Processfest! Day 5

[dira]

processfest Day 5: Collaborators

Tell us about your go-to creative buddies. You don't have to name names, but this is the place to talk about what your collaborator brings to your creative process, how the two-or-three-or-many of you work together, how you figured out how to work together, and why it works. None of us create entirely alone, so who gives you a hand when you stumble? Who helps you get unstuck? Who is that person who always understands what you were trying to do and helps you make it happen?

iulia is, of course, the person who always understands what I was trying to do (no matter how often I stomp away from her beta comments insisting that she Doesn't Understand My Art: she does, sometimes better than I do, since she also understands the part where it needs to be intelligible to readers).

I'm too much of a control-freak about my writing to co-write with anyone; I can't even do chatfic in the round-robin passing-the-thread-back-and-forth way I see other people doing it, unless I don't care about the story at all. If I care enough about the story to actually write it, it has to be mine alone while I do so.

But Iulia, and other betas and audiencers and so on, are an intrinsic part of my writing process; I can't write a story that I can't first tell to someone and convince them of. And I need betas at every other stage of the game, too, because in addition to rampantly abusing commas and sentence structure I tend to go off the rails in really weird ways sometimes.

One of my favorite stories to tell about this is the time missmollyetc saved me from having Charlie Eppes hit himself in the head with a rock. It was somewhere in the depths of Missing Persons, well over a year into the writing of it, long after the story had gotten altogether too far into my head, and it seemed like such a good idea at the time, and I think I had even run that sequence by other people and not been dissuaded from it, and then Molly came along and said, "Really? A rock? That's what you're going with?" and I said "...No. Wow. No. Sorry."

So, thank you Molly! And thank you Iulia! And thank you every single other person in the last eleven years who has attempted to keep me pointing in the direction of writing better fiction. I could not do it without you. ♥

Comments

[kass]

♥

[mmegaera]

I'm so glad you didn't hit Charlie Eppes on the head with a rock! I still miss Numb3rs, mostly because of him.

[dira]

Well, I did enough other awful things to him in that story. *g*

[riverlight]

♥ We are glad you keep writing fiction!

[dira]

Me too! ♥

[sapphoisburning]

Missing Persons was the most exciting thing to happen to me over Thanksgiving this year. I plowed through it in like 48-ish hours when I had time off? I'm glad he didn't hit himself with a rock.

[dira]

Yay, I'm glad you enjoyed the story! And, yeah, I think it's much better without Charlie hitting himself in the head with a rock. :)