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ratbonesI've been struggling at this for weeks, but if I'm going to do it at all, I really must do it now, before I forget any more than I've already forgotten. Here's a partial behind-the-scenes view of the writing of All-Consuming.
Caveats, warnings, things that you need to read for my peace of mind:
-Spoilers for the whole fic, obviously, but also for the epilogue/extra chapter, "The Cleanup".
-I have a terrible autobiographical memory. I've tried to write mostly about the strategies I used, which I know quite well, rather than the order of events, which I've had to piece together.
-This is rambly. I tried to make it tighter, but I just. Couldn't. I'm actively learning how to write about writing here.
-None of this is writing advice; take anything that seems useful and run with it, by all means, but I don't mean to imply that I did anything "right". Or wrong! It's just what I found myself doing as I made my way through this fic.
Concept
I started thinking about a zombie apocalypse AU in July, when I realized that I possibly had a knack for action scenes. If you read my first action scene in Flesh from Bone (chapter 3) and then immediately read the second one (ch. 6), you can watch me go from ??? to !!! in a matter of three weeks. I wanted to explore that, but I didn't have a plot. I wouldn't commit to the project until I knew the ending. That's sort of a Principle for me.
The ending happened upon me in the shower. I came up with the idea of switching around the canon time loop and having Shen Wei encounter the cure/cause of the infection in the past, where he would have to choose between bringing it back and destroying it. The idea was so rich in Shen Wei pain that I burst into actual villainous laughter. In the shower. As you do. So I decided to write the thing.
The next problem, working backwards from that idea, was what was turning people into zombies in the first place: science or magic? I went with science, albeit somewhat magical science, because I meant for this to be a "no-powers-but" AU. I wanted Shen Wei to be a biologist, and for him to save the day with science. I had already come up with his powers as the factor that would incite the time travel, and I guess I connected those two things quickly. Whatever science thing had altered his physiology in sorta-magical ways could be corrupted in some fashion, escape the lab, and cause a pandemic.
I don't recall quite where the chronokinesis thing came from. I think I wanted to give Shen Wei exactly one of his canon powers, because huge secrets and superhuman abilities are two of the things that make Shen Wei feel like himself to me. That thing he does early on in the show, freezing time for everything and everyone except himself and the people he's talking to, struck me as fascinating and weirdly underused. That's obviously not quite the power I ended up giving him, because that stops the action and lets Shen Wei win without having to try, which is no fun. The Black-Cloaked Envoy is way, way too OP.
A screwed-up version of the gene edit Shen Wei underwent could have made people go zombie all on its own. The plot logic works fine like that. It doesn't really change anything. Hallow-1: gives superpowers. Hallow-2: makes you go zombie. Hallow-3: a weakened version of Hallow-1, doesn't give you powers but gives you immunity to the other strains (this would be the vaccine Shen Wei would make). However, prion diseases are weird and scary and cause zombie-like symptoms, and I wanted to write about them. So there. It also gave me a quasi-red herring to work with. I had the idea of a compound infection very early, and it just sort of stuck. Of course, I gave myself headaches doing research to make sure my idea could work and to figure out the exact principles I'd need to invoke.
I also quickly came up with a basic structure for the fic, in four parts: the "casefic" before the outbreak, the period at DCU, the "road trip", and the ending section in Dixing. That's about as much as I had figured out before I started working on the first chapter.
Plotting/Planning/Windmilling On The Precipice Of Plot Holes
As soon as I had a loose idea for the progression of the plot, I started thinking of scenes to hang on that structure. My brain tends to spit out images and fragments of dialogue haphazardly, with zero regard for chronological order, and they may or may not make it into the fic. Of course, I am especially prone to daydream up shippy stuff and things that would "look cool", which is pretty important, because I do want the story to be fun as well as logical. (Actually, I think fun is more important than logic. I just find doing plot logic to also be fun, or I probably wouldn't bother with it.)
