Fic Postmortem: "Through a Glass Darkly"

[hobgoblinn]

Ok, for some people, writing fanfic is an end in itself. For me, it’s a means to an end. See, I want to grow up to be a writer. Except for the growing up part. So here is the obligatory postmortem on “Through a Glass Darkly”, the what-I-learned with interesting side notes on the process of creating my second completed bit of fiction in over 20 years, for the reading pleasure of one Lady antennapedia, who taught me how to do these, and her kitten. And maybe you.



First, the tale came from the very fun process of writing some prompts for the tenyearsofbuffy ficathon. The process of writing some possible plot bunnies down was instructive in itself, and I’m sorry nobody picked any of them up and ran with them. This particular prompt was originally so detailed the community mod had to insist I pare it down. That should have told me something, and when Snyder’s ghost started whispering to me, it did. I picked my own prompt with only the vaguest idea what the story would be about, and no idea whatsoever what it would become.

The main thing that drew me to this idea was -- what’s it Like to be a ghost? I hit on a kind of purgatory/ self imposed isolation-- chosen before death and made “real” after, when the soul no longer has the ability to choose its eternal path. And I found Lent to be a great season for such reflections-- at times, the readings for the day gave me the insight into what needed to be going on with Snyder’s twisted little soul.

I actually got a draft completed before the ficathon deadline. But when I looked at it, except for the creepy first part, there was something... missing. It was still a series of events, teetering on the edge of being a story. And I realized that what would make it a story would be a parallel journey-- Snyder’s to some kind of eternal destination, and Buffy, to a realization that adults are sometimes just as lost as kids, doing the best they can with imperfect information, seeing “through a glass darkly”, as St. Paul puts it.

Both these issues-- mortality and the struggle with what it means to be an adult-- are things I’ve been struggling with of late. One of my friends has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. She will leave behind an 8 year old son, one of my son’s best friends. Who is named for his Uncle Mark, a man he never met, who left behind a daughter of about the same age when he died of brain cancer about 10 years ago. It’s unfair on so many levels, I can’t even express it adequately. But it’s been making me face my own mortality. Our society spends so much energy trying to avoid the process of aging and death, that we really don’t have good coping mechanisms for such thoughts. Even if we have some kind of religious faith, and mine varies from day to day.

The other issue is just-- where’s the damned instruction manual for this being an adult gig? I missed getting mine. If you have one you can spare, please shoot it my way. Seriously, I realized, looking at Buffy and Snyder being off away from the others for much of the first draft, that this had to be from their alternating points of view, and that her issue had to be about finding out that adults are people, as misguided, frightened, and lost as she was feeling. That the feelings she was having at 19 were still going to be with her at 39. Or 59, if she lived that long.

So I reluctantly gave up a nice “finding a ghost in Giles apartment” scene from his Point of View, and rewrote it from Buffy’s. She wasn’t even There in the draft. I found her voice hard to write, much harder than Snyder’s. When I figured out he was a New Jersey Catholic Schoolboy, I could just look around the very Catholic culture of greater Cincinnati for models of 1950s style piety and devotion. I know men like Snyder, and I know nuns. Even very lapsed Catholics carry certain habits of thought from their childhood parochial school experiences, and we have ample evidence that some of the kinds of things he would have picked up in such an environment were still with him. Rules. Order. What I wondered was, could being forced to really see the reality of Sunnydale, and of these kids’ lives, change someone? Believably?

I have a hard time believing in true evil. It exists, of course. But more evil in the world is done by basically Good people acting with the best of intentions. Social workers spring to mind, from my own life. Even good people can be seduced by power, because the human lot is so essentially powerless. Feeling that we understand, that we can control what happens to us, especially when we want good things, like safety for those we care about, order-- it’s hard to resist. M. Scott Peck examines good and evil in People of the Lie, and the first time I read it, I understood my in laws and their son and the evil done by their panicked refusal to accept and deal with the reality of his mental illness. And, for a time, my refusal to accept the reality of my world and choices.

