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furniished) wrote2022-10-03 01:55 am
furniished) wrote2022-10-03 01:55 am
FICMIX 2022 LINER NOTES
I typed up a whole rambling thing about what I was thinking about during this year’s ficmix, reflections on various themes and intentions, and then realized that I was NOT really talking about the fic and that really just a lot of things have happened to me this year that I am still processing. So, you know, that draft of this post exists, but I figured a better way to rein things in is to write up true liner notes, structured around the (jazz hands) fic playlist I made :D I promise no musical cohesion or appeal in this arrangement of songs, but at least thematically they work.
original fic: tiger, tiger burning bright (chapter 2), chanyeolanda
remix: knocking without permission
(feel free to reach me privately if you want the playlist link, but all songs are listed below the cut)
♫
I - Lyric Pieces, Edvard Grieg
This piece is from the soundtrack to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which is actually more like three short-ish films in one. I’m gonna be 100% honest and say that although I did rewatch the movie while working on my fic, I don’t actually remember which songs were from the third act (which is the one I used for this fic) so I just chose one at random from the Spotify playlist I found. Grieg is good, anyway, so.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (WFF) was actually one of the first things I thought of when I read chanyeolanda’s original dialogue, which is a kind of mistaken identity of sorts. It’s kind of funny that this ended up being the inspiration because (1) I really wanted to write an AU based on Asako I & II, another Hamaguchi film, for a while but I gave up because I have issues with narrative media AUs, and (2) WFF is definitely my least favorite of the 3 of his works that I’ve seen. But it fit so well with the original work that it was kind of a no-brainer, and I’m happy I got to break free from my Director’s Cut baggage and use the movie as inspiration without feeling constrained in any way by the material.
[Somewhat] brief synopsis of the third act of WFF (which is by far the most compelling): A woman goes back to her hometown for a high school reunion and is really anxious to run into her ex-girlfriend, who she hasn’t spoken to since their long-distance relationship ended abruptly when they went to college. (There’s also some world-building about how modern communications technology and the Internet like, don’t work in the universe of the film – which is probably to lend a sense of finality as well as ambiguity to the relationships.) The ex-girlfriend doesn’t show, but the woman mistakes another woman she randomly sees on the street to be her ex and is really happy to see her. They start talking, and she’s about to launch into this dramatic confession about how she should have fought for her ex when things got hard, when the other woman interrupts and reveals that they’re actually strangers, but she didn’t know how to bring it up because she felt bad bursting her bubble. A bunch more stuff happens – well, actually, nothing really happens, but the two characters talk more and reveal different things about their lives, relationships, regrets, etc. In the end, there’s an exchange where each woman acts as a stand-in for a “missing” person in the other woman’s life, to hear what they need to say and also comfort them accordingly. The comforting part, to me, is especially interesting because there’s usually some degree of projection involved in comforting a stranger, where you say what you want to hear because you don’t know the other person well enough to know what they actually want or need to hear.
II - Lookalike, Conan Gray
This song (and the next) goes along with the plot of WFF, wishing so much that someone would show up that you end up with somewhat embarrassing mistaken identity. I’ll admit that when I first watched the movie it seemed like something of a plot hole to me – I didn’t really buy that the protag could care that much about her ex but still think some random person was her, and I think there’s some suspension of disbelief required there. The women in the movie are also significantly older, though, probably in their 40s? So it could also be a reflection on memory and aging, getting further away from things that once seemed very sharp, and what it’s like to see so many people and things in your life change drastically over time.
III - Thought It Was You, Kimiko Kasai (orig. Herbie Hancock)
I kind of like the original version of this song better, but they’re both fun. Not going to pretend I know anything about the artists or genre, I was just searching for lyrical relevance.
