Enough about you. Let's talk about me.
Jan. 27th, 2004 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyvyolaI wrote a Good Omens story, "A Hole in the Hedge" for River ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tieleen as part of the Yuletide project and she's asked me to talk about my original intentions for the story (light, humorous) and how it actually turned out (one of the first readers told me it was a nice bit of suicide-inducing angst just in time for the holidays). Given that I'm equally torn between the insecure nobody's interested in me and the inner diva Me! Me! It's all about ME!, I decided that it's close enough to the DVD Commentary meme going around to soothe the worries and justify the ego.
When I got my Yuletide assignment, choosing which fandom was easy.
Let's see: a fandom I do not recognize (anime, perhaps?), a TV show I never watched, a book I adore, and a movie I have not seen. Decisions, decisions.
Oddly enough, I'd just re-read Good Omens, Neverwhere, and Night Watch in the month before signing up for Yuletide, so I felt that my head was definitely in the Pratchett-Gaimen space. But I'd have bet anything that I was closer to Terry than Neil. Little did I know....
Other than reading some highly recced gen and Aziraphale/Crowley, I'm out of the GO fic loop. So I didn't worry that I might be treading any well-beaten paths with my story; it would all be new to me. River said she liked character pieces, atmospheric introspection, and that while she wouldn't say no to a PWP, it would be a bit of a waste of the whole idea of getting obscure fandom fic. This prompted me to take a look at Pepper and Adam as adults and reflect on how surviving Armageddon has shaped them.
From somewhere, my mind conjured up an image: Pepper and Adam in bed. Lots of white linen, sheer billowing curtains, all with a blue filter over it. Straight out of a perfume ad in Vogue or Cosmo, really. The mood was lazy, sated. I tried to riff off this image -- them going to bed, getting up in the morning, going to work -- but it remained a still shot in my mind. They wouldn't move.
So, if they were in bed and wouldn't get out, the next logical step was to consider what happened there. (Other than sex. *g*) Dreams or visions would be a fun and creatively satisfying avenue to explore. I could come up with all sorts of Adam/Pepper relationships and write them up -- a story made up of snippets. (I'm not Plot Girl at the best of times. I own my shortcomings!) Clearly one of them would have to deal with Pepper as War, taking up the sword and winning the Kingdom of Earth for Adam. I kept coming back to that blue filter and realized that the War dream should be red. This led directly to the idea of shaping the visions around colors. Green sprang to mind instantly: The Garden of Eden as re-created by Adam (with an assist from Anathema's ideas about whales, of course). I saw this as a happy vignette, filled with children and butterflies and cuddly lambs. At the same time, I wasn't sure yet if the dreams were caused by Adam's powers leaking through or if it was Pepper's own subconscious dealing with deeply repressed memories of the events in GO.
I was still stuck on the idea of Pepper and Adam being a current couple and tried to create their "real" life. I came up with a bunch of careers for Adam: environmental activist, schoolteacher, author. I put the bedroom in a cottage in Tadfield, a flat in London, a hotel on holiday. I sent Pepper to university, to a newspaper office, an advertising agency. But no matter how I combined them, the fit was off.
It was all Adam's fault. The end of Good Omens implies that he's getting a more subtle and conscious control of his powers and that he'll be able to shape his live and environs to his satisfaction... forever. I find it very difficult to see him adjusting to fit into someone else's life -- he'd be much more likely to adjust them to fit his. (And isn't that a creepy thought just begging to be explored in fic?) He just wouldn't settle down for me.
I'm not sure how I made the leap from Adam/Pepper as a couple to Pepper alone and permanently scarred by knowing Adam. Part of it came from a lyric that popped into my head:
she dreams in color, she dreams in red
can't find a better man
It mostly caught my attention because of the dream-color connection but the melancholy of the can't find a better man resonated with quiet desperation. And that, I realized, was how I kept seeing Pepper. She'd been involved with something bigger than she could have ever conceived as a child and it was still that way as an adult. How could life have any flavor, any color, when locked inside her were memories of such power? How could any man ever compare to Adam, a young god made flesh, the ultimate temptation and the ultimate threat? (More about the song later.)
