#i know i talk about TYBH a lot but like

[cinematicnomad]

4, 6, 10, 14?

004. do you outline before you start writing? if so, how far do you stray from that outline? do i!! sometimes. lol, it’s not typical of me? i’ve gotten into it a little more in recent years. honestly, i wish i could just show you guys my outline for taste your beating heart. it’s a fucking monster. the first 1.5 pages is basically the very early broad original draft and then it dives into a chapter-by-chapter outline and continues on for...another 63 pages (which is now almost all in red bc every time i finished a chapter i’d change the font color). and it’s pretty detailed! like entire dialogue sections are in there or descriptions i think of or a vague idea of someone’s emotion or background research for the magic stuff. i definitely can stray from an outline. but i’ll usually then go back and rework the outline itself lol! like originally the TYBH outline was planned for 18 chapters, and i eventually realized i needed to change a plot point which wound up adding a whole extra chapter to the fic. 

but honestly for the majority of my fics i do not use outlines. mainly bc for the most part i tend to punch out my fics in one or two sittings and don’t really need an outline (unlike TYBH which, again, took me seven years to write). at most i might jot down some minor outline-ish ideas for the rest of the fic so i don’t forget things, but that’s pretty much it. 

006. if you’re really concentrating, how many words can you write in a day? i mean, i pounded out like 13k+ in about 30 hours when i wrote the first draft of so show me (family). and i mean, not in one day, but i churned out like 43k+ in the month of october when i was finally wrapping up taste your beating heart (which YOU know because you edited it all for me <333). i wrote 17k+ in less than 24 hours when i was writing the last 2 chapters (according to my notes on that post i did nothing that day, not even really eat, just sat in my room and wrote). 

010. do you enjoy writing dialogue, exposition, or plot the most? dialogue! exposition kind of? plot not so much lol. so like, dialogue comes pretty easily for me—maybe it’s my lifetime of dreaming imagined conversations but i can often hear my characters speaking to each other when i’m working through a scene. exposition i enjoy...not in the sense of like, conveying necessary information for plots sake, but like...those meandering, wandering thoughts where the character is thinking back on their life or having quiet regrets or yearning. love to write that kind of stuff. 

plot is hard for me, it’s why a lot of my fics are much more ‘this person has FEELINGS and they THINK ABOUT THEM and FEEL THINGS and sometimes there’s a conversation and a kiss! tada!’  once again taste your beating heart is a serious outlier. 

014. if you were stuck on a desert island with only two characters, which would you pick? already answered :)

behind the scenes of fic writing: 30 questions for authors

[cinematicnomad]

20 and 22!

020. tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?) oh no. do i have any?? i’ll talk about taste your beating heart bc i worked on it the longest and i have a SIXTY-FOUR page outline that i can look through if needed (it starts off with like...3 bullet points under chapter one and then 10 pages of bullet points for the epilogue). 

okay so there’s a lot about that fic i’m proud of, but probably i’m proudest of the development of scott and stiles’ friendship over the course of the fic? bc, look, scott as a character doesn’t interest me (characters who are presented as inherently morally good with only external conflicts Do Not Interest me), and when i started the fic it was definitely just supposed to be a sterek-centric fic. but it had a lot to do with stiles’ isolation after their sacrifice in s3A and i had to write about why he was dealing with it alone when scott and allison went through the same thing. and at first i was like, whatever i’ll just mention that they don’t know what’s happening and be done with it, but then over the years (bc again...this fic took me SEVEN YEARS to write!!) i got interested in writing about how their relationship evolved and how scott felt about what was happening with stiles and derek etc. 

so i went back and edited in a bunch of scenes and dialogue and asides that weren’t there originally to really explore how distressing it can be to have your relationship change? and how sometimes you can objectively know something is an intention-neutral action and still feel hurt by it, etc etc. and i wound up writing a lot of scenes of stiles being very aware of his own mistakes and to portray how scott is genuinely trying to be there for stiles and how sometimes you just can’t ... stop things from changing? bc that’s just inherent to life? 

so like, the fic on it’s face is about derek and stiles falling in love and becoming a pack with the sheriff while solving the central mystery in beacon hills, but it’s also about scott and stiles’ friendship changing and evolving and maturing. 

and every now and then i get a comment from someone who thinks i should tag the fic with ‘bad friend scott mccall’ but i’ve resisted that advice bc i don’t think scott is a bad friend in this fic, and i don’t think i wrote him as a bad friend. they’re just taking different paths and learning how to grow together. and my FAVORITE comments are when people recognize that and say how much they appreciated or loved or enjoyed seeing how scott and stiles’ dynamic matures over the course of the fic. 

like one of my favorite comments on the fic came from someone who said:

I loved how the story stressed about no one being the real culprit of anything...no one really being the bad. Isaac wasn't a bad guy for stepping in between Stiles and Scott's time, Allison either. Scott wasn't a bad guy for paying attention to other people and Stiles wasn't a bad guy for wanting to approach things on his own. Everything was just circumstantial. They were teenagers who made mistakes but they weren't inherently bad. And I found it like a fresh gulp of air, something new from the usual approach this kind of situation have in other fics.

basically this was just a long rant of me explaining why i refuse to tag TYBH w/ the bad friend tag lol 

022. do you reread your old works? how do you feel about them? umm i re-read them sometimes. usually not all of it, but like, snippets that i remember liking? like for taste your beating heart i’ve re-read chapter 17 a couple times bc it’s the big climax where everything finally came together like i planned so it feels like proof that i accomplished something lol. 

and i’ve LISTENED to my jessica pearson POV fic about harvey and mike, smoke and mirrors, a lot over the years bc TheArcher on AO3 recorded it as a podfic!! she’s so talented and sometimes i listen to it and can’t believe i wrote that. (for real: if anyone ever, ever, EVER wants to make a podfic of one of my fics PLEASE YOU ARE WELCOME I WILL WELCOME IT)

but i can’t re-read my work until i’ve given myself some time and space after writing it. if i try to go back and re-read it too soon after writing it i’m mostly just...totally mortified by myself and find everything embarrassing. there was a like a week between me finishing up my draft of take my hand (take my everything) and when @crazyassmurdererwall beta’d it and i finally re-read it to edit before posting. every time i tried to go back and read it during that week i got like a paragraph in before i switched tabs. 

fun meta asks for writers