Hola, hola! Thank you very much for the questions, hehe <3
14. what's your worst writing habit
I don't know if it refers to the process or something that I do in my prose that could be considered a habit... For the latter, I would say that I tend to make sentences too long and redundant. I could probably edit a bit and trim here and there, but it's also part of my style—which makes my writings difficult to read, or "more demanding"—. And for the former... Maybe that I tend to overthink too much? Even if I plan, I always end up second-guessing my planning...
45. any writing advice you want to share?
Do not listen to the readers! Especially if you write online and are not paid. Sometimes we tend to get stuck into the (often unsolicited) opinions we receive in our writings about how it should have been written. I'm not talking about fair criticism, like pointing out bad habits and such, but like "Oh, I would have made character A do this thing instead of...". And while this can be very useful when received during an editing process, once it's set and done, or once it's YOUR story you want to tell, I don't see how we should change in regards to who's reading us.
I wanted to do a little essay about this, but I think there are certain fandoms where writers were influenced by the discourse online. Like Sherlock, or High School Musical (The Series), and the character development ended up having zero sense, often invalidating the psychological progress the character had done until then.
So: write your story, however you want to write it. Someone will fall in love with it. Do not let anyone tell you how you should have written the story that's yours. Everyone can pick up a piece of paper and pen.
83. less is more or more is more?
in the writing process, more is more. in the editing process, less is more. and in the marketing phase, to my view, also less is more.
hi hera! what are some tips you can recommend for world building?
hi anon! <3 thanks for the question! i don't know if i'm authorized to talk about worldbuilding, because even though i use it to create novels (they all have a kind of dystopian, political reality) i still don't write sci-fi or fantasy, in which worldbuilding is much more important. i do read them, though, sparsely. (coming back here after finishing to say that i think i know more than i thought, and also that this is going to be a long post).
of course, first i'd like to throw you the question: are you asking about creating or about depicting?
creating
for creating worlds, i truly have no "special" advise: i'd say that it can go before establishing your characters or later, but in any way, the worldbuilding should be tied with the ambitions/anxieties of your hero(es). for example, i am now writing a novel about a political disruption, but essentially it is a novel about friendship amidst of that. i have to make sure that the worldbuilding is strong enough so that it interferes in said friendship: there's a revolution coming, and my heroes don't know which side to choose (they choose different sides, and therefore, what happens with their friendship?). even though the revolution is not the cause of their friendship to fall apart, it is important enough.
because i knew this was going to be important, i was sure to think about the history of the world, what brought the country there, establish their politics (what do people from this country face? how do politics work?) and culture (which language to they speak? does it encompass my heroes' reality?). but this is all very basic, and i'm sure you can find fantasy or sci-fi guides that will tell you so and much more.
HOWEVER: although i would stress that you have to read about the genre, please, do not only read that genre. for me, the best novels are not only one thing but many, they take from many genres. for example: a share of night by mariana enríquez is basically a story about a father and a son tangled up in black magic amidst the political uproar in argentina. so, we have: family saga (literary fiction, how the characters develop, even a bildungsroman) with a fantasy novel (the hero gets tangled up in a mess and has to choose their path towards this magic) with thriller (because it's told from different povs, you don't really know what's happening, you discover it along the characters, so it's terrifying) and political novel (they are all touched by politics). so, i'd say, break the genre. i don't think that any fantasy or sci-fi novel doesn't have any politics or any other genre in between, but i do believe that if you want to make a good fantasy novel, you can infer much more "literary fiction", whereas if you want to do a good literary fiction, you can infuse fantasy to bring it up a notch. (that's my opinion, anyway)
depicting
now, this is i think where the tricky part comes. it's difficult to explain your worldbuilding without explaining to much or doing an info-dump.
i recently read a book (fourth wing, by rebecca yarros) that didn't do a good job on that, and the first 3/4 chapters i felt like i was reading a wikipedia sometimes. this happened because the infodump wasn't justified. the main protagonist, violet, has lived in this world FOREVER, yet, even though the novel was in first pov, she was explaining it. and that completely threw me out of the loop. it wouldn't happen because when we think we tend to know our world as the palm of our hand. when the novel advanced and violet knew more people with whom she could talk, the worldbuilding was revealed little by little through dialogs and conversations, which i think was great and how it should be.
i'd say that one can reveal it in different ways:
the main protagonist is a estranger to this world: essentially, a little bit like harry potter, eragon or memories of idhun (one of my fave books when i was young), or even cornelia funke's ink blood: the protagonist stomps into a world they don't know and thus, they make questions about it. constantly, small questions in each step so that it doesn't overflow the reader and the reader keeps on discovering things until the end. in the example of "harry potter", harry is not a magician so must of the info-dumping on the magic world comes from hagrid when they go shopping. however, rowling makes sure to only say some things during that time, what has to do with the shopping itself: we know that people have pets, that they fly brooms, that they have a bank with their own money; we do not know how hogwarts works (instead, mcgonagall explains before entering the sorting hat) or nothing about voldemort (this is the main incognita of the book, and it gets revealed little by little). what rowling does is camouflage the real incognita by another one: the philosopher's stone. but truly, this is just a coy so that we get more worldbuilding (chess moves, prohibited section in the library, dog with three heads, snape is terrifying). a lot of it is revealed through conversations and also harry's pov about things, filled with surprised and exclamations from the others, who are not strangers to this.
