Back When We Were There, You and Me

[lovesrain44]

So, I took the day off from writing. I've been elbows deep in my SGA fanfic, and trying desperately to find a way through it, or over it, or around it. I finally came to the realization that writing a Big Bang for one's first attempt at writing for a fandom is a recipe for....a whole lotta work and not a lot of security. Or fun.


I once recently exchanged words with an SGA fan, who had expressed her reticence to write Rodney McKay, on account of him being so hard. I agreed with her at the time (Rodney is so complex!), but had a lotta confidence in my ability to overcome the problems that his character presents.....and now, I look at my hands on the keyboard and I can't come up with a single reason why I felt that confidence. It's much, much easier to write John, he's sarcastic and funny and secretly very deep and smart, and secretly in love with Rodney...like I was just discussing with bookshop over on LJ, John's prepared to live and die for Rodney, and he loves him to pieces. That's the easy part.

As for Rodney, how on earth do you get inside the head of someone with an ego like that? With smarts like that? With the five-track mind, all solving equally difficult equations at the same time. He's too busy to fall in love with John, so....

But I got to the point where my Big Bang was getting too unwieldy and due to real life events, far too complicated for the time I had available to me to finish in time. Thank goodness the moderators put a little spin on the deadline, otherwise, I would be writing even harder and enjoying it even less. So I determined, on a drive on the way home from work, that I would switch up my usual method and make this a single person POV.

I have done that in the past (worked in a single pov), but when a story is long, I prefer to put two people's pov in there, to make it interesting and romantic. Naturally, the pov that I had the most done with was Rodney's (always start with the hard character first!), so that's what I have to work with. It just makes me want to throw in the towel because I have no idea what to do with him on his own. Does he really think John is that smart? Does he really enjoy sex? What on earth does he do to relax? I discovered quite quickly that I have no idea. And being the type of writer who doesn't write ironic, funny, crack fic (and I really wish I could), it has become terribly important that I know. Except I'm running out of time, and have been carrying this albatross around my neck for months now, and I can't even mention it to anyone because they couldn't possibly understand my panic. 

You have to understand, I love to write, I'd rather be writing than anything else, and any day that I write something, it's a good day. But I'm so lost in this story, so swamped with this unnerving feeling that I have no idea what I'm talking about, it's almost too much.

When I wrote in SPN fandom, I knew where I was, who the characters were, they were easy to grasp and love and write about. SGA is harder. I think I should have waited before trying to write, but I wanted that feeling again, of being INSIDE of a story and a universe, and I had such a good time watching the show and reading the fic and I thought, okay, I can do this.

But it was soon, too soon for that.

When I started this fic, I had been calling it "And Wended Homeward," which was one of the final lines from Jane Eyre, which is one of my altime favorite stories. It's what Jane Eyre talks about as she and Mr. Rochester are in the garden, watching the little French Girl that they've adopted as their own...

"Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand, held it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder: being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. We entered the wood, and wended our way homeward."

But, as the story developed, it turned out to be a little darker than even Jane Eyre. I had a hundred different titles for it, and none of them seemed to fit. As I struggled to make the story work, I longed for the ear of my friend NIk, who passed away some years ago. She was a writer, down to her soul, and she drank a lot, and sobbed into the phone when she would call at 2 in the morning. But...she also had an eye for what worked, and knew how to let me talk the idea until I could come upon a solution. But no Nik, and no solution and no title. Titles are extremely important to me, they encompass the theme of the story and carry a banner that I can see even on my darkest writing days. Finally, some days ago, I hit upon using the title that I thought I would use for an SPN story that never got finished.

In that story, Dean cleans his guns and remembers the time he forgot to pick Sam up from his after-school care, and how, during that time, it began to snow, and Sam almost got frostbite. The story was to be called Lay Me Down So, which had the theme in it (I thought) of how Dean and Sam would care for each other, and as such, lay each other down JUST SO, with care and tenderness and feeling. Alas, the story sprawled out into a field of self-indulgent pap and I couldn't bring myself to work on it. It lingers there still, unused, except for the title.

So, this title will come in handy for this story, I think, as Lay Me Down So has the elements in it of giving care, and of needing care, which, with the darkness that is in this story, both Rodney and John will need.

That's not giving anything away, I think, since until the big reveal, no one will know what kind of bad stuff happens to which character.

One of the things I like to do is google my title to see what will come up. And lo...this did. It seems to encompass John's thoughts, at least, of wanting to care for and about Rodney after all the two of them have been through.