DPP: Feed the Muse

[angelicalangie.livejournal.com]

Hi I am angelicalangie , also known as Angel and this week I am driving the DPP bus. Please strap yourselves in and enjoy the on board entertainment!

Our theme for the week is “Feed the Muse” a lot of us write, vid, create art and even just daydream about the possibilities of life on the Battlestar Galactica. But what inspires us to create, what “feeds” our collective muses, what gives us the impetus to pursue an idea from its inception?

That is what I aim, with a little help from you guys, to explore and hopefully have a place to return to in the future. On my twitter feed I have seen a few writers - from various fandoms express the same problem of writers block - and so my general idea is to have a place to go to, a repository of inspiration, so-to-speak, to generate ideas and break the writers block.

Today we are going to explore;

Fiction.

This doesn't just have to be limited to the Battlestar Fandom, this can be; books, poetry, fics, anything written. Essentially, anything that is fictional. 

Comments

[nazkey.livejournal.com]

Hi Angel! Great first post :-)

My writing comes in spurts and to be honest, I'm not much of a fic writer. I've been enticed (cajoled? prodded? pushed?) into writing fic by my awesome FLister's and I try, but it's hard. I don't think in terms of plot/dialogue so putting a story together is very difficult for me. I tend to think more organically and am most comfortable writing third person POV more than anything. First person is practically impossible for me and I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of reading first person POV's in general. The writing has to be superb for me to engage in first person narrative and we certainly have plenty of amazing writers in this fandom who pull it off. It's just not for me.

Because I find fic writing so challenging, I tend to second guess myself all the time and keep tossing out my writing. I'm never happy with the fic I write (which explains the lack of Act III of FI). To get out of my own way, I've devised an exercise (which I will start posting soon-ish) where I take my own experiences and use Kara/Lee as a vehicle to express them. We'll see how that turns out.

I'm really interested to see what other people say because we have some amazingly talented writers in this fandom and I'm curious to pick their brains and peek into their methodology. Clearly, I don't have much of a method to my writing and can use the help. ;-)

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

You've seen first person fics in this fandom? Where? :)

[nazkey.livejournal.com]

I love that your entire take away from what I said was this :-) Yeah, I've seen it. Probably on ff.net. I don't like them, so I haven't bookmarked. If I run across them again, I'll share with you.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Eh, no need. You lost me at ff.net, tbh.

I've seen a few super old ones but they weren't very good.

[nazkey.livejournal.com]

LOL. Yeah, I hear you on ff.net. I never even check the site any more, you know?

I've very rarely found one that has grabbed me. I did read one for this fandom way, way back when and I liked it but I'm usually really meh about that particular style. I personally cannot do it at all, so ... *shrugs*

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

I always used to think first person was a little weird for fan fiction because it's such a close/personal POV for a character that you haven't created but are only borrowing. However, after reading a few Hunger Games fics, I have to admit it works for that fandom because the source material is a first-person book. I still think I'd find first person fic a little weird for a TV show or movie though..IDK.

[ecstaticdance.livejournal.com]

Are you looking for fiction that inspires and helps to overcome writers' block? Or for ways to actually get around to writing fiction?

I'm going to guess that it's the first, because that answers feels more interesting to me.

Mythology is probably the most inspiring fiction for me. It's a pretty sure-fire way for me to find something that I want to write about. I like filling in blanks, answering questions, figuring out how characters get from point A to point B, and a lot of the original myths, as they currently exist in literature, have a lot of gaps or start in awkward places and don't offer much, if any, explanation. It's a good jumping off point when I'm just looking for something to write and am not fussy about genre or a particular scenario. And since the stories are so old, I don't have to worry about copyright infringement. Always a bonus.

[kdbleu.livejournal.com]

I am literally inspired to wrote by everything. In fact, my biggest problem in many ways is focus. I think too much and get way too big too fast, which frequently stops me from writing. Right now, I have a crazy number of potential plots running through my head including, but not limited to, an original novel, a couple of potential BSG plotbunnies and another original idea that I'm trying to ignore (mostly because I'm pretty sure I need to be a meteorologist to write it. Hee).

I wish I had a better example of what inspires me. I just sort of see or hear stories in my head and feel the need to explore them. *shrugs*

As for writer's block... I've come to accept it as part of writing, quite frankly. I write out of chronological order, as in not the order the story would necessarily be read, so one of the things I do when I get stuck is move to part of my story I'm excited about telling. The draw back to this system which is that I end up with just problem sections to work on sometimes, but I buy myself more thine to think about my problem sections and I keep myself writing, at least semi-productively.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I write out of chronological order, as in not the order the story would necessarily be read, so one of the things I do when I get stuck is move to part of my story I'm excited about telling. The draw back to this system which is that I end up with just problem sections to work on sometimes

I'm just the same way. I have a lot of scattered little scenes all over the place, which is often why I find it natural to turn them into one-shots. And of course I tend to keep things short and avoid committing to large projects because that's often stressful. I also find it very helpful to look for quotations that speak to me about the characters I'm writing for, because if I have a quotation in mind as I write it helps me understand how to try to pull things together and what the point of the story is, and I can often be inspired by a beautiful phrase or thought.