Some events that I had in mind early on:
-Shen Wei being bitten and healing it under Zhao Yunlan's nose, which went in ch. 1 because it foreshadows about a dozen things
-The sexy orange-eating scene (it's an orange because Zhao Yunlan likes oranges in the show)
-Zhao Yunlan trying to shoot his way into the Ministry's bunker/hideout
-Shen Wei revealing his powers by stopping bullets for Zhao Yunlan
-Shen Wei mentioning Zhao Yunlan's cat before Zhao Yunlan has told him he has a cat
-The epic Da Qing rescue
-Ya Qing catching Shen Wei when he's stealing or hoarding food for Zhao Yunlan, because not eating regularly gives Zhao Yunlan tummy trouble. This one never happened. Shen Wei was already suspicious enough, and I didn't need a food shortage subplot.
-Zhao Yunlan saying goodbye to BB!SW (at the end of ch. 17, "The Clockmaker"; my concept of the scene changed a lot, but the emotions and some dialogue stuck)
-The flashback confrontation between the twins and the Hallow Project director
-The conversation at the very end of The Cleanup, where Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei discuss going on a first date. Originally, I conceived of this taking place much earlier, right before or after a first kiss. Zhao Yunlan was flirting by suggesting the sort of date he'd take Shen Wei on if it wasn't the middle of an apocalypse. It was cute but didn't fit, so I chucked it. I didn't anticipate ever using it at all, but the boys surprised me by bringing it up again many months later.
That's just a few that I remember off the top of my head, to give you an idea of how I was thinking.
Because I insist upon having an ending first, I start off plotting backwards, but then I wind up going backwards and forwards and sideways, broad and fine, while working out exactly how I'm getting from A to Z; plots are just piles of problems and solutions, and once I've got the big problem (zombies) and the big solution (time travel) then a bunch of other problems start cropping up. I have to keep record of them somewhere, if only because noting things down helps cement them in my head.
I use Simplenote for both planning and writing, because I prefer an uncomplicated text editor, and because it syncs and loads fast on both my phone and my creaky laptop. I keep a planning document pinned to the top, and I dump ideas into it as I think of them, usually from my phone, all day long, and often in the middle of the night.
This includes all kinds of stuff, whatever crosses my mind: high-level problems-and-solutions type stuff, concepts for specific scenes, actual snippets of writing I could use in the story. When I have a chapter in progress, there's a similar mini-planning section at the top of it, with things drawn from the main document and new things I come up with while writing. I also keep a section there listing edits and fixes I need to make.
When I get stuck on a question or a plot logic problem, like "why do they have to stay put in the Snake Tribe village for a few days?" or "why does Shen Wei shooting at the Director cause Ye Zun's death?" I put that somewhere in my documentation too. These are great opportunities to mine for plot. I kind of think that the more stuck I am, the better the answer ends up being, because it requires me to have some kind of big idea. Sometimes my brain spits out an answer when I'm washing the dishes or whatever. If it doesn't, and I get to the point where I need to decide before I can progress, I sit myself down and just start listing ideas, starting with the dumb ones I definitely can't use. Eventually I start reaching for more out-there possibilities, and usually one of them just clicks. Sometime during the course of writing this fic, I found that this went better via paper and pen than keyboard. Something about literally writing in a different way opens up new thoughts.
This is how I figured out how to blow up Ye Zun. (Sorry, Ye Zun. Still love you.) I was stuck on that for quite a while, probably well into September at least, before I figured out that I could make it a parallel: Shen Wei's powers go awry and cause the time travel, and Ye Zun's powers go awry and cause the explosion.
Another source of plot and story structure for me is working backwards from a scene. I think mostly I do this while I'm actively writing, so scenes -> plot is less obvious to me than plot -> scenes, but it kind of has to be both. If I know I want to include sexy orange-eating, I need to set up for it: we have to know that fresh fruit is a rarity, and Zhao Yunlan has to get oranges from somewhere, and the characters need to be physically positioned in a way that provides some pretense for hand-feeding, at a time at which it's reasonable to be eating fruit...plus they have to be at a point (in their relationship and individually, emotionally) where the fingers-in-mouth move is bold but not weird. Then, after that moment, there's a bunch of built tension that I can work with, and I have to decide how to pay that out. That's kind of a lot, and that's just a fun scene that doesn't really impact The Plot, so with something like, I don't know, the car chase?, there's even more setup going on.
