I mean, I didn't write it consistently for thirteen years. And without my friend and co-star, Linda, to bounce ideas off of, this probably never would have gotten this far.
When my friend and I started writing this, the point was mostly for us to live vicariously through our fictional versions of ourselves, and have the lives we really wanted to live, in the Star Wars galaxy. It was maybe more roleplay than a strict story, so I really didn't do any time-jumps at all.
The whole real point of the story is that my character ("fic Jess," "fic me") and Obi-Wan eventually fall in love. (Otherwise it wouldn't really be wish-fulfillment, would it?) It seemed to me, then, that every interaction they had needed to be catalogued and couldn't be skipped, because every single interaction was going to build on the last one.
The results of that make me think of this saying. Maybe you've heard it:
"To future generations: I meant well."
It's just TOO. MUCH. So much.
Things I learned:
I am really bad at scene transitions.
Oh my god. For the longest time I felt like I had to describe how people entered and exited every scene and every physical area, when they went to bed, when they woke up, when they ate.
Only near the end of writing this thing do I think I finally got the hang of it. I had to learn how to let a line just sit there at the end because it was the most relevant. I had to learn how to cut away right when things were getting good. I had to learn to start a scene after something relevant had already happened, and make you wonder exactly how it went...
I'm bad at keeping things tight.
Oh god, am I bad. I think I over-outline or something. My outlines make sense to me, but then when I start writing, I come up against these scenes that seem like they need transitions between them, and suddenly one scene turns into four, or six. Which makes sense, because...
I'm really bad at over-describing everything.
I can't tell you how many times my outline said: Summary here, then scene.
And as I began to write, pretty soon the summary became a scene. And then my story was just scene after scene after scene, described in detail. Totally exhausting to read. Does nothing but up the word count. And yet, so hard to stop.
As I said, I first approached this like roleplaying, so in a way it makes sense that I don't want to skip past any of the action. By default, I want to describe every single scene. But it gets tedious to write, and to read. And it sucks because I understand why you're not supposed to do that, yet I still have trouble stopping.
If you have nothing but scenes backed up against scenes, how do you know when something really important is happening?
You don't.
You don't know when to pay attention, you don't notice when something important is happening that you're gonna need to remember later. You just know that the moment where the romantic leads kiss is apparently just as important as the gross food they ate for breakfast on the third day of their trip. Since you described them both in the same amount of detail.
I'm really bad at making the characters re-hash the same old shit over and over again.
Because the story went on so long, and it will screw up my plot if, for instance, the romantic leads get together this soon, things mostly went like this: Romantic leads flirt, start to get close, get really close, and then one of the leads backs off.
And then it happens again. And then the lead begins to realize he has feelings... and then he can't, so he convinces himself he doesn't. And then he can't think about it at all or else it screws up the plot. So he spins his wheels, sort of thinking about it but telling himself it's wrong or that that isn't really what he's feeling.
And around and around we go.
Realistic? Sure. Interesting to read? Probably not.
If it wasn't necessary for feelings to be realized later in the story, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem. But since I'm kind of writing with the canon as my outline, and I know when I want certain things to happen, I have to push back realizations and moments of admitting feelings until way, way later. While still wanting my characters to interact with each other, of course. Because I like having them together.
It is a nightmare and I don't know how to fix it without plopping on a ton of plot so they don't have time to think about their feelings.
But then I'd have to come up with more plot...
I'm really bad at thinking up plot and working it in.
Good at character interactions. Not great at plot.
I actually like my plot. I think it's kind of cool. The trouble is when should I throw it in, and how much should I say? How much needs to be said for people to be able to follow where it's all heading? How much needs to be revealed, and how often? What if I reveal too much?
And where is it all leading? Where and how will the plot end?
I don't have trouble thinking up ideas, actually. I have trouble paring them down. Deciding on one idea for the plot and sticking with it. Inserting it in throughout the story rather in an info-dump. Making the whole thing cohesive.
I had to learn not to show all my cards at once. Or maybe not ever.
One of the epiphanies I had while writing this thing was the day it occurred to me that the characters should all have secrets that they kept from each other.
And the next epiphany I had was that maybe some of those secrets would never be revealed.
And the next epiphany was that probably there were secrets that characters even kept from themselves, or rather there were topics that they consciously chose not to think about for various reasons.
I thought my writing improved a lot once I figured this out. But who knows...
Keeping a consistent writing style and story tone is really damn hard.
Is it drama? Is it corny? Is it realistic? Is it funny? Don't ask me 'cause apparently I don't fucking know.
Especially because this is fan fiction based on Star Wars, I think about this a lot. Do I write it in the style of Star Wars, or do I write it like it's really happening? Because there's a big difference there. People bounce back from huge issues really quick in Star Wars. You could make a whole movie about Luke dealing with the death of his aunt and uncle, but he gets over it in like one scene in Star Wars.
