fic talk: writing about writing

[sword_logic]

words about words! i'm writing a long...er fic again and, as always, i have Thoughts. (primarily: oh god the word count keeps going up help)

for last year, one of the goals i set (and achieved!) was to write a humorous fic — something funny for the sake of being funny. i really, really love reading humorous fics and i'd tried multiple times to write something start-to-finish humorous (i'm pretty sure there's at least one author's note on my fics saying something like "well this was supposed to be funny"), but i didn't actually achieve it until in stitches. none of the fic i've posted since then has been explicitly humorous start-to-finish, but i've noticed that in general, humor has become much more present as i'm writing; the conscious effort it took to write something humorous really made an impression on me, and i've been wanting to do it again.

so here i am! 15k words into an explicitly humorous fic. with much more to go.

i've been working on this current WIP in multiple forms since... june 2024, wow. i mentioned this in my 2024 year in review and in the AO3 wrapped asks i answered at the end of the year too, but i've been really wanting to write a fake relationship fic for a long while. this is a trope i love DEARLY for all of The Situations you can squeeze out of it, but admittedly, i'm often annoyed when i read fake relationship fic because... i really hate miscommunication as a trope. well, no, that's not quite correct — i love characters that don't know how to communicate verbally and refuse to learn, but i hate hallmark movie-tier Melodrama Miscommunication™ and that tends to be the sort of "classic" fake relationship ending (person A shies away from person B thinking they're overstepping or trying to cut themselves off from what they really want, person B is hurt because they thought person A was on board, yadda yadda). i cannoooooooot stand it. sorry.

so for ages now i've wanted to make my own (blackjack, hookers, etc.) with all the things i like and none of the things that annoy me, but i've never quite had the right ship or setup for it until one piece and zosan. this is in part due to the inherent Flavor of two characters who bicker constantly being shoved into a fake relationship, and mostly due to the simultaneous sprawl and freedom of one piece's world and narrative. there's a lot of room to splice in a side story adventure — also one of my favorite things to read — and there's also a canon arc that, shall we say, very much creates the type of situation that might be, uh, "resolved" with a fake relationship (and does have many fake relationship fics set in it!). this is all to say that when i created this document on june twenty-sixth of last year with bright optimism in my soul, i really thought i had this in the bag.

clearly, since i am here writing this post, I Did Not. boy i struggled hard with this fic. it was originally going to be a side-story-adventure fic (i guess that counts as casefic...?), but i was really struggling with the stakes. i just could not figure out how to create the outside pressure needed for the trope to work. since this was very consistently and stubbornly Not Working for me, but i still really wanted to write a fake relationship fic, i pivoted to trying to writing an AU set during the WCI arc so that i'd have built-in outside pressure coming from canon itself. i got about 6k words into that fic before hitting a massive wall of frustration because, again, nothing felt right. my writing didn't feel me, everything felt forced and stilted, i was totally losing the plot, it just was not working. at some point, a few months back, i decided to just shelve it. at the very least, i wouldn't have that forced feeling.

lo and behold, as these things tend to happen, i randomly reread what i had written at the very end of april (or start of may), and i thought to myself that i did pretty damn well with the first attempt, and that if i could just get something to click into place, it would all go from there. i closed the doc, shelved the thought, and went to sleep.

reader, you will never believe what happened. halfway through the next day i was hit with the proverbial bolt of inspiration: MAKE THIS ONE HUMOROUS.

i had been trying hard to cook up a proper casefic-type plot for this situation and i threw ALL of that out the window. being able to frame everything as Inherent Clownery simplified absolutely everything and blew the whole thing wide open on the plot front, but it has actually been really challenging to write. i'm a very logic-driven writer, and lately i've noticed a tendency to overexplain/over-show in my own writing, and i'm trying really hard to let go of both of those things as i write this fic. it is really hard for me to turn off Logic Mode and not go down rabbit holes trying to justify all the shenaniganery. it's also really, really challenging to be funny without turning into slapstick or lol XD random territory and without feeling forced. it's also a complete reversal of my usual serious-to-humor ratio, which means that i need to be very careful about creating tonal whiplash when i do want to dip into something a little more serious. this shit is hard, my dudes!

i'm having a really good time writing this, though. this is the Good Shit type of challenge — it's engaging and hard without being frustrating, and it's making me use different writing muscles in different and new ways. it's so hard not to have every single inch of this thing logicked out with iron-clad justifications, but it's so fun to Learn New Thing. i'm really liking this fic so far and i'm excited to put it out in the world.