oh gosh... this is such a hard question to answer. first of all though, thank you so, so, so much. i’m honestly a little overwhelmed that first love, late spring could stay with someone for so long, and it feels like it’s never gotten easier knowing how to properly convey my gratitude.

i also feel like i’m about to disappoint you because i don’t think i have a particularly mysterious answer. i’m just... pretty nosy 😭 not even necessarily in the sense that i love people (i actually think i have a fairly complicated relationship with humanity as a concept and lean towards misanthropy), but i do love observing. or idk. i can’t help observing. i really can’t help it. people at work make fun of me sometimes for remembering what someone wore on a specific day seven months ago, or the particular way this or that person likes to phrase things. maybe it’s overvigilance. i just like to tell people i watched crime shows too young and became convinced i would someday be called to the stand for a crime i witnessed and must provide exact details.

anyway. sorry for the tangent. what i meant to say is that writing gives me permission to ask questions that would be very strange in ordinary conversation, and if i have any advice about characterization, it’s paying attention to those details that only prose gives you space to delve into without jeopardizing like. the narrative logic of our irl social contracts. why does someone remember that moment and not another? why did those particular words stick with them? why does one person interpret kindness as pity while someone else experiences it as relief? i think the world feels more beautiful when it’s more legible. writing is one of the ways i try to make people—and myself—a little more understandable. it’s the closest i get to loving the world, i think. so when i'm writing characters, i’m usually less interested in what they’re like than in how they arrived there. i want to know what memories they keep returning to. what assumptions they make without realizing it. what they misunderstand about themselves. then once i understand the shape of someone’s thinking, dialogue tends to come pretty naturally.

one thing i do think i pay a lot of attention to is the way people speak. in the boring way you do when you’re learning other languages, but it’s been helpful since i’m writing in a language that i also had to learn second. everyone has these tiny conversational habits that become invisible once you know them. the kinds of metaphors they reach for. the things they answer directly versus the things they quietly sidestep. whether they ramble, hedge, interrupt themselves, apologize too much, ask questions instead of making statements. dialogue starts to feel much easier once i'm not thinking about "how would this character say this?" and instead, "what kinds of thoughts would naturally occur to this person, in this order?”

i also spend... a frankly unreasonable amount of time just thinking. a lot of writing, for me, happens long before i’m sitting at a keyboard. i'll spend days turning over one interaction or one line of dialogue in my head until it finally clicks into place. and then the flow state will finally follow. some of the best sentences i’ve ever written (in my humble opinion) came from noticing something in real life that i couldn’t quite stop thinking about. be obsessive, be nosy. to quote susan sontag:

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

also i answered another ask about writers that have influenced my diction, if it’s okay for me to link it here: https://alterspring.org/@sha/a/116983598472352949 (but i’m sure i can actually compile a more flls-specific list, now that i think about it… written on the body by jeanette winterson was a big one, even though it’s frankenstein that megumi ends up reading in-fic bc i thought it was funny for mahito’s newsletter to recommend it)