I think I flip-flopped on this quite a bit in the story. For the most part, though, I tried to go for a tone of: It's Star Wars, but it's also real life. So hopefully it's somewhere in between, occasionally silly, with time taken out to deal with emotional trauma the way you would in the real world.
I bounce ideas off my boyfriend a lot. He thinks going for realism automatically makes it NOT Star Wars. I think there's a lot of wiggle room. I don't know which of us is right. Maybe neither of us.
I had to learn that bullshit ages worse than truth (and purple prose is a foul temptress).
Since I've been writing this thing for thirteen years (or five years, depending on when you really count from), and since I have a bad habit of re-reading my own writing a lot, it started to become clear that when I wrote things just because they sounded good, they were really cringe-worthy to re-read. But if I wrote things from the heart and really meant it, even if it wasn't written in a "pretty" way, it aged better. And it sat better with me when I re-read it. It wasn't embarrassing, because it wasn't bullshit.
Bullshit is bad. And I can always spot my own bullshit when I see it again, and it's the worst. Never bullshit. Or if you have to, find some real, genuine thing to hang the bullshit on, so it's less bullshitty. Otherwise you'll really regret re-reading it later on.
I honestly think, in a way, this was the most important thing I learned. I love good prose, I love things that are just really well-described, that use language well. But I get so bogged down in that stuff. If I have one major flaw as a writer I think probably that's it.
My problem is I am capable of writing in a lot of styles, and they don't all come easily to me. My favorite styles are very hard, and exhausting, and I can't always "access" them, if that makes sense. My favorite writing style is basically very formal and "fancy," for lack of a better term. When I can do it well, that's when I'm usually really proud. (Although sometimes the bullshit factor destroys it when I re-read it later.)
But I also have a writing style that I can always access. It's kind of how I'm writing this blog post. It's my real, personal voice, about as clear and non-bullshitty as I can possibly be. But to me it looks very bland. Too casual, too personal.
I have a feeling, though, that because it's so easy to do, that means that's the way I should be writing. It's just a little bit disappointing, because I am capable of more. I'm just not capable of being consistent or fast when I write in that other style.
How this madness began:
So around 2002, either right after or right before Attack of the Clones came out, I became friends with this gal Linda because were both part of a Star Wars fan club and both lined up for the movie.
Sometime after The Phantom Menace, I'd read a self-insert Star Wars fanfic someone else wrote, which I think was called "Strangers in a Strange World." It was about a Star Wars fan who woke up in the Star Wars galaxy sometime before the events of The Phantom Menace, was discovered to be Force sensitive, was allowed to train as a Jedi, and then fell in love with Qui-Gon Jinn. At least, that's how I remembered it.
I'd told Linda about this, and suggested that we should write ourselves into the story the same way, as a way to pass the time while waiting for Episode 3 to come out.
Yes, that means my fanfic is a self-insert Star Wars fanfic of a self-insert Star Wars fanfic.
I was like 18 at the time this started. Linda was 20. I liked Obi-Wan, she liked Anakin. And Linda is awesome, so she thought all this was a great idea.
I wrote the very first chapter ever, which is no longer in the story. We were going to do a round robin thing, but at the time I was really unsure of my own writing, so eventually Linda took it over and wrote everything up to a point. All of what we wrote took place before Attack of the Clones, but we'd always planned to take the story through AOTC and eventually Episode 3, and slightly beyond.
At some point, we abandoned the story. We didn't have the time or the interest to work on it, I guess. And for a long time me and Linda didn't really even talk, since that was the main thing we ever talked about.
Sometime in 2010, I'd been watching the Clone Wars a lot, I think, and I was hot off the tails of Russell T Davies' run on Doctor Who, which would have just ended, I think. In fact, around that time I read Davies' book "The Writer's Tale," which goes deep into his writing process while doing that show. I feel like I learned a ton from that book. Great read.
Anyway, all this made me think of the old story. I still had the word documents, so I started to go through it and I realized I could write so much of this so much better than I had before. I started to re-work a lot of what was there, but one thing lead to another and I ended up changing a lot, and re-writing literally everything.
A few of Linda's contributions remained: A planet called Njuban, ruled by a guy named Sir Keiji, where Linda and I would prove ourselves (and our Force abilities) in a battle. And almost die, so our Jedi men could take care of us. Then there was a celebration/medal ceremony, and romantic dancing. And the finale was meant to be soon after that.
Except, it wasn't, because I can't write anything short. That is now just the turning point of the story, and sits somewhere in the middle of almost 185,000 words. And this is just Episode I of what I plan to have be at least a trilogy.
May the Force have mercy on my idiot soul.