So, I had a theme, a story worth telling. One of the great things I also had was some fantastic betas, and a very special companion on the journey. I had recently read something by clavally, a good first draft of a story. I invited her to read some notes and successive drafts, and I found the process of explaining my problems and choices to another person very helpful in figuring out what I was trying to do. Certainly, the flaws of my early versions were glaringly obvious, so I hope that clavally found it helpful in a non threatening way-- we always see others’ flaws better than our own. And her observations early on were also helpful-- she showed me what a reader who wasn’t me would find in the tale I was laying out. And I also shared drafts on Google documents, and the conversation with several betas at various times was also very much a learning experience for me. And fun for them as well, I think, seeing what other people picked up on.

I’m pleased with the way the tale turned out. I see some continuity errors-- how clearly Snyder sees is dependent on which part of the story we’re in, for instance. [Update: I think this problem is mostly fixed now.] A bigger one is a time error in the final part-- I decided to push Snyder’s return to Sunnydale High to almost dawn pretty late in the game, and forgot that Buffy would be with Giles after that processing, and not want the light off in the dark as she goes to sleep. I didn’t notice that one until after I’d posted it. And my betas can’t be blamed because I refocused both sections to solidify time cues after it left their hands.

Both errors would probably have been more obvious to me if I could bring myself to simplify my writing more. I like giving color and flavor to a scene, but even now, I find myself going in and deleting a word here or there from the posted material. It’s almost like how student teachers have to learn to live with the discomfort of silence for a while, to let the students come to the answer in their own time. Police officers use silence with suspects, who will often break down and say incriminating things just to break the uncomfortable silence. Human nature. Some of my descriptive writing is good, but there’s such a thing as too much. And there are some dialogue patterns Lady Antenna was good enough to point out to me. Those will be work for the future, though I must say they are better now than they were in earlier versions.

A final thing I found, having some parallel themes and a structure, was that I was able to consciously strengthen certain recurring images and ideas. Sight and blindness, even dealt with inconsistently, were a big part of Snyder. He’s piecing together a lot from imperfect and incomplete information. Just as we all are. There’s a natural/unnatural order/disorder compartmentalization going on with Snyder as he sorts everything out, and as he willfully refuses to see the Magic touching him personally. There’s also a bit of life=disorder/ death=order suggested, particularly in the section where Snyder observes he was to be buried in the cemetery they were walking through.

As I tried to sort out for myself why Snyder was the way he was, I was able to use an event from my own life, from a choral workshop I attended as a kid. The tenors were snickering about a passage they kept missing, and the director stopped them with a glare and told them that until they were uncomfortable enough about the error, they weren’t going to be able to fix it. It struck me that most change is like that-- we humans frequently cling even to really bad situations until they become so unbearable we have to change. What if Snyder Really Believes he’s doing some kind of public service, being the agent of discomfort and therefore, change?

Another recurring image I wish I’d done a little better was the idea of puzzles. I should mention I rewatched all the scenes with Snyder in them, straight through on a Saturday, and I was struck with how fixated he is on puzzles, figuring things out. Of course, his prejudices keep him from having all the pieces, or assessing them appropriately-- in life, he’s frequently trying to figure out how everything can be Summers’ fault. In death, he gets uncomfortable enough to start being honest with himself, to let his illusions fall away. That’s kind of what I think Purgatory, if such exists, must be like. If “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” how’s a soul clinging to its illusions going to be able to see that truth? If we accept that God’s not going to force himself on anyone, Purgatory’s as good an explanation for how that lifetime of built up defenses gets worn away, as quickly or as slowly as we choose. I kind of subscribe to C. S. Lewis’ explanations about a lot of things. God doesn’t send us to hell as much as we choose to be the kind of person who wouldn’t want to go to heaven, who wouldn’t be happy there until we let go of some of our cherished illusions and rationalizations.

The plot device of the Mayor placing a compulsion on Snyder to make him “keep an eye on” Buffy and Giles was obvious very early on. One thing I really like is where Buffy realizes and respects Snyder’s courage for bringing himself to ask about the Mayor, to face how completely he had supported that evil masquerading as all the things he valued-- order, rules, structure, power. I also like the bit in the last section about things growing riotously out of control, of life finding a way to thrive in the midst of destruction. I’d make that more solid throughout if I were going back to rewrite, too.

