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rsadelleI don't know how interesting other people's writing processes actually are if you're not them, so this might be one of those entries that's less for you to read and more for me to write. This does contain lots of spoilers for "Fighting For," so if you have any interest in the story, you should go read it before you read this. If you're not interested in the story, but are interested in the intersection of sci fi and feminist thought, you might still find the section on gender politics interesting.
Writing Without a Plot: Origins and Story Arc
My writing group's structure includes a craft chat about some aspect of writing with an associated writing exercise. The topic for our May 16 meeting was "describing sounds." When I came up with the prompts for our writing exercise (the exercise is generally based around a handful of prompts that people draw from an envelope), I tried to think of things that could make more than one kind of sound. The afternoon of the meeting, I was about halfway through reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sinuous_curve and insunshine's "In Our Bedroom, After the War" (Panic gsf - overall excellent, but will break your heart along the way) where Brendon and Ryan have a lot of angry sex, and if I'd drawn "piano" out of the envelope, you would have gotten Brendon and Ryan having angry sex against a piano (sounds would have included one of them slamming a hand down on the keys and the scrape of the piano's legs against the floor as they fuck hard enough to move it). But I didn't draw "piano." I drew "leaves." When I was creating the exercise, I thought that in addition to wind blowing through leaves or leaves rustling underfoot, there could also be the sound of leaves burning. So the first thing I wrote was the sound of the leaves going up in flames to William's left. I didn't know, when I wrote the line, where the leaves were or why they were burning. But then they were burning because the pursuers had missed William. So I went with that. Everything up to "Goddamn fucking Association would burn down the whole forest to get to one fugitive." was written in the half hour dedicated to our writing exercise. (William had his own name, but Vicky-T had a fake name so my writing group wouldn't necessarily know I was writing fan fic.) After we write, we read our pieces out loud, and one person asked me, "Is this part of something you're working on?" It wasn't, but I got home to transcribe it and kept going because I knew what Vicky-T was going to say, and then I knew the next bit and the next bit and the next bit.
This is a pretty good snapshot of my writing process. I had no idea where this story was going. I fretted repeatedly over Twitter that the story didn't have a story arc, especially once I hit the part where Gabe and William were sleeping together. Because if this is a romance, that's the end, right? Except that it wasn't because I wanted to write the scene in the armory and the scene in the infirmary. At one point, M asked, "don't you have some sort of rebellion arc?" and I said, "Sort of, but I think actually winning is beyond the scope of the story." But then I went to dinner withnorwich36, who is amazingly patient with me going on about fandoms she doesn't share, and in the course of blabbing away about "Fighting For," I said, "Maybe Pete could accidentally win the war. That seems like something Pete would do."
But even then, that wasn't enough. I kept thinking about William stumbling across the Association orphanage and finding a baby (named Alexa, of course, because the abundance of Alexes is a good running joke) who takes to him immediately. And even though I said, "Dear Resistance AU, You're almost 10,000 words. You need to eventually end. They cannot adopt and continue the story with a baby." I couldn't stop thinking about it. And thenschuyler provided us with a link to the New York Times article about Demi Lovato because it calls Nick Jonas a "brooding auteur," but which talks about the song she wrote with William Beckett, and my brain put her into the orphanage too.
I tell you this long tale because I think it's worth knowing that at no point did I have a plan for this story that extended much beyond one or two scenes I wanted in the future. And yet, when I finished it (on August 2), I realized that it does have a story arc, or, at the very least, a character arc. In the opening scene, William's alone, in danger, and on the run from the evil entity in power. In the final scene, he's safe, he's surrounded by the family he's put together, the evil entity has been replaced, and William's partner is part of the new power structure.
