ratherastory | Two writing memes

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Two writing memes

1- From

embroiderama: a passage less than 500 words (paragraph/excerpt/very short fic/whatever) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

2- From

sinnerforhire: First line of last 25 fics you wrote and try to find a pattern.

This one made me laugh, because I have exactly 27 fics written/in the works. A few weeks ago I wouldn't even have been able to do the meme in its entirety.

1- Lisa feels as though she's failing some subtle test which she never signed up to take.

2- A barista's work is never done, but sometimes there are slow days, and that's the day he comes in, complete with laptop and kicked-puppy expression.

3- This never happened...

4- A certain degree of separation was to be expected when it came to the Winchesters.

5- They stop in Toledo a couple of hours before sunset, and Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, fingerless gloves useless against the cold.

6- There are only a handful of people who have Bobby Singer's cell phone number.

7- Dean finds Sam sitting cross-legged on the floor of their motel room, clad in jeans and a soft, faded grey t-shirt, bare feet tucked under his knees.

8- Getting jumped by regular humans is bad enough, even if those humans are seasoned hunters.

9- After twenty years of dealing with it on and off, it's not a big deal anymore.

10- In her everyday life, Lindsey isn't much of a hand-wringer.

11- Dean's not exactly sure how he and Sam have ended up here, but he's learned to roll with the punches after fifteen or so years of being on the job.

12- “You going to eat that or keep turning it into a valuable work of abstract art?” Dean waggles his fork in the general direction of Sam's plate.

13- Sam is getting really tired of waking up in pain, alone and in the dark.

14- He's blind.

15- Sam hasn't screamed in days.

16- There is water dripping slowly onto the Devil's Trap, and Dean doesn't care.

17- Sam is sick to death of angels.

18- The first thing that Dean ever steals is a sandwich.

19- “I got it,” Sam is pulling their duffel bags out of the trunk of the Impala, not waiting for Dean to help or even come close.

20- Castiel is a bad angel.

21- Sam peered through the window of the dingy motel room, staring as roiling clouds slowly obscured the moon, plunging the parking lot into shadows, flickering orange in the light from the vacancy sign.

22- There's nothing on television except for Christmas specials.

23- “Cas! Castiel! We need some help over here!”

24- Sam is sulking.

25- “Sam, any day now!”

Patterns? I apparently like short, declarative sentences. Sometimes I change it up by starting with dialogue, and occasionally I add in some description about the weather or the time of day. I write primarily in the present tense, which is something I never did before writing fanfic.

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You busted your HTML somewhere around 19 or 20.

Because it still breaks my heart into a thousand itty, bitty pieces ... from Why Your Joyous Strains Prolong

Castiel finds him there the next morning, still cradling Dean in his arms. He looks up, thinks maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to scream until he's hoarse, stays silent.

“He's gone, Cas.”

Wordlessly Castiel pulls Dean away, draws the blanket gently over Dean's face. Dean stands by the cot, looking down at the motionless figure under the blanket, hands shoved in his pockets. He doesn't realize he's shivering until Cas puts an arm around his shoulders, across his back really, because he's always been shorter than Dean.

“I don't know why I'm still here.”

Castiel can hear the unspoken words. I even left myself behind. He looks up at Dean, feels his eyes fill with tears, pulls Dean close. “Not everyone leaves you,” he pulls Dean's head down, presses his forehead to Dean's, throws all the fierceness and passion left in him into his voice.

“I'm still here.”

*wipes eyes* God, when you kill people ...

I must now do these memes.

Edited 2010-05-27 17:38 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll go fix it.

Fun memes! I think I'll do the second one because I must be close to 25 fics in English and it's interesting to go back on your writing and see what are your habits. Present tense seems very specific to fanfic. Interestingly, a teacher once told me that it was used a lot more in French than in English, so that's probably why it never looked weird to me. I don't know the reason behind it, though.

I want a DVD commentary for the beginning of A Wild Night and a New Road:

"They stop in Toledo a couple of hours before sunset, and Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, fingerless gloves useless against the cold. Sam purses his lips, doesn't say anything, but rummages through one of the duffel bags and tosses him a woolen sweater. Dean shrugs out of his leather jacket, pulls on the sweater, zips the jacket back up over it, keeps shivering. Wonders if his lips are blue yet. Fucking cold.

