, felt like the beginning of the "real", complex story (both before are very real but can stand on their own, sorry I don´t know if I explain it well).
In general, TTESIT is the start of the larger plot. The first two have too much plot to be PWP, but they're the story of two people dealing with only so much of the plot as they want to deal with. TTESIT has a lot more elements in play, and that was part of why it was important to me to go so far as using other POVs, if only briefly; to make it clear that there was a larger story in play here.
I just really struggled with how far I wanted to take it. There was a version of things where Caroline and Bonnie came along on the rescue mission. Another where I got into more detail about what was going on with Alaric in those scenes instead of putting a lot of it off to scenes with Elena in them, or whether it should be Alaric himself that realized Elena was missing. A version where I thought about having Matt more involved, or maybe tell that opening more through Caroline's eyes rather than Damon's. Once I took the story outside of the Elena/Elijah focus it was harder to figure out what the focus should be.
And then yeah, chapter 5 sort of swings back to the style of the first two installments, where it's the two of them working through the plot stuff as they want to. But it was a difficult tone to walk after the Klaus chapter (which I had a really easy time writing actually, I made a comment at the time that it's easier to write Klaus being a horrible awful person than it is for me to write Stefan and Damon as not so awful that you wonder why Elena spends any time with them). I didn't want her to be completely forgiving or him to be completely apologetic, yet have them moving past it together in spite of that. They couldn't be casual about what Klaus did, but that's not their only concern.
It was a difficult tone to get right, especially since I had in mind it would be the last chapter of this installment and I wasn't going to get to the sexy part in this round, but I wasn't sure how to bring it to some resolution without at least implying they were headed that way. But once I was getting it right, I knew they kind of needed to come together in the end; hence why this chapter ended with the obvious clue that they were back on that track. Of course then I went on and wrote the sex into this installment anyway because I really wasn't satisfied with that as an ending; so again, the final version of this took a while to find.
(This should be a clue as to how much I'm babbling when I have full text to comment on, the commentary's getting pretty long.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-10-26 05:14 pm (UTC)In general, TTESIT is the start of the larger plot. The first two have too much plot to be PWP, but they're the story of two people dealing with only so much of the plot as they want to deal with. TTESIT has a lot more elements in play, and that was part of why it was important to me to go so far as using other POVs, if only briefly; to make it clear that there was a larger story in play here.
I just really struggled with how far I wanted to take it. There was a version of things where Caroline and Bonnie came along on the rescue mission. Another where I got into more detail about what was going on with Alaric in those scenes instead of putting a lot of it off to scenes with Elena in them, or whether it should be Alaric himself that realized Elena was missing. A version where I thought about having Matt more involved, or maybe tell that opening more through Caroline's eyes rather than Damon's. Once I took the story outside of the Elena/Elijah focus it was harder to figure out what the focus should be.
And then yeah, chapter 5 sort of swings back to the style of the first two installments, where it's the two of them working through the plot stuff as they want to. But it was a difficult tone to walk after the Klaus chapter (which I had a really easy time writing actually, I made a comment at the time that it's easier to write Klaus being a horrible awful person than it is for me to write Stefan and Damon as not so awful that you wonder why Elena spends any time with them). I didn't want her to be completely forgiving or him to be completely apologetic, yet have them moving past it together in spite of that. They couldn't be casual about what Klaus did, but that's not their only concern.
It was a difficult tone to get right, especially since I had in mind it would be the last chapter of this installment and I wasn't going to get to the sexy part in this round, but I wasn't sure how to bring it to some resolution without at least implying they were headed that way. But once I was getting it right, I knew they kind of needed to come together in the end; hence why this chapter ended with the obvious clue that they were back on that track. Of course then I went on and wrote the sex into this installment anyway because I really wasn't satisfied with that as an ending; so again, the final version of this took a while to find.
(This should be a clue as to how much I'm babbling when I have full text to comment on, the commentary's getting pretty long.)