writing til forever falls apart

 was i insane for tffa? yes, yes i was.

 

100k in a little over a month. yeah. yeah, that was actually crazy. granted, i had like, 2k already done from random spurts of inspiration during my sem + a few dialogues, but nothing really concrete. the most that i had done within a month was 43k or so. this was way beyond anything i've ever done. 

 

i think i pulled it off because 1) i was deprived of writing for a whole semester and 2) i could not stop thinking about this damn wip. once i got the idea, i simply couldn't think of any other idea i had. add to that my recent deepdive into nahyuck brainrot (ah yes me and my hyuck ships) so really. i felt like if i didn't write this i would actually perish. 

 

basically i spent my free time during my whole semester lying in bed, thinking about scenes in this fic and crying. i'm not sure how i got so affected with it (i blame the fluff of another hyuck ship i'm writing). i wrote out most of the angsty dialogue in my notes app, and then i'd sob reading it. overall, i was a mess. 

 

writing it out was scary, though. like, i know they're both my most-written neos ever and i should know how to write them, but i haven't written out their dynamics as much. i've only ever written short, angsty drabbles. i can't write full-on arguments, i can't write them as having resentment towards each other (too soft for that, please forgive me). 

 

so every now and then while i was writing, i wondered if it was any good. i wondered if it was up to nahyuck standards, because truly some of the most heartbreaking fics i've read are of them. i should know how to write them, and yet i struggled. 

 

and well there's this fear i have whenever i write really long fic. i didn't want to put so much time in it for it to flop or something. yeah, i should write for myself, but i wanted to feel validation for all the effort, y'know? i tried my best not to think about it too much as i wrote, but still. 

 

will go a little into my writing process and some random trivia in the next parts! 

 

 

 

writing process

 

 

everyone saw the thread please. i forgot that people do see my tweets lmao. 90+ parts, i really wanted to make it hard on myself, huh?

 

i wasn't at my fastest rate with tffa. there were days that i wrote like. 400 words. and then there days that i wrote 8k, max. there were days that i did not write at all. i used to be so much faster with these, but i've slowed a bit.

 

still, pretty damn fast. i can barely believe it either, but again, it might have been just how much i missed writing. 

 

i did however revert back to my habit of writing things non-chronologically. at least with uwian (my dotae), i wrote nearly all of the scenes one after the other. with tffa, i was at least 20k in without even writing the first two scenes. i kept jumping scenes because the filler scenes felt... wrong somehow. i dunno, something was just off with them and i didn't want to write them until i felt like i could. so i ended up writing a lot of the angstier scenes first, so basically i was crying for most of the first third of my writing.

 

my playlist for this was... nct hoe anthems LOL. that interspersed with this sad playlist i found on spotify. i do tend to have difficulty writing with english songs playing so the sad playlist was more to get ideas. with the nct playlist, i think i was more able to get more words out, so that was great. i think i also found this playlist with ggs/female soloists, and that also really helped with my sprinting.

 

confession time: i messed up the timeline a little bit. the new york trip was supposed to be a few months after, but i realized that things were not lining up. so i made it a year after, but then all the other timelines weren't quite lining up, so i had to move things around and hope for the best. i promise to do better on that next time, and i'm hoping it's not super odd when being read. (i read it a few times. it's not so bad.)

 

writing the flashbacks was both the easiest and the hardest parts of the fic. easiest because they were often short, and writing about happier times was a great break from the rest of it. hardest because i wanted to really show how much jaemin was in love with him, and how their relationship pretty much looked perfect. the flashbacks weren't supposed to be in the fic originally, but i think they really add to the feel of it. more pain really, when you see how jaemin viewed them and what they had. i liked that effect.

 

i've reread it a couple of times and i think it's written in a style that's pretty different from my usual one. i would say my style is very mellow, a lot of repressed feelings that aren't explicitly stated, a lot of pining, a lot of immersing the reader in the setting. this has that, but there are so many parts of it that are rawer, more emotional, so much more blunt than i would usually do. it really is angst, something i've only done in spare, muted amounts on my other fics. i liked writing it, even though it had a chokehold on me.

 

 

research?
 

admittedly not the fic i had the most research for, but there was a considerable amount. i had to figure out influencer life (i never though i'd say that), i had to research on locations, i had to put together believable hotels if i couldn't find a hotel that suited the scene. 

 

also mostly did research on food and when they ate it. food is prominent in the story, due to them travelling as well as enjoying a lot of home meals. i wanted to find food that they both enjoyed, as well as food that they could prepare. they both seem to enjoy traditional food irl, and then hyuck cooks more traditional while jaemin likes fusion usually. i kind of incorporated that into the story as well.

 

of all the locations, i think i did the most research for nyc. looked for hotels, for the layout of central park, for galleries, all the prices of things. didn't get to really detail everything, but i tried my best to really make it feel like they're there.

 

looking for a ring was one of the first things i did. i wanted a ring that wasn't a traditional wedding ring, and something that really suited hyuck. went through quite a lot of websites, bookmarked maybe a hundred or so rings because i got carried away. was also looking for a ring for a new wip, so it all works out.

 

i do wish i spent a little more time on some of these details, but i'm still pretty proud of what i was able to incorporate into the story.

 

 

trivia

• thought about writing this in jaemin's perspective, but ultimately i think donghyuck's perspective suited the story better
• really would've been longer if i didn't cut out a few scenes (too lazy to write those out + they didn't seem necessary)
• considered an epilogue where they get married
• considered a different epilogue with jaemin's pov (either of the past, or of the current time)
• originally going to be a oneshot until it was clear that it can't be a oneshot
• planned on giving them a dog at first
• almost made them fwbs with lines that they were blurring until i decided i wanted them to take it slow

 

to summarize: rather challenging to write, but i really enjoyed it! i honestly like the output, considering it's my first time really writing this ship and the tropes out. will i do it again? probably, but not in the near future. i want to hurt them a lot less in my next wip (which also has them in an established relationship because i'm predictable like that).