#write for yourself is a pithy phrase

[braaan]

HOLID-AMA ANSWERS!

OR: QUESTIONS AND BRAN-SWERS

Thank you to everyone who submitted an ask! These were very, very fun to do, and overwhelmingly flattering. I'd like to do more of these very soon :)

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On writing

@kooyabooya asks: what made you want to start writing about kpop ggs in the first place (this could aka what inspires you to write in terms of dynamics, tone, prose, imagery, etc etc...)

Hi Koo! Thank you for the question! :-) I think – like you’re indicating – there’s a couple of parts to this:

(1) and most inherently: COVID changed me. I went from legitimately adverse to kpop to perusing the genre to #ONCE Forever in maybe 6 months LOL. I seriously blame the physically disgusting amount of League I was playing (there was a player on ladder who always shit on me with Dahyun as their ID) but more realistically think it was just fandom at work! I wanted more content eventually, and it didn’t take me long to stumble onto the kpop-latent writersphere.

(2) Neatly from above: I think the kpop-latent writersphere is one of the most rich and rife communities out there; to a sizable degree: I write because of you! I am surrounded by great writers, am always reading something that is funky and/or makes me feel some type of way every month, and I think because of that, have similar stories to tell!

The Hyewon was my first piece of smut, longform, evocative writing (everything in between, really), and I credit all of that to the community. As long as you continue to enjoy my stuff, push the bar yourself, and re-invest in the space along the way, I think I’ll be here for a while!

(3) Bong Joon Ho says something to the effect of art needing to scare you. I believe in this so viscerally, and think it’s why I fundamentally write so… annoyingly descriptive… recursively metaphorical… pithy? I think I spend a lot of time understanding a character in and out; I’ll always have a Weverse Live going on when I’m writing — just to catch the quirks — because I really want you to believe that, even for a moment, what you’re reading is real. I think parasocialism can lend itself to a hauntingly beautiful form of want, and to me, if I can tell a story so true to life that it lingers — leaves a lasting impression on you that makes you feel something, even if just for a moment — that is awesome.

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@fuckkkkkklol asks: do you have ways to push through writer’s block and/or executive dysfunction when it comes to creative things (including but not limited to writing)? if yes gimme your best ones 

@majorblinks asks: tips for overcoming heinous & debilitating writer's block (asking for a friend not me)

Hi Miggy, hiiiiii major ^_^, and hi major's friend! I think my very unqualified advice here doesn’t stray far from: be bored and don’t do what you don’t want.

Above is just a screenshot-worthy sneak peek of what my current drafts look like — the slate totals up to maybe ~15 pieces that I’ve worked on on and off, and though are in many states, all of them unfinished. The haunting voice in the back of my head hates this: that I have so many drafts that I should finish, that I must go back and put out all of these stories, that I have an obligation to do these things… but the better part of me knows that is contradictory.

Creation is iteration — when @capslocked wants to be smart, he has a sweet turn of phrase that goes “writing is rewriting” — and I think it’s fundamentally inconsequential to have to create.

Get words out of your system, play around with an idea for a timeframe, get bored of it, chase a new premise that you start a completely different draft for, then do it over again — eventually, to me, this ends up coalescing to something that I can put out: I’m ALWAYS looking back at drafts and exercises to Frankenstein them into other pieces (“I really liked this pacing from here” … “Ooh, and then this metaphor I think sits nicely with this other one” … Eunseo was a combination of lots of unrelated drafts before it).

Also: you are so opinionated! Reading something, I form an opinion almost immediately of a writing voice: what I don’t like, what I do, and how I’d do an idea myself. I think this instinctive editorial motion is great when applied to the above exercise: I’ll start a new doc in the direct middle of a one-shot, riff off something I saw somewhere else, or just play with a metaphor that I really really like — none of these are ever intentional of a story I’ll write, but I do think it continues to keep writing instinctive and, like above, almost always becomes recycled into something that eventually does make it out.

In short, I think the remedy to writer’s block is time, and continuing to nurture the muscle is what makes overcoming the hurdle easier and easier when you inevitably come back to it. To me, any hacks, additional fire under your ass, or other things to speed up the process are inconducive of actual Craft, and most likely do not let you enjoy doing what you initially set out to!

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@kesujo asks: Every writer's writing style is inspired by his/her favorite writers, which may even change as they discover new writers. Has this ever happened to you, where you noticed your writing style change, or you pick up some stuff from new writers you've discovered? And, if you were to say the top 5 influences to your current writing style (doesn't have to be in order), who would they be, and what about their writing style did you like the most that you picked up from this writer?

Oh yeah, like I mentioned, I’m very new to the space (and this voice of writing in general), so I’m definitely always :notee:-ing. 

I’m not reading enough these days, and if I am, it really is strategy-latent nonfiction, but for here:

@yieldtotemptation easily has the most fun-laced voice and ideas — we could be several thousand words deep into an otherwise raunchy piece, and I'd still find myself putting my phone down to laugh at a disarming line of dialogue or perfectly packaged, real-life metaphor. Gray has inadvertently taught me a lot about having fun with my stuff, and I think I'm trying to take myself less seriously because of them!

@majorblinks is my blueprint, and genuinely, viscerally, in-real-life annoys me. Completely straight: I think Major is the bar for storytelling. We're both on the same wavelength when it comes to the stories we'd like to try, but only one of us has gone out and done it (see: DOWNRIGHT ICONIC), and I think that makes all of the difference. I'll spare you the brainworm: there's writing for writing's sake, and then there's writing with a purpose. DOWNRIGHT ICONIC as an example is a fundamentally masterful understanding of how smut and its readers work as a vehicle**, and I think everyone would benefit by taking a sliver of Craft that it literally oozes out.

@capslocked is a pioneer of many, many things in this space, but I think doesn't get enough credit for how technically crafty he is. My drafts are guilty of overusing "And" to start new sequences, and it's not until I've re-read a Caps piece that I go back and fix them. Caps has an expertly-crafted, seriously refreshing style of paragraphing, structure and usage that I'm always looking to for inspiration, and easily is the writer that dumbfounds me the most with how rudimentary / fundamental his phrasing feels — it's always a mix of "oh wow!" and "of course!" if that makes sense!

** Alex Cornell has a fantastic, 25-minute talk about Idea Vessels (here) that touches on this

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Anonymous asks: Hello Bran, just wanna say I love your fics and writing style. Wondering if you have any upcoming fics that your currently working on?

Anonymous asks: Curious on any upcoming fics? 

Hi very, very kind Anons! I have two in the slow cooker that I'd really like to see come out. Sneak peeks at both of them below!

(1) is this Julie piece from last summer that I put on pause. There was a week where I put on Mother (Letterboxd), Perfect Days (Letterboxd), and Shoplifters (Letterboxd) on back to back to back, and this came from that!

There's something about noir and darker themes that I think expert directors understand lend themselves well to the one long take that feels more and more intrusive as it stays on a character / scene, for example, and this piece really tries to encapsulate that into writing.

It's a more condescending and smartass character compared to what I'm used to, and the draft for it sits squarely on top of the framing that idol Julie becomes Oedipus Rex. Written in the style of a tragedy, rife with callbacks to Greek Classics; could be really sexy.

(2) is a Chaeryeong piece that I tried to put out for @passingnotions.

It's legitimately some of the raunchiest stuff I've written, and all sits on the premise that you haven't seen gross yet — I have each of the seven deadly sins in the document LOL; I genuinely always feel guilty when I re-read some of the stuff in here...

(bran pure bran pure bran pure)

On not writing

@octoberautumnbox asks: pls also get nachos on the next milk run and a flavor ice cream you'd rate 6/10

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@majorblinks asks: r we twin flames yes or no

:fishh:

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@kooyabooya asks: the last song you listened to on your spotify?

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@avenger7567 asks: Do you think WJSN will ever return again?

I cannot imagine that it will be the same iteration of WJSN if they do, but I think (and hope) so — the socials are decently active, and will 100% be a gimme for headlines!

It's truly such a sonic loss! I'll find the time to put it into words one of these days, but I really think underdog-y, just under the surface energy is what leads to experimentation within any genre. Music is trendy, and kpop is no stranger of the "regression to the popular grey" — groups like WJSN who don't have enough clout to conform must zag... and then you get shit like Last Sequence.

VIVIZ, NMIXX, RESCENE (here and here), and Billlie play this game very well + keep me sated in the interim! WJSN 2030 comeback :')

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@majorblinks asks: whats ur most recently read book & how many stars would u give it out of 5

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@friskyriskywhisky asks: Nice to see you on Tumblr again!😊 How are you doing so far? What is the most attractive thing an idol has once said? If you can only watch only one idol's live-stream for a whole year, who would it be?

Most importantly: SANA CLAUS is gonna get robbed by one female idol. Who's it gonna be and are you going to warn Santa?

(1) Always good! It's been a crazy start to the year, but I feel like I've always been legitimately blessed :-)

(2) HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(3) Probably Luda (WJSN)!

