hi lucia! i hope you're doing well <3
i wanted to ask 1. what inspires you to write and the process you go through with writing (for ex. if you have any specific media or maybe writers you take inspiration from, if you take inspiration from real life events, if you need to watch a movie/read a book before writing to get in a flow, etc.) and 2. how you managed to create an audience that loves your work and is actually invested in it. i would like to do the same thing in the future, be able to publish my story and have people fall in love with the characters.
trying to answer very so many writing asks i had buried…
for the first question: life ! much of my inspiration comes from my life, and just being out and about. i’ve always been a person who’s had too many thoughts that bleed over to the point of sudden fiction. some of my best inspirations are things which have nearly nothing to do with what i’m making (allegedly). i’m barely home, i try and spend the most time away from home as possible. this is why most pieces and stories start in my notes app on my phone. as an example let’s look at some of my inspirations for the 2003 chapter of american tradition, taking place in atlantic city:
i grew up visiting a small beach house by the lagoon in tuckerton every summer, where i could see the ferris wheel in beach haven all the way across the bay. my bathroom had a specific smell, and i thought of it like a buffer portal between home and the beach, because it held all the sand and had soapy sea air. it’s very curious how important scents are in preserving memories.
i have a small fascination with the former racehorse “ruffian,” one of the best racehorses who ever lived, who ran until her hoof broke off—and then kept running.
my family used to co own a restaurant, which was actually a haunted mansion. the mob used to frequent the speakeasy in the basement, and drag bodies out to the delaware through the revolutionary war tunnels. i visited that mansion thrice or so.
whales, as mentioned in my last post. i became very fixated on whales all the sudden and i’ve always found myself very curious about the ocean. i used to visit the museum of natural history in new york growing up. my favorite was the dark, dimly lit diorama of a sperm whale fighting a giant squid. then, the giant blue whale hanging from the ceiling. i found false killer whales very interesting, mostly because they’re not killer whales at all, and yet they’ve been reduced to a completely unrelated species. they have a tendency to strand themselves en masse, the highest totaling 835 individuals. they’re social animals, that’s why.
during a day at the mall, my friend and i met a very grating group of boys. we drove about an hour away to seaside heights (at night, in the off season where it was still cold cold cold). down the boardwalk, we saw those boys again.
all this to say, inspiration is very fickle. my writing process varies depending on what i’m doing. when i’m writing far gone and out, i always do the same thing: i lock myself in the dark room in my house nobody goes in (i like to call it the david lynch room because of how it looks), i sit down with a redbull, or a convoluted coffee order, and i write to my writing playlist which mostly consists of creepy jazz. because it’s a very location dependent story, i keep a bunch of tabs open with photos and google earth addresses so i can get a better feel of descriptions. every story has a different vibe and thus a different method, but this one seems to work for some other things i work on. sometimes i like to watch a mood-setting movie while i eat my dinner on my writing break. for fgao, i recall watching lost highway more than once. my favorite part is writing until im sleep deprived, which i definitely do not recommend, but with the main character im writing, i find its the time i write the best. flow state if you will.
for the second question: oh dear. i get this question a lot and i can really never give a good answer, because ive found its luck and faith. i started posting here and there about fandom stuff, which was how i gained my initial wave of followers, but then i quickly pivoted to original stories, and it just went up from there. i really can’t tell you what i might’ve done, because i feel like ive done nothing special. there’s many months long stretches where it sort of overwhelms me and i retreat back into my cave to work on things privately. the best advice i can give is to just post without any inhibition, i guess thats what got me here. i opened myself to a lot of questions, and frequently posted ramblings about my own work. it’s hard to say what might get people invested, because i think there’s an audience out there for anything.
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