wish i could slow the tape down, chapter 1 notes
“Santos can tell, even from all the way across the garage, that Yolanda Garcia is unhappy.”
hello and welcome to a re-read/annotation of my garsantos f1 au fic!
i started writing and posting this about a year ago and haven’t re-read it since, so i thought it would be fun to go back through and document some of the things i was thinking about while writing it, favorite parts, least favorite parts, etc. i've read similar things from other fic writers over the years and have always found it really interesting and instructive and i hope you guys feel the same!
starting from the beginning…
i usually find openings pretty hard. a lot of writers talk about whether they’re planners or pantsers; i think of myself as kind of both? as a planner, i had the skeleton for the overall arc of the story laid out (this was the table i shared in my previous post). i knew what i wanted the main conflict points to be, when they were going to break up, how they were going to get back together, and how i wanted it to end. (the last paragraph of the entire fic was one of the first things i wrote 🤭)
the "pantser" part is that the rest of the writing was more or less vibes lol. i kept a running list of random scenes and scraps of dialogue as they came to me and over time i would drop them into the chapter where i thought they made sense. otherwise i worked within the “scaffolding” i built in the outline and wrote stuff that got me from one scene to the next.
but maybe it's the planner part of me that enables the pantser part...i think if i didn't have an outline set out, i would have gotten more writer's block, so having the outline in place let me do the rest of the writing with vibes.
to be honest i was intimidated about writing the opening because i knew the fic was going to be a long endeavor, but then the first line came to me out of nowhere and then the first chapter kinda flowed from there! reading it back, i'm shocked at how much of it is exposition. i do remember wanting to introduce all of the characters in a way that felt organic and not boring, and trying to figure out how much technical stuff was too much/how much readers would be willing to tolerate. on re-read, it feels like a lot for the first chapter and i am a little surprised how many people stuck with the fic who weren't f1 fans 😅🙈
another thing i might have done differently is the "dropping a spanner on garcia's foot" parallel to the scalpel scene. the idea came to me during my brainstorming stage and i got attached to it, but i couldn't figure out how to give it more space. i saw it as a moment that shook garcia out of her stupor and the relative monotony of being at the top of her game and winning all the time - then along comes this young, impressionable, hot mechanic, dropping things on her foot. walsh alludes to this in her conversation with santos at the end of ch 15, but other than that, i don't address it again :/
and now a few favorite parts:
i wanted to find ways to work garcia's catholicism into the fic...can't help myself, i find religious imagery really hot
In the briefing room, Garcia looks somehow both smaller and more intimidating than she does on TV. Santos lets her eyes linger on the strong lines of Garcia’s neck, her furrowed brow, and the small curls that have started to frizz out of her tight braid. She watches as Garcia plays with her cross necklace, running the chain against her bottom lip.
this was also one of the first lines i came up with 🥰
Garcia shrugs, walking away in the direction of her driver’s room. “The course of preseason testing never did run smooth.”
this is the part that made it to the fic summary and i really love it!! this came to me through ~vibes~ and more or less stayed the same throughout all my editing. i loved working in some hero-worship into their dynamic.
So yeah, maybe Santos had Garcia’s driver card stuck to her bedroom mirror during her formative teenage years, and maybe that headshot of Garcia with the trademark no-nonsense look on her face played some small part in her discovering her sexuality. And maybe in the back of her mind, she was thinking of Garcia when she declared her major in mechanical engineering, when she was pulling all-nighters with the FSAE team, when she was doing her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh before everything fell apart, again. Whatever, it’s not weird.
whew this was a long one, i don't think all of them will be like this but hope you enjoyed it! i leave you with some mclaren unboxed content. these videos are so quality and really show the "work" side of f1 and a lot of behind the scenes action. i love the way this clip has lando very tenderly handing carlos his gloves...just imagine it with santos and garcia! 🥹