Writing
When I sit down at the keyboard, I have all this scrambled material to draw from. Sometimes, when things need to happen in a pretty particular order, like during the day the characters left Dragon City, I will formulate a point-by-point outline of events before I start writing. More often, I just start, with a sense for how I need to move the characters (physically, emotionally, and in their knowledge and plans) over the next few scenes. I don't know exactly how the characters are going to react to things, so I find out as I go. At least half of the scenes were not pre-planned.
Sometimes this means I start writing the wrong scene, or veer off in a bad direction. I cut scenes and parts of scenes out fairly mercilessly. I cut really good lines if they don't get me where I need to go. I'd estimate that at least 15% of what I wrote for All-Consuming was trashed in big chunks, like a few hundred words at a time. I don't have a problem with that. I think sometimes I have to take a wrong turn to figure out where I'm supposed to be going. Doing it wrong and discovering the problem gets you a lot further a lot faster than not doing anything for fear of doing it wrong.
I worked this fic very much in chapters, one chapter at a time. It's nice to have the next chapter started before I edit and post, but I don't always do that. I generally know clearly enough what is going to happen that I can commit safely. And, well, writing always involves problem-solving within a set of constraints, such as worldbuilding and characterization, so I treat what I've already posted as another constraint, and as a resource to work with.
My prose in this fic is pretty simple, I think. I like concrete sentences that are either actions, sensory descriptions, or the POV character's direct thoughts. I try to tinge all of it with the character's voice, without getting convoluted. As much as possible, I stay inside a moment where things are currently happening (as opposed to summaries of events or infodumping; I'm still learning strategies for avoiding those things.) I try to vary sentence length and structure and word choice, and to not use big words when smaller words will do, although sometimes I violate that in order to make Shen Wei or Zhao Yunlan sound like the smartasses they are.
In action scenes, and in lots of other kinds of scenes, I don't give a blow-by-blow of the entire sequence of events, but rather vary between describing specific actions and describing types of actions that are happening. The trick there is to avoid being repetitive while still being vivid, and to keep things moving swiftly without the scene ending too soon.
I make some edits to a chapter as I work on it, but I go through a very heavy edit/rewrite stage when I've finished drafting the chapter, and then another round of editing to get pickier with word choice and any little inconsistencies I miss. Since I haven't been working with a beta, I'm pretty particular about staring the whole thing down, often reading it out loud once to listen for confusing phrasing or odd rhythms. When I think I'm done, I proofread it again. I figured out very late in the game (like, in December or something) that I felt way less stressed out and tired if I saved that final proofread and posting for the next day.
So here's the summary, I guess: I plotted some things, pantsed others, and did a lot of plotting-as-I-went, a few steps ahead of what I was writing. I like to leave a lot of wiggle room in how events actually transpire so that the characters can act on their thoughts and feelings at the time, and so I can moderate pacing and tension as needed. I don't hesitate to cut things out when they don't work. I tried to never introduce a major (multi-chapter) plot thread in this fic without knowing how it would end, but I did get myself into plotting snafus that I had to brainstorm my way out of. I didn't have an outline for the whole fic before I started, and only outlined bits as I needed them.
Oh, and even though I had some things planned out long before I wrote them, I wasn't married to any of my ideas. I typically think of my plans as just the way I'll do it if I don't come up with something better. Zhao Yunlan bringing BB!SW to Haixing? That was a late(-ish) addition. It's one of the best chapters in the fic, IMO, and it almost looks like I had it planned from the start, maybe? — it makes a ton of sense in the structure of the story, and it explains a lot about Shen Wei's dedication to Zhao Yunlan — but no, I don't think I had that worked out until a quarter of the way through or something. Maybe this is a little fanciful, but I sometimes imagine these things are already in the story beforehand, and it's just that I realize what I'm building towards after I've already started writing it in.
A Treat(?)
I dug up an alternate first kiss while working over my old notes for this post.