I'm not a big livestream consumer, but I do notice that a lot of groups where the majority of them are adults tend to have more fun ones. For another time, but I think there's less media criticism inherently of what you are and aren't allowed to say when you're "an adult", and so these livestreams do feel a little less... sterile?

The last Luda stream I watched, I remember there being a sequence where she legitimately spent 2 minutes making fun of a fan comment because they commented that they were single LOL

(4 AND MOST IMPORTANTLY) step bro i'm stuck in the Sana multiverse and if you even remotely think about trying to get me out i will absolutely end u

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@kooyabooya asks: what is your spirit animal or pokemon (if you have one by chance) 

LOL can you guess:

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@majorblinks asks: give me like 3 of ur new year's resolutions . what r we getting up to in 2025

I need to crack open the journal and really Reflect to get them down down..... but I think will largely stem from the same place of having a better relationship w work and the things I do...

Long pause moment in recent memory came from a conversation I had with some friends — among many tidbits: "I want complete control over something ... and then will want control of my control" + "where is the line between full trust in yourself and mistrust in anyone else?"

... think I've come to a place where it's actively harmful for me to not let go a little bit more, so hopefully in 2025: less so default white-knuckle about things!

Other than that, probably getting back into music production in one way or another, and eating majorblinks alive! ^_^

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@zeketheknight asks: What are your favorite K-pop moments from 2024?

2024 was a great year for moments up my alley in general — I feel like I've been quite prolific about the more adult idols drum (which only becomes more real with time), and I think I can point to content coming out of Jeongyeon, Chaeyeon, Eunbi, Haewon, Shuhua, Youngji/Eunji as probably some of my more memorable moments of the year!

Like the middle minutes of this is still so fire LOL

The bar is low for risqué (real) in Kpop, but until we let them even address shit like this it's going to be diluted, pandering, and brainrot for a loooong time.

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@kooyabooya asks: thoughts on matcha lattes?

Big fan! I'm always doing a 2-shot matcha something within the workday. 

I've been meaning to explore more of this — I am somewhat... unconvinced the matcha game goes deeper than it looks like it does on the surface — so if you have good match recommendations please send my way!

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@friskyriskywhisky asks: How would you navigate this situation where you're not sure Hyewon is being friendly or flirty?

WHERE IN THE HELL IS THIS ONLY FRIENDLY IN ANY CONNOTATION?????????????????????

i'd probably piss my pants frisky 😎

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That's QUESTIONS AND BRAN-SWERS this time around! Thank you again to everyone who submitted an ask, and you for reading if you got all the way down here. This was really, really fun, and I'd like to do more writing-latent stuff in the future. Until then: happy new year, be good to each other, and see you in the next one!

— Bran

[xenofact]

Look For The Avatars

We’ve often heard the phrase “look for the helpers” from Fred Rogers. I’ve seen this simple bit of advice deconstructed, believe it or not, but instead of adding one, I’d like to add a recent, similar lesson. Look for the Avatars.

Recently I’d been contemplating the divine, as I’m prone to do. As stated previously, I believe there is something to the idea of gods, that there are great powers out there. We “connect” with these great powers and patterns with creative ideas - stories, rituals, and so forth. Art is kind of the bridge (which I need to write about more).

However, there are times my divine contemplations do feel rarefied. There’s those powerful experiences of the divine, those presences that make you realize something is there. At times I wish I had more of them, that personal experience, though I am rather abstract by nature.

A few days later, I was at an amazing exhibit about the amazing Amos Kennedy Junior, an engraver and artist. In his decades of work he’s spoken to issues of racsim, abuse, bigotry, and more with powerful and impactful text and designs. Maps with block text about the oppression of people. Pithy statements on simple posters. He’s a master of many things, but all of them get into your head.

There was something about his work that was deep and powerful. It wasn’t just art, or protest, or history. It was divine in its truth.

On my way back from the gallery, these words came to my lips: This man is an avatar of Thoth.

Thoth, god of writing and magic, of science and art. . The husband or father of Seshat, lady of libraries and archives (and thus I consider her goddess of bookstores). Thoth is the power of words, and Kennedy’s words and text had power.

That’s when I realized that there, in the museum, I had a religious experience. I got to experience the power of writing and words, artistically arranged, a kind of magic, spun by a master of writing and creativity. He embodied Thoth, the principles of Thoth, he had power.

I had a religious experience there, contemplating this engraver. Something powerful. Something unexpected. Something which taught me a valuable lesson.

Look for the Avatars.

If you want to see the divine in the world, look for embodiments of it. They’re all around you. They’re in art studios and making your coffee, composing music and making videos about food. They’re everywhere. There are people who embody the very thing you’re seeking if you give yourself space to see it.

We can argue what gods “really” are, we can argue minutae and we can try to grasp the ungraspable that-which-is. But the power of those things behind the world, the great principles, are there right now. Look for them in your fellow people.

-Xenofact

[fizzingwizard]

I'd guess 90% of issues people have with writing advice is they don't know what advice is. It isn't rules. It's suggestions of techniques that have likely proved useful to the suggester.

Same with creative writing exercises with strict limits. It's an exercise. It doesn't mean this is the way you must write for the rest of your life or you're doing it wrong.

Very often, the point of the exercise is similar to the point of the advice: to get you to try something you might not even realize you're not doing. Writing is like fitness. You've got to stretch your muscles and get them accustomed to doing things they're not used to.

I have multiple writing "sins" and the truth is most of them are things I'm constantly trying to knock out. Like relying on adjectives/adverbs. They are not evil! But I find the advice to use them sparingly useful. Because "he said happily" comes to mind more easily than "he said with a grin like a Christmas tree twinkling with ultra-modern Bluetooth-enabled bulbs." It's more creative, it provokes more emotion, and most importantly to me, it tells you more about the character. (You'll have to imagine what sort of person could be described as "Bluetooth-enabled" yourself tho. xp)

But guess fucking what! Now, instead of overusing adjectives/adverbs, I sometimes use too many wordy, specific phrases. No matter how interesting a book is, you'd get tired of reading it if every time a descriptor was called for you had to read a simile or some other pithy comment. And if everyone started writing like that, the most heard advice would become "Don't overuse similes!" or "Don't underestimate the power of the simple adjective!" And then everyone would start practicing only writing with adjectives and...

So yeah advice is like. Not gospel. It's just advice. Personally, though I've read several books on writing and taken several creative writing classes in high school and college, and got a shit ton of advice from all of them, I never heard "you must do this or you're a bad writer." I'm sure some people have and I happen to be a lucky one that got mostly good teachers (except that one prof who shall remain nameless...). If someone told you "You have to write like this," they were wrong. But is it possible that what they actually said was, "You have to write like this in order to grow as a writer," and you only heard the first half?

[bixbythemartian]

I actually think this is one of TWO big problems with writing advice.

I think the second problem is that a lot of the more popular writing advice that isn't for beginners is specific to Stephen King.

I'm not blaming Stephen, here, mind you. I still have On Writing, it's still a great writing book. I recommend it to anybody who wants to start writing, with the caveat that you take only what is useful, and leave the rest behind.

It's not the damned bible.

He says at a couple of different points that how applicable his advice is going to vary, but some of his advice still became gospel in the writing scene, and that aggravates me.

(It is a book that means a lot to me, personally, and I also sincerely doubt that he had any clue the book was going to become nearly as influential as it did. Somehow it was both a book about writing advice and kind of a memoir, which is a tough row to hoe.)

Kill Your Darlings was something where the idea didn't originate with him, but I'm fairly sure the phrase did, and he's the one who popularized it.

And he had a great point, and it's been sort of stretched and warped over time to not mean what it meant. He was talking about the really great bit you really love that actually doesn't work for the rest of the piece- but he's talking about the editing phase, here. Not the part where you're putting your brain on the page, but when you're going back and making things work.

The other big one is the thing about adverbs. I can't swear that he for sure originated this idea that adverbs are a bad evil thing to use, but up to that point, I don't remember it being A Thing, about using adverbs. I remember that becoming more and more of a thing after On Writing. Maybe I'm wrong, and again, if I'm not, it's not his fault. I'm not blaming Stephen King for it, just trying to explain why this is maybe not as widely applicable as it is claimed to be.

Stephen King has a kind of plain-spoken writing style that seems very bare bones. The reason he reaches for adverbs is that it can be kind of scary, having something be that bare bones. It's a style that works for him, and it means that he needs to eschew adverbs whenever possible, because his writing style is weaker with adverbs.

This is not universally true.

Writing styles are as varied as the writers who use them. Someone with a more verbose and flowery writing style is going to probably want to use the hell out of adverbs- in the right way. They don't always weaken writing, they weaken Stephen King's specific style of writing because his writing is meant to be very plainspoken and stripped bare of artifice, and I imagine it suits him and how he thinks about writing best. Additionally, he grew up in an era where adverbs were SUPER common in writing (particularly the type of comics he grew up loving and reading), which means he does overuse them and rely on them when he doesn't need them- it's a meeting of where his upbringing and his writing style clash. This is advice that is kind of specific to him, in particular.