“Cemetery?” Sam asks, and Dean nods.

There's a mass grave, but on closer examination they find someone's been there already. The air smells faintly of gasoline and burnt flesh, the ground is scorched. Not everyone knows to burn the bodies, but the knowledge is spreading quickly among the survivors: the infected don't always stay dead.

A voice startles him, coming from behind. “They're taken care of.”

He whirls, has his gun trained before he even has time to register the owner of the voice. A girl steps out from behind one of the graves, dark hair pulled back in a serviceable but untidy braid. She's wearing fatigues that are too big on her frame, supplemented by layers of cotton and wool that only serve to emphasize how thin she is. Her skin has the sallow complexion of someone who doesn't go out much in the sunlight. She squints in the fading evening light, and Dean's reminded of an alley cat, all claws and teeth and protruding ribs and fading memories of sitting on someone's lap and eating tuna out of a can.

“I know you.”

He keeps the gun trained on her, glances at Sam, who turned when he saw Dean react. It's rare that people recognize them, but when they do, it's rarely good. Sam is tense, but studying the girl's face, trying to read her. For a guy who's gone mostly deaf (fucking angels and their fucking super-sonic whateverthefuck, and if Dean had to go back he'd definitely come up with a better plan than the one they went with), he's surprisingly not that jumpy. Especially considering how twitchy he'd become just prior to the world nearly ending. To Dean's surprise, he relaxes after a moment, and smiles.

“You're Lily Shoemaker,” he says, a little too loudly, and she starts, narrows her eyes more before she places them."

Oh, this broke my heart when I wrote it. It was odd, switching to Cas' POV right at the end, but it was the only way to make it work.

I couldn't help but think that Dean, with all his abandonment issues, would take the death of his younger self really hard, as kind of a judgment of his personal failings. Past!Dean is everything that Future!Dean no longer is: hopeful (sort of), clinging to his ideals, still loyal to Sam, and he was a living, breathing reminder of what could have been.

As for Cas? Well, in the End 'Verse he's very clearly blindly devoted to Dean. "Are you coming?" "Of course." As if there's no question in his mind that he should go on this suicide run if Dean tells him to.

Poor boys.

Sam decides arbitrarily that he's been locked in the room for five days. He figures it's been that long because he's started to hallucinate, and that's about how long it takes for that particular symptom of sleep deprivation to kick in. Sometimes it's less, but he's managed to catch an hour or so here and there, or it might be fifteen minutes or three hours for all he knows, and that means that it would take longer for the hallucinations to kick in. Lucifer is there from the start, of course, but Sam doesn't count him as a hallucination: he's more of a permanent nightmare, some sort of weird supernatural construct that lives constantly in his mind. He hasn't told Dean about the fact that he dreams of Lucifer every single night, and he wonders if Dean dreams of Michael the same way. No matter how he thinks about it, he decides it's a conversation he never wants to have with his brother. Of course, now he's not likely to have a conversation with him ever again, and that's probably for the best. At least now he's done with causing his brother pain.

Predictably, the first hallucination is one of his fourteen-year-old self, talking to him about setting a field on fire with his brother, and how it was the most awesome Fourth of July ever. Then the kid's eyes turn yellow and he grins at Sam, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a roman candle clutched in his fist, sending sparks up toward the low ceiling.

“Just like old times, isn't it?”

Sam tries to ignore them. Tries to ignore the small things that creep around in the shadows, the sound of chitinous carapaces clicking against the cement. Shuts his eyes and pretends he doesn't see his mother using his own Zippo lighter to set fire to her nightgown.

“I should have done this when I knew I was pregnant,” she says calmly, as her hair is set alight with flame.

He almost welcomes the moments when Walt comes in to work him over some more. Neither he nor Roy have so much as brought him a cup of water. Maybe they're really testing to see if he can't die, and so far the test seems pretty conclusive. Sam thinks it's not really fair that getting fatally shot is easier to take than this, but then, life is never fair. Life sucks and then you don't die, he thinks, and laughs so hard he almost chokes, and Walt takes the opportunity to break two of the fingers on his left hand.

After a while the parade of this-is-your-life-Sam-Winchester stops, and there's only Dean, squatting on his haunches in a corner of the room, watching him with eyes filled with reproach.

“I'm sorry,” he whispers into the floor.

“You're always sorry,” comes the dry answer.