I'm sure I wrote this long before I wrote ch. 8, "Alight". I intentionally pre-write scenes and parts of scenes like this sometimes, especially scenes that are meant to do a lot of heavy lifting, partly to get a feel for how to make them work and partly because they're exciting and motivating. The entire "flashback" during which Shen Wei causes Ye Zun's death was written months in advance, and most of what I wrote for that made it into the final cut. This did not, which is more typical. There's a reason for that, and I haven't fixed it up at all, so it's not up to the level of something I'd usually post, but, well. Here you go? I guess?
The context here (IIRC) is that Zhao Yunlan is saying goodnight to Shen Wei and he takes a step into Shen Wei's personal space like he's about to kiss him. Shen Wei closes his eyes in anticipation, and:
"Oh, god, look at you," Zhao Yunlan murmured, and Shen Wei opened his eyes, flushing. He'd been presumptuous, to imagine that Zhao Yunlan wanted to — how could he have thought...? "No," Zhao Yunlan said, his hands coming up to bracket Shen Wei's waist, warm firm palms. "It's just I don't know what to do with you. You're so...you're too good for me by half, I don't wanna fuck this up."
"Don't be ridiculous," Shen Wei said. He didn't want to put Zhao Yunlan off, but he couldn't stop himself from glaring. "I'm the one who..."
"Who what?" Zhao Yunlan asked, his hands slipping down towards Shen Wei's hips like he wasn't aware of it.
Who's lying to you. Shen Wei considered just saying it. He didn't realize he'd wavered closer into Zhao Yunlan's warmth until he looked up and Zhao Yunlan's mouth was very close. He put a hand on Zhao Yunlan's chest to steady himself, but it made Zhao Yunlan drop his hands and take a half-step back, that maddening patient look on his face.
Shen Wei stepped forward and kissed him.
The first press of lips wasn't quite lined up, Zhao Yunlan startled motionless, and Shen Wei started to pull back, but Zhao Yunlan let out a soft sigh and took Shen Wei's face in his hands and fit their mouths together just so. Something that had been spooled up tight in Shen Wei these weeks, maybe all these years, unwound all at once.
—
Okay, that's all I've got for now. Questions are welcome — I'm not sure how clear I was here, and this is nowhere near a complete documentation of how the fic got made, anyway. I'm also curious about everyone else's plotting and writing habits and strategies, so please share thoughts!
Caveats, warnings, things that you need to read for my peace of mind:
-Spoilers for the whole fic, obviously, but also for the epilogue/extra chapter, "The Cleanup".
-I have a terrible autobiographical memory. I've tried to write mostly about the strategies I used, which I know quite well, rather than the order of events, which I've had to piece together.
-This is rambly. I tried to make it tighter, but I just. Couldn't. I'm actively learning how to write about writing here.
-None of this is writing advice; take anything that seems useful and run with it, by all means, but I don't mean to imply that I did anything "right". Or wrong! It's just what I found myself doing as I made my way through this fic.
Concept
I started thinking about a zombie apocalypse AU in July, when I realized that I possibly had a knack for action scenes. If you read my first action scene in Flesh from Bone (chapter 3) and then immediately read the second one (ch. 6), you can watch me go from ??? to !!! in a matter of three weeks. I wanted to explore that, but I didn't have a plot. I wouldn't commit to the project until I knew the ending. That's sort of a Principle for me.
The ending happened upon me in the shower. I came up with the idea of switching around the canon time loop and having Shen Wei encounter the cure/cause of the infection in the past, where he would have to choose between bringing it back and destroying it. The idea was so rich in Shen Wei pain that I burst into actual villainous laughter. In the shower. As you do. So I decided to write the thing.
The next problem, working backwards from that idea, was what was turning people into zombies in the first place: science or magic? I went with science, albeit somewhat magical science, because I meant for this to be a "no-powers-but" AU. I wanted Shen Wei to be a biologist, and for him to save the day with science. I had already come up with his powers as the factor that would incite the time travel, and I guess I connected those two things quickly. Whatever science thing had altered his physiology in sorta-magical ways could be corrupted in some fashion, escape the lab, and cause a pandemic.
