IWSG - March 2

    

    OMG, I totally forgot to pre-write this month's post! :O

    Fortunately, I actually have an answer to the monthly question (which is good, 'cause I don't have much to talk about on my own initiative aside from the usual complaining).

March 2 question - Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?

    Yup, I have definitely been conflicted about writing individual scenes of a story.  Not sure if I've ever been conflicted about a whole story, but individual scenes, for sure.

    Typically, these scenes involve things I don't want to have happen in a story--character deaths, mostly--and the only thing to do is just to force my way through it.

    Sometimes I've found it's indicative of something bigger than just "don't make me kill my darlings!"  Like, the first time I wrote a Velvet Goldmine fanfic, the story as I had planned it out involved Curt showing up drunk to Arthur's apartment (don't worry about who the characters are; I just thought it would be easier than "character A" and "character B" in telling the story here), and they get in an argument, and Curt calls Arthur something particularly offensive.  Just a basic insult, really, and one that Curt used several times in the movie, but it's a word that just bothers me for some reason, which I have only personally used like twice in my life, both times to exceptionally awful strangers who could not hear me.  I had a huge amount of trouble writing that scene and made it upset Arthur terribly (too much, in fact), and spent hours looking at the IMDB pages for the actors as a way of putting it off.  I did eventually write it, but it was rather agonizing to do so.  The ironic part of all this is that one of the first things I did in the second draft was to cut that scene, because it should never have been there in the first place, because things should have gone differently in an earlier scene, thus preventing that one from going that way at all.  (Curt still showed up drunk at Arthur's apartment in the second draft, but there was no fight, because they'd already had a sober mini-argument on the subject, which was 95% a misunderstanding in the first place.)

    Because of that, I've started to interpret my own personal conflicted feelings about a scene as my subconscious telling my conscious mind that there's a better way.  The project I had been working on for a game jam this February had a similar situation:  there was a pretty ordinary-seeming sequence that I had put in the chapter I was working on, and every time I started trying to write it, I just couldn't motivate myself to write it, to the extent that it was clearly that I just plan didn't want to write it.  The situation was this:  a young warrior was serving in the palace guards, and his boyfriend kind of accidentally ended up in a relationship with the king's eldest daughter, and when she found out her boyfriend was much more in love with another man than he was with her, she decided to get the other man killed, and after an attempt to kill him with booby-traps in the forest (it almost made sense in context), she decided to hire some mercenaries to pretend they were invading the kingdom, and then made sure he was put in charge of the troops sent out to drive them off, so that they could kill him.  The basic situation--young man leads a small force to deal with invaders--is something I've written before, and while I'm not good at nor particularly enjoy writing combat scenes, there was nothing about it that should have been causing me so much anxiety to write.  Given that, I decided to step back and analyze the situation, figure out why it was bothering me so much, and if that was an indicator that maybe I just shouldn't include the scene.

    As a result of that, I realized that yeah, there was something deeply wrong with the scenario.  Several things, in fact.  In many other times and places, a princess hiring a band of mercenaries just to off her romantic rival would work fine, maybe even seem normal (in a particularly twisted way).  But this story was set in Late Bronze Age Greece (because it's me writing it, lol), so there are two major things standing in the way of a princess hiring mercenaries.  First, money hasn't been invented yet, so how is she paying them?  Second, her culture's writing is quite honestly one of the most awkward and unwieldy systems of writing ever developed by mankind (not only are the letters too complex and sometimes hard to tell apart from each other, they also don't fit the Greek language very well), and thus was only used by highly trained scribes, and was frankly not well-suited for sending clandestine instructions regarding things like the intended targets of assassinations.  (Though if the tale of Bellerophon is as old as its telling in the Iliad suggests, then that writing system might well have been used for it anyway, but...uh, actually, yeah, I guarantee it was, even if Homer invented that wrinkle in Bellerophon's story.  Humans are terrible creatures who will always find a way to use anything to cause death and destruction.)    Oh, actually, a third--if slightly less convincing--problem with it was that this princess (and heir to the throne!) was completely okay with having large numbers of her subjects killed just to get rid of one man.  Not necessarily something that a king of that time period--or any other, unfortunately--would bat an eye at, but a teenage girl probably should have had at least some hesitance to do something that callous. Anyway, due to my analysis of the situation I decided to cut that scenario, and only have her make two attempts to kill him in that chapter, instead of three.

    And then, wouldn't you know it, I also took a further step back and realized that the whole script was total garbage and that no one would want to play the game (especially since I was making the graphics myself by tracing over photos of ancient frescoes and then trying somehow to tweak them to make them do what I wanted) that resulted, so I cancelled the whole project. 😅

    So, yeah, long story short, I've come to see my own conflicted feelings as being a reason to re-analyze what I'm trying to write and see if maybe I shouldn't be writing it.

    Sometimes I feel conflicted for different reasons, though.  I ended up still joining that game jam (which was actually about mentally unstable characters who frequently employ violence because of their romantic feelings) with a different, much simpler game.  Simpler, but much more risque, to the point where I felt super-conflicted about releasing it, because it was so unlike me to write something like that, and I worried about how people would react to the content in it.  (Though, really, it's tame compared to pretty much everything else in its genre...)  I spent like two days fretting about releasing it, and then a further two days fretting after releasing it, and when I finally got the nerve up to go to look and see what the reaction to it was, it's been getting way more hits and downloads than anything else I've ever released.  (Like, it's been up for four days and has almost surpassed the number of downloads of the big game I released last August, which is still my most popular title, having more than double the number of the next most popular.)  So, in that case, my conflicted feelings were just nerves, and I'm glad I didn't assume them to be "I shouldn't be doing this, throw it all away!"

    Hmmm....

    I feel like I have spent this whole post driveling nonsense.

    But I'm not sure if I can see a way to bring it all around to make sense.

    Honestly, my brain's still not recovered from the whole should-I-shouldn't-I about releasing the game, not to mention the freaking out after having released it.

    *shrug*

    Anyway, I'm planning on getting back to working on an actual novel soon.  I just have to finish writing a fairy tale first, but then I'm going to finally do the next draft of one of my YAish novels. :D