The sun rises on the wasteland that is my bedroom.  The sailor moon
tapestry falls off the wall to remind my alarm clock that it's time to go
off.  Shania Twain starts singing and I snap out of a dream in which Ranma
has been engaged to C-ko.  The sailors on the tapestry start yelling for
me to hang them back up, so I do, and then I eat breakfast,

The usual mundanities of life drag on, but part of my brain is busily
working on the words that will flow out of my finger into my keyboard that
night.  Everyone starts yelling for keyboard time, as Priss, Rei, Ranma,
Angel, and other duke it out to see what actually gets written that night.

It wasn't always like this.  I've been writing since I was twelve.  My
early stories were highly sporadic.  Around age 15, I went into my 'I must
write an epic fantasy or die' phase and turned out my longest work to
date, a 200 handwritten page, 13 chapter fantasy novel, of course starring
thinly disguised versions of myself and my friends.  I had a sophisticated
sub-theme, but I lacked the skill to write it effectively.  The sub-plot
was that each of us was slowly turning into the D&D character whose place
we had effectively taken, and in some cases, this character was very
little like us at all.  This was especially bad for Floyd, who was
becoming a dwarf (from being 6'3) and Terri, whose character was a devout
pagan worshipper of the Moon Goddess, and she herself being a devout
Christian.  I may go back and rewrite it someday, now that I have the
skills to maybe handle it well.  As it was, I had too many characters and
writing on paper was slow, and even I eventually figured out I was biting
off way more than I could chew.

I went back to short stories, mostly written to amuse friends or as
presents.  After reading most of Lovecraft's stories, I tried to write
some lovecraftian tales, but probably because I am almost as
philosophically antithetical to Lovecraft as one can get, they reeked.  

My next phase was collaborative fics.  I wrote a series of round robins
with various friends in college.  Most of them were quite silly, but fun.
(Some day, I will type up the 'Adventures of Stinger Ace'.  Someday...:))

I had never written a fanfic per se before I was 24, but I had already
been writing for 12 years.  However, I have written as much in the last 3
years or more, than in the 12 years before that.  More importantly, I've
read immense amounts of everything from scientific texts to modern fiction
to medieval romances.  It's hard to get more out of your mind than you put
into it.  

When I discovered the world of anime fanfic, I thought, 'I can do this.
I've been writing for a billion years.  Someone might actually WANT to
read one of these, though.'  So I wrote 'Putting Your Heart in the Right
Place'.  It all took off from there.  

For me, writing is almost an addiction.  Despite my school load, my speed
and my volume increases every year.  I'd like to hope my quality has
increased as well.  I'm often known as an epic writer, which I find
ironic, because everything I wrote was pretty short before I started doing
fanfics.  Now, I'm not sure how to write anything short anymore :)

Like CS Lewis, a lot of my stories are driven by mental images that
inspire me to create a story to make it real.  Ranmapunk 2033 started with
an image of Shampoo passing Leon and Daley on the road with her bycycle.
Dance of Shiva was born when I had a passing fantasy about Ryoko taking
over Genaros station.  Lemon Sherbet was inspired by a mental image of
Makoto seeing Ranma one day and announcing he didn't just remind her of
her old boyfriend, he WAS the old boyfriend.  

Like any other author, I bog down sometimes, but I never bog down in
everything simultanously.  That's why I write 20 or 30 projects at a time.
I can always turn to another story. 

Some of my stories were created with a specific end in mind, like Monster.
Others take over and take me where I never intended to go, like 'Putting
Your Heart in the Right place'.  Some like Dance of Shiva are elaborately
planned out.  I spent days working out the intricacies of how the various
series would fit together and getting the timeline to work out the way it
needed to.  Others, like Lemon Sherbet, I had no plans whatsoever and just
made it all up as I went along.  

Something I'm still trying to figure out about my writing is why I have a
firm grasp of character, but not a firm grasp of character voice.  To
clarify, my characters act with clearly defined, distinct, and (I hope)
correct personalities, but they all talk like me :)  My Ranma has a
tendency to quote literature, fantasy novels, etc, etc, etc, despite
acting like he should, rather than like he speaks.  It's a weakness, and
years of effort still isn't helping me much.  

So, how do I write?  I write in a lot of different ways, depending on the
subject and the series.  I had the advantage of doing my early lousy
writing in an environment where no one could see it, and emerging into a
more public view only after I'd already improved my skills a lot.  

My own advice to aspiring writers is;
1.  Write.  Just write, write, write.  You have to learn writing by doing.
2.  Read, read, read.  Feed your mind.
3.  Don't worry about being original.  The quest for originality is a good
way to just dry up your brain in obsessive worrying.  Everything's been
done, and probably done better, anyway :)  You don't learn to play the
piano by freely composing music.  That comes later, once you've mastered
what you're doing.  
4.  Write some more


John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

New CS Lewis Quote :)
"This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.  We must play.
but our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest
kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each
other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.  And out
charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in
spite of which we love the sinner--no mere tolerance or indulgence which
parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."
--The Weight of Glory