place and the fic writer

[agletbaby]

ok so last week (maybe? time's a little unmoored for me lately) danielle shrimpchipsss linked me to a convo she'd had, thinking about the differences between different fic fandoms. this, from our follow up conversation on twitter, summarises the point nicely: 'i have a whole spiel about how there are a lot of mdzs aus that take place in specific times and places (modern day in philly, for example) [...] whereas haikyuu is set in real time and real place and yet there's a lot of haikyuu aus set in [indeterminate college town, probably american] even though it isn't like there aren't colleges in japan haha/there's a fair number of aus that are sort of. place-agnostic unless multiple teams are part of the story and theres some kind of sense of diff territories etc'

(this is a side post which should be separate, but i'm going to note it within this one anyway, a little nesting doll of thought. anyway i think it's so nice to be able to refer to conversations. most of my writing is academic, so i'm very used to crediting the people i use, but not so much to acknowledging non-peer reviewed inspirations or influences. or even suggesting how you arrived at conclusions from certain scholars, and how you felt about them, even tho a lot of my use of sources is actually extrapolations and massive assumptive leaps and emotional reactions, that probably could do with a bit more explanation. but i'm already citing every other sentence, and wordcounts loom, and i can't. (in some ways, of course, i am. the need for citation does essentially render all academic writing, at least in my fields, a conversation, even if it's often (always, in my case, so far) one sided. it's just that the personal associations which 'conversation' evokes are carefully disguised by academic writing. meanwhile, internet convos are basically all personal chat - 'i speak' 'you speak' 'i reply' - which disguises the fierce and fun generation of new ideas.) anyway, i enjoy giving credit where credit's due, in all mediums and styles)

danielle's point got me thinking about place and writing. i'm always thinking about place and writing, in some ways - they're both things that fascinate me on the personal and academic levels, and that i enjoy enjoying. there was a few different ways our conversation got my brain sparking, but it specifically got me thinking about place in my fic. i mostly write haikyuu, but i believe very deeply in locating what i write about, despite the fact i've probably not been there. this isn't always about physical location - sometimes, it's just about being precise in culture, character, timeof life, and so on - but often it is geographical. one time i wrote about ikejiri and kita meeting and i identified where down to a specific bar, and then made sure to write the interior right. when i think about writing 'know what a river can be', i'm amazed i did it in a couple of weeks, not because of its length (intense for me, but plausible) but because i had to spend so much of that time looking up travel routes, locations, and so on. as i said in the AN, i hadn't actually been anywhere i described in it, so that information took a lot of work to collect. but i didn't want people to know that - at least until they finished reading.
this isn't a slight on people not doing that btw, but it's important to me. i really do think, if you are going to write canon stuff, and not generically relocate it, place, and travel, and space, are important to get right. we experience the world through places, even when we're doing virtual things, like reading or writing. i'm on a train rn, and that's part the writing of this, and when i look back at this post, and probably when i think about these ideas, i will remember which train.

writers write in and about place. there's this article by a geographer named douglas pocock from 1981 called 'place and the novelist' that i think captures this well. he characterises the novel as implicitly 'time-specific and, thus, by implication, place-specific also', and also says some other stuff that i'm going to stick in a list, and may not refer to again, but which are framing my thoughts here:

• 'we are rooted and grounded in place, by place'
• 'Recognition of the importance of place to novelists is also seen in the reticence they often express towards the portrayal of foreign scenes and characters [...]The difficulty in setting a novel in a foreign context illustrates the bias imparted by one's native place'
• 'Place, then, contains our roots, our unique point of reference. We may not be able to begin again but it is a point to which we can return'

they say write what you know, and part of what you know is where you know. certainly, whenever i write original things, it's always around the city i live in and walk through and which structures and is my life rn (even though i'm often apathetic towards it). i don't like that lack of imagination in myself, but it's difficult to remove myself from the city when it's so immediate and easy, and i'm still learning how to write creatively in many ways. even fantasy is often located in places known and lived in: my prime example of this is earthsea, which is modelled on the pacific northwest where le guin lived (in the mini-series they apparently have american accents, which feels strange in a world centred on british-accented fantasy, but that is itself its own kind of placing, firstly by tolkien, and then by a succession of other anglophone fantasy writers seeking castles. why not american, when le guin is?) i'm taking as a given, then, that your writing is about where you know.