I don't recall quite where the chronokinesis thing came from. I think I wanted to give Shen Wei exactly one of his canon powers, because huge secrets and superhuman abilities are two of the things that make Shen Wei feel like himself to me. That thing he does early on in the show, freezing time for everything and everyone except himself and the people he's talking to, struck me as fascinating and weirdly underused. That's obviously not quite the power I ended up giving him, because that stops the action and lets Shen Wei win without having to try, which is no fun. The Black-Cloaked Envoy is way, way too OP.
A screwed-up version of the gene edit Shen Wei underwent could have made people go zombie all on its own. The plot logic works fine like that. It doesn't really change anything. Hallow-1: gives superpowers. Hallow-2: makes you go zombie. Hallow-3: a weakened version of Hallow-1, doesn't give you powers but gives you immunity to the other strains (this would be the vaccine Shen Wei would make). However, prion diseases are weird and scary and cause zombie-like symptoms, and I wanted to write about them. So there. It also gave me a quasi-red herring to work with. I had the idea of a compound infection very early, and it just sort of stuck. Of course, I gave myself headaches doing research to make sure my idea could work and to figure out the exact principles I'd need to invoke.
I also quickly came up with a basic structure for the fic, in four parts: the "casefic" before the outbreak, the period at DCU, the "road trip", and the ending section in Dixing. That's about as much as I had figured out before I started working on the first chapter.
Plotting/Planning/Windmilling On The Precipice Of Plot Holes
As soon as I had a loose idea for the progression of the plot, I started thinking of scenes to hang on that structure. My brain tends to spit out images and fragments of dialogue haphazardly, with zero regard for chronological order, and they may or may not make it into the fic. Of course, I am especially prone to daydream up shippy stuff and things that would "look cool", which is pretty important, because I do want the story to be fun as well as logical. (Actually, I think fun is more important than logic. I just find doing plot logic to also be fun, or I probably wouldn't bother with it.)
Some events that I had in mind early on:
-Shen Wei being bitten and healing it under Zhao Yunlan's nose, which went in ch. 1 because it foreshadows about a dozen things
-The sexy orange-eating scene (it's an orange because Zhao Yunlan likes oranges in the show)
-Zhao Yunlan trying to shoot his way into the Ministry's bunker/hideout
-Shen Wei revealing his powers by stopping bullets for Zhao Yunlan
-Shen Wei mentioning Zhao Yunlan's cat before Zhao Yunlan has told him he has a cat
-The epic Da Qing rescue
-Ya Qing catching Shen Wei when he's stealing or hoarding food for Zhao Yunlan, because not eating regularly gives Zhao Yunlan tummy trouble. This one never happened. Shen Wei was already suspicious enough, and I didn't need a food shortage subplot.
-Zhao Yunlan saying goodbye to BB!SW (at the end of ch. 17, "The Clockmaker"; my concept of the scene changed a lot, but the emotions and some dialogue stuck)
-The flashback confrontation between the twins and the Hallow Project director
-The conversation at the very end of The Cleanup, where Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei discuss going on a first date. Originally, I conceived of this taking place much earlier, right before or after a first kiss. Zhao Yunlan was flirting by suggesting the sort of date he'd take Shen Wei on if it wasn't the middle of an apocalypse. It was cute but didn't fit, so I chucked it. I didn't anticipate ever using it at all, but the boys surprised me by bringing it up again many months later.
That's just a few that I remember off the top of my head, to give you an idea of how I was thinking.
Because I insist upon having an ending first, I start off plotting backwards, but then I wind up going backwards and forwards and sideways, broad and fine, while working out exactly how I'm getting from A to Z; plots are just piles of problems and solutions, and once I've got the big problem (zombies) and the big solution (time travel) then a bunch of other problems start cropping up. I have to keep record of them somewhere, if only because noting things down helps cement them in my head.
I use Simplenote for both planning and writing, because I prefer an uncomplicated text editor, and because it syncs and loads fast on both my phone and my creaky laptop. I keep a planning document pinned to the top, and I dump ideas into it as I think of them, usually from my phone, all day long, and often in the middle of the night.
This includes all kinds of stuff, whatever crosses my mind: high-level problems-and-solutions type stuff, concepts for specific scenes, actual snippets of writing I could use in the story. When I have a chapter in progress, there's a similar mini-planning section at the top of it, with things drawn from the main document and new things I come up with while writing. I also keep a section there listing edits and fixes I need to make.
