#apartment should be house or residence and drivers license should be DOD ID card

[compacflt]

i’ve got a question about your writing process: in order to write a 30 year narrative, you create it out of hundreds of individual moments & actions, and each one has to function by itself and also part of a whole—have truth to itself and emotional resonance in a timeline. imo the key to doing this successfully is to care about each moment and make each one memorable, which seems very difficult: you have to get at the meat of the human behavior, believably, in a way that matters and explains and progresses the story, every time. and to write 200k words of it you do it hundreds of times! could you talk a bit about idea generation for each moment and how you brainstorm and write them?

omg an excuse to make more diagrams ! Thank you so much for this lovely ask!

okay: in case you don’t want to scroll through like four/five months of my inane icemav Poasting, I’ve done a couple other posts that go into my process — here about specifically chapter 1 and here about the fatal flaw of my fics from a construction standpoint

but from an idea generation standpoint… it’s pretty boring and cynical. I literally just make checklists. “things that HAVE to happen.” here’s my notes app check list of stuff that HAD to happen for the story to make sense in my rewrite of what is now chapters 8 & 9. this is from last december lol

and here’s a checklist/diagram of the major story beats and the changes in relationship dynamics throughout the story. any one of these dynamics changing reflects on the others in a way that‘s worth talking about. the hard part is finding a framing device or scene to talk about them.

the A plot of the fic is ice’s relationship with the navy, primarily. his arc is defined by his rank. so that’s the number 1 dynamic I wanted to focus on in such-and-such scenes, and why I stuck as stringently as possible to the “one rank per chapter” formula until ice got to the top & had to reckon with what being at the top actually means. His change in ranks is inspiration enough for most scenes because it shifts the dynamics in a way that is worth remarking upon in and of itself.

as an example im thinking of this scene (mostly because it’s short but also) because i think it’s kind of representative of how my idea generation process works

It fills a lot of gaps that i needed filled at that specific juncture in the story. the idea started with a stupid little section of dialogue in my head (mav would be surprised that ice’s official Navy docusign signature isn’t his actual signature) that happened to be symbolically relevant too (of course ice would have two different signatures for his two different personas). Then it morphed into a discussion of Ice’s canonically unhappy-looking compacflt portrait, which is canonically unhappy-looking. Then add onto that ice admitting he’s only happy at home (home obviously meaning with maverick, given that he’s literally in his house right now and still doesn’t feel like he’s home) and maverick telling him, “well that’s a problem that has literally the easiest fix in the world. youre making this way more complicated than it needs to be. just come home to me.”

so it’s literally just checking off boxes of things I wanted to talk about. as I said, a very cynical creation process. ✅ ice and mav doing the long-distance-relationship phone call thing (framing device for the whole scene). ✅ mav knowing ice’s real vs fake signature ❤️. ✅ ice’s canon unhappy compacflt portrait that makes an appearance in TGM. ✅ ice not feeling at home in Hawaii. ✅ ice not being fulfilled by the job & only being fulfilled by mav. ✅ ice coming up with excuses to see mav at any possible chance he gets. ✅ ice still obviously thinking of mav and Bradley as his family & maverick as his home. Etc etc. You see what i mean? how many stupid little ideas, symbols, and dynamic shifts can i cram into a page or so? that’s pretty much my thinking.