~~ obligatory first `reena rants & angsts about her fic' post

[reenka]

*starts to gnaw on own bones*

i read amanuensis1's post about the common use of "contrivance" to write harry/snape fics, and am now wibbling like a madwoman.

the writing angst just doesn't stop. just. doesn't stop. maybe i should start numbering the days. i don't know, i think it's about two weeks? it's around day 18 of "reena goes insane and decides to write longfic seriously for once". i may not come out alive.


wah. every day is a new reason why my fic sucks ass. why is that? why god, why? it's like this. when i'm done, it's going to be like, 10 chapters and maybe 100 pages. that is very intimidating. i can't even -imagine- what i'll say about it. it'll be like: um. this took awhile. it was also hard. ahem. please say something about how it was worth it. i'll give you ...my souuuuul. well. something like that.

first of all, i hate contrivance fics, too. and yet, the reason that i'm writing this is a plot-bunny, amazingly enough. in a way, plot itself is a contrivance. i want harry & draco to get together in the most insanely realistic way possible, and if you really go there you'd need to work around jkr's plot (which is also full of contrivances), and what -is- a contrivance, anyway? my god. it boggles the mind.

i'm continuously thinking, "oh god, this is a cliche, isn't. oh godohgodohgodohgod", and it's just that it -fits- and it makes things smoother, that's why i wrote it of course, but no, it's too predicable, too easy. romance -coupled- with adventure is the devil's own genre. why did i not realize this before? how do people get together aside from sex? it's like, all coincidence, isn't it?!?! gah!!

the demands of a plotted story are so different. it's really a process of discovery, realizing that once you start, you have things sort of -emerge- as consequences, and you realize -this- bit needs filling out and -that- bit needs to be cut and -this- bit needs to move down/up. suddenly it's taken on a life of its own for probably the first time of anything i've written, and the idea that it's all -bad- just kills me. because well, it's been done before, hasn't it. well, not -exactly this way-, but still. the thing is, i didn't write this to get harry & draco together, it's just that they're my favorite characters and of course they're always having to interact and hey, sexual tension is fun.
    basically, it's about harry and about draco, and not really about their love. but i can see how people would say that, because well, they do kind of have a thing for one another, it's just that if i'm writing a romance, it seems to be that plot would be an interruption and a contrivance, exactly. so really, it's best to write for the plot, if you're writing the plot. the whole -idea- of contrivance is that you don't really -mean- it about the plot, it's just there to... what? get your characters to shag? get them to like each other? well, what if it's there 'cause you want it there? but who would even -know- what the authorial intent is either way, and does it matter?

all right, i feel better now. i do care about the cute little things i'm saying about canon, and if people see that as contrivance for the one kiss harry & draco eventually have, well, i guess i didn't say them well enough, but at least i'd tried.
    it seems like a plotted fic where i am writing canon-based events is intrinsically different from my previous fics which mostly just used the hp characters' personalities to get them to talk or snark or act silly or fuck or think or feel bad. i don't tend to go beyond that, because it's fun to get certain reactions from characters. but to write a -plotted fic- just to get those reactions (that is to say, a snog or a fuck) seems like a waste of space to me. i've never actually been able to write The H/D of my Dreams before because i can't seem to write a whole mess of justifications just to get to some endpoint like "and then they lived happily ever after". i mean, i want to, but it seems like those are two different sorts of story. there's "characters act out X scenario" stories and then there are "X happens to characters, therefore they act in X manner" stories. the difference is the focus.

in a more plotty story, suddenly you are concerned with a time-line (which i'm usually not in a character sketch or situational comedy or smutfic or whatever). you aren't just thinking of a semi-static sense of "in-characterness", you're thinking of the -causes- for the characters reactions, and you're placing these causes in a temporal context, which means that just as in real life, the nature of what's "in-character" has to change within the time-span of the fic at least somewhat, for it to be even believable. events happen, people react to those events, new aspects of their personalities emerge. this isn't contrivance so much as inevitability.

i suppose what people are thinking is that "well, these characters would never act in X way, therefore the story's conceit of making them do so is a contrivance meant to achieve X result". but really, the point isn't for the characters together together, i think that's what i'm discovering. you can easily have an h/d or h/s story where they interact and have emotional/sexual tension and there is resolution other than "they break up, angst angst angst" or "they're together at the end, sexsexsex". because what we're dealing with are two characters within a larger canon and implied larger storylines. i realize that almost everyone and their brother attempts to get harry & love-interest to defeat voldemort together (if it's a "serious story" with canon-based aspirations), but that's really not necessary, i think.

what i'm doing is writing a story about two characters who will continue to have a relationship within the canon timeline (though obviously it will be made even more AU by the release of the 6th book). what i'm saying is, you can expect these characters to continue having some sort of association in the canon beyond the time-span of your story thus there is no need to tie up all loose ends or even speak the final word on their `relationship' of whatever sort, since they'll just keep having one anyway. unless, of course, you've set it post-hogwarts or at the end of 7th year. that's why i don't like writing those `at the end' or afterwards stories: you no longer have any lee-way. this is it. you have to basically do jkr's job except you're trying to complicate it by having it be a romance between characters who aren't attracted to each other, probably to each other's gender in general, and in fact can't stand each other. it's daunting. contrivances seem... a way out, i suppose.

