![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
2024 writing year in review
Retirement era OVER! I'm not only writing again but had my most productive year ever in 2024 in terms of number of works posted and word count.
Here's the review where I do absolutely everything but stay on topic
Questions taken from a mix of these sources 1 2 3
Fandoms written for: Seventeen, SHINee
Total Words Written: 50,005 (those 5 words coming in absolute clutch)
Arachnophobia (Jun/Hoshi, 6.6k)
Smokescreen (Hoshi/Taemin, 16.4k)
Island in the Sun (Seungcheol/Jeonghan, 3.3k)
triangles (Jeonghan/Joshua, Jeonghan & Seungcheol, 6.3k, sequel to circles)
Spirit (Woozi/Hoshi, 7.1k)
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?
More, since I expected to write exactly zero words. I didn’t anticipate that I would come out of hiatus in 2024 mostly because I wasn't aware that I could.
Any recent favourite characters, dynamics, and settings?
Hilariously, a 2.5 year hiatus has reset me to default pairings. I think most of the government assigned ships in svt are really good. But I often find myself disagreeing with the general meta on what it is about them that makes them so compelling and I think that's fuelling me to want to write them. This year I wrote jeongcheol and soonhoon for the first time, currently very into verkwan.
Are there any recurrent themes and commonalities that emerged in what you wrote this year?
I don't think so? Nothing beyond what has always been common in my themes or style (ie. writing that skirts around the emotional crux rather than point at it explicitly, style that prioritises simplicity, etc). It's been interesting though to see how much of it has managed to remain the same after all these years.
What do you feel you've learned or improved at the most since this time last December? (Or in my case, since 2021)
This is kinda hard for me to answer because I think "improving" or "learning" have not been on my radar this year. My only goal has been to keep the little flame in my head that compels me to write from going out. So this year I wrote whatever fuelled that fire and dropped anything immediately when I felt the flame start to flicker, without caring much about how objectively "good" any of it was. Which was really freeing!! I don’t owe anyone good work, especially not myself.
Most fun story to write this year:
Pretty much everything I wrote this year was fun because if it wasn't I dropped it immediately.
Smokescreen was fun in that it was my first time writing this way—usually worldbuilding is something I have to do consciously once I've decided the message I want to convey. But for Smokescreen it was the opposite: the universe popped up in my head and kept expanding and expanding, so I just kept chasing the horizon of it and writing down everything that made my brain feel carbonated. The wordcount did run away from me though and by the end I was fighting to finish it. It’s also the fic I might change if I could—I think the idolverse commentary is kinda idealistic and one-dimensional as it wasn't my original intention and was shoehorned in kinda late. But then again I was not writing to deliver groundbreaking idolverse meta, I was writing to feed a fire. So in that sense no, I actually wouldn’t change anything.
Most challenging fic to write this year:
Fish in the Water part 2 but that’s for obvious reasons (hadn’t written in years, had to wrestle through several thousand words of existing draft). But I had to do it because I knew I couldn't write anything else with it hanging over my head. The only other hard one was the 5k worth of WIP from August/September that I probably will never post because it’s too hard to finish (Joshua Hong farming rpg au). Unfortunate since it has some absolutely killer lines in it.
Personal favourite fic from this year:
It's a three-way tie between Island in the Sun, Spirit and triangles, and all for different reasons.
In Island in the Sun I felt I did a good job of capturing a dynamic (canon Jeongcheol) that I'd been previously too intimidated to even attempt.
Spirit had the longest marination period (got the original idea in June, posted in November) and I think it's the most interesting thing I wrote this year in terms of construction and experimentation with different ways to express an idea.
I think triangles managed to capture a very specific, complex array of feelings and was probably the most emotionally affecting thing I wrote this year.
Favourite opening lines...
Idk about just one or two lines but my favourite opening scene was Spirit. I find openings so hard to balance—you need to immerse in a sensory way but also give enough sense of character to anchor, and also hint at enough plot to grab attention. But I think I managed it here.
Favourite closing lines...
From triangles:
What’s your favourite piece of dialogue you wrote this year?
