Female characters + meme

[hedda62]

Wrote a post for International Women's Day about my female characters and how much I love them. Yay ladies! *hugs them all*

Aside from that, still having a hard time getting my brain into writing mode for long periods of time, so here's a meme (borrowed from avanti_90). Questions are mostly about fic, so I'll answer them that way unless it makes sense to delve into book-writing. Pick a number; pick two or three and I might answer them all if I have time.

1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.
2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?
4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
5. Share one of your strengths.
6. Share one of your weaknesses.
7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you're proud of it.
9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?
10. Which fic has been the easiest to write?
11. Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?
12. Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?
13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?
14. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?
15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?
16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?
17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?
18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?
19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?
20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.
21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
22. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style.
23. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?
24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?
25. What do you look for in a beta?
26. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
27. How do you feel about collaborations?
28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
30. Do you accept prompts?
31. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?
32. How do you feel about smut?
33. How do you feel about crack?
34. What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?
35. Would you ever kill off a canon character?
36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?
37. Talk about your current wips.
38. Talk about a review that made your day.
39. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?
40. Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one).

Comments

[philomytha]

Can I have 6, please? And 21? And if you're very bored, 31? (You did say two or three, and I've managed to coax some life out of the antique computer tonight...)

[hedda62]

#6: Share one of your weaknesses. I'm assuming they mean writing weaknesses? And I know I have a bunch of them, but I'm going to be a little facetious and groan about my near-inability to write villains, because I was thinking about it today (mentioned it in the blog post, in fact). In my original writing, no sooner do I create a reasonable villain than they're discovered to have a plausible motivation for the villainous acts, or I manage to turn them into a big woobie, or at least humanize them in a sympathetic way. I have turned out one unsullied villain so far (in the book not published yet). I think I probably do this in fic too, at least in those where the villain isn't just a cardboard background figure in a case. Look at the Lion's Cub series, for example.

#21: How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting? Depends on what you mean by revise, and on the degree of seriousness with which I regard the piece of writing, but I do generally edit as I write, and read through for edits multiple times. I'd say something like 3-6 read-throughs for fic, some before and some after beta, and for the books, oh gosh, 10-20 editing passes. At least. I don't keep track. Fics seldom get major revision in the sense of rewriting, though sometimes a beta reader makes a good enough point; books often have bits totally rewritten or rearranged.

#31: Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant? Assuming we're not talking about an AU, or some side current of universe where I have to totally make things up, I'm generally picky about canon compliance. I make exceptions for timelines that don't make sense or are undefined or unclear, and other stuff like that. But on the whole I regard sticking to canon as part of The Game; it's more fun if there are some restrictions on wild invention, and if I'm constantly checking times and places and happenings to make sure what I'm doing to the characters fits in. I'm the same way about compliance with, you know, reality, insofar as that intrudes on fiction. Get the facts straight, and then make the rest the hell up.

[philomytha]

I think villains can still be villains if they're humanised/have a plausible motivation for their acts. The big woobie route, well, I can believe that too if it's a clear-eyed look at what being a big woobie villain does to the people around you - actually, I can see a great tragic villain who takes out his real and genuine misery on the people around him to devastating effect and simply doesn't get why this doesn't help anyone. I think humanising villains is almost inevitable, unless they're a villain ex machina who only exists to roar and blaze and do hideous things to people, like a human volcano.

And yes, I'm right with you on playing The Game with fic, at least unless I'm giving myself special license to write crack.

[hedda62]

Yeah, mine are just… not really villains anymore, or perhaps it's that they never were, just characters trying to get their way and not having particular moral restrictions about doing so, though they decidedly have moral codes and the ability to do good things. It was fun to write an out-and-out bad guy in Book Four - who turned out to be rather stupid, too, so I suspect that's part of my issue; I don't like writing stupid people, and the smart ones figure out how not to be villains.

[eight_of_cups]

Yay, you're not dead! I was getting a little worried there. :)

[philomytha]

Oh, I'm still here, but struggling with this computer. It's very old and tempermental and when it's in a bad mood you can click on a webpage, go and make a cup of tea, drink the tea, and come back to find the page finally loading. So I'm reading a lot of books :-)

[yunitsa]

2 and 3 please!

