#twyd

giymfa was right before s5, twyd was during (or at least, i started posting it during the season, and posted it near the end or after)

guy in your mfa (grad student bellamy)

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

She turns over in his embrace and presses her face against his chest, and he holds her and rubs her back and doesn’t say a word, not that it’ll be okay and everything is fine, because it’s not, it’s more complicated than that, and he knows that sometimes you just need the silent presence of a warm body beside you.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“I bore a child, Bellamy. An entire room of people saw a slimy, bulbous head exploding out of my snatch. I really don’t care.”

5: What part was hardest to write?

ALL OF IT. it was all hard. rip

15: What did you learn from writing this fic?

this is actually a super exciting question because i’ve never gone through and parsed out my au-building process. it just kinda happens, but there is a kind of method to it i think

so uhh the first thing i do in any fandom is read a handful of the top kudosed fics. in the case of bellarke my initial fic run-through showed me a few things about the fandom i wouldn’t have known from the show itself:

bellamy calls clarke princess in every fic. like. every fic. (so if i wrote a fic that was missing it, it would look weird)

in all E-rated fics, bellamy is obsessed with clarke’s tits and going down on her (or at least, i haven’t read a fic yet that doesn’t include both these elements)

the fandom overall is very skewed toward friends-to-lovers rather than meet-cutes

the fandom overall is skewed toward modern au over canon

the fandom overall sticks to TV canon rather than book canon (an important difference in, say, GoT fandom where the TV/book difference is pretty apparent in fic)

once that was done i started writing guy in your mfa, so, i’ll just...go over how i built each one, character-wise

guy in your mfa

i’d been wanting to write a fic about my MFA experience for a while but my previous fandoms didn’t seem to fit. t100 is perfect because it’s an ensemble cast with a strict age divide between the delinquents and adults, so it worked for the grad student/professor angle.

i paced this one differently than other romances i’ve written, where there’s a lot of pining through the whole thing and a confession at the end and suddenly they can be together. in this fic, they both realize pretty early on they have feelings for each other, because they’re writers, and writers, esp ones in grad school, tend to move fast and fall hard. 

so i had to engineer a reason they couldn’t be together, and i chose bellamy’s dark past in which he’s done some desperate deeds, and his self-hatred that makes him think he’s not worthy of love. 

in the show, they’re both kind of outcasts because they’re leaders. in an MFA this would translate to either being too good they stand out, or writing outside of the traditional literary canon. hence, bellamy is an amazing writer, and clarke writes from her gut (and what’s in her gut is YA SFF)

as far as building their romantic/sexual dynamic, it was a little difficult because i definitely veer more toward clarke’s mentality, like, we’re obviously perfect for each other, full speed ahead, which i think is pretty clarke-ish based on canon and how she just Gets Shit Done. but bellamy, while he thinks the same way, like this is a relationship that has a lot of potential, he also thinks, we better start it right, and we can’t do that until you know and accept all my bullshit. canon bellamy only acts rashly when it comes to life/death situations; otherwise i see him as very methodical and calculating. 

wanheda & the hunter

so this one started with the thought, i want to write a monsterfucker fairy tale, and from there i wove in a few canon details. this is probably the closest to canon i’ll ever get, unless i finish my six-years-on-the-ring fic. 

wanheda i built based on her actual character description -- she’s the commander of death. so if you only knew her as a legend, what do you think she would look like? so i described the image that popped into my head when i asked myself that question.

i don’t remember much of the rest of my process. i was pretty focused on practicing a new writing style that i’m not sure i pulled off very well.

talking with you in the dark

another fic where i was practicing a writing style. i wanted to see if i could put a lot of feels into fewer words, which i feel like i’m always practicing in some way because i’m hyperverbal. (i’m also working on leaning into it, but that’s in some other projects)

part of this writing style (kent haruf’s) is kind of........flattening characters in order to convey the simplicity of being human. so b and c are like diet coke versions of themselves, totally normal people living normal lives, and only flashes of canon made their way into the story.

bellamy’s initial hesitation toward clarke, followed by an intense sense of loyalty toward her, his strained relationship with octavia. clarke’s confidence and her prioritization of madi made their way in too. 

training wheels

lord help me. every once in a while i get an idea that i have absolutely 0 control over. one minute it flickers into my brain and the next i’ve written 20k and i don’t know how it happened. all i know is i started writing this fic august 22, even though i didn’t have time to or even want to write it. i don’t remember sitting down to start it, or how much of the idea had been fleshed out yet. it just happened, and it keeps just happening. if i let it, i would devote literally all my time to it, but i have other responsibilities so i can’t.

the character dynamic in this one was built separately.

for clarke, i took her pilot ep characterization, in which she’s experienced a lot of trauma and isolation, so when we meet her, she’s primed for badassery. but for ch1 training wheels clarke, i needed to strip even that away and go where i imagine she came from pre-canon, a little spoiled, very bright, manipulative as shit. so i need all the potential to be there but none of the growth, and the story over time will provide that growth.

for bellamy, i picked the s5 “i’ve sat in near isolation for six years and i’ve had a lot of time to introspect” version of himself. to me, being a teacher makes a lot of sense for him, because in s1 he was so dedicated to those fucking speeches (which i loved), and he seems like the kind of guy to get 97% of his self-worth and sense of fulfillment from finding the promise in people and helping them reach their potential, because he’s never learned to focus on himself or his needs. and he loves clarke, so it’s very hard to deny her anything she wants, especially when what she wants is to learn something new, something he’s very capable of teaching her.

then i tossed in their long-term undying loyalty and admiration of one another, and you get training wheels bellamy and clarke. 

there’s actually a lot more to this i think because i’ve spent nearly all of my mental and creative energy of the past month on this fic, but also i can’t talk about it forever, i have to go Do Things. happy to answer more questions later if there’s anything it would help for me to zero in on specifically. 

the need for human contact is a thing i feel p much constantly haha

oh yay! i love this verse it’s so chill

bellamy spends like way, way too much money on madi

seriously, like christmas and birthday presents out the ass, so many that clarke has to p much beg him to tone it down lest she become spoilt

so he DOES but RELUCTANTLY

until clarke and bellamy get married, and now octavia has a niece, and the present-drowning is renewed

speaking of married

bellamy proposes to clarke on a wednesday afternoon, mid-conversation about how terrible gummy vitamins taste

the question comes out of his mouth and surprises him just as much as it does her

but obvs she says yes

they pick out rings together from a small jeweler in town using stones from a few of clarke’s grandmother’s older pieces 

it only takes a month to plan the wedding because it’s small and informal, secular, at a park with about two dozen people 

i wanted so badly to make it a loooooong fic to get that much more immersive but it was so hard to write, just like. on a line level, and i had to let it go :((