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bluerthanbluets) wrote2023-08-07 05:06 pm
bluerthanbluets) wrote2023-08-07 05:06 pm
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a/n yearsafter: baby's first canon universe!
i havent been writing fic for long actually. i started 2020 and my first published work on ao3 was a story inspired by the song heartbeat by carly rae jepsen. 18 out of my 26 fics are inspired by an existing text (the works of Rob Sheffield and Nick Hornby, the movie The Old Guard, Lost in Translation, the comic 25 lives, the viral story of Cat Person, etc...) which is a lot, isnt it? and i guess a little bit strange. when i think of fic, im always thinking like this: okay, what other texts i love and find compelling and am interested with can i pull together to build a sturdy and new and interesting universe for these guys so i can talk about [grief/intimacy/disillusionment/the joy of sharing music/being loved is being eternal]?
thats the kit formula: the atmosphere or setting of a good movie [visual] + a line from a good poem [textual] + a strong feeling [emotional/metaphorical] = a good fic
in this formula, it hardly matters that it's jihoon's pov or that its a jicheol pairing. u dont even know that its jeonghan until the end! of course its... a means of enlarging the feeling and the fic if you know why - that jihoon does like to talk about music, that jeonghan in his blonde hair kinda does resemble seungcheol. i guess this is also why i dont rly have a favorite ship to write? i dont approach fic writing that way. the dynamics of the characters sometimes comes first and then i think about who i can write in those shoes. or the situation and the setup and then think about the pairing. sometimes its easy. of course its chancheol for a manager actor au. sometimes i need to be compelled by something to choose them, like when i did jihan for the transit love au, it was mostly to fill in the bingo boxes. its quite boring actually lol, when u think abt it. but in the end, it pushes me to be more creative with my choices and its also more generative for me this way.
ack basta. tldr; im always thinking of fic writing practice as a radical recontextualization of an existing work. this means there needs to be several texts or works or situations interacting and overlapping that almost renders, lets say, my jeonghan and chan into characters and a premise that feel new bec its quite far from what we know of them: as idols.
but then. ok heres where i rly talk about the fic u read haha...
well all i want to say is that. writing yearsafter, a canonverse/idolverse/future canon fic felt so challenging to me. bec i was thinking of them as idols and not anyone else. major learning moment. and this felt the most fannish work i ever did! i wrote about their concerts, which ive been through; the renewal last 2021, which i saw transpire online; i referenced to the talk shows they went to, soop filmings, TTT, to kkuma, etc. all of which im familiar with as a fan. i have access to as a carat. ive watched them, ive seen them live, ive heard them talk about their future, their thoughts as a group, about each other, etc. so really, its like, all the material is there. theres so much actually. it was more of a process of omission - what can i do away with so i can arrive more effectively to the story that i wanted? what was the story?
canon svt
writing in the canon mode used to be not very compelling to me bec it was like, dudeee what else is there to write? we watch them, we see their posts on weverse, what else? but then its like: you lift a veil and theres so much story there! esp when u think about how everything we have access to, is already edited for our consumption. their personas, the details we know about their personal life, and sometimes we get view of things we shouldnt see, which is a story in itself as well. so although the "present" canon svt doesnt figure much in the fic, it was still fun to creatively imagine how it went down from the inside. for ex. the hidden protagonist term being coined by their consultant lol, i had a blast realizing that could have been a thing and adding it in the first part of the story. of course that probably didnt happen, but its also like, it could have though. we dont know. maybe not specifically like that, but, something like that.
the allure then of canon writing for me is that exactly: the idea that you could be hitting the nail on the head as you render solid the details behind the veil. and if you don't, well, that's fiction for you.
but also, that then necessitates more care. when i wrote abt scoups meeting with a therapist in one of the chapters, of course, that was something i took time to write. and of course its not perfect, and who knows if therapy speak in 2027 was still going to sound like that, right. but in writing that i was mostly just gearing for the emotional truth of the moment. to portray how better they've gotten. how its gotten better for them.