confidante: we could argue that the characters of hp are confidantes to harry, but this wouldn't be what i'm talking about. take, for example, game of thrones (i'm talking about the series, not the books). in the first episode, we get the introduction between the most important families (yet, it is said that there are many others—by only showing those two, grr martin makes sure that we are seeing the main enemies) and in the same episode, we have the conversation between robert and ned. they talk about the main conflict, which is the long winter, and the revolution that robert led. they talk about this with such normalcy, because it's their world and they know it perfectly. it's okay not to know all the details, they are going to be revealed bit by bit as the series progresses. similarly to their conversation, we have daenerys and viserys convo about their condition as targaryen. we can piece together that they were thrown out of the throne, but we don't know how many years that was, or how exactly it happened (many seasons later, we learnt that jamie has a nickname because he killed the targaryen king). we can't forget that the politics and reality of a world is what makes us, so our characters need to be the same. when i meet new people, or when i talk with friends, i do not explain the history and culture of my country all at the same time. i begin with what's affecting my reality now, and maybe as i get to know them, i give them more info about everything.
through books/manuscripts/recordings: "the fourth wing" does that in every chapter, in which they cite a bible, or a recording, or something that talks a little bit more about worldbuilding. in game of thrones, we also have the little girl in the jail (i don't remember her name know) which the skin condition that talks about what's in her book. in harry potter, they discover the philosopher's stone because there's a recording about it. i think in the game of thrones books it's already explained like there was being a recording about it (as if, you're reading a historical recording of what happened in the world), which i think it's very clever because you can infodump asa much as you like without it being weird.
make all of this interact (read further on an example)
also, use the povs available. in "a share of night" by mariana enríquez (what a book, i can't recommend it enough), the father knows about the dark magic, the history of the family (to a certain extent), because his wife, now death, told him about it. however, his pov and information is limited because his wife was hiding things, and he also limits it in regards to gaspar, the son, because he doesn't want him to find out certain things and wants to protect it. but gaspar has secrets of his own (regarding dark magic itself), yet he's not able to fully grasp it, the world has been hidden. SO: when we read from the father's pov (not 1st person, but 3rd limited), we get the pov of a confidante because the way he talks with people about their reality signals that they know about it. but when we read from gaspar's pov (again, 3rd person limited) we get the view of the stranger. furthermore, gaspar sneaks in conversations with two or more confidantes, and also finds recordings and books. so, if you make the three interact and each character have their own thing, it makes it much more interesting.
anyway, as i told you this is not my main area of expertise! but this is all i've learnt through observation and critical reading! i hope it helps a little bit.
(ah, after writing, make it read to someone whom you haven't talked about this world. ask if there are questions by the end of the book, if they got bored, in which point... i think it helps!)
Quite often, I get questions on how to craft a story. "I want to write, but I don't know what to tell", they tell me. I try not to roll my eyes, and don't seem judgemental, because sometimes we don't have a story, but we have the urge to write anyway. I tell people to start writing a diary, because they'll find their topics. Sometimes, though, people don't want topics, just to write a story.
But, to write a good story, it's inevitable to think about the topic.
Topics—what is ours, what is not
I have this romantic view of writing as something that is innate to us. The need and habit to tell stories to others are millenary and it reaches even before we knew how to talk or even have an alphabet to do so. Even without writing it on paper, people learnt the stories by heart and sang them to the public to entertain. Not only entertain, also to show something, learn something from it.
So, I get the urge to write. But if you're writing without a topic, I feel that you're writing without a message.
There's nothing easier than finding a topic around you craft you story, I believe. It can be the simplest thing—the particular smell of coffee in the morning—or the abstracts that we know about—hate, love. But what I normally tell is that topics shouldn't be hard to find. Because, one: topics are within yourself. You're naturally drawn to some topics when you read or watch films, the same way your eyes are draw to specific things when you try to draw, or you enjoy the cadence of classical music instead of the up-beat of the pop. Along our years, we've crafted preferences—that's why I, too, think it's difficult to be a great writer if you're not aged.
But, despite this last affirmation, topics age very slowly. We can be drawn to the same things at 15 and at 45. Our optics about the topic might have changed, and we might have expanded our vision while tackling it, but normally, topics that interest us are as old as we have knowledge to say what a "topic" is.
A topic is not only ours—because humankind has been writing for ages—but the approach can be. And that's why writing, I feel, is such a vulnerable state of ours. Because we choose a topic that is universal, but we pour our understanding of that topic onto the page.
What precedes us and the repetition
Some people say that topics come to rise when we're children. Maybe. Certainly, what we experience as children follows us our whole life.
Once, when I was 23 and already writing my first novel (not my first: my first "serious" novel, as I had been writing novels since I was 16) I went on a walking trip with my boyfriend. With 8 hours of walking ahead of us, it was only natural that we ended up rambling about writing. I was telling him about my new exciting idea for the novel. I kept on repeating "new" like it was a mantra. He gazed at me and told me that he was sorry, but he thought I had only three topics, and I circled around them.
