shakti (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
markohmark) wrote2020-12-05 08:19 pm
markohmark) wrote2020-12-05 08:19 pm
Entry tags:
can you feel the rush fic commentary !!
sorry for this extremely long and self-indulgent fic commentary post… idk why i’m like this T_T
I. ACTUAL COMMENTARY
A. themes/topics
> i started off writing this thinking it would just be a chill fluffy 20k friends to lovers uni au fic. and like, that actually is what can you feel the rush is, but it’s also… much more unintentionally revealing/personal than i expected. i think it shows how my perspective on love/friendships & relationships has changed significantly since early 2019.
> i always use synecdochic writing meta for advice on conceptualizing, and through that lens i guess the theme is… “the one about opening yourself up to love”? not sure whether i pegged that completely right, i’m not very good at analyzing my own writing.
> i was definitely inspired by the quote below while writing, but i didn’t put it as an epigraph because i’ve honestly never used epigraphs before and wasn’t 100% sure if it matched the story in the first place.
> some recurring images/motifs (?) that i mentioned:
B. tinhat agendas
> i knew i wanted kai/jisung/taehyun as best friends basically before i even conceived of the actual fic idea, just because jisung/taehyun BIRTHDAY TWINS and also 02-line pandering to Me <3
> taehyun/ahn yujin is one of my tinhet agendas, they are both super bright and talented and lovely to me + i love that yujin is just two inches shorter than him *__* tyun short
> jaehyun i chose as a brother because their age difference (5 yrs) felt perfect to me. that’s literally one of the only reasons.
> chenle/jisung are best friends in a mutually-pining type of relationship/friendship, chenle goes to college in california (?)
sorry for never getting into this further oops
> jaemin/renjun are beomgyu’s roommates who fell in love with each other over the course of fall semester [yeah that could literally be a fanfic of it’s own huh]
> heeseung/jaeyun/skz members are beomgyu’s friends
> i am so sad for not including MORE heeseung/taehyun action but that is ok i cannot win them all.
C. background information
> location -- in my mind this is set in new england. it's pretty obvious where lol if you're familiar with the area...
> beomgyu is from the greater boston suburbs
> taehyun comes from this very specific school in texas -- if you’re familiar with private school it is very obvious what i’m talking about, but i’m not going to mention it publicly
> taehyun’s math background:
> choosing real analysis as the class: i learned a little bit about real anal over the summer (very basic rudimentary stuff), so i knew i could talk about it. it’s also a class where i know college freshmen and college seniors who have taken it… i wanted a course that was difficult yet feasible for soobin to take i guess? not sure how much i succeeded with the “feasible” part but yeah.
> the scene where beomgyu tells taehyun about his older brother is based off of this canon moment (thx kaia for sending this to me!)
II. OUTTAKES
> there was some stuff i took out of my outline, mainly the amount of dragging out of misunderstandings [yeonjun’s valentine for soobin, taegyu meeting yeonbin at the movie theaters] because i realized that taehyun is way too straightforward to ever populate the misunderstandings tag on ao3…
> i also had no idea what was going on with beomgyu’s backstory thru the first draft, only that he had some sort of crush on taehyun, and figuring that out made me cut some stuff
> because i watched some taegyu vlives, i removed some ooc characteristics [for example: i said that beomgyu walked fast which asdf. i have no idea how fast he walks but he said he was a slow talker/had low bp so i’m just going to assume he is not Fast.]