So finally I gave up on the idea of any sort of healthy, happy Adam/Pepper. This was very annoying, as the deadline was closing in! I had to completely discard the bedroom scene because it didn't belong. The War dream was easy, particularly once I came up with the last line
And every thing they touch, every place they set their eyes, bleeds.
and realized I could recycle the white linens from the bedroom and put them into the tent. The symbolism was a bit heavy-handed but when you're dealing with the Anti-Christ and War, subtlety is pretty much lost anyway, eh?
One of my shortcomings as a writer is a lack of detail -- I forget to use all of the senses when describing things. I realized that I could stretch myself by drowning the story in sensuality (in every sense! Ha, I kill myself) by making the dreams as lush and textured as possible. The more I contrasted them against the mundane details of Pepper's real life, the stronger the disconnect. This gave me the idea of sense triggers for each of the dreams (sound, sight, smell) instead of showing her having them while sleeping.
As The Them realize, the "whole point of gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home." The playing make-believe dream came directly from GO with an (un)healthy dose of The Twilight Zone episode about the little boy who can do anything and sends those who displease him "out to the cornfield". There's a bit of Dick Tracy and The Mask in it, too (that yellow trenchcoat), plus a drop of penny dreadfuls. I enjoyed juxtaposing the cartoon-like details of the childish game with the starkness of Pepper's deaths.
Another recycle was the Garden of Eden dream. But instead of emphasizing the idea of a fresh start and a clean slate as I'd originally planned, I twisted it. Here Pepper is the sinless Eve and Adam is not just the first man but his father Lucifer as well. He wants to recreate the Earth, properly organized this time, but he can't do it without introducing the original sin - knowledge - as well. He's the Serpent and far more dangerous than Crowley ever was. Of course, the perversion here is that Pepper obeys rather than disobeys when Adam offers her the apple. But the Devil prefers to play with a stacked deck, right?
I didn't realize until afterwards that I'd inverted the lifecycle - Pepper dies twice in the first dream while the last dream is all about new life. But it's also about losing eternal life so we come back to death again. There's also the way the store clerk badgers her about payment right after she bites the apple - that symbolism had escaped me until just this moment. You'd think I'd have noticed an anvil that large.
What else? I like a punchy last line and "Pepper doesn't dream much anymore. But when she does, she's pretty sure it's in black and white" came easily once I had the color/dream theme in mind. It was the last line even in the first draft. Given its grim tone, I should have realized much earlier that the story wasn't going to be a happy one! The title, on the other hand, was a bitch. I went all the way down to the wire on it. Nothing appealed - "In Dreams", "UnMemory", "Trick of the Light", "It All Started With Adam", "In Living Colour" - I hated them all. I finished the story about 4 o'clock on the 21st (deadline ever looming), then thumbed through the last chapters of GO hoping for a word or phrase to leap out at me. When I re-read how Adam created a hole that had always been in the hedge for Dog to escape through and Adam to chase after, I recognized the metaphor for Adam's insidious effect on Pepper and that I'd found a title at last.
Oh, and about the song - I'm not a Pearl Jam fan and didn't even know that "Better Man" was their song until I Googled it so I could cite it correctly in this essay. It was disconcerting to actually read the lyrics that I'd only vaguely heard on the radio. While the words don't align exactly with "A Hole in the Hedge", the feeling they evoke (in me, at least) is startlingly similar. Claustrophobia, despair, resignation....
Pearl Jam, "Better Man"
waitin', watchin' the clock, it's four o'clock, it's got to stop
tell him, take no more, she practices her speech
as he opens the door, she rolls over...
pretends to sleep as he looks her over
she lies and says she's in love with him, can't find a better man...
she dreams in color, she dreams in red, can't find a better man...
