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lostinanimage · 4 years

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Do you mind me asking about your writing process? How do you get into the midst of the characters so well? I'm just asking because I really love your writing.

I don’t mind at all, but this might get long. (Spoiler alert: It got very very long. No one is ever going to ask me this again.)

I do have a very different process when starting something that’s fanfiction as opposed to something that is mostly or entirely original characters. (My checkplease fiction is somewhere in the middle but more toward the original fiction process because it’s almost entirely original characters.) I’m going to go with my fanfiction process because I’ve been posting 911:Lone Star mostly, but if you want more about my original stuff, let me know. I’m not sure which fandom you’re from. <3

First off, my fanfiction ideas usually come from gaps in the show or a changing something (like Carlos’s job) and blending from there. Because 911: Lone Star tried to cram so much into 10 episodes with way too many characters and emergencies on top of that, they *expected* viewers to mentally fill in some blanks. (Though they may explain those blanks later, it’s still something that’s expected at the time.) Filling in these blanks is what tends to inspire me to start writing fanfiction. (Which is why my checkplease stuff is mostly OCs. I like Jack and Bitty, but we knew so much of their story already. Telling Kent’s story gave me more space. Playing with how Jack dealt with switching teams gave me material for him.) For Lone Star (and some for 911), I honestly feel like I have a huge advantage when it comes to writing these characters. For Carlos (and Eddie), I’m a Mexican queer person from Texas. (For Eddie I did a big move away from my family—to California at one point even.) For TK, I have recovered from an overdose and I have mental health issues. I was relocated because of these things. I’ve lived in Florida (Majan) and Chicago (Paul) and I’ve spent so much time in NYC that I have 3 exes in the city. Someone from my Lone Star fic recently decided to read my checkplease fic as original fiction and quickly discovered that Lone Star is basically just a show made up of tropes and characters I like to write anyway. I also have friend who developed schizophrenia in his early thirties. (Sadly, he was a black man in the south so he was killed the way many black men with mental illnesses in the south are killed.) I still do lots of research, but definitely not as much as I would have to do without all these things. That said, I’ve watched so many parts of the episodes over and over again. Except for the failed dinner scene—which is hard for me to watch, I’ve probably watched every single Tarlos scene over 20 times to pick apart the way they look and move and interact with each other. It gives me a base to grow from. I’ve probably watched the entire series in full (muting that dinner scene lol) over ten times. For the My Salvation series and Tunnel Vision, I’d usually pull up the episode in the time I’m covering and at least watch pieces of it to remind myself what all the characters were doing. This also helps refresh me so that their voices stay in character. When switching between 911 and 911:Lone Star, I’d put on any random episode for at least a little bit to make sure I was back in the right mindset and not, for example, writing Bobby with Owen’s voice. The only character I don’t have to do this with is Judd. I lived in Texas for 18 years. I can write Judd’s voice immediately with no refresher. Jim Parrack (actor who plays Judd) grew up an hour from me and is only 2 years older than me. I’ve literally attended an event at the school where he went to high school while in high school at the same time. Thanks for hiring an actual Texan, Lone Star. Never met him as far as I know, but I grew up with people talking like that. I’ve been to Austin multiple times. I think one of the easy traps to fall into is misusing the advice to “write what you know.” Lone Star for me is a very good example for that because I just outlined how much I know about the facts surrounding these characters. But my actual personality and life history is not like any one of them. I’m divorced, but I don’t think Owen reacts to his divorce like I would. I’ve overdosed, so I was able to know how TK would feel physically, but I’m not like TK so it writing that meant asking “okay, how does *TK* react to this physical feeling. I’m a queer Mexican from Texas, but my personality is almost nothing like Carlos’s, so I can put in facts from my background, but I have ask how Carlos reacts to those things because he’s not going to react the same why I do.

Also, because it’s been a hot topic lately, don’t write what you don’t know. If you’re not Mexican-American and you can’t develop this very complex knowledge for how your use of Spanish changes according to your life situation, so don’t try to write it in. No one will miss it. I love writing Paul, but there’s a limit to what I can write about him being trans and black. That’s okay. I just won’t write him as well as a black trans man, but I might write Carlos and Eddie better than that person. And seriously, don’t write Judd and Grace with a Texas accent if you have no experience. People will only notice if you get it wrong. Still do a lot of research so that you have some ideas in your head! And then don’t actually try to use it. I know that sounds like super-weird advice, but if you’re writing a different culture, that’s my best advice. There are so many traits that make up each character. For example, I can put in aspects of my background when I’m writing Eddie, but I’ve never personally served in the military, so I don’t highlight that part of his character. Also, since I’m here, people who have never done sex work should stop writing it and stop using imagery around it when writing sex scenes. It’s annoying and almost always wrong. Stop. I don’t outline and I make almost no notes until I get to the point of a verse being so big, that I have to make a timeline to keep everyone’s ages in line. I’m not there yet for my Lone Star fic. All kinds of notes and character things do just kind of stay in my head. It’s hard to explain, but that’s how it is. I write almost entirely chronologically. To be fair, I started writing fanfiction at age 14, I graduated with a degree in creative writing. I published my first book in 2009. I’ve always done this many things in my head. My characters were likely not always this well-formed. However, a lot of the character work I do in my head can totally be written down. If you’d like, you’re welcome to pick a character and I’ll write out a full character sheet with what’s going on in my head that influences how I write a character. (For any of my OCs, I could do this. For 911/Lone Star, I could do Eddie, Buck, TK, Owen, Carlos, and Judd the easiest.) One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about while writing Tunnel Vision is exploring what my different back story would change about Carlos. He’s purposely less closed off because in my opinion he learned to shut off emotion even more as a cop. I think this is evident in the show not just in the police station scene, but also in the finale when TK sort of ends the relationship. There’s no way he’s that okay with it, but you can see that he’s prepared himself for that response. (As opposed to the dinner scene where you see more emotion because he wasn’t prepared for that rejection.) As a teacher, I feel like he’d be a bit more open and better at communication, so I’ve made those little changes. That said, I think it’s obvious that dialogue is my jam. This is why I have to stay so, so far ahead of posting to be able to edit my own stuff. I write quickly and I leave out words and my brain will correct mistakes unless I step away from a section for at least two weeks. I also envision things so clearly in my head that I need that time away to realize when I need more description or when I need to use names instead of pronouns, etc. Sometimes I’ll add dialogue in editing but usually nothing major. One of my favorite things about writing fanfiction is that I can put out all kinds of extra scenes and points of view. I actually have some of these things for my published works just sitting in extra files because I’ve needed to write other points of few to get the reactions right. Anytime I write half a phone call, I always have the other side written somewhere. Anyway, wow this got really long so I’m going to stop rambling. Clearly I don’t mind asks like this is. Lol. I’m still almost completely quarantined and my girlfriend is out of town. Send me all the asks you want. lol

#my fic stuff #begin again fic stuff #911 lone star #tarlos #ask me things

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