DVD Commentary: Metamorphose
Jan. 3rd, 2019 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
everysecondtuesdayCross-posted to/from tumblr:
cupidsbower: can't find your ask box (it's clearly my bedtime), but i'd love to know about your writing process on a fic of your choice. ⭐star⭐
Late, because tumblr shenanigans saw this sitting unfinished for a while:
Pretty much no one is probably interested in this, but it’s somewhat timely, as the new Undertale game is out (though I have not played it), and if we were all still on LJ and doing DVD commentary challenges, I’d probably have already written about it: Metamorphose.
I wrote Metamorphose as a Yuletide treat. It was the only year Undertale was a Yuletide eligible fandom, and Yuletide is, sadly, the only time I actually finished any fic for it. Metamorphose was over 10k, and I wrote it in a handful of days, as has happened with some of my favorite stories. Like some of my previous stories, it’s a story about loss, about family, about grief, and about letting go. Unlike, say, Blot Out the Stars, it was easy to write and it was fun. I got the chance to sneak in a lot of the inappropriate humor that I think is an identifying feature of my fic. Chara!Frisk eats sentient beings! Chara!Frisk murders people and only regrets the potential of being caught! Chara!Frisk is a bit of a disaster of a human being and has love, kindness, and affection as their biggest weaknesses. You can see why I’m in Venom fandom just by looking back at my earlier works.
I also got to sneak in meta humor, as is a feature of some of my gaming fic. (See: my latest Knights of the Old Republic fic, Out at the Knees, written for the Multifandom Trope Fest, which just had author reveals recently.) As a story, I think it encapsulates a lot of what I like most about my own favorites among my stories. The plot is an emotional journey. The focus is on the character. It’s written sincerely and is heartfelt, even as there’s tongue in cheek and dark humor and metatextual razzing myself as the author.
It also is the one of the best examples of how I write longer (for me) fic. I have a seed of an idea that spins out into a few anchor points. I’ll write several scenes setting up little touchstones to reach near the beginning, scattered throughout the middle, and near the end. Writing the story is taking a journey where I’m connecting those points, then sliding my way down the rest of the hill that I’ve climbed to reach that last finished touchstone. Sometimes I’ll skip ahead and add more touchstones as I go. Sometimes the road will divert and that touchstone will be cut off, put in another text file to maybe guide another story someday.
The thing that keeps the fic interesting as I’m writing is that I know the general trajectory of the fic, or at least what I think it will look like from the wind-up, but very rarely do I know the exact end as I’ve started unless I’m planning beginning and ending bookends. (See: Distant like a Star, Burning like the Sun, where I knew it would start with Eddie watching the stars with Venom and end with that same action, in different circumstances, happier, more settled, but still together and still rooted in the beginning of their knowing and loving each other.) I may have ideas churning away in the background, hints of which I can see throughout a story, and I’m getting much better at realizing, “Oh, I’ve decided to do [thing],” and recognizing where I took that first step earlier on, but often enough I can surprise myself at least a little with twists and turns I take along the way, and sometimes with the climactic action. Sometimes I know the general story I’m telling, but not quite what the story is about, what it revolves around. Sometimes this results in quite a bit of editing after the fact, but I find it a rewarding way to write a story and actually finish it, rather than just tell myself the story in my head and leave the story on the page/in the text doc only half-finished.
Anyway, all this rambling about my general approach to longer fic brings us back to Metamorphose, where I knew some of what I was doing, but not all, and it was a blast. Prosodiical asked for “exploring a previously almost genocide route Frisk/Chara” and skeleton dates, which was the seed of the idea. My love of game mechanics, meta, and playing with both brought in the idea of “but what if Chara, Frisk, and the player were all the same person?” That and, well, the temptation to take “Frisk/Chara” as a literal “this thing is the same thing” rather an either/or.
The first touchstones were a couple parts of the Sans fights at the beginning, a Flowey scene (I honestly can’t remember if it was “My name is Frisk” or Toriel setting Flowey on fire), the knowledge (unwritten) that I was going to write about the helpful hint frog and Chara was going to steal and eat all the candy, plus the actually written “You murdered Papyrus,” “Some monsters told you a story,” “Sans was proud of you," “Let’s see how forgiving you are when your brother’s one of the dead,” and “You couldn’t kill the dogs.”
That gave me a general shape of the story, plus a few more tiny scene ideas, some of which were incorporated (Chara!Frisk eating the buttercups, knowing *full well* what would happen, sparing Burgerpants but not out of any sense of mercy) and some where were not (Chara!Frisk never went to the Temmie village).
Having take a break from writing this mini DVD commentary, I forget exactly where I was going with this (tumblr ate part of it, because I foolishly did not save my draft, then I set it down for all of December), but the general point is that this is still my general writing process for most of my fic over 5k. Strozzzi could testify, as I've been sending her fic snippets in another fandom, and several times the message, "I have reached my anchor point. \o/" Other people may be more methodical (and I make myself be a little more so when it's not fandom), but this is the process that works for me.
Thanks for the excuse to ramble about an older fic, cupidsbow!
cupidsbower: can't find your ask box (it's clearly my bedtime), but i'd love to know about your writing process on a fic of your choice. ⭐star⭐
Late, because tumblr shenanigans saw this sitting unfinished for a while:
Pretty much no one is probably interested in this, but it’s somewhat timely, as the new Undertale game is out (though I have not played it), and if we were all still on LJ and doing DVD commentary challenges, I’d probably have already written about it: Metamorphose.
