Answering a writing question: Kurt and Blaine
The very kind anonymous commenter Jane asked me another question: I really like the way you write for Kurt; your Blaine stories are awesome but there's just something about the way you capture Kurt's voice, like you really understand him (IMO). Which leads me to another question - do you find it easier to write Kurt or Blaine? I think you've said a few times you've started a story with Kurt in mind but Blaine's story was the end result. There's no need to answer if it's too hard to explain, but I'm curious, is all.
First of all, thank you. <3 I love trying to mimic their voices, and they mean so very much to me that I always hope I’m doing them justice.
Secondly, it’s a complicated question to answer, but I love talking about my writing, so thank you for asking!
If I had to pick my favorite character in the show and the one with whom I connect the most closely, it would be Kurt Hummel. I mean, I love all of the other characters, especially my sweet, darling Blaine and also the fiery ball of emotions and talent that is Rachel, but Kurt is always the character through whose eyes I watch every new episode. He is always the person whose emotional journey catches me first.
In part it’s because Kurt has had such a cohesive story and personality from the very beginning of the show. I mean, I love Blaine dearly, and I think he’s internally consistent if you put your mind to it, but he’s been written in a scattershot way over the years, especially at first, as the writers were figuring who he was and how long he would stay around. It’s completely possible for me to reconcile dapper and confident Blaine Warbler with the much younger-feeling Blaine in other seasons, but it does require more thought to connect all of those dots. Kurt doesn’t require that kind of work. He just is, fully formed, wholly himself.
I also am drawn toward Kurt because - although we are wildly different in a lot of ways - there’s a lot about us that is similar. From the way we’ve both dressed to express our personalities and separate ourselves from others (and heck, I still stand out in my own way - there aren’t any other parents at the museling’s proper New England private school who wear Docs) to the way we love, there’s just something about Kurt that resonates with me. He just makes sense to me, from his sarcasm to his heart to his priorities.
I do feel like I understand Blaine. I feel like I understand how he loves, how he hides his insecurities, how he always tries to be the best, how tries to please people to the point of losing himself. I love writing him. I love thinking about him. But I understand him as someone who loves him passionately from the outside; I understand Kurt as someone who could live under his skin.
(I mean, YMMV about whether you think I get any of it right. But from my POV this is how it feels.)
That being said, when I’m telling a story, I choose my POV character based on who has the most at risk in the story and/or who is going to give me the best insight into the moment/himself. (I'm mostly talking about my shorter fics here, but within a longer fic I pick the section/chapter POV based on the same criteria plus also the need to alternate.) Stories require tension or growth or something, and I pick the POV based on who will make the story the most interesting, tense, and/or close and often also whose perspective we needed more of within the episode.
For example, although Kurt’s perspective in 5x15 (“Bash”) is really compelling to me, we got tons of that within the episode, and he was fairly calm and collected about it; Blaine’s reaction to the events, however, we only got in glimpses, and he was far less okay. So although the story in the show is Kurt’s and he clearly has a very deep and emotional thought-process about why he stood up against bullies then as throughout the past few years, it’s Blaine who is having a harder time, who is more shaken, and who got less screen time for his reactions. There’s tons to think about about Kurt, but it was immediately clear to me upon watching the episode that it had to be a Blaine fic (ultimately “Wounds”) that week. His story was less served. His heart was more broken, even though Kurt was the one physically hurt. Blaine would bleed more fully on the page and we saw less of it. That was the obvious place for me to write a story.
Honestly, I really don’t care whether Kurt or Blaine is the one in whose voice I’m going to write. It doesn’t matter to me, other than that I get antsy if I only write one POV too many fics in a row. I like writing both of their voices, and I like writing the people they commonly interact with (who are different). They both often have an interesting story to tell, but one or the other will feel right because he’s got more at stake and thus has more emotion to share (or if he’s closed off and the other POV character won’t get it, I need to put it in that POV so we can see what’s going on in his head when he isn’t speaking).
It’s rare that I start writing a story in the wrong POV, but it does happen. Usually I start in Kurt’s head when chewing over a topic or gap I want to explore - because he’s my default while watching the show - and then realize that Blaine’s got more to tell us. The vast majority of the time it’s totally obvious to me before I start writing or even making notes to myself. When it isn’t, I usually figure that out less than a page in and then roll my eyes and start over, but it’s not often that I’m wrong by the time words start going onto the page about how I want to tell the story and who wants to be my POV character.
