#i keep having writer’s block so have this blurb in hopes that it details enough of what i have in head

[izusun]

reverse hanahaki au wherein the one you love is the one who blooms flowers. also no one dies.

izuku growing up with only yarrows from inko. everlasting love. they are the first flowers he’s ever had blooming in him—the first he collected. he saw their little buds and knew they are from his mother’s, and izuku hopes his flowers for her are just as beautiful.

they are. inko blooms sunflowers from him. adoration.

. . .

when izuku meets katsuki, he blooms white gardenias. inko giggled when izuku showed her his flowers from katsuki, blushing brightly. you are lovely.

he wonders what his flowers for katsuki are, and if he likes them as much as izuku loves his. (purple delphinium. first love. katsuki strongly does.)

when he turns ten, he stopped blooming gardenias. izuku waits, seeing if katsuki would have more flowers for him. but he is empty, and izuku goes back to only having yarrows. he cries that night, holding onto the jars filled with dried gardenias.

(katsuki stopped blooming delphiniums. a week later, a blue salvia flutters from his throat. i think of you.)

. . .

it’s years later when izuku meets all might that yarrows are joined by different flowers again. blue iris from toshinori. faith and hope, a flower for izuku’s long journey.

and when izuku gets into ua, more flowers unfurl in him—a garden in his own right.

white jasmines from ochako. sweet love.

heathers from tenya. admiration and solitude.

freesias from tsuyu. thoughtfulness.

hydrangeas from shouto. thank you for understanding.

everyday, more flowers bloom in his being and izuku weeps at his friends’ love. thank you, he whispers, i love you too. his flowers for them convey the intensity of his feelings.

. . .

one quiet day when everyone is still asleep and the sun is barely breaching from the clouds, izuku coughs and coughs and coughs.

asphodel. i’m sorry.

purple hyacinth. forgive me.

pink camellia. i long for you.

red chrysanthemum. i love you.

with these flowers in hand, izuku runs to katsuki’s room. “kacchan?” he asks despite the coughs that threaten to scratch at his throat again.

(from inside his room, katsuki coughs out a heliotrope. eternal love. he stands. “yeah de—izuku?”)

x, x, x, x, x

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Hi! I just started reading your fan-fiction, "Adrenaline Rush" and I have to say it is VERY good. I have a question if you don't mind answering it. I am writing fan-fiction of my own and I have been pushing it off for months because I don't know where to start. For this, what was your writing process? Example: Did you write your plot first or did you write as you went to each chapter?

Hi, anon! Thanks for your very kind note and interest in Adrenaline Rush! The story has its issues/tangles, but it’s definitely been a fun and personally meaningful project for me to try writing. It means a lot to hear that you’re enjoying it! And that’s very exciting that you want to start writing as well. :)

Each writer will be different in terms of their creative process, so a part of your question involves learning more about yourself as a creator too! It’s good to know how your brain likes to work and what environment helps it hum along, which may or may not align with what works for me.

Honestly, AR’s design and development has been haphazard. For me, AR all started because I was unable to attend a nearby drag racing competition in 2018, and those races had been a pretty big staple in my life. At the same time, my head was full of Voltron shenanigans because I’d just recently joined the fandom. I was walking the family puppy when it hit me that Blue Lion, Red Lion, etc. would be good names for Top Fuel machines. I was so excited at the concept of exploring drag racing in a fic. It gave me a “race” to look forward to, along with all the drama and adrenaline that came with it. In that moment, I had enough excitement in my brain to convert the Potential Energy of my idea into the real Kinetic Energy of writing/typing.

If you have the energy but are not sure how to “start” your story, then you might consider what it means to set aside the opening or even the assumed first chapter for now. What scene/image/dialogue in your head do you really want to write right now? What happens if you just…start there, and then work backwards or forwards? Sometimes you have to get a feel for the medium you’re working with before you can really start molding the scenes and imagery into something fully formed. My first “scene” I wrote for AR was definitely not the opening one. The first story lines I wrote involved Lotor smoking a cigarette on a pro stock motorcycle, lol. I built around that image, as well as the image of a determined Allura sitting in Blue Lion, preparing to race. The desire to bring these characters and their racing machines to life really helped me hammer out that first chapter in a blur of a few days, where I puzzle-pieced scenes together. 