so what does it mean, as a fic writer, to inherit a location you don't know? that is someone else's place. can you even write it? how?
i'm going to think through this a little, but i think the ultimate point of this post is to pose that question, and flag that it's weird, and tough, and cool that so many people are, in various different ways.

sidenote: haikyuu's a really interesting example here, because in some ways it conjures some quite generic settings: high school, sports teams. the existence of high school and sports aus as a way to relocate specifically located stories into generic settings prove how easily adaptable these concepts can feel - although that ignores how they are often extremely americanised versions in fics. yet haikyuu is also quite specifically located. firstly, it is about real places - not just town names and landscapes, but street corners and school halls and that big moon face. you can do that thing where you print out an image from the manga, and take it to a real place, and hold it up, and have it match, that's usually reserved for movie stills - photography, not illustration. and it's also very much about furudate's own high school volleyball experience, so there's another layer of additional locating. furudate has also said they research by going to the actual on-going tournaments, so it continues to be located in the existing, bordered and placed world of japanese high school volleyball. this is a very specific setting. there's an interesting contrast, then, between the story's delibrate (volleyball is for everyone - furudate) and inadvertant (high school is for everyone - the high school au tag on ao3) sense of universality, and the place it's actually specifically about. this means that fanworks run the whole gamut from generic to specific (even sometimes in locations entirely different to japan) in a way which must be about individual interests, but also culture. i mean culture in the online sense: the discourses (in both the (broadly) foucaultian and tumblr senses) that i saw on the internet in my formative years raised a lot of concerns about appropriation which made me cautious about how i dealt with other people's stories when i started writing. other people, within the same haikyuu writing spaces, will have inhereted different ideas, been introduced to fic in different ways, will be less neurotic than me. i think that's fine: i like reading all that different stuff. and, as i implied, i also think haikyuu lends itself to the range. this is good, because with the huge number of writers in the fandom, you're going to end up with a ton of different approaches. i'd also be curious to know if the popularity of hq fanworks has been encouraged the fact it can do both, as it were?
anyway, back to me (even more than already)(but listen, literature is always experienced individually, and so is place. i could say more, but instead, i'll converse. i like michael mayerfeld bell's article 'the ghosts of place' a lot anyway, but he has a good bit on this: 'Much of the evidence I use is reflexive, that is, drawn from my own experience of place. This, of course, is not the usual source of evidence from which sociologists draw, for such evidence is so particular. The particularity of place, though, suggests no better source. I hope that the personal evidence I report will, however, recall to memory similar and related experiences on the part of the reader').

anyway, back to me properly. just as a refresher, i'm actually now thinking about what it means to write somewhere you don't know, because you, as a fic writer, have inherited that setting.

i. fantasy
the first implication of writing places you don't know is that you end up writing fantasy. i don't mean this in the making-it-up sense, although that is, of course, a risk. what i mean is writing becomes a different sort of imaginative exercise. of course, all fiction (all writing?) is imaginary, but it's different describing new york vs a city you've made up. if nothing else, the reader needs different information from you. good fantasy writing (imo) requires the imaginative equivalent of going for a walk around the neighbourhood you're writing: the writer must work out the shape and size and feel of a place, what it looks like beyond the edges of the writing, before they can begin to describe it: it must be mapped. i love those tiktoks where people pour rice on paper and then draw round it to make fantasy islands, so that's what i'm picturing. only, miyagi, and othe rhaikyuu settings, are not somewhere i'm making up. it's somewhere real, and already as a clear shape. and so working out the shape/size/feel is not something which you can do internally; you have to look outward. you don't draw your own maps; you turn to google's.

ii. research
this is vital, to me. i want to get things right. partly because i just don't want to get it wrong (ok time for a tangent (who's shocked) but i was in a presentation the other day by someone who was studying a cultural phenomenon that happens, among other places, where i live, which she referenced, and then continued to get details wrong about my home. on a basic geography level. she was a full-on academic. it was astounding. my point is that it's very annoying when people just assume they get where you're from, and then don't. i try very earnestly to not do that). if i get stuff wrong, then anyone who know the place will know, and won't be able to enjoy my work, and will possibly feel weird and alienated more generally, which means i'm failing: there's a level of care i think i owe to my readers. but i also research because i want my writing to feel detailed, intricate, lived in. everything is placed, and every place is composed of a mass of physical things, sensations, emotions. if i'm placing my writing, it needs at least some of that, or it won't ring true, even if it's only me who spots the gaps in knowledge, because i'm the only one who definitely knows i don't know. i'm the only person i'm ultimately writing for.

