On Writing
Listening to: Dancing Mad - Final Fantasy VI
Ramble
From early September to mid-November, I wrote the first draft of my light novel. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but the anxiety of getting it done loomed over me. J Novel Club announced another light novel after their success for the first one, and I intended to enter. Right now there is eleven days until the deadline and I decided to not enter my manuscript. It wasn’t because it was hard or anything. The contest itself feels iffy to me, like another Tokyopop manga contest, since we hadn’t heard any news about the winners. I also don’t want to stress about anything in December. It is my birthday month after all, and Christmas and New Years Eve are around the corner. So yeah no entering.
It seems like I’m missing out on an opportunity of a lifetime. After all, I didn’t need to worry about publishing cost or artwork. There are other people who handle that side of it. The thought that always keeps me from feeling FOMO is I always treated my writing and any art I do as a commodity first. Ever since my teenage years, I had this wild expectation that anything that I wrote became future gold. I just needed to find a publisher or agent that was willing to take a chance on me and then I’ll make bank. A lot of this outlook came from the fear of being poor. My family danced along the lines of lower middle class and the actual poverty line. The specific circumstances during that time made me so susceptible to wishful thinking. So I thought maybe if I get a mega-bestseller, my family didn’t have to suffer anymore. We get a big house that didn’t have disconnect pipes running the basement, and we be happy. It was a lie of course, but a powerful one which latched itself well into my twenties. Which was why the contest was another get-rich-quick scheme. I will attain a modicum of success without the effort of struggle. The feeling didn’t get scrubbed off until now.
Now I know there isn’t anything to a get-rich-quick scheme. Now, I know the world isn’t going to wait on me to craft a masterpiece or hand me tons of money for my art. With the popularity of generative AI, Donald Trump’s presidential win, and the genocide on Gaza, the world, in essence, does not give a crap about what I have or don’t have. It just gives. So I either can wallow in some self-pity and cry about how unfair it all is, or I do something about it. I abandoned my need to make a masterpiece that sells and make something I love. I decided to not enter primarily because I realized I love my light novel. I love my idea, my characters, the world setting. Everything about it makes me feel I did something, and I’m going to do my best to make the best I can do at this moment. Entering it hapzardly without processing it is asking for it to get disqualified anyway. So yeah that’s going my vibe from now on.
I should talk about the process right?
Writing Process
My writing process is: idea, brainstorming, outlining, rough draft, first draft, long revision time, and finish. The process isn’t set in stone, but it is the general way of how I write. First, the idea stage. The idea stage consists of me thinking about an idea for weeks or months before actually committing to it. My light novel project, called ChocoChipMugCookie, came to me when I was thinking about a crossover fanfic idea. Originally these characters were from other stuff. Originally, all three characters isekai’d from their own worlds into another. During that process, they turned into dogs and now have to navigate this world in order to go home. Another aspect of it was they were secretly part of the same being who wanted to kill another character from another media. I sat on this idea for months until J-Novel Club contest announcement. At first, I didn’t want to do it because there was what I called the King Arthur idea where it follows the current Arthur in that world (Arthur was a title handed down to whoever can pull the sword from the stone. A lot of info about a project I abandoned I know). I then decided to scrap that idea and go with this one since I couldn’t work out the King Arthur idea. So, I decided to change my fanfic idea into an original fiction one. With that, I wrote the overview.
In an overview, I go over the plot, character, world, and even give it a time schedule (which I never follow). The overview leads to a brainstorming phase. During the brainstorming phase, I come up with the characters, bits and pieces of the world, and plot. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t get to know their characters until after the first draft, so the characters are more one-dimensional in this stage. In ChocoChipMugCookie, or CCMC, I drifted away from the templates of the fanfic characters into their own. The basic ingredients are still there if you know what you’re looking for, but they’re different enough to not be carbon copies. From there I sort of created the first versions of their backstories as well as any worldbuilding necessary to facilitate it.
I then try to outline. I outline the whole story up to a certain point. After finishing, I revise about two more times before rough drafting. Rough drafts are more like a fleshed outline than anything. If I feel that the rough draft isn’t work, I straight up outline the entire way. On the light novel project, I wrote a loose outline. I rough drafted the beginning then changed it to a more descriptive outline. From there, I started my first draft.
My first draft progress is like a slow advancing army. For CCMC, I tried for the first-time to first draft it in a journal. Specifically, a Midori journal because I liked the paper more. The experience frustrated me because of how slow handwriting is. When I type, I would just type a bunch of words in less than a minute. Not the same at all when handwriting. Perhaps I shouldn’t try this while writing a light novel in a contest, but it did get me into writing consistently at least. As I wrote, I put my ideas on separate piece of paper in order solidify it in my mind. When writing on a first draft, you get a lot of ideas of future chapters and the like, so you write them down. The first-drafting process started around the first week of October and continued to the second week of November. I sped it up through outlining the final parts of it. Yeah. Because I wanted to be finished before Thanksgiving. And have a month and a half to work my fanfic. Which I still have to revise.
Revision is a long process for me. My revision process is discarding a lot of it and starting near the ground up or rewriting certain proportions. I don’t have a specific order to tackle plot and character issues. I just do. A key part of my revision process is letting it rest. Stephen King once spoke of this method in his On Writing, so I apply his advice. Does it work? Surprisingly, yes. It allows your brain to chill for a bit and work on the kinks in the background. For CMCC, I’ll work on it again when I finish with my fanfic revision. I know my revision process isn’t more specific, but this process is the more general one. Depending on the piece, my way of tackling the solutions may differ. I don’t approach a fanfic’s wonkiness the same way as original fiction. For example, I go through less revision drafts than original fiction. Since fanfic is self-indulgent, my goal is to make it readable and somewhat good enough for people to be satisfied. With original fiction, I want people knock people out of their seats. For a short analogy, my fanfiction are the pork buns before the ramen. Once I’m satisfied with my own changes, I post it online and wait for people to read it. Rinse and repeat.
So yeah. This is my first post about it. If you read everything including the ramble at the beginning, then thank you. If you just skipped or just read the ramble, then thank you as well. Have a great week and Happy Holidays!