If you write like Stephen King, this may be genuinely useful advice, but it's not one size fits all, and it's a shame that this is one of the Big Things that came out of his On Writing book. Probably because it's pithy, but it's not his best advice by even a little bit.

Here's the thing I think people should have taken away from On Writing- build yourself a writer toolbox.

He talks about this in the book. You need to learn the grammar skills you need to write. You can't break the rules unless you know 'em, right? You aren't always going to follow them, but you need to know how they apply to break them correctly.

Also, and he points this out, if you're okay enough at the language to be writing and reading, you already have an inherent understanding of grammar- learning more is just a naming of the parts, by this point. (I might be indirectly quoting him, here, but I'm not sure. I'm trying to sum up what I remember about this bit of the book.)

This is like, what, your hammer, your screwdriver, yeah? Most tool boxes have those. What else you fill your tool box is going to super depend on what you write, your personal writing style, and your personal flaws and foibles in writing, and probably six other factors I'm forgetting off the top of my head.

Are you writing horror? You maybe need to read a lot of horror, study horror even. If you're into romance, read romance. You know? This is still nuts and bolts stuff, but the tools you need are going to be different, depending on your preferred genre and your writing style. If you're trying to write inclusively, there's some other stuff you're gonna need to put in your toolbox- how your preferred genre handles race and gender and sexuality and disabilities, and how to avoid those common foibles.

Also, go back and read some of your older stuff, stuff you haven't looked at in a while, and figure out where the flaws are, and where the good meat is.

These are all just places to start. I don't know what all you need in your tool box. The toolbox of a plumber and the toolbox of a carpenter are going to have some things in common, but they're going to have very different specialty tools. And you are going to meet two plumbers who have very different preferred specialty tools.

That was the point of the toolbox metaphor in the first place. It's gonna be your toolbox.

The other thing that I wish people took away from the book is that writing is a form of telepathy, a type of magic that's real and tangible and every day and beautiful.

okay love you bye

i think the problem with most widespread writing advice is that it's meant for writers just starting out and not meant to be applied to All Levels Of Writing.

like "show don't tell" is meant to encourage a new writer to think of different ways to describe something beside The Obvious and push them to observe how different uses of words can affect the reader. it does NOT mean "never outright state what is going on ever."

the common advice to cut out things that aren't essential to the story is to give new writers a better handle on how to PLOT a story-writers generally have to start out telling stories with Very Obvious conflicts and plot beats before they gain enough control of the form to tell more subtle ones. it doesn't mean characters talking to each other casually is evil.

"start in the middle" is a piece of advice meant for beginning writers who often have much bigger story ideas than they can feasibly put to paper. they don't have the writing experience to know which parts of their ideas they can execute well (or at all). starting in the middle then means writing the part with the most conflict and interesting things happening first (which is easier for a beginner) and, most importantly, gets them out of the planning stage and actually writing. it does not mean exposition is evil and your story should always start with something Big and Dramatic.

the thing with writing advice is that it's not one-size-fits-all, and writers should discard any advice that they've outgrown or doesn't serve them any more. the craft of storytelling is about learning how good stories are built and made from the smallest to the largest scale, not following a bunch of arbitrary rules to the letter.

[aurorasulphur]

First off, glad to see the DDDNE poll picking up speed in circles beyond my own.

Second, absolutely fascinated by the sheer variety of the nuanced explanations. (Idk what I expected, on this, the “my opinion is slightly different from everyone else’s” website.)

Third, I’m surprised and a little unsettled by the implied judgment in so many of the replies. Again, idk what I expected. Caveat that I’m both a linguist and a person from the USA, so sometimes my descriptivist training is at war with my stubborn “words mean SPECIFIC THINGS” mentality.

Fourth, all signs so far point to the fact that the broad misunderstanding that the primary purpose of the tag is “to indicate a lack of in-text moral condemnation” comes STRAIGHT from the first paragraph of the Fanlore article as it appeared from mid-2020 to literally this week. (When I bumped the info about the conflicting meanings up into the bit that shows above the infobox on mobile.) I feel Some Kind Of Way about that, as it underlines how seriously we should take our Fanlore edits, as well as how few people actually read the whole dang article.

Fourth and a half, I can only find TWO sources (tweets) from before the mid-2020 Fanlore edit that indicate the speaker believes the most important aspect of the DDDNE tag is that it deals with “problematic” or “morally questionable” topics without condemning them in-text.

Fifth, I completely understand why that Fanlore editor framed it that way (it is a rephrasing of Mostlyvalid’s original statement, after all) but seeing hundreds of tweets quote the statement verbatim without seeming to understand THE REST OF THE ARTICLE is alarming. And, imo, this phrase “morally reprehensible” has unintentionally contributed to the vitriol aimed at people who write fics tagged with DDDNE.

Sixth, the point, to me, is that the fic tagged with DDDNE may or may not explicitly address in-text the fact that its contents are (or could be considered) unpleasant, uncomfortable, disturbing, extreme, inappropriate, illegal, intense, “problematic”, immoral, or taboo. The tag serves as a piece of metadata to send up a flag (outside the context of the story itself) that the reader should carefully consider if they want to read a story where the contents (whatever they may be) might be presented as something other than what they would be in reality. It does not mean the fic DEFINITELY “glorifies violence” or “romanticizes necrophilia” or whatever phrase the kids are using these days. (Which is what the fanlore statement about “morally reprehensible” implies, imo.) All it means is that the fic might not have a flashing sign saying “hey this is bad”, so you-the-reader need to exercise your critical thinking skills and decide for yourself whether to read it at all, and whether the actions in the fic are something you should emulate in your daily life. Which, honestly, you should be using your critical thinking skills to assess this for every fic you read, regardless of the tags.

Finally, DDDNE is just the fic equivalent of the safety pop up on websites and applications saying “hey, did you really mean to do this? Are you fully aware of the consequences of sending this data packet to the server like this? Did you know you misspelled your own name? Are you sure you meant to type Wasingtn and not Washington? Do you understand what you are agreeing to? Did you read the tags so you know what to expect? You have unsaved changes, do you wish to exit without saving?”

By opening a fic tagged DDDNE, you are saying: “I, the reader, understand that this fic tagged X (a thing most people would not want to be jumpscared by) will contain X, and the treatment of X may or may not be subverted, glossed over, or otherwise toned down to a skippable cutscene. I agree that this is a thing I want to read.”

It’s hard to boil that down to a pithy statement that appears in the broad-strokes intro of a wiki article!!!!!!

[olderthannetfic]

Do you know what the origin of the "sold to One Direction" thing is? I know it's a common trope (or was), but, I have no idea where I first heard of it, where I learned it was a thing. How do weird tropes like that get started, anyway? Why do some concepts take off and become huge parts of a particular fandom, but others don't? (And does this particular premise show up in other RPF contexts as much?)

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tl;dr - Wattpad circa 2013, probably

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I'm only familiar with that from doing Wattpad research. I don't think it's a major RPF thing, at least not under that exact name. Horny f!sub is kind of the Wattpad way, so a lot of the popular tropes there make sense from that perspective. I've definitely seen plenty of badtouch sexy slave/kidnapping victim/stalk-ee stuff with BTS and other music groups. But maybe somebody reading has more specific 1D history knowledge?

As for why one thing takes off and another doesn't, the big answer is:

Historical accident

We can look for patterns, sure, but a lot of it is ultimately survivorship bias. That's the thing where we look at what's remaining (successful companies, popular fic tropes), and we assume they have some special property that made them survivors and then extrapolate from that. But maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it's a different type of causality than the one we're looking at.

For example, a trope in a popular fandom will spread farther faster than a trope in a dinky little fandom, so maybe fandom size is what matters and not the nature of the trope. Most analyses assume it's the trope itself that matters.

On an individual basis, many specific tropes get popularized by a particular famous author or fic that other people imitate. Some get popularized by a fanworks exchange or fest. (That's how 5 Times fic spread.) But why do they stick around long term? Why do they gain traction elsewhere?

Aside from random chance, it's probably something to do with broad applicability and easy entry points.

So, for example, the show The Sentinel doesn't actually have Guides as such, but the AU added an official role for the other dude to make the two of them super destined. Sentinel AUs took off across a ton of fandoms. (Less so these days, but I've even seen them in BTS, so they're definitely not gone.) The AU version is basically soulmates + potentially codified top/bottom roles + superpowers. People like fantasy AUs. They like frameworks to fit their ship into. The trope isn't highly specific otherwise, so it can be tacked onto many settings, both real world and sff. It fits two-person ships easily, which is most popular ships. One can do some worldbuilding about whether there's One True Guide for a given Sentinel or whether the bond is more a matter of choice. Guides might be equal in numbers/prestige/public visibility to Sentinels or not. The existence of all this can be openly known by everybody or a secret like in the show.

A/B/O has a similar level of "proof my ship belongs together" stuff with room to play around with worldbuilding. It also overlaps heavily with prior popular tropes people like for pretty obvious horny reasons. Same with plenty of tropes. They're often a slight remix of already popular stuff.

