Rubick

Some more writing questions from Tumblr!

What word(s) do you find yourself using a lot?

I'm not sure if there are individual words I have a weakness for, but I definitely feel there are a lot of phrases and descriptions I reuse endlessly. Unfortunately, I have zero ability to retain the knowledge of what those phrases are. If I reuse a phrase while writing, I have no awareness that I've used it before! And then I’ll reread the fic a few days after posting and go 'oh, goddammit, I’ve used that phrase in a million fics, haven’t I?' (If anyone else has noticed specific recurring phrases in my writing, I would be interested and/or mortified to know.)

One phrase I have developed conscious awareness of: I have used the phrase 'There is a pause' 76 times across my fics. At some point I became aware that I used this phrase too much, so I went for 'There's a pause’ instead. I have now used 'There's a pause' 96 times.

I suppose 'said' (or rather 'says', as I usually write in present tense) might count as a word I use a lot? I originally dismissed it as an answer to the question because I consider it a near-invisible word - it’d be like saying I use 'the' a lot - but different writers have very different attitudes to 'said', so the fact that I use it relentlessly is still a marker of my style. You can’t avoid 'the'; you can theoretically avoid 'said’, but I very much don’t. It’s so useful and unobtrusive! (Or at least it’s unobtrusive to me.) I’d say I average one 'says' every hundred words.

I... also average one 'blood', 'pain' or 'scream' every thousand words across all of my fics, now that I check. Whoops. (That's including words containing those letter sequences, like 'bloodied' or 'painful' or 'screaming'. Or... or 'Spain', I suppose, although I don't write a lot about Spain.)

What do you feel sets your writing apart from that of others?

Oh, this is a tricky question! I'd probably say it's the subject matter?

I don't think there's anything stylistically unique about my writing; I do have a particular style, but it's not necessarily something you could pick out of a lineup of similar writers. But the concepts that interest me can be pretty specific and niche, and I often find myself writing for rare pairings and small fandoms. I'll also write for more popular things, but I'm more motivated to write a fic if I don't think the concept has been written already.

In other words, you can find my style anywhere, but there are ships and concepts and fandoms where, if you want to read fanfiction for them, I'm more or less the only option (condolences). Of course, there are a lot of other writers out there who are also pursuing their own niche ideas - that's not unique in itself - but each of us is bringing something unique to the table.

What do you feel is your writing’s biggest flaw?

Impatience, probably! I really enjoy the act of writing, but I also spend the entire process itching to get the story finished so I can share it with the world. This can lead me to go 'great, it's finished, time to post!' as soon as a fic is in a theoretically finished state. Often, though, the fic would benefit from a little more time and thought, from adding a few more scenes, from fleshing out developments a little more. It's too late; I've already posted, and now it'll always gnaw at me that this fic will never be quite as good as it could have been.

Here are a few more questions and answers about writing from my Tumblr!

Are you only working on one project right now, or multiple?

I’ve got twenty-nine files in my WIP folder, and I’ll occasionally pop into one and write a few lines, but there’s no project that’s really grabbing me right now. Or there’s no fanfiction project, at least, because I’ve been busy building a Danganronpa website. I promised myself I wouldn’t make any more websites! They’re so much work! I don’t know why I keep doing this!

(To be honest, I know why I did this: it's because I got COVID and spent a week in quarantine. There are a lot of issues associated with COVID, but no one ever talks about the risk that, while you’re isolating in your bedroom, you will end up making a fourth goddamn website.)

What’s the best thing to get you in the mood for writing?

There’s nothing I can reliably do to get myself into writing mode, unfortunately! The only thing that will make me write is having an idea. Once I’m inspired, I’ll write at every chance I get, but I don’t know how to trigger that inspiration; I just have to wait until it hits me.

What plot points and themes do you find yourself falling back on again and again in your work?

There are a lot of themes I find myself revisiting constantly! The main ones coming to mind are:

- Being unable to trust your own memories. Memories being erased, memories being rewritten, memories of things that never happened filtering through from another timeline; I do a lot of writing about weird memory stuff in general!
- Feeling responsible for someone’s death.
- Seeing/speaking to somebody no one else can see. This often combines with the above one: a character hallucinates someone whose death they feel responsible for.
- Bad coping mechanisms.
- Isolation.
- Falling in love with and/or banging everyone you know. I write this so often that I made an entire AO3 collection just to house my fics on this theme.

How often do you write?

It varies a lot, but my general pattern is to go a few weeks writing almost nothing, then get a fic idea and write feverishly for several days, then go back into a lull once I’ve finished the fic. The exception is November, in which I try to write a little bit every day. We’re almost there; I’ll need to think of some ideas!

What books have inspired your writing the most?

Animorphs, no question. I was absolutely passionate about KA Applegate’s Animorphs series when I first started writing fanfiction as a twelve-year-old, and, looking back at my early efforts, I can see that the style was heavily influenced by Animorphs. I wasn’t writing Animorphs fanfiction; I was writing for Pokémon! But there’s no question of where my style came from.

Over the years, as I’ve grown up and become a more experienced writer, my style has developed. But you could probably trace a direct line back from my current fics to my childhood efforts to reproduce the style of Animorphs. If you dig up my writing style to see what’s underneath, you’ll find that the foundations are pure Animorphs: very straightforward, very unornamented, short sentences and short paragraphs, focused on emotion and dialogue above all else.