actualcomplaintsfrommystudents

[jitteryfool]

Not Five, Klaus and Viktor, the three favorites of the fandom, being the only ones not sitting on the bench...

[chainofclovers]

fic writer interview

Thank you for the tag, @talldecafcappuccino! 

name: chainofclovers

fandoms (i write for): Currently, Ted Lasso and Grace and Frankie. But the Devil Wears Prada fandom is where I got started! And I’ve written a few stories for other fandoms, too.

two-shot: I think two-shots are my least used fic format! I typically write one-shots, series made up of multiple one-shots, or multi-chapter stories. I think along came a spider, in which Ted Lasso accidentally shaves off part of his mustache and looks like a dumbass but he and Rebecca start dating anyway, is my only semi recent two-shot.

most popular multi-chapter: Done with the Compass, Done with the Chart, a multi-chapter Grace and Frankie story that includes multiple POVs from Grace, Frankie, and their four kids! I felt like I was in over my head multiple times while writing that story, and I’m really grateful it got the response it did.

actual worst part of writing: When I don’t have enough time and feel like I’m stealing time from other things. When I struggle to focus and it feels like I’m wasting the time I do have. When I accidentally think too concretely about something I’ve written and then when it’s time to actually get the words onto the screen, it feels stilted by comparison. Those are just a few of my top favorite worst parts of writing!

how you chose your titles: Miserably and right before posting, usually. I’ve been trying to get a little better about that--lately I’ve had a working title on most of my stuff. I’m a big epigraph fan, and usually find an epigraph to help guide me pretty early in the writing process, so it helps if I can remember to think about titles in the same context.

do you outline: Yes, for anything longer than a thousand words or so. My outlines usually look like mile-markers or signposts, and I don’t always follow each point, but it’s really helpful to have little footholds into what comes next. And even if I don’t know the exact ending line or ending scene, I have to know how the story will end--the emotional note, the resolution or lack thereof.

ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: For Ted Lasso, I had a couple of ideas from things that I very clearly won’t get to write before s2 comes out, and I probably won’t because I’m a big fan of writing either post-canon or engaging with whatever canon is available. One of my ideas was about marriage and the question of whether or not to change one’s name, and I wanted to explore Rebecca’s relief at getting her old name back and my headcanon that even if she were to marry again, she wouldn’t change her name. We’d have Bex in there as a Millennial struggling with the same stuff, maybe in the context of having married and divorced Rupert too? And we’d have Ted, and reflections on how he and Michelle thought it was really romantic to have the same last name when they married all those years ago, but how he wouldn’t have the same expectations or assumptions now. It’s possible that those ideas will be relevant even after S2 is out and I’ll engage with them in some form or another, but time will tell!

I also have a few G&F fic outlines and snippets for things that just aren’t gonna happen at this point. Definitely not done writing for that fandom, but for a variety of reasons I’m not motivated to go back to those ideas.

callouts @ me: I have GOT to get better at actually writing when I’m thinking about writing. Also I have an entire tag called #chainofclovers callout post if you would like to read the historical record of times I called myself out on this website.

best writing traits: Details! All the observational stuff. This isn’t to say I do an amazing job with this in every paragraph I write, but I work really hard to try to create a textured world that captures something about what it would mean to be this person or that person. I love, love, love filtering sensory details through a particular character’s POV. What do they pick up on that someone else wouldn’t? What comforts them, what challenges them? Which of their senses is the first to notice when something’s up?

spicy tangential opinion: Totally agree w/ @talldecafcappuccino’s answer here! Here are a few opinions of my own, based on my own experiences writing fic.

Be confident in what you post. No one expects perfection. Don’t apologize for your writing in your author’s note. Don’t joke that people shouldn’t read it. It’s like when someone says “I hate public speaking” right at the start of the speech. It’s like asking someone to listen less, to engage less carefully.

Leave comments. (I’m still a little behind on comments in current fandom, so this can be a callout post for me too.) It is impossible to overstate how much it means to receive comments of any length. Most writers I know don’t write solely to receive comments and engagement, but comments and engagement are a massive part of what makes it fulfilling to write within a fandom. 

Back things up. Mediums like tumblr and discord are ephemeral. When you post to AO3, the story and its comments are going to stick around a lot longer.

tagging people's whose writings I've read recently: @m-a-salter, @dollsome-does-tumblr, @eightforyou, @thesumdancekid

[echodrops]

Hi, i'm curious... Can you share some of your favourite fics? What kind of stuff do you like to read?

Interesting ask; since you didn’t specify a particular fandom, I’m assuming you just mean my favorite fics in general? Of all time? Or were you looking for more recent fics? Let me know if this wasn’t what you were looking for.

Hmmm…

Well, my absolutely undisputed favorite fanfic of all time is Twigcollins’ signal to noise series, particularly the short fic “Death Takes a Holiday.” I could go into a massive analysis about what makes this series stand out to me so much, but I’ll just keep it short and say that this particular story is what I think of whenever someone asks me what my writing goals are. Everything I want to capture as a writer–wit, charm, vulnerability, grace, evocative imagery, silliness, seriousness–is all encapsulated beautifully in this series and in this short fic especially.