Sense8 AUs, however, never really took off as a thing. I saw some fans sadfacing about this, but in this case, I think we could have predicted it. Why? Simple: the concept involves OT8, and that's not going to apply to most people's fandoms unless they happen to like a kpop group or a superhero team with 8 people. The 8 also don't have specific roles that would make this simpler to write. If you're going for less OT8 and more of a complicated network of relationships, that's a complicated story to write and it has much less of a template to work from. So low applicability + high barrier to entry.

Hogwarts AUs, on the other hand, are super popular. Why? My guess is that the biggest reason is that a million bajillion times more people know Harry Potter than know Sense8. Hogwarts also has some canned roles that are more obvious: which house is your Fave? Shit that could be in a clickbait-y personality quiz is easier to write fic about than something that requires you to make up everything yourself. But also, four houses are easy to keep track of in a way that all those Myers-Briggs types are not. Add too much mandatory complexity, and it gets too confusing.

--

If I had to guess about the popularity of Sold To One Direction, I'd say a lot of it is due to the problem of getting Mary Sue or y/n into the room with them. Why is she there? This fic concept provides the answer in one quick title or tag. Sexy slavefic and dubcon have had broad appeal since forever. There's room to go really dark or fluffier. Some of the fics are nothing but ravishment fantasies, while others are more abuse recovery stories (where 1D are better than whatever came before).

I don't think there's some simple answer for why this specific thing and not a closely related trope became such a known trope in 1D. Probably, if some BNF had posted a ravishment fantasy with a different pithy title at just the right time, some adjacent trope would be big instead.

As for why I've heard of this trope, it's absolutely due to 1D being a fucking massive fandom such that its popular tropes occur very frequently in a sample of Wattpad writing of the right eras. It definitely owes its lulzy memeticness to fandom size: lots of people care enough about 1D and 1D fic to know what the trends are and make jokes about them.

Here's Huffpo being dicks about 1D slavefic back in 2013. They don't mention the exact phrasing though. Here's a pretty standard specimen from 2013-14.

I presume this was also a big thing on Quizilla (RIP) and I see extant examples on Quotev. Sadly, these and Wattpad are fucking hard to study, and a lot of the meta-writing types stick to AO3, so I don't see as many good analyses of this part of fandom.

Any 1D fans want to weigh in?

[pensivethinker]

Finding meaning in the course

It’s often said that you should “choose a life that makes you happy”. I think that’s the easy thing to say. I also think it’s the popular thing to say. People throw around phrases like “everything happens for a reason” without understanding what any of it means. This is lazy, but many of these pithy responses are fleeting moments of comfort through self-illusion to resolve an existing conflict or contradiction that would otherwise potentially cause inner-turmoil to the way they conceptualize the world if taken seriously. Many people are not intellectually ready or capable to deal with that. I wish that weren’t the case but it sadly is.

There’s a massive confusion that lies on the underbelly of our culture, and it’s that people often mistake happiness for having a comfortable or unnecessarily simplistic or easy life. What I think people ought to instead look for is meaning in the course. 

—I write incessantly about this for good reason— 

There are many ways to feel happy, and therefore it follows that there are some “happiness-es” greater than others. It’s one’s responsibility to find that which is highest, and it nearly feels intuitive to say that it’s that which is embroidered with meaningful activity, almost by definition. Why would it be any other way?

An important thing to point out is that happiness is not a state of being, it’s an emotion. Emotions are experienced from seconds to minutes. Using the word “meaning” is more like what people try to mean when they use the word “happiness”—it’s more akin to a state of being, which is a long-term feeling that I would describe as a deep satisfaction with one’s life, that entails being proud of what you’ve accomplished, what you’re currently working on, and what you will accomplish in the future, and to have those three components come together in harmony. Now that we understand that the usage of the word is an unfortunate, popularly uncareful use of language, we can understand that the question “are you happy?” is a nonsensical one. I’m happy because I just had an egg omelet with a coffee, but it doesn’t bring any meaning into my life.

The anatomy of a meaningful [life] goal should take the following characteristics:

1) It should be a sufficiently difficult thing to accomplish, to the point where you’re doubtful that it’s even possible given everything goes perfectly, because if your ability is at level ‘x’ and the goal requires a much higher ability of level ‘y’, then the space in between is where you will grow as a person—the pursuit should stretch you as an individual. And of course, this is understood in light of the fact that life is not the destination but the journey. It’s finding meaning in the course.

2) It should be aimed at helping as many people as possible: if you do things only for yourself, then you’re missing the point of the entire experience. People have a remarkable ability to let themselves down, but feel greatly uncomfortable letting others down. When people depend on you, it changes the psychology of your performance entirely.

3) It should be something that can be expressed within a sentence, and understandable to anyone who hears it—even children. Why? Because the idea of the ultimate goal being easy to understand is for your own clarity. Yet, the steps required to get there will be complicated, so there will be much to keep you busy in orienting yourself through the winding road, and therefore allow spending less time on things that don’t matter at all. Think of it as a personal mission statement, which would serve as a response to the question “why do you wake up in the morning?”.

4) It should be wholly engaging. This goes without saying.

5) It should align (or at least not violently contradict) with the other dimensions of your life. There are limitless ways to orient a life, so usually this is not an issue at all, given the persistent existence of clever solutions to even the most seemingly rigid logistical challenges. However, if you’re 45 and you have a 6 year old running around, it’s probably not the wisest move to invest the 200k you have on that startup you always wanted to run at the risk of destabilizing your financial life, because your kid kind of needs you, man. Risk management is important, so you would have to take a safer, albeit longer road to accomplish the same thing. 

-

What are these “dimensions”? Well, admittedly, there are many ways to group them, but one way you can conceptualize them is like this (in no particular order):

Personal psychology & mental health

Work & professional life

Financial well-being

Family life

Intimate relationships

Friendship circles

The best way to assess the status of these dimensions is to ask yourself a myriad of questions, because questions are one of the most useful mental tools we have at our disposal. Ask questions questions questions. With [good] questions, you get useful information, and you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your life. The information you get from these questions allow you to regroup, reorient, and take action.

Some simple examples:

Does anyone care if you're alive or dead?

Do you have any friends?

Do you have people that love you?

Do you have an intimate relationship that works?

Do you have a strong networked family?

Do you have an interesting occupation that regularizes your schedule, gives you something productive to do on a long-term basis?

Do you have any room for advancement in the future?

Are you as educated as you are intelligent? (you should be, otherwise it’s just a waste of time, resources, and opportunity)

Do you have a hobby outside of work that is engaging? > One important caveat here: there’s nothing wrong with taking up a hobby like photography or chess or drawing, because if you have the main mission in mind after you’ve taken the time and put in the work to ask yourself the tough questions that allow you to understand the reason why you wake up in the morning, then hobbies serve to widen you as a person and make you a more interesting and learned individual. However, if you don’t understand what your main mission is, if you don’t “keep the main thing mainly the main thing” as Stephen R. Covey says in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, then hobbies become a waste of time and actually serve as a distraction. (Life is not a series of hobbies to pass the time until you die). -

Are you compromising your mental or physical health by doing things that are stupid?

One should probably get the above starter baseline questions in order before they can ask themselves the more complicated and nuanced questions about their family, work, finances, etc.

All of this is vitally important.

-

Even with all this established, it’s still worth the time to point out that it’s a grand privilege beyond belief to think philosophically about things given how much poverty, war, religious oppression, and strife there still is in the modern age, yet for those who find it as an option to do so, you will find that it will not even occur to most people to propose it as an activity for serious consideration. How depressing, though I think it’s always been this way given how populations are stratified within a bell curve. You need a certain mix of creativity, curiosity, and aptitude to find this kind of educational exercise as attractive. 

The implication of course is that for some, the blindness may be inescapable. It’s in reference to those who might never in their life understand they even had a decision they could make—they have absolutely no idea whatsoever on what they’ve missed. 

There exists another sub-section of the population that are just capable enough to understand the concepts and the gravity of the question, but don’t take it upon themselves to search for answers simply because they were never presented with it as a set of ideas to ponder in the first place—they didn’t know what they didn’t know, and that’s [probably] not their fault. That’s what good authors are for, and we would have to rely on those with influence to spread these ideas to the point where it becomes generally known. In our personal lives, we ought to discuss these ideas when permissible given their level of importance.

-

And finally, for those who find themselves unconvinced and attached to their linguistically misguided ideas of happiness, despite all evidence to the contrary, understand that although it’s an illusion to justify your place in the world merely by the dumb idea that you’re happy at the present moment (or at the very least not weighed by sadness), if you do look for that which is meaningful, happiness will always manifest itself as a pleasant side effect.

[garden-ghoul]

this week on poetry night, something a little different! Laurence has been getting back into JTTW so we did an extract from chapter 5.

In the middle of the uproar the Great Sage finally arrived, and called: "Make way!"

