Collaborating

I've been a bad blogger recently - when I started this blog I intented to write every week, but I've only written one post this month, and it's already the 25th. But I have a legitimate excuse: I have been busy collaborating with some friends on a script for a modern day YouTube series of Les Mis. Whether or not we will ever finish this and convince anyone to film it aside, it is an awful lot of fun. So that other people can appreciate the fun of collaboration, I have made a list of hopefully helpful thoughts. Or perhaps even instructions. Really not sure.

1. Find some people who are ridiculously enthusiastic about something you are ridiculously enthusiastic about.
   In our case this was Les Mis. And also shameless shipping. But it could be a genre, or a premise, or a character. If you're not all really excited about the idea one person will forever be dragging the others along, or nobody will care at all. If you are all really excited, basically, it will be really exciting.
   


2. Choose a way to communicate and share your work.
   I loathe to say it, but Facebook groups are good. They have a file sharing function which allows you to upload revisions and make sure everyone is looking at the same version of things. Googledocs is probably better, because there's a lot less scrolling down and click 'Older Posts', and there is also a useful search function. There is, however, essentially no formatting, which can get awkward depending on what you're writing.
   Of course, you could just collaborate in person. But you still need a way to record what you've come up with, and make sure you all have access to it.
   


3. Make sure everyone has the same copy of the work
   Like I said, this is easy to do on Facebook. It's also easy to do on Googledocs, beacuse what you're writing will all be in the one document, and you'll all see edits as they happen. But if you're e-mailing documents back and forth, you need to make sure that you're all working on the same thing, or people will end up wasting their time working on things that have already been written, or already been cut.
   


4. Plan. Or at least plan how you're not going to plan.
   The first collaborative works I ever wrote were stories told in letters with my sister. The first person would write a letter - usually on the premise that they had to have a pen-pal as a school English assignment - and the second person would write a reply, knowing nothing other than what they'd read in the original letter. Basically, there was no planning required beyond deciding to write something together.
   If you don't have a format like this, you need to make a plan. That can mean laying out a full plot plan and delegating scenes, or it can just mean deciding who is going to write the next chapter, with no actually decisions about what will happen in the chapter. It really depends how much you want to be surprised by the plot, and how much control you each want to have over what happens. Either way, you need to have some idea of some combination what is being written, who's writing it, and when, or no writing will get done.
   


5. Write down your ideas.
   This applies to all writing, not just collaboration, really. If you're having a conversation with your co-writers, or just come up with a brilliant idea by yourself, write it down. You might think you'll remember it, but you won't.
   The first comments in the Facebook group of our collaborative script at the moment go something like:
   "Quick! Write down all the brilliant ideas we had before we forget them!"
   "Um. Um. I DON'T REMEMBER. Probably I will remember once someone jogs my memory, but."
   And then there is a lot of frantically flailing while everyone remembers things. The moral of the story is, if you have a three-hour conversation about what you're writing, and nobody takes notes, then it will be bad.
   


6. Share all your ideas
   Unless the premise of your collaboration relies of surprising your co-writers with plots, this is always a good idea. Before I started writing this collaborative script, I was working on something similar by myself. And basically, because I had the good ideas of one or two people, rather than five or six, it was comparitively mediocre. But now, even if I have what I think is a good but unworkable idea, rather than just disregarding it, I tell everyone, and they make it workable. This is the great thing about collaboration, and you should definitely appreciate it.

Thanks for reading! Do you have any tips for collaborating on writing projects?

A Foray into Fanfiction

For a long time – although I have had a fanfiction.net account since 2006 – I have been a bit wary of writing fanfiction in a serious way. When I read novel-length fanfictions, while I have the greatest respect for their authors, I find myself wondering: if you had the time and energy to write that much, and then make it into something decent which you would feel comfortable putting out to the world, couldn’t you write original fiction? It seems to me like a terrible waste of good writing to use it on someone else’s characters rather than your own.

Many writers out there who suggest using fanfiction as a way to improve your writing without having to worry about serious things like character development, or worldbuilding. I always figured – wrongly – that this was for people who wrote for completely different reasons to me. I love worldbuilding and creating characters, and so I thought it didn’t apply.

As it turns out, I was entirely wrong. As I have mentioned in the past, I’m in the process of editing the first draft of a 115,000 word novel-in-progress. I wrote a post last week detailing my methods, but honestly, I haven’t a clue how to go about it. I’ve been reading a lot of writing blogs and advice by published authors on how to edit in the hope that they will explain this to me. Things like how one should cut ALL the adverbs, never, ever use a dialogue tag other than ‘said’, and remove every sentence that doesn’t serve at least two purposes. I don’t know, at this point, whether any of these things are true. I don’t mind adverbs, but I know that I horribly overuse the word ‘suddenly’.  I read a fanfiction the other day in which someone ‘tsk’ed an entire line of dialogue, and I recognise this isn’t physically possible, but I’m sure words like ‘exclaimed’ and ‘whispered’ exist with good reason. And as for the last one, I just don’t think that I can.