there's some random, and slightly less precise sources of research i work with. 1) the actual images in haikyuu really help: their hyper-precision is both a challenge and a help to rise to it. 2) there's one phrase in one of my fics, which i took from an actual book; i just happened to read this writer's description of a visit to a place which i was trying to write from my imagination on the same day. i took the phrase not so much because i needed the descriptive help, but because i wanted to mark the moment of inadvertent alignment. 3) there's also other fics. there's definitely been points where i've chosen a fan interpretation over a real thing, even when i know it's wrong (think olympics). i'm aware i'm writing for a community which has this communal understanding, and that in this context, the real thing will seem more invented than the fiction, and will create more dissonance. it's rare i do this, but sometimes, with fanworks which are going to be read only within community, that is the truer option. reading fic is its own type of research, and there's more i can say on that, but i won't rn.

but when i want precision, accuracy, detail, i turn to google. the only problem is, the answers it provides are none of those things. theoretically, everything's on the internet, but not everything is findable, and you only have so much time to look. ideally, i'd read novels or memoirs or something about the place i was writing about, but i'm busy, and again, writing for me. and anyway, who's to say a person's take on a place is all that place is. i had to stop reading a novel set in the town i went to uni once, because it was so unrecognisable, even though i knew the place names. i tend to use travel or culture articles, and pictures. lots of pictures. so many pictures.

but the stuff that comes up on google images isn't necessarily the most recent, or the most accurate: it often prioritises either aesthetics, or just fitting everything into frame. and wikicommons, for instance, has a shockingly outdated selection of images. with photos, you only get one angle, and then the place is stuck that way.
a couple of days ago, i heard someone make the point that 'if you visit a place online, it's fixed like that'. it was a totally different conversation, but at the back of my mind, i was like 'oh i have a dreamwidth post that would be perfect for'. the way a place looks, or is portrayed online, can never full capture what it's like: it won't include all weathers, all viewpoints (both visual and opinion), all anything. i'm not totally convinced by benjamin's rejection of reproductions (see 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'), but the aura of a place on a website will be different to a place on its physical site. websites and photos capture only a still slice of the movements which makes space into place: you only get the end product, not the on-going process (this is terminology direct from my thesis; i'm too close to it to know if it makes sense, but i hope you get some sense of meaning from it - it doesn't matter too much if it's the one i intended or not). it's hard to get past that stillness, imposed by the anonymous curators of the internet, when you're working with a location you don't know, imposed by the original author. you, the fic writer, need to find your own perspective on that place.

the research, then, lays the groundwork. it gives you the detail you need: names, routes, distances, landscapes, but also food, temperatures, currencies. the geograpy of the place and the things in it. to use the fantasy metaphor, tentatively and without endorsing it, it gives you the map and the lore. it's up to you to imagine what happens on the ground, to the people.

iii. places you've been
i wrote this fic about water once. it's the one i mentioned already, with 'river' in the title. i hadn't been to any of the places mentioned. but i did live by the sea for a while, and i missed it. i've looked out across one of the great lakes, and hopped across a stream so small it disappeared when the weather warmed up. i've flown over an ocean. i've been to pebbley beaches, and sandy ones. i can actually see the sea out of the window of the train i'm still on right now. this is the train journey, along the same tracks, that i took when visiting my parents after moving out for the first time - i always look to see the sea along this stretch. my point is, i know water. i know what it feels like to go to a heaving, touristy beach, and one on off-season. these are sensations i know, which i've felt across different places to places. i can apply it to some more.