Other activities that can help you start a story is to look at how other authors start their stories. For example, do they start with a question, or a conversation, or a description of scenery? Do they start at the very beginning of a plot, or in the middle of action and catch you up on the details later? What kind of opening in other people’s stories most engages you? What happens to your story if you start with one element over another? What kinds of plots and story structures make you feel most engaged when you read them? What happens when you try to emulate those things? (Just questions to munch on here.)

I think it also helps to ask yourself why you want to write this story. Do you just want to explore an aesthetic that makes you feel good? Do you have a deep need to explore a certain kind of character or world? Are you hoping to get a catharsis of some kind? Is it a couple of things at once? Are you wanting to write a massive epic or just a short drabble to convey a moment in time? If you know “why” you are doing something, that can help you to know what kind of scenes to write—and what the story’s goal or vibe should be. Silly plot holes and clunky dialogue and some OOCness can be forgiven, especially in fanfic, which is a labor of love anyway—but if your story radically changes its tune or plot and no longer addresses the “why” that made you so excited in the first place, then that can alienate even you from it. Once you know what you want out of your story, then you can start plotting out all the different ways you could potentially achieve that goal. This feeds directly into the types of scenes that appear in a first chapter.

Before I started writing any actual scenes for AR, I did try to feel out more of the story by writing a promotional blurb. Like, if this were a book jacket or a Goodreads summary, what would that enticing blurb potentially look like? What was this story going to be about, aside from Lotor and Allura being pretty while they race machines, lol? I had some people in a discord who were kind enough to let me “pitch” a blurb at them to see if it would be of interest. This was my original pitch, which isn’t terribly different from the story summary as it appears on AO3 today:

The discord members were very encouraging, and so that gave me the push I needed to start writing story content, beginning with the images of Lotor smoking on his bike and Allura preparing to qualify. This tactic might not be for everyone just starting out, but writing a short promotional blurb/story summary can help you identify some initial parameters in terms of characters/conflict/setting. Having those basic parameters can then further target the types of images, dialogue, and scenes that make logical sense for introducing your story.  

If you need more structure than just free-form writing or building off an image in your head, you can definitely use an outline to help you identify scenes or images that you’d like to try working on. While AR did not start off with an outline, it does have a plot outline now to help ensure I don’t drop something important. So I started bulleting ideas, trying to stretch out the story summary to its natural/logical end point.

An outline can help you write linearly if clear, concrete structure resonates with your brain. It can give you an opportunity to “preview” how a chapter opening can affect future events before you even write them, if you’re worried about where free-form-writing can take you. If you want to use an outline, it doesn’t even have to be all that elaborate. It can just be bullet points or explanatory sentences, or pieces of dialogue. It can be notes on a poster arranged in a spider web design. It can be a collection of gifs on your computer that signify the emotions you want to simulate in the story—it can be literally anything, and it can evolve too.

Paradoxically, writing an outline has also helped me move away from having to write individual chapters in a linear fashion, which is sometimes hard for me to do over a long course of time. So readers on AO3 might experience AR as a linear story, but I have dozens of pages of future scenes or bits of dialogue that I felt inspired to write over the last few years. Like, one major scene appearing in the most recent chapter 9, which published here in January 2021—it’s been written since July of 2019, lol. Using an outline to tackle a story can empower you to follow your bliss in a nonlinear fashion. For example, sometimes I’m more in a mood to write racing, and other times, I’m more emotionally invested in writing AR’s background drama or romance. If I halfway know where I’m going based on my outline, I can switch gears to write what I immediately want to write, and then I can later sew scenes and dialogue together later in a fairly smooth fashion.The concept of writing a chapter straight from start to finish just doesn’t have to constrain me with this method, and that’s critical for me. I understand having to trudge through writer’s block for a particular scene, but I like to minimize that pain as much as possible. And sometimes moving beyond that point can remove the writer’s block entirely.

