#writelogging

[ciaran2020]

*thinks about my favourite character getting fucked over by canon* this is unacceptable *goes off to write fic where I fuck them over in my own, superior way*

[ciaran-archive]

so it turns out, "you love me and i know you love me and i don't know what to do with that so i'm just going to watch you be in love with me and not move and not say anything, and hope you stop, because i don't think i'm good enough and i'm waiting for you to catch onto that without realizing how much you've resigned yourself to being mine forever whether or not i get my head out of my ass" is still my favorite ship dynamic

[radiqueer]

ways to title your fic

think of a word that crops up in your fic. translate to latin. boom. 

song lyrics !

poetry is your friend poetry blogs are your FRIEND

title by date

title by what happens, but slightly abstracted. 

in which _ and _ and _, but _

5 + 1, but swap out the numbers for whatever fits

paste in the title of the word document because there are no laws guiding this shit

one word title

puns!

[soukcku]

especially if you’re writing fanfiction. you have the freedom to just choose to never write what you don’t wanna write. and most people get this concept when it comes to characters and ships but it also applies to other stuff. don’t like writing dialogue? write in reported speech and internal narration only. don’t like writing action? skive past the action scenes. don’t like writing internal narration? keep your writing sparse and learn to write body language to hint at your character’s emotional states. because i promise you once you’re at a point in your writing where you aren’t being forced to work around writing things you hate, you’ll be much happier. and then you can focus on writing what you love, which is so much nicer. 

[tenderwiki]

Hey. I know we're not mutuals or anything, so this is probably not very useful at all, but I think you should write what you want. Your darker/kinkier fics are honestly my favourites. I'm crap at communicating most of the time (and very new to the fandom) but fwiw I really enjoy your writing!!

aaaa thank you for this! it's so good to hear that someone likes the weird stuff I put out ¶:

[ciaran2020]

dynamics where the villain is the only person giving the hero the affection they crave are superior. there is just something about having to fight the only person who has ever tried to make you feel comfortable and safe that hits different. it's so painful and awful to turn down power and safety for a cause that doesn't love you back and doesn't really see you as a person, against someone who would love you as you are forever

[ciaran-archive]

[pretentious writing rambling]

i’ve been trying to articulate my personal writing ethos to a few people and it’s, something like - i believe that a story happens on 3 levels: the really apparent one, the obvious plot that keeps the story moving; the thematic and structural level, which is the way a story looks and what ideas the story circles around and touches on; and the narrative, descriptive/detail level, which is all the tiny nuances of absent-minded gestures and adjectives and metaphors that are scattered throughout a story so that any one on its own wouldn’t stand out but when you pick them out they form their own cohesive miniarc. 

because i mostly write fanfic, i don’t care so much about having the most brilliant plot. some fic writers care about this (good for them!) i don’t and can’t because my brain doesn’t work too great on that level. i’m fine with most of my stories having the same basic plot spun in 300 different ways and it makes it easier for me to get to the stuff i actually enjoy working with, theme/structure and description/detail. i think nailing those elements makes for a satisfying read even if the plot itself is nothing special because even if you can predict what will happen next, it doesn’t matter - the important thing is the way it’s written and what it signifies for the characters. because i write for love of characters, i want to explore particular ideas around them; i want to dig inside their head and pick out everything related to the idea of this story and figure out how to illuminate all those facets one by one. 

which is why my editing process consists primarily of going through the story and identifying the foundational themes and throughlines and adding focus to the moments where those elements exist most strongly. even if the reader misses every single theme and detail i added, it literally doesn’t matter, because just by reading it they absorb those themes and details and even if they don’t register they’re still a part of the way that story made them feel after they read it. 

of course, this only works when my audience is familiar with and loves the characters they’re reading about. goodreads would hate my work, they’d be like “this makes no sense” and they’d be right! because it’s not meant to make sense or have a mystery-thriller plot, it’s meant to walk you through the emotional landscape of a character. everything is in service of that goal.

[ciaran-archive]

I wish there were more depictions of less-than-fully-functional polyamory. I feel like it has an obligation to be clearly Good otherwise it is Clearly Bad but like, I do want polyamory where sometimes one partner feels left out or not as much a part of the relationship as the others, or people fail to communicate their desires and boundaries, etc. it's not even necessarily a completely unhealthy relationship (though it could be and that would also be nice) but like... regular human complexity and failure, actually?