i know what it's like to move away, but i don't have access to the specifics of doing it to play volleyball and renouncing your citizenship. so, when writing oikawa, i took what i knew, and i built on it, and where i encountered large voids between the story furudate was laying out and what my life has been like, i did a little research, and a little imagining, and i felt my way between them. ultimately, i think, the best research for writing about a character encountering water is visiting myself - but i still have to know what kind of water they're looking at, how deep, are there islands? knowing that there are islands makes me consider what i feel like when i see an island, and suddenly it's all realer - not just the description of place, but character sensation too, because suddenly the character (i) am responding to where they are, and i have been. even if i haven't been there.

writers write place. all the time


iv. places you are
there's a secret layer to my fics that you will never know about. and that's where i was when i wrote them. even if i tell you, you're only getting the fixed, website version. you'll never properly know about the perpetual chill and the specific shade of wood, or the way the unusually warm spring filled up the concrete yard where i had breakfast. the brown, clear water, and the iterative finding of it. the dark street, the gravel lane. the too-short distance between my bed and the ceiling. the train by the sea, where i wrote all of this so far. i'm describing flashes here, i'm gesturing to edges, but you'll never know more than words. but i will, or at least i'll remember (i'm off the train now. it both literally and metaphorically recedes, and i remember it like its windows in the dark: flashes always), but that memory is baked into what i write, and it still spills lights into now. this means that when i revisit my fics, there's a double placing. where i'm describing (already a mix of my real places and the real place), and where i wrote that description. to me, that's as much of the story as anything else, and sometimes i can see it pushing its way through so, so clearly. it's part of what you read. and you'll never know

there's a secret layer to my fics that i will never know about. it's where you read it. sometimes people comment and tell me, but i can't really extrapolate much, not from the anonymised comments. i can fit it onto my knowlege of the world: i know bus stops, but couldn't begin to guess what the one that the commenter stood and read my work at is like: could it have a roof, a bench, did they need to sort out change to pay? (there's nothing like going to a new place to remind you that buses are mysterious and temperamental beasts which may respond any which way to your outreached hand.) i don't know, i won't ask, and i'll never get it. but i know what it means to read at a bus stop and i appreciate how it feels for me, and it makes me smile to think of someone else doing that. place is at once inherently individual, which brings with it a distance from other people, but it's also a source of real empathy. it's a shared experience; we are all placed, all 'rooted and grounded in place, by place'. i hope you remember where you were when you read my fics, and if you revisit that place, you also revisit that memory. not because i want to be remembered, but because i think it makes place, and writing, much richer when they bleed into each other and add all these other, invisible locations into each other. i want to add a metaphor here but i can only come up with lasagne. invisible lasagne of feelings and associations.

places and writings are never fixed. they alway grows and builds on each other, even if the process invisible, and individual, and no one else ever knows. that may sound sad or lonely, but it's really not, because we're all together in that experience.

thank you for reading this. i know it's messy, and horribly long, and i've not edited. i've also not slept much, which is why it's gotten all weird and ephemeral and heartfelt at the end here. but that's okay, because i only write for me.

except, if you made it this far, i also write for you. wherever you are.

Comments

reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[shrimpchipsss]

it's funny that you ended the post on where we read things because I was thinking of that when you started talking about where we write things

EARTHSEA IS MODELED AFTER THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST???? I’ve been many times and I wonder if I'd have a different image of the settings if I'd known. Honestly when I pictured it in my head in the past I did often think of the lake district in england which when I went there I thought "so this is what high fantasy is talking about" and have forever held the feeling of the place in my heart

“the discourses (in both the (broadly) foucaultian and tumblr senses)” hahaha

I think I'll always appreciate when writers go for specificity about real places and especially when I know those places and they get it right. I'm thinking about the ushiiwa mango fic and roxast's SUNNY and the bit in your river fic that get southern california, and specifically irvine and south orange county right. also thinking of that one iwaoi where iwaizumi goes on a drunk bender after thinking that oikawa and ushijima are together? the ocs in that fic are a very specific type of orange county person that do exist. it's amazing.
while rereading your fic recently out of curiosity I looked up "things to do/places to go in irvine" and those really are.. the things people do in irvine hahaha

Re: reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[agletbaby]

the earthsea thing feels immensely strange to me purely because when i think pacific northwest i imagine twilight... although i have been to vancouver island, and when i make the effort to connect that to my imaginary of earthsea, it does slot into place. but not enough to write over my imaginings, even though those are actually quite generic.
i thought i'd been to the lake district but the fact that was your reaction to it makes me wonder if i've just been to some english lakes... it makes me want to go, i love when a landscape just imprints (i've got twilight on the brain now)on you as significant. like some locations are just built fantastically i think.