so while there's that allure of getting it right, theres also that personal fannish disruption there too: writing it in the way you hoped it would go for the idols you love. writing them into a version of the canon thats... kinder? much softer.
the nonfiction in fan fiction
i realized literally just now, wait... in some specific but still limited ways then, since rpf is all about writing about (not for) real people albeit idols/celebrities, it kinda feels a little bit like creative nonfiction doesnt it? esp when theres talk abt care in portraying these people as they are/as idols in their world. i mean theres parts of cnf thats also fictionalized to some extent, except there's that contract between the writer and the reader that what they're encountering in the text is real. anyway yeah i just wanted to write that down, ill still have more thoughts about this later on.
but for now here is a quote from this wonderful interview that im always thinking about in whatever mode im writing in ["you can write what you want, but let us live a little more beautifully the second time": Jihyun Yun in conversation with Nicole Lachat]:
When I first asked my grandma if I could write and publish about her, she gave me an instruction that has stuck with me over the years and I try to always keep it in mind when I write about family. She said, roughly translated from Korean: “you can write what you want, but let us live a little more beautifully the second time.” I took this as permission with a condition that I would fictionalize where necessary, to protect them and myself.
but even if its not in the context of writing about a real though fictionalized guy, i think we still have to protect them in a way. and most importantly, the readers too. i mentioned this to a friend while i was deep in some fic writing feelings: someone out there might read your fic and see themselves in the seungcheols or jeonghans you're writing and... we laugh a lot about how fic is silly and stupid (true) but: it can also be a formative experience to some. so i think care will always be necessary whenever we approach writing, esp when u know its going to be posted on a public platform. anyone can read it.
future svt
this was what made writing this so hard lol. i kept telling lui as i wrote how heartbreaking it is writing them five+ years from now, writing about enlistment and disbandment etc. my carat heart almost couldnt take it! but its also like, we have to be brave. we have to be prepared haha. its not like they would do it forever. my only wish is for them to stay together as the family that they are even after all of this, vague hand gestures, unfolds you know.
writing the whole story really made me love being a fan more too. ack, its like, you hope they would go together forever. but in this world when they dont, you gotta still find it in you to be happy at least you encountered them at all.
CYOA format
idk if this is even a legit Choose Your Own Adventure bec the ending is the same. of course its the same! i guess the whole idea was... no matter what paths sc choose/you choose, they're always going to end up being together. if you didnt follow my instructions and didnt click through the SKIP PROMPTS and read everything, you'll read how almost all the "paths" all follow the same arc. in the paths that show him onstage as scoups, they still sing and do aju nice and bow and say the name. in the ones where they dont make it and scoups locks himself in seoul or goes to daegu, mingyu still ends up visiting him. proposing the same thing. that he's going to gather everyone together again. which circles back to the first part, the request sc asks mg. not explicit there but he was asking him to be the hidden protagonist again. in a sense then, its still just one big story.
my fic for scoups this year was supposed to be based on slam dunk the movie. i had a messy bare bones outline of the scores and the lines i picked up from watching the movie twice in the theaters. i even had the casting (choi minho was going to be ryota's brother, scoups was ryota) and the title (the body is a blade) all down and ready. but once i started it, damn, i didnt know how to write a basketball game. so anyway, pivot. idk how i arrived at this idea but i guess ive had in my head the format of a CYOA long before. just not idolverse. and then its like. well why not. idk i forgot why i decided on idolverse haha but it wasnt something ive written before, and i am unable to write the same thing twice so this.
but yeah tldr; this format rly made my view (and experience) of writing idolverse so much more expansive.
and gave me space to really write all the different scenarios i had in my head when i think about scoups as idol as leader as seventeen member. and made me deeper of a carat. of a couprang. goodness...
