Write every day! October 2019 - Day 2

[zwei_hexen]

Lovely to see so many joining us again, and welcoeme to all the new (at least to me ;o) ) faces!
I've also a question for you, as I've just experienced this again myself: do you find your ability to write or your writing creativity in any way influenced or compromised when reading a lot of fic, and particularly well-written, long, intense or so fic?
I find I do. I've observed that the intensity and output of my writing is inversely proportional to the amount of transformative fic I'm reading, and vice versa. I don't read much and mostly only slowly when I'm on a good writing streak, and more so when working towards a deadline; and when I find myself immersed in some intense or just really good fic my writing creativity and output is singificantly less. I know this happens to others as well, but I'm wondering if we're the exceptions or if this is more common.

Tally:
Welcome post

Day 1: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, china_shop, cornerofmadness, fadedwings, falkner, iferion, mergatrude, sanguinity, silveradept, schneefink, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme (15/15)

Day 2: china_shop, schneefink

Let us know if we missed you or if you didn't check in for a while, so we can add you. Of course joining the fun is possible at any point.

~ ~ ~

ysilme here: no tally yet for me again; this is going to be another late writing night.

sylvanwitch here: One of the many perks of moderating a student writing club at my school is the opportunity to write while at work. We typically do a writing exercise at each meeting, and sometimes I get something cool out of it. Today's is just the beginning of a story, 293 words, and it may not go anywhere, but I like what I have so far, so I think I'll file it for the next time I'm stuck on something else.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I wrote a few hundred words on something for fan_flashworks and I'm still poking at where the firelight fades.

Often the only downside, in terms of creative output, I experience from reading more good fic is having less time in which to write.

[sylvanwitch]

To answer your question, which is a good one, I generally cannot read fanfic while I'm writing fanfic, for fear of being influenced by what I'm reading. Even if I'm reading in a fandom different from the one in which I'm writing, I worry that something (a trope, for example) will carry over without my noticing. I'll still read original fic, of course, but even there, I'm careful sometimes about what genre I choose. That's also the case if I'm *writing* original fic. I can read all the fanfic I'd like, but I'm careful about what books I'm reading while I'm writing, for example, the ambush project, which is a time travel novel. I won't read time travel stories while I'm working on my own. I'm just super impressionable and figure it's better to be safe than sorry. Good question, btw! :-)

[carenejeans]

Hallooo! I missed the check-in for Day 1 because for some reason DW was loading too slowly and I kept getting a timeout error message. Argh! Anyway, I didn't write much, just a couple of alibi sentences.

Today, I've been working on the nonfiction project (which is taking up a lot of my time) and brainstorming on the current fan_flashworks prompt (about 300 words on that).

Anyway, I am here, and plan to go along as I have been, pretty much.

As for the question about reading fic & writing, I'm just the opposite! I find reading a lot of ANYTHING gets me writing more. Especially if it's good, but even if it's bad (like the rather silly bookshop novels I've been reading lately). Though as alexseanchi said, reading a lot of fic does leave less time to write...

[fadedwings]

I added new words to two different fics and did a bit of revising on a third. Not much done on any of them but anxiety was getting in the way today.

I tend not to read all that much when I’m writing. Though sometimes it depends on what I’m writing. Or I stick with reading short little fics. I do find that sometimes reading really good emotionally charged fic when I’m writing (especially at first draft stage) can make me feel too inadequate. Like, I’ll never write anything that good, so why bother trying, and it can make the words freeze up.

[sanguinity]

I have the same correlation (high writing output = low fic consumption), but I think the causality goes the other way for me: when I'm having a really good writing day/streak, I don't want to read fic, because I don't want someone else's story in my head, I want my story in my head. When writing is going well, I spend a lot of my not-writing time during the day thinking about my story. It feels like a live thing, and I don't want to uproot and displace it with someone else's.

Oct 2: 500 words on a new story (incidentally throwing out the bad couple hundred words I had before).

[yasaman]

Day 2: 535 words for me on a WIP I've had kicking around since last August! Finishing this WIP is gonna be this month's WED goal, though hopefully it won't take the whole month.

Re your question: I find that I start writing more fic when fandom's producing less of the kind of fic I want to read. Otherwise, I don't know that my fic reading plays into my writing, beyond the simple reality that I only have so much free time. Sometimes a fic will spark some inspiration for me on how to write something in my own fic, or it will make me think more deeply about a character or trope and inspire me to try my own take on it (which is usually different than that of the fic I'm reading, otherwise I wouldn't bother to write something new!), so I'll deliberately seek out fics adjacent to what I'm writing or thinking of writing.

[nafs]

Checking in for day 2. Just 2 paragraphs but it's more than I've written in over 2 weeks so hurray!

Relatedly, the thing that gets in my way the most right now productivity-wise is not reading fic (transformative or otherwise) but my side gig writing about hockey, which burns me out a bit.

I find it helpful when switching from straight factual observation writing to creative writing to pause and read something before I start into the novel. Re-sets my brain or something.

[lferion]

Oct 2 -- 80ish words, and some notes on the SWG challenge thing.

Also -- it's Lferion, not iferion (though I do have iferion, as a re-direct journal, for this very reason :-))

Thank you for hosting!

