some fic and some meta
First, the fic: I've posted my fic for the the_ouroboros Snape/Draco ficathon here: Shelter From The Storm (no, geoviki, it is not a songfic, dammit). Hard R or possibly light NC17, about 4500 words.

Now some meta about the fic, because as you all know I love to ramble on about my writing. As I've said earlier, I scrapped the first two attempts at a story for this ficathon before settling on this one. The first attempt at a story, which didn't get over a few paragraphs, started with Lucius in Azkaban the summer after OotP, and Draco scheming to get Snape to help release his father. The second attempt, which I may yet finish, began with Draco a few weeks before his legal majority, made a ward of the Ministry (and the Weasleys) after his parents received the Dementor's Kiss; it was sort of a Snape-rescues-Harry-from-the-Dursleys story, except with Draco and the Weasleys. After reading Storm you may notice how some of the ideas from these two attempts made it into the third, final story, even though plotwise each is entirely different.

Each time I started, I had a vague idea that I pushed and pushed at, but it just didn't want to go anywhere. The third story began the same way - but then it started to work. What happens for me, I think, is that the story must take over; and when it does, I know it's going to be successful (in the sense of 'I'm going to finish writing it, and I'm going to be happy with it' - not in the sense of it being popular). It no longer becomes a matter of figuring out what comes next; the story itself tells me what comes next, and I just need to write it down. It was at this point that "that goddamn S/D story I committed to writing" became something I loved and cared about. And I have to say that I am extremely pleased with this one!

A couple of people have sent me feedback recently (and one of my betas made this comment on Storm) that one of the hallmarks of my writing is the multistranded plot which comes together neatly and completely. I think that what happens is that in the first phase of the fic I lay out ideas and elements; I set the scene, stick the characters in, give them some conflicts to deal with. And as I've said before, I always have an idea about where things are going to end up, in general, before I start writing.

When the story gels, the middle is revealed to me - how I take the elements from the beginning and braid them so that I get to the end. These are things I don't know until I get there (I'm a strictly linear writer) but if the story's working, I see where it's going, and don't need to force a thing. Themes start appearing, that I then consciously write into the rest of the story. Sometimes I'll see where I need to back up and introduce elements in the beginning. I suppose that I probably occasionally see where I need to delete extraneous elements, but I can't think of any such cases offhand - I tend to be such a spare writer that I edit by addition far more than by subtraction. Conversely, if the story doesn't gel, I am left staring at the beginning, trying to figure out where things go (or how to get to where I intend them to go), stymied.


An example here is the weather imagery, and the title. My original working title was "The Traitor and the Spy". But when I got to the sex scene and stuck myself in Draco's head, trying to see what it was that he felt about Snape, the issues of security and shelter came up (which you can see go back to my earlier aborted stories), and combined with the way I'd written the beginning it suggested both a title and the continuing 'storm' metaphor. But the rainy beginning of the story was just how I viewed the events - not written with any metaphor in mind at all.

A more plot-based example is the detail of the things on the table in the cottage. Snape needed to have a wand, to perform Legilimens; when I realized that, I backed up and put a description of the table a bit earlier, so that it didn't just show up out of nowhere when he went to get his spare wand. Of course, Draco doesn't know that's what he's doing, so I had him apparently toying with the various items there, which just came out of my head...but then I wanted to reach back and use one to tie the rest of the story together, and hey, there's a bowl, I'll use that. And as I was thinking about Draco finding the broken bowl, the details of the ending showed up in my brain as if by, um, magic. That is, I knew I wanted to end with Draco somehow being recruited to the other side, but I had no idea how that was going to happen until I got there.


Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the details actually end up driving the story. In a way, I think, it's like randomly tossing a few blobs of paint at a canvas, and then connecting them all into a picture. If I can't make the blobs form a picture at all, the whole thing doesn't work and can't be finished. But if I squint just right, and can see what the picture needs to be, I can artistically daub more paint of the precise color in the exact places that will make the whole thing look as though it had been planned from the very beginning.