May Writing Meme: Day 19
May. 19th, 2011 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dagas_isa19. Do you write long stories, short stories, or both? What's challenging about writing a particular story length?
My stories range from 100~30,000 words, with most clustering between 500~3,000 words. So that would mostly be shorter stories.
The challenge with the shortest stories particularly with length restrictions (drabbles, double drabbles, single sentence stories), is keeping the prose vivid and full of detail, while also making sure that the syntax and sentence structures remains intact enough that it's not just a glop of pretty words.
Longer stories, the issue becomes about making sure that all the bits of the story logically flow with one another. How does the pacing work? Do the payoffs near the end of the story have a logical set up earlier? Then of course, there's the joy of trying to keep the momentum going to finish longer stories.
1. Why do you write?
2. What piece of writing are you most proud of?
3. How often do you write? Do you have any writing rituals? Say, certain locations, beverages, background music, times of day, target word counts, etc.?
4. How much of the story do you know before you start writing it? Do you use outlines?
5. What tools do you use to write? Audio recordings, pen and paper, computer software, other methods, some mixture thereof?
6. How do you come up with names and story titles?
7. Do you use beta reader(s)? If so, what do you look for in a beta reader? What specialties would your ideal beta have?
8. What kind of support, if any, do you get for your writing?
9. Do you share your writing publicly or keep it private? Have you or would you like to be published?
10. What's your biggest source of writer's envy?
11. How much detail do you usually leave out of a story?
12. Where do you turn when your research is coming up with nothing of value to the story?
13. Optimally, how many times does your work go through the revising process?
14. Do you make literary or cultural references in your work? If so, what sources do you usually draw on? How do you decide whether to make (or keep, when editing) a particular reference?
15. What repeated themes do you see running through your work?
16. How do you support your themes? How do you make sure your language reflects them, and how do you decide whether something belongs in the plot or the theme category?
17. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
18. What genres have you written in?
19. Do you write long stories, short stories, or both? What's challenging about writing a particular story length?
20. Is your writing generally plot- or character-driven? Why?
21. Do you ever participate in writing challenges? Which ones?
22. Out of all the characters you've ever written, which one is your favorite? Which one has surprised you the most?
23. Do you use unreliable narrators? Why or why not?
24. What do you like most about writing? What do you dislike?
25. Give some examples of how various story ideas have come to you. What forms did they come in?
26. What stories haven't you written that you would like to write?
27. Do you have any works in progress?
28. Do you visualize scenes when/before you write them? Or do you go by how the words sound in your head? Both? Something else entirely?
29. What do you do when the words just aren't coming?
30. Do you like to tell stories orally as well as writing them down?
31. What's your policy on remixes, podfic, and other transformative work?
My stories range from 100~30,000 words, with most clustering between 500~3,000 words. So that would mostly be shorter stories.
The challenge with the shortest stories particularly with length restrictions (drabbles, double drabbles, single sentence stories), is keeping the prose vivid and full of detail, while also making sure that the syntax and sentence structures remains intact enough that it's not just a glop of pretty words.
Longer stories, the issue becomes about making sure that all the bits of the story logically flow with one another. How does the pacing work? Do the payoffs near the end of the story have a logical set up earlier? Then of course, there's the joy of trying to keep the momentum going to finish longer stories.
1. Why do you write?
2. What piece of writing are you most proud of?
3. How often do you write? Do you have any writing rituals? Say, certain locations, beverages, background music, times of day, target word counts, etc.?
4. How much of the story do you know before you start writing it? Do you use outlines?
5. What tools do you use to write? Audio recordings, pen and paper, computer software, other methods, some mixture thereof?
6. How do you come up with names and story titles?
7. Do you use beta reader(s)? If so, what do you look for in a beta reader? What specialties would your ideal beta have?
8. What kind of support, if any, do you get for your writing?
9. Do you share your writing publicly or keep it private? Have you or would you like to be published?
10. What's your biggest source of writer's envy?
11. How much detail do you usually leave out of a story?
12. Where do you turn when your research is coming up with nothing of value to the story?
13. Optimally, how many times does your work go through the revising process?
14. Do you make literary or cultural references in your work? If so, what sources do you usually draw on? How do you decide whether to make (or keep, when editing) a particular reference?
15. What repeated themes do you see running through your work?
16. How do you support your themes? How do you make sure your language reflects them, and how do you decide whether something belongs in the plot or the theme category?
17. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
18. What genres have you written in?
19. Do you write long stories, short stories, or both? What's challenging about writing a particular story length?
20. Is your writing generally plot- or character-driven? Why?
21. Do you ever participate in writing challenges? Which ones?
22. Out of all the characters you've ever written, which one is your favorite? Which one has surprised you the most?
23. Do you use unreliable narrators? Why or why not?
24. What do you like most about writing? What do you dislike?
25. Give some examples of how various story ideas have come to you. What forms did they come in?
26. What stories haven't you written that you would like to write?
27. Do you have any works in progress?
28. Do you visualize scenes when/before you write them? Or do you go by how the words sound in your head? Both? Something else entirely?
29. What do you do when the words just aren't coming?
30. Do you like to tell stories orally as well as writing them down?
31. What's your policy on remixes, podfic, and other transformative work?