“Doesn't mean it's not true.”

“Doesn't change anything, either.”

“I guess not.”

Oh, this one was fun —if a bitch to write.

I decided to set this one in a post-apocalyptic AU, and as such this section is all about the exposition. Exposition is hard without getting into the "As you know, Bob," trope of having one character explain things to another.

So I did it mostly by establishing the weather and by re-introducing one of my favourite secondary characters from season 1, making her grown up and dressing her in a way that would make it obvious that things are no longer the way they were in the show (fatigues and multi-layered clothing).

I also had fun with the "alley cat" metaphor, as you can see. Lily's seen too much for someone her age. I have a strange fascination with the "Bloody Mary" episode (this is the second time I've used it in a fic), and I always wondered what became of Lily after her fears of killing her father proved to be true.

And the most obvious clue that it's set post-apocalypse is Dean's parenthetical, very annoyed thoughts about angels and how their plan didn't go well.

Great memes there - it's fascinating to see patterns emerge in the first lines one.

This bit was a lot of fun to write (and that probably makes me a bad person). Anyone who's watched the show through Season 4 will recognize the very blatant parallels I drew here with "When The Levee Breaks."

My reasoning was that Sam hallucinating as a result of sleep deprivation wouldn't be all that different from Sam hallucinating as a result of demon blood detox: it's all coming from his subconscious, anyway. The main difference being that this time, he's more or less aware that it's not real.

It always goes from bad to worse, the people he feels he betrayed: his mother, his younger self (and again, I used the image of the kid having yellow eyes, because it seems to be a recurring fear of Sam's, that he's always been tainted), and finally and most importantly, Dean. Dean who, in Sam's mind, shouldn't accept his apologies, because Sam is sure he doesn't deserve forgiveness.

Interesting, isn't it?

*nodnod*

Because I just love everything they are not saying here as well as everything they are saying.

Sam looks past him at Castiel. “You agreed,” he says simply. “There's no other way, so let's not make this harder than it is, all right?” He slides the blade out with a quiet snick, flips it deftly in his hand, and holds the handle toward the angel.

Castiel steps forward to take it, but Dean intervenes, puts a hand on the angel's wrist, stopping him. “No.”

“Dean, please.”

He shakes his head, stares Castiel in the eyes. “I can't let you hurt my brother like that. Not anyone, not even you.”

A beat, then Castiel nods, understanding written in every new line in his face. “Very well,” he replies, and steps back.

“Dean, come on. You—” Sam stops abruptly, his face draining of colour, as Dean turns and holds out his hand, palm up.

“If we're going to do this, it has to be me. I can't...” he forces his voice not to break. “I can't watch while someone does that to you, Sammy. Give it here.”

“Are you sure?” it comes out quiet as a breath. “I didn't want to ask you. Not after—”

“I know, and yeah, I'm sure.”

“Will you be okay?”

“No, probably not,” he swallows as his throat threatens to close up. “But there's no one else to do it.”

As you said, what made this scene for me was everything that's not being said. This is all about the subtext, all about what the readers knows and what the characters know, but which is almost too terrible to put into words.

The important part of writing this for me was to convey how much the boys are still trying to protect each other. Sam knows what Dean went through in hell, and is trying to shield him from having to relive it. Dean, in turn, still can't bear to simply stand by and watch as his brother gets hurt.

Neither of them are happy with the decision, but there's really no other way this can work.

And, of course, Castiel gets this, probably better than almost anyone else these days, now that he's almost human (finale notwithstanding: this was written before that). I think the only other person alive who understands how Sam and Dean work together better than Cas is Bobby.

The first thing that Dean ever steals is a sandwich. It's one of those pre-made things that you usually find in vending machines, encased in hard white plastic and wrapped in a second layer of saran wrap. He shoves it in the front pocket of the over-large brown hoodie sweater that Dad got him at goodwill —this is the only time he's grateful that it doesn't fit him right— saunters up to the cash as though he owns the place, and buys a quarter's worth of candy. A handful of jujubes. He gives the cashier his best winning grin, the one that makes women coo over him as though he's the most precious thing ever (Dean is adorable, he's learned), and saunters out, casual. Totally frosty.

