WIP Challenge Check-in, Day 9 -- Sunday

[linaewen]

Greetings, linaewen at your service for this new week of checking in!  I don't usually post this early when it's my turn for it, but I'm having a bit of insomnia, so I thought I'd go ahead start things off for this week.  ;-)

Has today been a fresh start for you, the first day of a new week of writing possibilities?  Tell us how you spent your day, writing or otherwise.


For discussion:

J.R.R. Tolkien once said in a letter,  "I wrote the Trilogy as a personal satisfaction, driven to it by the scarcity of literature of the sort that I wanted to read."  Is this a good description of why you write?  Why or why not?

Comments

[linaewen]

Last week was a very busy, stressful week for me, and its very possible there won't be any letup all month long. I'm trying not to be defeated in my writing before I even start, though! Maybe the fact that some of things I'm working on have deadlines coming up soon will jog my writing discipline a bit this week. ;-)

Discussion -- I'd say writing for myself to fill the gap between what's out there and what I want to read is pretty much the main reason I write. Certain characters don't get enough attention, or the stories that are out there don't tell me enough of the details I want to know about, so I have to write it myself! Even when I am writing from a prompt provided by someone else, I still manage to make it about those stories and those characters I want more of.

[lilly_c]

Editing for me today. I may work on my goal fic later on.

I mostly write for myself for two reasons. To improve my writing in an all round way. To gain a better understanding of my dyslexia and the mistakes I make most often.

[lacygrey]

I had a heavy end of week with work. In fact the work stuff is so scary its keeping me awake at night and that's ruining my days. Fortunately I didn't crash until the weekend, so I'm still keeping up appearances.

Fic-wise, surprisingly, I achieved one of the goals I set myself for the month - the chapter of the big bang that completes the first draft. It feels kind of ridiculous in relation to the RL work troubles. I doubt I would have even signed up for the bigbang if I'd known what was ahead.

I don't know if I will continue to check-in for the next couple of weeks because I might not be doing much fic-centric and tales of me working my butt off at other stuff don't belong here. I might blog, but I don't think so - I don't to want to pollute my fanfic blog with RL baggage.

In any case I'll check in again when things cool off again. In the meantime good luck to all.

[ladygriddlebone]

I have not done any writing yet today, but it's on the schedule.

I definitely write my own fanfics because there's (typically) a lack of what I want to read being written in the fandoms I follow. If there were lots of other people writing the types of stories I like to read (and focusing on the characters I like to read about), I'd probably be lazy and not write.

[lielac]

This month has been bluh-central for me, and I've mostly been playing Dwarf Fortress and otherwise skiving all the things. Oh and I think I did a liiiiittle bit on one of the versions of The Chronicler's Toa but that was a few days back.

YESYESYESYES I believe I may thieve that quote for if anyone asks why I write because YESSSS. I write what I want to read, always. Always. If I didn't want to read it on some level I wouldn't be writing it, that's just how I work when it comes to this craft. And if people were writing what I wanted to read I'd be reading their stuff instead of hacking apart the Queen's English and mashing it together again like a mad scientist with suturing needles and lightning.

[barbayat]

Great first day of the week! Thanks to the sprint session I managed to almost reach my goal for this week. Only 60 more words needed ...

As for what Tolkien said - yeah this desribes me to a T, for both fanfic and also my ambitions for original stories. There is just not enough of my type of stories out there ...

[lacerta]

Writing sprints were productive, but I keep getting stuck on editing which is not good. I'm now at half the required word count (though not halfway through the fic), so I really have to step it up a notch the upcoming week or I'll have a problem at the end of the month.

[the_rck]

I got some writing done. I've still got time tonight, so I'll likely write more. I just have to soldier through this scene, and the rough draft of this chapter will be done. I need to go through and stick in the stuff the main character is hearing from the next room. It was a distraction I didn't want to deal with as I wrote the main conversation.

I write because I need to. It's not so much that I'm writing stories I want to read as that the stories want to be told. I think I'd write even without an audience. An audience helps me focus, but I think I'd write without one.

[krait]

J.R.R. Tolkien once said in a letter, "I wrote the Trilogy as a personal satisfaction, driven to it by the scarcity of literature of the sort that I wanted to read." Is this a good description of why you write?

In a word? Yes. (It's also why I read so much fanfiction -- fanfic authors write the kind of stories I want to read and can't find in pro fiction, at least not in quantity.)

I subscribe to the Steven Brust Cool Theory of Literature: I write stuff that think is cool, and whether you like my writing or not depends on how much overlap exists between your definition of cool and mine. :D

I suspect it's why I like kinkmemes so much -- seeing what other people think is cool/want to read, and finding prompts that overlap with my own preferences, is like this huge dose of enthusiasm: oh, wow, someone else wants to read X? I've wanted to read X for, oh, forever! I should write it, and this person and I would be friends!

[krait]

Well, I suppose for full disclosure I should add that there's one thing I've written that did not have that premise as its basic. That one was a kinkmeme fill for an odd pairing, one I'd never even considered before and didn't even like one member of, and I still can't adequately explain why I read that prompt, thought, Huh,... and then churned out 2k words on the subject without stopping. All the while not knowing where it was going till my fingers hit the keys.

The rest, though? Very much What I Want To Read.