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morningsound15 · 6 years ago

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Can u do all the odd fic questions on that ask post for perdition? Or really any of ur other fics, I just like hearing abt this kind of stuff

FYI THIS IS VERY LONG I APOLOGIZE

I’m putting most of it under the cut because I don’t want to clog up all the dashes…

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

What a question. I’ve answered something similar to this, mainly the question: What was your inspiration in writing this fic? And I’ve been pretty open about that, generally. (If you’re interested, there are a few longer posts about that and some other insights into my thought process linked here: x x x x x x )

But essentially, I wrote this fic because at the time I was going through a sort of similar situation to Chloe. I was kind of seeing this girl who had a boyfriend… it’s a pretty long and complicated story that I won’t go into for privacy’s sake (both hers and mine). But it wasn’t my finest hour, and definitely not something I’m proud of. So anyway, things had just ended with this girl and I was trying to work through some feelings that I had about it (a lot of anger and confusion and a little heartbreak, mostly), and I was looking for a character/pairing to write this specific situation for, and Bechloe kind of just… came to me. Like it just fell into my lap. And it made more sense than anything else, and when I started writing it just… poured out of me. Like I wrote the first four chapters in a feverish two days where I basically couldn’t stop typing.

But I’ve gotten a lot of questions about why I chose to write the fic the way I did. The question I get most often is basically, why did I write the fic from Chloe’s POV exclusively? Especially during the early days of Perdition, before I wrote the Beca interlude chapter, I had a LOT of people who were practically begging me for Beca’s POV, for her side of the story, for some explanation as to WHY she was doing what she was doing. And I was really hesitant to do that, because I was hesitant to break from the fixed person, singular POV. And I want to explain why. I know I have before, but I want to do it again.

I wanted to write Perdition from exclusively Chloe’s POV because I wanted the story to really focus on her emotions and her involvement in the affair. I feel like so many cheating stories are from the POV of the cheater, or the person being cheated on, and rarely on the ramifications felt by the person who’s being cheated with. I wanted to explore that dynamic.

But I also really wanted to focus on Chloe as a person and as a character. I felt drawn to her as a character partly because we know so little about her in the movies. Beca is the main character, the audience’s established perspective, so we know a lot about her and how she thinks and operates. Because Chloe was basically a blank slate, I felt like I could dig deeper into her character and imagine a lot more backstory for her. I wanted to explore her as a character, and as a writer I felt like she really offered more opportunities than Beca.

I eventually wrote the Beca POV chapter because I really wanted to make sure that both Beca and Chloe were sympathetic characters. I wanted to emphasize the fact that Chloe was providing just one perspective of the affair, and because of that, she was somewhat of an unreliable narrator. I wanted to emphasize that there were two sides to every story, and just because we’ve only seen Chloe’s side of things doesn’t mean that she’s blameless or that she’s completely right and has done nothing wrong. Though I wanted to focus on her/explore her journey, I didn’t want readers to think of her as a faultless victim. (I was also getting a lot of comments criticizing Beca’s character for being heartless/cruel, and I didn’t think that that was the case. I thought their situation was messy and confusing and hard on both of them, and I didn’t want people to think I was using her as a scapegoat to just like… assassinate her character.)

In my mind, no character is perfect. There’s no such thing as a black-and-white situation. No one is inherently good or bad. They’re just people, who make good and bad choices, who make mistakes, who let things get out of hand. I really wanted to be clear on that. So I ended up breaking with my plan and writing the interlude chapter. I think, in the end, I’m glad that I did.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

Good Lord. This fic is so long… There are so many lines I like. How do I even pick?

I have a couple favorite lines of narration. These are just some of them (unsurprisingly, a lot of them are chapter summaries):

From Chapter 1:

(Earlier in the night Chloe stumbled over to Beca on swaying feet, grabbed her hands, and proclaimed that they were going to be “fast friends,” and Beca laughed and winked at her and made some joke about being naked and Chloe felt her stomach bottom out so suddenly that she wondered if she was tipping over backwards.)

From Chapter 4:

Fat Amy showing her vag to the leader of the Free World is not exactly how Chloe envisioned starting her year.

