I Suddenly Remembered My Charlemagne

I'm not talking about the "can't write" part where you're sitting in Starbucks with your coffee and your iPod and that mocking cursor...I'm talking when you're bursting with ideas and prohibited, for whatever reason, from writing them down.

annerbhp actually inspired this post with her lamentation a couple days ago of having lost a perfect scene for not having been able to write it down. We've all been there. Some of us have lost entire stories to the void of Not Having Writing Materials On Hand. It's very frustrating. I am interested, however, in how you guys cope with that.

For my part, I have always been a note taker. If you look back through my university notes, you will find that I have entire SG-1 fics written out in the margins, on the backs of hand-outs, between the lines. When I worked at the Nursing Home, I always had paper in my pocket and at the end of the night, it would be split half-way between notes for charting and snippets of Daniel/Janet sequences. At the Book Store, I had oodles of time to myself and wrote entire stories while I waited for customers to come in.

This changed a bit with The Stone Thief. I took almost no notes beforehand, and wrote it so quickly that I didn't have time to take more than basic "What We Need To Do" notes as I was ploughing through it. Typically, I would stop writing it with a chapter still in my head so that the next day when I got back to the coffeeshop, I would know where I planned to start. I was basically racing myself through the novel, and I don't think it suffers for that.

It used to really, really piss off my uni friends that I could write my papers the night before and still get an A- (or a B+) on them. The truth is, I'd been writing that paper for a month at that point, but in my head. By the time I sat down the night before (or sometimes the morning of if it was a night class), I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I could write as fast as I could format. Writing fic has been a lot like that, since my Thesis anyway. I decide what I am going to write, and then I write it.

(Thank you, once again, Dr. Daviau! If I ever have a memory half as good as yours, I'll be content.)

But all of this assumes I can take notes. And sometimes, you can't. Because you're working or driving or chasing a three-year-old. Then what? Fortunately, I've trained myself to take notes in my head and remember them as well (again, largely thanks to Dr. Daviau, but also because of another trick I learned when I was little).

I used to have terrible, terrible nightmares when I was little, but I could never remember what they were. My mother had a friend who was interested in lucid dreaming, and so she taught me how to take some measure of control over my dreams. There are two amusing side effects of this: 1. I can wake up at 6:34 without an alarm almost any time I tell myself to, and 2. Any time I start to have a nightmare, I replace the villain with Boba Fett, because apparently when I was six, I found him an ineffective bad guy.

What this means is that if I think of something before I fall asleep, I can make myself dream it, and then I can make myself remember it. It's how I saw the closing scene for my Angel story "Transcendence" years before I wrote it down. It also means that when I'm stuck in the field digging shovel tests or walking for kilometres on end, I can recite the fic to myself until it's wedged in my brain, and then I just need to think about trees and blisters and there it is again (music is my preferred trigger, obviously, but beggars can't be choosers).

I do have a freakishly good memory, particularly if things come "in voice", but generally speaking I plan for weeks in my head before I actually write anything down (besides character names. If I didn't write those down, I'd never remember them).

I'm curious, f-list, what do you do?

I neglected to mention this last night (probably because I didn't read the fic I'm going to recommend you all read until this morning), but another really fascinating aspect of Shared Personal Canon is the part where we come up with things independently. I'm slowly making my way through the Sanctuary archives, and finding fabulous fics that other people wrote that use conclusions I drew without having read them first.

Again, let me start with something simple. I assumed that Nigel was never really part of the Ménage à Quatre that Helen, James, John and Nikola seem to fall into (again, we all seem to agree that it's James before the Ripper and Nikola after). I have nothing to back this up with, aside from his non-presence on the show so far, except that he got married and had a kid and, after 1908 anyway, seemed to sort of...get out and do his own thing without getting tangled up in their complete insanity.

The COOL thing, however, and the thing I did completely on my own, was to decide the nature of Helen and Nikola's relationship as seen in Venatus Debitum. On the surface, it's a bit obvious. But then this morning, I discovered Understanding, by penknife, and it provides the EXACT HISTORICAL BACKDROP for what I tried to get into in my own fic.

(BTW, if you haven't already, you should read it. Because it is just heartbreaking, and also really awesome.)

I suppose what I am saying is that we all rock, but mostly I'm just over the moon to be immersed once again in so clever a fandom. Brain sharing for everyone! Brandies all around! Bring on the back half of season three. ;)