I was dumbfounded, but we went through them: mental health, gender, and oppression. My novels so far included a schizophrenic professor who had been in love with a Jewish girl during WWII and tried to find her again; a woman who had been silenced and invisibilized in favour of his husband who had Alzheimer; a dystopia about two clans, one oppressed by the government and forced to exile; and multiple stories about girls, women, etc, oppressed by the system.
So, of course, I was bound to repetition. When I realized this—when I suddenly thought about what my topics were—I felt relieved. It felt so natural that I shall be writing about this, and realized that all my topics and all my novels could be threaded into my childhood and my personal life somehow, without making it personal.
Of course, my personal life is changing, and over the years, I realize I don't look up to one topic anymore in favour of the other, or vice versa. I can't no longer tackle a novel that I wrote in 2020 because the weight of the topic has changed in me, or because I changed the optics.
On inspiration
So, does inspiration truly exist? I wonder that sometimes. There's the myth that you need to be working to be struck by inspiration (cue Picasso). But we have all experience that burst of sudden revelation in the middle of the street, hitting us with the idea.
I dare say, though, that inspiration only happens because you know your topics. Suddenly, you find something, even if subconscious, that triggers your interest of that topic and boom, you get the idea.
Once, I came across an ice cream place that was empty. Not only empty—the vendor was outside of the shop, looking from side to side, wondering if someone would come. My question was immediate: How much time is he spending outside? Does he have a clientele? Can he make it? I was really sad. I went down my sadness: I was sad because the old man reminded me of my grandmother—who suffered a mental illness—and because my city is disappearing as I know it—full of tourists—and because we cannot change this capitalist system that is changing my city.
I could have easily wrote a story about the man, or make it one of my characters. I didn't because I can't write everything I get ideas for, and so I left the idea to simmer, maybe another me will pick it up soon.
While watching the man, I might have not seen the mother and the baby on the other side of the street, or the stray cat next to the garbage can, or the teenagers snogging. My eyes were somehow trained to pick what I just wanted to see—what interested me the most—and so my mind went to that.
Introspection
So yes, for me, inspiration happens, but it does because we've done introspection as writers. We allow ourselves to go with the flow but we know, too, what we want to talk about. Doing a story per se it's not sufficient, because if the topic doesn't interest us, we won't make it further to page 50. We are, after all, our first readers.
I know I am too rational, maybe. I love sitting and thinking and maybe not letting myself feel. But, at first, when I was 12 and didn't rationalize a lot, I did let myself feel, and surprisingly, the topics have remained for the most part.
Just as we are children of experiences, we're children of topics, and without a topic, we won't have an idea, much less a story, I fear.
Good news is: we only have to look within ourselves. Turns out, our topics were hidden inside of us all along.
while uploading chapter two of liquid confidence today, i received two comments that made me think. they went on about how "pathetic" it was that eren was waiting on mikasa as she loved kenzo and hadn't have relationships (although he states that he did) and also on how could it be possible that mikasa loves eren if she loves kenzo.
at first, it nagged me because so much of their prejudice and critique was lacking reading comprehension. then, i decided to do a twitter thread about love, but i think what i'm writing needs to speak for itself.
however, here are some random thoughts about love and loving—and, therefore, maybe of how i depict love.
1. there's not "one type of love", nor "one direction of love"
love is something that is nurtured and flourishes, and you can love multiple people at the same, because there's not just romantic love, but also friendly love, familial love, admiration love, possessive love. not all love is the same, and not all love is directed towards just one person. different loves can coexist.
2. love and being in love is not the same
you can be in love with someone but love your significant other. you don't have to be in love to marry someone, nor you have to love someone to have a good time. being in love lasts months—after that, you love the other. because love is not a magical thing that appears, but something nurtured. that's why, if there are different types of loves, you can love multiple people at the same time—rarely be in love with multiple people, though. because being in love is built on admiration and dazziness, and as we get to know the other person, this diminishes to bring out a more "human" approach.
3. love is not "deserved"
you don't deserve someone's love, because nobody owes you love. even if the other person has been waiting around for you all of their life, if you don't feel for them—if you don't love them—it's much better that you're not with them. loving and caring is one of the most free things humans can do, so if love chains someone, it's not a worthy love. because love is not something that flourishes but something constant, you don't owe anyone certain feelings you cannot maintain.
4. you can love someone and still make it a mess
because being in love equals admiration, we normally don't make messes in those months. but after, love is kept with communication, perseverance, patience—not only feelings. that's why, you can wake up one day and have enough: i don't want to work on that anymore. and that's fine. it doesn't mean you have stopped loving, but you are tired of meeting some requirements of the relationship which don't satisfy you anymore. you're not a "feeling-less monster". we cannot love the same people all of our life.
5. you need to learn how to love
similarly, loving doesn't always imply that we are natural doing so. we don't know the codes, the meanings. we've been taught on possessiveness, jealousy, owning, romantic toxic love. we have matrimony—a farse in the old sense, because it makes you feel guilty if you have "impure" thoughts (that you're bound to have sometime) and we have the promise of being "successful" if we're in a long relationship. love is no bonds. love is freedom. love is not success. love is falling and having a hand that will help you stand again.
and, furthermore: writing is about exploring. so please, do write about whatever interests you, the little nuances and moral greys of the whole life.
