poppyseedheart: Light installation art piece. A lightbulb on a string, pink against a dark purple background. (Default)
As I work on the neverending final chapter of what's mine is yours, more and more often I come back to the idea that I am generating for myself a uniying framework around conceptualizing, complicating, and portraying moments of confict between characters. My entrypoint to fandom was primarily via hurt/comfort. I was a young teen and accidentally stumbled onto ff.net, and the soapy drama of someone being or feeling deeply hurt and subsequently experiencing the exact kind of care they need appealed to me greatly.

I have posited before that the core draw of hurt/comfort is the promise of perfect safety. In a lot of h/c fic, there is almost an element of mind reading. What do you need? How can I give it to you even if you're ashamed to ask for it? And can the fact that you've been broken down "enough" by either physical or emotional pain allow me to give it to you when you might otherwise turn it away?

In this way, h/c can be a surprisingly conflictless genre. What conflict exists often exists in service of total apology by the end of the story. The older I've gotten the more critical I've become of stories where someone, either intentionally or unintentionally, utilizes their own pain as an excuse for any and all bad behavior: "I hurt more than you, so I'm owed remorse because [my trauma response is outside of my control / I'm not emotionally stable enough to reckon with the ways I can cause harm myself / you didn't intuit my needs quickly enough so you deserved to take everything I dished out / etc]." This isn't really conflict. It's sanitizing and somewhat dehumanizing. Accountability takes a backseat to comfort. The victim gets to be perfect, and then the story gets to end.

I say all of this as someone who is still a huge h/c fan and loves the genre and what it can offer around vulnerability and getting to the root of something. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to really complete the cycle of healing something. That's all true! Also sometimes my blorbo needs to get sick and have someone give them soup, and to believe they've done nothing wrong now or ever amen.

But this fannish upbringing did not help me write conflict. 

My understanding of all of this has changed slowly over time. This current WIP has pushed me harder than any other story in terms of conflict without easy answers. I put some guys in an impossible situation and tried to honor their individual perspectives. No one is really all the way right or all the way wrong, or even most of the way in either direction. Someone gets hurt more, yes, but does that make them a victim? I think a younger version of me would have structured this much more as a hurt/comfort fic, but adult me ended up having a different take.

I worried before posting chapter one (and the subsequent chapters too) that the comment section would turn into a courtroom: who is the poor baby and who is the predator? I've been really delighted actually to see so many different takes, many of which go all in on acknowledging that everyone here is hurting. That is literally the point. It's all about pain. It's all about what we do to each other. All I've done is make it literal.

When I think about writing conflict I am thinking about the ways I have hurt the people I love, and the ways they have hurt me. I am thinking about the people in this world who hate me, and what might be driving that hate, and the fact that I'll never be able to change it, and the fact that I don't have to. I am thinking about getting it wrong when you're young and don't know any better, and then looking back and holding that messy young self with all the compassion you can muster.

I am thinking about:
  • core immutable personality traits and their healed and unhealed forms
  • saying the thing you didn't mean and trying a dozen different ways to take it back
  • microexpressions and posture
  • how a story changes with every telling
  • fighting as a release of tension
  • the thin line between courage and impulsiveness
  • and hurting someone just because you're angry and you want to
My framework for writing conflict ultimately centers the unsettled. What isn't being said and needs to be? What need isn't getting met? What unhappiness will eventually transform into resentment?

The challenge for me as a writer is to leave it unsettled. Stop fiddling, stop making it better so quickly, stop making your characters say exactly what they mean and especially stop letting them hear what the other person is saying without their own filters and biases in the way. Let them fight, be angry, verbally spar, retreat and cry. Let them hate one another. I don't necessarily struggle when it comes to bringing things back around. I'm fundamentally an optimist, and I'm pretty bad at holding grudges — my characters will come with me into that space if I let them, and what the story so often needs is for me to hold off as long as I can before letting them clear the air.

