Introductions: What kind of writer are you?

[healingmirth]

Introduce yourself, if you wish to! This is not at all a questionnaire to be filled out, just some thoughts to get people started.

What do you write? How long have you been writing it? Are you a write-every-day sort of person? Do you go dormant for months at a time and then churn out an epic? Or go dormant for months and churn out a drabble?

Do you have a type of story that you return to again and again to perfect, or do you branch out to new styles and structures every time you pick up a pen or sit down to the keyboard?

Do you like to spend three paragraphs on the sun setting behind the trees? Do your characters have a passion for discussion or banter? Is everything better with a few mysteries to solve?

Is there an author (pro, amateur, original, fanfic, whatever) whose writing you particularly aspire to?

Comments

I'll start...

[facetofcathy]

I kind of like the questions so I'll go with most of them.

I write fanfic, FPF and RPF, slash, het and some gen. I'm branching out into more fandoms lately, and my goal here on DW is to not get caught up in one fandom.

I have quite a bit of free time right now, less so in the summer, so I write a lot. Not every day.

I write in a very spare, almost abstract style sometimes. Some people might even call it vague. I don't go in for heavy description, generally. (I wish I could remember who wrote that great essay on LJ a few years back about 'cold' vs. emotional writing, It explains what I mean really well--I definitely write cold.)

I write interior life, not much plot, which might be a polite way of saying porn and relationship fic.

I participated a bit on the concrit_my_fic comm on LJ, but it seems to have withered lately, so I've been looking for something similar.

I posted a bit about my writing process, and some of the resources I use the other day. You are all welcome to read it here: http://facetofcathy.dreamwidth.org/2440.html and comments are welcome there.

Please note: The post contains my unpopular opinions about the general process of betaing and my own preferences. These things are true for me, now, and I am not suggesting that they are true for everyone.

I am looking for some beyond the basics ideas and advice about technique. I've been playing around with structure as a way to convey theme, but I think my ambitions outstrip my ability. I also want to develop better characterization skills.

[zeldaophelia]

Hi! I'm Zelda! :D

I am mostly a fanfiction writer. I'd like to say that someday I'll sit down and write that great American novel that we all have inside of us, but until then I'm happy playing in the fanfic sandbox. I've been writing fanfic for, um, half my life now? (Yikes!) I really only started posting it back in 2003, though. (Well, technically there is an account on ff.net that I lost the login for years ago with some REALLY old fanfic, but I try to not claim it anymore.)

This year I decided to take part in the getyourwordsout challenge, which has resulted in me writing nearly every day. Last year I hardly wrote at all, not much until fandom_stocking at the end of the year. It's been a nice change of pace, although it means that days like yesterday, where I was purposefully taking a break from writing, I found myself at wit's end. No idea what to do. :/

Currently I'm writing a lot of long, plotty crime!fic. I fell in love with CSI:NY a little over a year ago (and am currently trying to keep falling out of love over the spoilers) and have been doing a ton of writing. I'm currently posting my first longer fic. (Longest thing I've ever finished!) I have a sorta!sequel to it for csi_bigbang that will be posted in July (the rough draft is finished and I'm taking a bit of a break from it) and I'm working on a longer two-part AU fic for the Finiah-A-Thon. Prior to these I've written in Dark is Rising, Harry Potter, some Criminal Minds drabbles, Stargate SG-1 and Magnificent Seven.

I am a dialogue person through and through. I have a tendency to get bogged down while reading tons of description *cough*Tolkein*cough* and really do write what I read. It doesn't always work the best that way, but that's what rough drafts are for, so I can revise and add more description later. As an odd quirk of mine, when I am writing dialogue scenes, I have a tendency to not so much act out the scene as mimic the facial expressions and emotions the characters may be using/going through. Yeah, I know. *facepalm* :D

[lark]

I just found this community through the promo community!

I write mostly fantasy and science fiction. I have an in-progress mystery novel which I have been told is extremely marketable. The more I work on it, the more I hate it. I don't do fanfic although I was involved in some fandoms when I was younger, I really just prefer writing my own stuff because I don't work well on the small scale. Which is the other big thing; I haven't completed a short story since high school English class. I wish I could write short fiction. Desperately.

Right now I'm trying to settle down and get really serious about my current project. I've always worked a little haphazardly, and the scale of this one is too large to do that, so this time I'm making copious notes, outlining, writing character sketches, and generally trying to have a really good handle on it. I've got a pretty good idea of what's going on with about five of the main characters at this point. A good indicator of the scale is that there are still a few more left to figure out before I'm actually done with the viewpoint characters...

[dame_grise]

I joined here with my regular journal, this one, and my writing journal linden_grove. Any work I post will likely be from the writing journal unless the mod says this isn't okay. I am just trying to keep things separate in a weird way that makes sense to me.

I write historical fantasy, science fiction, modern fantasy and sometimes fan fiction. When I write fan fic these days it is likely Scarlet Pimpernel fic. I've been trying to find and organize the bits and pieces of one of my original novels to get working on it regularly this year. The one I've got my eye on is historical fantasy. I have quite a bit from when I used it in NaNoWriMo a few years back, but the files are scattered between 5 computers and various disks that may or may not still be readable.

My work is very character driven. I search for the character's voice and try to figure out what kind of story he or she is telling, and mostly try to steer it more than plot it. This has been sort of successful for me from time to time, but I've still never finished anything original other than a few short stories.

I've been overwhelmed the last week or so trying to set myself up over here.

-Sam