Countless blogs. Countless articles. Books by great authors, books by mediocre authors, books by bad authors. Physical courses and online courses and tweets and Tumblrs all dedicated to: make you write better.
As if writing was a sole thing, a sole notion, a commonplace and designation for everyone in the world, the same. As if writing was a natural thing where all humans converge—immovable, static.
How restricting—how incredibly boring.
Their advice
I've been seeing a lot of Tumblrs and blogs creating masterlists about "How to write a scene between a villain and a hero", "How to write a kiss", "How to write an angry character". All of their tips sound as if there was something so exact about writing. They make us believe there's a sole way to do this, and this is how you should do it (disclaimer: I do believe in the reader's criticism, and I acknowledge these tips might be helpful for a lot of people, so if they are for you, it's all good! But bear in me for a little longer).
But writing is not something universal—rather, the universality of writing stems from its specificity of it. Writing pours out of our own experience, vision and caleidoscope of ideology, experiences and semantics, and reducing everything to simple tips feels, at least, misleading.
First, we can differ in characters. Why? Because everyone has had their fair share of experiences with people. If I want to write a villain that is nuanced, I should be able to do that; but if someone wants to write a villain that is plain "villainous", it doesn't mean that they are not doing it correctly.
We feel the appeal of literature because it shapes our world—and it does because we're shaping literature in return, too.
It doesn't make sense that everything should be written the same, because not everyone experiences the same, in the same parts of the world, with the same ideology. How I, the daughter of an ex-dictatorship country, might depict a dictator, might differ completely from the depiction of someone who hasn't lived in a dictatorship. Expecting everyone to write the same is not also reductive and unfreeing, but also completely privileged and biased.
Why writing advice is often privileged
I believe that those who write this advice come from the same place. And I do, myself, when I give advice on planning. We come from higher education, or access to literature, or even access to a computer. We come from places we can turn on our TV and watch series and learn about pacing, or watch some tropes, or feel some way or another about daily topics.
But literature is not only writing, and writing (as it often happens) is not always literature. To write literature, there must be something else (I'll refer to it as truth, and speak about it largely after). Sure, everyone can put down a thousand well-written words, making sense, even with metaphors, and dialogues. But is this really literature—if we regard literature as something that transcends the writing and shapes us?
Because, if we do regard writing as literature, what do we do about the people who have so much to tell, but not the privilege to tell their stories?
When we tell someone about "writing power dynamics", are we all understanding the same? What about a kid who has been raised in a household with power dynamics, but can't rebel, or society doesn't allow him to see that? What about people who, for example, are not taught that their story matters?
This is the problem of a single story, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains. And while I think we're progressing in this sense (more and more new, unheard voices in literature and the book publishing sector), I am still baffled by how we keep normalizing certain writing advice on how to write certain scenes, and certain tropes, as something you should regard in terms of writing. Because not all experience is the same, and therefore, the advice that some people claim as universal might differ.
Because everything is your own tradition
Everything is a fashion, and everything is tradition. My literary tradition might not be your tradition. When someone tells me that "stories can be told in a consecutive way, in media res or from the end", or any other advice on how to plot, this feels so simplistic to me. There is just not one way—there are hundreds of ways to begin a story and tell it.
You can begin my merging voices of the beginning, the in media res or the end of the story. You can put different adventures in the middle of the main plot—coming back to what happened, but not in a chronological way (the way The Odyssey does). You can begin in the middle of the action and never address what happened before (Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin; The Transformation by Franz Kafka)—so that the "story" that was "worth" being told is not the "story" that is actually being told.
Pacing: "be sure not to use a lot of commas. Use full stops when you want to speed things up", etc. How about you get the help of the music, as if writing was writing a partiture (the way Thomas Bernhard did)?
The three acts of writing: What about you do five, or four, or basically, concentrate your whole plot in just an event? You can focus your story in just a day (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Ulysses by James Joyce)—not caring about the plot altogether.
You can write characters that are already "evolved" by the beginning of the story (Humbert Humbert in Lolita), that will never evolve (Werther in The pains and sorrows of young Werther). And so on.
This is the great joy—and obvious mess—about writing.
The infinite possibilities allow us to explain a story that is completely ours. Even if what we are telling is similar to another person's, the scope of the story might change completely depending on the words you pick, the way you use dialogue—every single little decision.
Cover the basics
Of course, it doesn't mean that you should not cover the basics. Orthography, grammar, syntaxis, vocabulary—this all comes in handy. It is handy, especially for non-English native writing in English (aka me) to have posts that signal you the use of "" for dialogues, and how punctuation goes.
But don't let the rules constrict you, it's all I'm saying. People that gives this kind of advice are well read, and have really studied this, and maybe have even gone to grad school for that—but what they normally fail to mention is that maybe rules are there to be learnt, then bended when we need.
You just need to be mindful of how you're writing.
Of course you should learn how to write in in media res, because if you don't, maybe you won't know when or if you're doing it and the plotting might be a whole mess. And you can't pretend to write a character evolving without having learnt that characters evolve.
Just like how we are taught verb inflection in a language, but then when we're fluid, we totally miss it and bend it to adequate it to the talk in the streets—writing is finding your best channel to portray what you want. Maybe the writing advice doesn't work. It doesn't mean that you're not doing it right.