> “then again, he’s always been indelicate with beomgyu” might be one of my fav things
> however i wrote about it in the first place because i am obsessed w/ beomtyunning going out to [redacted] together and ordering drypot *__*
III. WRITING PROCESS
this section is kind of boring so feel free to skip! i wrote it out in depth because i’ve gotten ccs about this type of stuff and i want to be able to direct people to this post in the future n__n
A. inception
> this started out as a nomin idea i came up with on october 12, where the premise was “jeno went to an all boys school / so he doesn’t know how to talk to girls / so he asks jaemin for help / they fall in love instead” and it was going to have jeno crushing on heejin (loona) and jaemin being exes with hyunjin (loona)... however the idea didn’t really fit jeno’s personality well / i had already written a fake-dating nomin / i was in the middle of writing venn diagram at the time so i never ended up writing it x__x
> cue october 29, a couple days before nanowrimo, when i was trying to figure out a fic to write. i ended up making it into a taegyu fic and realized it could plausibly fit their personalities a little bit more n__n
B. outlining
> so on oct 29 i ended up outlining the basic elements (exposition/rising action/climax/falling action) and i fleshed it out into a calendar outline on oct 31. the idea of using a calendar came from eri’s cc answer on how she organized things for her chwe boys fic!
> in particular i knew that i wanted to start it at the beginning of second semester and i wanted to acknowledge taehyun’s birthday/beomgyu’s birthday/valentines day so i ended up arranging everything around that.
C. drafting…
> lol thanks to participating in wip olympics i can actually see my wordcount jumps to an extent!? for example i wrote ~8k in the first week of november, ~8k in the second week of november, then ~4k within the next two days after that [i wrote 7k within the span of 3 days. yes i’m unhinged].
> i would say that i finished my first draft of this fic on ~nov 17. but here’s the thing. I REALLY HATED IT mostly because there were a couple of dropped threads [taehyun & his hesitancy towards showing affection, beomgyu’s weird past with taehyun] that i didn’t ever elaborate on and the fic didn’t make sense. at the time the wordcount was around 20k - 21k.
> i ended up reverse outlining the fic on spreadsheets just so that i could see everything chronologically, then i basically inserted things that i thought would make the story flow more -- so the stuff about beomgyu’s first meeting with taehyun, taehyun’s r/s with his brother, was included then. that’s basically what i’d call draft 2? i finished draft 2 on nov 22nd or so and it was ~23k
> random aside but, as all of this was happening, i started talking to kaia on nov 14/found this txt primer/started actually watching more taegyu content!! as a result i started having a more nuanced take on txt dynamics and this brings me to draft 3.
> this stage is what i call the “line by line edit.” it’s something i started ever since i wrote square (2017) in september, and basically it means that i downloaded a pdf of the fic, annotated it with my stylus/tablet, then implemented the handwritten changes x___x i don’t know why this is necessary but it’s honestly really difficult for me to catch typos otherwise!! i know i’m insane but i am free n__n
> i only ended up doing this for 50% of the fic [oops sorry to the middle section!] so if u notice any gaps in quality there then… [stares into the distance] yeah that’s on me.
> on nov 25 i finished doing the line by line edit, or at least as much as i could tolerate doing without losing my sanity, and then sent it to my beta, rose. that was also the same day i wrote up my entire taegyu manifesto…
> by this point i kinda hated my fic. LOL
> rose betaed the shit out of it [in parts] and also reminded me that this fic had redeeming qualities which was rlly nice x___x and i ended up posting chapters as soon as i finished addressing her comments… <3
IV. CONCLUSION
> i’m actually really proud of this fic! i remember reaching a point half-way through where i was like help this is so bad, i didn’t know anything about txt when i came up with the idea of this fic, what do i do, but through editing it many times i managed to get the dynamix and plot going somewhat the way i wanted? rip side yeonbin and not mentioning kai/sunoo outright tho... x__x
> hopefully this taegyu renaissance that has been happening will continue!! i love taegyuism. <3
> this is the first fic i've written where i really felt supported by a bunch of different people thru the writing process? like the difference between drafting the nomin 25 lives au and barely talking to ppl about it vs. ranting abt tg1 on priv, asking rose to beta it, discussing taegyu dynamix with kaia & lav, general support from ecbc+c !! x__x "i can [write] well because i am loved well" [i need to stop tenderhearting on main]
> ultimately this fic is just incredibly personal to me and something i put a lot of myself into and i hope it shows… quote my november reflection post “sometimes u need to write the tropey mathematical coming of age strained sibling relations fake dating fic of ur dreams…” AND I DID! #shaktisnthwin
> what's next: i see a lot of non-taegyus in my future and that is fine. for some reason i thought i'd just only write taegyu fics for the entirety of my stay in moa ficdom but i truly do want to try rewriting yeonbin/sookai narratives ;; i just need to figure out wth chwesoobin is first. and, of course, i'm writing a lot of jaemin-centric nct fic this month ;;AA;; hopefully by the time i come back to taegyu i can write them in greater depth & detail and rlly do them justice!! also if i'm not doing college apps during dec break then i'm probably going to re-format/re-do the taegyu manifesto :o
> i started off writing this thinking it would just be a chill fluffy 20k friends to lovers uni au fic. and like, that actually is what can you feel the rush is, but it’s also… much more unintentionally revealing/personal than i expected. i think it shows how my perspective on love/friendships & relationships has changed significantly since early 2019.
