Hey there! Firstly, let me express my gratitude and appreciation towards your masterpieces. You know, your fics can always make me feel touched and light me up whenever I feel depressed. To be honest, maybe you are like some kind of fanfic god to me, so thank you again for your hard work!
Also, I am really curious about your process of writing those fanfics. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing this, it’s perfectly fine :D! And if you are good, here’s my question: Please allow me to take Warm, Like Starlight as an example. In this fic, George is a Cat-Hybrid, which is undoubtedly suitable for him. Also, he is an admiral of the space ship, which is also very reasonable based on his personalities. So what I really want to ask is that do you come up with these fantastic ideas simultaneously, or some of your creative thoughts are actually “activated” by your other ideas?
Last but not least, if you feel like you want to share other writing techniques or some kind of interesting things happened during your writing , please spill and I will always be your loyal audience :D
Thank you again for your fics!
First of all—thank you so much 😭 literally such a sweet sweet message I appreciate all you said!!
For Starlight, I actually used this writing prompt for inspo and uhhhhh honestly I wrote that initial chapter in under 20 hours when I was loopy as hell from COVID and lowkey in a fever dream and hardly remembered half of it when I woke up. So, the alien-cat hybrid thing, that was all the writing prompt. The George having a high-ranking role on the ship, the ancient Egyptians vibing with the cat aliens, and every other wacky thing in Starlight… yeah that was all my COVID brain, so I feel like I can hardly take credit. That being said, in a lot of other fics, sometimes the whole plot shifts based on a random idea that I realize would fit super well in a scene. My witness protection AU turning in my piss kink fic like 5k into the story is prime example (ATRM) lol
For Starlight, I do remember prior to writing it I struggled to determine if I wanted the alien hybrid to be cat-George or dog-Dream. I thought dream being a dog and really leaning into George like “oh come on! No one’s gonna know it happened and I’m giving you permission. I wanna know what it feels like!” And human George who’s lucky enough as it is to be on the crew of an alien ship for the first time is like “knock it off you’re going to get me banned from space!!” Ultimately, cat-George won because… something about the ancient Egyptians I don’t know anymore lol
My writing has changed a lot over the years, both in style and in process. I’m still not one for proper outlines or truly knowing the whole story before starting, but I can say at least jotting things down—even if they’re notes for far away in the story—as little bullet points is soooo helpful. Most often, I start a story because I have a random idea for a concept or scene. For the current fic I’m working on, this is the ‘concept/prompt’ I wrote myself to stay on track: Fic idea: omegaverse, dream puts out a Craigslist ad for a non-sexual hookup aka hes touch starved, george is traveling and needs a place to crash so he responds to the ad, yeah … so clearly not very detailed or anything, but I add bullet points or leave myself comments so I don’t forget future things I want to happen—so annoying when I have a good idea, forget it, take the fic in a different direction, then remember the first idea and wish I did that instead.
An example of writing a whole fic because of one scene in particular I want to write is my Karlnap fic BYAL. All I wanted to write was Karl visiting Sapnap in Texas, Sapnap taking Karl to a rodeo, a cowboy hitting on Karl (w/o Karl even realizing he is), and Sapnap swooping in and getting possessive of Karl thus warding away the other guy. I wrote some of the scene when I first started to get it out of my system, but then I worked my way backwards. Like, why are they in Texas, how did they there, what’s the dynamic of Sapnap’s family, etc etc. and once I filled in all the backstory and got to finish writing the scene that started it all, I had to make the ending—who confesses first, how do they get together, how does Sapnap’s family react, etc etc again. All in all, this paragraph-long synopsis ended up being a ~140k fic. I think the whole rodeo scene is maybe 5-10k in total lmao
Idk if any of this is helpful or interesting, but if you’re the kind of person who stresses about the daunting task of having everything figured out before they start, just say fuck it and start wherever you want. I once wrote a fic entirely out of chronological order (IWIWABY) because I kept jumping around to write a different scene that felt more interesting at the time, and it actually ended up one of my favorite fics I’ve written :’)
Again, thank you so so much. Comments like this are absolute crack to authors/fic writers, you have no idea <3
