hello nobody but myself later,
someone new has been reading &tfat and leaving lil comments. i am touched but also having a good time just really tearing it apart in my own head and wanted to share some of my further thoughts:
i feel like one of &tfat’s greatest strengths is also one of its greatest weaknesses. i considered &tfat to be a jumping point off of the experiment i ran in writing the foundations of a sphere, which is actually where i sat down and i wrote that first chapter where they play the same game with the same exact dialogue, in 7 different perspectives, and then chose one to be the starter. the point of it was to attempt to approach the storyline with the same weight in my head given to each and every character so that even the most minute details pack a punch. i had gotten feedback before that in academia about brevity, so i was really just experimenting with getting out a point with very few words.
&tfat was overwhelmingly more ambitious, because i attempted to do that very thing with literally everybody. like actually think of them as a person, who they are, what their day looks like, before introducing them as a character. so, of course, the kids, obviously, but also: the parents, their coworkers, etc. ange, georgie, sharon, wentworth, patty, rick, jo, EVERYBODY!
i vividly remember writing a very dramatic heart to heart with jo and bill, and then re-reading it and being like “why would jo be doing this? jo doesn’t have time for this. she is an entertainment manager for a renn faire. she would be like like shut up bill do ur job” so i scratched it and rewrote it.
fucking EXHAUSTING. in my re-read, i’m noticing i “know” way too much about certain people, katie & emily, who were literally just there for the kind of wrap-up theming we still haven’t gotten to, and like NOTHING about other characters who are actually plot-relevant.
ben’s mom is never seen or mentioned but in a phone call.
i never actually committed to mike having one or two grandparents and the mentions of them are incredibly vague.
and i’m really reading this being like “of course i never finished this. i literally had no where to go. this ends with mike, mike’s plot wrapped around his family, and we as a reader know absolutely nothing about them in reality. only from mike’s monologues. we don’t even know the reasoning they’re insisting he stays on the farm. it’s perfectly reasonable to sell a family business when children have no interest in it, like why are they like this? we don’t know who they are at all. they lost at least one of their children, that’s absolutely devastating to a parent, and i’ve treated their character with pretty much no respect other than plot filler for mike’s story.”
perhaps i will just go back and gut this story. the entire party chapter should be about mike and his family, i need to rewrite the date chapter. perhaps!
me, feeling like “i knew the plot intrinsically”: yeah mike somehow with incredibly strict grandparents that have no real reason to leave the property and probably would not, threw a rager for two years in a row and no one was none the wiser!!!
how did i not even GUESS that i was copying what the fuuuuuuuck i gotta change that
i got nothing to do tonight. the edits have begun. idk why i was making a big deal about it, end of the day its my fucking story. very minor tweaks to chapter 1, but it feels good. honestly, shitty rough drafts do exist for a reason. i did have a vague plan to just make this its own thing one day, but completely gutting it of stephen king and leaving the heart there might be damn well impossible now that i’m really looking at it. it’s meant to hold a mirror to IT, in a modern, non-supernatural timeline, unfortunately, unlike my other works.