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[stakebait]

A short Spike/Angel snippet. Early ATS season 5. Self-rated PG. Mutant Enemy characters, not mine.

"You just have to tell them how you feel, that's all."

Spike likes Fred, he really does, and not just because she's skinny and half-crazy, or because he's grateful to have a body that can grip a shot glass and crush a lime to sticky pulp in his hand. He reminded himself of this so that he wouldn't ram a plastic stirrer up her left nostril to see if he could mix the smart back in.

"Test that hypothesis, did you, pet?" he said instead, and poured another round without dripping a drop on the stainless steel gurney that served them for a bar.

She slammed it back like a pro and only spoiled it a little with a tiny cough and widened eyes. "Yeah."

"How'd that go for you?" Spike asked.

"It wasn't a statistically significant sample," she enunciated with exaggerated dignity. "Gimme the salt."

Spike left it where it was, just out of reach. "Admit it, talking never goes well."

"You evil salt hoarding fiend," Fred accused.

Spike quirked an eyebrow. "I need it to spice up my bloody boring unlife."

Fred squinted, trying to focus. "Did you really season your victims?"

"Nah," Spike sent the salt careening at high acceleration, but the reigning Wolfram & Hart air hockey champion caught it just before it went off the edge. "It's like edible underwear. Fun for a lark, but not worth the effort. Can't taste it after the first drink anyway."

Fred winked. "Can't taste anything after the first drink. Switch to the nasty stuff."

Spike eyed her appraisingly. She couldn't be that pissed if she was snaring flying condiments. "Cheap date you are."

Fred lifted her glass in a toast. "You said it! All you have to do is not be evil, or condescending, or a demon, buy me a funnel cake and I'm yours for life!"

Spike passed the employees of Wolfram & Hart under mental review. "So you're not seeing anyone, then?"

Fred folded her bare arms on the table and rested her cheek in the hollow of the nest. "No," she said. "Not since Knoxy wanted me to wear this weird blue wig in bed. Which you can NOT tell Wes about, okay? I'm already behind schedule this month, I do not want my best lab assistant turned into kinky Swiss cheese."

Spike nodded. "Got it. No sex with cheese."

Fred picked her head up and laughed. "You're drunk."

Spike shook his head. "Not nearly drunk enough."

"C'mon," Fred coaxed. "What's the worst that can happen?"

"He mocks me mercilessly for the rest of eternity."

"Besides that."

"He tells Buffy." Spike shuddered.

Spike could see Fred opening her mouth to offer more peppy encouragement. Drastic measures needed to be taken.

"You know how you meet some guy and forget his name, and by the time he's chatted you up for twenty minutes it's too late to ask?"

Fred nodded. "That's why I make my whole department wear name tags. Ah, the awesome power!"

Spike ignored the digression. "It's the same thing. You can't walk smash up to a bloke and say "by the way, I've been in love with you for a hundred years, sorry I forgot to mention it but work's been a bitch, you know how it is."

Spike's voice had gotten rather tight and loud; he gentled it with an effort. "So just leave it, love, will you? Least said soonest not getting my bloody head ripped off and fed to me."

Fred's forehead wrinkled. "There's something wrong with that sentence."

Angel's voice came from behind them. "Yeah. Since when do you work, Spike?"

Fred whirled around and several strands of her loose hair whipped Spike across the cheek.

Spike poured himself another shot and downed it before he bothered to turn. "You get lost in the building again? Hit the intercom, I'm sure security'll send a Saint Bernard with a bottle of O Neg round its neck."

Fred found her voice. "Angel! How long have you been there?"

Angel shrugged casually. "Bout a hundred years."

Comments

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*blush* Thank you so much. Seriously. That means the world to hear.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I keep trying to reply to this and deleting it unposted because I feel like I'm either coming off arrogant, patronizing, or too coy to be useful. Bear with me? I don't mean to be.