Single piece of dialogue is probably this part from Spirit. This popped into my head very early in the process and was when I started to understand where I was going with this idea (redacted some of the description to focus on the dialogue).
But my favourite dialogue overall was Island in the Sun. You know what’s crazy about that fic? I counted how many words Jeonghan and Seungcheol say directly to each other: 171 words. For scale, the paragraph you’re reading now is 113 words. I somehow felt that whatever existed between them had to be unspoken. The words they exchanged must reveal very little about their feelings for each other, and yet the audience should still understand clearly the depth of their bond. I was heavily relying on instinct for this one (more on that later) so I don’t know what I did and I probably couldn’t do it again. But I did do something.
What’s your favourite piece of description or narration?
One thing I now know about myself: I’m really not good at abstracting feelings. I think I’m pretty good at metaphors for visual or sensory things (the apple in my head is 4K and rotating) but trying to link a metaphor to an emotion or abstract concept is really hard. Which is why the below passage where I feel like I got it right is one of my favourite narrations I wrote this year.
From Spirit:
Also, the whole predator-prey dynamic with Soonyoung and Jun in Arachnophobia was so much fun to write. I didn’t reread that fic for like six months after posting so when I finally did I was surprised by how much of that imagery I managed to slip in without it feeling too heavy-handed.
Favorite fic(s) you read this year:
There are many but first let me spiral real quick. Here's something I think no one really talks about: writing style envy is real and it can hurt you. I think in the past I would always conflate “fics I like” with “fics I want to write like”. There’s some overlap obviously but it should be a venn diagram, not a circle. It’s a small but important distinction. Admiration can be good and healthy but at some point in past years it was kinda not anymore for me and that’s really sad. Like, don’t I deserve to just enjoy things without that shadow of envy and self-doubt creeping in? Don’t we all? And the writer deserves their work to be appreciated too, not used as a self-flagellating whip.
My writing hiatus was also a reading hiatus and I think it completely reset me in a positive way. Maybe it's because I lost my own identity as a writer so I lost the yardstick with which to compare myself, especially in the first half of the year. Maybe it was the joy of rediscovering how incredibly creative and talented this community is. But many of the fics I loved this year, I loved precisely because they were doing or saying something completely beyond the scope of my knowledge or imagination. There’s such a joy in clicking on something, getting a few paragraphs in and knowing that it’s something I could never ever have written. Give me a thousand years on this earth and this combination of words would never occur to me. I’m about to experience something completely new here and that’s so exciting.
Under the Boardwalk (Vernon/Seungkwan) by sunburst: Just delightful. There’s no other word for it.
and the moon falls into the earth (Jeonghan&Joshua, Jeonghan/Seungcheol) by amoteamame: Please read this. Please please read this. I am begging you.
mono no aware (Mingyu/Minghao) by calypsio (arundels) - Hard reset my brain. That gyh magic distilled into its purest form.
i said i’m done (Jeonghan/Seungcheol) by sharpa: The tipping point between love and violence in an impeccably executed dark comedy style
Bright Enough To Light Up Any Dark (Mingyu/Jeonghan/Seungcheol) by averytree: So much fun and one of the Yoon Jeonghans of all time.
Do you have any fanfic or general writing goals for the new year?
The number one goal is to keep doing it because wow, I missed it a lot.
I also really do want to finish Fish in the Water. Thank god I am a severe pre-planner because at the very least I know exactly what happens and how it ends. I just need to find the motivation to write it…
My other goal is to write more women. The only recent-ish f/f fic I have written is one of my personal favourites out of my works and also a sleeper candidate for the most personal thing I’ve ever written. I had three unfinished f/f wips in the past couple years (jihyo/sejeong canon, winter/karina vigilante au (this one was also painfully personal damn), xiaoting/yujin space pilots au). Some of them got hit with the hiatus write-like-shit beam so idk if I’ll go back to any of them or write something new but. Just know I am cooking.
