I write too much longfic. AMA

[headstone]

DISCLAIMER THAT YMMV AND MY EXPERIENCES ARE NOT UNIVERSAL

I don’t claim particular expertise or authority on writing longform fiction, but it is factually true I have spent a lot of my one wild and precious life on it. I like to talk about it because I find it fun and exciting, and I know it’s something a lot of people express intimidation about, which is something I also used to feel (and sometimes still do, sometimes starting a new longfic project feels like a criminal sentence.) I felt like yakking about it, so I asked if any folks I know on Mastodon had AMA-style questions for me on the subject. A couple people did, and I… wrote like 4k about it. The curse. Of being longwinded.

There will be a lot of generalizing, personal opinion, etc below, and no writing advice works for everyone. If you read something and you’re like “wtf I totally disagree” that’s cool! I’m talking about me~

tei asked: How do you do, like, the upper level of plotting, I guess? Turning the idea into an overall structure? (Or do you?)

Ok, so for the purposes of this post, “longfic” is anything that is long enough to require chapters, which in my opinion is anything 30k+ (but not everyone agrees.) Out of the novella range, basically. IME, this is where writing something based on vibes alone becomes untenable.

Keeping in mind that every fic I’ve written of this length is either canon compliant or a canon divergence, and this might vary the more “distanced from canon” a story is, and also that I’m talking specifically about fic right now because the process with original fic is quite different, IME:

Start from some specific divergence point or “hook,” usually as a question. To use my completed longfics as reference points (sorry if these fandoms are meaningless to you, they’re just examples), that would look like:

• “What if Sugimoto Saichi was transferred from the 1st Division to the 7th prior to the Russo-Japanese War, and he went through the war in Tsurumi’s troop instead?”
• “What if Jiang Cheng died at Nightless City?” AND “What if Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli both survived the Sunshot Campaign and immediate aftermath?” (these got merged into the same fic but were originally conceived separately)
• “Would a semi-accidental trans awakening be enough to jolt postcanon Nie Huaisang into a life beyond revenge? And how would the resulting bad-idea heterosexual affair with Jiang Cheng work out?” (look, some of these premises are more obvious leaps than others)

Then I ask questions. “And then what” and “yes-and”-ing myself, following resulting rabbit trails, and noticing which ones feel the most vibrant or enticing. It can be helpful to do this via conversation with a friend or two, but brain dumping into a document or taking a voice memo can also work. In the case of flight of a one-winged dove (fic #3 up there), the concepts of “Nie Huaisang twink-to-MILF pipeline” and “straight Sangcheng would kind of go crazy” were linked from the start, so there were a lot of immediate questions about how the ideas would talk to each other. “What sequence of events are we thinking, here? Are Sangcheng already fooling around before Nie Huaisang starts having a gender crisis at age 39, or does it happen after?” and “How would they navigate the need for secrecy around their relationship due to political dynamics and image-consciousness?” and “Who initiates the relationship and how?” and “What directly precipitates Nie Huaisang’s trans awakening?” are all questions that kept me thinking, because I wanted the answers.

(This is about the point where an idea goes from just “fun daydream” territory to “actual story,” because this is when you begin to make decisions or commit to choices, even just as thought experiments. I think it's important to keep this in mind: One trap that All the Time Daydreamers, Sometimes Writers, fall into is this idea that writing is transcribing the daydream. It's not. The daydream is a fuzzy thing. There are gaps that you don't need to fill in a daydream, because you already get the emotional point. A lot of it is emotion. And because it makes you feel like a complete story would, your brain is tricked into thinking that's what you have. […] When you write, you're building something. It's not a pale imitation of what you have in your head- what you have in your head can't exist on the outside. (x))

What distinguishes the story “kernels” that end up devouring months to years of my life from the ones that don’t go anywhere is how gripping and engaging that brainstorming process is. Are any story developments or tableaus kind of just surfacing of their own will? Is it making an immediate impression on me? Do I just feel excited about it?

If the answers to those questions are along the lines of “very gripping, much inspiration,” I give it a week or two to see if the initial enthusiasm subsides. (Sometimes it does!) If I still feel the buzz about it by that time, I outline.

I’m an outliner 100% the time, so if you’re one of those “I don’t and can’t outline or it kills my desire to write” people, I support you so much in whatever process works best for you. The following (wrt this specific question) may be completely useless and unrelatable for you, so feel free to stop here.