One thing that chanyeolanda noted in their comment on my fic is that they weren’t convinced that Cheng Xiao and Xiao Xiao aren’t actually the same person, which is actually so funny because that’s how I felt the entire time I was watching WFF until the very end. I’m still really not sure if that possibility is left open intentionally or not in the film. When it comes to my fic… well, that is also up to the reader :)
IV - Dreams Come True, WJSN
I added this song because it’s the last WJSN track that chinity (chinaline) participated in, which is pretty sad when you think about it because at this point (2022) they’ve been apart from the group for longer than they were actually in the group. It’s actually fortuitous (?) that I got ujung’d earlier this year while watching Queendom 2, which led me to watching a bit of iQiyi’s Stage Boom, which led me to understanding both Cheng Xiao’s and Jieqiong’s careers better (even though Xuanyi is in Stage Boom, not Cheng Xiao) even before ficmix started. So really, this whole fic is possible because of money piece Exy and the broken hourglass from As You Wish stage.
Coincidentally, the lyrics of DCT ALSO work with the fic:
I’ve always been concerned with endings. The question of permanence is one that is always present, for me, even for seemingly trivial things. In many ways I would rather leave something behind completely than let it become a memory. I think modern goodbyes – when sns, facetime, and long-distance travel exist and are so much a part of everyday life – often have a lack of finality to them, a reassurance that people will remain accessible in one way or another, even if it’s in a different form from how they (and you) used to be. Despite this, there are still always partings that you don’t really come back from, at least not in the same way, no matter how much convenience is on your side – goodbyes that you don’t realize will be your last. The not knowing is what saddens me the most, and that ambiguous lingering is something I definitely internalized (or projected, depending on the vector of your perspective) when it comes to Cheng Xiao’s situation as an idol, existing in a limbo where your absence is understood but never really acknowledged for what it is. (Cue Seola saying, in the year 2022, that WJSN has 13 members…) At what point does someone become a stranger? When does a person, and your relation to them, exist only in the past tense?
V - Running, Pristin
Obviously there needs to be a Pristin (or IOI) song, too, and I liked this one because it’s about a person living in your head rent-free, and how exhausting that can be:
It may be easy to read Jieqiong’s character as a bit foolish or childish in the fic, but I think that’s fine because childhood emotions or experiences do tend to have a kind of disproportionate impact and can lead to somewhat irrational responses given nostalgia and the way that our younger selves (and their limited capacity for comprehension/processing) still exist within us. I’m a big sucker(?) for first loves, first true loves, and writing this was a way for me to exorcize certain parts of my past too.
VI - How U doing, Younha
I think everyone can relate to the mixed feelings that come with a slow petering out, when contact becomes less and less frequent, a lack of shared context feels too burdensome, things feel out of sync; eventually, it’s just easier to let the conversation die out or only communicate in short, concentrated spurts. There’s also the ambiguity of how another person might feel about you, which can make relationships quite difficult to navigate regardless of the communication style, especially if there’s a real or perceived imbalance in the dynamic. And then there are, of course, always more abrupt and permanent endings in life, ones that have no good explanation, that offer very little comfort. All of these have been on my mind, in both a personal and an abstract sense, and were things I wanted to write about, which is (in part) how I ended up with yet another Sad Chinaline Fic(TM), but in a specific flavor of sadness and regret that I hadn’t previously explored. There are many reasons why it can be hard to even ask someone you once knew how they’re doing.
A setup in media that really Gets Me is when character A is given an opportunity to say something to character B that they would not otherwise get to say. This can take many forms, including dreams and afterlife/time travel scenarios, but I also appreciate good old playacting. An example is in Before Sunset, when each protag pretends that they’re calling a friend back home and talks about the person right in front of them as if they weren’t actually there, as an opportunity to be vulnerable/familiar and say how they really feel. A similar approach is a contrived dialogue where character C becomes a stand-in for character B, because oftentimes it’s more about character A getting the closure of saying what’s being weighing on them rather than character B actually hearing it. That’s what happens in WFF and this fic, and I just think it’s so real that we often speak and act out of our own needs as much as or more than for the person on the receiving end.