One thing my fics all have in common with maybe only a few exceptions is that they all have a similar hopeful tone or message, and everyone in them is generally a pretty good person. I do think it would be interesting to write something more morally ambiguous: people who are bad people, people who are not necessarily bad people but make bad choices (toxic icon yjh from and the moon falls into the earth, I will think of you forever). People who are just a bit fucked up!! And not in the way that we get to see them grow from it. Maybe they just are that way. —I wrote this before 17hols started and my first fill has such a satisfyingly nasty main character in it that I can already tell I’m gonna be doing more of this in the coming year.
Pipe dreams:
It’s a far-off dream of mine to write a long murder mystery fic. I feel like when writing other fic I spend so much time trying to drop clues and pick words very carefully that will become important later on, and I want to see how well I can translate that to actual mystery. But I also don’t have the stamina to plot and then write something that involved, so it remains a dream for now.
I am also a huge lover of the fantasy genre. My first introduction to fiction was my mum’s huge fantasy novel collection at like 10-11 years old and I think it did a lot to shape my taste and my understanding of language. But again, the worldbuilding is not something I want to commit to now or probably ever. I did kinda scratch the itch writing ATLA/TLOK fic a few years ago though, so maybe writing an au of an existing fantasy world is the way to go for me (His dark materials would be crazy. Mistborn would be CRAZY).
That’s it!!!! I’ve had a great year and I’m so happy to be back. Thanks to everyone who kudosed or commented or otherwise talked with me about anything at all this year <3
The following section is not 2024 review but feel free to read on if you’re curious!!
So while I haven't always been very active, it’s been around 9 years since I started writing fic (not counting the brief asianfanfics shinee/OC escapades of my youth). After a few years away I was worried I’d have to learn to write again from zero and I was so relieved to find that all my old familiar tools were still there waiting for me to dust them off and pick them back up. And looking back over the past decade, especially with the objectivity of several years hiatus, I can clearly identify certain eras/trends in my writing. So while it's not exactly an end of year review, I kind of want to put this down somewhere and it makes sense for it to be here.
2015-16: The really fundamental stuff. Learning how words fit together. Learning how to visualise something in my head and put it on paper. How to express emotion in words. Constructing plots that make logical sense and are emotionally satisfying. Thinking about how people act and react and move and speak. How to explain something clearly, different ways to convey information, how to write movement and time.
2017-18: Meaning and symbols. How to say something implicitly, how to say more with less words (I credit a run of shortfic challenges I did from late 2016-early 2017 with teaching me how to do this). Learning how to link sections of a story together to express something bigger than its parts. Mixing storytelling mediums. How to create a more nuanced type of attachment between people. Getting comfortable with uncertainty and abstraction. Becoming more intentional with description; understanding what sensory details to pull out to give a certain effect.
2019-21: Learning how to fragment an idea with more intention. Leaning into non-linearity as a tool instead of an obstacle to overcome. Getting better at managing momentum. Learning how to pinpoint character traits and what words to use to pull those out in the most efficient way. More ambitious worldbuilding.
2022-23: rest.
About 2024, I’ve had this idea floating around in my head for several months now but I still don’t think I can articulate it quite right so you’re gonna have to bear with me a bit here. If you asked me anytime before this year what the most important thing about writing is, I’d have said it’s being intentional. Knowing first what effect you want, and then making choices with what and how you write in order to create that effect. And I don’t fully disagree with that now but I also think there’s something to be said for purposely underthinking parts of the writing process, especially in rpf.
In 2022-23 it was the subconscious side of my creativity that was offline (brain chemistry was unfortunately whack). I could plan and rationalise but ideas didn’t bloom the same way, connections didn’t jump out at me, and when I sat down to write the right words just wouldn’t come. If the most important thing is intentional choice and I was still as capable of that as I had always been, then why was I unable to write anything of meaning for those years?
That subconscious side of things has trickled back to me over this year and I really am just so fascinated by it. I’ll be going about my day and suddenly a random thought hits me like a train and I have to scramble for my phone to get it down or I feel like I’m gonna explode. This is where the real juice is, not in the intentional choices made. And I’ve started to realise that the kind of writing I want to do is one that balances the conscious and the subconscious sides of writing. I want to know when to be intentional but also know when to just get out of the way and let the thing that exists in my head land on the page without first telling it what I want it to do, or how I want it to be.