He pulled out his iron rod; with one shake and then another it was as wide as a bowl and twenty feet long, and he went to it. Of the Nine Luminaries, who dared oppose him? In a moment they were beaten back.

The Nine Luminaries stood among their forces on the road: "You act without regard to life or death, stableboy; you are accused of committing the Ten Evils! First you stole peaches, then you stole liquor, you caused chaos at the festival of the Peaches of Immortality, you stole Laozi's elixir, and you stole heavenly wine just to enjoy yourself. You pile crime on more crime, don't you see that?"

The Great Sage laughed: "The things you've said are true, all true. But now, what are you going to do about it?"

Notes and original text under the cut.

正嚷間，大聖到了，叫一聲：「開路！」掣開鐵棒，幌一幌，碗來粗細，丈二長短，丟開架子，打將出來。九曜星那個敢抵，一時打退。那九曜星立住陣勢道：「你這不知死活的弼馬溫，你犯了十惡之罪：先偷桃，後偷酒，攪亂了蟠桃大會，又竊了老君仙丹，又將御酒偷來此處享樂。你罪上加罪，豈不知之？」大聖笑道：「這幾樁事，實有，實有。但如今你怎麼？」

I’ll confess I like translating prose a lot less than I like translating poetry. I have this urge to translate it very literally; the prose I write in English is pretty plain too! Anyway have a couple notes.

one shake and then another - so the original is 幌一幌, apparently meaning curtain one curtain, but for Laurence it recalled another pronunciation of huang, meaning to shake. So, one shake, another shake. I like the rhythm of this! It gives a very certain picture of the motion he’s using. Like he shook it once and it only grew ten feet long and he had to shake it again.

“You act without regard to life or death” - this is a very literal translation of the chengyu 不知死活, generally translated as “being reckless.” But Sun Wukong is constantly disregarding life and death! The literal translation brings to mind like half a dozen incidents immediately and this is only chapter five.

stableboy - okay I’ll admit this one is notable because Anthony Yu bafflingly translated it as BanHorsePlague, which not only is not a cogent English word/phrase but shares nothing except the horse with the original 弼馬溫, which sounds a lot more like a description of putting a blanket on a cold wet horse and feeding it some nice mash. The sneering tone with which the Nine Luminaries talk is so funny! Hey you! Comforter of horses!! Bitch!!

“you pile crime on more crime” - GREAT imagery here. I’ve actually rendered it pretty literally but I can’t stop saying to myself “Stableboy, your pile of crimes does not stop from getting taller!”

“what are you going to do about it?” - agonizingly the original is the extremely pithy “你怎麼?” or “you how?” It has HUGE “what are you going to do about it” energy but Laurence’s translation--”now what?”--is so much snappier. Sometimes Chinese is just a superior language for taunts.

[jilytoberfest]

Author - @bcdaily

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this! Find her on ao3 and ffnet !

1. What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

I don't know that I'd necessarily call them quirks, but I think I am highly fixated on alliterative phrases, and it is tremendously difficult for me not to open a story or chapter with a pithy one-liner. They are my happy place. Oh! Actually, maybe a real quirk is also that I absolutely can not write un-chronologically. It always leads to disaster when I try. I write so based on the feeling and pace of what came before that if I try to jump the gun and skip scenes, I inevitably mess myself up. It can be really frustrating when I'm stuck on one bit and would rather jump ahead, but it never works for me. Sigh.

2. What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your books?

That I'm funny. I know this seems IMPOSSIBLE to some because literally all I write is funny & kissing, but I am not funny in real life. Or, at least, not quick funny. Give me a good ten minutes (or a week) and I can whip you up a pithy lol, but just in moment by moment? No. I am so underwhelming. I'm so sorry. But writing taught me that I am funny...just at my own pace.

3. Do you have any suggestions to help others become a better writer? If so, what are they?

Read incessantly. Reading is the best tool available to you other than writing itself. When you read, you soak up so much--on a fundamentals level, you soak up vocabulary and grammar, but when you're consistently reading the types of books you want to be writing, you're also helping build your larger toolbox. You learn what characters appeal to you. What dynamics. What kind of pacing and plot works. The tropes you like. The conflicts you don't. There's so much to take in during the intrinsic research of reading. And it's fun. So do it.

4. What do you think makes a good story?

Anything that makes you feel something. Or see something in a new way. Storytelling is so complex, and "good" is so relative. I would probably say what makes a good story is whatever you enjoyed writing, though that seems trite. But as a writer, that's true. It's good if you enjoyed it.

5. What is the first book that made you cry?

I honestly had to think about this because I don't know?? Strangely, the first book that came to mind was that Molly American Girl book, where at the end she had to stay home from her victory pageant but then her dad came back from war...but I don't know that I actually cried at that?? Maybe I just remember it vividly as something heartwarming that maybe I ought to have cried at if I wasn't eight. But if not that, probably The Giver, which I read in 7th grade. That seems late, but then again, I am almost never reading a book that will make me cry. I am a light and jovial gal.

6. Does writing energize or exhaust you?

Both? I think the two go hand in hand. Writing is work. But if we didn't enjoy it, we wouldn't keep doing it. So I think everyone would say both.

7. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? If so, what are your tips to overcome it?

Reader's block? No. Writer's block? Yes. And really the only thing you can do in my opinion is give yourself enough space from your writing to quit being in your head about it--however long that might take--and then launch back on that horse. Even if you're only writing a sentence a day, that's still something. But you have to be able to find the joy again, and you can't force yourself into that.

8. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly?

Well, I don't know exactly what "feel emotions strongly" even means, because all of that is so arbitrary. I'm sure most people feel certain things more keenly or prominently than others. But I also think writing isn't just about emotion. It's about observation. It's about relaying the way you see the world, a character, a moment. And you don't need to feel anything strongly yourself for you to describe something in a way that can make other people feel. That's the magic thing about words. They can do a million different things for a million different people, and not a single one of those is wrong.

9. If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

My quite young self? Absolutely nothing. Preteen Bee wrote like a demon and thought she was a genius. It didn't matter if she sucked. She didn't know what that meant, and bless her. Teenage+ Bee? Chill the fuck out, gurl. It literally doesn't matter. Write what you want.

10. What was your hardest scene to write?

It's difficult to pinpoint one. I think maybe that ending scene in the most recent chapter of Commentarius? Mostly because it was something I had living in my head for literal years, and then suddenly I was writing it...and it was so much smaller of an exchange than I thought it would be? In my head it always seemed liked such a LONG row, a lot of back and forth, but actually trying to write it out, that just couldn't be the reality. Because people can't fight for that long without going in circles or deviating wildly, and going in circles or deviating in fiction is dead space. So that took me awhile to really accept and quit trying to fit my square peg in the round hole.

11. What is your favorite childhood book?

Ella Enchanted. It's still one of my favorite books of all time.

12. How long on average does it take you to write a one shot or a chapter of a fic?

It depends? I am a slow writer in general, and some of my chapters and oneshots are quite long. They have taken at times literal years. But I am also the sort of person that if I start a shorter drabble or oneshot and I don't finish it either that day or in a matter of a few days? Then there's an 80% chance I don't finish it at all. I have approximately 9 million documents of 500 word things I've started and never picked up again. It's my way. So I'm basically a woman of extremes: it either takes me hours or years. XD

13. A fic that inspires you?

I don't think anyone will be surprised if I pick one of Sarah's ( @ghostofbambifanfiction )...and maybe I'll go with Shelf Awareness on that. It's just such a lovely fic and it's so dynamic and the trope is so strong and Sarah's writing is next to none. I've also always always loved Buried Treasure and Transmogrify by RiennaHawkes. It's the perfect mix of plot and smut and just brilliant characterization.

14. How do you edit your work?

I edit as I go. Basically every time I open a doc, I'm skimming back a certain percentage and editing through before I start writing anything new. Generally, once I finish something, I only read it over once or twice before posting because I've already edited so much as I went. If there's a larger problem with the story or chapter, I generally catch it before I get to the end (usually because I can't get to the end without fixing it. It will trip me up).

15. Where does inspiration come from?

Everywhere? Anywhere? The space between and the tears we cry?

16. Who has been helpful for you as you write for the fandom?

I've always said that the reason I have stayed in this fandom for decades (!!!???!!!) is because of the people. The community as a whole is just so lovely and supportive and sticks with you even when you don't update the things they want (lol sry). There have been dozens of people throughout the years that have helped me and been my friend and kept writing and fandom fresh. And there have been hundreds more who have never even spoken to me, but still read my stuff and lurk around, and that's amazing too. So, all of them. Also, you know, Sarah. Who is my light and love and everyone knows it, so she has to get her special call-out otherwise everyone would just call me a liar and they'd be right. ;)

17. What is your fav POV to write from?

Close third person, for sure. I've done first, and it has its moments, but I just find close third so much steadier and still really gives you a look inside the character's head. If you're asking me to choose between Lily or James's POV, though...I literally couldn't. It just depends on my day, honestly

18. What is a fic you would love to write but are worried you won’t be able to accomplish it/nervous it wouldn’t work out?