i rly thought this wasnt going to be this long, but if you read until this part, thanks. sorry i took up so much of your time! but if anyone has any thoughts abt whatever i wrote here, it would be fun to talk. please say happy birthday scoups and drop my little guy one big wish for his day. he's lovely, isn't he?
thats the kit formula: the atmosphere or setting of a good movie [visual] + a line from a good poem [textual] + a strong feeling [emotional/metaphorical] = a good fic
in this formula, it hardly matters that it's jihoon's pov or that its a jicheol pairing. u dont even know that its jeonghan until the end! of course its... a means of enlarging the feeling and the fic if you know why - that jihoon does like to talk about music, that jeonghan in his blonde hair kinda does resemble seungcheol. i guess this is also why i dont rly have a favorite ship to write? i dont approach fic writing that way. the dynamics of the characters sometimes comes first and then i think about who i can write in those shoes. or the situation and the setup and then think about the pairing. sometimes its easy. of course its chancheol for a manager actor au. sometimes i need to be compelled by something to choose them, like when i did jihan for the transit love au, it was mostly to fill in the bingo boxes. its quite boring actually lol, when u think abt it. but in the end, it pushes me to be more creative with my choices and its also more generative for me this way.
ack basta. tldr; im always thinking of fic writing practice as a radical recontextualization of an existing work. this means there needs to be several texts or works or situations interacting and overlapping that almost renders, lets say, my jeonghan and chan into characters and a premise that feel new bec its quite far from what we know of them: as idols.
but then. ok heres where i rly talk about the fic u read haha...
well all i want to say is that. writing yearsafter, a canonverse/idolverse/future canon fic felt so challenging to me. bec i was thinking of them as idols and not anyone else. major learning moment. and this felt the most fannish work i ever did! i wrote about their concerts, which ive been through; the renewal last 2021, which i saw transpire online; i referenced to the talk shows they went to, soop filmings, TTT, to kkuma, etc. all of which im familiar with as a fan. i have access to as a carat. ive watched them, ive seen them live, ive heard them talk about their future, their thoughts as a group, about each other, etc. so really, its like, all the material is there. theres so much actually. it was more of a process of omission - what can i do away with so i can arrive more effectively to the story that i wanted? what was the story?
canon svt
writing in the canon mode used to be not very compelling to me bec it was like, dudeee what else is there to write? we watch them, we see their posts on weverse, what else? but then its like: you lift a veil and theres so much story there! esp when u think about how everything we have access to, is already edited for our consumption. their personas, the details we know about their personal life, and sometimes we get view of things we shouldnt see, which is a story in itself as well. so although the "present" canon svt doesnt figure much in the fic, it was still fun to creatively imagine how it went down from the inside. for ex. the hidden protagonist term being coined by their consultant lol, i had a blast realizing that could have been a thing and adding it in the first part of the story. of course that probably didnt happen, but its also like, it could have though. we dont know. maybe not specifically like that, but, something like that.
the allure then of canon writing for me is that exactly: the idea that you could be hitting the nail on the head as you render solid the details behind the veil. and if you don't, well, that's fiction for you.
but also, that then necessitates more care. when i wrote abt scoups meeting with a therapist in one of the chapters, of course, that was something i took time to write. and of course its not perfect, and who knows if therapy speak in 2027 was still going to sound like that, right. but in writing that i was mostly just gearing for the emotional truth of the moment. to portray how better they've gotten. how its gotten better for them.
so while there's that allure of getting it right, theres also that personal fannish disruption there too: writing it in the way you hoped it would go for the idols you love. writing them into a version of the canon thats... kinder? much softer.
the nonfiction in fan fiction
i realized literally just now, wait... in some specific but still limited ways then, since rpf is all about writing about (not for) real people albeit idols/celebrities, it kinda feels a little bit like creative nonfiction doesnt it? esp when theres talk abt care in portraying these people as they are/as idols in their world. i mean theres parts of cnf thats also fictionalized to some extent, except there's that contract between the writer and the reader that what they're encountering in the text is real. anyway yeah i just wanted to write that down, ill still have more thoughts about this later on.
