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galadrieljones · 7 years

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Hello. As I've told u, I'm currently struggling a lot with my ongoing chapter. (Context : It's my first fic !) I was wondering whether you had some chapters of the dead season that you absolutely hated, and did you manage to come to terms with it eventually ? Luv u, xo

Hey Amburu!! (*^_^*) xoxo

First of all: Yes, yes, yes. Writing can feel like a struggle sometimes, especially when just starting out. Part of this is because we just don’t always know what to expect out of our writing process yet, and so we’re often left wondering, “At what point will this start to feel right or finished?” It’s hard to trust ourselves, as writers, and this can be discouraging, but just like with any skill, we can’t get better unless we persevere. I like to think that writing improvement exists like a series of plateaus. It is not incremental. It’s like, you are on one plateau for a really long time, and then one day, you sort of hit critical mass. You’ve written so much, a pattern has struck. You’ve figured something out, even if it is not conscious, and suddenly, you’re just better. This process never ends.

Now, to your question: In terms of the writing process, it can take a long time and a lot of words to hit the point where you feel like you can actually trust your instincts. Or, at least it did for me. In fact, The Dead Season is my first project in which I feel like I’ve actually honed a writing process that works, and I have been writing fiction for a long, long time. Part of my writing process is experiencing a great deal of doubt, at some point in the week, as to whether or not the chapter is going to come together at all. This makes me anxious, as it would many of us, and certain chapters have made me more anxious than others. I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever hated any of my chapters themselves, but there are certainly chapters that have given me a lot of stress and self-doubt, and this is a feeling that I very much dislike.

For example, my early chapters, ie: about 1-7, feel super experimental and are very small. I’m not terribly happy with them by any stretch. But I have, over time, found small things that are working, and things that, in the long run, I actually like very much and would not change. For example, there are some rare, very strange and dark moments in the Fade, and we don’t actually go to the Fade all that often in TDS, so this is good. This is important. There are also some early seeds planted per Solas’s complex friendships with both Sera and Dorian, and Sene and Sera as well, plus Sene and Cole. These are big relationships that I was already investigating early on, and so while those chapters certainly aren’t perfect, I feel good about the fact that this has ALWAYS been a story about friendship, first and foremost, and that’s something I have not forgotten.

I’ve also accepted the fact that I was still new to the story back then and still feeling my way through and figuring out what was to come. So of course my early chapters weren’t going to be as careful and multi-layered as chapters that would come much later. This is a serial piece, which makes it feel, to me, a little like writing for TV, in terms of methodology. It took me a minute to figure out my formula, my process, my characters, but once I did, things started to take shape much more quickly and reliably.

Writing is hard, and it can be a struggle, but that is normal. The most important thing to remember, especially when writing more or less publicly, like for a fandom, is to not compare yourself and your writing to others and their writing. That is a toxic beast that we all fall prey to from time to time, but it will hamper your creativity more than anything. Also, and more practically, a lot of the time, when a chapter is causing problems, it might just be that you need to step back, locate the problem, and solve it in the quickest way possible so that you can move forward. Can’t get a transition to work? Then fuck it. Take the transition out and just put in a page break instead. Writing is sometimes just grunt work. It’s just problem-solving. Getting from point A to point B. The art we read on any brilliant page of any piece of writing we love takes many gruelling drafts to complete. It is a process. No writing comes out perfectly on the first try.

UNDER THE CUT: I go through some specific chapters in TDS that I really struggled with, mostly to give you some concrete perspective on the fact that YOU ARE NOT ALONE in your struggle to bring a chapter together. This is for anyone who’s interested!! (It was no bother and actually very productive!

Chapter 10: Hallelujah

I wrote that entire chapter while sitting on a bar stool at a cafe in my hometown in Wisconsin. I pulled a Patrick Weekes on this chapter, and it was hard, ie: For all the Fade stuff with Sene and then Sene and Cole, I adapted the meter of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, hence the title. Looking back, it’s a little precious, per my aesthetic, but I’m glad I gave it a try and somehow made it work. It was just a blatant nod to Weekes and his brilliant writing in DA:I.

