What a 24h it was, "It Was Only A Matter Of Time" took me by my neck and shook me like a puppet. I don't remember last fanfic, heck last piece of media that pulled me in so badly. I was today at Hadestown thinking in the back of my mind how the heck Fox will stitch his gut back up.
And what a delight Fox was, the complexity, the wit, the underlying despair and hopelessness that fueled his suicidal tendencies. The absolute commitment to taking care of his brothers to the point it twisted into pathological lack of ability to ask for help. All that in the compelling story about injust power system and it's failures. About standing against impossible ods for your loved ones, because of your loved ones. About the power of trust that made strong community that will support you in dire times.
I really appreciate what you did with Quinlan. He is a love interest but he doesn't outshine the care, and love of Fox's brothers. He is important, but not a centerpiece, not a magical solution to the whole issue. It's hard to write romance relevant to plot yet not taking over it. It was delightfully made under your pen.
Love how you written characters, all of them seem so deep and alive. I wanted to ask you about your writting process. How does it look like in general? How much of the story you plan? Do you have any tips on coming up with plot point, metaphors, dialogues? (All of them which I adored). What was the hardest character for you to write?
(Pls infodump if you are comfy)
Thank you so much for this experience
HEY HELLO IM SO SORRY you sent me this message just as i was starting Uni and its been a CRAZY month thats for sure haha I tried to info dump as much as possible in reponse to your questions about writing to make up for taking so long to answer❤️❤️❤️
First of all im so glad you enjoyed my story! It really means so much to me when people come down and point out specifically things they like cause YES!!! You're picking up on my themes!!! My ideas!!! Let's go thank you so much!!! And yeah, im a hardcore fan of platonic relationships, mostly because they hold such an important place in my life. I also wanted this story to focus on Fox and his story as an individual, but I also wanted to acknowledge romance as still a very important thing to him amongst all of that. Im really glad you enjoyed that element :)
Im gonna put my writing advice under a read more. I am by no means an expert, this is mostly to relate to you how I view the writing process and specifically what I did with IWOAMOT. Hope at least some of it is helpful!
Planning: So generally im a HUGE planner when it comes to writing. I didnt have all it planned out necessarily, but i always find it pretty vital to have the begining and the end in mind, because especially if you dont have a clear end, you dont know what youre writing tiwards, and in a way you almost limit how cohesive and well paced story can feel when youre just weiting with no idea where the final position of your characters will be. Whne you have an end in mind, your job as a writer becomes "what needs to happen to all of these characters to get them physically, emotionally and mentally to this exact position" and all the stuff in between you can be very creative and fluid with. This meant i was constantly adding to my plan as I wrote and the story revealed points i had to adress. But that's just me, some writers love flying by the seat of their pants and seeing where they end up and honestly that's a perfectly valid way of doing it too, especially since you can get really bogged down in weoting EVERYTHING into a plan and then spend less time actually writing the damn fic
Plot points: Honestly, for plot points, im sorry, that one you just gotta thug out. Itll come to you whne it comes to you, but it helps if you just think about your story all the time. Plot points are also easier to come up with when of thinking in terms of 'how can i explore smth?' For example, i needed Fox to have more time between killing the Chancellor and him collapsing and behing taken to the hosiptal. How can i give him more time? Introduce a secondary objective of wanting to pick up the information about corrupt senators to take down the whole system. The Plot point is created and ontroduced to solve a problem and allow for Fox to run around longer and have a bunch of meaningful conversations before hes caught. But dont worry too much, i had a whole phase of worrying about how to bring Fives back at the end without some deus ex machina 'ooooo the force saved him and somehow constructed him a whole body out of thin air!' Or, even worse, just leaving him as a force ghost forever (which has lowkey horrifying implications) or having him like, fade away to the force which would feel SUPER sad after all they've been through. The eventual epiphany for how to bypass all of those potential endings (yippee! Palps stuck his body in a tank!) didnt come to me till id nearly finished the whole story, so yeah, dw.
Dialogue: For dialogue it was super important that i knew the characters. For creating dialogue id keep in mind 3 or 4 essential perosnaloty traits (eg Thire- pragmatic, level headed, disciplined) and that would inform their dialogue (how would someome level headed respond to that last comment? How would a pragmatic person approach this problem and what would they say?) To distinguish characters and give them a unique voice, i would also assign them specific vocal patterns. For example, i gave Thorn a kind of drawl, and with that in mind his dialogue was eaiser to write, or with Stone i made a rule that he would generally be the type not to contribute much to a conversation unless he had something to say.
Metaphore: Metaphors and langauge was something i could never plan for. They always came up during the writing process when i was thinking about dialogue or writing a scene and would go "damn what if this was used as a metahpor" and id type it up. Sometimes id write something once and keep bringing it up so it became a consistant theme (eg. Fox and his stars) A lot of imagery also came from just daydremaing about certain scenes on my walk to school lmao id play the same sene out multipe times in my head and sometimes something interesting and different would happen that i would put in.
