#brought to you by it being 5 am and i couldn't sleep so yee haw

[radellama]

13, 18 (something from Men of Mystics!), 29, and 36!

13. What is a subject matter that is incredibly difficult for you write about? What is easy?

Hmm... I feel like the hardest and easiest thing is writing characters uniquely. In bigger projects, I care about the characters and put a lot of effort into making them feel like they have depth and are themselves - butttttt also it's hard to not make everyone sound like me. I think the effort shines through, but the social aspects of characters is really difficult for me, esp when I want them to come across a certain way

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end. Spicy addition: Questioner provides the passage.

(WAUGH I MISS MEN OF MYSTICS SO I'LL GIVE A PREVIEW OF VERY FAR INTO THE FUTURE)

"Well aren't you just a bundle of contradiction." Flea mused.

"Pardon?" Harland asked.

Flea sauntered up to harland, circling around him as he spoke.

"A friend to both sides of the war." He swatted harlands hair from his shoulder, watching it fall as harland avoided eye contact. "A pacifist whose work has made weapons."

Harland opened his mouth to defend himself, but flea dragged his finger across his chest. Harland couldn't help but get distracted as the generals nail tugged at his collar.

"I don't make weapons." He said, unable to hide the slight waver in his voice.

Flea pouted at him condescendingly. "You may not make them, but would they exist without you?"

Harland clenched his jaw.

"Even when you fight-"

"I don't fight." Harland interrupted.

"EVEN WHEN YOU FIGHT," Flea continued, "you are offensively defensive."

Flea smiled, enjoying Harland struggling to keep himself composed. He stood in front of him, tracing his jawline. "What a contradictory mess of a man…”

SO.... This is one of the core moments for harland that I wanted to get right... So here's the draft of it so far lol. I wanted this confrontation in particular to not only question Harlands actions and involvement in the war, but also to show how his character is starting to fracture.

The initial conception of harland was just to give Magus an epic boyfriend to be gay with, but as I also wanted it to be a love letter to his character, as Harland developed more I realised that the ONLY way I wanted to write a romance like this, would be to explore the good AND bad of both Harland and Magus. It's a little difficult to explain, but I want the two men to rub off on each other (😏) and slowly corrupt until they need to question their very core and ideals. Like, think about it... A war lord and a pacifist being together is.. So strange. I knew early on in creating this story that harland would start off nieve and relatively sheltered in his point of view, and that you as the reader would get hints towards the fact that harland is an unreliable narrator and that it will become more apparent when he starts to crack. Harland will become Magus and Magus will become Harland, they will corrupt each other, they should've been more like each other, they should've stayed themselves. It's an all consuming romance that lasts beyond their time as a couple. And in this passage it only feels appropriate that Flea, a master of illusions, is the one to force him to see reality. But, yknow, in the provocative way he likes to do because it's just sooooo easy to get harland all flustered and it's really funny

29. Where do you draw your inspiration? What do you do when the inspiration well runs dry?

Literally anything and everything babbbeeeyyy!! I strongly believe that if you limit your inspiration and over think them, you're fucking yourself over. I feel like being inspired and letting inspiration come are different things, and you can't force either of them lol, you just gotta let it come as it will.

When I'm struggling to think of things, I'll often try to work backwards or go through inspiration things I've collected. It really helps to collect it all and keep it somewhere you can access easily enough, so you can go through it to try jog your memory. I'm sure some people have noticed that I tag a lot of interesting stuff for my characters Abe and Orc, and that's a pretty good example of what I mean by not limiting inspiration lol... Curating stuff in your mind can be really helpful cause you learn to look at and think of what parts inspired you, and how you wanna work on that inspiration with your skills and strengths.

ALSO another thing that helps when I'm feeling pretty dry is to just spitball and be curious. Curiosity is pretty straight forward, just ask questions and try to learn more about stuff and deepen your understanding of things, who knows what kinds of things you can be inspired by!! My st au is inspired by star trek and chrono trigger and mushrooms and hive minded parasites. Abe and Orc is inspired by the interesting things that happen in the mundane, by staircases and history and cutlery and genitals and the weird thresholds between strangers and friends. These all kinda sound disconnected but like.. They're so linked! Whenever the stories get to parts where you see how they're connected I hope you'll remember how strangely my brain collects and curates insp haha.

Like... Who knows!? Maybe you'll end up inspired listening to your friend talk about their dads worm farm, or while you're absently mindedly catching the bus home, or when you're passively watching a documentary on household appliances in Victorian England - things you'd never think you could relate to what you want to work on. A varied creative diet is important, and I also think recognising the fact that things that DON'T inspire you (ie, that actively pisses me off / feel negative insp for this) can be just as helpful as things that do >:)

36. They say to Write What You Know. Setting aside for a moment the fact that this is terrible advice...what do you Know?

I know that I know nothing... Soooo... Who give a shit.

I think a lot of people get caught up in like... 'I don't know [subject matter] so I shouldn't write it!!!1!" BUT it's contradictory when the same kinds of people write escapist fantasies about being rich and having it all. You can draw some very real and evocative scenarios from transforming your lived experiences into fiction and explore them- but I don't think people should discount that we KNOW we want to write things bigger than ourselves... I try to follow more of a "I KNOW when it feels good" for whatever purpose I'm writing for. If I wrote exclusively in what I "know," there'd probably be too much repetitive and boring shit because I only "know" so much

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