Sometimes, like after 4x04 (“The Break Up”) or 4x14 (“I Do”) or more recently 5x14 (“New New York”) and 5x17 (“Opening Night”), I need to write two fics to explore the issue from both POVs. Each of them has something interesting to say to me, and they can’t say it from the other’s POV. Writing two fics for 5x17 was an unusual process, because I wrote the Kurt fic first (8000 words of what would become “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”) and hit a wall with it (ultimately because canon needed to get to 5x20 for me to round out the fic, though I didn’t know that) and switched to the Blaine-POV “Lost in the Crowd,” which got out some of the Blaine meta in my head around the episode and a what life was like for them before he moved out. It wrote itself really quickly, which is always a sign that I’ve made the right choice. Usually when I have more than one fic in my head I finish one and then write another, but this time I had to pause the Kurt fic until canon gave me what I was missing.
Within either POV, I don’t really think one is easier for me to write than the other. Blaine sometimes requires me to step back and ponder a little more about what exactly he thinks he’s thinking vs. what I as a third party observer think is going on (and sometimes I get comments on my Blaine fics telling me his limited perspective isn't really what's going on, and it's not that I don't know that but that Blaine doesn't see it that way), where Kurt I can write more on instinct and with the knowledge that he’s pretty darn self-aware and so probably isn’t fooling himself or tearing himself down the way Blaine can, but that doesn’t make them easier or harder. I am a Method Writer, meaning I really submerge myself into the personality of the character while writing, using countless data points from canon to inform who I think he is and what he would do, and I try to feel and see and experience what he does as I write the words. I try to be him. Neither one of them is difficult for me to sink into. They’re just there, waiting for me to watch them do what they do.
My process for writing within an episode is the same, whether I’m writing Blaine or Kurt (my most common POV characters, though sometimes I write others): I always watch and re-watch the relevant scenes, looking very closely at body language cues as well as the dialogue, to make sure that I have that bit of Kurt or Blaine’s life in my head. It doesn’t matter what the Kurt and Blaine in my head think; I need to know what the Kurt and Blaine on my screen think and integrate that into the characters I write.
Wow, I could talk on this subject all day! :D Long story short, I guess Kurt is my default window into the show, but I feel confident slipping into both perspectives at this point. I love writing Blaine, who still gushes over Kurt and doubts so much, and I love writing Kurt, who is so much sharper-edged than Blaine is and who loves so deeply it’s like an ocean beneath everything he does.
Thanks for asking! <3
First of all, thank you. <3 I love trying to mimic their voices, and they mean so very much to me that I always hope I’m doing them justice.
Secondly, it’s a complicated question to answer, but I love talking about my writing, so thank you for asking!
If I had to pick my favorite character in the show and the one with whom I connect the most closely, it would be Kurt Hummel. I mean, I love all of the other characters, especially my sweet, darling Blaine and also the fiery ball of emotions and talent that is Rachel, but Kurt is always the character through whose eyes I watch every new episode. He is always the person whose emotional journey catches me first.
In part it’s because Kurt has had such a cohesive story and personality from the very beginning of the show. I mean, I love Blaine dearly, and I think he’s internally consistent if you put your mind to it, but he’s been written in a scattershot way over the years, especially at first, as the writers were figuring who he was and how long he would stay around. It’s completely possible for me to reconcile dapper and confident Blaine Warbler with the much younger-feeling Blaine in other seasons, but it does require more thought to connect all of those dots. Kurt doesn’t require that kind of work. He just is, fully formed, wholly himself.
I also am drawn toward Kurt because - although we are wildly different in a lot of ways - there’s a lot about us that is similar. From the way we’ve both dressed to express our personalities and separate ourselves from others (and heck, I still stand out in my own way - there aren’t any other parents at the museling’s proper New England private school who wear Docs) to the way we love, there’s just something about Kurt that resonates with me. He just makes sense to me, from his sarcasm to his heart to his priorities.
I do feel like I understand Blaine. I feel like I understand how he loves, how he hides his insecurities, how he always tries to be the best, how tries to please people to the point of losing himself. I love writing him. I love thinking about him. But I understand him as someone who loves him passionately from the outside; I understand Kurt as someone who could live under his skin.
(I mean, YMMV about whether you think I get any of it right. But from my POV this is how it feels.)