But what writing advice fails to say
And this is the thing that angers me the most—maybe the reason why I've decided to write all of this—is that they never tell you to read.
It infuriates me: read all my writing advice, but forbid you to read a book. Maybe it's the kind of thing that's happening everywhere—we gobble easy content, and it's undoubtedly easier to read a short article on writing than reading a novel of 500 pages.
But it will never be the same.
Because what you can get from reading (or even better, a re-reading) is your own interpretation of the literature you've been given, and there's nothing more powerful to understand yourself—therefore, to understand your motives, your aspirations, your topics as a writer—than seeing how you, as a reader, react to structures, plot, dialogue, character ideology.
Use all the writing advice you want, but your writing will lack truth if you don't read.
Because few people have this spark—this truth about them that makes a reading special. And trust me: I read a lot of manuscripts, very good written, decent in plot. But this is not all. There is something, and I can't quite explain it—a soul, a spark, maybe. It is the moment when you read something and go: "Ah". It's like sighing of relief, having your heart clenched, being absorbed by something—plot, style, whatever. It's that word that the author has used that is so unique in that context, like you feel that no one has ever used that before.
Some people have the craft and the truth but, to me, they are extremely rare. And it's always much better to have the truth than the craft—the craft, you need to learn, and that's more or less easy (you'll find a ton of articles, haven't we said?). But the truth takes years, even a lifetime, because we are in constant development—after all, never forget that even if we apply the best advice to our writing, we're still human: inherently flawed.
When I started November, I knew I wanted to create my own goal of writing. Nano has never been my thing: I don't write well under pressure or words or chapters or pages. I write under hours, or time, and a little bit every day. This persistence only stays with writing—I don't study with that energy anymore, and I tend to live other things for the last minute.
The last times I had ever tried Nano, I ended up losing motivation right at the end. It didn't felt right, that I was neglecting my brain when it said, that's it, you've had enough for today. I felt like I was being pushed, and I decided I didn't want my creative flow to feel overwhelmed. I am a very pragmatic, rational person—I follow structure and timetables and routines.
But this October was a mess, creatively. I abandoned my novel, which I had been working on for 5 years, at just 30 pages of revision. I was feeling very down with Rotten Judgement and wanted to focus on other things. I felt detached from fandom, people in fandom, and literature in general—I barely read.
So, I took November as "a vacation": I promised myself I would not push myself to write certain something or work on some pages. I would not get up at 6 AM to write before work. I would just enjoy that writing is available to me, in all forms—computer, notebook, schemes and head.
The tracker
I downloaded a wordcount that allowed me to change how many words I wrote. I duplicated the sheets in different projects: Rotten Judgement, Novel, Other projects and Final word count. On this last one, I made all the words per day sum each other to determine how many words I had written (in all projects).
True, I still set myself some word goals that I knew I was not going to make: 40K for RJ, 20K for other projects.
I didn't look at the word counter every day. I had no interest in knowing if I was on the right word path with some of the projects or not. Admittedly, that made it difficult to track the words written because sometimes I would have to go back several days and count on Word (or by hand if I had used the notebook) :')
But this allowed me not to be pressured, and, what's better: to know if I was writing because of compromise, or if I was writing because I wanted to.
The results
In all of November, I wrote 28.192 words. I wrote those in a total of 21 days, because I didn't write anything for 9 days (almost all Thursdays and Fridays).
I wrote Rotten Judgement only 8 days in November, amounting to 8753 words (and I believe they were all used in Chapter 17).
I only wrote my new novel 4 days, which says a lot: I need to plan, I need to let it simmer a little more until it is boiling. I wrote 4382 words for it.
I wrote 15057 words for other projects, mainly my #rivamika shot "A dreadful night", which tells me that I was in the right and I indeed needed some vacations for the novel and the fic to focus on other endeavours for a while.
But I didn't stop writing. I always came back, and I never went with a week without writing. It might be small, but to me, it's big. And I don't even feel it as an accomplishment: it's just natural.
I am part of this, and this is part of me. I am indivisible from my projects and my works.
While thinking about what I wanted to do with Rotten Judgement, I realized that I had already begun my journey in Instead, they said: the story starts when we, as a reader, don’t know what has happened between two people, and it’s time to figure it out. However, I didn’t want to get chronological about it and repeat what I had done with ITS. Rather, I wanted to ration the information I was giving each chapter, and get flashbacks of the past, to (hopefully) build the tension and the intrigue.
That’s why planning with anticipation was key, in RJ, as well as establishing some leit motives that would get recurrent in the narration, in concordance with the major events from the past.
Now that the second past is over—and so is the past story that the readers have to know—I thought it would be funny to go down onto the memory lane and tell you where all the hints were placed.
The first entrance is going to be the hint for the first big major event: The janitor’s closet.
The hints of what happened in the janitor’s closet are first introduced in chapter 1, actually! A long, long time ago (hello, March 2022), but what truly happened in the janitor’s closet is not said until chapter 12. I realize this wasn’t much of a surprise, since it was quite clear from the beginning that Armin and Mikasa had had some sort of special relationship when Eren wasn’t in the picture.
