hi! for the "one thing" I remember about your writing I'd think it's your ability to capture moments before a major change/edge?? like "a true thing", which is soo good at capturing band dynamics because no one is fully culpable or blameless, I feel like Niall was just trying to hold onto the stasis that everyone else seemed to know wouldn't last. its both foreboding and nostalgic! or "we'll live a long life" (which HAUNTS me) is so ominous with that "loads of times left//he wasn't at all ready"
I came late to the fandom so in ~canonverse, I usually write with this awareness of how I’m partly working off of institutional memory, like the body of memory of other fans who were here. But I mostly stay in one corner of the fandom and in that place, I often worry that I’m not taking everything into account (but like I am very happy with my corner aha). tl;dr that’s really cool to know!
what the one thing is
(cut below as i ramble on)
In another life, I probably would have written some bits of ‘a true thing’ not a little differently but more carefully. Like I think people who didn’t or don’t go on to read ‘i’ll go by you’, the fic it was a prequel for, might not catch just how much ‘a true thing’ is coming from Niall’s pov. I did expect that going in, though, so my quick imperfect fix was to set the band scenes where I imagined their lives were being lived together at the time, in non-places like hallways and curb sides, places that were not his personal space if that makes any sense.
I still wish I could write more 1d tourfic even though their last tour was two years ago ha. I feel like ‘we’ll live a long life’ was so much fun/agony to write because it was a time when the band was becoming incomplete and like Harry’s nightmare of Niall’s heart being cut out and Niall’s response, which was to try to comfort him whilst feeling their hearts beat in unison, and perhaps anxiously wondering which heart was whose anyway, really touched on the stakes of that. To bring it back to the start (sorry for this rambling!), I think ‘we’ll live a long life’ was deeply influenced by the feeling I got from other fans that this was a ship about a really deep bond taking shape amidst really big changes. It’s not more important than other bonds in the band, but there’s the sense (to me anyway) that they weren’t quite done with each other.
