All the cool kids are doing it.

[alexmegami]

(By which I mean reflectedeve is doing it, and she's pretty damn cool.)

So basically, over the last I-don't-even-want-to-think-about-how-long-it's-been while, I have had IMMENSE difficulty putting words to page (screen? disk?) and also reading (like, let me tell you how many books I've read in full this year. ...yup) and it is AWFUL LIKE BURNING and I just don't even know what to do with myself any more. SO I'M GONNA DO THIS HERE PROCESSFEST THING (Processfest!) and maybe, hopefully, kind of give myself the inspiration to start something. I'm even gonna TRY REALLY HARD NOT TO BE NEGATIVE LIKE BURNING while I do it.

BUUUUUURNING.

(Okay, now that that's out of my system... allez cuisine!)

Day 1: Where do you create? What does your work space look like?

When I create, it's almost always on my laptop, usually when I'm sitting on my bed, hunched over (terrible posture, I should know better, but even my desk is too low to be really ergonomic). Pretty much anywhere I can set my computer down is where I work.

I try not to work in public, since a lot of my stuff is, shall we say, NSFW, and I don't want to accidentally drag people into that... although if they can read the words on my screen, maybe they deserve to get an eyeful of tentacle sex. :P

Day 2: What's your first spark of inspiration? What makes you decide to work on a new project? What's your first step? Is it always the same or does your method change? How do you begin when you create?

Honestly, a lot of the time it's because someone else gave me a prompt. My creations are almost never internally generated (which as we've seen can become a problem). So I'll, say, trawl the Circlet CFS tag until I have an idea for something. But it's extremely difficult for me to do something without parameters, and I can't easily set them myself... so I need to write to spec, basically. (This wasn't the case previously, and even WITH specifications I sometimes have immense difficulty to the point of inertia, but I don't think I've written something that just came whole-cloth out of my own head since probably third year university.)

Day 3: Do you work on multiple projects at once? If you do, how do you juggle them? Do they fight for your attention? Or are you singularly focused? Do you set aside specific time for one project or many projects, or do you let yourself be guided by what you want to work on the most?

I said I wasn't going to be negative, didn't I? ... *ahem* No, no, I definitely don't juggle multiple projects. The best I could say is sometimes I have a few false starts with a story and then I latch onto the one it finally becomes (there were two story ideas I had with "Whispers in Darkness", for example, but the Alhazred-and-the-Caliph required straight-up too much research for me to reasonably do - I'd disappear down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and still come up feeling like "oh god, I don't know nearly enough about 700s Damascus to properly write this" - so in the end I switched over to the Lavinia story that was eventually chosen).

Day 4: What do you consider a challenge for you? What is something that's hard for you? What part of your process trips you up? What do you wrestle with? What's always in your notes from your beta? What's the part of your process that makes you throw your hands up and go "This? Again? ARGH!"

Well, since you asked...

It's whatever-this-writer's-block-is (depression, anxiety, total lack of motivation or inspiration). It's a fight with myself every damn step of the way to put words to paper. You know how practically every advice column about writing is "just sit down and write, let it be crap, you can only get better by getting the crap out of the way"?

I can't do that. I will sit in front of a blank screen for HOURS without putting a sentence down because I can't think of the right sentence. (Starting a story is the hardest; at least once I've gone a little ways I have a bit of a head of steam going and can at least figure out where I should be in relation to what has come before.) I also cannot plan out story beats (probably why I keep to short stories rather than novels or film-length scripts).

And, as you may have noted from a previous answer, research is pretty much the worst. I am FILLED with dread of Getting It Wrong in a really obvious way - which hamstrings me when dealing with, oh, almost anything (other cultures, other time periods - there's a reason that what I've written has largely dealt with already-extant worlds, and the ones that don't are set in a modern world or a weird, dreamscape-esque version of it).

Basically all of it, I mean...

On the other hand, I rarely have to edit much because every goddamn sentence has been gone over ten times by the time it is committed to the page?

Day 5: Tell us about your go-to creative buddies. You don't have to name names, but this is the place to talk about what your collaborator brings to your creative process, how the two-or-three-or-many of you work together, how you figured out how to work together, and why it works. None of us create entirely alone, so who gives you a hand when you stumble? Who helps you get unstuck? Who is that person who always understands what you were trying to do and helps you make it happen?

...

I actually don't have someone for this, most of the time. Not in a long, long, long time. (Maybe that in itself is part of the problem.)

I'm gonna leave Day 6 for later, because... again... trying to avoid the negative... (so well, as you can tell. :P)

Comments

[alexmegami]

You're cute when you have expectations of my abilities. ;)

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I do have expectations of your abilities, as you've demonstrated them well in the past. But I also have an understanding of your hangups, and I wish I could do more than provide encouragement.