VII - Matilda, Harry Styles
I saw a Cheng Xiao edit on twt that used this song and included the lyric “you don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up” which had me screaming crying throwing up etc but is basically the whole thesis of this fic.
Obviously, the fic is an allegory for idolverse, because what else am I supposed to write as ao3 user miissedappointments. At first, I wanted to make the character’s lives mirror their idol experiences exactly, but it felt too on the nose and unnatural to recreate a situation between a person and an employer/authority entity as an interpersonal relationship. So I tweaked the backstories, which was good because it gave me permission to focus on the specifics of the actual characters/world that I was building without getting bogged down in the prevalence of any connection to real life... but hopefully there’s still like, a strong hint of their real situations and various permutations of dynamics beyond the immediate storyline. Either of them could be stand-ins for themselves, for each other, for others around them, or some mix of all of the above...
I attributed a certain amount of desire and decision-making to the characters in the fic that may or may not be “accurate” to the idols themselves. Part of me does believe what I wrote, especially when it comes to Cheng Xiao wanting to stay in China, but of course it’s all speculation. || (I mean, when the alternative is to continue being burned out by cross-country promotions and have your career be a weird combination of farmed-out variety content and the bare minimum necessary to exploit your overseas appeal and compensate for the departure of the remaining Chinese members...) || Regardless, I’m generally interested in the reality of characters exercising whatever agency they have, rather than wholly villainizing or absolving them for their decisions. (In Elaine’s words: I support women’s wrongs....) There are those who leave, and those who are left behind, and both sides are painful. My hope is that the story doesn’t make any strong value judgments on what people do, but acknowledges that even the choices we make for our own best interest can be difficult and can involve a certain type of regret or bitterness – for the situations that caused us to make those choices, for the unavoidable sacrifices, for the consequences we did and didn’t foresee.
VIII - Make It Without You, Andrew Belle
This is one of the saddest songs that I know, like it truly makes me feel gut-wrenchingly horrible every time I listen to it. It’s also on my junhao playlist :) Striking out on your own, conflicted feelings of departure, transitioning from your hard-fought idol career to acting, saving face by self-soothing, etc…
IX - Everything, Muna
We’re now circling back to the sentiments of the beginning of the playlist, and the setup of the fic – looking for someone everywhere you go, because they matter that much to you, and how painful that kind of wishing and hope can be. WFF is really good at portraying this yearning without being too in-your-face about it (s/o Fusako Urabe), and I wanted to generate some of that same sentiment in my fic. Here’s where I run into another issue with using film as inspiration for writing – I find it much harder to be subtle in writing (when compared to visual mediums), because as an author you’re actively controlling the reader’s perspective at all times. Whatever you write automatically draws their attention and thus betrays its own significance. (I also had a similar quandary when thinking about how to suggest that a character may be lying/withholding information without making it too obvious to the reader. At first, I had a more clear bait/switch setup between Cheng Xiao and Jieqiong sharing their backstories but ultimately I scrapped it because I couldn’t stand the idea of not executing successfully.)
I really loved writing the ending of this fic, the scene at the train station. Originally it would have been a much simpler scene, but while I was writing I remembered the security system that I saw at the Shanghai railway station when I visited a few years ago and the whole ticket-scanning setup that they have before you actually take the escalator to the train platform. That physical setting gave me a lot more to work with, and I quite liked how it turned out in the end.
X - See You When I See You, Handsome Ghost
A fun fact about this song is that in college I had a fwb situation, and at some point I introduced the person to this band Handsome Ghost and we would listen to their album a lot during my last semester. The song makes me think about that time because we would never really make explicit plans to meet, so it was always kind of up in the air until the actual time when we would see each other.