Admittedly, the original outline I wrote for AR doesn’t match 1:1 to what’s currently written. As I started actually writing out scenes correlating to those bullet points on my outline, things changed. The space between bullet point 1 and bullet point 2 expanded with additional scenes, and those additions changed the details in the original bullet point 2. So my outline has gone through several tweaks as well.

This is the “organic” slop that can occur between your true written product and your initial assumptions for where the story should go. There are going to be plot milestones that you likely have to hit in order to achieve your end-goal/correct vibe with the story, but it’s totally okay to let your characters have a voice in how they get there. You might start an outline or a story assuming Road Trip A through the city is the best way to get to the end or achieve a certain vibe, but as your characters grow in your head, they might decide for themselves that Road Trip B through the mountains is the best way to the end. Once you set a story in motion, it’s no longer just you driving it. Your characters should drive the story too. Allowing them to do that will keep you emotionally invested and interested in the story. Sometimes, your characters will even write for you if you don’t know what to write. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I’m in control of AR—I suppose I’m the navigator with a map sitting in the passenger seat, but I know I’m not the one holding the wheel, LOL.

And while we all do hope to create something quality that we’re immensely proud of, I do think it’s important to keep G.K. Chesterton’s thought in mind: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” In other words, the desire to create something immediately perfect with minimal effort can keep you from doing anything at all. It’s better to accept a messy first draft and to know you may have to revise later, than to sit in fear and end up writing nothing. And sometimes, your brain needs physical content to react to before you feel you’ve found the best option. Like, just getting content down to start with can change your whole perspective. You can revise and mold things as you get a better feel for what you want to convey. There’s always draft 2 for structural changes. Or draft 3 or 4 for polishing and getting a satisfying first sentence down. There’s no pressure to crank out a Pulitzer Prize Winner on a first draft or even after you publish something to a fanfic archive. This is fanfic. It’s supposed to be fun, at the end of the day. Let yourself enjoy the process of messy creation. Let your characters help you out. Don’t be afraid to revise or try out a few different things get to the vibe/end you really want. To do is to know.

If you’re still not confident in yourself or your abilities to make a critical design decision, you can always engage a beta reader or have someone listen to your ideas. Talking things out loud or reading your work out loud to yourself can help you process creative decisions in a new way! There’s also a significant difference between typing on a computer or writing things down on paper. Typing on a computer can take away the fear of permanence, while writing things down on paper can slow you down and make you experience each word more fully.

So I guess to wrap all of this up: I have a pretty fluid process, and I’m more worried about not creating at all than I am about screwing it up. Even a screwed-up work can teach you something and help you get somewhere better next time. And if you had fun making it, then maybe it wasn’t a screw-up at all! I really encourage you to soul-search on what gives you joy or excitement regarding this fic idea you have, and to hold on tight to that joy as you begin translating images in your head or outlining plot points, or something in between.

I hope something from this response helps you! <3

[dumbfrickinlit]

extended bio

I’m dani. 24 years old at the time of writing. Gender can be weird sometimes but overall I’m ok with identifying with my assigned sex/gender, which is female. You could call me other stuff and I wouldn’t really care though. But this isn't a blog about me. Well, not completely. You're here for some nerd talking about themselves and D&D. So let's get into that.

I'm not quite a newcomer. I've been playing on and off for about two years, I believe.

My first introduction to the game was seeing silly out-of-context stories and quotes of other peoples' games via tumblr and reddit. I found everything so hilarious and captivating that soon enough I found myself binge-watching an entire D&D livestream series (s/o to High Rollers). Only a couple months after I'd initially taken interest to D&D I actually started playing! My friend (@bloodylilzi on this website) who was already into role-playing introduced me to a group of friends who were also interested in doing D&D. The rest is history, I guess. We've seen a small handful of people come and go, but I think at this point we've finally shaped into a tight-knit, reliable group that I've become more than a bit attached to. While I still have so much to learn and experience, I’ve gained more than a considerable amount of knowledge from playing with them.