I default to a three-act structure, and the most common issue I run into with my own plotting skills is when I actually write the first act of the story and then realize how rushed the pacing for the subsequent act will be if I go ahead exactly as planned. The third act will also require some tweaking as a result of the changes made in the second, but that’s usually about spending more time/words on sections I already knew I had to write, rather than changing what happens. But the second act generally sees not insignificant amounts of material added and material removed.

I’ve come to (mostly) grow out of feeling like this indicates a failure to outline properly in the first place. It’s the kind of thing that I wouldn’t have known wouldn’t work as originally planned until I was up to my elbows in the work of writing the story, because that early drafting will teach me what the story wants to be when it has to function as a coherent narrative, as opposed to how I might have initially seen in my head.

I find the outlining process very generative, but that’s more about going through the motions of developing an outline and through doing so letting your brain happen upon the “unknown knowns” — the aspects of the story your subconscious is fomenting, which you haven’t consciously grasped yet. The actual format of the outline itself doesn’t really matter; besides relying on a three-act structure, I don’t have any specific outline/format I use consistently. I consider it very goofy whenever writers insist that they’ve hacked the One True Process or the one spreadsheet to rule them all.

The last thing of note is that a big difference between the stories I actually see through and the ones that remain premises is whether my early ponders of an idea spark any kind of “endgame tableau,” as it were. If I get one of these, it’s usually over for me, RIP the next nine months of my life. Like, with tender prey (fic #1 up there), my initial consideration of the idea led me to this vision of Sugimoto and Ogata making a run for it together out from the Asahikawa barracks into the snowy wilderness, which I found very compelling, but for it to hit the way I wanted, I knew I had to start from a point where I’d be able to convince the reader they would actually do that together. Because I write out of order, I often write at least a sketchy version of that climactic scene or significant point of denouement shortly after it comes to me, and then spend the rest of the writing process closing the distance between the initial “what if” hook and the… um… procurement of the fish, as it were?

soph asked: how does one turn an idea into something that needs/wants a longfic's amount of words to explore it? I think that when I write I am trying to find the most direct way of approaching the Thing that the fic is about, which means it gets wrapped up in like, 1-5k words, usually. how does one approach, I guess, finding all the other things that the idea can also be saying, the framework that those things can all be put into, that aren't just "laser pointer your way to the theme directly" lol

So, first off, this is an acquired skill 100%. There was a time a 3-5k fic felt really long to me, and the first “longfic” I wrote was 20k-ish and that felt INCREDIBLY long, and only went that long to start with because it was an OT4 get-together fic and there were a lot of moving parts. It took a lot of practice of gradually longer and more ambitious projects before I got a good sense of how to think about stories on that big level without it also feeling like a big sprawling daydream-verse rather than a discrete narrative object. Now it takes active effort for me to keep things short, lol. The point is that it’s a habit/way of thinking about narrative that can be developed over time, rather than being “you’re either a longform writer or you’re not” (though some people will still find that to be their experience, tbf.)

So, you mentioned starting with a Thing. Start rotating the Thing in your brain like a video game character model. What are the different attributes or aspects of the Thing? How would different characters who could feature in your story feel about the Thing—does it hold resonance for them in different ways?

As an example: the Thing that tender prey (fic #1) was about was violence and survival. The two lead characters, Sugimoto and Ogata, are both violent people with a keen drive for survival, but they have very different understandings of their own relationships to violence, of other people’s relationships to/potentials for violence, on the acceptable uses of violence, of what even counts as “survival” (what kinds of loss or moral compromise are an acceptable price for personal survival, for instance)? I thought about all the different scenarios that could offer opportunities for the characters to demonstrate their understandings of these core concepts, and for those understandings to be challenged and tested as a result of their relationship with each other and the events of the plot. It was pretty easy to do this at first because they’re active duty conscripted soldiers, but there’s still a range of violent situations: training, wrestling/brawling, and then various actual battle situations. Then there’s psychological and emotional violence, which are rife in the inherently abusive and hierarchical military environment. The limits of sanctioned, acceptable violence begin to deteriorate through the war, as their CO becomes increasingly radicalized and cult leader-y. The lead characters bond over their exceptional aptitude as violent killers, which makes them valued in this military setting, but only as tools to be used. As a result of the Self-Recognition Thru The Other, they determine that in order to transcend mere survival and really live, they need to desert the army together. Doing this brings them closer together, because they admire the other’s tenacity and the ways it serves as a mirror for their own selves. However, they have irreconcilable differences re: the violent actions they can excuse vs. the conditions that can be tolerated, and these differences will put their nascent connection and trust to the test. Etc. Lots of other stuff happens in the fic, obviously, but maybe this gives you a sense of how if you start from your Thing, it can be a real compass for navigating all the possible directions a story could go.