Anyway, a lot of this story is about girls trying to find closure where there is none to be found. This can apply to the idols themselves, to their respective groups, but also to their fans, who had to deal with sudden/unexplained changes without any insight as to what happened behind the scenes. With Jieqiong’s character especially, I wanted to explore what you do when you never get the final goodbye you always wanted, the one that would allow you to move on properly. Cheng Xiao, of course, is set up to be a sort of foil for Jieqiong in this sense. There’s a version of this story where the two switch places, where one learns to let go and the other learns to hold on. But I felt in writing that I should practice what I preach; if I’m trying to make a point about having to continue on without resolution, then I wanted my story to reflect that. Change is hard. It’s both simplistic and unrealistic to say that one good conversation, one meaningful encounter, can transform how you see things. That’s why the ending of the story is the way it is – Jieqiong is still the same, in a way. She still wants, and waits. Years of feeble hope, so ingrained as to become instinct, aren’t that easy to shake. And even that, to me, is okay.
♫
In terms of craft/logistics, there were a few things I was actively working on with this fic in order to develop my writing. One was being less abstract. I re-watched WFF when I was struggling a lot and realized that good fiction writing is not always about coming up with clever and eloquent ways to express some larger “truth,” whether that’s about life or love or even a character you’re using for rpf. The skill is in making your story real and fully-formed, while allowing it to reverberate into something larger for the reader/consumer without directly telling them what that is. This is still something I’m working on, but I’d like to think I did it better than in last year’s remix.
The fic is very dialogue-heavy, and I have never considered dialogue to be a particular strength of mine. I used a strategy that Elaine suggested, which was to write out all the dialogue as a back-and-forth exchange just to get it all out on the page and then add in the narrative elements of description, action, imagery, etc. later. I suffer from writing paralysis the most when it comes to said narrative elements, so it worked out pretty well, until a few days before the deadline when I remembered that I had to go back and actually finish all of the scenes…
For the dialogue, I tried to be more realistic, which is why there are parts that seem like tangents (like Cheng Xiao asking Jieqiong what she was good at in school), and I was also conscious of exactly how much a person might reveal to a stranger. Of course, the whole setup is already a stretch, and a romanticized encounter, but I still didn’t want the characters to be baring their souls that easily just to move the plot forward, so not everything is so explicitly put out there for the reader.
I did a lot more reworking in this fic than I have in the past, which I’m quite proud of. I’m generally okay with deleting things when I edit, but I usually don’t have the balls to truly go in and hack at a draft by rearranging and/or rewriting an entire scene into something new, even if it actually does a better job at accomplishing what I originally wanted. It wasn’t until I was filling in around the dialogue that I came up with the whole arc of the two of them getting lost walking around as a parallel representation of navigating memory/change, which I was quite proud of but which required a lot more work to develop and fit in properly. You may notice that the word count in the twt graphic (which, by the way, I LOVE – I can’t believe the mods found that image of the butterflies on the window, amazing attention to detail :’))) doesn’t match the final wc of the fic because I kept going in and “tweaking” it after I uploaded to ao3 and somehow ended up adding 500 words >_<
I don’t really have any favorite lines, but my favorite scenes to write were definitely the ending and the flashbacks to when Jieqiong is a child, sneaking out of school and the stickers. My least favorite scene/part by far is Cheng Xiao’s funeral performance. I did research on professional mourners when I was planning the fic but saved the writing of that scene until the very end (before I started revisions) and kind of forced myself to bang it out. I liked what I envisioned in my head, but translating action to text isn’t something I have a lot of experience/skill in so I just had to make do. In the past, I’ve paid a lot of attention to pacing in any story, but I don’t think I did that as much in this one just because there were so many more moving parts that I was dealing with at any given time.