How long do you have??? There have been a MILLION over the years. I still have a half dozen in my head brewing at any given moment. I guess maybe the longest lasting one would be that I've always looooved delving into this idea of James growing up and what pushes him there and how that plays out with the people around him. And for a long time, I really wanted to write a chaptered fic about James trying to give up being Head Boy. Because he just didn't trust himself with it. And the dynamic of how other people see him vs. how he sees himself and him properly growing into a leader who would join a war effort at eighteen. But I could never make myself launch into yet another WIP, so I ended up sort of squeezing the concept out in a one-shot (Realising) because I wanted to do it in some way, but I do regret a bit never properly tackling it. I think that would have been a really cool story to delve into James as a character. But time is my enemy.

19. Do you ever self insert in fics?

No. I honestly rarely pull anything from people I know in real life, myself included. At most I'll drop in pop culture references to things I enjoy, but that's basically it.

20. What is the story you are proudest of?

I'm proudest of different stories for different things. Commentarius is my baby, and I can never not love it and what it's become to so many. Scenes from a Hogsmeade Pub is special. Elevator Love Song was my first Muggle AU that launched a thousand ships. Eight Days is such a fun world. Auror Training is really really fun smut. And so many more. Truly. I am a proud mama.

21. Do you prefer writing canon jily or muggle au?

Lately? Muggle AU. Just because it lets me flex my muscles more. And I like that. But canon will always hold a place in my heart.

22. How do you go about planning a fic and which of your ocs is your favorite and why

I hate outlines with every fiber of my being, so I don't do outlines. When I have a fic idea, my planning process is usually to have a beginning, certain middle points, and generally an end point, and then to let myself roam free as I write to connect those and fill in the gaps. Sometimes it's a hot mess that way, but I feel instantly claustrophobic if I set things down too firmly. Because then I feel beholden to the things written down, and half the fun of writing is coming up with the freshest ideas as you go.

My favorite OC is MJ Rosier from Commentarius. If you know, you know.

Thank you very much for doing this!

[mikkeneko]

14 + 19 for the meta asks?

14 - At what point in writing do you come up with a title? 

I’d say it’s not entirely consistent! Sometimes I have the title pretty early on in the process (sometimes the title is the inspiration FOR the piece, like with ‘hot necromancer singles’) and sometimes I get all the way to the finish line with only a working title -- sometimes I go ahead and publish with the working title because I simply cannot think of anything better (like with the Five Times/Jiang Cheng’s Core story.) Sometimes I have a title I like and then change it (like how ‘gravity ballet’ became ‘one hundred, ten thousand, thirty million.’)

But generally  speaking, I would say that I usually have the title picked out during the planning and outlining stage, or before much of the text is written. It’s rare for me to get most of the way through with no title.

19 - Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)

Offhand, I can’t think of anything? I certainly am vulnerable to the writer’s trap of repeating a phrase, verb, or pithy saying too many times within a certain scene, because once it’s ‘on deck’ in my head it will come up repeatedly in the shuffle. But I can’t think of something that shows up over and over again in my works. Possibly there’s some self-blindness there, regular readers might have noticed something I missed.

Fun meta asks for writers!

[ghoste-catte]

15, 17 and 19 for the meta ask

Thanks for the ask!!!

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Gosh, this is a tricky one. So, to start, I don't find tagging very difficult at all. I have some very basic principles that I think of when I tag:

1. Is the story about this thing? Does this tag encompass a genre, trope, or main theme?

2. Would someone searching for a story by this tag be satisfied with my fic showing in the results?

3. Is this a common trigger that is a major component of this work?

4. Does this tag give readers a sense of what's inside, even if it's not a 'canonical' tag (in the Ao3 sense of a searchable, indexable tag)?

1-3 are really just variations on a theme, and obviously anyone can tag any way they like, but that's how I think of tags. And I do give myself laterality to add one or two humorous tags if it fits the tone of the fic.

An example I've given before is: Hunting is a trigger for some people. If I've written a fic where a side character happens to go hunting and mentions it, or has hunting trophies on their wall, that doesn't warrant a tag, but I'll stick it in the warnings in the header note. If the fic is about hunting - the main characters are hunters, or they spend 5k words stalking a deer around the woods, then that warrants a tag.

Titles and summaries, on the other hand, are variable in their difficulty. Some titles walk right into my head before I've even written the fic, or the fic is inspired by some particular song or line of verse or whatever that makes a title simple to figure out. A lot of the rest of the time, though, I get to the end of writing the story and go "fuck, what the hell do I call this?" For fluff and humor fics, I often resort to googling "X jokes", where X is the main topic of the fic, and looking at the image search results since those tend to be pithy and easy to visually scan. So, like, for example, 'Chop it Like it's Hot' was a thanks-to-Google title (I googled "lumberjack puns"). I'm also not shy about crowdsourcing titles in the GaaLee Discord (shout out to Whazzername specifically for coming up with the titles for, like, a BUNCH of my fics).

Summaries are kind of similar: sometimes I know exactly which line or paragraph I want to pull or exactly how to sum the story up, and sometimes I have to agonizingly workshop it. It's much easier to write a summary for something plotty than it is for something more emotionally driven.

17. Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

The weirdest bit of feedback that I've often received about my persona is people finding me intimidating to start up a conversation with? Which feels crazy to me because in my mind I'm just a simple idiot wizard who spends way too much brainspace and man hours on writing a truly ridiculous amount of fic for a single niche pairing. Like, all I did was hop on this train and refuse to disembark. So I don't really know where that comes from or how to, like ... fix it. I don't necessarily want to be intimidating, and I feel sort of bad that people find me unapproachable. Like yes I'm abrasive and a shitty conversationalist but also I'm not scary!

As far as my fics ... no, I think people generally get out of my fics what I put into them. There's been one or two times where readers glommed on to a detail that I intended to be a bit throwaway and not especially salient, particularly in multi-chapter works where the irrelevance isn't clear until later, but those moments are fairly rare.

I think what people would find surprising about my writing is just how often I latch on to a stupid sort of flight of fancy conversational whim in Discord and spin it out into like 10k+ of fanfic. Prompts and other people's ideas are actually one of my favorite ways to drum up fic concepts! I'm not that of a creative person on my own, so it helps me to have someone else's skeleton to flesh out.

19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)

Ugh, yes! The bane of my existence is these little phrases I can't seem to stop repeating. I often re-read my own work and sometimes I'll come across a line and I'm like =_= "how is this already in here, I just used this in something I'm writing right this moment!" The one that's been stuck in my craw recently (and thank you so much to a reader who brought it to my attention!) is how much I talk about how small Gaara's hands are? I don't know why that's a fixation point--I think partially it's because I just can't stand to have a noun without an adjective attached--but it's something I'm trying to be more thoughtful about excising moving forward.

Trope-wise, I love an AU, especially sci-fi and fantasy AUs. They're some of my least popular fics, but they're usually the ones I have the most fun researching and writing for, and many of them number among what I consider to be my best works. I would go batshit if other people wrote GaaLee fic in those genres tbh.

[lightandwinged]

When you are a mom trying to decorate your home, you come up against a LOT of word art decor, and it can be maddening. On the one hand, a truly unique piece with a phrase that really encapsulates your home or makes you snort laugh every time is 100% worth it. On the other hand, that piece does not exist unless you make it, and I’ll be real, I am too lazy to make such things.

In short: most of my home remains decorated in a “family photos and random shit like a Halloween mask mounted like a taxidermized deer head” manner.

Worse, even when you try to avoid word art decor because you’re very tired of the same phrases over and over again (”Live, Laugh, Love” is the most common, then there’s the “in this house...” followed by a bunch of twee things like “we laugh a lot!” and “we make mistakes!” and variations that talk about Hogwarts or Jedi, and then you have the one word arts that are always kind of ominous, like “GATHER” or :FAMILY” and the ubiquitous Bible verses), people force them on you. I have one that I’m hanging in my living room because I see the person who gave it to us very often (”this is our perfect chaos” it says) and another that’s hiding in storage because it, thankfully, does not fit anywhere. 

Honestly, the only word art I want in my home would be art of Carrie Fisher quotes (maybe “g’night fucko’s” in my upstairs hallway), but even then...

Which brings me to the story of the Lettering Class.

I love me some good calligraphy, mind, and I love watching videos of people who’ve turned their handwriting into artwork writing just... anything. A grocery list. The word fuck. The name of the instrument with which they’re writing. And I feel like I could do well with calligraphy if I bothered to apply myself, but I don’t do anything that I’m not perfect at on the first try, so womp womp.

But nevertheless, my mom enticed me to a Lettering Class with the promise of good cheese (spoiler: the cheese was not good) but also with the promise of a much needed night off. We met up at this place that probably used to be a greenhouse but had been repurposed as the physical manifestation of HGTV. The walls were all shiplap. There were plants of indeterminate variety all over. The furniture was mismatched but in a boring, safe way. None of the lights had lampshades, and that hurt my eyes. In the corner, by a bunch of antique shit that didn’t mean anything to anyone there, a smart speaker played string quartet arrangements of pop music. 