Characters: For difficult characters, Funnily enough, i always found rex super difficult to write. He had such complicated feelings about Fox that meant balancing him and making him feeel like a consistant character was super tough. Second hardest was Fives. Cause he was always present but typically we saw most things through Foxs eyes. By contrast the easiest was hands down Fox cause we followed him and his emotional arc the closest. It was easy to write him because in a way his emotional arc was so entwined with the story. Most fun character to wrote was Wolffe. Lmao anything with him and Fox was such a blast cause he allowed scenes to get very volatile and charged.
Honestly, my overall writing advice is just be a little bit crazy and obsessed about your writing. Play scenes over and over in your head. Ruminate. Mull over it. Your story is yours to play with, align it in a configuration that makes you feel most fulfilled.
And here we have it, the final Chapter of IWOAMOT. It's weird to finish something you've worked on for a year and have poured A LOT of love into, so I hope you all enjoy tuning in one last time for one last chapter <3
Chapter 20 is just my shameless excuse to air out my QuinFox drinking headcanons (Fox drinks hard liquor which Quinlan HATES. Quinlan drinks the most interesting cocktails he can find on the menu which Fox pretends to hate but actually really enjoys)
You know, i don't think I EVER mentioned this before, but like a huge part of capturing the vibe of Rex's and Fox's relationship came from the Oppenheimer sound track, weirdly enough. Like, all of the flashback scenes with younger Rex (chapter 7) i had "Can You Hear the Music" playing on repeat and then for any further Rex scene that involved him thinking of Fox I put on "Quantum Mechanics" which is just a slower version of the first one. Idk guys, its weird I never mentioned it cause in my mind that was like 'Rex's Theme' that was legit just what he sounded like
omg “would you fall in love with me again” for iwoamot foxquin im sick to my stomach
You know I've never actually listened to Epic but listening to this song I prolly should. BUT YEAH ANON YOU ARE SO RIGHT ESP WITH THAT LINE "Would you fall in love with me again If you knew all I’ve done?" LIKE OUGHHHHHHHH DONT EVEN HIT ME UP
In It Was Only A Matter Of Time I know it’s about Fives and Fox, but I have a question about Echo!
Do they eventually find him? I know you have one chapter left of the fic so I don’t think you’re probably gonna show finding him but I just kinda curious on what happened to Echo
Yeah, Echos whole shindig is deffo not covered in IWOAMOT (alas, if only I had more time to plan and write a sequel 😔) but I HAVE ACTUALLY THOUGHT ABT IT. Echos story would prolly follow a similar route with canon, the only difference is that obvs the war would be dying down and Fives would practically drop everything and sprint across the galaxy the MINUTE he heard even whispers of him being alive. Echo would deffo come back to one hell of a story tho lmao
I've reached the inevitable point one gets to when about to finish a fic where ideas for sequels, prequels and spin-offs start to creep in. Since I have a tumblr, I might as well let you guys in on the ideas I have that I'll prolly never write but still persistently cross my mind these days.
All of these are related to IWOAMOT of course:
The 'Shameless Headcanons' prequel set in the Kamino days which would follow Fox's batch in the early days and insert as many Clone Folklore headcanons i could possibly fit into one story. I think this one would be quite fun, especially exploring Fox's latent force abilities and just the nuances of Rex and how he integrated into the main batch
The 'Disgustingly Sappy RomCom/Down right Horror movie' Prequel, which would FINALLY give me the chance to explore the EXTENSIVE BACKGROUND INFO I've created for Quinlan and Fox's relationship that I don't even TOUCH in IWOAMOT (I'm very sad abt this btw). I mention the RomCom/Horror bc I like to think that the early days of the QuinFox relationship was literally Quinlan kicking his feet writing in his diary with a sparkly pink gel pen like 'Fox is so cute ^.^ I like him so much he's so sarcastic and funny and he makes me feel bubbly >///<" and then there would be an abrupt cut to Fox who's gripping the sides of his desk so hard he's leaving indents in the wood with a haunted expression on his face like "I CANNOT be FUCKING ATTRACTED to this HOT GUY I have TRAUMA TO LIVE THROUGH and he's FUCKING STUPID" like the dynamic is very much "I have a crush /wholesome" vs. "I have a crush /agonised screaming"
The 'Let's see how many Corrie Clone ocs in can make' Spin off set during the events of IWOAMOT which would heavily feature my favourite trio of Kite, Maven and Kelpie and Condor too. I'd also want to look at a Corrie who is also force sensitive and how that effects them as well as a Corrie character who just spends the entire time scared shitless of Fox lmao (those last two are far more developed in my mind but I'm only dropping the general idea here)
The 'Let's see how complicated we can make Foxs recovery' sequel, which i have a vague idea for a plot line revolving around Quinlan and/or Fives being in the extremely uncomfortable position of regaining Fox's black out missions memories via Force magic Dream shenanigans. This one I'm hesitant to write, cause it could get real dark REAL quick, but I like the idea of testing Fox's relationships by having others be the one to see the very worst actions he's done, with Fox having to navigate the inherently terrible experience of his loved ones seeing him at a low he himself isn't even privy too, and his loved ones having ti deal with, ya know, terrible terrible violence. But this idea feels plain mean to write, especially when I worked so hard to give Fox a break.... it could be interesting though
Anyways, these are just some ideas I wanted to toss out, some are definitely more developed than others lmao. Feel free to lemme know what you think of them