♫
Thanks to… the fm mods, as always, for running such a complex event with such care, and to rquive for listening to my verbal storyboarding (vomit) and always cheering for me with so much love, to kit for just GETTING it and for friendship, to anyone else I’ve managed to force into listening to me about this fic or any others. It seemed like this year was a busy one for many, but it’s always wonderful to see our unhinged stories bringing people together ♡
original fic: tiger, tiger burning bright (chapter 2), chanyeolanda
remix: knocking without permission
(feel free to reach me privately if you want the playlist link, but all songs are listed below the cut)
♫
I - Lyric Pieces, Edvard Grieg
This piece is from the soundtrack to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which is actually more like three short-ish films in one. I’m gonna be 100% honest and say that although I did rewatch the movie while working on my fic, I don’t actually remember which songs were from the third act (which is the one I used for this fic) so I just chose one at random from the Spotify playlist I found. Grieg is good, anyway, so.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (WFF) was actually one of the first things I thought of when I read chanyeolanda’s original dialogue, which is a kind of mistaken identity of sorts. It’s kind of funny that this ended up being the inspiration because (1) I really wanted to write an AU based on Asako I & II, another Hamaguchi film, for a while but I gave up because I have issues with narrative media AUs, and (2) WFF is definitely my least favorite of the 3 of his works that I’ve seen. But it fit so well with the original work that it was kind of a no-brainer, and I’m happy I got to break free from my Director’s Cut baggage and use the movie as inspiration without feeling constrained in any way by the material.
[Somewhat] brief synopsis of the third act of WFF (which is by far the most compelling): A woman goes back to her hometown for a high school reunion and is really anxious to run into her ex-girlfriend, who she hasn’t spoken to since their long-distance relationship ended abruptly when they went to college. (There’s also some world-building about how modern communications technology and the Internet like, don’t work in the universe of the film – which is probably to lend a sense of finality as well as ambiguity to the relationships.) The ex-girlfriend doesn’t show, but the woman mistakes another woman she randomly sees on the street to be her ex and is really happy to see her. They start talking, and she’s about to launch into this dramatic confession about how she should have fought for her ex when things got hard, when the other woman interrupts and reveals that they’re actually strangers, but she didn’t know how to bring it up because she felt bad bursting her bubble. A bunch more stuff happens – well, actually, nothing really happens, but the two characters talk more and reveal different things about their lives, relationships, regrets, etc. In the end, there’s an exchange where each woman acts as a stand-in for a “missing” person in the other woman’s life, to hear what they need to say and also comfort them accordingly. The comforting part, to me, is especially interesting because there’s usually some degree of projection involved in comforting a stranger, where you say what you want to hear because you don’t know the other person well enough to know what they actually want or need to hear.
II - Lookalike, Conan Gray
This song (and the next) goes along with the plot of WFF, wishing so much that someone would show up that you end up with somewhat embarrassing mistaken identity. I’ll admit that when I first watched the movie it seemed like something of a plot hole to me – I didn’t really buy that the protag could care that much about her ex but still think some random person was her, and I think there’s some suspension of disbelief required there. The women in the movie are also significantly older, though, probably in their 40s? So it could also be a reflection on memory and aging, getting further away from things that once seemed very sharp, and what it’s like to see so many people and things in your life change drastically over time.
III - Thought It Was You, Kimiko Kasai (orig. Herbie Hancock)
I kind of like the original version of this song better, but they’re both fun. Not going to pretend I know anything about the artists or genre, I was just searching for lyrical relevance.
One thing that chanyeolanda noted in their comment on my fic is that they weren’t convinced that Cheng Xiao and Xiao Xiao aren’t actually the same person, which is actually so funny because that’s how I felt the entire time I was watching WFF until the very end. I’m still really not sure if that possibility is left open intentionally or not in the film. When it comes to my fic… well, that is also up to the reader :)
IV - Dreams Come True, WJSN
I added this song because it’s the last WJSN track that chinity (chinaline) participated in, which is pretty sad when you think about it because at this point (2022) they’ve been apart from the group for longer than they were actually in the group. It’s actually fortuitous (?) that I got ujung’d earlier this year while watching Queendom 2, which led me to watching a bit of iQiyi’s Stage Boom, which led me to understanding both Cheng Xiao’s and Jieqiong’s careers better (even though Xuanyi is in Stage Boom, not Cheng Xiao) even before ficmix started. So really, this whole fic is possible because of money piece Exy and the broken hourglass from As You Wish stage.