Chapter 21: It’s Raining in Val Royeaux, Chapter 22 & 23: Man of Faith, Pt. 1 & 2

These chapters were logistical nightmares. This was also my first go at using the stakes and politics of the world, plus a quest in the game, to really propel the plot AND Solas’s character forward. At first, what was so difficult, was navigating Josephine’s plan and introducing the “game” in a way that felt like it was informed by Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts without piggy-backing it completely. This would be an innocent affair. No murder, only sly quips and earning the favor of the Comte and Comtess Berrande. Plus, romance. Also, this whole thing was me building toward Solas’s diplomatic charm, which is HUGE per his history with Mythal, and then I just had to get to that scene with Blackwall like…I had been working toward that scene for weeks. So a lot was at stake. All told this was a LOT of writing, and I had a really bad head cold when I did it, and I was very very worried about these chapters for a LONG time. I still have not gone back to read them. I assume they’re okay?? Lol.

Chapter 25: The Mother We Share

This is the purple chapter, and I still think there is probably TOO MUCH purple and TOO MUCH mother imagery dumped in. This chapter took me FOREVER and was the moment I realized Solas had become too soft, and that he needed a shove in the other direction. So I had to introduce Abelas, and also, at this point, my stuff with Mythal/Flemeth disassociating began to take shape. Bleh. Thinking about this chapter feels like wading in molasses sometimes.

Chapter 30: Dust of My Dust

This chapter was hard, because it was transitional. I had to get us OUT of Crestwood, and Sene and Solas were in two different places, which had never happened before. Sometimes it is SO HARD to just get from one scene to the next. And so in the end, to save myself more pain, I ended up just splitting the chapter up into a couple separate sections and skipping the transition altogether. This was so useful that I ended up using the section format in multiple future chapters and will most certainly do it again. Half of writing is just problem-solving, it turns out.

Chapter 34: The Elves are Asleep

This is the chapter that comes after Sene learns the truth about Solas as an ancient elf, which comes right after he finally tells her about the miscarriage. This chapter was VERY hard, as it starts in the Fade, and then they come back hard to reality. Huge tone shift. Dorian is there, etc. I’m still a little unhappy with this chapter, especially the ending. It was difficult to find the thesis, ie: what is the ultimate goal? I knew it had to be something with Sene’s character, as this is when her flaws and fears truly start to take shape, but I just couldn’t get a grip on the ending. I probably wrote 14 different endings until I finally figured out what her state of mind needed to be and even still, I’m a little unsure, because I just couldn’t mess around with it anymore. I was going nuts. So I just published it and moved on. Moveon.org. Sometimes you just gotta. Bleh. Oh well.

Chapter 36: Hey, Morrigan. Spin me a tale.

THIS CHAPTER KILLED ME. Lol. Looking back, I am actually very pleased with it, but at the time, it was so much that I had to delay publishing, because I just could not get it right. In the end, it just ended up being a series of impressionistic, almost paratactic scenes, all with very oblique titles. Again, problem-solving. Though I love writing like this. It’s totally my wheelhouse. But to earn this kind of thing, I knew I needed to establish a really strong thematic drawstring to unite all the pieces. I had like thirty metaphors going at once with the knitting and the gloves and the hands, and then creating that sense of confusion in the end, between what Solas is experiencing NOW and what he is remembering–that was really fucking hard. This chapter took me two weeks to draft, and I remember publishing it at 2am and then dragging myself to bed like TIS FINALLY COMPLETE.

Chapter 38: Assassins

This chapter was another logistical nightmare. I don’t typically write a ton of consecutive, immediately chronological scenes, or scenes where the tension completely shifts based on real-time action. But in this chapter, I had to locate Sene’s state of mind with Mythal, coordinate the accidental reveal of Solas’s identity, then cue the assassins, trigger Sene’s response, locate Mythal’s state of mind, and then get everyone down to the brig. FFFFFF. Like this is NOT my strength as a writer, and so this chapter was a huge challenge and I feel like I actually learned a lot. Also, I remember I initially wrote past the ending of this chapter by like 2500 words, only later to realize I needed to save all that for later. So yeah. :deep breath: This chapter, in my mind, feels full of sharp knives.

@thevikingwoman, per your interests.

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