I may come back to this topic at some point, either to talk about revising conflict or to discuss specific craft strategies to evoke some of those difficult emotions without letting them overwhelm the story or veer into soap opera land, but for now I think this is where I'll leave it! I hope you are all doing well and that if you're writing you let them fight a little. <3
poppyseedheart: Light installation art piece. A lightbulb on a string, pink against a dark purple background. (Default)
Welcome to chapter six! Man time flies.

Read more... )

And that's the chapter! I hope you enjoyed it <3 and thank you as always for reading!!
poppyseedheart: Light installation art piece. A lightbulb on a string, pink against a dark purple background. (Default)
We are back and better than ever! Let's do some extended a/n for chapter five which I am literally about to post. Things go down in this one! As ever this contains spoilers for the chapter so I'd recommend going to read that first if you haven't yet.

Read more... )

Thank you for reading!! Hope you enjoy chapter 6. Hope I also enjoy chapter 6. What is even in there... off to revisions I return!
poppyseedheart: Light installation art piece. A lightbulb on a string, pink against a dark purple background. (Default)
Quick extended authors notes to talk about my yuletide fic from this year, since it wasn't revealed by the time I put up my end of year wrap up :) I wrote this fic for the Teixcalaan duology by Arkady Martine (if you haven't read these books I'm so sorry but I do need you to drop everything right now and then come back. Good luck) and it centers around a character we meet in the second book, Nine Hibiscus.

I ended up brainstorming while at Brenna's house. Brenna do you have dreamwidth. Sound off. (I'll ask her in like 90 mins when we're on a call.) Anyway I like to handwrite for brainstorming when I get the chance, and below are my notes :')



I ended up being somewhat faithful to this! The major divergence was that "framing through OC?" because "OC POV, OC backstory, I made this OC and I love her and she's the star of this show I am so sorry to anyone else" (I wasn't sorry). The fic ended up being mostly prose from her POV with the occasional epistolary/media excerpt, as well as a surprise cameo (it was a surprise to me as well until I had fully decided to keep it in). The brainstorming above is really true to my usual process whether I write it down or not—I am far more likely to start with framing and themes and then get into specifics rather than think about the logistics of what I'm doing first.

I am pleased with the end result! As I was writing I was convinced I was making a MESS because Martine writes with such elegant, rich prose... it was so scary to try to emulate even a little bit and I felt daunted by the task. By the time I started writing the letters though I hit my groove and I ended up especially happy with those segments of the fic. 

In the end it was just a lot of fun to come back to this world and I wanted to give a lil behind the scenes of how we got to the finished product! That's all thanks so much. <3
poppyseedheart: Light installation art piece. A lightbulb on a string, pink against a dark purple background. (Default)
 What it says on the tin, folks! I mentioned this on twitter but here are some more longform thoughts about ringing in the first (messy, full of holes, in need of revision) 102k draft of this fic. I started writing this fic last nanowrimo, so it has been a little over a year.

For those new to the wip, I've mugged Emma by Jane Austen in an alley, run off with eveyrthing I could carry, and used those plot threads to inform a story set in modern day Seoul where Hyunjin is an influencer, Felix is an ASMR YouTuber, several of the cast work at the LGBT center, and everyone is doing their best and kind of making a mess of it. It's my first attempt at a full-length romcom, which has been both intimidating and a lot of fun, and it includes lots of social media elements — texting, instagram posts, youtube posts — that I can't wait for future me to figure out how to format onto AO3. We'll see.

Emma AU (which does have a real title, I promise) is a romantic comedy and a coming of age story and a little bit satirical and I hope you can feel how much of my heart is in it! Why does this feel like an ad! I'm just excited!

Revisions are gonna be a lot. I went into this project with the full intention of drafting loosely and pulling it together at the end, in part because I did want to test run a novel-length story and go through a full process of outlining, writing, and making it into something I'm proud to share. I'm going ot start actually revising after nano, I think, because revisions don't tend to yield much of a word count a lot of the time and I'm still trying to win for the month, but I am hoping for this to be ready in the next couple of months. Maybe for my birthday... we'll see.

Anyway, that's an update! Thank you to anyone who has been cheering me on along the way, you all know how long this has been in the works and in my brain, and it's gonna be such a joy to unleash it upon the world, FINALLY!