as if there isn't a giant glob of people in transformative fandom that do both at the same time. Maybe it's easier to separate out the aspects for more practical reasons that I'm not seeing right now. Anyway, onward to the list.
And there we are! There will be a longer AO3 output post around the end of the month with commentary on works, but here's a little glimpse inside how the process works (or doesn't.)
bladespark posted something of a fannish roundup or introduction set of things, although they're focused on output created and the processes thereof than more general fannishness, if that makes sense. Sort of the obverse of the coin that focuses on the things that one might request or says are the things they look for in content and fannish content. My brain is helpfully reminding me that there's a tiered hierarchy of sorts in fandoms, and depending on whether your focus in the fandom is primarily curative or creative, who occupies the levels of the hierarchy changes. At least in the transformative fandom and their audience, though, there does seem to be a fence between the people who primarily consume and the people who also create. I'd like to believe, especially in these halcyon days of the Archive of Our Own and all sorts of other sites where transformative fandom flourishes, that it's a very short fence, but it's still there, at least in the ways that these questionnaires seem to focus either on "what do you like to consume" or "what do you like to produce", as if there isn't a giant glob of people in transformative fandom that do both at the same time. Maybe it's easier to separate out the aspects for more practical reasons that I'm not seeing right now. Anyway, onward to the list. - What names do you claim for yourself?
Silver,silveradept, S.A., [REDACTED], [EXTRAVAGANTLY REDACTED], and [PROFESSIONALLY REDACTED], among others. - What Are Your Fandoms?
Eh, basically anything that I can write a fic about that won't crash and burn? I like a lot of different things, and often for different reasons. If you look at my AO3 fandoms list, you might get a slightly sideways opinion of my fandoms, as I have Opinions about Pern-as-written that are not "I'm a fan" at all, but much more "this could have gone much better than it did". Same for a few others on the list, where I am firmly in the camp of "the setting or characters can be put to good use, but only if the original author and/or canon is to be jettisoned or carved in such a way as to remove the toxicity of it." So, there's a good chance I'll find something to enjoy and something to be annoyed at in anything that I consume. - Where do you post?
silveradept, save the Giving of Grief, the armchair literary analysis of the Dragonriders of Pern, which is first on Slacktiverse before it becomes refined and Director's Cut archived on AO3. Other things go here, at
silveradept. - What's your most popular multi-chaptered fic? (Presumably, there's an equivalent for other work forms, but since I deal in fic, this question applies.)
This is one of those questions where I could use a little more definition of terms. Because I have a multi-chaptered work, Take Care of Yourself (Into the Spider-Verse, Gen, Miles & Uncle Aaron) which by kudo count on AO3, would be the winner (just under 200 kudos), but is also a little shy of 6,000 words, and I feel like this question isn't really asking about chapters as such, but is instead asking something more like "What's your most popular fiction over $WORDCOUNT?", relying on a tacit shared assumption among creators that works under a certain length are all "one-shots", because a chapter has a minimum length requirement, regardless of whatever decision a creator may have made about putting in chapter breaks in a work. If we raise the bar to being works of 10,000 words or higher, most of my work disappears from contention, and then I'm relying mostly on the fact that I've writtten in a mega-fandom for kudo counts. At the 10k and 20k-plus lines, the most popular work by kudos is The Royal Test, which isn't actually that far under kudos of Take Care of Yourself. (And is also songfic where I've pulled selections of the soundtrack from a compleletely different fandom and set a narrative to it.) I feel like The Royal Test would conform more to what people's expectations of what a multi-chaptered fic is, but if songfic also doesn't fit, then there's Liberté, Solidarité, Accessibilité, which is simply prose, no potential gimmicks, and would probably be most easily accepted into the idea of multi-chapter fic. - What's Your Favorite Story Written (So Far)?
I mean, they're all good in different ways. Some of them are spectacular for having brazenly slipped an Actor Allusion in (that someone comments on three years later and says "I only just got this!"), others are good because they're a silly one-shot that's perfectly tuned to the characters and setting (which makes it my statistically best everything, barring wordcount), and a lot of them are things I'm proud of because I managed to deliver something enjoyable to the recipient that followed the brief set before me. I really can't choose a favorite, because they all have different purposes in mind, whether as a reimagining of Chaucer into the reality television era or as large a digitus impudicus as I can raise to the author that's turned out to be a transphobe. - Which Fic Were You Nervous To Post?