Right in the first meeting, the first scene in the whole fic, we already have the Armin POV of who Mikasa is: “The beaming figure is none other than his first-ever-lots-of-things, and one of his former best friends, Mikasa Ackerman.” After they talk, Armin begins noticing changes in her, and when they hug after reuniting, it is stated: “Mikasa’s Ackerman changes are even more palpable than Armin’s, because he used to know her face like a map of the treasure, every crevice and every muscle under the white skin. […] It’s not that touching Mikasa is something new — because, after all, he used to know every bone of her shoulders and hips”.
To keep with the janitor’s closet without it being too explicit, I pin-pointed two or three leitmotivs for Armin and Mikasa: The bodies, The whispers and rumors and The secrets.
The bodies
Armin and Mikasa are their each other’s firsts (not technically since they didn’t go all the way, but still) so it was evident to me that when Mikasa came back, Armin had to be pulled to the past and the way he felt the body of Mikasa. This was very special to me because his horniness had to come from another place, instead of the fetishization that Mikasa has always suffered in school.
So, the fact that not once Armin focuses on her long legs, but Floch and the others do, is completely wanted. Instead, Armin speaks about crevices, wrinkles, bones. He doesn’t see Mikasa as a fetish, but as a true body. He feels attracted to Mikasa for whom she is (his friend). In Chapter 5, for example: “Armin watches the movements—the limbs he knew so well, used to kiss feverishly when they mixed up their feelings—and feels the relief off his chest thinking that he wants to kiss Annie’s, and explain it to Annie, and feels the head all drunk by Annie.” When Armin speaks about her body, he talks almost technically about it, as if Mikasa was nothing more than organs put together.
Yes, friends, remember what Armin does in the first scene of the fic, right in page 2? “The task has included Armin moving across Shingashina with the cut-finger of one of Hange’s corpses.”
When Mikasa and Armin begin being more sexual, and Armin experiences his sexual awakening, he even speaks about it: “It was so natural, so he wouldn’t know when it started, that he began feeling his limbs consumed by her closeness, the stomach churning in revolution, the tickling in his ears. He felt Mikasa deep into his chore when she hugged him […]” (Chapter 9)
But Armin is still aware of the sexuality they both bore for each other. When he meets Eren at the pharmacy after Eren and Mikasa have drunkenly hooked up, he sees traces of how Mikasa played in Eren: “And Armin knows just one with the fetish—with the same digits, marked on his neck once, as she attacked his lips and kissed and bit them.” (Chapter 8)
Levi as the witness
Levi, who was a witness of the janitor’s closet too, sees Mikasa’s body in a whole another way. As you can see, how people saw her body is quite important for the story because Mikasa was not taught how to see her body healthily (and what it meant, even if it meant anything). Levi sees Mikasa as limbs and as harsh edges. The harsh edges/walls/steel/iron are words that come around a lot to signal when Eren and Mikasa shut down from the world and started on their autopilot to survive.
Already on chapter 2, we know what Levi witnessed: “Levi nods —the disgusting image coming to his mind again, from ten years back, the janitor closet, the need to look for a lightbulb, his hand on the doorknob, the two bodies pressed together, the skirt up, the trousers down.” Forward to Chapter 8, we know that it is first Levi who keeps them in the closet after Eren has rejected Mikasa: “Levi ushered them to the janitor’s closet, and trapped them inside. It would become their place ever since.”
This isn’t accidental: I wanted Levi to be both the person who wants Mikasa to get adopted and, unconsciously, the one who presents Mikasa with the place where her adoption will be endangered. I wanted Levi to both shelter Mikasa from pain (after the rejection) and to see Mikasa exposed and completely pained (after being discovered with Armin). Levi is the only one that knows Mikasa since she was a little girl, and he is the one who has seen her change the most. Through their anger and their disappointment, I wanted to show that even if Mikasa thought that Levi had forgotten about her, he always had her back (in fact, this favouritism got him problems in school. It is stated in Chapter 2 and Chapter 8, before we witness the scene where he protects Mikasa in Chapter 12: “the sheer memory of him bowing his head to the school director and accepting that yes, he had made the mistake of having favourites, is something unforgivable” [Chapter 2]).
And we proceed to see how Levi how she’s changed (also in Chapter 2, but this will be stated whenever there’s a Levi POV in the past): “She’s more vulnerable, he can see, with all the vulnerability that crafted Mikasa but she took care in hiding from people. She carries herself gentler, cocooned. She’s pained and hurt, as she’s always been, Levi figures, but it stems out of her pores as if it was a warning. She was all harsh edges —on her jaw, in her long limbs— and now she’s all rounded and soft, even her cheeks and her wide, surprised eyes.” (Again, you can see that to depict Mikasa’s body I use limbs. And I want to clearly differentiate it from “legs”, which is why she gets catcalled by Floch & co.)