When I get stuck on a question or a plot logic problem, like "why do they have to stay put in the Snake Tribe village for a few days?" or "why does Shen Wei shooting at the Director cause Ye Zun's death?" I put that somewhere in my documentation too. These are great opportunities to mine for plot. I kind of think that the more stuck I am, the better the answer ends up being, because it requires me to have some kind of big idea. Sometimes my brain spits out an answer when I'm washing the dishes or whatever. If it doesn't, and I get to the point where I need to decide before I can progress, I sit myself down and just start listing ideas, starting with the dumb ones I definitely can't use. Eventually I start reaching for more out-there possibilities, and usually one of them just clicks. Sometime during the course of writing this fic, I found that this went better via paper and pen than keyboard. Something about literally writing in a different way opens up new thoughts.
This is how I figured out how to blow up Ye Zun. (Sorry, Ye Zun. Still love you.) I was stuck on that for quite a while, probably well into September at least, before I figured out that I could make it a parallel: Shen Wei's powers go awry and cause the time travel, and Ye Zun's powers go awry and cause the explosion.
Another source of plot and story structure for me is working backwards from a scene. I think mostly I do this while I'm actively writing, so scenes -> plot is less obvious to me than plot -> scenes, but it kind of has to be both. If I know I want to include sexy orange-eating, I need to set up for it: we have to know that fresh fruit is a rarity, and Zhao Yunlan has to get oranges from somewhere, and the characters need to be physically positioned in a way that provides some pretense for hand-feeding, at a time at which it's reasonable to be eating fruit...plus they have to be at a point (in their relationship and individually, emotionally) where the fingers-in-mouth move is bold but not weird. Then, after that moment, there's a bunch of built tension that I can work with, and I have to decide how to pay that out. That's kind of a lot, and that's just a fun scene that doesn't really impact The Plot, so with something like, I don't know, the car chase?, there's even more setup going on.
Writing
When I sit down at the keyboard, I have all this scrambled material to draw from. Sometimes, when things need to happen in a pretty particular order, like during the day the characters left Dragon City, I will formulate a point-by-point outline of events before I start writing. More often, I just start, with a sense for how I need to move the characters (physically, emotionally, and in their knowledge and plans) over the next few scenes. I don't know exactly how the characters are going to react to things, so I find out as I go. At least half of the scenes were not pre-planned.
Sometimes this means I start writing the wrong scene, or veer off in a bad direction. I cut scenes and parts of scenes out fairly mercilessly. I cut really good lines if they don't get me where I need to go. I'd estimate that at least 15% of what I wrote for All-Consuming was trashed in big chunks, like a few hundred words at a time. I don't have a problem with that. I think sometimes I have to take a wrong turn to figure out where I'm supposed to be going. Doing it wrong and discovering the problem gets you a lot further a lot faster than not doing anything for fear of doing it wrong.
I worked this fic very much in chapters, one chapter at a time. It's nice to have the next chapter started before I edit and post, but I don't always do that. I generally know clearly enough what is going to happen that I can commit safely. And, well, writing always involves problem-solving within a set of constraints, such as worldbuilding and characterization, so I treat what I've already posted as another constraint, and as a resource to work with.
My prose in this fic is pretty simple, I think. I like concrete sentences that are either actions, sensory descriptions, or the POV character's direct thoughts. I try to tinge all of it with the character's voice, without getting convoluted. As much as possible, I stay inside a moment where things are currently happening (as opposed to summaries of events or infodumping; I'm still learning strategies for avoiding those things.) I try to vary sentence length and structure and word choice, and to not use big words when smaller words will do, although sometimes I violate that in order to make Shen Wei or Zhao Yunlan sound like the smartasses they are.
In action scenes, and in lots of other kinds of scenes, I don't give a blow-by-blow of the entire sequence of events, but rather vary between describing specific actions and describing types of actions that are happening. The trick there is to avoid being repetitive while still being vivid, and to keep things moving swiftly without the scene ending too soon.