Sex Scenes That Don't Obey
I did think ahead to many of the sex scenes before I wrote them. And then they came out completely different, to the point that not one of the sex scenes ended up being what I had imagined in the first place. For the most part, they came out a lot kinkier. The first one was just supposed to be them working off the adrenaline, and then William turned it half into a fight. The scene in the armory was supposed to be fast and hard, and then William dragged it out and it became a bit more d/s-y. (That particular one I can partially blame on this thread whereadellyna and airgiodslv were talking about Gabe being manhandled, which I read just as I hit that sex scene.) They were only supposed to exchange blowjobs after they win, and then Gabe said, "Can I just come on you?" and William started talking dirty. Their first unhurried time in their new home was maybe going to include some bondage (see, again, that thread about Gabe being manhandled), but instead William narrated over it and it was about just the two of them and how much William is in love with Gabe.
Gender Politics
About the time I decided I wanted to write the scene in the armory, I realized that I'd pretty much cast William in a fairly traditional female role. The armory made me realize it because the endpoint of that scene is not so much the sex as it is William shoring up Gabe's doubts and saying that he loves Gabe - in essence, doing the emotional work of the relationship. His overall story arc, too, is what you might find in any number of sci fi novels focusing on a woman in a resistance/rebellion situation (not surprising considering that I like to read those kind of novels). From the way he snaps and talks back to Gabe at the beginning and softens as they become a couple to the way he creates his family to the way he does the emotional work to the way he's never competition in Gabe's professional sphere, he's the traditional girl of the story. Make William female, expand on the politics and conflict of the story, and you have a fairly standard semi-dystopian sci fi novel.
But William's male, so you might not notice this if you don't live in my head and know where I was coming from. Part of what I wanted to do with the story was create a world without our world's sexist (and religious - hence the "not everyone celebrated it anyway" Christmas consideration and the characterization of the JoBros religion as "some religious sect") baggage. I'm sure there are places where that wasn't successful, but I hope there are places where it was. The two places where I consciously fought for it are in William's discussions with Mike.
When Mike comes to visit and they go out to the explosives training ground, he says, "So this is what it's like to belong to the camp commander." The first version of that line in my head was, "So this is what it's like to be the camp commander's woman." But I didn't want the story to depend on gender roles taken from our world, so I changed it to, "So this is what it's like to be the camp commander's man." That doesn't work either, because without the gender role baggage, it becomes fairly nonsensical. What he really means is that William belongs to Gabe, so that's what I changed it to when I did the editing.
The other discussion that gave me trouble is when they have lunch in the city after they've won. My original intent was for Mike to be the one to push William toward children. In my head, he called William "a bored housewife" and there was maybe something about how he should have a baby. But, again, I didn't want to rely on our world's gender roles, so that part of the conversation got cut when I wrote it down, and William walks home past three different schools instead.
There's something here that I can't quite articulate yet about how we internalize and reproduce messages in our fiction and reading choices (I love romance novel AUs) even when we're consciously disrupting them.
Credit Where Credit Is Due: Influences
While I'm sure there are other things that influenced this story, a few I know of, in only the order I'm thinking of them at the moment, are:
Things I Did That You Might Not Have Noticed
One of the things that deeply amuses me about "Fighting For" is the way that you can trace my growing involvement with/knowledge of bandom via the expansion of characters in the story. It starts with just William, Gabe, and the rest of the Cobras. Then you get the throwaway bits about the Alexes. Then Travis, Pete, Maja, and Mike. Then Andy and Joe, Ashlee, Patrick, the JoBros, and the rest of TAI. Then Leighton, the Millionaires, and Cash Colligan's personality. And, finally, as I started getting more interested in the JoBros, Demi. I think the Millionaires are the most fortuitous of these (and the ones you'll miss if you blink - in the story they're only mentioned by their first names: Melissa, Allison, and Dani). There was this whole big thing about them just as I was plotting out Gabe ending up in the infirmary, and so I had fun putting them into the story as pranksters Gabe appreciates but both William and Vicky-T hate. (Because if there is anything William and Vicky-T are in agreement about, it's Gabe's safety.)
