you're such a riot.

hi first of all YEAH to writing! yeah to writing and you haven't done it in like ten years! this was me two years ago completely, hadn't put words together in an intentional way since i was in highschool. also a scarily absent formal relationship to spelling and grammar, not a writer and yet. and yet. here you are writing so we must reinvestigate the definition of the word. ya sorry to tell you my friend legally if you're writing you are a writer.

i'm gonna answer your question for real and i'll also answer it for fake right here. i don't think you need metaphor. i have tried to stuff the slack mouths of my own flat-feeling fics with all the velvet petaled imagery in the universe and never has it really added any depth. look at that sentence. i wanted us to consider the flower-stuffed mouth, but for what? seconds later it is a nice picture disintegrating. it was different which leant it the assumption of being dense but it doesn't actually have weight because it didn't deliver us anywhere.

i wanna hear more about what specifically feels flat, but on a broad level, for me if it's flat it's because the character is absent. and not just character but, discovery within character? i have mostly found that transformation translates to the depth. writing really lets us burrow past the protective layers of social projection and aspirational selves we wear on the surface and get down to the genuine who. to show us not just who we are but who we wish we weren't? so i guess i like discovery to happen for the audience/writer first (the 'that's THEM' moment) then culminate for the character. that's what i mean by delivery; we can't just have nice scenery, i want to go somewhere.

and for my actual metaphor answer:

i'm working (not really) on something where they're roommates. they've lived together for years and shane has an enormous unrequited (......) crush, and i want him to sleep on the couch for a period of time.

my options to get him out of the room/on the couch are many. but then i have to peel the surface of this situation back and see what's underneath, how much it emotional weight it can carry for him. like, loud construction on a building across the street - this could work if i wanted to show that he's feeling left behind, too hung up on a guy who doesn't like him while watching the rest of his friends construct a real future. if there's a couple fighting loudly in the apartment below, that works if i want a way for him to reaffirm for himself that intimacy is too messy and not worth it.

but uncomfortable bed that hurts his back? this is my chef's kiss. first of all because i get to write about sensory stuff, sheets that were expensive but feel scratchy and make him sweat, mattress that seems both too hard and too soft - but mainly because i can switch back and forth between describing the bed when i'm really describing ilya, or describing ilya with the same words i've used for the bed. downy, rough, plush, firm, whatever. always there: comfort, always there: trap. i can have double-conversations where ilya asks shane about the bed: "since when?" and shane says, about ilya: "i don't know, i guess it's been like that for a while. maybe i just finally stopped being able to ignore it."

Shane hasn’t lost teeth to a puck since juniors.

“Look so pretty with your mouth stuffed, Hollander,” Rozanov tells him, and moves his free hand to cup Shane’s face. His thumb brushes up against the side of Hollander’s nose, idly pushing one nostril shut. He slides his fingers to the inside of Shane’s cheek, rubs along it full length before dipping his forefinger into the crevice between cheek and gum, stroking along each curved line of a tooth, and Shane tries to swallow some saliva down, but it’s like he can hear every little scrape of Rozanov in there, flat thumb stroking the pad of Shane’s tongue. He tastes dirty.