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
ohh...
talkin' to herself, there's no one else who needs to know...
she tells herself, oh...
memories back when she was bold and strong
and waiting for the world to come along...
swears she knew it, now she swears he's gone
she lies and says she's in love with him, can't find a better man...
she dreams in color, she dreams in red, can't find a better man...
she lies and says she still loves him, can't find a better man...
she dreams in color, she dreams in red, can't find a better man...
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
yeah...
she loved him, yeah...she don't want to leave this way
she feeds him, yeah...that's why she'll be back again
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
can't find a better...man....
tieleen as part of the Yuletide project and she's asked me to talk about my original intentions for the story (light, humorous) and how it actually turned out (one of the first readers told me it was a nice bit of suicide-inducing angst just in time for the holidays). Given that I'm equally torn between the insecure nobody's interested in me and the inner diva Me! Me! It's all about ME!, I decided that it's close enough to the DVD Commentary meme going around to soothe the worries and justify the ego.When I got my Yuletide assignment, choosing which fandom was easy.
- Johnny Maxwell (any - preferably future)
- My So-Called Life (any)
- Good Omens (Adam/Pepper)
- Life As a House (any)
Let's see: a fandom I do not recognize (anime, perhaps?), a TV show I never watched, a book I adore, and a movie I have not seen. Decisions, decisions.
Oddly enough, I'd just re-read Good Omens, Neverwhere, and Night Watch in the month before signing up for Yuletide, so I felt that my head was definitely in the Pratchett-Gaimen space. But I'd have bet anything that I was closer to Terry than Neil. Little did I know....
Other than reading some highly recced gen and Aziraphale/Crowley, I'm out of the GO fic loop. So I didn't worry that I might be treading any well-beaten paths with my story; it would all be new to me. River said she liked character pieces, atmospheric introspection, and that while she wouldn't say no to a PWP, it would be a bit of a waste of the whole idea of getting obscure fandom fic. This prompted me to take a look at Pepper and Adam as adults and reflect on how surviving Armageddon has shaped them.
From somewhere, my mind conjured up an image: Pepper and Adam in bed. Lots of white linen, sheer billowing curtains, all with a blue filter over it. Straight out of a perfume ad in Vogue or Cosmo, really. The mood was lazy, sated. I tried to riff off this image -- them going to bed, getting up in the morning, going to work -- but it remained a still shot in my mind. They wouldn't move.
So, if they were in bed and wouldn't get out, the next logical step was to consider what happened there. (Other than sex. *g*) Dreams or visions would be a fun and creatively satisfying avenue to explore. I could come up with all sorts of Adam/Pepper relationships and write them up -- a story made up of snippets. (I'm not Plot Girl at the best of times. I own my shortcomings!) Clearly one of them would have to deal with Pepper as War, taking up the sword and winning the Kingdom of Earth for Adam. I kept coming back to that blue filter and realized that the War dream should be red. This led directly to the idea of shaping the visions around colors. Green sprang to mind instantly: The Garden of Eden as re-created by Adam (with an assist from Anathema's ideas about whales, of course). I saw this as a happy vignette, filled with children and butterflies and cuddly lambs. At the same time, I wasn't sure yet if the dreams were caused by Adam's powers leaking through or if it was Pepper's own subconscious dealing with deeply repressed memories of the events in GO.
I was still stuck on the idea of Pepper and Adam being a current couple and tried to create their "real" life. I came up with a bunch of careers for Adam: environmental activist, schoolteacher, author. I put the bedroom in a cottage in Tadfield, a flat in London, a hotel on holiday. I sent Pepper to university, to a newspaper office, an advertising agency. But no matter how I combined them, the fit was off.
It was all Adam's fault. The end of Good Omens implies that he's getting a more subtle and conscious control of his powers and that he'll be able to shape his live and environs to his satisfaction... forever. I find it very difficult to see him adjusting to fit into someone else's life -- he'd be much more likely to adjust them to fit his. (And isn't that a creepy thought just begging to be explored in fic?) He just wouldn't settle down for me.