Somewhere in the middle of writing this story, I started following Pete on Twitter and reading his blog. One of the things he talks about is wanting privacy for Bronx, who, you may have noticed, I did put in the story. At the time, my thought process went something like this: I don't want this to be an everybody's gay story, so Pete should be with Ashlee and not Patrick, and Pete with Ashlee means Bronx. Only later did I think about it and realize that he actually serves a purpose in the story. First of all, he further cements the relationship between Pete and Ashlee, which settles William's potential jealousy of Gabe's flirting with Ashlee and spending so much time with Pete. Secondly, he's a baby, and in a lot of ways, this whole story is about babies and families. And thirdly, the way Ashlee uses him to pull Pete away from their strategy discussions at Clandestine Camp also sets her up as an implicit ally for William at the end of the story.
Bronx is also a real person, and in casting "Fighting For" I tried to use real people wherever possible - only three named characters (Astrid, Ingrid, and Alexa) are made up.
And on the subject of names, you might not have consciously noticed Victoria's name. She's Vicky-T to everyone she's close to (Gabe, Nate, Ryland, and Suarez all call her that). William is never quite that close to her, and he calls her Victoria the whole way through. (Of course, as I've been watching more and more Gabe interviews, I've been noticing he always calls her Victoria, but I decided to let it stand for purposes of the story.) I once pointed out the way someone in my writing group had their characters using full names versus nicknames to a similar purpose, and it wasn't something they'd done consciously. Since then, I've been noticing how I use names and making conscious decisions about nicknames versus real names.
The name of the evil entity also has a story behind it. I'd been reading a lot of AUs, and noticing that ever since Firefly, the large, overbearing evil entity in AUs with such things is often called the Alliance. I wanted something different, and the first thing I thought of was the Recording Industry Association of America, so the bad guys became the Association. What's funny to me about this origin is that Pete & Co. are not actually independents - Decaydance and Fueled By Ramen are both part of Atlantic, which is in turn part of Warner Music Group, which is one of the big four. There could conceivably be an outsider pov story about how life under Pete & Co. is not actually that different from life under the Association.
Things I Did That I Might Not Have Noticed
One of the things I love about having other people read something I wrote is when they notice things I didn't even know I was doing. If you read "Fighting For," I'd love to know what you noticed in it that I didn't know I was doing.
Writing Without a Plot: Origins and Story Arc
My writing group's structure includes a craft chat about some aspect of writing with an associated writing exercise. The topic for our May 16 meeting was "describing sounds." When I came up with the prompts for our writing exercise (the exercise is generally based around a handful of prompts that people draw from an envelope), I tried to think of things that could make more than one kind of sound. The afternoon of the meeting, I was about halfway through reading
sinuous_curve and insunshine's "In Our Bedroom, After the War" (Panic gsf - overall excellent, but will break your heart along the way) where Brendon and Ryan have a lot of angry sex, and if I'd drawn "piano" out of the envelope, you would have gotten Brendon and Ryan having angry sex against a piano (sounds would have included one of them slamming a hand down on the keys and the scrape of the piano's legs against the floor as they fuck hard enough to move it). But I didn't draw "piano." I drew "leaves." When I was creating the exercise, I thought that in addition to wind blowing through leaves or leaves rustling underfoot, there could also be the sound of leaves burning. So the first thing I wrote was the sound of the leaves going up in flames to William's left. I didn't know, when I wrote the line, where the leaves were or why they were burning. But then they were burning because the pursuers had missed William. So I went with that. Everything up to "Goddamn fucking Association would burn down the whole forest to get to one fugitive." was written in the half hour dedicated to our writing exercise. (William had his own name, but Vicky-T had a fake name so my writing group wouldn't necessarily know I was writing fan fic.) After we write, we read our pieces out loud, and one person asked me, "Is this part of something you're working on?" It wasn't, but I got home to transcribe it and kept going because I knew what Vicky-T was going to say, and then I knew the next bit and the next bit and the next bit.This is a pretty good snapshot of my writing process. I had no idea where this story was going. I fretted repeatedly over Twitter that the story didn't have a story arc, especially once I hit the part where Gabe and William were sleeping together. Because if this is a romance, that's the end, right? Except that it wasn't because I wanted to write the scene in the armory and the scene in the infirmary. At one point, M asked, "don't you have some sort of rebellion arc?" and I said, "Sort of, but I think actually winning is beyond the scope of the story." But then I went to dinner with