I also like its being a Christopher medal Snyder finds as the last remaining vestige of himself. Appropriate for one about to take the ultimate journey, and appropriate as a link to someone he had very much loved in his limited way as a child. I suspect Snyder had a family that did not know how to show love, and that his psychological makeup was such that puzzles and objects were far more comfortable for him than emotions.

I also had fun with the final discussion in Snyder’s office, not only for the echoes of all the other times they had sat there as adversaries, but also bringing the opening scene in Snyder’s office full circle. Order and disorder still matter to him, and old habits die hard, but he’s got something new as well. A new trust, a willingness to be vulnerable, to admit he was wrong. And Buffy, who is frequently figuring things out in her capacity as Slayer, now takes up his fascination with puzzles just he finally lets all that go. But the difference is, her thoughts are not directed at keeping reality at arm’s length, but trying to truly understand him, and herself. To do her own kind of growing.

I also like Giles’ words to Willow and Tara about magic having consequences. It always bothered me in Season 6 that Giles was holding Willow to some kind of standard about that-- but when did he ever Teach her all these things about the forces of Nature? Maybe here.

I struggled a lot with the Epilogue, even though that conversation was part of what I wanted Buffy to have gotten out of the whole experience. Like Snyder, Buffy reexamines her prejudices and assumptions, and they help her grow up into the kind of adult we see shouldering the responsibilities of life and family in Season 5. Season 6 and 7 were such travesties mostly because they completely abandoned the growth and maturity she had come to by Checkpoint. I won’t say by The Gift because I agree there’s some very unhealthy suicidal stuff going on with Buffy by the end of Season 5, a lot of very unresourceful atypical choices.

But I also wanted to give some plausible reason why Giles might be wanting to leave by the end of this summer, when he’s just found out how vital a part of this family he really is. Buffy’s musings about people who cling to their beliefs no matter how wrong-- I meant to have Giles start rethinking his own assumptions. But as I got to writing it, I realized that Giles shared something else with Snyder-- a Role. A set of habits that dictated his adult thoughts and actions. Buffy challenges him to drop the role, and one of the consequences of that is that he starts wondering what his place in Sunnydale is without it. That could probably be clearer, but it’s Buffy’s point of view, and she has never been percepto girl-- not since about season 2. I don’t think the epilogue ending is as strong as Snyder’s last vision, but my betas, particularly theblackmare, felt Buffy’s epiphany needed to be on equal footing with Snyder’s. So I kept part 4 and the epilogue as one long section.

So, that’s my postmortem. I hope it’s served as a good insomnia aid if nothing else. If anyone has questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. And if anyone has other ghost!Snyder stories they can recall, even just basic plot info, I’d love to see other takes on this idea.

Comments

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Thanks for writing this - I always like to see insights into why people make the creative decisions they do. Sometimes the structure and symbolism is obvious - but sometimes it kind of works at a subconscious level, so readers are affected by it without understanding quite why, unless they re-read lots of times... or have it pointed out to them by a friendly author (or teacher....).

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm glad you found it interesting. I like seeing this kind of discussion, myself. And in this case, I've been able to make some small changes with this discussion in my conscious mind, things that strengthen what I say above I was trying to do.

Thanks again for the comment.

[clavally.livejournal.com]

I thought it ironic that you mention not feeling adult, etc, because of all the people on my flist, you always strike me as being the most adult-like. Maybe it's just your writing style, but my impression of you is that you're very level-headed and although you've hit bumps along the way, you've learned lots from your hardships and stand strong against whatever life throws at you. I also gather from your posts how protective and maternal you feel towards, not only your children, but the younger people in your life (for exaple, when you made your co-workers wear ties).

So, we have steadfast,wise, strong, helpful and caring. You, my dear, are a wonderful example of what an adult should be and I hope one day to grow up to be like you.

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

You're too kind, my dear. I think one of the main things I've learned is that Everybody is just as lost as everybody else. Except for a couple of crazies who don't realize it. But I still cling to this childlike idea that other people are more grown up than I, that they have more clues. Probably because it give me some hope that Someday, I'll not be so clueless, myself. Just as well that'll never happen, since that's an illusion too, and not a terribly healthy one in the long run.

I think you're doing fine, at any rate, too. Least we can be all good and lost together.