#since I'm not a pro-writer and this is shaping up to be the longest thing I've written

[momosandlemonsoda]

for the wip ask game: i think that i'm breaking form a bit here, but i'd be fascinated to hear about your process for the long fics, if you wanted to talk about it. how much do you have planned out in your head before you start? how do you maintain such consistency in them?

apologies right now for how long this got...

So I’ve been mulling this over for a while, trying to figure out how to answer it. I’ll go ahead and use DTSD as the example, since it’s the one currently living rent-free in my brain, but this probably applies to all my long-fic.

A lot of times when I get an idea and start rotating it in my head, I spend a fair amount of time just doing that. Trying to figure out what’s going on, where the story is going, what I want to do before the end. I usually have things I’ve envisioned I want to include. And then lines show up out of nowhere that I have to write down, and then a scene kind of forms around it. 

I start telling myself the story—but I can’t go too far, because if I know the ending, I lose momentum and probably won’t write it. At the same time, I fully expected to be at the next major plot point by now (this was supposed to be 80k, she wails) and I am not because first, there were other plot points that showed up, but more… I wanted to let things happen more organically. I could write you 3k of LLH and DFS fucking for the first time in 10 years, but it wouldn’t have been true to either of them (and I really, really needed LLH to attempt to seduce DFS in an alley and get interrupted, this has been living in my head since like November) (also sex scenes are the worst and I need so many words to get to the actual fucking, maybe this wasn’t a good example). (maybe a better example is that I had no plans for FDB to play the showcase originally and when I decided to do that I figured that there would be like 4 chapters between him signing up and him playing.) ( ha ha ha sob )

I do know what is happening further out—I know the backstory that I’ve been feeding you in dribs and drabs, I know the way that Shan Gudao and Jiao Liqiao are going to show back up. I am determined to have LLH and FDB dance at a club and DFS angrily stalk over and join them. I have a fair amount of the next big arc written down in disconnected pieces (why are the connect-y bits so hard?). So I guess the good news is, I do have a plan for DTSD, and I don’t write unhappy endings. But the ~bad~ news is, I don’t actually know what that happy ending is. I’m still feeling out what seems in character for the three of them. 

As for consistency—first, thanks very much for the compliment! Second, the fics I like best, the ones I come back to again and again, are the ones that take their time to get where they’re going because they really dig into their characters, and they let the characters breathe so that their actions make sense, they aren’t contrived for the plot. So a lot of it is me going, ok, but how would they get there? How would that character react? With a background as a child of privilege living in the real world, not fantasy jianghu China, how does FDB react to being told he can’t make music, when that’s fundamental to him? If Li Lianhua is planning on keeping the rhythms of his life and leaving town because it’s warm now and he has enough money, what would make him stay? (spoiler: it’s certainly not the two men who are half (fully?) in love with him.) If Di Feisheng is a well-known musician trying to make a comeback and his former bandmate turns stalker, how is he going to deal with it?

So I think that’s what keeps me going, and keeps it consistent—I don’t need to bend them into particular shapes because I’m not completely certain how they’ll look in the end, and I’m trying to see how they respond to what I throw at them, and stay true (or as true as I can manage) to my interpretation of the character in canon.