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cedarbranch · 18 hours

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for the fanfic writer ask meme: 2-4, 30-35, 41-50, and 77!

wheee thank u!! this is so many omg (/pos) definitely putting these under a cut lol

2. talk about a notable time a narrative or character has looked you dead in the eyes and said “fuck your plan, here’s what we’re actually doing.”

when DOESN'T this happen honestly... most recently, steve's mom insisted that she MUST make an appearance in my stranger things wip, but the first instance of this happening on a dramatic scale was wayyyyy back when i was writing my frerard ghost au. frank decided to have more significant Issues than i originally intended which ended up with me rewriting half the fic from scratch (which now i do more often than not)

3. on a scale of 1-10 how much do you enjoy incorporating romance into the average story?

hmmm... 9! i love romance :) i love writing Romance As Exploration. figuring out what makes characters tick, then how and why they'd make each Other tick. i do struggle with writing entirely romance-centric stories though, it tends to be one plot thread out of many

4. what is the plot bunny you’ve been carrying for the longest? optional bonus question: do you ever wonder why you haven’t written it yet and experience deep existential dread?

jeeeez... there are SO many ideas i've written and then abandoned... keeping it to ones i actually intend to finish, it's gotta be my pacific rim chance-meeting fic, but part 5 of magnolia 'verse comes as a very close second! i think about it constantly. i know exactly why i haven't written it yet: it's partially because... i HAVE written part of it (i rewrote the same 20k of the intro 5 fucking times), and also because after those 5 times i lost the hyperfixation and have been caught up in other fandoms ever since. still Thinking About It though.

30. most inspirational quote you’ve ever read or heard that’s still important to you.

i'm not gonna hunt down the exact quote, but there's a post floating around here disparaging the idea of going to an art museum and saying "i could do that!" in an insulting way because yeah - you could! the only difference between the artist in the museum and you is the fact that they Did and you Didn't. that concept was big for me. it's a great reminder that nothing i do has to be perfect, i just have to make it Exist. the first step to being a writer is words on the page

31. tell us about one of your characters who’s an absolute joy to write?

oh that's so tough, i have so many i love writing!! in terms of who makes me giggle and kick my feet the most, though, gotta be eddie in my stranger things wip or newt geiszler. love me a character who is an Annoying Little Shit On Purpose

32. do characters influence your writing style?

i would say less characters and more the source material itself. i'm someone who likes to match character/narrative voices as closely as possible, so the way i write dialogue obviously reflects that and changes from fandom to fandom. it's not always super noticeable, but i think it shows the most when i'm writing pacific rim or hannibal. (writing hannibal fic is its own beast, that's the only one that's really changed my entire approach to writing and not just dialogue)

33. do you start with the characters or the plot when writing?

they inform one another so closely it's hard to separate them! i guess the first inklings of plot are where it begins, and then the characters generate what the rest of it looks like.

34. how do you name characters and places?

most of the time i don't have to bc i'm primarily writing fic ❤️ but on those rare occasions when i'm writing original fiction, it's purely based on vibes.

35. tell us about a character who’s very different than you who you love a whole lot

literally any character i'm invested in. i'm always most compelled by characters who are very much unlike me, especially the bitter angry types. right now it's will graham :3 i love RIGHTEOUS RAGE yay yippeee!!!

41. what is the weirdest story idea you’ve ever had.

hmmm. quite possibly the crack fic i wrote for tma where jon is confronted with the horrors of homestuck. (IN MY DEFENSE: WAS NOT ACTUALLY MY IDEA, WAS WRITTEN AT A FRIEND'S REQUEST, but i did make it exist).

42. describe the aesthetic of a story in 5 words.

ough this is Hard. i can give a bad 5-word summary of a fic, but its aesthetic? let me give it a shot for the hannigram wip: bloody knuckles, sick with yearning

43. how did writing change you?

got me a girlfriend :)

serious answer: i am always thinking about craft when interacting with any kind of written art. i deconstruct, i nitpick, i analyze. sometimes it's criticizing bad writing from a place of love (as with stranger things), sometimes i'm frustrated by what could've been done much better (THE MAGICIANS!!), sometimes i'm just in awe of the skill of the creators (succession, hannibal).

