The one that got away...
May. 12th, 2005 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallison...or, Kat Attempts to Originate and Propagate the Self-Crit Meme.
Because I am fearsomely avoidant these days about actually writing, I've been doing some rereading and brooding over stuff I've already written, and it struck me that -- if the rest of you are anything like me, with every story you've finished and posted, there's always, glimmering somewhere in your mind, the Platonic Ideal of the story you wanted to write, and then there's the flawed and falling-short reality of what actually made it into prose. And you rub your face and sip Irish whisky and mourn to yourself about the emotion that you couldn't quite pull off, or the stuff you probably should've yanked out, or the thing that you just couldn't make work quite the way you'd envisioned.
So, my idea -- for one/some/any or all of your stories, let us know what that thing was, what you really wanted to do and couldn't quite achieve.
Heavy Bag: In my original conception of the story, there was not actually going to be any sex. For unrecalled reasons, I wrote the sex scene in at some point, and then I was going to take it out, because I decided that this was really going to be all about lack of resolution, and tentativeness, and uncertainty, and admitting you want something you might in fact never get, and this would all tie thematically into Ray's wanting to fit in with the black guys at the gym even though he so obviously doesn't, and thwartedness and blah blah. But in the interim I'd sent![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cesperanza a draft of the with-sex version, and then told her I was thinking of taking that part out, and as I recall she threatened me with mayhem if I did any such thing, and I was tired and uncertain and I tend to believe (with reason) that Ces is way smarter than me anyway, and so I left it in. But sometimes I wish I'd gone ahead and written that other story.
Xeriscape: Though there are various weaknesses in this story, the thing that drives me crazy about it in rereading is -- OK, the moment when John is completely decompensating, kneeling on the floor of the bathroom in the hotel, rolling his pills around in his hand and thinking about flushing them down the toilet, and then he looks up and sees Joe watching him -- that should have been so much more real. Joe should have been so much more real in that moment, really, it should have been an honest-to-god horror-movie making-your-flesh-creep moment, the story should have been a more authentic ghost story, and that didn't really, in my judgment, come off.
End of the Road: There's a big imbalance in this story, which is because when I first wrote it it was going to be a lot shorter (*hollow laughter*) and was going to end pretty soon after the end of the Quest, and so I wrote all this amazingly lengthy detailed stuff about the sled trip, and then realized that actually Ray and Fraser were going to spend quite a bit of time trying to live together in Canada, and then all the Quest stuff turned into a kind of a side issue, except I couldn't stand to throw it out, and so ... it's unbalanced, yeah. Plus I hate the first-morning-after scene, although I acknowledge that emotionally-ambivalent morning-after are a bitch to write, and so, whatever.
One for the Road: Do we ever provide any kind of an explanation for why Duncan here is so very unlike the Duncan we see in canon, and instead resembles a pouty teenager with a crush? No, we do not, and in retrospect I do so wish I'd done that. People sometimes (with reason) rag on my version of Methos, but the Duncan here is what's really off-key. I needed his drive to connection as a foil to Methos's drive to disconnection, but it's more a device than a thing adequately explained and justified. This criticism also applies to Strata, and if I'd been able to pull that off they would both be much stronger stories.
The Kindest Mortals and Deep End: These are the two weakest stories I've posted (IMO) and they both suffer from my effort to write against my inclinations and do some sort of a Happy Ending. I like the beginnings of both of them, and then they fizzle. (The Kindest Mortals I'm actually rewriting/recasting into the story I originally sort of wanted it to be---all about death and how differently that appears to mortals and immortals. Deep End should be rewritten, with Fraser's grandiosity and his belief that he's achieved happiness cut against in some significant way, but it pretty much has to stand as is...)
So, who's next? *g*
Because I am fearsomely avoidant these days about actually writing, I've been doing some rereading and brooding over stuff I've already written, and it struck me that -- if the rest of you are anything like me, with every story you've finished and posted, there's always, glimmering somewhere in your mind, the Platonic Ideal of the story you wanted to write, and then there's the flawed and falling-short reality of what actually made it into prose. And you rub your face and sip Irish whisky and mourn to yourself about the emotion that you couldn't quite pull off, or the stuff you probably should've yanked out, or the thing that you just couldn't make work quite the way you'd envisioned.
So, my idea -- for one/some/any or all of your stories, let us know what that thing was, what you really wanted to do and couldn't quite achieve.
Heavy Bag: In my original conception of the story, there was not actually going to be any sex. For unrecalled reasons, I wrote the sex scene in at some point, and then I was going to take it out, because I decided that this was really going to be all about lack of resolution, and tentativeness, and uncertainty, and admitting you want something you might in fact never get, and this would all tie thematically into Ray's wanting to fit in with the black guys at the gym even though he so obviously doesn't, and thwartedness and blah blah. But in the interim I'd sent
cesperanza a draft of the with-sex version, and then told her I was thinking of taking that part out, and as I recall she threatened me with mayhem if I did any such thing, and I was tired and uncertain and I tend to believe (with reason) that Ces is way smarter than me anyway, and so I left it in. But sometimes I wish I'd gone ahead and written that other story.Xeriscape: Though there are various weaknesses in this story, the thing that drives me crazy about it in rereading is -- OK, the moment when John is completely decompensating, kneeling on the floor of the bathroom in the hotel, rolling his pills around in his hand and thinking about flushing them down the toilet, and then he looks up and sees Joe watching him -- that should have been so much more real. Joe should have been so much more real in that moment, really, it should have been an honest-to-god horror-movie making-your-flesh-creep moment, the story should have been a more authentic ghost story, and that didn't really, in my judgment, come off.
End of the Road: There's a big imbalance in this story, which is because when I first wrote it it was going to be a lot shorter (*hollow laughter*) and was going to end pretty soon after the end of the Quest, and so I wrote all this amazingly lengthy detailed stuff about the sled trip, and then realized that actually Ray and Fraser were going to spend quite a bit of time trying to live together in Canada, and then all the Quest stuff turned into a kind of a side issue, except I couldn't stand to throw it out, and so ... it's unbalanced, yeah. Plus I hate the first-morning-after scene, although I acknowledge that emotionally-ambivalent morning-after are a bitch to write, and so, whatever.
One for the Road: Do we ever provide any kind of an explanation for why Duncan here is so very unlike the Duncan we see in canon, and instead resembles a pouty teenager with a crush? No, we do not, and in retrospect I do so wish I'd done that. People sometimes (with reason) rag on my version of Methos, but the Duncan here is what's really off-key. I needed his drive to connection as a foil to Methos's drive to disconnection, but it's more a device than a thing adequately explained and justified. This criticism also applies to Strata, and if I'd been able to pull that off they would both be much stronger stories.
The Kindest Mortals and Deep End: These are the two weakest stories I've posted (IMO) and they both suffer from my effort to write against my inclinations and do some sort of a Happy Ending. I like the beginnings of both of them, and then they fizzle. (The Kindest Mortals I'm actually rewriting/recasting into the story I originally sort of wanted it to be---all about death and how differently that appears to mortals and immortals. Deep End should be rewritten, with Fraser's grandiosity and his belief that he's achieved happiness cut against in some significant way, but it pretty much has to stand as is...)
So, who's next? *g*