> i always use synecdochic writing meta for advice on conceptualizing, and through that lens i guess the theme is… “the one about opening yourself up to love”? not sure whether i pegged that completely right, i’m not very good at analyzing my own writing.
> i was definitely inspired by the quote below while writing, but i didn’t put it as an epigraph because i’ve honestly never used epigraphs before and wasn’t 100% sure if it matched the story in the first place.
There is so much that can be said in silence, if only I were to close my eyes and listen.> rose pointed out that in this fic and the last taegyu i wrote, it’s always about beomgyu teaching something to taehyun. i think it just goes back to what i really like about them and how their differing perspectives and skills can benefit each other. i really like it when they learn from each other and grow as a result of that -- and i guess like seeing taehyun as this intellectually curious person who tries to solve his problems in a very straightforward way (aka by asking chwe beomgyu for help?? lol)
There is so much love in the world, if only I were to open up my arms to receive it.
> some recurring images/motifs (?) that i mentioned:
- stars: connecting the stars to taehyun’s home and his conflicted feelings about his past/hometown -- i feel like that’s pretty representative of those in a closeted situation [um. me] … the “love is like the stars thing” was an attempt for me to reference the silent/unspoken love in taehyun’s family i guess. flawed but it’s still there. also connecting beomgyu to the stars/taehyun bringing beomgyu to astronomy club because beomgyu also becomes part of taehyun’s “home”/a source of comfort
- colors: i blatantly tried to associate golden/orange/sunlight/warm colors with beomgyu, both to show him as a source of warmth & convey how charismatic/bright he is, but also as someone who illuminates new truths within taehyun. i vaguely tried to associate blue & colder colors with taehyun, expressing more of an analytical side to him, but i’m not sure how well that worked out >_<
- temperature: honestly this just started off as me complaining about how cold it gets during the winter… but, yeah. beomgyu giving taehyun his scarf/buying him a winter coat & hat & gloves and just protecting him from cold weather >__< opening his heart to the Warmth of Love or whatever (yes i’m cheesy. no i don’t care)
- comfort/discomfort thread: initially when i wrote this fic, i just was like “dating is about being comfortable” and wanted to explore how beomgyu makes taehyun feel at ease. but then at the same time i realized that they wouldn’t be able to have a strong relationship if they don’t acknowledge/confront difficult things together!
- so, in a sense, it’s like this paradox: they’re comfortable with each other, so comfortable that they can approach topics of discomfort…
- also in my opinion if you have a crush on someone there’s a bit of that on-edge heartracing type of feeling not just pure relaxation *_*
- ice: this one was much more minor but i mentioned it a couple times, usually during moments of emotional significance/breaking points because ice breaks? also it’s slippery and dangerous
- physical contact: i know there’s a lot of wrist-grabbing in the beginning because beomgyu’s like something out of a kdrama [jk] but i hoped to convey a shift from beomgyu initiating contact vs taehyun shaking it off → mutual reciprocation/taehyun initiating physical contact as well n___n.