Coincidentally, the lyrics of DCT ALSO work with the fic:
For me
Sometimes, I fall into a scary thought
Us passing by like strangers
As if we don’t know each other
I don’t even want to imagine that
Where am I to you? Where are you to me?
I’ve always been concerned with endings. The question of permanence is one that is always present, for me, even for seemingly trivial things. In many ways I would rather leave something behind completely than let it become a memory. I think modern goodbyes – when sns, facetime, and long-distance travel exist and are so much a part of everyday life – often have a lack of finality to them, a reassurance that people will remain accessible in one way or another, even if it’s in a different form from how they (and you) used to be. Despite this, there are still always partings that you don’t really come back from, at least not in the same way, no matter how much convenience is on your side – goodbyes that you don’t realize will be your last. The not knowing is what saddens me the most, and that ambiguous lingering is something I definitely internalized (or projected, depending on the vector of your perspective) when it comes to Cheng Xiao’s situation as an idol, existing in a limbo where your absence is understood but never really acknowledged for what it is. (Cue Seola saying, in the year 2022, that WJSN has 13 members…) At what point does someone become a stranger? When does a person, and your relation to them, exist only in the past tense?
V - Running, Pristin
Obviously there needs to be a Pristin (or IOI) song, too, and I liked this one because it’s about a person living in your head rent-free, and how exhausting that can be:
All day, I thought about you
Then I tried to erase you
You knock on me without permission
Why do you keep playing games?
You push me again, go away
You’re like a word bubble
Always floating above my head, I try to make it go away
But it gets bigger the more I think about you
It may be easy to read Jieqiong’s character as a bit foolish or childish in the fic, but I think that’s fine because childhood emotions or experiences do tend to have a kind of disproportionate impact and can lead to somewhat irrational responses given nostalgia and the way that our younger selves (and their limited capacity for comprehension/processing) still exist within us. I’m a big sucker(?) for first loves, first true loves, and writing this was a way for me to exorcize certain parts of my past too.
VI - How U doing, Younha
I think everyone can relate to the mixed feelings that come with a slow petering out, when contact becomes less and less frequent, a lack of shared context feels too burdensome, things feel out of sync; eventually, it’s just easier to let the conversation die out or only communicate in short, concentrated spurts. There’s also the ambiguity of how another person might feel about you, which can make relationships quite difficult to navigate regardless of the communication style, especially if there’s a real or perceived imbalance in the dynamic. And then there are, of course, always more abrupt and permanent endings in life, ones that have no good explanation, that offer very little comfort. All of these have been on my mind, in both a personal and an abstract sense, and were things I wanted to write about, which is (in part) how I ended up with yet another Sad Chinaline Fic(TM), but in a specific flavor of sadness and regret that I hadn’t previously explored. There are many reasons why it can be hard to even ask someone you once knew how they’re doing.
A setup in media that really Gets Me is when character A is given an opportunity to say something to character B that they would not otherwise get to say. This can take many forms, including dreams and afterlife/time travel scenarios, but I also appreciate good old playacting. An example is in Before Sunset, when each protag pretends that they’re calling a friend back home and talks about the person right in front of them as if they weren’t actually there, as an opportunity to be vulnerable/familiar and say how they really feel. A similar approach is a contrived dialogue where character C becomes a stand-in for character B, because oftentimes it’s more about character A getting the closure of saying what’s being weighing on them rather than character B actually hearing it. That’s what happens in WFF and this fic, and I just think it’s so real that we often speak and act out of our own needs as much as or more than for the person on the receiving end.
VII - Matilda, Harry Styles
I saw a Cheng Xiao edit on twt that used this song and included the lyric “you don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up” which had me screaming crying throwing up etc but is basically the whole thesis of this fic.