Island in the Sun was the fic I first tried this with, it took around ten days from initial idea to posting, with only four days of actual writing. It totally skipped over my usual 28-day marination period. I did have a scene plan but it was much vaguer than usual and I didn’t really have a message like I usually do. I just wanted to capture the dynamic that existed in my head, as well as the odd feeling of nostalgia but also peace I had in the lead up to Jeonghan’s enlistment. And I think it somehow worked!
So if I summarised 2024 it would be something like: Learning how to underthink the writing process, how to balance conscious choice and subconscious understanding. Skipping straight from an emotion to written words instead of stopping off at thoughts in between. Writing character based on instinctive understanding instead of conscious construction. Letting symbols occur naturally while writing instead of creating them. Loosening up my planning process so that it becomes a framework for my creativity to grow off of as I write, not a cage around it. Finally feeling like myself again :)
This is really the end!! See you in 2025 <3
Here's the review where I do absolutely everything but stay on topic
Questions taken from a mix of these sources 1 2 3
General stats
Number of fics posted on ao3: 6Fandoms written for: Seventeen, SHINee
Total Words Written: 50,005 (those 5 words coming in absolute clutch)
Fic summary
Fish in the Water chapter 2 (Jun/Wonwoo, 11k)Arachnophobia (Jun/Hoshi, 6.6k)
Smokescreen (Hoshi/Taemin, 16.4k)
Island in the Sun (Seungcheol/Jeonghan, 3.3k)
triangles (Jeonghan/Joshua, Jeonghan & Seungcheol, 6.3k, sequel to circles)
Spirit (Woozi/Hoshi, 7.1k)
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?
More, since I expected to write exactly zero words. I didn’t anticipate that I would come out of hiatus in 2024 mostly because I wasn't aware that I could.
Any recent favourite characters, dynamics, and settings?
Hilariously, a 2.5 year hiatus has reset me to default pairings. I think most of the government assigned ships in svt are really good. But I often find myself disagreeing with the general meta on what it is about them that makes them so compelling and I think that's fuelling me to want to write them. This year I wrote jeongcheol and soonhoon for the first time, currently very into verkwan.
Are there any recurrent themes and commonalities that emerged in what you wrote this year?
I don't think so? Nothing beyond what has always been common in my themes or style (ie. writing that skirts around the emotional crux rather than point at it explicitly, style that prioritises simplicity, etc). It's been interesting though to see how much of it has managed to remain the same after all these years.
What do you feel you've learned or improved at the most since this time last December? (Or in my case, since 2021)
This is kinda hard for me to answer because I think "improving" or "learning" have not been on my radar this year. My only goal has been to keep the little flame in my head that compels me to write from going out. So this year I wrote whatever fuelled that fire and dropped anything immediately when I felt the flame start to flicker, without caring much about how objectively "good" any of it was. Which was really freeing!! I don’t owe anyone good work, especially not myself.
Most fun story to write this year:
Pretty much everything I wrote this year was fun because if it wasn't I dropped it immediately.
Smokescreen was fun in that it was my first time writing this way—usually worldbuilding is something I have to do consciously once I've decided the message I want to convey. But for Smokescreen it was the opposite: the universe popped up in my head and kept expanding and expanding, so I just kept chasing the horizon of it and writing down everything that made my brain feel carbonated. The wordcount did run away from me though and by the end I was fighting to finish it. It’s also the fic I might change if I could—I think the idolverse commentary is kinda idealistic and one-dimensional as it wasn't my original intention and was shoehorned in kinda late. But then again I was not writing to deliver groundbreaking idolverse meta, I was writing to feed a fire. So in that sense no, I actually wouldn’t change anything.
Most challenging fic to write this year:
Fish in the Water part 2 but that’s for obvious reasons (hadn’t written in years, had to wrestle through several thousand words of existing draft). But I had to do it because I knew I couldn't write anything else with it hanging over my head. The only other hard one was the 5k worth of WIP from August/September that I probably will never post because it’s too hard to finish (Joshua Hong farming rpg au). Unfortunate since it has some absolutely killer lines in it.