- some examples: beomgyu teaching taehyun footsie vs taehyun initiating footsie later on, beomgyu discussing hand-holding vs taehyun holding hands with beomgyu at the movie theater, etc.
- the transition from wrist-grabbing to hand-holding was very important to me specifically.
- also: i know that beomgyu is probably terrible at hugging but sometimes you just gotta pretend for the sake of the narrative that he is, in fact, one of the best huggers that taehyun has met.
- movie theater: for some reason movie theaters are actually quite romantic to me? like i know in reality it’s kind of boring, but let me just leave this murakami quote:
- crosswalk: rose mentioned that i set a lot of the scenes in this fic at a crosswalk… unfortunately i don’t know why? i think that’s just how i picture people walking in a city oops
Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.
> i knew i wanted kai/jisung/taehyun as best friends basically before i even conceived of the actual fic idea, just because jisung/taehyun BIRTHDAY TWINS and also 02-line pandering to Me <3
> taehyun/ahn yujin is one of my tinhet agendas, they are both super bright and talented and lovely to me + i love that yujin is just two inches shorter than him *__* tyun short
> jaehyun i chose as a brother because their age difference (5 yrs) felt perfect to me. that’s literally one of the only reasons.
- i was conflicted on whether i should delve more into taehyun/jaehyun’s relationship, but honestly, i wanted to keep it realistic. like life won’t ever be tied up super perfectly at the end and that is okay!
> chenle/jisung are best friends in a mutually-pining type of relationship/friendship, chenle goes to college in california (?)
sorry for never getting into this further oops
> jaemin/renjun are beomgyu’s roommates who fell in love with each other over the course of fall semester [yeah that could literally be a fanfic of it’s own huh]
> heeseung/jaeyun/skz members are beomgyu’s friends
> i am so sad for not including MORE heeseung/taehyun action but that is ok i cannot win them all.
> location -- in my mind this is set in new england. it's pretty obvious where lol if you're familiar with the area...
> beomgyu is from the greater boston suburbs
> taehyun comes from this very specific school in texas -- if you’re familiar with private school it is very obvious what i’m talking about, but i’m not going to mention it publicly
> taehyun’s math background:
- this is pandering meant for me only but i see him as someone who was good at competition math in middle school but shifted focus a bit in high school to focus on topics outside of competitions/his track career.
- it was honestly really important to me that i mentioned his love for math… i just really like perfect mathdol kangtaehyun!
- he isn’t one of those finance mathbros making 500k at jane street out of college, he’s just like… a cute pure math major ^_* who wants to go to grad school and become a professor ;;
- i hope his analytical mindset came thru with this fic bcs i really tried to describe some things in a more… mathematical way at times?
> choosing real analysis as the class: i learned a little bit about real anal over the summer (very basic rudimentary stuff), so i knew i could talk about it. it’s also a class where i know college freshmen and college seniors who have taken it… i wanted a course that was difficult yet feasible for soobin to take i guess? not sure how much i succeeded with the “feasible” part but yeah.
> the scene where beomgyu tells taehyun about his older brother is based off of this canon moment (thx kaia for sending this to me!)
> there was some stuff i took out of my outline, mainly the amount of dragging out of misunderstandings [yeonjun’s valentine for soobin, taegyu meeting yeonbin at the movie theaters] because i realized that taehyun is way too straightforward to ever populate the misunderstandings tag on ao3…
> i also had no idea what was going on with beomgyu’s backstory thru the first draft, only that he had some sort of crush on taehyun, and figuring that out made me cut some stuff
> because i watched some taegyu vlives, i removed some ooc characteristics [for example: i said that beomgyu walked fast which asdf. i have no idea how fast he walks but he said he was a slow talker/had low bp so i’m just going to assume he is not Fast.]