Our games' actual format and style is likely not similar to most people's. Our group's "sessions" (if you can even call them that) are chat/text-based and are more akin to marathons that last days or weeks on end that have respites here and there for work, school, sleep, etc. It’s very breakneck in pace, but because of that it’s incredibly immersive, which I really enjoy. It’s chaotic, sure, but it’s become what I know and love.

From my time playing D&D I've been able to discover and define what I love and look for in the campaigns I am a part of: that being immersion, character development, storytelling, and the forming of relationships between characters. If you want further explanations on these topics, what they mean to me, and why I love them so much, you can read that in this little blurb here:

1. Immersion

Immersion is something I value immensely as D&D serves my penchant for escapism. It’s not that I have a terrible life; I just enjoy occupying another person’s head in another person’s world. -- It makes a change from being inside my own all the time. It's really that simple.

2. Character development

When I mention character development here, I mean both the development and solidifying of the character in my brain just as much as the changes a character will undergo throughout a story. I think both are incredibly interesting. I don’t ever have a strong idea of a character I make when I first start making one. -- It could be as simple as a two or three-word thought like “flamboyant magician" or some sort of “aesthetic” or a feeling or something. From thereon out playing the character becomes like chipping at a block of marble — a slow whittling away until the character becomes something of their own, defined by both my exploration of the character and the events of the campaign as they unfold.

3. Storytelling

This is pretty straightforward. -- I mean, little beats a good story, right? That being said, I enjoy my D&D campaigns to read/sound like long epics. I enjoy when every little detail seems purposeful and events and people seem to constantly fold in on each-other. I hate when things seem inconsequential. I dislike it when characters are introduced only to never be heard from again. To be fair though, maybe some of that is necessary and/or unavoidable - especially in the chaotic and unpredictable world of D&D. But I’m nothing if not incredibly picky. Maybe someday I’ll loosen up, but for now a storybook-like campaign is what I consider to be the peak experience.

4. Forming relationships 

Really? - I just enjoy making friends (and enemies and everything in-between) in the game world. I like learning about other characters. I’m the type of player to keep goading your NPC until they tell me anything and everything I can get out of them. And one of the things I enjoy most is having long, deep, meaningful conversations with another character. All of these things are very much because I enjoy sucking up useless information, but amongst other things I enjoy true believability in the relationships of the party members. To me, I really want to feel and believe that the team is a team. Look, I know it’s the world of fantasy, but not everyone travels with a group of strangers (and stays strangers!).

Anyways, those are the things I enjoy. D&D drives me crazy, but in a good way. When a story really gets going it gives me a boom of creativity like no other. And although my go-to medium is drawing, my involvement in D&D has inspired me to slowly picked up the art of writing.

I should state upfront that I am not a professional writer, and that my education in creative writing and the English language as a whole does not extend beyond my high school years (with the addition of a single English class during my college years). Before D&D I found no reason to nor interest in writing my own works. Because of this, it has been difficult to judge the quality of my literature. I’ve been told before that my formal writing is/has been “horrible,” but I’ve also had people tell me that my writing is excellent. For the most part I’ve stopped trying to make heads or tails of it. I have some strange locutions, my understanding of punctuation is turbulent, and I am one of the worst abusers of the comma this world has ever known, but I think outside of these things I do just fine. It doesn’t matter much to me anyways; when I write it’s for my own enjoyment. And I can only suppose that with attention and practice I will be better tomorrow than I was the day before.

So I think that covers everything relevant: me, D&D, writing... yeah. I am who I am, I like what I like, and I write what a write; and all of these things are good. Hopefully you will think they are good too, or at least enjoy them. While I admit that this blog will more than likely exist as some void that little will ever look at, it doesn't matter much to me.

To me, this space is my own. It is meant to archive my old works and (hopefully) provide inspiration for newer ones. And that is all I could ever hope for this place.

- dani