Another angle is “vibe curation.” This is about the Thing again. My longfics all have very specific, defined settings and mental aesthetics, which feel almost as important to the story as the action plot does, in terms of communicating the Thing. tender prey was primarily set in military camps and trenches in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, because it was a riff on war novels about the relationships between WWI soldiers in the trenches, with the twist that this was a story about deserting the military with your gay lover (and this being a good thing.) mercies (fic #2) leaned into the canon portrayal of Lotus Pier as this lush, verdant place of waterways and growing things, and juxaposed that with the first phases of rebuilding that are going on after it was the site of a razing and massacre. This supported the mood of this story, which was about the inseparability of grief and renewal, epitomized by Wen Qing’s relationships to her widowed sister-in-law and her own now-fatherless child. one-winged dove had this grey, grey wash to it in my mind, despite being a romance; Qinghe is depicted as this forbidding, austere, pseudo-Gothic estate that Nie Huaisang sees with great beauty and affection, but is also being suffocated by. It’s not a coincidence that nearly all the major “positive decisions” or turning points for her in the fic take place when she’s away from home.

The action item here is to investigate storytelling through the environment. Lean into description and material culture, but also think about scenes or tableaus that might showcase the setting you’re trying to evoke. Most of mercies took place on or around the water, or in the domestic world that surrounds it. The characters cook, harvest lotus roots, go on boat excursions…

I mentioned earlier that I’ll often use some other genre or specific work as a touchstone, and I’ll often be drawn to story beats that reflect or are inspired by an existing structure of some kind. Romancing the Beat) is a great resource for this if you’re writing romance, but it applies to many settings, and can be a riff on a specific work’s structure rather than a genre formula. This can be amazing scaffolding for hanging your ideas on, figuring out how to distribute points in time, and getting a sense of how much development will be required in between them.

This last thing is a double-edged sword, but I’ll mention it: it can be helpful to get into the habit of consciously thinking through as many ripple effects as you can resulting from every choice, change, or decision. This can become overwhelming if you get too wrapped up in it, but it’s a good place to start if you’re just trying to learn how to think bigger.

betty asked: how do you plot? Like, what's the journey from whatever initial impulse to "series of things happening in some kind of order"?

IMO the one of the most important things for any creative person to learn how to do is to listen to their intuition; I wouldn’t have been able to tell you in so many words all that stuff about how tender prey is about violence and survival etc. back when I plotting it out, but I “got it” on some level—see the title I chose for the fic. It’s really important to learn how to ignore/quiet your inner critic and just let yourself free-associate and feel your way toward the thematic core of the idea even before you might have a concise thesis statement you could put in a book report. (If you’re looking for ways to practice this, I genuinely find tarot practice helpful in terms of developing that sort of mental receptivity, but that’s not everyone’s bag.)

Why am I saying this frou frou stuff? Because really, what I’ve been dancing around when I say “the Thing” or “what your story is About” is… theme. I just find it helpful personally to not start from a place of being like “oh god what is The Theme,” rather than just letting myself go, “okay, what is this fic About”?

To quote one of the synecdochic writing meta posts that I imprinted on as a teen: you express themes through what happens. Which is to say: you express themes through the plot. Now, plot is a four-letter word in a lot of people's minds, but really, what's the scary thing about it? The plot's just the breakdown of what happens next. (x)

In other words, plots are just… the clotheshangers you hang your character arcs on.

I often find it more helpful to call character arcs “emotional plots,” because I think it makes it more clear what their actual purpose is. In the type of fiction I’m most interested in writing and reading, the character arc is the story. The things that happen in the story are part of a matrix of events that play out the way they do because of actions the characters take in a dynamic universe. The “action plot” is the things that actually happen, which shouldn’t be entirely seperable from the “emotional plot,” because the characters should be behaving in ways that reflect their emotional journeys.

I apologise if this sounds like a bunch of truisms, that’s just kind of what talking about writing is like IME.

For fic specifically, you can get a lot of mileage out of “what would need to happen in order for [x narratively enticing choice] to feel like an in-character action for [Y blorbo]?” A lot of my fic springs out of an effort to get very stubborn characters to acknowledge they have feelings. The more mountains-must-be-moved for your concept to make sense, the more latent plot you have in it. For the original fiction version of this, think, “What kind of starting place would make the protagonist’s transformation into the kind of person who would do the things they do at the latter part of the story feel like a satisfying and compelling change?” It doesn’t have to be a change for the better (morally), just a change that will make the reader go, “damn, that totally makes sense (even if it’s in some way elevated or absurd) and the author has made me care.”