The whispers
There are a lot of instances in which Levi says that he would have had to be aware of how they were treating Mikasa (especially in Chapter 12, as we go back to the past in his POV). This is because the whispers precede Mikasa from a very young age (“The whispers travelled through the walls and with the breeze and arrived at the children as hushed secrets” [Chapter 2]), but specially more when we talk about what happened on the janitor’s closet:
“Mikasa is pulled back to the time where the whispers surrounded her and her past —and, after some years, also surrounded her and her body, what she did with it. She turns around to the stairs, to the intruder, and she finds the very object of the rumours of her body —you know, there were caught doing… I heard she was on top of him, can you believe it […] And he was everything to her, during months, because they only had each other and they only came back to each other, the whispers surrounding them both —I heard they moaned so loud they…, Armin Arlelt, with her, how on earth.” (Chapter 2)
When Mikasa goes away, she leaves Armin to deal with the whispers: “Mikasa went away with his feelings and his secret, and now she’s back without any of the feelings that they bore for each other and still the same secret that they swore not to tell a soul. Even if it made the whispers in their school become screams.” (Chapter 4)
Butt the whispers also precede what happened with Eren in the rooftop (the rejection), which I will talk about in the next post: “They stay in silence. The silence expands through them and pours over the bodies and washes them anew. With every wave, there are the whispers that belonged to them —I heard she called him on the roof and…; Did you see how he looked at her?— coming back to punch them in the gut.” (Chapter 3).
Even Eren is completely aware of the rumors and the whispers: “And he [Eren] doesn’t want to ask Armin, either —they are not best friends anymore, it’s not his place to be aware of such things, to ask him if the rumours were true.” (Chapter 4) And this need of Eren wanting to know the truth doesn’t go away, as he says in Chapter 5: “The gushing need to go back to the past—to ask them, beg them to answer him: why are people speaking about you two in a closet? But then, he wonders, if I did know the truth—what use would it do—it would be just so bitter, and I would have to gulp it down.”
The secrets
In this sense, Eren and Annie parallel in their thirst to know the secrets. Annie grows suspicious of Mikasa in Chapter 4, when they meet at the café. Armin knows about Annie’s worry, too:
“I still need to explain to her what happened in the closet. She doesn’t trust you much.”
She [Mikasa] bites her lower lip. “I wouldn’t jump on you now.” (Chapter 4)
But Armin is almost relieved that he loves Annie, because it is stated several times in the fic (it would be too long to put it here!) that Armin doesn’t think his relationship with Mikasa was healthy. He says, in Chapter 4: “Armin watches the movements—the limbs he knew so well, used to kiss feverishly when they mixed up their feelings—and feels the relief off his chest thinking that he wants to kiss Annie’s, and explain it to Annie, and feels the head all drunk by Annie.”
But still, the way Mikasa and Armin think about both Eren and Annie and the reveal is completely different. While Armin is afraid of telling Annie for him (he’s scarred of what happened: “I am not ashamed of what we did—I am ashamed of why we did it” [Chapter 9]), Mikasa doesn’t want to tell Eren their secret because she’s afraid it will devastate Eren.
Armin says: “Because he was never the one to know how to keep secrets —but he has always had to keep them, that’s his role, the secrets-keeper, the boy in the closet[…]—never telling Eren what they did in the closet.” (Chapter 4)
Mikasa, instead: “But Mikasa knows—Eren could not stand this. Not the younger Eren, not the new one. She’s seen his looks when she’s spoken through the phone.
“We cannot break him”, she mutters.” (Chapter 10)
Before going (this is getting long!) I wanted to note on the juxtaposition of “silence” to “whispers”. Whenever “silence stretches” between the characters, it is either because they remember “the whispers” or because they are not knowing how to process what they did. This happens between EMA mostly, while the “silence/voice” to Eren and Mikasa has a different feeling.
Next on “The hints” series is: Eren’s marriage proposal and Mikasa’s rejection. I know people were intrigued by this one! But, again… It is stated quite early in the fic! ;)
I thought, for this entry of the Writing Diaries, I would share some of my screenshots while editing!
Editing is the process of tweaking and introducing changes to the writing, whether to a macro-level or a micro-level. On a macro-level, we would look for the coherence of the work as a whole: is the message understood? Can it be explained better? Do the characters work? And the order of the chapters? On a micro-level, we look for the correction and tweaking of sentences or paragraphs.
There's no way one of editing, and it varies a lot depending on who does the editing, so what I'm going to do is not 100% what should be. Since I have already planned the whole fanfic, I don't do much macro-level as a whole, but you can still see some changes in it.
What do I look for when editing?
Some of the things I try to get across with the revision are:
Macro-level: on the chapter as a whole
The scenes >
- The order of the scenes in a chapter: does it make sense organically? Does it make the rhythm flow, or rather it's a big break for the reader? I tend to do that while I'm planning, but there have been instances when, even that, the order I thought, in the beginning, wasn't the working order.
- Deleting or adding scenes in the chapter: can it be that I'm not getting the point across because a scene is lacking? Or rather, is it too long, it doesn't flow well, so I have to delete a scene?
Example: Here I wrote 3 pages of Jean grieving for Marco, but the chapter ended up being too long and distracting from the true nature of the chapter, which was Mikasa and Eren's aftermath. Even if Jean's was an aftermath too, I decided I could keep it into Chapter 9, which is called The Ghosts, and hence I deleted the whole scene.
