A Meme!

[fiachairecht]

I am mooching off coffee shop wifi, having been helpfully reminded that it is an unsecured connection and anyone can see information I send/receive, so I hope everyone is enjoying my smutswap nominations and Swedish lessons. Shall we additionally chat about:

A: How did you come up with the title to [insert fic]?
B: Any of your stories inspired by personal experience?
C: What member do you identify with most from [insert fic[?
D: Is there a song or a playlist to associate with [insert fic]?
E: If you wrote a sequel to [insert fic], what would it be about?
F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
G: Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?
H: How would you describe your style?
I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?
J: Write or describe an alternative ending to [insert fic].
K: What’s the angstiest idea you’ve ever come up with?
L: How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
M: Got any premises on the back burner that you’d care to share?
N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you?
O: How do you begin a story–with the plot, or the characters?
P: Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an “architect” or a “gardener”? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?)
Q: How do you feel about collaborations?
R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?
S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?
T: Any fandom tropes you can’t stand?
U: Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
V: If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
W: Do you like more general prompts, or more specific ones?
X: A character you enjoy making suffer.
Y: A character you want to protect.
Z: Major character death–do you ever write/read it? Is there a character whose death you can’t tolerate?

kimaracretak, for [insert fic] ones

Comments

[breathedout]

F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

and also

O: How do you begin a story–with the plot, or the characters?

[fiachairecht]

Oooh excellent questions!

F: I am not, on the whole, amazing at dialogue - I tend towards internal monologue and indulgent scenery description, but I'm really proud of a lot of the dialogue in among the fallen stones, especially:

"It was more than anyone else would give me, at the time. My thanks were sincere, despite what you might believe of me." She pauses, and the night's tension has nothing to do with anything outside their small circle of light. "What belief keeps you with me?"

"I believe in life and death." If she shuts her eyes, especially here in the Shadowfell, it's beyond too easy to hear the screams of the dead and the dying. Percy's family. Her own friends. "I believe you upset that balance and don't care, except when you do." She opens her eyes. "I believe you want me, because only a druid understands what your guns mean."

"Oh, good," Ripley breathes, and sways that much closer. She's all shadows in the firelight. "Very, very good."

"What is it that you believe in?" Kelyeth asks again, edging on desperation. She can barely hear her own voice. "It has to be something. Anything. Anything that ... you know, guides you. Lets you keep doing ..." What did you have to believe in to do the things Ripley had done so dispassionately?

Keyleth doesn't want to know. She couldn't bear not finding out.

"Myself," Ripley says simply. The easy answer, the obvious one. Keyleth waits. "I believe in money, in invention and progress and the thrill of discovery. And ..." she hesitates, and the next words come with the studied deliberation of a thought the speaker has been considering for much longer than they'd admit, and perhaps never expected to give voice to at all. "I believe that you'll see us safely home, and you won't kill or capture me as soon as my back is turned."

When I first drafted this scene I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about them both stating their motivations so plainly, but explicitly starting from a point of 'what keeps you, my enemy, with me' rather than simply 'what do you believe in' gave the conversation a performative spin that I really enjoyed - neither of them are quite lying, but they're also both very clearly focussing on {a} their points of similarity and {b} things that force the other to want to keep them alive. Manipulation of the person you know you could have been! I love it.

O: Characters! Usually characters + a song lyric, honestly. I go less for plot and more for characters worrying or plotting or dreaming alone or with one other person. I've also been working a lot more with setting-enforced unreality elements recently, and it's less 'what's happening' and more 'who thinks this is happening'.

[chestnut_pod]

Hm, H?

[fiachairecht]

I think the most consistent descriptor I have is 'self-indulgent', tbh - I write because I need other people to love the things I love as much as I do, and quite often in the way that I do - a lot of my favourite characters have fans that love them for [reasons that are at best dull and flattening and at worst harmfully stereotypical and directly contradicting the text that drew me to them in the first place], and rather than stomping into other people's places with UR FUN IS DUMB signs I write fic. It's also become increasingly concerned with consumption, and especially the hunger of things which are not quite right (twisted nature, eldritch women) for things they don't really know how to express. Ambiguous, also, maybe, in a good way or a bad one - I talked a bit about that in my yuletide wrapup post, how I struggled with writing from the perspective of an unreliable narrator while still posing a satisfying question rather than a '...it's over?' question.