the iwaoi bender fic is an alltime standout in my heart, and i do think that's because it's so knowledgable about where it's about. like to me, it transcends haikyuu fic status to become just a love letter to a place and community which happens to also have some familiar faces in it. it must be lovely when a story just winds up somewhere you know.
and i mean, where do you think i got my list of things to do in irvine from lmao

Re: reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[shrimpchipsss]

when the one media place reference you have eclipses(ha) all others for the rest of your life

but yes to some locations being built fantastically, i remember when i got to a completely pancake flat still lake and sat there for a while, and a breeze came in over the hills and created rippling patterns across the surface of the water i thought oh my god, of course people would think "this is magic"--this is magic.

YES about a love letter to a place and community, there's this one mdzs fic that takes place in the underground music scene in san francisco in the 90s that i need to track down again because i foolishly didn't bookmark it. ahh fic like that is something special

Re: reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[mozaikmage]

god that iwaoi bender fic is everything 2 me and I've been to irvine all of. like. 3 times in my life lol it's just so. it's SO.
on the subject of things that are love letters to very specific communities can I tempt you all into reading <a href="https://www.utowncomic.com/comic_pages/page-1/>a short webcomic about gentrification in Montreal</a> it's entirely unrelated to fandom but it's really good and effective with its placeness. my other webcomic rec about places and communities is Octopus Pie but you can't read that in an hour the way you can Utown

Re: reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[agletbaby]

oooh thank you for the recs, i'll have a look at both!

Re: reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[shrimpchipsss]

I've been to irvine an innumerable amount of times in my life so you can imagine how I feel! maybe we crossed paths at some point and didn't even know it

I have Utown open in a tab to read it, thanks for the rec! octopus pie looks familiar, I'll have to keep an eye out for it next time I'm browsing

Re: reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[mozaikmage]

imagine that! my mom's best friend's family moved there a while ago so we've been to visit a bit

Octopus Pie is one of my favoritest things in the world and does amazing things with comics and storytelling and art but it is pretty long http://www.octopuspie.com/comic/001-pea-wiggle-2/

Re: reading this sitting on my bed in my studio apartment

[agletbaby]

ohhh yeah that's so good. i have a similar thing with rippling grass - i think i first saw it in a studio ghibli film, and was like 'that simply can't be real' and now whenever i see it irl, i feel like i live in a slightly more wonderous world.

Reading this in the dark on a couch in my apt

[mozaikmage]

Hi and welcome to dreamwidth longposting!
This post was fascinating to me bc place is at the bottom of things I think about when writing most of my fics, except for Yuri on Ice where it is probably the most important part of the fic for me because being gay and Russian is the main thing I have in common with award winning fictional figure skaters Viktor and Yuri lmao. I'm haunted by this one YOI fic I saw once with an authors note that said "yeah they're in St. Petersburg but I didn't feel like doing research so all the places they go to I just made up" when Piter IRL has so much cool stuff in it! It's beautiful! Aaaaaa!
Anyway my Yuri on Ice fics are mostly about place, but my other fics are more about characters interacting than where they're interacting in (a classroom, a party, a cafe.) But I do try to do research when the characters interact with the outside/real world in a broader sense. It's fun! I learn a lot! But I don't feel like I really need to elaborate on like. What the cafe looks like, if the important part is what they're talking about at the cafe. It's new and trendy, good enough.
Also as a cartoonist I hate describing things that I feel like would be faster/easier to just draw, but I also do struggle with drawing environments characters can believably fit in (perspective is hard! Ignoring it and making a drawing look convincing anyway is also hard!) But I want to be good at drawing environments so bad I've actually been practicing that for the past few weeks. That's not very related to this subject.
I do think a lot about like. Abstract big top-level place as a member of intersecting diasporic communities with very very complicated feelings about our origins (Russian and Jewish), but not as much about place as character in fiction. Although the books I've been reading recently have all been very heavy on setting as character, and inspiring me to get more into that in the book I'm kinda trying to write a bit (maybe someday I'll finish it haha)
One time I read a mystery novel set in my hometown by a guy who grew up not right here but fairly close by and hired consultants from this town to help with accuracy and now every time I drive to the train station I think about the fact that in this mystery novel the murder victim's bones were buried next to that road. It was surreal. I've never been able to visualize a prose story so clearly. Or taken as much psychic damage from a book.
Anyway very interesting and thoughtful post! Will have to think more about how I write places in the future.

