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While You Were Sleeping fic, and writing meta
Apr. 3rd, 2026 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
china_shopArticle 48 [Restriction on Acceptance of Engagement] (7647 words) by china_shop [Teen and Up]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 당신이 잠든 사이에 | While You Were Sleeping (TV)
Relationships: Han Woo Tak/Jung Jae Chan/Nam Hong Joo
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Threesome - F/M/M, Getting Together, Prophetic Dreams, Found Family
Summary:“Woo Tak, you haven’t left home yet, right?” Hong Joo’s voice comes down the line with the familiar confidence of long-standing friendship. “Don’t drive. You’ll get stuck in traffic, and you’ll miss your test.”
Woo Tak momentarily forgets his place in her life. His crush is usually manageable, but this morning, taken off-guard, he can’t suppress a kindling warmth, nor the smile that accompanies it. “Nam Hong Joo, have you been dreaming about me from all the way over in Australia?”
This request came up for pinch hit around the time I defaulted on Yuletide, and I thought, well, if I can't manage my assignment, I'll at least do a treat. Especially since I'd nominated While You Were Sleeping (one of my long-standing tiny Kdrama fandoms). But in the end, this foundered too. Turns out partners having operations is not great for my writing productivity.
So since mid-February (I think?!), I've been finishing the draft, re-writing, and re-re-writing. I came up against successive problems, and I want to document them here, because I know these issues are cropping up in my writing generally, of late.
- Internal/external consistency: one of the big problems with my first few drafts was: Character A decides to do X and continues to believe they're doing X while actually doing Y. In other words, the external dialogue and actions contradict the internal monologue in a way that is not deliberate and just comes across as confusing and nonsensical. ("I've decided not to tell them how I feel... except that I keep hinting without acknowledging that.") I'm sure there are deliberate ways to do this that can be very effective. This was not that.
Solution: step outside the POV and look at what the character is actually doing. Then signpost reversals and the reasons for them. - Cue words/flow: one of Matt Bell's newsletters a while back quoted Robert McKee talking about cue words:
[E]very reaction[...] needs an action to prompt it.
Therefore, ideally, the last word or phrase of each speech is the core word that seals meaning and cues a reaction from the other side of the scene. [...] A miscue happens when a core word is placed too early in Character A’s line and prompts a reaction from Character B, but because Character A has more words to recite, Actor B must swallow her response and wait while Actor A finishes performing his speech.
In prose, this isn't just about external reaction, but internal reaction too. If the POV character's internal monologue isn't reacting to the last thing that happened/was said, then the reader is left scrambling to make connections with something that might have happened lines or paragraphs back, or which might not be there at all. I find I'm particularly prone to this when I have a lot of meta thoughts I'm trying to include in the POV's internal monologue.
Solution: restructure so that the reactions directly follow on from the thing that caused them, and make sure that meta thoughts flow naturally, each one prompted by the last, in a way that fits the overall arc/direction of the scene (keeping in mind that it's perfectly fine to have reversals). - Location of conversation/theory of mind: I've been finding lately that my POV characters often conduct a huge amount of the story just inside their heads, even when there's someone else there. They have all these thoughts and feelings to process! It's a lot! And then occasionally the other person says something, setting off a new cascade of thoughts and feelings. But most people have theories about what the people they're talking with are thinking, how they're feeling, what they're trying to achieve. Conversations, especially romantic ones, usually work better when the focus is shared between the POV character's internal thoughts, and their assessment of what is happening externally.
Solution: make the other party to the conversation more active. And make the POV character react to them, as well as their own internal stuff. - Direction/progress of scenes: I touched on this above, but it deserves its own point. Because I discovery write, I find it easy to take a very meandery path from the start of the scene to where I want to end up. In fanfic, this isn't fatal because we all enjoy spending time with our characters. But it can undercut tension and test readers' comprehension. It's something I want to work on.
Solution: structure scenes so that there's a sense of progress, with only one or two reversals, not flip-flopping every few paragraphs.
Anyway, things to think about. Things to work on. I'm super grateful to
teaotter for multiple beta rounds, helping me figure some of this stuff out. And I'm looking forward to applying these lessons to my current WIP, which oh dear, really needs it. ;-)
