InsaneJournal

A note about process for those who are interested
This section of the fic has been redacted. I've left it here as an out-take.

This part was really REALLY hard to write. Not merely to write, but to come up with. I fooled with it all day Saturday and couldn't make it come right, and I've been at it today for a few hours too. It was difficult to imagine how Buffy and Spike would relate, what they could say to each other. Whereas most of this fic has pretty much pounded itself out, the dialogue and scenes piling up in my head as fast or faster than I could offload them, like planes at JFK lined up for take-off, the last couple of parts have been really challenging, wringing such emotional exhaustion out of the characters--and me, I guess--that I was really at a loss how to move them forward, especially as I was mindful of not wanting to succumb to cliche or the easy immediate choices. (I don't know if I succeeded in avoiding either, but I was trying.)

The subject matter here has gotten really dark--I guess it's been dark from the beginning of the fic, but now it feels to me like it's dovetailing with things going on in the real world in a way that makes me feel kind of solemn and responsible as I work on this. I find myself thinking about the experience of people who go off and have really awful prolonged ordeals--soldiers in Iraq or in any war, for instance, or people who escape unimaginable hardship events like genocides, and then are able to return to the setting and people of their previous life, except that they are so altered by their experience which they perhaps can't really talk about or convey to those who weren't there, that they can't just fit back into things or begin to meet the expectations of those around them, or their own expectations.

And it feels weird to be thinking about these really serious terrible human occurrences, which are more and more prevalent in our contemporary world, in the context of writing fanfic about Buffy the Vampire Slayer for chrissakes, and it generally feels kind of presumptuous to try as a writer in comfortable circumstances to put myself into the headspace of someone who has really suffered and try to tap that for the kind of fiction that's really just supposed to be escapist and porny and satisfactory of various narrative kinks, an entertainment. But it seems that when the writing is really on the boil, things just go where they go, and it would be a disservice to the story, to me as a writer, to you as readers, to pull back on it. I was reading a piece in a recent issue of The New Yorker over breakfast, where the painter John Currin was talking about his recent work, which is of a pornographic nature, somewhat to his own discomfort, and he says "You should never will a change in your work--you have to work an idea to death." This really jumped out at me, not merely in the context of this particular piece of fanfic but in the context of my own ongoing controversy with myself about writing fanfic at all, and it also resonated with some ideas, uncertainties, doubts etc I grapple with about my novel in progress and what it's about, what all my writing has been about, because all my writing life I've dealt with this strong push-back within myself that what I'm drawn to write about isn't what I should write about.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge, while in the midst of it, the complexity of feelings and thoughts that writing Distance is bringing up for me, because these things are very fleeting and forgettable as I barrel along. And this post is fairly incoherent, but there it is.