Personal favourite fic from this year:
It's a three-way tie between Island in the Sun, Spirit and triangles, and all for different reasons.
In Island in the Sun I felt I did a good job of capturing a dynamic (canon Jeongcheol) that I'd been previously too intimidated to even attempt.
Spirit had the longest marination period (got the original idea in June, posted in November) and I think it's the most interesting thing I wrote this year in terms of construction and experimentation with different ways to express an idea.
I think triangles managed to capture a very specific, complex array of feelings and was probably the most emotionally affecting thing I wrote this year.
Favourite opening lines...
Idk about just one or two lines but my favourite opening scene was Spirit. I find openings so hard to balance—you need to immerse in a sensory way but also give enough sense of character to anchor, and also hint at enough plot to grab attention. But I think I managed it here.
There’s this one memory that keeps reeling Jihoon right back no matter how many years pass.
It was late afternoon and light edged around the closed curtains in Minghao’s living room. Autumn had just arrived and the days all had a greyish tinge. It must’ve been while they were writing the third EP; Jihoon remembers the topline that was circling in his head like a lone bird of prey. It would later become the lead single.
Very suddenly, Soonyoung was standing over him. Smoke from the joint on Jihoon’s lap muddied the air between them but through it Soonyoung’s eyes remained fixed on his, sharp and sober.
“Jihoon-ah,” he said. He was standing so close that his knees bumped Jihoon’s. “Are you ready?"
Favourite closing lines...
From triangles:
Seungcheol shakes his head and tips it all the way back to look at the sky. “I drive across the bridge every weekend to take the kids to soccer. And every time I look down and see the Opera House, I think of you. Still, fifteen years later.”
“Fifteen years,” Jeonghan echoes. Somewhere nearby in the garden a solitary cricket is crying out loudly. Be quiet, Jeonghan wants to call down. My best friend and I are talking. “God, has it really been that long?”
Seungcheol looks back down from the sky to smile wryly at him. “It feels like just yesterday, doesn’t it?”
The night grows colder and colder. But even when their bottles are empty, they don’t go back inside.
What’s your favourite piece of dialogue you wrote this year?
Single piece of dialogue is probably this part from Spirit. This popped into my head very early in the process and was when I started to understand where I was going with this idea (redacted some of the description to focus on the dialogue).
“Dreams,” Jihoon mutters. “I hate that word.”
“Why? What did dreams ever do to you?”
“Nothing,” says Jihoon. “That’s the point. They’re just random neural ricochet. Why did we all start using that word to describe the thing we’re supposed to chase?”
“Then what is it?”
“What’s what?”
“It,” Soonyoung says. “The thing we’re supposed to chase.”
But my favourite dialogue overall was Island in the Sun. You know what’s crazy about that fic? I counted how many words Jeonghan and Seungcheol say directly to each other: 171 words. For scale, the paragraph you’re reading now is 113 words. I somehow felt that whatever existed between them had to be unspoken. The words they exchanged must reveal very little about their feelings for each other, and yet the audience should still understand clearly the depth of their bond. I was heavily relying on instinct for this one (more on that later) so I don’t know what I did and I probably couldn’t do it again. But I did do something.
What’s your favourite piece of description or narration?
One thing I now know about myself: I’m really not good at abstracting feelings. I think I’m pretty good at metaphors for visual or sensory things (the apple in my head is 4K and rotating) but trying to link a metaphor to an emotion or abstract concept is really hard. Which is why the below passage where I feel like I got it right is one of my favourite narrations I wrote this year.
From Spirit:
Jihoon put his guitar aside on the bed. Soonyoung watched wide-eyed as he crossed the room to squat beside him. He didn’t know how to raise his guard, not in his words nor in his face. It was as mesmerising as it was horrifying, like watching the ocean rush back and bare the seafloor as a tidal wave built on the horizon. Watching and thinking, How could I possibly survive this?
