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pynkhues · 3 years

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Hi ! I just wanted to say that I love your writing and I wanted to ask how you go about doing research for all your au's. Thanks!

Hi! Thank you so much, anon! And what a fun question! I could talk about researching all day, haha. My undergraduate degree is actually in history too, so research is something that’s sort of fundamental to my education in a lot of ways.

To talk about researching is kind of hard though, because while the steps are more or less the same, the approach is really different depending on what it is that I’m writing. For instance, the answer’s pretty different if I’m writing a modern day au where I can shorthand certain things because my readers know what I’m talking about vs an historical au where I really have to think pretty deeply about everything if I want to submerge a reader in a storyworld.

So I thought it might be fun to answer this question using my two biggest au’s as sorts of case studies! This is probably an extremely nerdy answer, I don’t know, haha, and it talks about both researching and incoporating research into the creative process while writing, so I hope that’s okay!

Generally speaking, all my writing starts with a question:

What’s the story that I want to tell?

This is always a process that tends to vary for me, but I rarely actively ask the question to myself prior to getting ready to write it? Usually it ends up as me sort of thinking over a concept then getting to a point where I know I’m going to write it, and it’s only when I really start to think seriously about that that I ask myself that question.

In both of these cases, it was pretty typical for me, haha:

And well, then we get to the next question.

What background do I need to know to be able to tell that story?

While this question might seem AU specific, it’s something that’s actually a step in everything I write. I was working on the second part of the Christmas fic today, which is technically canon divergent, but has made me think a lot about Beth and Rio’s canon cultural backgrounds.

I’ve always liked the headcanon that Beth and Annie are Jewish, but disconnected from their heritage (Marks is a traditionally Jewish surname, Annie’s used some yiddish slang before), and Rio’s obviously Latino, but of Mexican heritage if we apply Manny’s background, and wears rosary beads on the show which indicate that he’s Catholic. I wanted to embrace both of those things, so I’ve tried to thread them through the story where it’s appropriate to do so. For instance, there's a scene of a Las Posadas celebration at Sainte Anne de Detroit which required a LOT of research on my part and hopefully reads well!

The point is that those things felt important to me to include in a Christmas fic about Beth and Rio in the C&C ‘verse because the entire series is about their lives entwining and getting to know each other fully. I want to include detail that feels specific to what we know about them and embraces and (with any luck) deepens our connection to the characters in my fic.

What I’m getting to in a really roundabout way is that once I have a story idea, I start to think about what I’m going to have to understand if I’m going to do the story justice.

In the case of the pornstar and pirate aus, this couldn’t look more different:

Annnnnd so on, haha.

As you can see, sometimes that background research is really clear and straight forward, as it was with the pornstar AU. I looked up how it worked, and because I knew that I wanted it to steer clear of the seedy and toxic parts of porn, I basically researched ideal environments and best practice, put those in place, and then focused on how to get Beth from her suburban home into a legitimate studio.

The pirate AU was extremely different and much more of a mutable process. Without a clear sense of the era from the get-go, I had a much wider scope to explore when and where the story could take place, and when I realised that dating the story would inevitable force me to contend with parts of history I might not want to (i.e. the lead up to The Civil War), it let me re-shape a world around an era, but not feel entirely beholden to it.

In that sense, the research process for both of them involved me choosing fantasy over reality – I negated certain realities to focus on the things I wanted to write (I highly doubt you will find a porn set anywhere near as ethical as Thank You Ma’am after all) – but if I can’t do that in fanfic, where can I? The aim still is for there to be enough that is real that you feel grounded in the story even if I’ve taken certain creative liberties for the sake of telling the story I want to tell.

That’s the beauty of research. Once you know enough about it, you can make informed choices about what you use to shape your storyworld, and make it feel authentic even as you’re fictionalising it.

The point of that though is that this background research is so fundamental to the DNA of the story itself, that it can’t even begin to exist without it.

Loose plotting

It’s usually around this point that I’ll put together a loose plot. This is generally pretty thin, but I’ll start to put pieces into a bit of an order.

The pornstar au is, again, a really easy example of this. Three parts felt right for it, the shooting of the porno itself was always going to be in the final part, which gave me two chapters to get Beth there. I knew she was going to submit herself through an amateur talent callout which I’d discovered in my background research, so the question of it was more around why would someone like her sign up? Canon plot points help – Beth needs money! Fantasy kicks in again, haha – because she and Dean are finally divorcing.

