#me smacking nick suzuki and nicklas backstrom with a broom: what are you doing in my house get out of here

[boysandgirlsandbabes]

for the ask meme: 7 and 10 ✨

(from this ask meme)

7. what books have shaped the way you think about writing the most? why?

kind of a sidestep answer (to hide the fact that i haven’t read a book for [redacted]), but i actually think theater as a medium has influenced my writing a lot! i’ve always been really interested in playwriting because i used to love writing dialogue and HATE having to write any character/setting description or action, but i think designing/directing shows in college forced me to be a lot more intentional about how an actor or a character’s blocking and movement during a scene does so much heavy emotional lifting, and made it a lot easier/more fun for me to try and incorporate more physicality into my writing (if u ever read a scene i wrote where two characters are having a conversation and one gets up to wash dishes, and the way they wash dishes mirrors the tone of the conversation, u can thank the first director i ever stage managed for, who was allergic to having characters stand still for more than two lines of dialogue if they could be doing something thematically resonant instead). 

more broadly, i also think plays do a better job than a lot of fictional media of just, like, refusing to answer questions that they raise? (something like wolf play by hansol jung (which is like, almost bar none, my favorite play of all time) come to mind - they feel less like the playwright is trying to send you a message, and more like they’re documenting field notes on human behavior, and handing them over to you to draw whatever conclusions you want from them.) i feel a really strong compulsion when i write to tie things up very neatly (not necessarily happily, but to account for all the loose ends and make sure that all the lingering questions are answered), and i think theater is a good reminder to not just accept the easy, straightforward answer, but to let stories and people be more complex and messy and unfinished than my instincts want to allow them to be.

(putting the second answer under a cut for brief mentions of suicide)

10. which patterns keep popping up in your projects/characters?

LMAO which patterns don’t??? i am nothing if not a one trick pony 🤪

(but actually though lol: i think a lot of the fic that i write (both in and outside of hockey fandom) is about recovery – what happens when the worst thing u can imagine ever happening to u happens, and then...you wake up the next morning and the world hasn’t ended or anything? everything just keeps going? and u just have to, like, keep living thru it, i guess? that makes it sound very dramatic lmao but as someone whose number one coping mechanism for the past decade has been “well if [X] goes really badly and i fuck up my entire life i’ll just kill myself!” it is honestly like...a useful mental exercise for me to put characters in a situation where the worst case scenario does happen to them, and then be like: okay. what happens next? how do you survive this? and like, sometimes the worst case scenario is like, “i have a chronic illness and it isn’t gonna go away,” and sometimes it’s “this thing that i used to love no longer makes me happy and i don’t know where to find things that will make me happy again,” and sometimes it’s “my hometown burned to the ground and i watched my dad kill a man in front of me,” and sometimes it’s “i told my boyfriend i wanted to slap him in the face and he laughed at me.” the last one is mostly facetious but the point is like! it’s about proving to yourself that there is always a way out, and it’s worth it to try and find that way out, even if the road getting there is hard and long and scary.)

in terms of less serious things lol – you might be in a cloudsandpassingevents fic if: 

you spend a lot of time thinking about your body, or what you’ve been taught your body can and can’t do or is/isn’t good for, or how much control you do or do not have over your body, or The Body™, in general

you cannot verbally express care for another person to save your LIFE so you’re relegated to constantly using acts of service

you keep doing things “after a second” 

there are weirdly detailed descriptions of your phone use

you have a sappy thought about another character and then immediately have to do or say something incredibly blunt to get rid of the feelings cooties

you commit a food crime and/or are forced to wash dishes at some point as a metaphor for your internal emotional state

you are named nick