We took our seats without taking any snacks and received one of many picture frames onto which we would be writing our chosen phrase in a generic brush script font. Most everyone was doing the phrase provided in our lesson packet, which was something pithy like “always believe in yourself” or something. I hated that and decided to go with the old D&D chestnut “crit happens,” but my ability to recreate the brush script was lacking, and I ended up creating a messy mixture of serif and sans serif instead, alongside a couple of D20s. It wasn’t something I’d hang in my house, but it was passable and not “live, laugh, love,” so I accepted my own design.

When I drew the letters with a pencil, they looked great. When I inked over them with permanent marker, they looked great. But then I had to use a paint pen. 

If you’ve never used a paint pen, let me explain how they work. You shake the pen. You open the pen. You press the tip of the pen against a surface until the paint starts to flow. The paint then flows at some speed determined only by fate and the position of Jupiter or some shit. If you’re lucky, the paint flows smoothly and you get some nice letters. 

I was not lucky.

My mom was looking over my shoulder, as you do, and she was remarking on how nice my letters looked. I was almost done, adding some weight to the S in “happens” when Jupiter shifted and the pen just... exploded. A huge white splat of paint on the S of “happens.” The words that a moment before had been somewhat passable were now a disaster.

In the end, I think it was the universe’s way of telling me that no, word art will never happen for me, and I should probably give it up. I brought the frame home and shoved it at my husband. “I made it, so you have to love it and take it to work,” I told him. 

“...okay,” he said after a beat and promptly buried it under a stack of bills. 

And that’s the story of the Lettering Class.

[coffeesuperhero]

For the writer ask!: 5, 15, 19, 23!

Yay, hello!  5. What character that you’re writing do you most identify with? In TBTP fandom, Richard, hands down. “Grumpy and overthinking it” should probably be on my tombstone. Although (and I am very excited to get back to writing this for real now that I have some time!) the real answer for folie á deux is actually Charlie, because she’s a queer disaster in that story and I love her to death and can’t wait for her to show up for real. Queer Charlie forever! I accept no other canon.  15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)? SUMMARIES. The worst. What a fucking struggle. Legit last night when I posted this first bit of this Leverage thing at like 2am I wandered into our bedroom and said, “I need an adult!” to my wife, because I couldn’t come up with the summary. It was easier to write 32,000 words of story than it was to write like 10 words of a summary. Pithy, I am not.  I will say this though: if I get to the end of a story and it hasn’t got a title yet, I know I’m in trouble. That either happens in the first few minutes of writing the dang thing, or it is the result of many hours of agonizing after I’m done, and there’s like, no middle ground there. 

19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?) Apparently people laugh a lot in my stories? Like, that’s my dialogue tag, a lot? I probably overuse italics but I just find them so useful. The phrase, “Well, shit,” probably appears in a lot of my fic because fuck, what an eternal mood. I definitely tend lately to write way too many run-on thoughts broken up by commas. And I write a lot of banter. In every fandom. What can I say? I was badly brought up by an age of television where people did nothing but banter, and I am now doomed forever to repeat that in my own work. 

23. What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest? This one is the hardest question on the list, possibly! I’ve got an unfinished epistolary novel that I started in college, so approximately a million years ago, that I may never finish now, because I think its season has passed from my life. It was about loss and grief and there is so much of that in the world that I just don’t feel like I want to put any more out there right now. I kind of hope I don’t ever feel like I need to pull it back out, tbh.  And that’s a terribly sad way to end these answers, so: maybe the other longest held thing is this massive sci-fic epic I started writing with my wife, also when we were in college, also a million years ago. We had a decent outline and some fun characters, and as far as I recall, everybody lived happily ever after. It would be really fun to return to that. 

[amariasolo]

I have a Notes document called “A Job Done Right.”

It is dedicated to the fanfiction that has not been written, but nevertheless I want to read.  So, you know. “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”  In this case, it’s just “if you want a job done at all.”  I just wrote a post about how writing multiple sentences in a row is a Herculean undertaking for me, so “A Job Done Right” is full of scraps of dialogue and pithy phrases that become paragraphs only through immense effort. 

This is relevant because the sentence that just occurred to me, “Zagreus has never known when to leave well enough alone,” would be a good fic summary.  It will probably never become a fic.  

[traversetheatre]

Interview with Tim Key

‘Poeticals, talking, standing, spotlights, cables, Kronenburg, foot-stamping and old school wistfulness.’ That’s how comedian Tim Key describes his new solo show – Megadate – which arrives at the Traverse in June.

Interview by Ben Williams.

Indeed, a Tim Key show features far more than just stand-up. His live offerings are ambitious and theatrical, an intricate web of pithy poems and playful anecdotes, short films and elaborate stunts, and, yes, plenty of lager guzzling.

Off stage, Key’s acting skills has scored him parts in TV treasures like Inside No 9, Peep Show and Detectorists, and back on stage in the twentieth anniversary run of Art at London’s Old Vic Theatre. Plus, for the last eight years, he’s been sitting alongside Norfolk’s premiere digital radio DJ Alan Partridge as the scene-stealing Sidekick Simon. 

But it’s live on stage – reading silly poems off the back of playing cards, teasing the audience with semi-whimsical stories and sloshing cans of beer – that’s earned Key a legion of fans, and Megadate is his funniest show yet.

In Megadate, you reminisce about an elaborate first date. Is the show based on your own person experience? I think this show is rooted in reality – somewhere, somehow, someone – but blended with a lot of dreamy imaginings. There are moments, people, things that happened in real life. But I talk about throwing myself out of the Shard, so it can’t be entirely true. If there are moments on stage, however, where I look a bit wistful, that’s because I am a bit.

Short poems are your trademark, but there’s a large story element to this show. Which do you prefer to write? The short poems are the enjoyable bit. They take no time or thought – obviously! – and I like doing it. The long-form bits kill me. Lots of thinking, trying it out on stage, reaching deep, deep into your soul. That’s the hard bit, but, obviously, the more satisfying part, too. No gain without pain.

Megadate’s your first solo show in four years. Why the break from live comedy? Good point. To be fair I did make a TV show – Gap Year – that took ages and meant I was, weirdly, living in Kuala Lumpur for five months. It’s difficult to stay active on the live scene in those circumstances.

You didn’t attempt to break the southeast Asian comedy circuit while you were there, then? I did do ten minutes at a Malaysian lady’s fortieth birthday party one night, to be fair to me, it was a fairly mixed reaction. But I have missed not having a solo show, I must admit.

This is your third UK tour. What’s your favourite thing about being on the road? Best part is definitely the shows. You assume the show will only ever work in London, you’ll travel to some other town and be destroyed. Then you suddenly realise that no matter where you go it’s more or less the same. Maybe better.

And the worst? Hearing the applause die down as you walk to your dressing room and eventually you are sitting in silence staring at yourself in a mirror with light bulbs around it sipping a warm Grolsch.

On stage, as well as your solo work, you recently played Yvan in Art at the Old Vic. How did you find the role? Mmmm, the most difficult thing I’ve ever done? God, I still have flashbacks. But, inevitably, it was also one of the most rewarding. That’s the problem, you realise that you really have to go out of your comfort zone to get anything worthwhile done these days. Glad I did it, but at times I did feel like I was going mad.

Going mad? I was part of a three-person cast with Rufus Sewell and Paul Ritter – two very well-respected theatre actors – and I remember, in rehearsals, seeing those two gradually getting better and better at doing their parts. It did feel like I was slightly watching a masterclass at times. Ritter going absolutely mental at my character, spit flying everywhere, Sewell watching on callously. They were exceptional.

Would you like to do more West End roles? Yes. One day. I’d like to do some Pinter at some point.

Which Pinter play would you most like to take on, and who would be in your dream cast? Well, I guess I wouldn’t mind doing The Caretaker with Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan if push came to shove.

Your TV acting CV is substantial, too. Does the writer in you want to change lines or edit scripts? It’s case by case, I think. Ideally, you take jobs because you like the writing. Sometimes the writing can be exemplary but it still might make the thing better if you just tweak a word or a phrase. I’m shooting Alan Partridge at the moment, that’s a pretty good example. Steve Coogan and [co-writers] the Gibbons brothers’ scripts are impeccable, but there’s always room for the odd tweak in the moment… To be fair, slightly more than the odd tweak with Steve. But he’s Alan Partridge.

What can you tell us about the new series? It’s kind of a bit like The One Show – so there are autocues around the place.

Does that mean you don’t have to learn your lines? Well, it helps you stay on top of them, because they change a bit on the day. The trick is not looking like you’re literally reading your lines off the autocue. Desperately hoping my head and eyes aren’t drifting slowly from left to right whilst I’m talking.

You were a Partridge fan before getting the part. How does it feel to be involved? If I wasn’t in this I would be counting down the days until I could watch it. It’s so odd. Steve shook my hand at the end of a scene the other day and said “thanks mate”. Not a great anecdote, but amazing how surreal that stuff is. Steve Coogan pleased with you. Feels good!