Also, the whole predator-prey dynamic with Soonyoung and Jun in Arachnophobia was so much fun to write. I didn’t reread that fic for like six months after posting so when I finally did I was surprised by how much of that imagery I managed to slip in without it feeling too heavy-handed.
Favorite fic(s) you read this year:
There are many but first let me spiral real quick. Here's something I think no one really talks about: writing style envy is real and it can hurt you. I think in the past I would always conflate “fics I like” with “fics I want to write like”. There’s some overlap obviously but it should be a venn diagram, not a circle. It’s a small but important distinction. Admiration can be good and healthy but at some point in past years it was kinda not anymore for me and that’s really sad. Like, don’t I deserve to just enjoy things without that shadow of envy and self-doubt creeping in? Don’t we all? And the writer deserves their work to be appreciated too, not used as a self-flagellating whip.
My writing hiatus was also a reading hiatus and I think it completely reset me in a positive way. Maybe it's because I lost my own identity as a writer so I lost the yardstick with which to compare myself, especially in the first half of the year. Maybe it was the joy of rediscovering how incredibly creative and talented this community is. But many of the fics I loved this year, I loved precisely because they were doing or saying something completely beyond the scope of my knowledge or imagination. There’s such a joy in clicking on something, getting a few paragraphs in and knowing that it’s something I could never ever have written. Give me a thousand years on this earth and this combination of words would never occur to me. I’m about to experience something completely new here and that’s so exciting.
Under the Boardwalk (Vernon/Seungkwan) by sunburst: Just delightful. There’s no other word for it.
and the moon falls into the earth (Jeonghan&Joshua, Jeonghan/Seungcheol) by amoteamame: Please read this. Please please read this. I am begging you.
mono no aware (Mingyu/Minghao) by calypsio (arundels) - Hard reset my brain. That gyh magic distilled into its purest form.
i said i’m done (Jeonghan/Seungcheol) by sharpa: The tipping point between love and violence in an impeccably executed dark comedy style
Bright Enough To Light Up Any Dark (Mingyu/Jeonghan/Seungcheol) by averytree: So much fun and one of the Yoon Jeonghans of all time.
Do you have any fanfic or general writing goals for the new year?
The number one goal is to keep doing it because wow, I missed it a lot.
I also really do want to finish Fish in the Water. Thank god I am a severe pre-planner because at the very least I know exactly what happens and how it ends. I just need to find the motivation to write it…
My other goal is to write more women. The only recent-ish f/f fic I have written is one of my personal favourites out of my works and also a sleeper candidate for the most personal thing I’ve ever written. I had three unfinished f/f wips in the past couple years (jihyo/sejeong canon, winter/karina vigilante au (this one was also painfully personal damn), xiaoting/yujin space pilots au). Some of them got hit with the hiatus write-like-shit beam so idk if I’ll go back to any of them or write something new but. Just know I am cooking.
One thing my fics all have in common with maybe only a few exceptions is that they all have a similar hopeful tone or message, and everyone in them is generally a pretty good person. I do think it would be interesting to write something more morally ambiguous: people who are bad people, people who are not necessarily bad people but make bad choices (toxic icon yjh from and the moon falls into the earth, I will think of you forever). People who are just a bit fucked up!! And not in the way that we get to see them grow from it. Maybe they just are that way. —I wrote this before 17hols started and my first fill has such a satisfyingly nasty main character in it that I can already tell I’m gonna be doing more of this in the coming year.
Pipe dreams:
It’s a far-off dream of mine to write a long murder mystery fic. I feel like when writing other fic I spend so much time trying to drop clues and pick words very carefully that will become important later on, and I want to see how well I can translate that to actual mystery. But I also don’t have the stamina to plot and then write something that involved, so it remains a dream for now.
I am also a huge lover of the fantasy genre. My first introduction to fiction was my mum’s huge fantasy novel collection at like 10-11 years old and I think it did a lot to shape my taste and my understanding of language. But again, the worldbuilding is not something I want to commit to now or probably ever. I did kinda scratch the itch writing ATLA/TLOK fic a few years ago though, so maybe writing an au of an existing fantasy world is the way to go for me (His dark materials would be crazy. Mistborn would be CRAZY).