another thing that's been giving me trouble is the concept of "this is how harry & draco should act post-ootp". their dynamic has shifted, and of course one has to address it. i wrote the initial plot-bunnies before the book, so now everything keeps shifting and reconfiguring and recombining, and this is how i've realized that my whole method of writing is different. i try -fit- my story to the (canon) timeline character development instead of just my idea of the static nature of the character whereas before i avoided messing with it because it seems like to write a believable timeline story you'd need to make it much longer than i'm comfortable with. timeline-based canonicity seems to require length.
    and of course the length and the idea of having to express what i feel about h/d in general and the needs of their particular characters is daunting. this might be where the fear of contrivance comes in-- you want to get to saying what you want, but you cheat because it's extremely difficult to get the desired result. like in math, you take certain things for granted because if you took nothing for granted, you'd sit there forever, arguing about the nature of reality itself. hehehee, which is what i do, of course.
    it's never the "right time" to explain the nature of love in a direct, concise, and believable way that doesn't suck.

in my own fic, initially i just threw things together without bothering to check if it fit some grand scheme of things. this is how i usually write: unconsciously, just picking ingredients based on some equivalent of taste and smell and whimsy. "seems good! throw it in!". i am now forced to do -this- but not -that- all the time: the story has its own demands based on its logical structure. and anything past a certain length seems to acquire its own logic somehow.

suddenly, instead of dancing all across the board like a madwoman, i am having to get from point A to point B in some sort of realistic manner. the characters (being harry & draco mainly) resist and don't -want- to do certain things (once you decide the plot wants them to), and they are hellish when uncooperative. some people say that harry & draco (or harry & snape or ron & draco) don't want to be together at -all-, and i can see that. but i don't think it's the whole truth. i think it's all about how you see it as the writer. i think you can write anything if you are capable of imagining it in enough detail, if your personal vision of the characters' dynamic is sweeping enough and has enough depth. basically, i think if you're a good writer, if you know the characters, if you're aware of the continuity and the timelines, then you can overlay your belief onto this matrix naturally, because that's just what writers do.

in a lot of h/d fics, certain hard-to-handle character traits become atrophied-- draco is nice for no discernable reason, harry is patient as a saint, draco has -always- had a crush, harry and draco aren't sniping at each other anymore with no good explanation (or even -with- an explanation), etc. this is usually a fault of the writer's lack of imagination and scope, as far as i can tell. if you can't write canonish!harry and canonish!draco getting together (or canonish!snape and canonish!squid for that matter), you basically shouldn't write it because that particular dynamic is not something you understand. and yes, it's possible that you're stupid and don't understand humans at -all-, but then, you can at least write about your confusion if you nurtured a habit of honesty (which is obviously too much to ask from most people, i know). and while it's not necessary to always write what you understand-- you can grow to understand things-- most people's writing seems to be a process of telling the reader what you already think you know rather than discovering (along with the reader) the things you know you don't know.

i think the whole idea of "contrivance" and the philosophy of writing therefore implied kind of says they all miss the point as i see it. because as a writer, you may have certain issues/characters/situations you're interested in, but it seems much more productive to explore them through your writing rather than force them into being something you secretly -know- they're not. if you're consciously using a plot-device to get a result, then you're saying your result is more important than the writing process and the -story- you wrote to achieve it, which is just not something i can agree with as a practice or, more importantly, an implied philosophy.
    in my own fic, even though i have a -plot- and a character-development arc in mind, i have no -point-. this is merely yet another step in their development as human beings. it's not like they've graduated from the school of life with all O's or anything.

that's what jkr is doing with her seven books: attempting to show the progression of at least one person through their formative years and just some of all the changes and challenges and side-tours involved, while keeping her focus on a rather involved overall plot. i am assuming most people outside of cassie claire aren't doing that. so all we can do is explore certain aspects, see where we can go with these characters-- but without the supposition that we'll end up anywhere static, because life doesn't work like that.

this idea of "contrivance" seems to imply this focus on end-goal, like a "happily ever after", which is just painfully naive. i can see how every story needs a climax, somewhere it ends up at. but if we think about our own versions of the -characters- outside the story (and hopefully we -can- do that), we can see that they don't really -end up- there-- it's just part of the journey. and yes, this whole philosophical clap-trap -does- have an intimate relationship to writing, as far as i can see, because if you -don't- have an idea of what you think of life in general and your characters in general, then what you're doing is a flat little exercise in meaninglessness and futility and the thought i'm left with at the end would be "so what", no matter -who's- together now harry & snape or harry & ginny or dumbledore & his hat.

so even if in the end, my story will look like those stories, i suppose i've decided it doesn't matter, since the process and the philosophy behind it has been quite different as far as i can tell. i've always -wanted- to write a "how they got together" story, and i've failed spectacularly so far. it's so... huge of an undertaking, so deeply connected to my ideas as to how life and love could/should work, that it just kills me. and only this background meaning can truly motivate me, because otherwise all i have is a bunch of mechanistic movement. it's like i'd be playing god with toy soldiers, and that is simply not why i write.

Comments

[starflowers.livejournal.com]

I do that too. Get all frustrated and then rant to someone and while I'm bitching about all my writing problems, I come up with the perfect, genius solution. Sometimes. Like, they'll ask a question about whatever I've just ranted about, and in my answer, there will be the perfect, genius idea that I'd never even realized before. it's always good.

But I do wanna read your story, so as soon as you are done... SEND it! hehe.