...all of them? Okay, most of them, because most of them are written to be enjoyable to myself and to someone else, and I don't know if the someone else enjoyed them until after the thing's been written and posted. That they've turned out well so far usually provokes "past performance is not an indication of future success" in response. But, I would say that I was much more nervous about Take Care of Yourself, The Greatest Ambition, and Liberté, Solidarité, Accessibilité, because they're works with characters and cultures that I might try my best to do well by and fall flat on my face anyway about it. - How Do you Choose Your Titles?
Truthfully, if there isn't an allusion or reference being made in the title, I usually try to think about what the main concept or plot beat is for the title and use that. I'm not terribly creative about titles, I think, because they're usually pretty utilitarian, but occasionally, a good spark zips through my brain and a somewhat clever title appears. (You'd think I have more practice with this, given how I try to come up with good subtitles for specifically themed posts.) - Do You Outline?
Not specifically as such, but there are times where I'm writing, and an idea appears, and it's not something that's going to get integrated into the story right there, so I'll make a note of it and then see how it integrates later on in the narrative. When plotting songfic, I tend to want to sync up the song's high and low points to the plot going on, so there's a little more detail and action in there, but usually, the amount of outlining that was actually done on a work is what you see in the summary box for the fic - the core idea, maybe a couple of narrative beats, and a hook to try and draw the reader in. - How Many Complete Works Do You Have?
Officially on AO3, one hundred sixty-five, but that number is almost always short whatever exchange fic is yet unrevealed, but is completed, and some number of books' worth of the Grief hasn't been transferred yet, because I'm on the last work of the Todd Era, and I want to be done with it in the first pass before Director's Cutting my way through it for AO3. Those works are complete, just not in place for AO3 to count them. - Any Works-In-Progress?
A few. There's another massive songfic that I need to write my way out of the current situation and then figure out how the back half of it goes. There's another songfic that I've written some of, and should probably just get back to working through. Maybe with some vacation time, I'll get those figured out. - Any Works Conceptualized But Not Started?
One, possibly, but I'm still wrapping my head around it, and it'll start taking shape once I start putting the fragments down and turning them into scenes. I've got enough fragments to think there's a work there, however, if I decide to pursue it. - Do You Accept Prompts?
...most of my work is exchange fic, so yes, I do work with prompts. I find them really helpful, actually, when it comes to trying to put down a work, because I subscribe to the Seanan McGuire school that the more restrictions you put on any given work, the easier it is to make that work take shape, even if occasionally it means you end up throwing penguins here and there. I've been able to do work that's just been a character, maybe a pairing, a rating, and a fandom, but those are almost always going to be "Well, I wrote something I liked, and to hell with you if you didn't, because you didn't provide any details about what you were looking for." I'm not always bursting with ideas from my own head, so it's nice to be able to take someone else's idea and go, "Oh, that's brilliant. Let me see what I can do with that." And, occasionally, someone leaves a perfectly good outline lying around and you have to do something with it. - Anything Upcoming You're Excited To Write?
Sure, but I haven't received the prompts for it yet. Maybe one of these unfinished works will turn out to be really exciting, but the truth is that there's probably something over the horizon that I'll be excited to try and put into a story form. - Tag, Is Anybody It?
No, I don't think that's a good idea. If there are people that want to do it themselves, that's fantastic, but I'm not going to say that other people should do it.
And there we are! There will be a longer AO3 output post around the end of the month with commentary on works, but here's a little glimpse inside how the process works (or doesn't.)
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also my email for this comment seems to have gone missing, grumble
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Personally, I know what you mean about the fence, and in some ways fencing off the two spaces is not positive. And yet in others, creating and consuming are two entirely different "modes" for me, most of the time?
Of late I actually find consuming things to be more difficult. The muse is very active these days. A combination of being suddenly very deep in *several* different writing communities that keep sparking ideas, and having always been able to write in tiny, interrupted chunks but having a much, much harder time *reading* that way, except things that *are* tiny chunks, and really I should nose further into the flashfiction community, because that stuff I could read! I read too many reddit posts to fill the "short and who cares if goober interrupts" niche.
BUT anyhow. I will say I should probably poke at a few of your shorter works as well, because I've enjoyed all the ones I've read so far!
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The fence is there, and they're are some people intimidated by it (me, for one, before recognizing it as a fence with a gate that allows for easy passage.
I am glad that your muse is feeling active! Those short works will still be there when you decide you want to go looking at them.