Also, when I'm starting a scene I tend to write dialogue first - just sit down and write a conversation between characters with no descriptions or anything else. This often doesn't actually translate into the final story; I cut a lot as I go back and fill in everything else, but if I want to know where a scene is going the best way for me to find out is to try to write dialogue. It's funny, because many of what I consider my best efforts have no dialogue in them at all, or very little (though those are almost all based around quotations). And sometimes when I need to figure out what to do with a scene, I write myself little questions. Like, "OK, what options for getting out?" and make a list of possibilities. Or, "OK, what parallels Kara/Daphne?" and write everything I can think of.

Also, I let myself read other fandoms and fictions - often crossover ideas and situations strike me powerfully even if I don't wind up writing an actual crossover.

[kdbleu.livejournal.com]

I really like the idea of writing out questions that go with each scene. I get a wandery when I write, and I think having a reminder of my objective might help me to keep on track without so much rewriting and frustration. Thanks for that. :D

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Ha! I have to admit that I'm really, really surprised that you write dialogue first. Because as you say, your final works don't strike me as very dialogue heavy.

I do this too, often, just get the convo down and fill in the rest later. Although I'm not great at writing out of order. I've done it a few times on long fics and it ends up being frustrating because usually it mostly gets rewritten because of the evolution of the story that's come before it.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Hee! Yes, the dialogue thing is weird, but there you go. To me, conversations are the only part of writing that seem to easily pick up their own momentum, and they are a way I can surprise myself because in letting the characters answer each other I often wind up arriving somewhere I didn't have a plan for going to. So that's nice, because that way I can write even when I don't know where I'm going with it and sort of find out on the way. It's often tiny little nuggets of worthwhile conversation that start a story for me, though it's always something else that I'm worrying about by the end of it. And the early phases leave their traces; in "Every Sense," which is not dialogue-heavy at all, the two first things I wrote were a radio conversation about faith and a little "That's me"/"That's you" exchange, both of which are still in the story. I wrote those things before I had any idea that I wanted to take a "five senses" approach to the story. They're part of what helped me figure that out. *shrugs*

I can definitely see how writing out of order could get frustrating on long fics. The longest fic I ever wrote (a Highlander story that was still not very long, around 15,000 words) was done completely out of order, but that's because I skipped to my favorite parts and it took me *ages* to come back and fill in the middle. It wasn't a very good system, so I won't try to convince anyone to try it! :)

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Timely topic for me!

I have come to realize my impetus to write tends to get clustered around the times I have insomnia (now, for instance). I can write anytime, sure, but I only seem to really make time for it when I'm so exhausted I have an anxious flutter in my chest and can't stop thinking about the story. When I sign up for things (bsg_pornbattle, pilots_presents, etc), I can make myself write something passable, but it seems far less difficult to write when I'm at the edge of overtired insanity. Which makes sense, I guess. It also really sucks to not sleep much for weeks.

I find prompts are a great help for getting unstuck, as is just chatting with the gang at no_takebacks, or other fans when fanfic is what's stuck.

Also helpful for getting me stuck in an infinite loop of imagining possible stories is watching clips of a show. I made myself a short-ish best (kissing) scenes of K/L video that I will sometimes play over and over until I get back in the frame of mind to write them. My current obsession, though, isn't K/L at all but Castle. I keep playing THAT ONE SCENE over and over and over and OMG I WILL WRITE SOMETHING, I JUST HAVE TO. :)

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

What inspires us to write?

I don't know exactly. Everything. Nothing. An idea comes from the ether or someone's comments or a connection of thoughts based on something else I see/read/do and the next thing I know I'm applying it to pilots and seeing if it relates and if I can work with it and then I'm hearing lines or picturing certain moments and I'm off and running.

When I have writer's block it tends to be less about not having any ideas, than about not having the right idea. Not feeling absolutely sure as to what the story demands next. Sometimes even looking at my outline doesn't work because notes and quotes aren't always enough to get me into the execution of a scene. I have to figure out who the POV is (sometimes) and what their goal is (what the arc of the scene is) and what kind of tone it should be told with. And sometimes those are really hard to figure out.

[shah-of-blah.livejournal.com]

This is not about pilots but writing in general:

I kind of don't believe in writer's block. It's not that I never feel like the words aren't coming, but that it's all in my head. There's nothing blocking me except for myself (it's all very Black Swan). When I feel like I have "writer's block," I acknowledge that I am just making excuses for my own laziness. The only "cure," in my experience, is just to get off my ass and write something. Doesn't matter if it's mediocre, or if it's not what I was planning to write. Just write something and keep writing. I can't just sit around and wait for inspiration to strike, tempting though that may be.

[reginaspina.livejournal.com]

I have to say that I have a very visual imagination - I always see scenes in my head as movies and then I write by describing them in words. Unfortunately, I often feel like I'm not living up to my own imagination (as weird as that sounds) and that the written description doesn't do justice to the thing I'm seeing in my head at all, which is why I procrastinate so much about writing.

When I write original fiction, I have to "cast" it so I can see the visuals I need to write which is also weird.

As for inspiration, it could be just a word or a phrase I've read, or again, a visual from something or someone. It could just be that I can't find the thing I want to read at that particular moment, so I'm compelled to write it myself (though I prefer it when I can be lazy and read what other people have written!)