Ask the Author: thevinegarworks
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Ask the Author: thevinegarworks |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | thevinegarworks |
| Date(s): | January 6, 2010 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Supernatural |
| External Links: | interview and comments are here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
thevinegarworks was interviewed for Supernatural Roundtable.
Some Excerpts
The beginning is, or so they say, as good a place as any to start: my fanfiction "career" has been a long and tumultuous thing, first starting with X-Files back in the day. From there I branched into BtVS, Roswell (Max/Michael, yes please!), LOTR, Queer as Folk, Farscape, MLB RPS, etc. I jumped from place to random place, never really settling on anything concrete, before finally I took a break from fanfiction altogether and worked on writing original fiction instead. I completed two novels, started dozens of others which I’ll never return to, and had a couple of crappy poems published.Cue Supernatural.
Being a paranormal geek at heart already, the pilot snagged me and never really let go, though for the first three seasons I kept a respectable distance between myself and fandom. And then one glorious day, a very intriguing (and pretty!) trench-coated angel came along; Castiel's arrival and unnerving blank stares meant I was more or less done for. I lurked around fandom for a couple of months, scribbled out a few fics here and there, before finally giving up the ghost and jumping head-first into the Wonderful World of SPN Fandom.
My first SPN fic ever was a 120k-word Dean/Sam that I've long since destroyed all traces of. After that was a series of one-shots and unfinished tatters, most of which have fallen to the wayside never to be found again. Then, early into season 4, a gargantuan plot bunny hopped right into my lap, fully formed. This was eventually shaped and whittled into my first real Dean/Castiel effort, The Propensities of Good Men, a 15-chapter, 139k+ word madhouse.
Since then I've moved onto much greener pastures and, I feel, improved my writing by leaps and bounds.
Oh, word count... It's my biggest downfall. I wish I could be more concise, really I do, but long-windedness is something that comes naturally to me. It's really quite annoying sometimes, to be completely honest. I've been writing for a long time and brevity has always eluded me.Largely it depends on the story. I tend to enjoy reading epic and winding plots, so I also enjoy writing them; I love both reading and writing stories with a lot of intricacy and weight. I tend to get drawn into stories probably way more than I should, I tend to go off on tangents, and I don't self-edit very well - the natural conclusion is lots and lots of words (even when it's sometimes not necessary, I've found.)
How I keep myself going, though, would be that before I get deeply into a long story I think about how I want to write it and where I want it to go. Sometimes I outline completely, and even if I don't follow that outline I'll at least have a vague skeleton of where I want to end up. I don't like writing aimlessly (long fics, at least - shorter fics, I'd much rather just let the flow carry me wherever), so I usually plan them out to a certain extent. I rarely adhere to what I scribble down as an outline, but it helps at least to an extent; I don't get burned out if I have a clear endgame in mind.
That being said, though, I do very much enjoy short stories as well! For some reason I just tend not to write them very often, at least anything of more substance than random porn.