I wrote Metamorphose as a Yuletide treat. It was the only year Undertale was a Yuletide eligible fandom, and Yuletide is, sadly, the only time I actually finished any fic for it. Metamorphose was over 10k, and I wrote it in a handful of days, as has happened with some of my favorite stories. Like some of my previous stories, it’s a story about loss, about family, about grief, and about letting go. Unlike, say, Blot Out the Stars, it was easy to write and it was fun. I got the chance to sneak in a lot of the inappropriate humor that I think is an identifying feature of my fic. Chara!Frisk eats sentient beings! Chara!Frisk murders people and only regrets the potential of being caught! Chara!Frisk is a bit of a disaster of a human being and has love, kindness, and affection as their biggest weaknesses. You can see why I’m in Venom fandom just by looking back at my earlier works.
I also got to sneak in meta humor, as is a feature of some of my gaming fic. (See: my latest Knights of the Old Republic fic, Out at the Knees, written for the Multifandom Trope Fest, which just had author reveals recently.) As a story, I think it encapsulates a lot of what I like most about my own favorites among my stories. The plot is an emotional journey. The focus is on the character. It’s written sincerely and is heartfelt, even as there’s tongue in cheek and dark humor and metatextual razzing myself as the author.
It also is the one of the best examples of how I write longer (for me) fic. I have a seed of an idea that spins out into a few anchor points. I’ll write several scenes setting up little touchstones to reach near the beginning, scattered throughout the middle, and near the end. Writing the story is taking a journey where I’m connecting those points, then sliding my way down the rest of the hill that I’ve climbed to reach that last finished touchstone. Sometimes I’ll skip ahead and add more touchstones as I go. Sometimes the road will divert and that touchstone will be cut off, put in another text file to maybe guide another story someday.
The thing that keeps the fic interesting as I’m writing is that I know the general trajectory of the fic, or at least what I think it will look like from the wind-up, but very rarely do I know the exact end as I’ve started unless I’m planning beginning and ending bookends. (See: Distant like a Star, Burning like the Sun, where I knew it would start with Eddie watching the stars with Venom and end with that same action, in different circumstances, happier, more settled, but still together and still rooted in the beginning of their knowing and loving each other.) I may have ideas churning away in the background, hints of which I can see throughout a story, and I’m getting much better at realizing, “Oh, I’ve decided to do [thing],” and recognizing where I took that first step earlier on, but often enough I can surprise myself at least a little with twists and turns I take along the way, and sometimes with the climactic action. Sometimes I know the general story I’m telling, but not quite what the story is about, what it revolves around. Sometimes this results in quite a bit of editing after the fact, but I find it a rewarding way to write a story and actually finish it, rather than just tell myself the story in my head and leave the story on the page/in the text doc only half-finished.
Anyway, all this rambling about my general approach to longer fic brings us back to Metamorphose, where I knew some of what I was doing, but not all, and it was a blast. Prosodiical asked for “exploring a previously almost genocide route Frisk/Chara” and skeleton dates, which was the seed of the idea. My love of game mechanics, meta, and playing with both brought in the idea of “but what if Chara, Frisk, and the player were all the same person?” That and, well, the temptation to take “Frisk/Chara” as a literal “this thing is the same thing” rather an either/or.
The first touchstones were a couple parts of the Sans fights at the beginning, a Flowey scene (I honestly can’t remember if it was “My name is Frisk” or Toriel setting Flowey on fire), the knowledge (unwritten) that I was going to write about the helpful hint frog and Chara was going to steal and eat all the candy, plus the actually written “You murdered Papyrus,” “Some monsters told you a story,” “Sans was proud of you," “Let’s see how forgiving you are when your brother’s one of the dead,” and “You couldn’t kill the dogs.”
That gave me a general shape of the story, plus a few more tiny scene ideas, some of which were incorporated (Chara!Frisk eating the buttercups, knowing *full well* what would happen, sparing Burgerpants but not out of any sense of mercy) and some where were not (Chara!Frisk never went to the Temmie village).
Having take a break from writing this mini DVD commentary, I forget exactly where I was going with this (tumblr ate part of it, because I foolishly did not save my draft, then I set it down for all of December), but the general point is that this is still my general writing process for most of my fic over 5k. Strozzzi could testify, as I've been sending her fic snippets in another fandom, and several times the message, "I have reached my anchor point. \o/" Other people may be more methodical (and I make myself be a little more so when it's not fandom), but this is the process that works for me.
Thanks for the excuse to ramble about an older fic, cupidsbow!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-04 03:56 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed your discussion of your own method here. Especially this: "The thing that keeps the fic interesting as I’m writing is that I know the general trajectory of the fic, or at least what I think it will look like from the wind-up, but very rarely do I know the exact end as I’ve started unless I’m planning beginning and ending bookends."
My process is similar. I kind of know the shape, and what the scenes need to do, but I don't invent the details until I get to writing them. There are always those moments of joyful discovery as the scenes unfold. I don't use the touchstones as much as you do though. For me it's "beats", and they are usually where the story turns, but that could just be a different way of saying the same thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-04 11:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-05 01:16 am (UTC)Oh, I had a question! In your funny stories, do you find the humour beats match up to your touchstones? Or is the humour more incidental and not so much part of the structure of the story?