On the other hand, the pirate au is pretty much unrecognisable from it’s first loose plot.

In it, I’d pencilled in Beth travelling on a ship with Dean and the children, pirates boarding, and Rio kidnapping Beth as collateral to help him escape.

My loose plots change a lot and usually grow in detail, evolve and change shape as I start to ask myself why, and there are a lot of reasons why the pirate au changed so much, but I’ll get to that a bit later.

The point is, once I have a loose plot, I’ll usually throw some more words down, see what I’ve got, and then get to the part of the research process I like to call:

Question time

With background research done and a loose plot and some draft scenes written, I hit a much more specific part of the research process where I don’t need to know broadstroke background detail, I need to know the answers to really specific stuff. I usually write a list and try to do it all at once so that the writing process isn’t too much stop-start. I bullet point the answers in my creative doc then too, so the information is right there when I need it.

Again, the questions I asked of the pornstar au and pirate au were pretty different (although there were a few similarities, haha). Some of the questions I asked were:

This is actually a case where the pirate au was, in a lot of ways, easier. History is well documented and fact checked after all, but current porn industry standards are, y’know. Not quite as transparent, haha. I’ve mentioned it before, but I actually started to fill out an amateur porn application (with a false identity of course, haha), so that I could see the full form and get a genuine sense of the questions they ask, which is hilarious, annnd brings us to sources.

Sources

In researching, there are definitely things I’ll just Google, but I also like to utilise sources pretty widely. In particular, Google’s not really going to give you a great sense of what - say - the life of a pornstar’s like, but there are some great podcast series where performers talk about their lives in their own words. Similarly, Google searches are great for the cliffnotes of an answer, but don’t hold a candle to era-made drawings, letters and newspaper clippings.

For the two, I’d probably say my sources looked something like this:

How do the answers to these questions affect the story that I want to tell?

Annnd of course, the answers to these questions frequently end up re-shaping and re-framing my story, both directly and indirectly. Originally for instance, I wasn’t going to have condoms at all in the pirate au, because I naively assumed they wouldn’t be invented yet in a loose 1800s-set fic, only to discover that some version of a condom has been around since Ancient Rome (it was made using the bladders of animals! Gross!).

Other times it’s indirect. The idea for instance in the pirate au to have Beth realise the houses that the men had robbed through certain items they were wearing came really from looking a lot at antique store sites and image archives and seeing how much was custom made for families and individuals. That in turn made me think how for someone who’s ability to think on her feet and observe are her strengths, that could really come into play as a plot point.

Re-Plotting and Writing

It’s usually around this point that everything comes together and I start to really map out a fic in a firmer, more meaningful way, and also just throw myself into the writing of it. I generally feel like I’ve got the tools at this point in the process, and start to talk to the story in a bit more of an informed way.

It’s also really where I start asking myself why? and what does this mean for the next scenes? a lot.

Jumping back to the original pirate au plot, this was really where it pivoted as drastically as it did. There were too many tropes in that premise that I didn’t like. I didn’t like that Beth had no agency in the act that connected her to Rio, I didn’t like the trope of the MOC kidnapping a ‘helpless’ white woman, I didn’t like that Beth would be taken from her children by force and how that would impact any connection her and Rio formed and ensure that a major part of the story would have to be devoted to Beth trying to get back to them.

Immediately that made it a case where Beth had to choose to go with Rio, but why would she leave her family? And why would Rio let this upperclass lady onboard his ship? So she snuck on. So she had to, because Dean lost everything again. Okay, but would Beth just leave the kids with Dean after he’d done that? No way, not with the implications of the time, so who would she leave them with? Annie or Ruby - no, I want Ruby on the pirate adventure. Annie. But what on earth could put Annie in a secure enough position that Beth would willingly entrust her children to her?

Thus the subplot of Greg wanting to legitimise Ben was born! Which I doubly liked, because it kind of mirrors canon, haha.

In that case, the research really helped me flesh out a story world that let me explore character storylines in a way that I wouldn’t always do, which is insanely fun to me, haha, so I forever am left hoping it’s fun to read too.

But yes! In a nutshell, that’s my research process. :-)

#fic asks #writing #fanfiction #welcome to my ama #Anonymous

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