I'm not sure how I made the leap from Adam/Pepper as a couple to Pepper alone and permanently scarred by knowing Adam. Part of it came from a lyric that popped into my head:
she dreams in color, she dreams in red
can't find a better man
It mostly caught my attention because of the dream-color connection but the melancholy of the can't find a better man resonated with quiet desperation. And that, I realized, was how I kept seeing Pepper. She'd been involved with something bigger than she could have ever conceived as a child and it was still that way as an adult. How could life have any flavor, any color, when locked inside her were memories of such power? How could any man ever compare to Adam, a young god made flesh, the ultimate temptation and the ultimate threat? (More about the song later.)
So finally I gave up on the idea of any sort of healthy, happy Adam/Pepper. This was very annoying, as the deadline was closing in! I had to completely discard the bedroom scene because it didn't belong. The War dream was easy, particularly once I came up with the last line
And every thing they touch, every place they set their eyes, bleeds.
and realized I could recycle the white linens from the bedroom and put them into the tent. The symbolism was a bit heavy-handed but when you're dealing with the Anti-Christ and War, subtlety is pretty much lost anyway, eh?
One of my shortcomings as a writer is a lack of detail -- I forget to use all of the senses when describing things. I realized that I could stretch myself by drowning the story in sensuality (in every sense! Ha, I kill myself) by making the dreams as lush and textured as possible. The more I contrasted them against the mundane details of Pepper's real life, the stronger the disconnect. This gave me the idea of sense triggers for each of the dreams (sound, sight, smell) instead of showing her having them while sleeping.
As The Them realize, the "whole point of gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home." The playing make-believe dream came directly from GO with an (un)healthy dose of The Twilight Zone episode about the little boy who can do anything and sends those who displease him "out to the cornfield". There's a bit of Dick Tracy and The Mask in it, too (that yellow trenchcoat), plus a drop of penny dreadfuls. I enjoyed juxtaposing the cartoon-like details of the childish game with the starkness of Pepper's deaths.
Another recycle was the Garden of Eden dream. But instead of emphasizing the idea of a fresh start and a clean slate as I'd originally planned, I twisted it. Here Pepper is the sinless Eve and Adam is not just the first man but his father Lucifer as well. He wants to recreate the Earth, properly organized this time, but he can't do it without introducing the original sin - knowledge - as well. He's the Serpent and far more dangerous than Crowley ever was. Of course, the perversion here is that Pepper obeys rather than disobeys when Adam offers her the apple. But the Devil prefers to play with a stacked deck, right?
I didn't realize until afterwards that I'd inverted the lifecycle - Pepper dies twice in the first dream while the last dream is all about new life. But it's also about losing eternal life so we come back to death again. There's also the way the store clerk badgers her about payment right after she bites the apple - that symbolism had escaped me until just this moment. You'd think I'd have noticed an anvil that large.
What else? I like a punchy last line and "Pepper doesn't dream much anymore. But when she does, she's pretty sure it's in black and white" came easily once I had the color/dream theme in mind. It was the last line even in the first draft. Given its grim tone, I should have realized much earlier that the story wasn't going to be a happy one! The title, on the other hand, was a bitch. I went all the way down to the wire on it. Nothing appealed - "In Dreams", "UnMemory", "Trick of the Light", "It All Started With Adam", "In Living Colour" - I hated them all. I finished the story about 4 o'clock on the 21st (deadline ever looming), then thumbed through the last chapters of GO hoping for a word or phrase to leap out at me. When I re-read how Adam created a hole that had always been in the hedge for Dog to escape through and Adam to chase after, I recognized the metaphor for Adam's insidious effect on Pepper and that I'd found a title at last.
Oh, and about the song - I'm not a Pearl Jam fan and didn't even know that "Better Man" was their song until I Googled it so I could cite it correctly in this essay. It was disconcerting to actually read the lyrics that I'd only vaguely heard on the radio. While the words don't align exactly with "A Hole in the Hedge", the feeling they evoke (in me, at least) is startlingly similar. Claustrophobia, despair, resignation....
Pearl Jam, "Better Man"
waitin', watchin' the clock, it's four o'clock, it's got to stop
tell him, take no more, she practices her speech
as he opens the door, she rolls over...
pretends to sleep as he looks her over
she lies and says she's in love with him, can't find a better man...
she dreams in color, she dreams in red, can't find a better man...