That’s it!!!! I’ve had a great year and I’m so happy to be back. Thanks to everyone who kudosed or commented or otherwise talked with me about anything at all this year <3
The following section is not 2024 review but feel free to read on if you’re curious!!
So while I haven't always been very active, it’s been around 9 years since I started writing fic (not counting the brief asianfanfics shinee/OC escapades of my youth). After a few years away I was worried I’d have to learn to write again from zero and I was so relieved to find that all my old familiar tools were still there waiting for me to dust them off and pick them back up. And looking back over the past decade, especially with the objectivity of several years hiatus, I can clearly identify certain eras/trends in my writing. So while it's not exactly an end of year review, I kind of want to put this down somewhere and it makes sense for it to be here.
2015-16: The really fundamental stuff. Learning how words fit together. Learning how to visualise something in my head and put it on paper. How to express emotion in words. Constructing plots that make logical sense and are emotionally satisfying. Thinking about how people act and react and move and speak. How to explain something clearly, different ways to convey information, how to write movement and time.
2017-18: Meaning and symbols. How to say something implicitly, how to say more with less words (I credit a run of shortfic challenges I did from late 2016-early 2017 with teaching me how to do this). Learning how to link sections of a story together to express something bigger than its parts. Mixing storytelling mediums. How to create a more nuanced type of attachment between people. Getting comfortable with uncertainty and abstraction. Becoming more intentional with description; understanding what sensory details to pull out to give a certain effect.
2019-21: Learning how to fragment an idea with more intention. Leaning into non-linearity as a tool instead of an obstacle to overcome. Getting better at managing momentum. Learning how to pinpoint character traits and what words to use to pull those out in the most efficient way. More ambitious worldbuilding.
2022-23: rest.
About 2024, I’ve had this idea floating around in my head for several months now but I still don’t think I can articulate it quite right so you’re gonna have to bear with me a bit here. If you asked me anytime before this year what the most important thing about writing is, I’d have said it’s being intentional. Knowing first what effect you want, and then making choices with what and how you write in order to create that effect. And I don’t fully disagree with that now but I also think there’s something to be said for purposely underthinking parts of the writing process, especially in rpf.
In 2022-23 it was the subconscious side of my creativity that was offline (brain chemistry was unfortunately whack). I could plan and rationalise but ideas didn’t bloom the same way, connections didn’t jump out at me, and when I sat down to write the right words just wouldn’t come. If the most important thing is intentional choice and I was still as capable of that as I had always been, then why was I unable to write anything of meaning for those years?
That subconscious side of things has trickled back to me over this year and I really am just so fascinated by it. I’ll be going about my day and suddenly a random thought hits me like a train and I have to scramble for my phone to get it down or I feel like I’m gonna explode. This is where the real juice is, not in the intentional choices made. And I’ve started to realise that the kind of writing I want to do is one that balances the conscious and the subconscious sides of writing. I want to know when to be intentional but also know when to just get out of the way and let the thing that exists in my head land on the page without first telling it what I want it to do, or how I want it to be.
Island in the Sun was the fic I first tried this with, it took around ten days from initial idea to posting, with only four days of actual writing. It totally skipped over my usual 28-day marination period. I did have a scene plan but it was much vaguer than usual and I didn’t really have a message like I usually do. I just wanted to capture the dynamic that existed in my head, as well as the odd feeling of nostalgia but also peace I had in the lead up to Jeonghan’s enlistment. And I think it somehow worked!
So if I summarised 2024 it would be something like: Learning how to underthink the writing process, how to balance conscious choice and subconscious understanding. Skipping straight from an emotion to written words instead of stopping off at thoughts in between. Writing character based on instinctive understanding instead of conscious construction. Letting symbols occur naturally while writing instead of creating them. Loosening up my planning process so that it becomes a framework for my creativity to grow off of as I write, not a cage around it. Finally feeling like myself again :)
This is really the end!! See you in 2025 <3