[thatyourefuse]

Ooh!

D: Is there a song or a playlist to associate with "written on their seams"?

and

M: Got any premises on the back burner that you’d care to share?

[fiachairecht]

D: Oh! Do I ever. The full Zelda/Lilith playlist is on my list of things to post this weekend, but written on their seams specifically is soundtracked by [youtube links] Vuur's 'My Champion' and Dark Sarah's 'Hunting the Dreamer'. Love a god who starts finding the boundaries between herself and her champion fuzzy and starts wondering if the solution is Eat :}

M: Like fifty million of them, ngl, and unfortunately the CAOS ones that are maybe most relevant to you are all things I'm poking at trying to get into shape for exchanges. More long-term I have a Babylon 5 AU where Anna Sheridan took command of the station instead of John in s2 that I'd really like to finish this year (it's a whole-series AU and I'm up to ... the first ep of season 2 ... how do plot, even when it's mostly there already.) and the Really Big Star Wars AU. I have some Criminal Minds fic from forever ago that I keep idly thinking I'll finish. And the Vox Machina/Chroma Conclave AU, for which I made one graphic and half a fanmix and love Thinking about but not actually Writing, yet.

[maplemood]

Oh! How about P, R, and S?

[fiachairecht]

P: It depends on the fic! A lot of the <3k-ish things I write I write because I get into a Mood about a specific scene, and want to get it down on paper/screen, with not much planning involved at all. Longer than that, I tend to do the same thing I do in my D&D sessions: have a few things I want to hit for sure, but let the story find its way there on its own.

R: For fanfic, Nat and Nina for sure, though I think that may be more mutual enabling than anything. Elsewise, I am p firmly embedded in the Shirley Jackson/Angela Carter/Jeff Vandermeer School Of Weird (I don't think anyone else actually lumps them together in that category, but).

S: Nah, I'm not really a tropey writer - I'm character-grounded more than anything. A lot of fandom tropes tend towards romance/getting together, and a lot of them came from dudeslash fandoms that I never had even a passing interest in. Uh, are vampire AUs and body horror and nature that wants to eat you fandom tropes? That's all I write these days whoops. Maybe enemies to lovers, though even that that's usually 'enemies to lovers because the ~hero one turned and/or they exist in weird grey obsession-and-importance-but-not-romo-love areas'.

[filigranka]

B, N, U, please!

[fiachairecht]

B: Not plotwise, no, though a lot of my Ben Solo & Regina Mills characterisation comes from how profoundly their brainbad overlaps with mine.

N: Where is my 100k word long epic about Ana and Amelie chasing each other all over the world coping with their grief over trying to kill each other and their relief over not being able to and the soft sad identity porn-y sex they have where they're pretending they don't know who the woman they're sleeping with is but they can't stop because they think it's the only way they'll ever be able to have each other?

[shakes Overwatch fandom upside down] Wheremst.

U: meritmut for soft angst and body horror and eldritch things, spookykingdomstarlight for politics and complicity and Bad Idea Relationships, mickleborger for spooky elves and the end of the world and feelings about artificial intelligence. Which - maybe it's cheating, to list off three friends like that, but honestly I don't read fic outside my canons and oftentimes not even outside my favourite characters (see above re: not in it for tropes), so we have to have an awful lot in common before I read enough of someone's stuff to tell if I Like Them As A Writer rather than just liking a specific story about my faves.

[metimauresse]

*shows up days late* can i ask A but more generally, how do you pick titles for fics? i know you usually use song lyrics but beyond that is there a method?

[fiachairecht]

*shows up even later* Usually I have character/ship songs before I have fic ideas, tbh - so a lot of the time I'm listening to that as I write and picking lyrics from there. Occasionally I'll have a sense of an artist/genre I suspect the title is probably hiding in - for one of my chocobox fics I knew as soon as I started writing that the title was in a [redacted til author reveals] song, and then just stuck their discography on shuffle til I found what I wanted.

...so, not really a method there, no, haha