norwich36, who is amazingly patient with me going on about fandoms she doesn't share, and in the course of blabbing away about "Fighting For," I said, "Maybe Pete could accidentally win the war. That seems like something Pete would do."But even then, that wasn't enough. I kept thinking about William stumbling across the Association orphanage and finding a baby (named Alexa, of course, because the abundance of Alexes is a good running joke) who takes to him immediately. And even though I said, "Dear Resistance AU, You're almost 10,000 words. You need to eventually end. They cannot adopt and continue the story with a baby." I couldn't stop thinking about it. And then
schuyler provided us with a link to the New York Times article about Demi Lovato because it calls Nick Jonas a "brooding auteur," but which talks about the song she wrote with William Beckett, and my brain put her into the orphanage too.I tell you this long tale because I think it's worth knowing that at no point did I have a plan for this story that extended much beyond one or two scenes I wanted in the future. And yet, when I finished it (on August 2), I realized that it does have a story arc, or, at the very least, a character arc. In the opening scene, William's alone, in danger, and on the run from the evil entity in power. In the final scene, he's safe, he's surrounded by the family he's put together, the evil entity has been replaced, and William's partner is part of the new power structure.
Sex Scenes That Don't Obey
I did think ahead to many of the sex scenes before I wrote them. And then they came out completely different, to the point that not one of the sex scenes ended up being what I had imagined in the first place. For the most part, they came out a lot kinkier. The first one was just supposed to be them working off the adrenaline, and then William turned it half into a fight. The scene in the armory was supposed to be fast and hard, and then William dragged it out and it became a bit more d/s-y. (That particular one I can partially blame on this thread where
adellyna and airgiodslv were talking about Gabe being manhandled, which I read just as I hit that sex scene.) They were only supposed to exchange blowjobs after they win, and then Gabe said, "Can I just come on you?" and William started talking dirty. Their first unhurried time in their new home was maybe going to include some bondage (see, again, that thread about Gabe being manhandled), but instead William narrated over it and it was about just the two of them and how much William is in love with Gabe.Gender Politics
About the time I decided I wanted to write the scene in the armory, I realized that I'd pretty much cast William in a fairly traditional female role. The armory made me realize it because the endpoint of that scene is not so much the sex as it is William shoring up Gabe's doubts and saying that he loves Gabe - in essence, doing the emotional work of the relationship. His overall story arc, too, is what you might find in any number of sci fi novels focusing on a woman in a resistance/rebellion situation (not surprising considering that I like to read those kind of novels). From the way he snaps and talks back to Gabe at the beginning and softens as they become a couple to the way he creates his family to the way he does the emotional work to the way he's never competition in Gabe's professional sphere, he's the traditional girl of the story. Make William female, expand on the politics and conflict of the story, and you have a fairly standard semi-dystopian sci fi novel.
But William's male, so you might not notice this if you don't live in my head and know where I was coming from. Part of what I wanted to do with the story was create a world without our world's sexist (and religious - hence the "not everyone celebrated it anyway" Christmas consideration and the characterization of the JoBros religion as "some religious sect") baggage. I'm sure there are places where that wasn't successful, but I hope there are places where it was. The two places where I consciously fought for it are in William's discussions with Mike.
When Mike comes to visit and they go out to the explosives training ground, he says, "So this is what it's like to belong to the camp commander." The first version of that line in my head was, "So this is what it's like to be the camp commander's woman." But I didn't want the story to depend on gender roles taken from our world, so I changed it to, "So this is what it's like to be the camp commander's man." That doesn't work either, because without the gender role baggage, it becomes fairly nonsensical. What he really means is that William belongs to Gabe, so that's what I changed it to when I did the editing.
