Snowflake Challenge #7 and #8 - What I Like About Me + Creative Process

[jedibuttercup]

Challenge #7 - List three (or more) things you like about yourself. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good.

Obviously, first, my creativity. I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and doing it specifically for others' enjoyment since I was in my early twenties, and I like to think I've got pretty good at it over the years. Maybe not at the level of a BNF, but as long as I'm entertaining myself and making other people smile, that's good enough for me. I've also had a camera in my hands since I was a teenager; it's one of the things I'm known for in the family. I don't share a lot of my photos on the internet, because internet, but let's just say I give a lot of well-received Shutterfly gifts every year.

Overlapping with that a little: my job! I've been working at the same not-for-profit HR consulting firm for almost exactly twenty years now doing database and marketing management. I'm respected there, I get along with the other staff, the work is variable and interesting, I consistently achieve my goals and projects, and after the years I spent in the temping and fast-food trenches before that, I know exactly how lucky I am to have such a good work-fit. It doesn't pay a ton, but it allows me to live on my own, pay all my expenses, and have enough left over to treat myself to my favorite media and some travel every year. I'll be working there until either I physically can't anymore or they aren't in business anymore.

And lastly, my roadtrip planning. Every year since 2012, every time the BFF and I (or Mom and I) decide roughly where and when we want to go, I cobble together a day-by-day roadmap. Not nailing anything down specifically other than the hotels (with addresses, for the GPS) and any 'this is the point of the whole trip' locations - having a moment-by-moment itinerary can be stifling! - but presenting additional options: national parks, locally famous restaurants, noteworthy monuments, niche museums, fannish locations, anything that looks intriguing, including hours of operation and any fees. Rough travel times, even weather projections when it gets close. The research is fun in itself! Then when the time comes, the potentially stressful parts are already taken care of; we can fully be in every moment.

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Challenge #8 - Talk about your creative process.

I'll talk about photography first, because the answer's boring, but simple: I just always take pictures. There are more than twenty thousand photos on my iPhone, and that's after deleting the blurry ones and the ones with thumbs in the way and so on. Part of my brain is always paying attention to the world around me in that kind of assessing way - aware of what things would look like in that rectangular frame - and occasionally I just have to try to capture what I'm seeing: beautiful flowers, playful pets, family moments, snapshots from a roadtrip narrative, and so on.

(It might sound silly, but I'm very proud of the fact that every single web meeting background I've used since so much of the workspace started going virtual has been a gorgeous landscape photo I took. People are always asking me about them, and then I get to tell them the stories!)

And as for writing: I'm an ADHD person, so traditional plotting methods don't really work for me, but I've worked out ways to compensate. So depending on what I'm writing, the first thing I always do is research. Yes, even when not writing for exchanges, because I tend to get story ideas while I'm reading or watching something. A scene will pop vividly in my mind, or a loose plot thread will snag at me, or I can almost hear the characters reacting to some plot idea suggested in a request or mentioned on some fan site, and I have to immediately make a note.

For an exchange, or another planned longer story - as opposed to something like a reaction-fic that smote me in the mind's eye immediately after consuming media - I might also look into ancillary research that might be useful. For example, when I knew I was going to be writing a long Mummy-verse story, I looked up several books and websites and documentaries about ancient Egypt and archaeology. It helps me to sound like I know what I'm talking about, but I'm also absolutely a curious person, and just like with roadtrip planning, the research ends up being half the fun for me!

Once I have that initial aha! moment, I take that story-kernel, sit down, and just write. If my flow snags on a fact I can't immediately recall, I might pop up a new browser window with a wiki or a transcript or some other piece of research; but otherwise I just keep writing until I lose focus or have to go do something else. I can't really write out of order, or I lose track; and if the fic takes too long to write, I might have to go refresh myself on the canon again to keep the voices clear. (This is why I still have a few longer WIPs out there that ran aground when the gaps got too long and the details got too unwieldy; it takes time and heavy lifting to get back in the mental space to recapture that long-lost flow.)

So these days I try to write until it feels like I've reached a good place to wrap it up, then I put it away for a little while to give myself a break. THEN I read the story to myself loud; I've found it really helps with the editing, knowing where to add or remove things to help with the reading flow. And finally... I usually deliberately try to guide my edit so the wordcount for any given fic rounds to the nearest 100. It makes me really consider word choices, whether I could say something in fewer words or if a scene could use more to flesh out the descriptions, whether I used too many adjectives, and so on. It might not work for everyone, but it does for me.

Comments

[mossy_bench]

I usually deliberately try to guide my edit so the wordcount for any given fic rounds to the nearest 100. It makes me really consider word choices, whether I could say something in fewer words or if a scene could use more to flesh out the descriptions, whether I used too many adjectives, and so on.

This is a neat idea! I'd never thought about using that approach outside of e.g., writing drabbles, but in those cases I really am inspired to look at the words I've chosen from a different angle.