they never meet, but there's a skirmish of wit between them

i ran a poll on twitter asking people which of the following four things were difficult for them to write and the results surprised me.



i was struggling with writing the feelings realization part of [redacted] and was curious what my fellow writing pals felt. by and large it seemed like things that required lots of talking weren't people's favorite things to write.

for me, the rank from hardest to easiest of these 4 goes:

1. feelings realization
2. the first kiss/hookup/etc
3. feelings confession
4. falling in love

in general, i think one of my greatest strengths as a writer is writing people falling in love. i'm quite proud of this, too. i think it's maybe (probably) why readers always say they find it 'achey,' 'real to life', 'full of yearning'. i've found i get pulled into a story more quickly when an MC's train of thought is clear but still laden with details that they don't realize are important. it gives the chance for you, the reader, to have that delicious feeling of knowing something they don't. (insert high school english lit example of dramatic irony being the audience knowing juliet isn't actually dead when romeo encounters her and thinks she is.)

feelings confession isn't that hard for me per say, but after writing fic for this long i think i'm struggling with finding new ways to do it where i'm not straight up plagiarizing myself. at the end of the day it is fanfiction and i guess it doesn't truly matter if i do, but i don't really enjoy the feeling of repeating myself.

the same goes for writing the first kiss. this one is starting to really fucking kill me. i think i need to experiment with structures/plots/etc that get it out of the way earlier, or in different ways like next level. i feel like i've scraped the bottom of the barrel for fics where it's the climax along with the confession. it's quite possible i need to 'get' 'back' 'out' 'there' for some inspiration lmao.

feelings realization is hardest because it's internal monologue. anything where the action of the plot or interactions/dialogue between characters isn't driving the fic forward i find hardest—UNLESS i have a super super strong character voice for what i'm writing. i think i really did this well in my taebin though i still ended up leaning on that classic "he felt weird and he didn't really know why". i struggled really hard with it while writing my woosangjun but when i reread it not long ago i actually realized i was too hard on myself over it. yeonjun's voice turned out a lot better than it felt to me while writing it.

but in other fics (especially longer ones, in which you can't really rely on a character voice to sustain you through a high word count) again it's hard for me to do this and feel like i'm not retreading the same path i've been down. again, maybe this is a sign i need to break out and explore some different structures/ideas/tropes/plots.