Check-In Post #2

[slashmarks]

Week one is complete! Each week, I'll make a new check-in post with a few optional discussion questions. You can use this post to update us on our progress, complain, celebrate, or talk to other participants! Also feel free to discuss each week's questions in our discord server.

Comment to share how your first week went!

Optional Discussion Questions:

1. Is your story planning complete? If you like to plan, do you plan out the end before you start, or do you stay just a few steps ahead?

2. Writers: what POV (first/second/third) tense do you prefer? Do you always stick with the same ones, or do you like to switch it up? What about swapping character POVs within the story? Comic artists: do you include a lot of narration, or do you like to stick to art and dialogue? What about comics with no dialogue?

3. What sort of scene do you think makes the best story opening?

Comments

[wolfish_willow]

Haven't made any new progress on the fic yet. Saw the amount of words we would need to write each week in order to reach the minimum word target and all my motivation sort of sputtered out (on top of also ending up with some RL stuff happening that made writing the last thing on my mind after that). Still hoping to try, but considering how much of my outline is "figure it out when you get there", I don't have high hopes. We'll see what happens!

1. My story planning is complete in that there's a outline for the beginning/middle/end, with way more wiggle room of the "but how they do it is a mystery" variety. For the most part, I only fully plan out fics that I expect to be long, by which I mean written for big bangs where I have to be able to finish it within a certain period of time with a specific word count minimum and I don't trust myself to be able to do that without an outline to work from.

Otherwise, I usually stay only a step or two ahead, if that.

2. Third person, usually present tense but sometimes past tense. I never know which it will be until I start writing the fic, but the POV is always third person. Even when I've tried my hand at some x reader fic, I wrote from the canon character's third person POV rather than the reader's. It's where I'm the most comfortable.

A lot of my stories, particularly the longer ones, swap character POVs within the story, though never within the same scene. This isn't always the case, I enjoy being in one character's POV the whole time. But some stories need to be told through multiple character's eyes.

3. No idea! I can't say that I've noticed any particular kind of opening scene drawing me in more than others. Though when writing, I tend to have an easier time opening with a line or two of dialogue and going from there (only to then go back and fill in the beginning with something else before that dialogue later on).

[sansigma]

1. Is your story planning complete? If you like to plan, do you plan out the end before you start, or do you stay just a few steps ahead?

Hm. I have a plot with a beginning, middle and end planned out, and character arcs for both of the characters in the main pairing. And I think I have at least a vague idea for all the set piece scenes in the story. But I have not decided on all the plot beats and transitions. And I know that the details will either fall into place or change as I write.

2. Writers: what POV (first/second/third) tense do you prefer? Do you always stick with the same ones, or do you like to switch it up? What about swapping character POVs within the story?

For me, what POV and tense I go for depends on the story. For this specific fic I started jotting down small sections of prose before I "officially" began writing, and those were in different tenses and – to my surprise – POVs. I thought I had at least settled on third person but one of my notes was actually in second(!). I think I wrote that one while reading a Disco Elysium fic in second person POV, lol.

As most of my fic is in present tense these days but I decided to go for past tense with this one, I'm sure a large part of my editing work will consist of catching tense slippages. Oh well.

I usually stick to only one character's POV per story, and will do so here too. The only time I can think of when I didn't was for a story where one character got kidnapped and I wanted to show the POV of both him and the characters searching for him.

3. What sort of scene do you think makes the best story opening?

As long as there's some kind of hook, I'm not too fussy. But I'm not a fan of long sections of exposition at the start, or a long section of a character just going through their day for ages before the plot actually kicks off.

I'm writing OW for this event, so I am in the position of having to deliver quite a bit of exposition early on, without it getting boring. I'm working on the opening scene right now and I'm trying to provide enough tension to keep the reader interested as I present the characters and the premise + presenting just enough info, so the reader gets curious rather than bored. Hopefully it'll work!