#one day I will get my shit together and we'll do an spn flash fic event or something

[egipci]

re: your flash-fic 'tutorial' (lol), I'm curious: what was "the sentence" that sparked your last few fics? (your choice)

do they normally survive until the final draft?

hello dear friend <3 so I would say a lot of the time "the sentence" ends up being the first or last sentence of a story, but sometimes it goes somewhere in the middle, especially in a longer piece, in which case I'm kinda stuck until I find another sentence to go first. A lot of the time for a flash I need both the first and the last sentence before I even start writing, so I have a general sense of the sound of the story. And I really try to make sure it survives, but it doesn't always happen, in which case it lives somewhere in my drafts until I write a new story for it (if I actually remember, but the good ones tend to stick around!)

So like, for "Vertigo," I'd already had the first sentence playing around in my mind for a long time, and I actually lifted it from a Mary POV fic I was working on (that sentence is sort of a madlib of a first sentence I really like from a Kathryn Davis short story-- which is a great way to come up with "sentences"). And then a final sentence came to me, which according to my gdoc history is

"But then you turned your head up to the sky, so I looked up, and it was huge and black, super-infinite."

I really really wanted the last word to be "super-infinite." I was very much in a John Donne mood (cf. fleas and mysterious bitey things in this story and in "Chorus"). I played around with all variations of "the sky was black and it was super-infinite," and "it was black and super-infinite," and "it was huge and black and super-infinite," "black, super-infinite" etc. for probably way too long. There was a weird discordant thing going on where I didn't necessarily want to write this story in first person, but that last line demanded it. And then by the time I'd finished the bulk of the story that line had to go, in part because of logical/practical concerns, e.g. how are they looking at each other if they sky is black? but also because it didn't sound right. First-person can very easily veer on excessively sentimental, and a fic context is doubly perilous because we know how the characters talk (not that 1st person fic has to sound like a monologue off the show or anything, but you know). And so it was cut, but having it as scaffolding was really helpful for me to figure out that I wanted that stargazing moment and the feeling of smallness that comes with that, which (hopefully) is more subtly translated in "to feel us so small again..."

For "Chorus" the "sentence" was also the first sentence, which had been floating around in a j/d draft since like, May 2022. It was initially "we hung from the rafters" (which now that I think about it could have worked, "We hang from the rafters and we watch," but I guess I liked the rhythm of those first four sentences more: "We watch from the rafters. It’s dusk. He’s in love. We send him home."

For "Miles Ahead" the sentence was that opening fragment and the last line as a unit. "What I was trying to tell you---" came first and I played around with it for a while until I got "is I’ll take you anywhere," and then all the stuff in the middle (the interruption/flashback) came in after. Needless to say, many many hours were spent agonizing over "I'll take you anywhere" vs. "I'd take you anywhere," but I liked the tense-trickery of the first one more.

For this (older) flash, the sentence was the (incredibly baroque lol) final phrase that had been on my mind for a while -- "quiet for little Sammy sleeping, then vigil for little Sammy gone"-- and the whole story is basically written to get to it.

In "Dubuque" (which started off as a flash) the sentence was the first sentence: "In the space of three hours that no-good son of a bitch Lee Webb had Dean swaying on his feet," but the reason the story ended up going further was this bit in the middle: "fingertips over strong muscle loving him and loving the weight of him. Loving his danger. His masculinity," which felt excessive to throw in in a flash.

But like, sometimes the sentence is not a sentence and just more of a story structure I want to play with. This story from earlier this year stalled for a couple of days after I nailed the opening until I remembered Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," so that inspired the structure there. This birthday story has no stand-out "sentence," I just liked the rhythm of "Dad said and Dean said and Sam said," etc. (Though just now I'm noticing the sentence is basically the whole story!)