So, after shooting Partridge and going on tour, what’s next for Tim Key? Go to the Edinburgh Fringe, do the show there. Then I don’t know, maybe four years off? I was surprised I made this show, to be honest, so I’m interested to see what comes next.

Finally, why should people across the country see Megadate? Well, it’s only an hour and a bit. You can watch it and it still doesn’t screw up your whole night. I know it’s not really the hard sell but I guess I would say “you may as well”.

Tim Key: Megadate  Wed 13 – Thu 14 Jun, 7.30pm BOOK NOW

[ollyarchive]

Olly Alexander on harnessing the power of sexual fantasy in pop

The Years & Years frontman talks about owning his queer sexuality in the mainstream and writing a twisted disco album about ‘holy wood’

Owen Myers

9 March 2018

“It’s like my Rihanna Loud era,” declares Olly Alexander, before breaking into a laugh. The Years & Yearsfrontman is referring to his cropped curly hair, which is freshly coloured to the hue of a nice Merlot. It’s a cold February evening, and he’s puffing on a roll-up while huddled in the fire exit doorway of a Camden venue. His new dye job has to be kept under wraps, he explains, until its official unveiling in the band’s new video. “It’s so stupid,” Olly says with an eye roll. He then flashes me a grin, suggesting that this moment of starry subterfuge is not entirely unwelcome.

Olly Alexander really likes being a pop star. He says that it’s full of “fairytale” moments, like when his Years & Years earnings enabled him to buy his mum a house, or when he and his ex-boyfriend, Neil Milan (formerly of Clean Bandit), became embraced as British pop’s new golden couple. After winning the BBC Sound poll in 2015, Years & Years’ earworm synth pop was everywhere. They had an inescapable number one single, “King”, and their album Communion was the fastest selling debut that year from a signed British band. Olly says that there are downsides to the tabloid headlines and Twitter trolls that come along with being “a public gay man” – a phrase that he puts in self-deprecating air quotes. But right now, those pressures feel far away, as he prepares to change into a bright pink boiler suit and play to a boozed-up Saturday night crowd, at an Annie Mac-curated showcase. Or, as he put it on Twitter earlier today: bring his “gay agenda” to The Roundhouse.

Years & Years’ great new single, “Sanctify”, contrasts lurking vocals with an ecstatic synth-fuelled chorus, and is as unapologetic as any of Olly’s pithy social media posts. He was newly single when he wrote the song, and reading Andrew Holleran’s 1978 chronologue of gay desire, Dancer From the Dance, had got him thinking about a couple of hookups he’d had with straight-identifying men. “It would always be under darkness,” he says. “It had this added layer of eroticism because it was somewhat forbidden. But (being with me) was a window where they could be themselves, and I felt responsible not to fuck them up.” Those conflicting feelings come through in evocative lyrics about obscuring masks and sinful confessions, with a climax that’s about as on-the-nose as chart pop gets. “I sanctify my sins when I pray,” says Olly, quoting the chorus’s payoff. “What do you do what you pray? You get on your knees. So is it a sexual baptism?” He laughs. “I was just like, ‘There’s a lot to work with here.’”

Years & Years are a three-piece, but the other two members, Mikey Goldsworthy and Emre Türkmen, tend to hunker down behind synths and let Olly take centre stage. His soul-searching lyrics give the band’s maximalist pop its heart, with a singing voice that pierces through a constellation of synths. Their videos bring acts which are often shrouded in darkness into the light, showing the singer cruising in a dank car park, or at a pansexual orgy. The new “Sanctify” visual riffs on dom/sub culture, with an elaborate sci-fi plot that is a device for Olly to perform “Slave 4 U”-inspired dance moves to an audience of androids. When he was commissioned to write a song for the Bridget Jones franchise, he made it about bottoming. “I have sex, I enjoy sex,” he says flatly. He’s sitting in his cosy dressing room the Roundhouse, which rumbles with bass as Disclosure and Mabel soundcheck next door. “In the past, I think gay men (in pop) have often shied away from being overtly sexual, or being commanding of their sexuality. But I believe that our sexual fantasies are a big drive for us all. Exploring that side of yourself is super empowering.”

In the past year or so, many well-known LGBTQ artists have begun to bring queerness into their music in sex-positive ways. Pop’s boy-next-door Troye Sivan strapped on Tom Of Finland leathers for a back alley moment with well-fluffed trade, Janelle Monáe caressed women’s bare thighs, Fever Ray returned with a concept album about queer kink. For better or worse, Sam Smith is now calling himself a “dick monster”on primetime telly. “Sometimes seeing a man express themselves in an overtly sexual way, especially a gay man, makes certain conservative people feel a bit uncomfortable,” Olly says. “I always wanna keep people a little uncomfortable.”

“I believe that our sexual fantasies are a big drive for us all. Exploring that side of yourself is super empowering” – Olly Alexander

Years & Years are far from the first mainstream British pop act to proudly put gay sexuality at the centre of their music – that’s a lineage that runs from Will Young to George Michael, Pet Shop Boys to Bronski Beat, and beyond. But Olly’s performances are a reminder that mainstream pop can be open to explicit queerness (at least, when it’s embodied in a handsome white cis man). Olly has faith that you don’t have to be “generic to be palatable,” and that “straight guys can hear a song that I’ve written about being fucked by another guy, but still relate.” LGBTQ+ people like me grew up seeing straight culture pretty much everywhere; seeing more of our community thrive is crucial.

Growing up in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, Olly was a flamboyant kid. That got him bullied at school, called a “batty boy” before he was even aware that he was gay, and meant that he retreated into drama lessons. While acting, he felt it was okay – a good thing, even – to be expressive. He always nurtured a passion for music, too; he taught himself how to play Joni Mitchell songs on piano, and obsessed over “Dirrty”-era Christina Aguilera. An early performance at a year six assembly blended intimate songwriting and outré entertainment: Olly played piano and sang lyrics about lost love, while two of his friends did a dance routine.

In his late teens and early 20s, Olly cropped up in whimsical micro-budget indie films like 2011’s The Dish And The Spoon, alongside Greta Gerwig, as well as Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void, and Skins. But his early experiences at school stayed with him. “Your first encounter with your sexuality is often from people bullying you and calling you the thing that you just pray to god that you won’t be – but deep down suspect you might be,” Olly says. “Well, no wonder we have an incredibly conflicting relationship with our bodies and our sexualities, because we’ve had to experience all of that.”

Reflecting on these difficult early years in his dressing room, Olly speaks openly about his own decade-long experience with depression, and the inadequate NHS provisions for those who are struggling with mental health. LGBTQ+ folks disproportionately struggle with depression and substance abuse, he recognises, and there’s only one UK organisation, London Friend, that caters directly to the specific needs of the queer community. “I’ve been there,” says Olly. “They’re amazing, but they are over-subscribed, with a tiny office, old chairs, and not a lot of money. When you’re seeing that people aren’t getting the help they should be, there’s an issue there.” That’s something he knows from first-hand experience. Last year, Olly fronted a BBC documentary, Growing Up Gay, about young LGBTQ+ people struggling with their mental health. His openness around the subject made him a kind of ambassador for those struggles, and he’s trying to work out how to deal with the “almost daily” DMs he gets from people at their lowest moments. “I feel very privileged that someone is wanting to share that with me, but it’s frightening,” he says. “We’re all in fucking pain, and I don’t know if we’re communicating with each other that well.”

“What do we expect a male pop star to do? As a society, how do we want them to behave or present themselves?” – Olly Alexander

Years & Years’ second album, out later this year, mixes gliding pop melodies with churning bass and twisted disco. The new songs feel more varied and exploratory than Communion, thanks in part to new collaborators like current pop’s minimalist masterminds Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, as well as Greg Kurstin, who co-wrote “Shine”, Years & Years’ best song to date. The album’s centred around a motif of Palo Santo, a healing incense-like wood that you burn and waft around a room. (Olly dramatises this with hand motions as if he’s conducting an invisible orchestra.) Perhaps Palo Santo, with its power to expel evil spirits, could be a metaphor for the songwriting process? Maybe, Olly says. “But (when writing the album) I was angry about loads of things, particularly men. Palo Santo literally means ‘holy wood’ and I was like, ‘This is fucking perfect.’ Like, thinking that your dick is holy? I’ve known guys like that.”

Years & Years’ renewed vision also extends to creating a futuristic universe for their new music to exist in. That’s an idea that Olly’s idols – “Bowie, Prince, and Gaga” – have embraced, and “Sanctify” is the first part of an interconnected series of “weird, wonderful” videos. It marks the next step for a band aiming to join British pop’s pantheon, at a time when Olly, too, has been reflecting on his place in music. “What do we expect a male pop star to do?” he questions. “As a society, how do we want them to behave or present themselves? If I was asking myself, it would be like, ‘Well actually, I’ve always loved this kind of popstar. Maybe I should just be the pop star I want to see in the world.”