From Chapter 6:

But when she’s on that stage, performing for all those people… when she starts to sing that song, especially in the wake of their fight… something grips her. She feels this pull, this swell of romantic energy like she’s in the midst of a goddamn fairytale, and then she just…

Well, does she have any choice in the matter, really?

(He’s the acapella boy and she’s the acapella girl. This is their story.)

From Chapter 6:

She tries to say everything in that kiss that she’s never had the courage to say. I’ve missed you and I love you and I’m willing to try and I’m sorry and I don’t deserve you and Please just wait for me a little longer.

From Chapter 7:

The summer heat is oppressive in North Carolina. Thick air that feels like soup; slogging days of unendurable murky, foggy, wet waves. When it isn’t raining, the sun beats down against the tops of heads and the backs of necks, cooking cars and superheating pavement, scorching the flesh of bare feet that slap against the ground. The smell of freshly mown grass, new mulch, and — further towards to coast — salt spray permeates everything. Sun screen and bug spray make skin sticky; mosquitos flock from person to person in droves, only driven away by rare and brief breezes off the water. The air feels stagnant and heavy, the days endlessly long.

From Chapter 10:

Beca’s music has always so upbeat, so lively, so full of joy and energy and reckless abandon, all about pounding bass notes and soaring vocals, all about mixing together as many songs as possible until the artistry verges just on the hint of chaos.

From Chapter 11:

She bared herself to the entire world. She exposed every bit of her dirty laundry to millions and millions of people for them to look at, pick through, and analyze. She did the one thing she hates most in the world to prove to Chloe that she can, that she wants to, that she can be a new person, that she’s changed, that secrets and lies are all things in her past, and her future is an open book.

Of course. It’s for her. It’s always been for her.

From Chapter 12:

They’ve been together for a year, Chloe’s been living in LA for eight months, and for the past two months or so she’s taken up a near-permanent residence in Beca’s home. She already owns half of the shoe space, half of the space in the bathroom cabinet, and half of the drawers in Beca’s dresser. Her keys have a permanent spot by the door, her soy milk a permanent spot in Beca’s fridge. Her work schedule is stuck on the wall next to Beca’s calendar. Beca’s Netflix queue is full of Chloe’s favorite shows, Chloe’s favorite movies. All but Chloe’s least-favorite outfits have migrated to Beca’s closet, and all of the books she’s currently reading have found a place on Beca’s bedside table.

5: What part was hardest to write?

The hardest part to write were the years where Beca and Chloe didn’t talk. There were whole chapters that just dealt with Chloe and her depression, or Chloe and her inner monologue, or Chloe and her new life in Denver, or Chloe and her love life sans Beca. And those chapters were hard to write. I was really worried they would be boring, or that they would turn off readers, or that people wouldn’t respond well to Chloe dating other people, or that people wouldn’t like the inclusion of original characters, or that people would get annoyed with how they dragged on, or that people would object to the distinct lack of Beca for so much of the story.

But I really felt those chapters were necessary, because I really felt that Chloe had to learn for herself and grow and get better on her own before she and Beca could reconcile. I believed that, in order for Beca and Chloe to truly be together in a healthy way, they had to become healthy on their own. They couldn’t just be together because they fell together, but because they chose to be together. I wanted them to fight for each other, to realize that they weren’t using each other as an emotional crutch or a way to avoid dealing with the problems in their lives, but to realize that they actually helped each other, that each made the other stronger. So despite the fact that those chapters were really hard to write, I’m really glad that I did write them.

7: Where did the title come from?

This may be embarrassing to admit, but I actually have an entire document just of fic titles/small little ideas/summaries/exchanges of dialogue. So the title Perdition had been sitting around in my mind for a while, way before I even got the idea for the story. I was just waiting for the perfect fic to use it on. (I’m kinda obsessed with pretentious titles, if you guys haven’t noticed.)

As I explained in the summary for the story, “perdition” is a word that comes from Christian theology, and it means: “a state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unpenitent person passes after death.” And I liked that; this idea that both Beca and Chloe understood that what they were doing was entirely wrong and unjust and, if you subscribe to that sort of belief system, “sinful”, but that neither of them really cared. They continued on with their affair with (seemingly) unrepentant, reckless abandon. I thought it summed up the themes of the story nicely. The beginning of the story, at least. The set up for the dramatic arc.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

While I knew how the fic was going to end when I started writing it (generally, at least, I knew that Beca and Chloe were going to end up together, and the Grammys acceptance speech was actually like the 5th scene I wrote), it still went through a lot of different drafts. In an early version of the story, Jesse was the one to walk in on Beca and Chloe mid-sexual encounter, but I ended up really hating what the scene said and how it treated Jesse as a character (and the fact that it took away Beca’s agency by denying her the chance to confess), so I got rid of that quickly.

