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Very much a pantser. I do have a general idea of the ending I’m aiming for, but if I start analyzing the desires and antagonists and obstacles too much it stifles instead of making sparkles. Only in the last week did a revisit of old character friends made the story really flow. I work so much better as a pantser, but that leads to bigger issues for longer pieces. Short ones are usually light on those qualities like theme, development, and world building so I think I’m okay. I’m trying to figure out why my fanfic has gotten so much less spontaneous… and why my originals I’ve made so hard. I suspect it’s because the results of two novel length pantsing ended up messes and wasted of all the time spent on them. I desperately need an editor, but budget-wise that won’t happen anytime soon unless I win a lotto. So I muddle through as best I can with the occasional opinions. I love a good review that points out things… at least once I calm down. :p I get ideas from anything, and keeping them long enough to get them recorded is an issue. I break ideas into fandom/series and a bucket for original ideas. When I finish a story i may take a day or two to relax, and then check my idea files. That is best case, sometimes a plot bunny will not let go, hence a Neverwinter sequel has displaced my NaNo projects for the moment. Usually I have at least two active stories and one or two a semi active. (right now, active original, three active Star Wars, and a Neverwinter… NaNo has kicked my muse into high gear but not the direction I planned on) On a good week I post for two stories, on a bad one, nothing. (that is one thing about NaNo that leaves me antsy, I may not post anything that month) Once I have the basic idea down I usually have the starting point and a major plot arc. That can usually be sumarized in a single sentence or so, no matter the final intended length. Names, quirks, background, etc I make up as I need it. I use highlighting to mark areas to fill in and clean up later, staying a bit generic. ‘Search and replace’ is my friend. character studies killed my muse dead in 2010. There are random generators too for lots of details. I concentrate on the story flow and love cliffhangers, and hiding the answer in plain sight where I hope it was overlooked. Pushing and concealing answers in the story, means I prefer 1st person for the same reason its favored by mystery writers: a fair mystery! I don’t want characters to look incompetent in any genre by making the events too obvious. I also don’t want the readers to get frustrated because the reader didn’t know some obscure fact like one car doesn’t come in stick shift that year, so the clues should be given to the character and reader. That is a tricky balance and sometimes I lean toward underexplaining. One of my bigger problems is that I have too much going on in the last chapter so it ends up huge. But finishing a story is important so every one is a victory. The next big problem is editing and selling, but that’s more a publishing challenge than a writing one as I see the 1st draft as foundation and blueprint. All the revision in the world can’t help if it wasn’t written down.

I am very much a pantser. I’ll come up with an idea, a setting, and characters, and start going from there. I’ve had character arcs shift from original ideas and outlines entirely because it was what was working as I wrote. Current story I’m still not entirely sure what’s going to happen with one of my major characters and if she’ll be hero or villain. To me I find if I go too close to any kind of outline, things get a bit too wooden.

I am something of a pantser when I write by myself. When I co-author with someone else, I keep copious notes, but left to my own devices, I let my characters tell the story. It’s not even remotely efficient, but it’s how my brain works best when I don’t have someone else to bounce ideas off. The only thing I might make notes for are certain elements of the backstory, like pantheons, place names, and a very, VERY rough timeline. Otherwise, I wing it madly. I also do collect pictures as mental prompts, which I save to private boards on my Pinterest, just to fuel the imagination a bit, or aid me in describing something. I’m very visual in many respects, even if I prefer not to describe my characters in such minute detail as to rob readers of a chance to imagine the characters themselves.

When I started my potter fic many years ago, I did make some notes, etc, including “behind the scenes” shorts to the other side. Now that I’ve decided to restart that story, fifteen years later, I’ve been finding those notes useful, invaluable actually, in restarting it with some consistency. Overall, if it’s important to the story, or good backstory, I do write it down, either on paper, or in the computer. I even have a database for my original works. Another invaluable file I have, from years ago, is a spreadsheet for the potter story. Given its size, I had columns for each of the major/significant charactors, a row per day of the story, and for those interesting days, a thing or two about what was happening – useful, very useful, to refer to. (And, now that I’m revising, I’ve got some of the older drafts too.) As to writing the story itself, words definitely flow more easily at a keyboard, especially if I’ve got “inspirational pictures” up onthe rest of the computer monitor. Now, I don’t start with a comprehensive story outline….NO! I will write any key scenes, have a rough idea, and refine it as I write. So, this next section to the current chapter I’m working on, yesterday, I came up with a few points to write to, so I give one sentence snippets, and I’ll likely write to those goals as I work tonight/tomorrow at it. Any “later” ideas that I don’t have a spot yet, will loiter as one-liners in the rough order I intend, until I reach them.

Hey there, I’m curious how other writers develop their ideas into a full story. What is your process? When I was a teenager, I was daydreaming all the time and stories ran though my mind like films non-stop. I could only write via computer or typewriter because handwriting was too “slow”. One of my favorite instruments was a handheld word processor that I got from a library (does anyone remember those?). I didn’t have access to a computer unless I went to a public library, so often times a story would be stewing in my head for weeks and when I finally had a keyboard in front of me it would spill out in one go – then the editing process could begin with a wealth of material. When I have access to a computer to write whenever I wanted, I barely wrote at all. I realized a story must sit in my head for a long time before I can write it. I can’t write character sheets or outlines or summaries, otherwise the story dies. It seems like everyone is going to have a different method to get their ideas out. It’d be interesting to hear how your methods developed over time or how you discovered them!

I remember those word processers. My parents hHad a similar one in the house until we got our 486 PC in about ‘94/95, and then it probably went into a cupboard or classified ad. With my shorter flashfics up to 1000 words I often just have a rough idea, or a bit of word play, or a shit joke, and start typing to see what happens. Sometimes something pretty good happens. Other times it’s a load of horse cock. With my longer stories I’ve tended to come up with as many ideas and concepts to use, type ‘em in a text file, and then try and get them into a rough chapter plan order to work out how I’m going to do it, the plan will often include turns of phrase I’ve thought up to use. The plan will also sometimes get mixed around a bit with things being moved to other chapters or deleted. My current story plan is messed up a bit because I’ve found I can’t fit everything I wanted in part 3, so I’m rejigging part 4 and so on. Even with all that I sometimes have a really hard time getting things down as they are in my head. I sometimes sit here for minutes trying to find the right frigging word that’s on the tip of my tongue – sometimes I try and google for it. I don’t have any character sheets either, which probably means I’ll contradict the shit out of myself one of these days. Another thing with me was I did a lot of request stories for other people, and for some of those they had a paragraph or two about what they wanted to see so that part of the work was already done, in a way. To take an example from the forum – If I did one of T_B’s requests, say. These usually have a plot outline, a few details of characters to be included, and indicate the main fetish or fetishes involved. All I’d be doing there would be hanging the descriptions and whatever perversity occurs to me off that skeleton, and crediting T_B for it. I guess with requests like that, it’s like someone’s dug down three feet by six and you the author just have to dig another three by six. Sometimes it could be difficult because I’d say to the requester, “What about if X does Y?” and they’d say that they would never know arousal again, you monster, Harry would never felch Amelia, but otherwise it’s basically easier developing someone else’s story idea with those.

“You know, I guess one person CAN make a difference. Nuff said.” RIP Stan Lee

Rest in Peace, mr. Stan Lee…