By using your imagination. by
Huinesoron
on 2017-12-11 19:42:00 UTC
Reply
"Oh, come on! That's not possible."
Selene sighed and looked up from her book. "That's the third time you've said that tonight," she pointed out. "What have they done now?"
"They're burnt on the outside but still raw in the middle!" Kaitlyn folded her arms and glared at the campfire. "It's ridiculous."
Selene raised one thin eyebrow. "Sorry, are we still talking about Merry and Pippin here?"
"Merry and--?" Kaitlyn scoffed. "Selene, sweetheart, if the fuzzies had set themselves on fire, I'd be a little more concerned than this."
"You weren't when they scorched themselves with that firework..."
"That's different," Kaitlyn said with a sniff. "That was comedy."
"For a given value of the word." Selene shook her head. "So who has gotten themselves burnt? With this fic, I really have no idea who you're thinking of."
"You have some really weird ideas about fanfic." Kaitlyn waved a frying pan in the air, sloshing hot oil everywhere. "My dinner, Selene. I was talking about my dinner." She tilted her head to the side, thoughtful. "I suppose it's not really a problem you'd face..."
"It's not usually considered polite to cook people before drinking their blood, no." Selene gestured upwards with her bookmark. "But I thought you were watching the Words?"
"No, you were doing that," Kaitlyn said. "Weren't you?"
The vampire fixed her with a level gaze. "Kaitlyn. I have a book in my hands. What do you think I'm doing?"
"... fair." Kaitlyn sighed and prodded the disaster of her dinner with a fork. "Do you think you can exorcise slash-wraiths with badly-cooked sausages...?"
~
I went for sausages over eggs because they make more sense to cook over an open fire, but exactly the same principle applies. You use the concept as a basis, and let your characters interact around it.
Also: this is exactly why we have the Permission Prompts in the first place. They are designed to be quirky situations which your characters get into and have an opportunity to show us who they are. If you're scrabbling desperately to find an idea for your Permission piece, just use the ones we worked so hard on! Seriously.
The 'normal', expected path for a PPC writer's first few stories is:
-Permission prompt showing their agents meeting/joining/whatever.
-Permission prompt showing a weird situation.
-First mission.
-Second mission.
-Probably first Interlude.
-Third mission.
-Branching out into different stuff.
Lily Winterwood had a lot of missions and interludes under her belt when she wrote the Blackout story. She knew how the PPC setting worked, inside and out, and had shown us that she did. That's why I was happy to let her borrow my character (Morgan), and why I was so excited to read it. None of us started out by writing epics, here; take it slow, and find your feet before trying to soar.
hS