Without any practise, I don’t know yet what works in writing, or what works for me. If I start on a 115,000 word monstrosity, it will take me a long time to work it out. What with the two-and-a-half years that it took me to write the thing, the year-and-a-half it’s taken me to start editing, the whole writing process isn’t going to make sense to me any time soon. On the other hand, if I start on a 300 word drabble, I’ll know have a mini snapshot of the writing process in a much shorter space of time.. And then I shall apply it to my novel-in-progress.

That is, at least, the plan.

(And guys, by the way, read my fanfiction. It’s an Eponine/Cosette fic, of sorts.)

Three More Methods of Character Development

Three methods of developing your characters, in continuation of last week's post. And there's even a little summary at the bottom. Get excited, people!

One-shots

Basically, it's just like writing self-fanfiction, for all the people out there who have dreams of opening fanfiction.net, and clicking on the title of their novel, and reading real writing by real fans about their characters, and then gouging their eyes out with sporks, while secretly feeling very smug about the whole affair. This is exactly like that. Only without the real fans. Or the sporks.

For the sake of legitimate character development, one probably ought to go for one-shots that answer useful questions. How did your characters meet? What were their childhoods like? How did Raven get that adorable scar just above his eyebrow? But once you've started writing one-shots about your characters, why limit yourself to the constraints of your canon? One-shots can also be used to throw your characters into situations they will never be in, and that way you can explore how they would react, and learn all sorts of new things about them. Or while you're on the topic of fanfiction, you can shamelessly and gratuitously ship your own characters in ways that would never actually happen. I have done this, and to this day, I stand by my claims that it is a legitimate exercise in character development. After all, I tell myself, I will learn a lot about Storm's personality while trying to work out exactly when and why he would kiss his boarding-school room-mate. (Yes, I named my character Storm. Please don't judge me.) This shows how good writing one-shots really is – it can be genuinely useful and gratuitously fluffy at the same time.

Overall, this is lots of fun, and since almost any scene containing your character gives you insights into their psyche, you can pretty much do anything you like with character one-shots. And it's just like fanfiction, but without the sporks. It's also an opportunity your characters to come alive on paper in real, actual scenes, which is something that otherwise mightn't happen until you start writing your story.

Writing a page about each character

A lot of writing-advice type articles and books recommend this as a way to develop your characters. And that's basically all they say: write a page. Personally, I don't think this does much in the way of character development. I don't feel like I learn anything by sitting down and writing 'Gadkinalia is an exploited slave-girl in the palace of King Zdefn. She is fifteen-years-old, with medium length brown hair...' I find myself staring at the page, trying to fill it, and eventually just making up random facts in the hope of getting it finished. Like the questionnaires I talked about last week, this might be good for consolidating character – ensuring you have everything you know about them written down, so that you don't forget – but when it comes to actually learning and exploring different things about your characters, this is way too unstructured for me. Maybe I'm just intimidated by the blank page, but I've never found that this works.

Just start writing the novel already

It works. It really does. I suppose it depends on the novel in some ways, but most of my favourite characters that I have created have just turned up on paper without any development exercises or deep thought. For my second Nanowrimo attempt, I sat down on the first of November with no idea what to write, and so I named male lead Bessie, after Doctor Who's car. Over a hundred thousand words later, and he has plot, and personality, and relationships and all the other important things a character needs. The one thing he is a little light on is an explanation for why a boy in Victorian England is called Bessie.

Of course, the only problem here – other than the massive amounts of editing required if you knew nothing about your characters' backstory and the like before you began writing – is that you can't plan a novel without characters. So this really only applies if you are willing to dive into your writing with no planning whatsoever. And of course if you don't mind a hell of a lot of editing afterwards. But in terms of creating a memorable, well-rounded character, I think this works as well as anything.

In conclusion...

At the end of this, I couldn't resist a summary. Ordered with star ratings. Because I'm cool like that.

Writing a page about each character: This is too unstructured for me, and I don't think you learn anything from it. Two stars. 

Extended questionnaire: I find them stifling and dull. Two-and-a-half stars. 

Just start writing the novel already: It's super effective! I swear! Although I don't think it's for everyone. Four-and-a-half stars for people who don't like to plan. Two-and-a-half stars for people who do. 

List your characters from one to ten...: Lots of fun. Especially useful if you actually tailor them to your characters before you begin. Three-and-a-half stars. 

Interviewing your characters: It doesn't work for me, but I don't see why it shouldn't work for other people. Four stars. 

One-shots: It's fun. It works. I don't have much else to say. Five whole stars.