I keep falling into the trap of thinking that people who can write like this obviously know that they are brilliant, because it is so obvious to me.

I know you're not joking, but I keep wanting to say you must be. And yet, I don't want to give the impression that I think I suck and need reassurance. I don't.

I know I'm not a bad writer. I'm competant. Some days, in some moods, I think I'm actually good -- or at least, I think I've written some good stories and have the potential to write more and get better. The bones are good, it seems to me, and the skin is good too, and it's a matter of building up all that pesky muscle and connective tissue in the middle. In fanfic, especially short pieces like this, I get to skip some of that and let the canon do that work for me.

I'm strongest at making words do pretty things on the level of turns of phrase. Sometimes I do too much of that and the story suffers for my over-cleverness. I try to cut that stuff out, but sometimes I'm too in love with it to kill my darlings and sometimes I don't notice.

A strong beta would help with that, but I've never found a beta who likes doing it, is 100 percent on the same wavelength as I am, likes the same pairings and isn't busy, so I tend to save arm twisting my friends for Serious Stuff and let the rest go.

All my characters talk too much, their sentences are too complex and go on too long before giving the other guy a turn. That's, basically, because I do in real life -- my sense of normal is off. I try to cut that too, but see above. :)

Similarly, I don't move much -- my default state is sitting around somewhere talking with a cat on my lap, or sitting around somewhere typing with a cat complaining that she can't be on my lap. My characters don't sit around, per se, but I suck at blocking -- I either don't put enough in, leaving them talking in an unenvisionable void or motionless a la Waiting for Godot -- or I put it in too methodically.

In the piece above, look how many times I do action, speech, action, speech in a row. It's plodding and too predictable, it doesn't flow naturally.

Sometimes I put in too much blocking to overcompensate. It starts to feel like some improv game from Whose Line Is It Anyway -- you can't speak your line without changing your position. Spike touches his ear! Fred puts her hands on her hips! Spike does one handed pushups! Fred makes a monkey face!

I'm pretty good at catching a character's voice. It's basically a parlor trick, like imitating the accent of someone you just spoke to (which I also do, usually unconsciously). There are a lot more characters I can fake dialogue for in a responsive situation than I have any real understanding of their inner motivations.

Angel, unfortunately, is not one of of them. I can catch the diction some of the time but I have no idea when he'll have which emotional response. This is why, much as I love Spike/Angel, my stories almost always feature a chatty Spike and an Angel who's asleep, far away, not answering, or written by someone else.

I'm worst at story level structure, but I've been getting better at it since I started writing fanfic, because I've been practicing so much more. Still, there are things you can take for granted in fanfic, and those things are still weakest in my original fic -- not character creation or worldbuilding per se, but blending them into the narrative, plus introductory physical description of characters and places. And action scenes? Forget it. If I can't avoid them all together I either have to pin all the participants down to their places or call buffybot for help.

(continued in next comment)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

But I feel comforted in the knowledge that the talking and the moving can be put in almost separately, and still flow nicely together. I don't have to know exactly where someone is standing and what they are doing when I write what they are saying.

*nodsnodsnods* In a virtual season or a script you need to know, 'cause it's imitating a visual medium. In a story I'm sure it would help, but I'm not a visual thinker and I hardly ever do.

Since you only need to mention it if it's a plot point -- if where they are and what they're doing expresses some emotion or achieves some action -- you can just write each bit as needed. And if you find it more comfy to do all the talky bits first and then go back and move them as needed, no one will know. :)

Just do a read through of blocking only at the end to make sure you haven't got somebody seeing stuff they've turned their back on or using a third hand. Sometimes mentioning only the highlights leads to confusion for the audience when you skipped the connecting bits -- especially if they *are* visual thinkers. (Hence why I needed to say that Fred picked her head up again.)

When in doubt if something looks natural -- act it out. Kinda like reading your dialogue allowed instantly exposes what doesn't sound right.