I make some edits to a chapter as I work on it, but I go through a very heavy edit/rewrite stage when I've finished drafting the chapter, and then another round of editing to get pickier with word choice and any little inconsistencies I miss. Since I haven't been working with a beta, I'm pretty particular about staring the whole thing down, often reading it out loud once to listen for confusing phrasing or odd rhythms. When I think I'm done, I proofread it again. I figured out very late in the game (like, in December or something) that I felt way less stressed out and tired if I saved that final proofread and posting for the next day.
So here's the summary, I guess: I plotted some things, pantsed others, and did a lot of plotting-as-I-went, a few steps ahead of what I was writing. I like to leave a lot of wiggle room in how events actually transpire so that the characters can act on their thoughts and feelings at the time, and so I can moderate pacing and tension as needed. I don't hesitate to cut things out when they don't work. I tried to never introduce a major (multi-chapter) plot thread in this fic without knowing how it would end, but I did get myself into plotting snafus that I had to brainstorm my way out of. I didn't have an outline for the whole fic before I started, and only outlined bits as I needed them.
Oh, and even though I had some things planned out long before I wrote them, I wasn't married to any of my ideas. I typically think of my plans as just the way I'll do it if I don't come up with something better. Zhao Yunlan bringing BB!SW to Haixing? That was a late(-ish) addition. It's one of the best chapters in the fic, IMO, and it almost looks like I had it planned from the start, maybe? — it makes a ton of sense in the structure of the story, and it explains a lot about Shen Wei's dedication to Zhao Yunlan — but no, I don't think I had that worked out until a quarter of the way through or something. Maybe this is a little fanciful, but I sometimes imagine these things are already in the story beforehand, and it's just that I realize what I'm building towards after I've already started writing it in.
A Treat(?)
I dug up an alternate first kiss while working over my old notes for this post.
I'm sure I wrote this long before I wrote ch. 8, "Alight". I intentionally pre-write scenes and parts of scenes like this sometimes, especially scenes that are meant to do a lot of heavy lifting, partly to get a feel for how to make them work and partly because they're exciting and motivating. The entire "flashback" during which Shen Wei causes Ye Zun's death was written months in advance, and most of what I wrote for that made it into the final cut. This did not, which is more typical. There's a reason for that, and I haven't fixed it up at all, so it's not up to the level of something I'd usually post, but, well. Here you go? I guess?
The context here (IIRC) is that Zhao Yunlan is saying goodnight to Shen Wei and he takes a step into Shen Wei's personal space like he's about to kiss him. Shen Wei closes his eyes in anticipation, and:
"Oh, god, look at you," Zhao Yunlan murmured, and Shen Wei opened his eyes, flushing. He'd been presumptuous, to imagine that Zhao Yunlan wanted to — how could he have thought...? "No," Zhao Yunlan said, his hands coming up to bracket Shen Wei's waist, warm firm palms. "It's just I don't know what to do with you. You're so...you're too good for me by half, I don't wanna fuck this up."
"Don't be ridiculous," Shen Wei said. He didn't want to put Zhao Yunlan off, but he couldn't stop himself from glaring. "I'm the one who..."
"Who what?" Zhao Yunlan asked, his hands slipping down towards Shen Wei's hips like he wasn't aware of it.
Who's lying to you. Shen Wei considered just saying it. He didn't realize he'd wavered closer into Zhao Yunlan's warmth until he looked up and Zhao Yunlan's mouth was very close. He put a hand on Zhao Yunlan's chest to steady himself, but it made Zhao Yunlan drop his hands and take a half-step back, that maddening patient look on his face.
Shen Wei stepped forward and kissed him.
The first press of lips wasn't quite lined up, Zhao Yunlan startled motionless, and Shen Wei started to pull back, but Zhao Yunlan let out a soft sigh and took Shen Wei's face in his hands and fit their mouths together just so. Something that had been spooled up tight in Shen Wei these weeks, maybe all these years, unwound all at once.
—
Okay, that's all I've got for now. Questions are welcome — I'm not sure how clear I was here, and this is nowhere near a complete documentation of how the fic got made, anyway. I'm also curious about everyone else's plotting and writing habits and strategies, so please share thoughts!
