pippychick

Hi Mars, I'm happy to read it through for you if you'd like.

I did a quick forum search, and didn't find a topic for this specific thing, so I thought I'd start one off. If you're a writer, and you can't touch type, it's a really easy (and strangely fun) thing to teach yourself. I did it quite a few years ago. I used learn2type.com but I'm sure there are other free resources out there too. Touch typing is a skill that is useful in lots of little ways you can't foresee, and it's also something you never forget. I know for a fact that I could never go back to writing longhand now, but that might be personal preference. When you can type without thinking about it, the ideas flow from your brain down through your fingers and appear on the screen like magic. Perhaps we could have a fun little wpm competition on this thread. I'll start, though it's a long time since I tried to be fast, so it's probably not all that good. .... Without any practice, my current WPM is 42. You can do better than that. Go on and have a go!

The Doctor would regret the offer. First, I'd make sure I had a tent and a placard. Then, I'd coolly inform him that I don't want anything to do with any of the future daleky time war idiocy, and I'd insist instead that we spend a weekend at Woodstock, followed by the opportunity to march in the civil rights movement and hear Dr King's "I have a dream..." speech. Then, after that, go back a bit further and meet the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, preferably before the syphilis. I'd probably insist on Harkness accomanying us there as bait. Oh, he'd regret asking me all right...

Well, I got the following (I've edited out the ones that make me want to uninstall my word processing software): Charles Dickens H P Lovecraft (2) Stephen King (3) Leo Tolstoy J R R Tolkien Douglas Adams Vladimir Nabokov J D Salinger Gertrude Stein Then I was curious, so I fired up my Kindle app, and found out the following: Stephen King writes like H P Lovecraft H P Lovecraft writes like Mary Shelley But, disturbingly, my favourite of the moment had an astonishing result... The Marquis de Sade writes like Jonathan Swift.... As if my fan fiction wasn't enough, two people are now restless in their respective graves.

For me writing fan fiction invariably starts with hearing dialogue. I've usually become inspired after immersing myself in whatever the canon is. If it's a visual canon like a film or television series, the voices are even clearer, and I'm aware that I will both consciously and unconsciously add in little mannerisms that the actors bring to their characters. Once the dialogue is in my mind, I have to write it. If it's insistent enough, I'll need to fill it in, and fan fiction happens. In the case of multichapter stories, I've never started writing one where I knew how it was going to end. A couple of chapters in I'll start seeing scenes from further on in the story - they're like little lights appearing on a darkened map, showing me where to head to. About halfway through the story, then I'll usually know the ending and the important scenes along the way, so my dark map is now a collection of beacons with little ley lines lit up between them. The strange thing is, that visualisation of the map with the lights isn't new on me. It's something I've been aware of for a while, which is why I posted a reply to this topic. Yet, if forced to say what it looked like, I'd say it seems more like a network than a continuous line, which doesn't really lend itself to a longer narrative. But then, perhaps I'm visualising the scenes as ingredients that lead to the conclusion, rather than a sequence of events. It's most like seeing a lighted up town from space, or a collection of synapses, or some strange mix of the two. Sorry if that doesn't make much sense. Somewhere I read something by Stephen King, talking about how it is for him, and he describes finding a story as if it were an archaeological dig, and he only knows the shape of it as he scrapes away all the dirt around it. I suppose it's different for us all.