Hi! For the meta asks, how about 4, 7, 22 and 24?
4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)
This was a hard one! Often when I go back to things I’ve written, I just pick them apart and can see where they’re weak. But anyway, here’s a bit from the (very short) fic about Gaara having to make the decision to send his sons off on a deadly mission, let me go.
“Please, just let me go with them,” Lee begs. His knuckles are white against the smooth sandstone of Gaara’s desk. He rarely begs for anything, anymore, accustomed to his tenure and status.
Gaara collapses a stack of papers in front of him. Each page clatters to the desk, bones being thrown for augury.
“Your squad is needed on the Eastern Front,” Gaara says coolly, but he won’t meet Lee’s eyes. “It would be a waste of resources to send two of our best close-range fighters to the same area.”
“Don’t talk to me about strategy right now!” Lee shouts, banging his fist on the desk. The surface rattles. The terra cotta pot of a cactus cracks, soil spilling across the forms. Gaara’s crowded office fills with the freshly dug grave scent of raw earth.
This is one of those few scenes that I feel still stands up to scrutiny after a long time away from it. I really like the imagery that’s in here, the looming death that sort of colors their whole conversation. I feel like there’s a lot of backstory that gets crammed into these few sentences, which is something I sometimes struggle with, going on long tangents about the lead-up to the fic rather than the current plot.
7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?
Hmm. I think I write a lot of visual description and do a fair amount of scene setting. I’m hard-of-hearing, so the visual description of places always resonates more with me. I often have to go back and deliberately add descriptions of background noises, because they’re not part of my general milieu. I forget, sometimes, that other people can hear (and hear well!) I think most of my stories are character-driven rather than plot-driven, so you get a lot of character movement and emotions without necessarily much happening. And I think my characterizations are a little unique, maybe slightly left of canon, especially for Lee because I feel like in Shippuden he didn’t get enough depth and became sort of a caricature of himself ... so I like to dive back into the depth of development we got about him in the original series. I have a fair few headcanons that always tend to sneak in, too. Like there being different ninja dialects and languages in the various villages, Lee’s first language not being the Shinobi common language (which is why he struggles with formality registers), Lee having very extensive residual scarring and chronic pain, and Gaara being a manlet (lol).
22. Do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?
I do! I reread a lot, both my own fics and other people’s fics. It’s sort of a comfort thing, like I know exactly how this story goes and I know I enjoy it. I often re-read when I’m trying to fall asleep, it’s sort of a mental lullaby. I do also reread to catch typos and little nitpicky editing things, so I make minor edits to fics even months later. Plus, like, for the most part I write the stuff I want to read. I really got into writing GaaLee because I felt like a lot of the stories I wanted to read just ... didn’t exist for them, and I wanted to fill that void. That’s much less of a problem now with all the active fans, but I still remember back in the day where you had to basically pan for gold to find good content for them.
24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?
I think so? I haven’t really been actively writing for that long. I wrote some in middle school (my horrible, cringey self-insert LOTR fic is still up on ff.n), and a bit here and there in high school. I’ve gone back and read some of the stuff I wrote then and some of it is ... decent, but clearly really amateurish. Since I got back into actually really focusing on writing in 2019, though, I do think I’ve made some strides. I’ve definitely gotten a lot faster (it took me literal months to write the 18k of Hanakotoba, but I banged out the 33k of The Stolen Child in like 2 or 3 weeks), and a lot more confident ... I can write in more places than in my bedroom with the door closed, and I don’t blush and wince when I write out character names! I think I’ve been able to improve some of my pacing and phrasing, and I’ve been able to build more internal monologue into the characters, which enriches the character development. And I’ve gotten a lot more confident writing smut with my smut prompt fill project this year, which is a big plus for me! Hopefully next I’ll be able to start integrating the smut into fics with actual plot, instead of having my long plot fics completely separate from the PWPs.
Fun Meta Asks for Writers!
