#the exposition is important but I've also got to balance it with the dialogue and the inner thoughts

[perpetualexistence]

*looks at how 307 words in the first sea monster post has transformed into 1288 words in the one-shot when I've just hit the halfway mark plot-wise and am still on the first draft*

...Yeah, I think choosing to make the other ones AU posts was the correct decision.

[caparrucia]

10, 12, 21 for the behind the scenes ask game?

10. Do you enjoy writing dialogue, exposition, or plot the most?

It depends on the story, for me, on what the original spark for that story was. If my original idea for the story revolves around dialogue, exposition or plot, that's what I'll have the easiest time writing, because that's the thing I keep wanting to write. I do tend to favor dialogue and plot more than exposition. I write dialogue focused stuff when I have a scene very clearly in my head, or when I focus on plot, I just want people to figure out how the pieces fit together.

12. Is there a trope you haven’t written yet but really want to?

I kinda wanna revisit "fake dating" with a ship I'm a lot more invested in. I don't have anything against PromNyx, but that entire series was written out of prompts because it's not a ship I personally ship super hard, so I needed prompts to write more for it. Plus there's some sad/unfortunate associations with how that series came out, so I'd like to give it a shot with a ship I have more positive associations with! Possibly mix in some enemies to lovers, I don't know. Fake dating is one of my favorite dynamics, I just want to do one that makes ME happy, y'know?

21. What is the one fic that got away?

I feel my most defining "oh, let's better not" moment was in 2006, when I was writing FMA fic, and one of my long, sprawling messes got tangled up in the movie verse and I had a moment of blinding clarity while doing research that maybe FMA fic that requires you to research political and military developments in Germany in the 1930s and the 1940's is fic that you... probably shouldn't write? It wasn't even a matter of skill - there's fic I've thought about and then realized I don't have the chops for it - it's just. Y'know. I found myself researching the rise of Nazis for fic and then I decided I was better off not writing fic about fucking Nazis.

I think about that fic a lot, specially every time there's massive wank around Issue fic.

I'm not one to disparage fic. I'm sure fic is important and transformative and worthy of a lot of pretentious adjectives. But at some point you gotta realize that if you're using real life tragedy as salad dressing for your fic, that comes with the decision, conscious or not, to reduce real, actual human suffering to the badly painted background for the stage where you make your dolls kiss. It was a very powerful realization, for me, that. There's themes and topics that when you put them in a story, they just. Dominate the story. You can't have slavery or rape or torture or any number of real world harrowing things in a story, and not have them dominate the story by immediately forcing the story to SAY something about them, one way or another. It's why you see the iddy omegaverse fic so very quickly spiral into grimdark melodrama the moment you expand it beyond the iddy smut one-shot. Because the setting carries consequences and most writers want to explore those. That curiosity and need to really think about and explore consequences is one of the defining things that makes a writer. And I think there's a point where you realize you have a lot of things to say about something or other, and shippy fic about shonen jump teenage protagonists isn't the best vehicle for it.

I feel that balance of how much srs bsns you put into your setting and worldbuilding, framing your story, and how to not fall face first into You've Made It Issue Fic Now, Thanks, is a very underappreciated skill that takes a lot of years to master. And I will always remember that one FMA fic for being the one that taught me that. Because it was clever and witty and to this day I think it made sense, building up on what canon had presented and the type of story I was overall trying to tell. Absolutely.

But it was also a fic that was definitely going to have Nazis in it for it to work, and life is too short to waste it characterizing Nazis with any depth or having to write characters who at any point have to entertain their ideology. Can it be done? Maybe! I don't know. I'm not the arbiter of all things Nazis or anything. But it can't be done BY ME. And teaching me that lesson is why that fic is the best fic I never wrote, and I will remember it fondly probably til the day I die.