Re: Reading this in the dark on a couch in my apt

[agletbaby]

that st petersburg attitude is so frustrating, because it feels to me like it would take as much effort to make things up than to just check what kind of attractions there are and just vaguely allude to them! deeply frustrating! glad you're pushing back on that.
it's actually so interesting to hear you say it's not so important where your characters interact, because i read 'the inherent eroticism of coordinating schedules' ages ago, before we ever met (so i'm sure i've never mentioned this before), and it became an absolute touchstone of college aus to me. because even though it's not a specific college, it really conjures up the atmosphere, locations and groups which blossom around them. maybe important to note that i read it like 6 months after i graduated, having been part of a journal-publishing society and was like omg. so i feel like that is a very located story, even if it's not about a specific place?

it's interesting to think about place in visual art, because i feel like it does function very differently - i'm thinking of like fine art here, but often it is much more about where you see them (what museum, what's the room like, what other artworks are nearby, if it's a sculpture, can you get up close?) rather than where they were done. obviously cartoons can be very specifically located, but it depends - like calvin and hobbes takes it all in. i'm just musing now, but it's such an interesting point. i'm interested to see where your practice goes!

i find place as character is really hard, when it's not, like you say, big and abstract. i don't really know how you do it - i'd be curious to know what you've been reading that's emphasised it?
i do like when you read about the place you are though - i live in a place that's been written about enough that i can do it semi-regularly and it does always slightly scar the landscape for me (positive)

Re: Reading this in the dark on a couch in my apt

[mozaikmage]

that is so funny because I wrote coordinating schedules a few months after I graduated and based some of it off my college experience but most of it off visiting my friends at their colleges because I went to an art school that did not have a "campus" with a "student center" or "multiple libraries" lmao lot of that was just. best guessing. I am very proud of it though it reminds me of a lot of good times
we had a student newspaper but no lit mag and I missed my old high school lit mag every day despite getting into journalism against my will
okay so most recently I've read Beartown by Frederik Backman, and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Both of which are very Place-y books but for opposite places (remote Swedish hockey town vs Columbo, Sri Lanka in the 80s). I feel like both books made the Placeness a big focal point by jumping around a lot of different points of view, while focusing on a small central cast, and detailing each character's place in the world they inhabit. Each book really made me feel like I was physically in those places.
A coworker recommended Beartown as a Winter Book, but honestly I think it's a book to read when the air conditioning is broken in the middle of the summer because it will make you feel colder. I don't know if I liked everything in it, but it was interesting. Maali Almeida might not make you feel warmer but it will make you very aware of your own sweat. It's really really good-- visceral and unflinching, layered and complex, intense but also like, fun? I really enjoyed reading both of these books. Maybe look up content warnings for them before you read them though
Fine arts feels like another universe to me I almost never think about galleries and always think about books paper printing and stapling. One of my grad school profs dumped out all of her original pages for her second graphic novel into a trash can in Berlin because her luggage was over the weight limit and she didn't like the pages anymore and now every time I see that book in a store I remember that.
I live in a small town next to a more famous town and within commuting distance of NYC so reading a book set in Exactly My Small Town And Nowhere Else was very new and strange to me lol

Re: Reading this in the dark on a couch in my apt

[agletbaby]

it's good guessing!, and idk taps into the vibe of those experiences! funnily enough i'm currently studying between two universities in the same city, and one has multiple student centres and the other has none, so honestly who knows what's up.

i really enjoy the range of places in the two books you recommended there, i think it's very cool to be able to draw out links between both of them. interesting and complex are always intriguing descriptions - i've found myself reading a lot of very okay books lately, and both of these sound like they go beyond that (maybe in different ways?).