Sammy is waiting on the step outside the shop, right where Dean left him. There's a hole in the toe of his left sneaker, and he's whiling away the time by wriggling his big toe through it, in and out. With a sigh Dean realizes he's going to have to do more laundry: Sam's socks are filthy. He grabs Sam by one grubby hand.

Welcome to my obsession with caretaker!Dean. No, seriously, I have a thing about Dean being Sam's surrogate mother/father/everything. So when Roque asked about Dean's relationship with stealing, in my head it became obvious that the reason he would start stealing at all is because Sammy needed something. That's also where the bit about having to do laundry came from

This was my attempt at getting into wee!Dean's head. He's about eight years old here, small enough to still get cooed over by women, old enough to know he can use it to his advantage. He's learning all the mannerisms that will be second nature by the time the show starts: the cocky swagger, the charming smile, the casual larceny. Right now, though, he has to talk himself through it. The goal was to show just how nervous he is, but I'm not sure I succeeded entirely.

The Winchesters, as someone else put it, are a classic example of downward mobility after a tragedy in their lives. Most people don't have their mothers killed by a demon, but a lot of families lose their homes and their livelihoods after a fire or a death or both. So I tried to convey that in a few sentences here: the oversized hoodie, the fact that they shop at goodwill (and Dean's embarrassment about his clothing not fitting right), the hole in Sammy's shoes.

Also, when I was a little kid about Sammy's age I used to poke my toes in and out of holes in my socks and/or shoes when they were there. It was fascinating. So I included it here for kicks.

That's cool, thank you! I love caretaker!Dean too and I think you did a great job of showing that aspect of him here.

It's just so fascinating, and right, to me, that Dean is more able to do something horrible but necessary to Sam than to stand by and watch and not intervene while it happens. You really caught at some dynamics that came through in Swan Song and in the whole series. I think the most agonizing thing about the finale for Dean was that he did finally have to watch and not intervene, and that he found the strength to do that without running away was incredible, because that is one of the few situations Dean really does run from. In some ways the cemetery scene was the balance for the two times when Sam was in the panic room detoxing and Dean, in Dean's own words "left him to rot," partly out of anger but partly because Dean always interpreted his role as Sam's protector as meaning he has to do things for Sam, even disastrously counter-productive things like selling his soul or swearing himself over to serve the angels, and until the very end he didn't know quite how to be Sam's brother when it really was just a matter of being without any possibility of doing.

Precisely!

I think you hit the nail on the head, right there. I *loved* that scene, although I was crying too hard to properly appreciate it by then.

Because this fic was awesomely disturbing I really had a hard time deciding which snippet to use because they were all so dark.

He's forgotten how to sleep.

Sam tries to get him to at least lie down. He's been up for nearly three days, and his skin is crawling and the shadows have turned red. Every time he closes his eyes all he sees is red, pulsing and swirling. Sometimes it matches his heartbeat, sometimes it oozes past him until he's sure blood must be dripping past his eyelids.

He paces in circles in their motel room, caged, wishing he were chained down. At least he'd be secure.

“Dean, come on.”

He jerks away as Sam's fingers brush against his elbow. “Don't fucking touch me!”

A silent withdrawal, and he wants to scream, lash out, make Sam hit him as hard as he can. He doesn't remember how to sleep, only remembers how to lose consciousness for precious fleeting seconds. He presses his back against the door, slides down it until he's on the floor, head buried in his folded arms. He spends the night there, standing watch and keeping his escape route open. The first rays of dawn find him drifting half-awake, and wishing for the familiar feeling of being ripped apart, rather than the terrifying discomfort of merely existing.

*

Alastair traces beautiful patterns in his skin with his straight razor. They resemble tribal tattoos, all intricate whorls and knots, parallel cuts and slashes. He draws the same pattern every day for fifteen years, starts in the same spot and moves the finely-honed blade with exactly the same precise motions. The process lasts all day, and the cuts burns and sting and the blood trickles beautifully crimson against the white of his skin. So beautiful it takes his breath away.

Alastair likes to run his tongue over the newest ones, to taste the blood on the razor blade. Sometimes he even lets Dean keep his eyelids so that he can choose whether or not to watch.

In the end, he always watches.

Practical Application is one of my favorite stories, so.