[cornerofmadness]

I'm a vast consumer of reading materials but overall no, I'm not influenced much by it other than if I find something particularly bad, I get more determined to get my own stuff out there. If I find something quite good I might study it and see if I can learn from it.

Today was a good day, got 300 words on a comment_fic I wasn't supposed to be writing and 986 words on my IWRY story

[trascendenza]

750 words on the novel!

Reading + writing depends for me.

- Sometimes I can't read when I'm writing because I need to be in a bubble with just me and the source canon. (Or maybe I can only read stuff by certain authors, usually the ones who write the character voices really well.)

- Sometimes reading helps my writing by putting me in the "headzone" for a particular fandom/character, inspiring me, or just helps words move around in my brain.

- Sometimes reading CAUSES my writing because I read something and think "nope, I need to write my own take on this."

[mergatrude]

Day 2: just 250 words of noodling on a character that I unexpectedly had feelings about. I don't know if it's going to resolve into fic yet, but I hope so.

I do find the more I read, the less I write, and that this also works in the reverse. However, when my writing is stuck I might read a favourite fic, or story, or author, and find either inspiration or a loosening of the writing nerves. :)

[bookherd]

Hello, and thank you both so much for hosting! I tried to comment on Day 1, but DW was having an issue, so I'm reporting in now for both days (Day 1: 1282 words; Day 2: 1378).

[auroracloud]

I mostly focused on planning; for one thing, I went through my writing goals and plans at the moment, exploring them in form of a diagram that's a bit like a mind-map but I shaped it like a multi-branched tree instead, because that felt freer. That was helpful in sorting out through all the ideas and plans I have active now, and how to go on. Basically my current vague plan at the moment is to get a first draft of my current novel-in-progress by the end of the year or so (I'm not holding on to hard-and-fast deadlines when I don't need to, but it's good to have a time scale in my head), while also preparing and brainstorming for possible future projects. I hope I'll have a clear idea of what to write next by the time I finish this first draft. And also, make time to finish stories for a submission call I'm really interested in. I also spent some time musing how to keep my current novel to a manageable size, which parts of focus on, and I even looked at the Scrivener project for it and pruned the plans a bit, removing planned scenes that don't fit my current plans. So while I didn't produce any new words for that as such, it was much-needed planning and musing at this stage.

I also worked a bit on an unfinished piece of fanfic.

For me, reading and writing varies, both with original stuff and fanfic. I generally believe in reading voraciously and widely, and being influenced and impressed upon by so many pieces and writers that no one influence comes through as the only strong one. I get so much out of reading other stories, picking up themes or details or characters and going "hmm, what could I do with something like this but another context...?" But while I'm actually writing a specific story, I don't usually read another fic on just the same topic, because I want to discover my own vision. However, if I feel stuck, it often helps me to read a story about that character/pairing/situation, because then I can pick up something as a point of departure, even if I end up writing directly against that. Or someone else's fic might remind me of an aspect I could explore in my own story, a piece of background that I could include, etc. It doesn't always help, but sometimes it does. I don't really have hard-and-fast rules about any of this, I just go with whatever seems good at the moment.

[ysilme]

That's a cool perk! And yay for a new story beginning and the words written! *\O/*
I also think a writing club at school is really cool. We didn't have anything about creative writing at school in my time, or generally; I don't think something like this existed at all back then. (Of course we wrote lots and lots of essays at school, in the last three years also in our foreign languages, and we were taught about the basic structures for this, and analysed literature and whatnot, and not only a little and learned lots about text analysis and how to do write non-fic and so on. But nothing called creative writing, and no encouragement exactly to go creative. For those of us who were interested in going that way, it was kind of self-understanding
I've only heard about creative writing being something that is taught when I discovered the internet and fanfic. At first I've been totally envious, until I found out that there's also a big advantage to not having had any tuition on that, after seeing manuals and instructions in how to deviate from the rules learned in such classes, or when I found that certain types of fanfic read like carbon copies of each other for structure and plot: I was free of that, "only" had what I'd learned myself from text analysis and voracious reading. But what I'd really loved to have would've been encouragement for my own writing. Until I discovered fanfic all I did was write for myself, with the rare exception, and didn't even dare to show my efforts to anybody because I knew they were very beginner-level. ;o)
Word-wise, I've done much better this time, 662 words, although it's all non-fic. But at least the words are flowing again, which is good.

[alexcat]

Got 44 more in the virgin Steve sotry and a 366 word Spooktober ficlet.

[silveradept]

Finished an assignment draft on Day Two, which means I'm caught up again on all my possible assignments. I could-maybe-should troll some request lists for more things, but I'm also working off the paper copy of the source for Griefing Pern, which means library due dates are a thing, so I'm probably going to be sinking a lot of energy into continuing to build up my post queue for that while I have the materials handy.

To answer the question, I tend to read more when I'm stuck in a spot on my writing, because I'm one of those people that of you background the process of trying to solve the problem, my brain does faster and better work and will take on any new inputs or go "huh, that's a clever way of doing it, would that type of thing work for this setting?" toward solving the problem.

When the words are going, I don't read as much, because I want to make sure I get all the things down before they fly out of my brain and I can't remember what it was.

[falkner]

Eek, I keep checking in late. Words were written!