I'm sure I look possessed, twitching my hands in vestigial gestures and muttering on the bus, but there's no better test I know.

continued from previous comment

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I have this image of writers like you, where you have a perfectly tuned set of characters in your heads, and you just sit down and channel flawless prose onto the page. I know it's not quite true, but it's in my head anyway.

Yeah, really, it's not. Channeling straight onto the page is fun, but it often takes retrofitting afterwards to get to even passable, let alone flawless. Fixing as I go is another mode -- which one I'm in seems to depend on the story, and I let it do what it wants to.

Anything longer than a single scene needs much more thinking through, if only to figure out which scenes have to happen. If I'm not outlining in advance, I tend to get to the end of one pretty fast and then get stuck waiting for inspiration for the next to strike.

This ficlet was pretty much channeled in one go and got only cosmetic retouching (make the shift to past tense halfway through consistant, correct the spelling, add more blocking). But it definitely shows:

My transition from present tense to past in the first paragraph is awkward.

"How'd that go for you?" is an expression I borrowed more from thebratqueen than from canon.

"Test that hypothesis did you" and "Cheap date you are" are each okay on their own, but both in the same short piece makes Spike sound like Yoda. Similarly, I should've cut the second repetition of "bloody".

"Not nearly drunk enough" sounds more like Wes or Giles than Spike, though I'll fanwank it by saying he's relaxed -- or trusting, or drunk -- enough to let a shade of his William past show.

"There's something wrong with that sentence", though I quite like it, was a save after I wrote the sentence and found there was, indeed, something wrong with it. Besides the part where if you rip off a vamp's head, he dusts.

I'm good at last lines (though I worry sometimes if my compulsive need for at least a tiny twist at the end is too much of a schtick). But I'm terrible at titles. I always hear phrases and go "that would make a fabulous title for something" but when it comes to titling a story I've actually written, I either go for something banal or I don't do it at all.

All of that is not to devalue the compliment you gave me or insult your taste. I'm touched that you liked it that much. I like it too, or I wouldn't have posted it, at least not without a disclaimer. It's just to point out where the cracks are that I usually skim coat with quippage and hope no one will notice, so that you don't get discouraged looking at whatever cracks are obvious to you in your own work. It's kinda like having a pimple -- a writing flaw tends to look much bigger to the person who's got it than it does to anyone else. :)

have just gone from wishing to write to trying to write, and have posted the tiny results.

Congratulations! That's a huge step, and I hope you keep going.

And the need to get some outside feedback on whether things are working as intended and are enjoyable.

Yeah, and that can be a tough line to walk -- on the one hand, we absolutely need that outside perspective. On the other hand, you can't always trust crowd pleasing to be the same thing as a good approximation of what you're going for. Too much believing your feedback can turn into like a politician governing by polls instead of leading -- too much ignoring it and we can go into little closed loops in our head, writing stuff that makes sense only to us and the choir. I haven't got any clever advice on this, just sharing the dilemma.

This ficlet of yours is an example of what I aspire to, a bit down the line. I have put it in my "writing to emulate" folder.

And now I'm back on *blush*. That's got to be something every writer lives to hear -- or I do, anyway. Even if I thought my writing was technically flawless -- and when that day dawns, somebody hit me with a skillet and a bad review -- it's certainly nothing I'd take for granted.

Whatever it is about this story that you want for yourself, I hope you get it.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

And now you're probably backing away slowly and wondering "what did I say that sounded like "tell me everything about your writing process?" Sorry.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Yay! I was comforting. I like being comforting. But I'm not a perfectionist, I swear! Look, I posted it without fixing any of those errors! Or even really noticing most of them until I started this, when I started reading like an editor.:) I'm okay with not being perfect, I'm just trying to recognize what to work on for next time.

But then you are aiming for a level that I know are out of my reach.

At the moment I'm just aiming for finishing something. Quality can wait. :)