44. any writing advice you want to share?

for fic writers: don't stop reading actual books!!

45. name three of your favorite fanfic writers.

three is too few!! i'll just say i'm currently rockin with emungere and zipegs, and always w my gf @stoplightglow :)

46. what time are you the most productive when it comes to writing?

hmmm. late evening, maybe?

47. what story are you most proud of?

in terms of completed works, moth to light. for my entire body of work including what's yet unfinished, my hannigram wip! (it'll have a title... eventually)

48. do you reread your own stories?

oh absolutely. partially just because it's fun, but mostly as a learning exercise! it's helpful to get some distance from a fic and then go back and see how reading it feels compared to how writing it felt. gives me a sense of whether my intentions came across how i meant them to in the end. also lets me identify some of the flaws i'd like to work on!

49. do you want to be published some day?

i don't really know! i used to want to be a novelist once i'd "gotten good enough" by practicing with fic, but i've since realized that fic and original fiction are very different skill sets and i'm just not as interested in writing original work. i do have a few short pieces that i'd like to finish one day and i hope they'd be publishable but it's sooo intimidating to have a partner who actually is a successfully published author and get a firsthand look at how much rejection and persistence it involves :'D i think i'd like to give it a shot when i'm ready, whenever that is. maybe for poetry too!

50. do you plan or do you write whatever comes to your mind?

i plan obsessively. my planning documents are pages and pages of outlining, character notes, snippets of scenes i want to write, etc. but to be fair the actual act of writing once i sit down to it is whatever springs to my mind, the story often takes off and guides itself into deeper levels of nuance from there

77. how do you write kissing scenes?

ummm. they're kinda formulaic in my work tbh which is smth i want to change... i do think my kiss scenes are improving as the rest of my writing improves, though! there's one in the hannigram wip i'm pretty fond of. will kisses hannibal and then punches him in the face ❤️ for the second time that evening

#thank youuu i love to Think About Writing #time to take this motivation juice and go write!#answered #ask meme #n.txt #magnolia #haunt me

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stormyoceans · 2 years

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Hey :) here's the JayFoei anon from like literally only an hour ago. My brain took a turn from the cuddling image and based only on the fact that Poppy was also in Lovely Writer, I suddenly had this thought: "What about a JayFoei childhood friends AU?"

I have absolutely no idea if it could work but then I considered it more and - what if they knew each other as kids but then one of them moved away and they lost contact. So when Foei wants to come with Lian to a business meeting with Jay, he reads the name and thinks "could it be? No. No, that would be too much of a coincidence." And indeed, when he meets Jay, he seems to be nothing like that awlward child/teenager he knew before but he is this handsome, charming guy that doesn't know how to properly button his shirts.

While Jay is completely overwhelmed that the guy he's had a crush on since childhood (and that he stalked on social media so he knows kinda what he looks like now, not that Foei posts a lot of selfies) is suddenly standing in front of him, in a suit and everything and logically he wants them to stay in touch again.

And it's so awkward and cute because Jay who is normally so good at natural flirting continues to flirt with Foei on accident - he doesn't consciously intend to flirt because he doesn't want to scare Foei away but he just can't help himself - while Foei slowly discovers that Jay is still the weird guy he was so fond of when he was younger.

And now I kinda want to write this but - does it even make sense? I don't know.