Originally, Emily played a much smaller role in the story. But I liked her as a naïve sort of foil to Beca + Chloe; I liked her optimism and her almost-hero-worship of the two of them; and I liked being able to build a mentor-mentee relationship between Beca and Emily. So she ended up playing a bigger role in the story than originally intended.

In the original draft of the story, there were much fewer chapters. I think originally I only planned on having 6 (4 years of Beca + Chloe’s affair, 1 year apart, and then the chapter where they get back together), but I’ve never been very good at keeping my writing succinct. It just kept growing and growing and by the end I doubled the chapter count. But it felt right to me. All of the additions felt necessary. In the end, I don’t mind the length, because I told the story I wanted to tell.

Raquel was also a pretty late addition to the fic. I toyed a lot with the idea of having Chloe only go on a few unfulfilling dates with men during her time apart from Beca, because a part of me liked the idea of having Beca be her only female long-term romantic partner. But then it felt like I was trying to erase the bisexuality I had established for Chloe early on, so I wrote her a girlfriend. And then I ended up REALLY liking Raquel, so I gave her more and more to do, and I made their relationship stronger and stronger.

Originally, I wanted Chloe to be dating someone when she started having romantic feelings for Beca again, and then realize that she’d only ever really loved Beca etc. etc. etc., but in the end I didn’t like what that did to the story. It felt too much like the beginning, like Chloe hadn’t grown enough as a character. And besides, that’s just not realistic. Very few people have like… ONE true love. And in the end, I wanted Beca and Chloe to choose to be together, like I said. I wanted to have the possibility for other partners, the possibility for happiness elsewhere, and then have them decide to be together anyway. Because they wanted to, because that’s what felt right. So I felt like it was really important to build up their friendship again from the ground up. They couldn’t just leap into romance again after so long and after everything they went through. They needed a strong foundation first. And to have Beca see Chloe happy in a relationship, happy without her… I thought it was important for them to both know that it was possible.

11: What do you like best about this fic?

There are a LOT of things I like about this fic. I like its perspective, I like what it says. I like that it’s almost entirely from Chloe’s POV. I like that it’s a character study more than anything (which is something I’d never previously done). I like that it’s really long (and that I ACTUALLY FINISHED IT which didn’t seem likely for a while). I like that it takes its time, that it really builds to a natural conclusion, that it doesn’t feel rushed or hurried, that there’s a payoff that feels earned. I like all of that stuff.

But what I like most is the impact it’s had. I have gotten such extraordinary feedback from this story, things you guys wouldn’t believe. Not just comments and asks, but individual messages from people who have reached out to me and told me what reading Perdition meant to them. And that’s… I never expected that. It was just supposed to be a sexy little romp, something for me to work out my own feelings and practice writing some smut, and then it turned into this… behemoth of a story that SO many people read and responded to. And I never really anticipated that. But I’m SO glad that I wrote it. And I’m so glad so many of you liked it.

13: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

People have asked me this question a lot! And I definitely did have a Perdition playlist or two going while I was writing it. It’s funny to look back on that music now, because it’s from like over a year ago and I don’t listen to those playlists often anymore, but I’ll link them below if people are interested:

https://morningsound15.tumblr.com/tagged/perdition-playlist

(tagged/perdition-playlist)

15: What did you learn from writing this fic?

What a question. And a hard one to answer. I think anytime with writing, you end up learning a lot. About yourself, about your characters, about your own personal style. I do believe that writing this story really made my overall writing stronger. The fact that I was able to finish it and give people the ending they wanted was also huge for me, since most of my other really long stories are still unfinished.

I’m not 100% sure what I learned from writing this. I think I’m still learning. Every time I go back and reread it (and I did go back and reread most of it to answer these questions) I feel like I draw something new from the story. And every time I answer questions about it I feel like I understand my writing in ways I never have before.

#anonymous #asks #perdition #questions #long post

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