The other discussion that gave me trouble is when they have lunch in the city after they've won. My original intent was for Mike to be the one to push William toward children. In my head, he called William "a bored housewife" and there was maybe something about how he should have a baby. But, again, I didn't want to rely on our world's gender roles, so that part of the conversation got cut when I wrote it down, and William walks home past three different schools instead.
There's something here that I can't quite articulate yet about how we internalize and reproduce messages in our fiction and reading choices (I love romance novel AUs) even when we're consciously disrupting them.
Credit Where Credit Is Due: Influences
While I'm sure there are other things that influenced this story, a few I know of, in only the order I'm thinking of them at the moment, are:
- Parallax 'Verse by ignipes
- But Not The Song by ignipes and emilyray
- Dancer of the Sixth by Michelle Shirey Crean
- The Rising of the Moon by Flynn Connolly
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- "Build Your House, Call Me Home" by skoosiepants
Things I Did That You Might Not Have Noticed
One of the things that deeply amuses me about "Fighting For" is the way that you can trace my growing involvement with/knowledge of bandom via the expansion of characters in the story. It starts with just William, Gabe, and the rest of the Cobras. Then you get the throwaway bits about the Alexes. Then Travis, Pete, Maja, and Mike. Then Andy and Joe, Ashlee, Patrick, the JoBros, and the rest of TAI. Then Leighton, the Millionaires, and Cash Colligan's personality. And, finally, as I started getting more interested in the JoBros, Demi. I think the Millionaires are the most fortuitous of these (and the ones you'll miss if you blink - in the story they're only mentioned by their first names: Melissa, Allison, and Dani). There was this whole big thing about them just as I was plotting out Gabe ending up in the infirmary, and so I had fun putting them into the story as pranksters Gabe appreciates but both William and Vicky-T hate. (Because if there is anything William and Vicky-T are in agreement about, it's Gabe's safety.)
Somewhere in the middle of writing this story, I started following Pete on Twitter and reading his blog. One of the things he talks about is wanting privacy for Bronx, who, you may have noticed, I did put in the story. At the time, my thought process went something like this: I don't want this to be an everybody's gay story, so Pete should be with Ashlee and not Patrick, and Pete with Ashlee means Bronx. Only later did I think about it and realize that he actually serves a purpose in the story. First of all, he further cements the relationship between Pete and Ashlee, which settles William's potential jealousy of Gabe's flirting with Ashlee and spending so much time with Pete. Secondly, he's a baby, and in a lot of ways, this whole story is about babies and families. And thirdly, the way Ashlee uses him to pull Pete away from their strategy discussions at Clandestine Camp also sets her up as an implicit ally for William at the end of the story.
Bronx is also a real person, and in casting "Fighting For" I tried to use real people wherever possible - only three named characters (Astrid, Ingrid, and Alexa) are made up.
And on the subject of names, you might not have consciously noticed Victoria's name. She's Vicky-T to everyone she's close to (Gabe, Nate, Ryland, and Suarez all call her that). William is never quite that close to her, and he calls her Victoria the whole way through. (Of course, as I've been watching more and more Gabe interviews, I've been noticing he always calls her Victoria, but I decided to let it stand for purposes of the story.) I once pointed out the way someone in my writing group had their characters using full names versus nicknames to a similar purpose, and it wasn't something they'd done consciously. Since then, I've been noticing how I use names and making conscious decisions about nicknames versus real names.
The name of the evil entity also has a story behind it. I'd been reading a lot of AUs, and noticing that ever since Firefly, the large, overbearing evil entity in AUs with such things is often called the Alliance. I wanted something different, and the first thing I thought of was the Recording Industry Association of America, so the bad guys became the Association. What's funny to me about this origin is that Pete & Co. are not actually independents - Decaydance and Fueled By Ramen are both part of Atlantic, which is in turn part of Warner Music Group, which is one of the big four. There could conceivably be an outsider pov story about how life under Pete & Co. is not actually that different from life under the Association.
Things I Did That I Might Not Have Noticed
One of the things I love about having other people read something I wrote is when they notice things I didn't even know I was doing. If you read "Fighting For," I'd love to know what you noticed in it that I didn't know I was doing.