Obviously, the fic is an allegory for idolverse, because what else am I supposed to write as ao3 user miissedappointments. At first, I wanted to make the character’s lives mirror their idol experiences exactly, but it felt too on the nose and unnatural to recreate a situation between a person and an employer/authority entity as an interpersonal relationship. So I tweaked the backstories, which was good because it gave me permission to focus on the specifics of the actual characters/world that I was building without getting bogged down in the prevalence of any connection to real life... but hopefully there’s still like, a strong hint of their real situations and various permutations of dynamics beyond the immediate storyline. Either of them could be stand-ins for themselves, for each other, for others around them, or some mix of all of the above...
I attributed a certain amount of desire and decision-making to the characters in the fic that may or may not be “accurate” to the idols themselves. Part of me does believe what I wrote, especially when it comes to Cheng Xiao wanting to stay in China, but of course it’s all speculation. || (I mean, when the alternative is to continue being burned out by cross-country promotions and have your career be a weird combination of farmed-out variety content and the bare minimum necessary to exploit your overseas appeal and compensate for the departure of the remaining Chinese members...) || Regardless, I’m generally interested in the reality of characters exercising whatever agency they have, rather than wholly villainizing or absolving them for their decisions. (In Elaine’s words: I support women’s wrongs....) There are those who leave, and those who are left behind, and both sides are painful. My hope is that the story doesn’t make any strong value judgments on what people do, but acknowledges that even the choices we make for our own best interest can be difficult and can involve a certain type of regret or bitterness – for the situations that caused us to make those choices, for the unavoidable sacrifices, for the consequences we did and didn’t foresee.
VIII - Make It Without You, Andrew Belle
This is one of the saddest songs that I know, like it truly makes me feel gut-wrenchingly horrible every time I listen to it. It’s also on my junhao playlist :) Striking out on your own, conflicted feelings of departure, transitioning from your hard-fought idol career to acting, saving face by self-soothing, etc…
This is the starting of my fall from grace
My self esteem, oh, it's seen better days
But you know I'll never let this go to waste
I'll keep this memory on the map I trace
Back to home
IX - Everything, Muna
We’re now circling back to the sentiments of the beginning of the playlist, and the setup of the fic – looking for someone everywhere you go, because they matter that much to you, and how painful that kind of wishing and hope can be. WFF is really good at portraying this yearning without being too in-your-face about it (s/o Fusako Urabe), and I wanted to generate some of that same sentiment in my fic. Here’s where I run into another issue with using film as inspiration for writing – I find it much harder to be subtle in writing (when compared to visual mediums), because as an author you’re actively controlling the reader’s perspective at all times. Whatever you write automatically draws their attention and thus betrays its own significance. (I also had a similar quandary when thinking about how to suggest that a character may be lying/withholding information without making it too obvious to the reader. At first, I had a more clear bait/switch setup between Cheng Xiao and Jieqiong sharing their backstories but ultimately I scrapped it because I couldn’t stand the idea of not executing successfully.)
I really loved writing the ending of this fic, the scene at the train station. Originally it would have been a much simpler scene, but while I was writing I remembered the security system that I saw at the Shanghai railway station when I visited a few years ago and the whole ticket-scanning setup that they have before you actually take the escalator to the train platform. That physical setting gave me a lot more to work with, and I quite liked how it turned out in the end.
X - See You When I See You, Handsome Ghost
A fun fact about this song is that in college I had a fwb situation, and at some point I introduced the person to this band Handsome Ghost and we would listen to their album a lot during my last semester. The song makes me think about that time because we would never really make explicit plans to meet, so it was always kind of up in the air until the actual time when we would see each other.