[hedda62]

#2: Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to? I'd love to pull off an amnesia fic that a) makes physiological sense, so no sudden convenient switches from total loss to total regain, and maybe some aphasia or fun stuff like that thrown in, I don't know, I would research; b) does something to enlighten relationships or other aspects of characters' lives. I tend to roll my eyes violently at amnesia plots, so taking on the challenge would probably help me appreciate how hard doing them well is. No idea what fandom I'd go for, though POI is presenting us with a likely offstage test subject at the moment (I think lots of other people have taken advantage of this, though). Can't do Vorkosigan because it's already been done in canon - well, it would work as long as Miles got to give whomever it was lots of unsolicited advice. Have sex with your doctor, take lots of showers.

#3: Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole? There are several, but… I've always been unrelentingly allergic to wingfic. Can't understand the appeal or the reasoning. Have forced myself through a few of them by authors I like, and ended up shrugging and moving on - why? Why take a perfectly good character and stick wings on their back? Transformation into a bird (or a dragon) I can get into; flying dreams are cool. But wings on a person just seem inconvenient most of the time, and there's never actually room for them under the clothes, and being able to pick up your loved one and swoop around with them doesn't, for me, make up for it. (This doesn't even touch the "how?" aspect, because magic I guess.)

[eight_of_cups]

7 and 8, please. :)

[hedda62]

So it's good that I have lots of choices for these, and I'll pick some fairly obvious ones since I don't want to take the time to dig out the less obvious. Really I should show off and select parts of the books, but that would take even more time, so you get fic.

#7: 7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

From Children of an Idle Brain:

Finch dreams wildernesses of poetry, absurdities sprouting from the soil of his measured mind, tendrils seeking the sun.

It's said that dreaming is how we work out the problems of our daily lives. Since Finch spends all his days solving problems, his nights perhaps require that sense and logic be put aside. Nathan once joked that he must dream in code. And it's not that he hasn't; but it was the code of miracles, of cloud-castles and star-networks and unimaginable power, imagined. He could have built anything with that code, if only he'd remembered it on waking. But he can't reconstruct the miraculous, only its shadow. All his work is like that, he sometimes thinks: like painting in a mirror, like fiddling with live wires in the dark. The blind engineer, using another's eyes as his hands; and he's done it well, if never perfectly.

In dreams he can do anything, though, and he does. He's been known to fly; he's not above puns or triteness, though when he shows up at the class he's failed to attend all semester he still aces the exam, hacking directly into the teacher's brain if necessary. It's a trick he wishes he could replicate in daylight, if only because it would save so much time. Skating along neural pathways as over smooth black ice, he sees memories frozen underwater, gazing up with pallid eyes. Slicing through the ice hurts, and what he wants is usually on the surface anyway. But he's used to pain, and in dreams he can swing a pickax or throw a stone. He might draw lines on the ice with a finger like a bone saw, and watch it fracture, but the mathematics would swallow him, and in dreams he does not abjure rough magic. When it's John's face under the water, he uses his fingernails. When it's Grace's, he sits back on his heels, a pose he hasn't managed waking in several years, and wishes he'd given her a diamond ring; emeralds are not hard enough to mark the fire-toughened barrier between them. She is perfectly preserved in the shallow grave, warm and living, but he knows she'd rather fight her way out and join him in the cold.

A bell tolls and the dream-structure tilts like a Coney Island ride, shifting to vertical: a window, many windows overlapping on a screen, lakes and rivers and canals, a massive weight of liquid threatening to overflow. He stuffs a finger into the hole in the dike, and holds back the flood. The pressure mounts, cracking his bones one at a time. "Give it to me, Harold," the water whispers, gleeful at his torture. "Give it up. You know you want to tell me." And he does; he wants to shout out the news of his creation: the heavens and the earth, and darkness upon the face of the deep. No man is an island, he remembers, but he is one; water laps in a circle around him, washing away clods and promontories and numbers, and he is all things insular, inaccessible cliffs and Galapagos finches, cotton candy and Dickens and passwords that change every two hours. Isolation is his hallmark; it's stamped in little greeting cards all over his skin, each of them yearning to be opened.