People clearly think he’s dateable judging by the amount of times he’s witnessed random students asking Beomgyu for his number or hitting on him at parties.> chwe beomgyu perfect face hottie. enough said
“Woah, you look happy,” Hueningkai notes, padding into the room with a towel hanging around his neck.> just wanted to point out that i am NOT IMMUNE to the hueningkai/kai thing. in my defense this was written before i even posted the yeonmark and i quickly realized the error of my ways. but seriously why are there so many fics on ao3 with hueningkai instead of KAI X___X it’s a disease and i used to have it.
Taehyun shrugs. “Just the usual,” he says.
“Is he...” Taehyun trails off, wondering how to word your asshole ex who broke your heart without sounding indelicate. Then again, he’s always been indelicate, with Beomgyu.> lol i had no idea what i was doing with beomgyu’s backstory at the time. i kind of wish i was able to keep in the “everyone goes at their own pace” line because i always like reinforcing things but at the same time it didn’t work with the story
Beomgyu just nods, looking down at the table. His hands fidget with his chopsticks.
…
“Right, yeah, I’m sorry,” Taehyun says quickly, feeling guilty for even wondering about it in the first place. “Everyone moves on at their own pace.”
“Right,” Beomgyu agrees, looking a little surprised that Taehyun has echoed his words from earlier.
> “then again, he’s always been indelicate with beomgyu” might be one of my fav things
Kai’s the one who showed both of them how to order at the drypot place—it’s mostly a lot of pointing and nodding, because neither of them know any Chinese, but they manage to get the message across—but he and Beomgyu more commonly eat there by themselves. Part of it is that it’s easy for them to share an order, neither of them particularly big eaters. Another part is that Beomgyu doesn’t gel as well with Kai for reasons Taehyun doesn’t quite understand—they’re more similar than Beomgyu likes to admit.> deleted this because A) do i really want to get anon hate for seeding the beomkai agenda again B) it’s a lot of useless exposition
> however i wrote about it in the first place because i am obsessed w/ beomtyunning going out to [redacted] together and ordering drypot *__*
He had asked Jisung if he was going to this formal, to which Jisung made a face and responded with something about how he could barely get a normal date with a girl, much less a formal one. Alright, fair.> deleted this in favor of seeding chenji. it is kind of ridiculous that most of my close friends reading this fic [u know who u are] are chenji shippers
this section is kind of boring so feel free to skip! i wrote it out in depth because i’ve gotten ccs about this type of stuff and i want to be able to direct people to this post in the future n__n
> this started out as a nomin idea i came up with on october 12, where the premise was “jeno went to an all boys school / so he doesn’t know how to talk to girls / so he asks jaemin for help / they fall in love instead” and it was going to have jeno crushing on heejin (loona) and jaemin being exes with hyunjin (loona)... however the idea didn’t really fit jeno’s personality well / i had already written a fake-dating nomin / i was in the middle of writing venn diagram at the time so i never ended up writing it x__x
> cue october 29, a couple days before nanowrimo, when i was trying to figure out a fic to write. i ended up making it into a taegyu fic and realized it could plausibly fit their personalities a little bit more n__n
> so on oct 29 i ended up outlining the basic elements (exposition/rising action/climax/falling action) and i fleshed it out into a calendar outline on oct 31. the idea of using a calendar came from eri’s cc answer on how she organized things for her chwe boys fic!
> in particular i knew that i wanted to start it at the beginning of second semester and i wanted to acknowledge taehyun’s birthday/beomgyu’s birthday/valentines day so i ended up arranging everything around that.
> lol thanks to participating in wip olympics i can actually see my wordcount jumps to an extent!? for example i wrote ~8k in the first week of november, ~8k in the second week of november, then ~4k within the next two days after that [i wrote 7k within the span of 3 days. yes i’m unhinged].
