ProcessFest Day 2: Where do you start?

[dira]

I swear to God I am almost done procrastinating on my yagkyas story. Soon I will be procrastinating about Yuletide instead!

I finished my yagkyas story and it is off to beta! Now I can do stuff that is not that with a clear conscience! :D

Meanwhile, processfest Day two:
What's your first spark of inspiration? What makes you decide to work on a new project? What's your first step? Is it always the same or does your method change? How do you begin when you create?


My story ideas usually come from noticing a story that's not getting told (sometimes this is because that story is a bad idea that will not work, but a lot of the time I can find my own angle on it) or from a prompt, or out of a conversation. Frequently out of a conversation I am having with someone while avoiding writing something else (ohai, Teen Wolf marriage of convenience bunny, I see you there, it is not your turn).

Conversation is also where I start the process of actually writing a story, so the bunnies that spark while I'm talking to someone get a running start. Most of the time, for anything bigger than flashfic and often including flashfic and, hell, drabbles, I have to run the idea by someone before I can write it. This is less collaborative than it might sound (having someone else jump in and start telling me what happens next tends to put me off the idea entirely) but convincing someone of the idea, and answering their questions about it, is a necessary first step to actually writing a story.

Because I'm always in the middle of writing something else when I get a new idea, actually writing a new thing once I've come up with it usually has to wait a while, which is a sort of automatic winnowing process. If I've forgotten all about it a week later I must not have been that into the idea anyway, so it's just as well I didn't start writing it. I generally decide to start a new thing either because I have finished an old thing or because the new thing has taken over my brain and made me so frustrated with still having to write the old thing that I go FUCKIT, NEW THING IT IS. That's how The Boy and the Beast happened, bursting up through the middle of You Drive Through the Dust like a chestbuster alien.

When it comes to actual writing, I'm a very linear writer, so I spend some time figuring out where I want to open the story, and as often as not I get that more or less right, and the opening line or scene I start with remains as the opening of the story when it's all done and edited and everything. But it means that I do a bit of staring-at-a-blank-page sometimes when I try to start a story before I have managed to come up with The First Line. And when I do come up with a first line that I can't resist, that's sometimes what pushes me to start working on the story.