Retrospring is shutting down on 1st March, 2025 Read more

anon ! · 3mo

hi!!!! okay first of all you are such a great writer . i love all your fics to the death omg i think at this point i've been so addicted that i binged all your hkthm fics in like 3 days!!!!!!! thats how good you are !! i especially love love tuesdays, pomp and circumstance, and one lifetime too short!!! your writing in it is just . so good like Damn i love how clinical ur alhaitham is written and how steadfast he is in his love for kaveh i love them so muchhh ough and your characterisation!!!! And language!!!!!!! Its all so good and your fanfics could genuinely be published novels purely based on quality of writing and word count like ur fics are so hefty and they don’t feel long because of how they’re written!!! you capture so many things so brilliantly in ur fics, esp the dreamlike feeling of high school(?) and graduation and drifting apart .. also the bit about alhaitham’s grandma in one lifetime too short rlly hit me in the feels :sob: :sob: okayyy now that im done yapping about how much i adore ur fics, i have a few questions!!
what is ur writing process, if no one has asked you that yet?? and also like how do you write such pretty imagery and like idk write in general,,,,,,,
any good writers u recommend/fave fanfics? :3
how do you get inspo for your fics?
yeahh i hope this wasnt that big of a yapfest, youve rlly inspired me to keep writing and improve my prose hahah . have a good one!!

WAHHH THANK U SO MUCH.... eee... my writing process typically begins with an idea floating in my head; i'll take tuesdays as an example!! with that fic i knew i wanted to write an ambiguous exes vibe, and typically i also know what kind of atmosphere i want to create - like if i want to be more prosey and flowery or if i want to take a laidback, conversational tone for my crack fics with more simplistic language. my goal with tuesdays was a sort of dry but still figurative approach that leaned on metaphors, so i knew going in that i wanted 1) exes to lovers, 2) a certain writing tone to replicate, and 3) to kind of fuck with the formatting a bit, like the list and the one; two; three; four sequence. then i just jump into the first scene! i know that quite a few (aka all) of my writing friends jump around, but i can't write unless im going chronologically. my goal with the first scene is always to set up the premise of the fic (It’s a Tuesday when Kaveh breaks up with Al-Haitham.) and then i sort of derail from there! most of my fics follow a chronological timeline like p&c but tuesdays skipped around a bunch to sort of build up this atmosphere around the fic while still following this overarching sequence of kaveh breaks up w hthm -> goes to grocery store -> goes to thai place -> ends up at tighnaris -> gets sense knocked into him and then he returns to hthm, where they then reconcile. i didnt have the reason why they broke up revealed until the latter half, so before that the scenes that existed outside of the straightforward timeline were there to build up the love and apprehension in equal parts that led to kaveh's self sabotage. but to be honest i didnt think of it in that extensive detail; i can just see how it comes together after the fact LKFMKSDFJ but i knew that i wanted sort of pieced together scenes that didnt flow to an exact chronological order! tbh my writing process is very much fuck it we ball so after the initial scene of setting up the rest of the fic i just go with the flow and with wherever the doc wants to take me. for me at least, if i outline too extensively then i KNOW ill derail from the plan and end up somewhere outside of the outline which is why i don't do it LMAO my philosophy is always that if a fic wants to end, then ill let it end even if i planned other things to add to it later. ALSO while im writing i usually think of details or scenes that i want to add later so i have a priv discord server where i make separate channels for each fic to keep track of the specific details, just so i know what to reference later on! it's a very informal process lol

u also mentioned p&c and olts, which r actually very significant anomalies to my typical writing process LMDKSFL so i figured id touch on it bc those two + the angel kaveh fic were the only three hkvh fics that i extensively outlined (i did not even outline olts, ink came up with an extremely detailed plot after we came up with the premise and i added around 15~ out of 150+ scenes during creation). but for those fics, i had bullet pointed outlines that included both detailed scenes and vague "this needs to happen at this point" to keep track of where i was and the end goal. i'll include screenshots of both my p&c outline n an example of an informal discord planning channel on the tweet if it helps!

ok now that that's over with. FOR IMAGERY AND WRITING IN GEN i am very much inspired by other people... i think about richard siken's poetry a Lot which is a huge thing for me. i also developed imagery and metaphors that i always lean on just by writing a lot of fic + poetry on my own, so i know that i prefer things that have to do with water, earthquakes, rib cages and chests, birds, fire and matches, and most of all KNIVES AND BLADES AND HOOKS,,, i really dont think theres any other way of figuring out ur own personal style unless u practice it a bunch on ur own! it took me forever to figure out LMAO i read my writing from 2022 and i hate it ngl. writing is a learned skill and it takes time but also the process of figuring it out can be something so beautiful... theres nothing to do but to start! i started when i was like. six or seven technically. but i only started thinking of writing novels at ten (which ive since mostly given up on), and then fic at late fifteen!! writing fic definitely made me a way better writer and is why i can sort of write things like poetry and attempt to dabble in original fic these days without cringing at it

omg ok im sorry for talking so much but i was pretty unaware and unconscious of my writing until june . like. 2.5 months ago. like ofc i knew what i was writing and that i had different styles i switched between but in june i read way home by yamabato (https://archiveofourown.org/works/41831829) and it really had a HUGE impact on me bc i was like holy shit... how r people just casually writing like that... i need to get better. n to be very honest i had a crisis and multiple breakdowns abt how much i hated my writing LMAO TO BE FULLY TRANSPARENT... i really really really despised my writing and felt that it was so incredibly unimpressive and plain and mediocre and um long story short i began paying a hell of a lot more attention to my prose and how i worded things and attempted a new writing style entirely when i wrote fugu! something i think helped me improve my writing was to take a piece that i really admired (for me it was the fic that reoriented my life) and then replicate the details that i really admired; for me it was the immersive details and the really beautiful way they described the settings, emotions, and people. so basically i forced myself to adapt my writing into something i could be proud of and writing fugu was a really slow process but it allowed me to be able to write again! OKAY ANYWAY im not sure which of ur questions that answered but it felt relevant to the whole how i write spiel

in terms of writers/fics i recommend i compiled a list of the ones that give me the most inspiration in the latter half of this ask retrospring.net/@luminvies/a/113036706381550933 and all of my fav fics r bookmarked on my profile!

inspo for my fics... honestly i dont even know they pop into my head half formed and then i attempt to put it to the doc... sometimes ill take tropes like superhero, office au, identity porn, fwb, and then i just go from there but its mostly just intuitive. i belieeeve i have a diff ask where i tweeted a couple of screenshots of my fic prompt list to give an idea of how my ideas come to be? shld be somewhere in my media lMSFLKJ

ok im done now im the one whos the yapper here obviously LMAO but thank u again for such a sweet ask and so many compliments aughhh...... im literally so honored to be an inspiration that means so much to me since a huge part of my writing is to make other people feel the way that i do when i read really good writing T^T thank you again.. have a nice day i hope the length of this didnt kill you.....

Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting

*italic text* for italic text

**bold text** for bold text

[link](https://example.com) for link