Some other greats that come to mind from the past are:

Quillslinger’s Deceitful Above All Things

Zeff N Company’s Gunmetal

Cygna_Hime’s i don’t need you (to worry for me)

Resmiranda’s Tales From the House of the Moon

Glassamilk’s Gutters

Nuitnovember’s Sign a New Agreement With Itunes

suncityblues’ If There Is Light (but this one appears to have been deleted, RIP)

Legete’s the sirens and the thunder

And there are probably many, many others but my memory is garbage for medical reasons and I never thought to keep a list of all my very favorites across multiple fandoms, so some great fics are probably consigned to oblivion in my search history forever. If I think of more I guess I’ll come back and add them. XD

Looking back at these fics, I think I’d say that my “type” is really aesthetically oriented, atmospheric fics. I tend to prefer strong non-romance-related plots over fics that are entirely about a ship (or, if they are only about a ship, the fics need to be genre savvy and creative in their use of tropes), and I tend to prefer canon, canon divergent, or at least canon adjacent fics over entirely AU fics. I think the “emotion” of a story is almost more important to me than the pairing or even sometimes the actual beats of the plot itself–if the writing quality is high and the storytelling is compelling, I can fall in love with a fic even if I would never have read that ship or type of plot otherwise. I like stories with melancholy vibes and even sometimes tragic endings, although I feel like stories have to earn their tragedies for such endings to be worth it. In short, I like “pretty” stories with clear, strong writing voices.

There are also certain tropes I like to read a lot. In particular, I really love Outsider POV fics and stories that look at characters’ behaviors and situations from different perspectives. I love almost scientific-tinged fics where a character–perhaps one of a different species like an alien or other worldly being–makes observations about a “normal” character and is confused and amazed by the differences. Gold. I’m a huge sucker for accidental baby acquisition, especially when it’s male characters who are uniquely unsuited to parenting who get stuck with children for both the comedy and heartwarming factors… Found family is A++… Villain redemption and reorientation into normal life stories get me EVERY TIME… Crack-treated seriously is a special interest of mine. Like, fics that take absolutely bizarre or absurd plotlines and treat them realistically and with deep thought are flawlessss. Speaking of crack, I have a soft spot for well-written rare pair fics; there are so many fun interactions that never get explored by a majority of fan writers… World-building and fics with careful action to background details are so nice!! And a special guilty pleasure: while I tend to prefer canon-based stories, I do really like dragon AUs because I really like dragons in general…

On the other hand, there are some tropes that can completely turn me off a story in seconds. Probably biggest pet peeve is fics where characters drink, do drugs, or even just smoke “for the aesthetic.” Drunk fics often feel like an excuse to write OOC to me, drugs aren’t cool kids, and like… do the people who write cigarette smoking into their fics know how absolutely unsexy it is in real life? I feel like cigarettes in fics are a 50/50 toss-up between real-life smoker authors who are projecting their habits onto their characters and authors who have never smoked a cigarette in their lives and just think it looks cool/sexy/edgy. There’s an annoying correlation between villain characters and cigarette smoking in fics and I’m just like… :/// Love triangles and will-they-or-won’t-they plot lines tend to exhaust me… Gratuitous smut without a logical plot for said smut, such as two characters who have absolutely no build up to their attraction suddenly deciding they want to fuck is just like... “Sure, Jan” to me.

It takes A LOT, A LOT to convince me to read a coffee shop, floral shop, or soulmate AU. Absolutely nothing against anyone who writes them, and I know they can be done very well, but as much as I agree with that one post here on tumblr about the two cakes, I still feel like there’s a such thing as too much cake, sometimes. XD I crave diversity in AUs, like where are the “I got hired at Hooters but I’m a dude” AUs? My “I’m a bouncer… at Costco” AUs? “My family bought a snowcone truck and now I’m forced to shave ice all summer” AUs? The “I work at a pawn shop and people keep trying to sell me really weird shit” AUs? The “I mow lawns for a living and your yard looks like hot garbage but you keep insisting you don’t need my services” AU? “I got in trouble with the law and was assigned to clean up the streets near your work as community service” AUs? I feel like there’s a lot of comfort in using a tried and true AU structure, but the most memorable AUs for me tend to be those which do things totally differently from anything I’ve seen before.

All of this makes me sound like I’m really picky but the truth is that when I get free time, I just read basically everything that’s available. I’m that “goes through the AO3 tag… then goes through the AO3 tag again with lower standards” type readers. If the summary and tags look even remotely interesting to me, I’ll definitely give it at least a shot. My tolerance range, even for things like bad grammar and OOC is really pretty high, especially for rare pairs… T____T

Currently I’ve been reading mostly BNHA fics. aloneintherain’s history has its eyes on you was very nice, and I’ve recc’d juurensha’s stuff before but their ShinIida collection is charming. I recently caught up with Ohmytheon’s Reconfigure and it is the embodiment of all my special interests so I’m especially excited to see where it goes.

Uh… I hope that answers the question???

Please send me fic recs that match my obscure personal tastes; I’ll love you forever.