I also just wanted to say thanks for the cookie offer, and you're really not alone in the JayFoei household, I think there are a lot of people who jumped after you when you decided to sail this ship ;)

HI HELLO OH MY GOD okay first of all IM SO SORRY FOR THE LATE REPLY ANON for some reason this ask didn’t show up on my phone??? so i only saw it today after i turned on my laptop and i REALLY HOPE you’re still around to see this because

HELLO??????????????? IM SO IN LOVE WITH THIS??????????????? IT’S SUCH AN AMAZING IDEA and it definitely makes sense to me, because hear me out.. i’ve said it before, so i apologize for being repetitive, but jay and foei actually have so many things in common, they have the same work ethic, the same sense of humor, and the same penchant for the dramatics. i think this is very important for a childhood friends AU because i believe there are some traits of your character that, especially at a young age, are very influenced by your friends and the people around you. even now that im way older, sometimes i realize that along the way i picked up some way of expressing myself or even just some words that i’ve never used before, but actually come from my closest friend and my coworkers. all this to say that going by this logic i can see jay and foei being childhood friends perfectly well!!!!!!

AND NOW IM GETTING SO FOND OF THIS because it’s so easy to imagine the two of them as kids and young teenagers being weird and playing together and having inside jokes!!!!! and finding each other again after so many years is kinda awkward at first because they’ve both grown up and changed in some ways but then they find themselves alone and it’s SO EASY AND NATURAL to go back to how they interacted with each other as kids. AND BRAIN.EXE HAS STOPPED WORKING EVEN JUST THINKING ABOUT THE ACCIDENTAL FLIRTING!!!!!!! THE PINING!!!!!!!! having being in love with each other since forever but being afraid to take that last step because they just became friends again!!!!!!!!!!!!

yeah no im so normal about this if you ever decide to actually write it im probably going to pass out and be found dead in a ditch sdkfgsdkj

#okay im sorry for getting carried away but this is seriously SO GOOD #I LOVE IT SO MUCH #no pressure about writing it of course just know that if you ever feel like doing it you're gonna have someone cheering for you #honestly im just incredibly grateful you sent me this so thank you!!#cutie pie #cutie pie the series #jayfoei #m: ask

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olderbynow · 7 years

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Some time ago the always lovely @whopooh made a post asking writers to talk about their own fics, posing five really interesting questions she’d like to get input on. And is there anything you can think of that writers love more than talking about their writing? (Other than maybe comments.) No, right? So settle down around the fireplace, kids. Get your marshmallows roasting and prepare to be bored stiff for a while as I talk endlessly about me, myself and my fics. (And most of these answers are even MFMM related.)

Pick one fic that you’ve written and talk about what makes it important to you.

For this first one, I've got to go back a bit to my pre-MFMM days and this one fic I wrote for Rookie Blue, the show I loved and then hated even more than I had loved it, but which got me back into writing again, so I'll have to be grateful to it for that. But yes, back when things were still mostly rosy I wrote this fic called These Dreams Will Haunt You, which is the only time that I can think of when I've posted something and thought, "I have no idea if this works outside my head, but I don't really care. I like it." Which is a pretty powerful feeling. I set out to write a specific thing, in a specific way, and I did. That fic is the story I meant to write when I started writing, written in the way I meant to write it. THAT NEVER HAPPENS. (I'm obviously not saying that I didn't angst endlessly about it while I was writing it, and I'm not saying I didn't sit there biting my nails as I waited for comments from my incredibly patient beta, I'm just saying: The final product is something I've always felt good about, even with all the water under that fandom bridge.)

Pick one of your older fics and say what about it you like most, and what you would do differently now.

In MFMM, I think my biggest "regret fic" (of the published ones, there are plenty of things I regret about the ones that never saw the light of day) is The Place Where He Fell When He Saw The Stars, which is one of those fics that started out as what I thought was a good idea, but then I just completely failed to do what I had wanted to with it. Which is why it turned into the one-shot that it is, rather than the full on multi-chapter fic I had been meaning to write I still like the idea, and I like the intention behind this fic, I just don’t particularly like the fic itself. If I got a do-over on this one, I think I’d have given up on the Year of Tropes deadline that I was working towards and hung onto it until I knew how to do what I wanted to do, rather than writing myself into a corner I can’t be bothered to make my way out of. (But I do think, honestly, that then the fic would never have been published at all, so I’m not sure where that leaves us, really.)

