Fic - bottle water

I said on Mastodon that I wouldn’t be doing my usual retrospective blog post on my latest FangHua PWP fic because it would just be a list of all the Writing Crimes I committed. But after that I started to think it would be a good exercise to figure out what I did wrong.

The big issue with this fic was that I threw in the kitchen sink so it had an inconsistent tone (what else does a PWP have other than tone?). It has

• very blatant attempts at humour
• sappy emotional sincerity
• introspective serious ideas

and there is no synergy between them. I knew they were not working together but didn’t want to take any of it out. I mean, these are also the 3 ingredients in MLC itself. And there are loads of comedic, emotionally sincere, serious things out there that synergise well! Even I have written something I thought did okay on that front, my Silas Octakiseron TLT fic. So what’s the difference between that and the current fic…

Firstly, the writing isn’t in a distinctive register which would give the tone a consistent thread. I realised during editing that it would’ve been great to write the whole thing in fantasy novel language to sort of match the wuxia setting, but by then it was too late.

Secondly, specifically the humour and the serious parts clash because it’s not dark enough. Humour belongs a lot better alongside dark grim stuff than calmly serious stuff. So, dig deeper on the darkness in Li Lianhua’s POV (not that hard, just look at him).

Thirdly, the emotionally sincere stuff jumps out of nowhere and clashes with everything because it’s unearned. I know the whole point of fanfiction is to skip straight to the payoff but… what I wrote in the fic is not really a payoff for anything in canon! At least, not in the early canon where I set it.

This is the hardest one to deal with. I could have just taken it all out (a fic with zero conscious emotions sounds fine to me, unironically). Another option is to add more scenes set at a different time period with different emotions, because juxtaposition counts as an arc. This is my entire approach to writing at the moment, leave me alone.

Maybe there could be a prologue set early in Li Lianhua’s new life about him making peace with the people he’s lost/who betrayed him, and deciding that he’s better off alone. And losing his virginity in a one night stand with a random stranger or something because it’s PWP. This would help with making the fic darker as well.

I had an idea, which I almost shoehorned in as an aside, that back then he would have been penniless wandering around foraging in the woods and eating raw bamboo shoots (as opposed to the cooked ones he eats in the fic). They are poisonous but he’s immune to poison. I don’t know if they are even soft enough to eat raw, but why do I know that they’re poisonous raw if nobody tries to eat them that way!? Whatever, even if that doesn’t work he can eat every random thing that grows in the forest.

Moral of the story: Don’t plan your fics too well or you might end up deciding that you need to write about raw vegetables and depression, when what you really wanted was to describe your fave moaning a lot during sex