"A September eleventh card," John murmurs, clutching a bouquet of white lilies. "I thought you'd forgotten, Harold." They have eggs Benedict and beer, sitting by the river. It's chilly in the wind, and he unbuttons John's coat to get at the warmth inside, puts his hand over the beating heart; the diamond ring on his finger cuts through flesh and bone like a saw, and inside it's all gears and circuits, and lines of code flowing like blood under the surface. He knows the code, intimately, possessively; he knows it in the biblical sense. Be fruitful, and multiply. I know, because I built it.

The robot isn't John any longer; it's Nathan, and it laughs at him and steals his ice-cream cone and pushes him into the deep end of the pool and he swims.

*

Reasons I am proud of it: SO MANY WORDS, dream-logic and dream-language, flowing associations, canon references and character insights, sense-expressions that sing and shiver and groan. I couldn't (and shouldn't) write like this all the time, but I'm glad it happened here.

[hedda62]

#8: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you're proud of it.

From Offerings:

Miles gave him a you-suffering-bastard look that seemed to presage a hug, but then apparently decided against it. "This," he said, "is where a Vorkosigan should pull out a bottle of booze." He pushed aside folds of the shirt and reached for what turned out to be a small flask clipped to his belt.

"It's not even lunchtime yet," said Gregor.

"You apparently have an insufficient understanding of Vorkosigan tradition. Cheers." Miles unscrewed the top and took a sip, then handed the flask to Gregor. Tasting first to prove to the Emperor he wouldn't be poisoned: also a tradition.

"This isn't maple mead, is it?" Gregor asked.

"Brandy." Gregor drank, and coughed hard. "Sort of," amended Miles.

"Something you found in your father's desk, perhaps?"

"Um... foot locker. God knows how old it is."

"Well," said Gregor, "maybe it'll grow on me." It did, slightly. He'd been very careful to avoid alcohol during the whole Serg debacle, and since he'd begun to recover had returned to his usual ways, drinking toasts in good wine when he had guests, and otherwise mostly abstaining. He could stand to get really drunk, he thought. There wasn't much in the flask, but Miles no doubt had more -- and better -- back at the house.

But before they became incoherent... "Miles," he said, taking one more sip and passing the flask back, "how do you think I'm doing? As Emperor?"

"Huh. Well enough, I think. You've been Emperor my whole life; I really have no basis for comparison."

"Yes, you do."

"You mean my father, as Regent? I was a kid. And... he was my father. And it's different. Knowing that you're not Emperor, I mean. Saves you from... going over the edge. Whatever edge that might be. Stark raving terror, most likely."

Gregor began to laugh. "I was just remembering," he said when Miles gave him a questioning eyebrow lift, "what Ekaterin said, elaborating on her bluff. I was going to give my throne to Xav, with you as Regent. It was what no sane advisor would counsel me to do, a recipe for disaster: a cuckold with total control over an Empire abandoned by a man he'd thought was his friend, fleeing with his wife. And an Emperor barely older than I was when I took the throne. Xav the Doomed. And yet she didn't seem to think it was imprudent."

"She was improvising wildly. You say crazy things."

"Yes, but... I think it would have worked. The circumstances, I assure you, are completely fictitious, but even if it was all true, you're the one I'd trust. To be Regent, and to stay Regent. Even if you hated my guts." He waited until Miles, looking slightly stunned, toasted him with the flask, then added, "As Emperor, I wouldn't trust you a day."

Miles snorted brandy, choked, and had to be thumped on the back. "Agreed," he husked out when he could speak.

"If I live," Gregor said, "I plan to give up the throne when Xav is thirty, or earlier if he says he's ready. That will be quite long enough for Gregor the Already Tedious. But so far I think I've managed basically competent."

"Gregor the Modestly Fishing For Compliments. Gregor the Really Not So Bad. Gregor the Pretty Fucking Good At His Job, In Fact."

"Ha. Gregor needs another drink now." Miles passed the flask.