Sam flinches, doesn't answer. Dean can hear the unspoken “I'm sorry.” Apologizing for apologizing about something he shouldn't be apologizing for. Christ. He buries his face in his hands, still perched on the edge of Sam's bed, looking at his brother's back. More scars. He doesn't want to know how many times Sam “tested” his theory. His hand hovers over Sam's shoulder, wants to pull him into his arms like when Sammy was a little kid and a hug could make everything better. He pulls back, settles for dropping a blanket over him so he won't get cold.

“Get some sleep, Sammy.”

Also, I love the disclaimers to that story. You have truly out-disclaimed yourself, there. :)

Yes, exposition in a bitch, especially in a post-apocalyptic AU setting. My big bang has a setting like that, you'll tell me how good I did with the exposition if you read it! I don't think I managed as good as you, your beginning really gives the informations in a way that feels natural - which is all we ask from exposition! Thanks for the commentary!

Two passages, eh? Cheater. ;)

Okay, well, the first one is actually harder to explain than the second. It's Dean with PTSD, the insomnia, the hyper-vigilance, the whole nine yards. After forty year in hell, I figured that Dean wouldn't be accustomed to not hurting in some way, that just existing from day to day without knowing if it would bring pleasure or pain or something in between would be somehow worse for him. Sometimes anticipation is the worst form of torture.

As much as I love Sam, the Dean from Season 4 (and even Season 5) feels very isolated, and I can easily see him pulling away from human contact.

The second passage has been floating in my mind since last November or so, when I started the first draft of this (which will never see the light of day). The Show made a point of saying that Alastair was an artist with a straight razor, so I decided to exploit that.

I had the image of using the razor to cut patterns in the skin like Maori tribal tattoos almost right away, and it wasn't much of a stretch of the imagination from there to having Alastair recreate the same pattern every day. Like I said, anticipation is the worst form of torture, and so having it go on for fifteen years, knowing every day exactly what was going to happen and when and just how much it was going to hurt... yeah. If it were me, I'd lose my mind.

I also wanted to play up the erotic undertones here. I hinted a LOT at Dean/Alastair in this fic, even if I never actually came out and said there was a sexual element to the relationship. In fact, I'm not entirely sure you can call it sexual, though it's certainly sensual and erotic. Blood-play is a kink I've come across a fair bit in the fanfic for this fandom, and hell, it's practically canon, if you count Sam/Ruby.

There's a fine line between pleasure and pain, and since hell is nothing but pain and damnation, my reasoning was that eventually Dean would stop seeing the difference and look forward to the more "gentle" forms of torture as pleasurable. It's a way for Alastair to assert his dominance more subtly.

Last but not least, I have a personal squick about eyes. I do include it in my fic, but there is *nothing* that makes me cringe and look away faster than eye injury. Even talking about it is hard. So, uh, yeah. Cutting away eyelids? Blick.

Heh. Yeah, there were a lot of disclaimers that day. *shrug* It's a thing. ;)

As for that excerpt? It's all about the lack of communication between Sam and Dean. Because, as much as it breaks my heart, they haven't actually talked since Season 3, at best. It's their assumptions about what the other is thinking that got them into this mess to begin with (among other things), what they assume is being left unsaid.

So I was just trying to show that here. The invisible wall that separates them even as they're still both just trying to do the right thing. Sam thinks he can't be redeemed, thinks that Dean won't ever forgive him, and Dean thinks Sam wants nothing to do with him. So they're both left to suffer on their own.

Man... I just depressed myself. I need to write something with bunnies and kittens and rainbows. ;)

"Two passages, eh? Cheater. ;)" Hell, I wanted to highlight the whole damn story, but I think I stayed under 500 words! :D

"I also wanted to play up the erotic undertones here." This definitely came through!

"There's a fine line between pleasure and pain, and since hell is nothing but pain and damnation, my reasoning was that eventually Dean would stop seeing the difference and look forward to the more "gentle" forms of torture as pleasurable." That makes a horrible amount of sense.

Thank you!

Yes, when you think about them separated, estranged, their ~unique brotherly bond~ cracked, somehow it`s more depressing than to think about them dead.

Kittens, you say? You know, some gen writers really love to turn one of the brothers into a small, helpless animal and make the other really protective of little bunny!Dean or kitten!Sam. After that, they usually feel embarrassed and write deathfic, but... it`s known to happen. :)

I've already turned Sam into a dog, what more do you want from me? ;)

Some of my favourite fics involve Dean being turned into something wee and cute.

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Two writing memes

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