How I Write Fiction
I just finished another short story a few days ago, which I think turned out decent. The narrator is a child, though, so some may find him annoying. I still am not used to writing essays every day and don't have much I want to write about today. I tried writing a short HPMOR fanfic which details my idea for improving Quidditch, which I think is better than HPJEV's idea and good enough it would have worked in Canon and satisfied HPJEV. But it was kinda boring, and the idea was just "lower the number of points you get for catching the snitch" which I am sure others have pointed out. It at least has the nice property of making the seeker position central and cool, which is needed for Harry in canon - though not for HPJEV.
I also lost my morning because I slept in way too late (and didn't take any stims today) so I think I will just have to stream-of-consciousness this one, as it is getting late. In keeping with the Ink Haven tradition of writing about writing when one is out of ideas, I will do just that. Please don't take this as anything more than a description of my process. I don't claim this is how you should write or even how I should write. It is how I write.
I start by figuring out the narrator's mind. But I don't figure it out on the page. I get an idea for something or an evocative phrase or thing I want to do or try, then I start thinking about the type of person needed. I am a mentalizer. I find this stuff comes pretty naturally. So then I start writing in the voice and it comes pretty quickly until I hit a conceptual block, structure getting harder as the story goes on. As for structural stuff, I just kinda keep things in my head. Then I go for a walk and I usually get idea on what should happen next and the shape of the story in general.
It's all very random-walkish until about halfway through when I figure out the ending. Once I figure out the end, I skip to writing it. And it usually comes to me as a fully formed chunk of monologue. I then write it out and adjust it to sound better. After that, I write towards the ending and it becomes just a matter of one scene after the other.
The Origami Men started in the fashion I described, but with the constraint that I was trying to write a story that seemed like ironic satire but was actually just science fiction completely devoid of any satire. So higher-level concerns are always in the background of my mind. And there is sometimes a hidden story in the story that is just for me. I think one reader figured out the one in The Maker of Mind, and it's so subtle it's hardly there. So they may just have had a mind that was looking for such things. Having a second story just for me seems to help for some reason.
Once the story is done, I put it through Claude and have it list any typos. I fix each typo manually, on the theory that this will make me not make such a typo again. I have no idea if it works. Then once it is clean of LLM-findable typos, I read it and clean up anything that sounds clunky.
After I do that, I publish it and inevitably find and fix problems that were mysteriously invisible to me until just after publishing.