That being said, when I’m telling a story, I choose my POV character based on who has the most at risk in the story and/or who is going to give me the best insight into the moment/himself. (I'm mostly talking about my shorter fics here, but within a longer fic I pick the section/chapter POV based on the same criteria plus also the need to alternate.) Stories require tension or growth or something, and I pick the POV based on who will make the story the most interesting, tense, and/or close and often also whose perspective we needed more of within the episode.
For example, although Kurt’s perspective in 5x15 (“Bash”) is really compelling to me, we got tons of that within the episode, and he was fairly calm and collected about it; Blaine’s reaction to the events, however, we only got in glimpses, and he was far less okay. So although the story in the show is Kurt’s and he clearly has a very deep and emotional thought-process about why he stood up against bullies then as throughout the past few years, it’s Blaine who is having a harder time, who is more shaken, and who got less screen time for his reactions. There’s tons to think about about Kurt, but it was immediately clear to me upon watching the episode that it had to be a Blaine fic (ultimately “Wounds”) that week. His story was less served. His heart was more broken, even though Kurt was the one physically hurt. Blaine would bleed more fully on the page and we saw less of it. That was the obvious place for me to write a story.
Honestly, I really don’t care whether Kurt or Blaine is the one in whose voice I’m going to write. It doesn’t matter to me, other than that I get antsy if I only write one POV too many fics in a row. I like writing both of their voices, and I like writing the people they commonly interact with (who are different). They both often have an interesting story to tell, but one or the other will feel right because he’s got more at stake and thus has more emotion to share (or if he’s closed off and the other POV character won’t get it, I need to put it in that POV so we can see what’s going on in his head when he isn’t speaking).
It’s rare that I start writing a story in the wrong POV, but it does happen. Usually I start in Kurt’s head when chewing over a topic or gap I want to explore - because he’s my default while watching the show - and then realize that Blaine’s got more to tell us. The vast majority of the time it’s totally obvious to me before I start writing or even making notes to myself. When it isn’t, I usually figure that out less than a page in and then roll my eyes and start over, but it’s not often that I’m wrong by the time words start going onto the page about how I want to tell the story and who wants to be my POV character.
Sometimes, like after 4x04 (“The Break Up”) or 4x14 (“I Do”) or more recently 5x14 (“New New York”) and 5x17 (“Opening Night”), I need to write two fics to explore the issue from both POVs. Each of them has something interesting to say to me, and they can’t say it from the other’s POV. Writing two fics for 5x17 was an unusual process, because I wrote the Kurt fic first (8000 words of what would become “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”) and hit a wall with it (ultimately because canon needed to get to 5x20 for me to round out the fic, though I didn’t know that) and switched to the Blaine-POV “Lost in the Crowd,” which got out some of the Blaine meta in my head around the episode and a what life was like for them before he moved out. It wrote itself really quickly, which is always a sign that I’ve made the right choice. Usually when I have more than one fic in my head I finish one and then write another, but this time I had to pause the Kurt fic until canon gave me what I was missing.
Within either POV, I don’t really think one is easier for me to write than the other. Blaine sometimes requires me to step back and ponder a little more about what exactly he thinks he’s thinking vs. what I as a third party observer think is going on (and sometimes I get comments on my Blaine fics telling me his limited perspective isn't really what's going on, and it's not that I don't know that but that Blaine doesn't see it that way), where Kurt I can write more on instinct and with the knowledge that he’s pretty darn self-aware and so probably isn’t fooling himself or tearing himself down the way Blaine can, but that doesn’t make them easier or harder. I am a Method Writer, meaning I really submerge myself into the personality of the character while writing, using countless data points from canon to inform who I think he is and what he would do, and I try to feel and see and experience what he does as I write the words. I try to be him. Neither one of them is difficult for me to sink into. They’re just there, waiting for me to watch them do what they do.
My process for writing within an episode is the same, whether I’m writing Blaine or Kurt (my most common POV characters, though sometimes I write others): I always watch and re-watch the relevant scenes, looking very closely at body language cues as well as the dialogue, to make sure that I have that bit of Kurt or Blaine’s life in my head. It doesn’t matter what the Kurt and Blaine in my head think; I need to know what the Kurt and Blaine on my screen think and integrate that into the characters I write.
Wow, I could talk on this subject all day! :D Long story short, I guess Kurt is my default window into the show, but I feel confident slipping into both perspectives at this point. I love writing Blaine, who still gushes over Kurt and doubts so much, and I love writing Kurt, who is so much sharper-edged than Blaine is and who loves so deeply it’s like an ocean beneath everything he does.
Thanks for asking! <3