Of course, that made me introduce changes to what followed this scenes, too: I had to make sure that Jean was lacking from the interactions that followed, and twitch and rewrite some of the sentences:
2. Repetition of ideas in the chapter as a whole > Because we write in different days, it can be that the message we want to get across repeats itself all the time. We have to make sure that the message is spread across the chapter consistently, but without it being repeated endlessly.
Example: Here I deleted a whole paragraph because the idea that Eren had always loved Mikasa was repeated in the pharmacy and in the end. I could have deleted it from the end, but I thought it would be nicer from him to realize when he sees her again, and if I kept it on the pharmacy, such answer couldn't have made him be as confused as I pretended to.
Micro-level: on the sentences or paragraphs as a whole
The descriptions > Sometimes, a description can be too long or too short. I normally lack the last one, so I tend to introduce sentences here or there to bring some environment to the scene. It's important to show the actions of the characters, rather than just saying them, so that people can get a view of how they are operating. My brain whirrs as a manga panel: I'm always thinking, what would this panel focus on, if it was a manga? You can also think in terms of a camera.
Example: Ending the sentence with "Eren thinks" would have been easy, but it wouldn't have said anything of how Eren is thinking. So by adding the movement of him watching his hand, the reader can get that despite what he's thinking, he's not being sure he's right.
2. Repetitions > I try to avoid them at all costs. When writing, we can
repeat whole expressions or words. It's important to go back and read again and note these repetitions, which can reverberate on the reader and make them feel like the whole chapter is spiriling.
Example: In my case, I don't know why I was writing "turmoil" and "can avoid it" all the time in the chapter, so I needed to get rid of the expressions. Here are two instances in which I did.
3. Clarity > Sometimes, the referents of the sentences (the pronouns) are not too clear for the reader. Who am I referring to? There can be, also, some instances in which the phrase is confusing in itself, so I try to add some clarity.
For example, 1: "From the other side of the bed" -> I needed to add that because it had already been almost a page since I mentioned that Eren and Mikasa were sleeping together. So "Mikasa doesn't move" could have been understood, but I feel that it wouldn't have been as fluid, because moving from where?
*Careful: sometimes, too much clarity can bring over-explaining. It is a fine line, and honestly, I do that myself too. The thing in rereading is to think that the readers are intelligent. Even if you can see that it's not clear enough for intelligent readers, then you should add your clarity
For example, 2: "On the fact that she thinks" / "Oh, no". In the first instance, I added "on the fact that she thinks" because of the rhythm of the sentence, too, and because the transition from what she was thinking in third-person omniscient to first person ("his skin is beautiful") didn't make it fluent or clear. So I decided to keep it in the third-person.
In the "Oh, no", I decided to add it because it wasn't clear who was speaking the question. The idea was that it's Mikasa, but since her thoughts get interrupted, one could have thought that it was Eren. By adding the "Oh, no", we introduce a realization in Mikasa's mind, and it naturally flows onto the question.
4. Order of sentences: It is important to establish a rhythm while writing. The rhythm is almost a cadence of how the words, sentences and paragraphs come together, and it's very intuitive, so everyone has its own. I like my rhythm to play with short sentences, and then long sentences. But for the rhythm to be how I like it, I need to avoid confusion, hence search for clarity, too. In tweaking some of the order on the micro-level, it makes it easier.
Example 1: As you can see, if I had left the initial sentence, it would have been too long and gone together with another sentences of three adjectives in a row, with a lot of description. So, by changing the order, I don't only give a hint of who it is by mentioning Dalia at the beginning, but I also create two whole sentences (before and after the hyphen) that have a good cadence. And after the long sentence, a short one: "He sneers."
Example 2: "Connie nods, long and slow. Hm, he says". Similarly to the last one, and to the clarity one, it made much sense that this sentence was in the green position. 1) It introduced much better what Connie was saying about Ethan, without it making to over-explain who was saying the sentence. 2) By deleting the sentence from the initial paragraph, the focus of the reader is on Eren's actions and the cadence of the paragraphs flows much better.
*To get a rhythm, I used to read out loud. After doing so sometimes, I now play my own voice in my head. Every work has its rhythm and its cadence, I feel, so I do it every time I edit something.
5. Effect: There haven't been any instances in this chapter, but I also look for effect when I work in a sentence. For example, does the order of the sentence bring effect to the reader, or not?
An example: "And I watched her, cheeks all red, twirling a strand of her hair as she sipped her coffee." > This is a normal sentence that is preparing us for something else, right? Maybe a little scene. It surely feels descriptive, doesn't it? But what if we didn't want description, but effect? What if the important thing wasn't how the main character watched her, but what stroke him? Then we could change the order: "And I watched her as she sipped her coffee, twirling a strand of hair, cheeks all red." Even for more effect, I would change the punctuation: "a strand of hair. Cheeks all red." (Even if it's not grammatically correct).
This was quite a shitty example, but it just occurred my mind.
___
So, to end this incredible long post: You do you! I have only shared some of my tricks when I look at the chapter. I can't stress enough the importance of editing. It can really change a chapter from A to B, but be careful not to edit too much: the first intuitive writing is always the raw, most honest one. You should not be losing that spark, but you can make the whole a little bit better, too.
I might be speaking of macro-editing in another post, when we near the end or we finish Part 2 of RJ, so that I can tell you how the order of the chapters changed, and such.