> i would say that i finished my first draft of this fic on ~nov 17. but here’s the thing. I REALLY HATED IT mostly because there were a couple of dropped threads [taehyun & his hesitancy towards showing affection, beomgyu’s weird past with taehyun] that i didn’t ever elaborate on and the fic didn’t make sense. at the time the wordcount was around 20k - 21k.
> i ended up reverse outlining the fic on spreadsheets just so that i could see everything chronologically, then i basically inserted things that i thought would make the story flow more -- so the stuff about beomgyu’s first meeting with taehyun, taehyun’s r/s with his brother, was included then. that’s basically what i’d call draft 2? i finished draft 2 on nov 22nd or so and it was ~23k
> random aside but, as all of this was happening, i started talking to kaia on nov 14/found this txt primer/started actually watching more taegyu content!! as a result i started having a more nuanced take on txt dynamics and this brings me to draft 3.
> this stage is what i call the “line by line edit.” it’s something i started ever since i wrote square (2017) in september, and basically it means that i downloaded a pdf of the fic, annotated it with my stylus/tablet, then implemented the handwritten changes x___x i don’t know why this is necessary but it’s honestly really difficult for me to catch typos otherwise!! i know i’m insane but i am free n__n
> i only ended up doing this for 50% of the fic [oops sorry to the middle section!] so if u notice any gaps in quality there then… [stares into the distance] yeah that’s on me.
> on nov 25 i finished doing the line by line edit, or at least as much as i could tolerate doing without losing my sanity, and then sent it to my beta, rose. that was also the same day i wrote up my entire taegyu manifesto…
> by this point i kinda hated my fic. LOL
> rose betaed the shit out of it [in parts] and also reminded me that this fic had redeeming qualities which was rlly nice x___x and i ended up posting chapters as soon as i finished addressing her comments… <3
> i’m actually really proud of this fic! i remember reaching a point half-way through where i was like help this is so bad, i didn’t know anything about txt when i came up with the idea of this fic, what do i do, but through editing it many times i managed to get the dynamix and plot going somewhat the way i wanted? rip side yeonbin and not mentioning kai/sunoo outright tho... x__x
> hopefully this taegyu renaissance that has been happening will continue!! i love taegyuism. <3
> this is the first fic i've written where i really felt supported by a bunch of different people thru the writing process? like the difference between drafting the nomin 25 lives au and barely talking to ppl about it vs. ranting abt tg1 on priv, asking rose to beta it, discussing taegyu dynamix with kaia & lav, general support from ecbc+c !! x__x "i can [write] well because i am loved well" [i need to stop tenderhearting on main]
> ultimately this fic is just incredibly personal to me and something i put a lot of myself into and i hope it shows… quote my november reflection post “sometimes u need to write the tropey mathematical coming of age strained sibling relations fake dating fic of ur dreams…” AND I DID! #shaktisnthwin
> what's next: i see a lot of non-taegyus in my future and that is fine. for some reason i thought i'd just only write taegyu fics for the entirety of my stay in moa ficdom but i truly do want to try rewriting yeonbin/sookai narratives ;; i just need to figure out wth chwesoobin is first. and, of course, i'm writing a lot of jaemin-centric nct fic this month ;;AA;; hopefully by the time i come back to taegyu i can write them in greater depth & detail and rlly do them justice!! also if i'm not doing college apps during dec break then i'm probably going to re-format/re-do the taegyu manifesto :o
no subject
this is the only reason i got dw this is so sexy of u shakti omg,,,,
THE MOTIFS!!! DUDE!! I SQUEALED WHEN IS AW THE MOTIF LIST!! the colors absolutely came across it rlly stuck w me and i really really really loved it <3333 every singlemotif u mentioned came through rlly well dude i am heart eyes it's rlly lovely
also thanku for the chenji. i love u
sorry for flaming u sm while betaingaskjga but rlly. this is a fantastic fic and def one of my favs by uuu <33333
(no subject)