but for now here is a quote from this wonderful interview that im always thinking about in whatever mode im writing in ["you can write what you want, but let us live a little more beautifully the second time": Jihyun Yun in conversation with Nicole Lachat]:
When I first asked my grandma if I could write and publish about her, she gave me an instruction that has stuck with me over the years and I try to always keep it in mind when I write about family. She said, roughly translated from Korean: “you can write what you want, but let us live a little more beautifully the second time.” I took this as permission with a condition that I would fictionalize where necessary, to protect them and myself.
but even if its not in the context of writing about a real though fictionalized guy, i think we still have to protect them in a way. and most importantly, the readers too. i mentioned this to a friend while i was deep in some fic writing feelings: someone out there might read your fic and see themselves in the seungcheols or jeonghans you're writing and... we laugh a lot about how fic is silly and stupid (true) but: it can also be a formative experience to some. so i think care will always be necessary whenever we approach writing, esp when u know its going to be posted on a public platform. anyone can read it.
future svt
this was what made writing this so hard lol. i kept telling lui as i wrote how heartbreaking it is writing them five+ years from now, writing about enlistment and disbandment etc. my carat heart almost couldnt take it! but its also like, we have to be brave. we have to be prepared haha. its not like they would do it forever. my only wish is for them to stay together as the family that they are even after all of this, vague hand gestures, unfolds you know.
writing the whole story really made me love being a fan more too. ack, its like, you hope they would go together forever. but in this world when they dont, you gotta still find it in you to be happy at least you encountered them at all.
CYOA format
idk if this is even a legit Choose Your Own Adventure bec the ending is the same. of course its the same! i guess the whole idea was... no matter what paths sc choose/you choose, they're always going to end up being together. if you didnt follow my instructions and didnt click through the SKIP PROMPTS and read everything, you'll read how almost all the "paths" all follow the same arc. in the paths that show him onstage as scoups, they still sing and do aju nice and bow and say the name. in the ones where they dont make it and scoups locks himself in seoul or goes to daegu, mingyu still ends up visiting him. proposing the same thing. that he's going to gather everyone together again. which circles back to the first part, the request sc asks mg. not explicit there but he was asking him to be the hidden protagonist again. in a sense then, its still just one big story.
my fic for scoups this year was supposed to be based on slam dunk the movie. i had a messy bare bones outline of the scores and the lines i picked up from watching the movie twice in the theaters. i even had the casting (choi minho was going to be ryota's brother, scoups was ryota) and the title (the body is a blade) all down and ready. but once i started it, damn, i didnt know how to write a basketball game. so anyway, pivot. idk how i arrived at this idea but i guess ive had in my head the format of a CYOA long before. just not idolverse. and then its like. well why not. idk i forgot why i decided on idolverse haha but it wasnt something ive written before, and i am unable to write the same thing twice so this.
but yeah tldr; this format rly made my view (and experience) of writing idolverse so much more expansive.
and gave me space to really write all the different scenarios i had in my head when i think about scoups as idol as leader as seventeen member. and made me deeper of a carat. of a couprang. goodness...
i rly thought this wasnt going to be this long, but if you read until this part, thanks. sorry i took up so much of your time! but if anyone has any thoughts abt whatever i wrote here, it would be fun to talk. please say happy birthday scoups and drop my little guy one big wish for his day. he's lovely, isn't he?
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other than that i remember you saying that you were going to write a basketball fic so a CYOA was such a fun surprise! i used to read so many of those books as a kid, first to see the paths, then straight through. i think that it's moving? also a little terrifying? seeing where the arcs remain the same. in a media landscape where we seem to be obsessed with time and multiverse and the ability to change things, it feels like a small breath of fearful relief to see that even in a fictionalized future that some things will not change. this is "canon" because it falls in line with what we know and understand. i do mean what i say in that i think this is my favorite scoupsfic of yours - though i do still need to finish happiest moment!
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