*

Reasons I'm proud of it: This is one of my favorite fics for dialogue, because Miles and Gregor play off each other so well; the conversation just flowed, with a remarkable amount of trading straight lines and ba-da-boom ripostes for people talking about such serious issues. There are funnier bits in the story, but I like this bit because it shows clearly how much they value each other, how they can be honest with each other, and still go for the one-upmanship. It was all so fun to write, and I remember the feeling of that, and it's great.

[kivrin]

38 and 14

[hedda62]

#38: Talk about a review that made your day. I appreciate nearly all reviews (there are those few that just make me go WHAT and shake my head for a while, but they are few and far between luckily) and lots of them have made me happy. I appreciate the ones that go on for a while quoting things from the story, and the grateful ones, and the flattering ones, but perhaps my favorites are the funny ones, especially when it's clear someone's been touched and is being dryly humorous about it. I had someone tell me about "L'oiseau qui vole" that "I was expecting not to like this, but it tripped me in an alley" which is pretty much how I felt about writing it, and I laughed forever about gogollescent's comment on "the heart is hard to translate," beginning with a quote from the fic:

"but, instead, the brain-rubbish inventions about people he cared for being hurt or lost forever, or saying ridiculous sentimental things to him."

I'm so glad that those three scenarios are listed together, fresh out of nightmare. What a perfect moment. I mean, counting out the total number of times I thought "Oh, Simon" in this could take a while, but that one in particular-- just. Simon Illyan's deathly fear of being taken out behind the woodshed and told "You did a great job, thanks for the thirty years of intense loyalty to our family". And then maybe getting clapped on the back or something. Wow.

In other news this is really great.

That's perhaps my favorite comment of all time, though the one on the same story where raven talked French to me comes pretty close.

#14: What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across? I kind of blanked out on this one - I'm sure I've read some horrendous bits of writing advice over the years, but I purposefully don't remember them, I guess. There are some methods that just seem absurd to me - all of that making charts about your characters' favorite colors and preferred foods and family vacations and grade school embarrassments and so forth - but if they work for some people, I'm not going to put them down.

I do have a personal grudge against "Murder your darlings" because - though I understand what it's getting at; let's avoid the overly fancy and out-of-context clever-clogs bits - I think it makes many writers edit out stuff that's actually really good, because it's really good and they think that can't possibly be right, as if the singing phrase should be shot down like a songbird before anyone's disturbed by its noise. And I hate cute meaningless tips on principle - anyone who's ever murdered darlings in the right way already knew where they'd gone wrong without being lectured at, and anyone to whom the admonition might have been useful if it were phrased better was probably confused or depressed hearing it, or else oblivious to its wisdom.

How about we try not giving advice that makes people feel worse about themselves and their accomplishments, for a start, and how about if we feel we must say something then we explain what we mean instead of being pithy and trite? There.

[kivrin]

One of the things that bugs me about "murder your darlings" is that it assumes affection MUST be irrational. You couldn't possibly like, much less love, a line or a moment because it displays in microcosm the whole emotional thrust of the piece. No, you like it for some squishy, possibly estrogen-related reasons, and you should shoot those in the head. It's like an aesthetic doctrine of Total Depravity.

[hedda62]

*nods vigorously* And I suppose the corollary is that one should be indifferent to everything one writes, in a firm and masculine sort of way, patting it on the head and telling it to calm down.

I should have noted in the above response that I have a darlings tag for favorite lines from fics. I don't think it's completely up to date, but I haven't written much recently so it makes little difference. I think everyone should do this.

[eight_of_cups]

Agree with all of this, and add that self-suspicion is much better as a leavening agent than a tenderizing mallet. If I'm so taken with my own genius while writing, I give it time, knead it once or twice as needed, and if it turns into bread when I bake it, then I EAT THE FUCKING BREAD. No mallets necessary.

Most recently I had an idea for a darling just before bed, wrote it down on an index card, checked it in the morning to see if it had survived the passing of my giddy joy, and then wrote a whole fic around it. So if I'd obeyed the command to kill my darlings, an entire story would never even exist.