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
ohh...
talkin' to herself, there's no one else who needs to know...
she tells herself, oh...
memories back when she was bold and strong
and waiting for the world to come along...
swears she knew it, now she swears he's gone
she lies and says she's in love with him, can't find a better man...
she dreams in color, she dreams in red, can't find a better man...
she lies and says she still loves him, can't find a better man...
she dreams in color, she dreams in red, can't find a better man...
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
yeah...
she loved him, yeah...she don't want to leave this way
she feeds him, yeah...that's why she'll be back again
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
can't find a better man
can't find a better...man....
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 08:54 pm (UTC)Anyway, absolutely fascinating commentary. And no problem about tardy responding -- I still haven't got around to replying to people about YT feedback yet....
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Date: 2004-01-28 06:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-29 04:06 am (UTC)It was all Adam's fault. The end of Good Omens implies that he's getting a more subtle and conscious control of his powers and that he'll be able to shape his live and environs to his satisfaction... forever. I find it very difficult to see him adjusting to fit into someone else's life -- he'd be much more likely to adjust them to fit his.
Yeah. That characterisation of Adam is something of a cliche in the (tiny, tiny amount of) GO Them fic there is, and though I see where it comes from and acknowledge that it's pretty canonical, I kind of really really hate it. You did it remarkably well in your story, though, and much more thoughtfully than most, which was what made the difference, I guess.
Johnny Maxwell is indeed a trilogy, as
A response longer than the essay...
Date: 2004-02-01 08:51 am (UTC)I have to say, I'm glad you picked this fandom (though if you ever read the Johnny Maxwell, it should be damned interesting to see what you'd do with them). But the other two fandoms I mentioned are too well-anchored in reality, and the unreality (or hyperreality, maybe) here was one of the best aspects.
I'm not sure how I made the leap from Adam/Pepper as a couple to Pepper alone and permanently scarred by knowing Adam.
Direct psychic connection, I should imagine.
I agree with Afrai about Adam's characterization. The thing that seems off to me about the easiest route to go - Adam changing the person in front of him as he goes along, smoothing things over - is that, in GO, Adam tries so *hard*. He knows he can make things better and he stops, because he gets people, maybe, and because he loves them, and maybe because he's human enough to be all about the trying (and through that, I suppose, also about the slipping.). And at the end of the book there's no telling if this is an Adam whose only extraodinary feature is that he never, ever gets given an assignment he really doesn't want at work, or an Adam who'll slowly but surely start changing people to fit him better, but the way you wrote this story - the slippery out-of-life feel of it, the unclear lines and the moments frozen out of time - it all works much better, for me, than Adam being married to Pepper and changing her bit by bit as she stands besides him.
(I think it also helps that Adam has no apparance in the real world of this story. There's no telling if he's simply not in Pepper's life, or if he's slipped out of the world entirely, became creator rather than someone who lives. Or if, maybe, it really is Pepper's mind and the lingering aftereffects, and Adam is living in a small cottage in Lower Tadfield trying to tend his garden with human means.)
I'd love knowing, by the way, whether the Pepper inside those moments is effected; the worlds she acts in are Adam's, or hers influenced by Adam's presence, but is she still herself, or does she bite the apple and fight the war because he wants her to? I could see it going the first way, but I suppose there might be a component of the second in it.
But no matter how I combined them, the fit was off.
To tell the truth, I didn't even remember I'd asked for Adam/Pepper. I wanted a future Them, and in the end, Adam and Pepper are the only ones who are ready-made for writing; the other two don't, in my mind at least, get enough lines for me to really fall for them, while both Pepper and Adam are infinitely easy to fall for. The shippy aspect was just force of habit, I suppose. And this story fit that perfectly - Adam and Pepper, alone and together, children and adults and forces of nature. I always start wondering, at this point in a response, whether I sound overly enthusiastic; I really do mean all of it, though, and thank you again.