Pick a fic and say something about why you wrote it – if there was a specific inspiration, perhaps from RL, fandom life, or a theme or a trope you felt needed to be written in a new way.

I hesitate to bring attention to a WIP that has gone un-updated for more than six months, but lets forget about that for a bit and I'll tell you about Fast Times at Wardlow High, the high school AU the MFMM fandom had been pretty damn sure they didn't want until @heavyheadedgal suggested one here on tumblr and we all realised that YES, 17-year-old Jack rocking the debate team and Mac with a mohawk are in fact things that should be in our lives. And after reading people's suggestions for this non-existent AU I was so determined to bring it to life that I wrote a quick one-shot in a day, completely desperate to get it out there before AO3 was flooded with HS AUs. LOL. That one-shot turned into a thing, and although it doesn't look that way from the infrequent updating, it's my favourite thing that I've done in MFMM fanfic, because it's just my happy place in fic. There's no pressure, since I've totally given up on things like plot and character development and this making any kind of sense in the long run and am entirely focused on just enjoying writing it. I only do it when I feel like it, and I never really worry if it's any good. Because it's a HS AU, there's something about the nature of that that just allows for all sorts of badness. Basically I’ve given myself carte blanche to suck, and it’s really liberating and I should probably do that more, actually. In life in general.

Is there something you wrote in a fic that was read differently than you intended, and that made you see your own fic in another light?

I think the best example of that happening to me is the MFMM fic Back In The Ring, which was my contribution to the March Trope of the amazing Year of Tropes organised by @firesign23 and was a very poor excuse for a bottle episode fic. The fic was just meant to be a jokey bit of plotlessness, but some people seemed to take the whole thing more seriously - and in a very different way - than I had intended. They certainly took it all much more seriously than Jack had done in the fic. But it led to my favourite ever analysis of anything I've written in the history of the Universe by @whopooh, and so I can't really be sorry for the fact that a few readers were offended by Phryne's offhanded attitude to her past dalliances.

Is there a fic by another writer that has inspired you?

Okay, the thing is, for MFMM fandom, I don't have that. I have fics that I love, and I am inspired by this fandom as a whole (cue string section) but there's no one specific fic that has made me go "I need to write a story now." (Possibly this is the one downside to being part of a fandom with SO MANY writers who are just so incredibly talented? Which is not a thing you'l find me complaining about. Ever.) But in past fandoms, it has definitely happened, and this stroll down memory lane as I tried to find a good example of it was threatening to steal whole days from me as I reread past favourites from fandoms of yore, but instead of doing that, let me tell you about these two writers who used to co-write Rookie Blue fic and then edited their way into writing original fiction instead. Their style of writing was completely mesmerising to me, and I devoured, repeatedly, anything they wrote, whether or not it was a ship/au/whatever I was interested in. Because I just adored their words. They influenced my own style of writing in a lot of ways, but mostly in a way that was "Huh, so I can just write like I'm me and that's fine?" rather than feeling like you need to write like you're ~literature. I don't take that with me in all my writing, and I think in MFMM you mostly see it in Wardlow Whoopie, which was very much me trying to force this extremely contemporary sounding narrator's voice into a story set in the 1920s. I still don't understand at all how it could ever make sense, but it made me laugh as I wrote it, so I'm not going to argue any fine points here. (But yeah, that fact that I can't just do that is definitely the most challenging thing about writing MFMM fic - which I guess is also why writing Fast Times is such a relaxing thing, because I get to mostly do it there.)

I’m pretty sure people have been tagged on this already - I know I was, which makes me think everyone else must've been covered, but in case you weren't and this is the first you've heard about this questionnaire, you should definitely do it!

#what we talk about when we talk about fanfic #mfmm fanfic #rookie blue fanfic

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