i am fascinated by the dumping of the pages. why not! a lot of my phd is about literary history, and there's always such an emphasis on original manuscripts when explaining writers to the public, but i find that so discouraging, because what has handwriting or browning pages got to do with the actual experience of reading and being caught up in a story? the emphasis on the original feels v archaic now, with the internet and good scanning opportunities. which isn't to say i don't value books paper printing stapling etc, but i wish it was used in more on-going (?) ways

Re: Reading this in the dark on a couch in my apt

[mozaikmage]

omg yeah no so the thing abt comics is original pages can sell for a LOT of money esp if you have a reputation for being good at drawing the way this cartoonist does which is why everyone's first reaction to this information is "WHY would you do that"
even now there's a publisher that puts out "artist editions" of very high-res reproductions of original pages from the 20th century where you can see all the editorial marks and white out and the marker lines and they're very expensive but so fascinating to see how the human artist made their art
I love making physical comic books I mean ok I don't always love assembling them but it's insanely satisfying to have a little book of your little pictures. and then sell it to strangers for money at a convention lol I'm currently debating whether I want to do my travelogue comics next week in color (prettier) or black and white (cheaper to print and aesthetically consistent with the last travel comics I made)

[virgomoon]

"writers write place. all the time"

the informing of place also occurs on a level where the textual isn't just space-specific but also just author-specific, like u said, i can't know the specificity of the physical geography you're traversing and u won't know the specificity of the humidity, the colours, the sounds of where I am as i read this. place comes through in writing as well -- what i meant by my british yuletide comment on twitter was that very often, the way language is wielded by some people reveal the spaces they've traversed. they may or may not be British, but there is a certain way language is being wielded which reminds me of Britain. a favourite personal exercise of mine is locating Indian fic writers, no matter whether they're living in India or not, because cadences of language slip through, and suddenly even though ao3 user Batman is writing about tsukki and kuroo I can envision them in a geography intimate to me.


anyway!!!!!!! SO HAPPY TO SEE U POSTING hope u had fun writing bcs it's always fun for me to read whatever you write <3

[agletbaby]

ahh okay i'm so interested in that yuletide comment. to me yuletide tends to be a lot more novel focused, and prominent novels often either are british or inspired by british novel writing traditions bc they are soso prominent in anglophone lit culture (the whole charles dickens inspiring donna tartt's goldfinch comes to mind), so i wonder if that's part of it? but i'm also a bit too entrenched in british writing/languages to spot it anyway, so maybe it just is the vibe.
i lovelovelove the comment that it's the language that unlocks the geography, not just the descriptions. i can't think of anything equivalent - although i think i've had it in film sometimes, where there's a turn of phrase which makes me go 'oh yeah this is made by people who i could almost have mutual friends with'. i'm going to be looking out for that though i'm so fascinated.

i did have fun writing bcos i love to talk, thank u for your continued support of this

[virgomoon]

also i think while I've always enjoyed people who ground their writing in place -- it just teems of care and i love seeing care in writing -- it's really interesting to me when people don't, and then they work out the intricacies of that. i don't mean simple AUs, i mean experiments, "what ifs", and all that. it's just really really fun. Although homeground will always be locating the writing in the space it's emergent from. AUs when properly dealt with can have so much depth, can reveal so much (sometimes only revelatory of author, but my favourites are when they're revelatory of author and character). like, "oh that's right, so that's how kenma will continue to behave even in outer space?" Or "oh so if ennoshita met sakusa this is how their characters will mesh?" but also if you leave it slightly askew, slightly strange, then try to pull back together the strings again... delicious.

I'm mostly getting carried away because I was discussing fantasy atsukita scenarios with pinya

[agletbaby]

i think this is what i meant by stories being located but not in place. like the kenma au (if we're thinking about the same one) is very located in a genre, and tropes, which allow it's character moments to stand solid against a comprehendable backdrop. and to me my ennoshita+sakusa story is essentially me hashing out some feelings about finishing university, through the lens of my relationship w haikyuu (which bookended it), through the lens of ennoshita, in the situation of this AU. so although it was completely about character and it had nothing to do w my life, it was also somehow very autobiographical?

but also i do completely agree i think aus can be the best because of how twisty they are. haikyuu i think is particularly good for it because people are willing to leave canon situations behind and preserve only the heart of the characters, which lets you do the coolest stuff