Anyway, a lot of this story is about girls trying to find closure where there is none to be found. This can apply to the idols themselves, to their respective groups, but also to their fans, who had to deal with sudden/unexplained changes without any insight as to what happened behind the scenes. With Jieqiong’s character especially, I wanted to explore what you do when you never get the final goodbye you always wanted, the one that would allow you to move on properly. Cheng Xiao, of course, is set up to be a sort of foil for Jieqiong in this sense. There’s a version of this story where the two switch places, where one learns to let go and the other learns to hold on. But I felt in writing that I should practice what I preach; if I’m trying to make a point about having to continue on without resolution, then I wanted my story to reflect that. Change is hard. It’s both simplistic and unrealistic to say that one good conversation, one meaningful encounter, can transform how you see things. That’s why the ending of the story is the way it is – Jieqiong is still the same, in a way. She still wants, and waits. Years of feeble hope, so ingrained as to become instinct, aren’t that easy to shake. And even that, to me, is okay.
♫
In terms of craft/logistics, there were a few things I was actively working on with this fic in order to develop my writing. One was being less abstract. I re-watched WFF when I was struggling a lot and realized that good fiction writing is not always about coming up with clever and eloquent ways to express some larger “truth,” whether that’s about life or love or even a character you’re using for rpf. The skill is in making your story real and fully-formed, while allowing it to reverberate into something larger for the reader/consumer without directly telling them what that is. This is still something I’m working on, but I’d like to think I did it better than in last year’s remix.
The fic is very dialogue-heavy, and I have never considered dialogue to be a particular strength of mine. I used a strategy that Elaine suggested, which was to write out all the dialogue as a back-and-forth exchange just to get it all out on the page and then add in the narrative elements of description, action, imagery, etc. later. I suffer from writing paralysis the most when it comes to said narrative elements, so it worked out pretty well, until a few days before the deadline when I remembered that I had to go back and actually finish all of the scenes…
For the dialogue, I tried to be more realistic, which is why there are parts that seem like tangents (like Cheng Xiao asking Jieqiong what she was good at in school), and I was also conscious of exactly how much a person might reveal to a stranger. Of course, the whole setup is already a stretch, and a romanticized encounter, but I still didn’t want the characters to be baring their souls that easily just to move the plot forward, so not everything is so explicitly put out there for the reader.
I did a lot more reworking in this fic than I have in the past, which I’m quite proud of. I’m generally okay with deleting things when I edit, but I usually don’t have the balls to truly go in and hack at a draft by rearranging and/or rewriting an entire scene into something new, even if it actually does a better job at accomplishing what I originally wanted. It wasn’t until I was filling in around the dialogue that I came up with the whole arc of the two of them getting lost walking around as a parallel representation of navigating memory/change, which I was quite proud of but which required a lot more work to develop and fit in properly. You may notice that the word count in the twt graphic (which, by the way, I LOVE – I can’t believe the mods found that image of the butterflies on the window, amazing attention to detail :’))) doesn’t match the final wc of the fic because I kept going in and “tweaking” it after I uploaded to ao3 and somehow ended up adding 500 words >_<
I don’t really have any favorite lines, but my favorite scenes to write were definitely the ending and the flashbacks to when Jieqiong is a child, sneaking out of school and the stickers. My least favorite scene/part by far is Cheng Xiao’s funeral performance. I did research on professional mourners when I was planning the fic but saved the writing of that scene until the very end (before I started revisions) and kind of forced myself to bang it out. I liked what I envisioned in my head, but translating action to text isn’t something I have a lot of experience/skill in so I just had to make do. In the past, I’ve paid a lot of attention to pacing in any story, but I don’t think I did that as much in this one just because there were so many more moving parts that I was dealing with at any given time.
♫
Thanks to… the fm mods, as always, for running such a complex event with such care, and to rquive for listening to my verbal storyboarding (vomit) and always cheering for me with so much love, to kit for just GETTING it and for friendship, to anyone else I’ve managed to force into listening to me about this fic or any others. It seemed like this year was a busy one for many, but it’s always wonderful to see our unhinged stories bringing people together ♡