#sam keeper

so first bit, from my very first star wars fic:

There’s just one catch to this otherwise brilliant plan: Kylo Ren does not personally own a boombox. To be precise, his dad owns a boombox he’s terribly fond of, but to get it Kylo would have to apologize and the fact of the matter is, the injured party in this situation is obviously himself and he isn’t going to demean his literary genius by apologizing to his dad who is about as literary or full of genius as a lump of cold, hard rock. Kylo’s desperate, but he’s not that desperate and the thought of begging his dad and the endless string of questions and jokes that’ll inevitably follow are immensely off-putting to a spirit as sensitive and finely-attuned as his. He could ask Chewie, but Chewie has developed a nasty tendency to pull out his crossbow every time Kylo crosses his path and Kylo isn’t entirely sure that Chewie wouldn’t let one of his arrows loose and then claim the trigger released by accident afterwards.  There’s only so many times Hux can play knight in shining armour before the act gets old and not very seductive and Kylo Ren is not a damsel in distress. Whatever anyone else might say.

okay, so this passage ostensibly looks like it has a lot of "consciousness" going on! and to an extent it does in that it tells us a lot about what kylo ren thinks about his family in this modern au and what his various relationships are. it does also, to an extent, tell us about kylo ren as a person - someone who perceives himself as a genius, someone who presumably is sensitive, surrounded by people who aren't. but at the same time, there's a whole lot going on that makes this a lot of noise.

for one, on rereading this fic, its evident that i haven't really thought about why kylo ren thinks he needs a grand romantic gesture to demonstrate his love for hux. what does he actually feel for hux? why is he attracted to hux, outside of a brief throwaway i have about hux having "rescued" him? why does chewie want to shoot kylo? what the hell does kylo feel about that? (like, that's a pretty significant thing lol) at no point do i allow kylo to ever dwell on the fact that a) people find him scary or b) his family finds him annoying, so you never get a sense of what this means to him.

okay, but this is clearly a funny fic and all of this is designed to make us laugh, rather than be any kind of serious thesis about the characters. so here is another fic:

Wanda’s eyes met and held his, the shadows along her face distorting. Somewhere inside, he knew, threads of red would be spinning slowly through his mind. “What does it look like?” he asked her once, when they were lying on their hard iron-frame beds and staring up at the dark ceiling of their tiny bedroom because that was the safest place in all of Sokovia. She turned on her side and smiled at him. “Like an island. A beach with white sands and trees.” They fell asleep, fingers entwined across the gap between their beds. Wanda first, Pietro after. He stayed awake, thinking. There was no island with white sands or green leafed trees waving gently in the winds.

okay so ostensibly, this memory that Pietro Maximoff is thinking about is supposed to convey some level of depth to us, the reader. however, as the actual author of this piece, reading this back, i can confidently say that i have no actual idea what i was thinking about when i wrote this specific passage. at no point is this ever referenced again in the fic, at no point is this cross-referenced to something else that might make sense of why wanda says this and why pietro then thinks "there was no island". the beach island is a sign with no meaning attached to it.

its like a tertiary level symbol, right? absent the context provided within the fic, i can only surmise that i'm using a beach island as shorthand juxtaposition against the "hard iron-frame beds" to signify luxury and safety - something that wanda & pietro don't have in this universe. the use of the flashback and imagery suggests a certain literariness and is interior to pietro's consciousness, but it doesn't explain why its relevant - why is pietro thinking about it while wanda is reading tarot cards to understand the changing political situation, why is pietro thinking about it while he's telling wanda that a spy is following them? what does this mean to pietro, specifically? none of these questions are answered. so it looks good as writing, but it doesn't actually...convey anything at the end of the day - it just kind of vaguely gestures towards meaning, but stops short of actually imbuing it with any meaning.

another example from this same fic:

With cream or without cream. Cream for the west. Without cream for the east.

“Cream?” she heard him say. “No thank you. I’ve got my own stuff.”

A shiver ran down her spine.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

Wanda turned a page. The words swam down the page, letters slithering and sliding away from her reach and rearranging themselves into a simplistic litany. No thank you. My own stuff. My own. Own. Wanda forced herself to uncurl her left hand. Her fingers had curled in on hearing those words, nails digging into the palm. She studied the half-moon crescents for a moment and then went back to pretending to read.

In their profession you lived with the knowledge they’d come after you one day or the other hanging like an axe over your head and you made your peace with it.

so here, the problem is one of opacity! it's a deployment of show don't tell, but its used very weakly here. we are given the key to interpret this - when the man says he's brought his own cream, it means he's not a spy for the west or the east but is a free agent; we are told that the maximoffs are spies; the fact that he's approached them directly, instead of using their cafe as a transit point for meeting someone else, means that something is about to happen. we even know that wanda is having a strong emotional reaction to it. but what the fuck is she actually feeling? is she anxious? is she frightened? is she dissociating? why are her thoughts so opaque to us? a little bit of editing could probably bring wanda into sharper relief, instead of gesturing impressionistically to that.

last example, from something i wrote last night in my current WIP and then edited for greater clarity:

1st draft:

Curufin’s eyes stung, even as he returned his brother’s embrace. Lauro’s eyes were wet and he pressed his palms to them when he finally released Curufin.

This comes after a big emotional turning point for both the brothers and...Curufin's thoughts/feelings about this are completely opaque to us. Okay he's crying or trying not to cry, but why? But at the same time, I want to capture the specifics of what's going on in his unconscious, which is that sometimes you have feelings which are too big and too numinous to understand or express. ergo, the second draft:

Curufin’s eyes stung, even as he returned his brother’s embrace. Emotions too vast and incomprehensible swirled in his breast, threatening to split him at the seams and spill his insides everywhere. Somehow, despite the grief for all that might have been, they held themselves together, too disciplined against their hearts to fully let it drown them. Lauro’s eyes were wet when he finally released Curufin.