I don’t worry too hard about trying to make my character arcs be chartable according to any one model of narrative arcs/beat sheet/etc. I tend to think about a long story—and this much is definitely not universally applicable to all stories, so it may not work for you—as a series of “spikes,” with the thing spiking being emotional intensity (for the characters) and suspense (for the readers.) The biggest spike is the story climax, but the “rising action” period can be a pendulum swing between quieter moments—possibly extending to periods of stillness, breathing space, what Miyazaki calls ma 間—that allow the reader to digest what’s happened to that point, and smaller “spikes” that gradually increase in spikiness until the climax. Spikes are moments where the audience should be keen to know what the protagonist is going to do next. Like, you should always want them to know what the protagonist is going to do next, but spikes are turning points; they’re the moments when things shift, and the world that exists now isn’t quite the same as the one before. The audience will have to adjust their understanding of the character to accomodate, “ah, this is the kind of person who would do X, in Y way.” And if the character would make the same choice, in the exact same way, at the eleventh hour as they would have at the start of the story, you don’t have enough story yet!

So, simply, a plot is the vehicle through which a character becomes who they are at the end.

I still haven’t really said much about practically how you… come up with the “this happens and then this happens” of it all. I get a lot of mileage out of drawing, mind-mapping, making charts, etc—just visualizing the story structure as best you can. I find it really helpful to make connections when I’m putting pen to paper and it feels very exploratory and not “real.”

Brainstorm situations that would result in tough choices or complex feelings for the specific characters you’re writing about. Pick which ones seem the most engaging and/or workable from a writing perspective. Tell the story in synopsis form to see if connections between events emerge. Or just think it through in a linear, “what would the outcome of X be?” way. Sorry, that’s all I got for now.

verity asked: how do you not get bored and abandon your project like 5-10k in?

I’m obsessed with myself and my concepts.

I only get to the longfic writing stage once I’m desperate to read something. I reread all my own fic like a million times. So my motivation usually comes from the desire to read something, which is different than just partaking in the eyelid-movie daydream version, because there are always aspects of the story that come out during the writing process that I wouldn’t have been able to think up if it were purely a fantasy. The ability to read the end product is the carrot on the stick that keeps me going. I imagine this advice is not useful to people who don’t like to reread their own work, though.

More seriously, what ends up happening (and why I feel like the experience of writing a long-form story is different than working on a shorter one) is that I end up developing a hyperfixation not only on the source material/canon/ship but on my fic as a story itself. And then I have this frenetic energy I need to express, but I feel annoying when I just talk people’s ears off about my concepts, so I end up writing stuff just to direct that energy somewhere. And, like—I want to talk to people about my story, and in order to do that, I need to make the story exist. It’s fun and very helpful to throw around ideas with people about a story in the abstract but it’s not the same as having someone respond to the actual thing I wrote. And I find the experience of being able to do that so compelling that I am moved to bring the story into existence…

Also, like, I don’t consider myself someone who writes “ventfic,” but I do lean on writing for emotional regulation, and I find that when I’m in times of high stress, especially when external life circumstances feel turbulent or out of control, I really launch myself into working on long projects. You could frame that as escapism and maladaptive daydreaming, but I don’t think it’s just that… What I’m about to say might make me sound really wack but it’s about having control over something: both the characters going through the events of the story, but also readers (especially when publishing serially and I really feel like I’m leading people through an experience over time.) This isn’t to say that readers are guaranteed to all have the same responses, or to take away the things I was consciously trying to impart, but when I’m able to translate something from my head onto the proverbial page successfully and achieve the intended emotional payoff for an audience, it’s enormously gratifying. And not because I want to “shock” people in a bad way or produce a cruel reaction; it’s a specific feeling of competence that comes from the feeling that I set up story and someone experienced it and had an emotional response and feels excited or satisfied about it as a result. This is true of shorter works, too, but it feels like so much more of an accomplishment when I manage to stick the landing (to the best of my understanding) with a longer, more complex story that has a lot of moving parts. So I keep crawling back for more…

Even though the process is drudgerous and frustrating at times, that emotional experience is what I mean when I talk about how writing long-form fiction is ~sooo fun.~ I just find it extremely satisfying. If writing a successful short story is like solving a 100 piece puzzle, writing a successful long story feels like solving a 1000 piece puzzle. And it’s very possible that other people just don’t have that kind of emotional response to it, in which case there’s no reason to force yourself. There’s nothing superior about longer work; it’s only aspirational if you think you’d enjoy doing it.