#benafee talks about writing

[benafee]

not to be that person or anything but i read all of remaking the world in like 4 days and i desperately need to know if theres any possible chance that it could one day be updated

Considering it’s been well over a year I’m shocked this is the first message I’ve gotten of this type so it’s cool. Considering where I left things in the last chapter some may even say it’s warranted.

The good news is I will definitely be updating “remaking the world.” Bad news is I’m shit with timeframes and a perfectionist to boot so I can’t promise it will be updated soon. I really hope to get at least one chapter of a fic done and posted by the end of the year. It’s a toss up whether the first update will be for “remaking the world” or “eternity is our friend” (my princess bride au which somehow also became long and over complicated). Both are fighting me so it’s just a matter of which one I beat into submission first.

[benafee]

...oops?

Do you ever just…cry at 2 in the morning because you’re thinking about one of @benafee’s fics? Because yeah

[agentsnickers]

just for fun, some sneak peeks at current wips:

1:

“Hello, everyone, I have an important announcement to make!” Race calls. Spot, who has at this point been married to Race for nearly two years, sighs heavily. “You do?” “We can swear in the house again!” Race announces. “Aisling Moira Conlon is officially a teenager!”

2:

“Look, I’m, like, sure there’s something going on,” Leah says, leaning forward on her elbows. “I have never seen two teachers not from the same class talk as much as Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Kelly.”

3:

Benny snorts, despite his best effort not to. “Right, of course. Could we tone down the sass?” “Uncle Les says I got a natural aptitude for sass,” says Leah. “Uncle Les needs to stop expanding your vocabulary if this is what he’s gonna do with it,” David grumbles.

4:

Kath got caught up in a conversation with Davey about sprinkles in beverages (he was adamantly against, but she asked for extra in an effort to cram as much sugar as possible into her coffee) almost immediately, both of them passionate even though the topic was basically nonsense.

5:

Confronting Pulitzer had been stupid, and he hadn’t even told Davey that was what he was planning to do, which meant that even yesterday afternoon he’d known it was stupid. Davey would’ve told him not to come.

[penzyroamin]

11, 15, 22!

!! thank u for asking!

11. have you ever written a fic for a concept you know someone else has done before? how did it impact your writing process or feelings after posting?

(averts my eyes from my soulmate au)

hksddksjdhsdksjds in all seriousness my fics are born from such a weird little center of my brain that i honestly dont think any of my fics from the last year and a half are like. carbon copies of an idea i’ve already read. even with popular tropes like the soulmate au i throw my own twist in there-- i.e. jack being able to directly interact w the strings and knowing davey is his soulmate beforehand.

the closest ive ever gotten to really being Aware that i was coming late to something is what i will loosely refer to as Blue Moon Adjacent. but thats allowed because ella and i are married and therefore all our property is shared. (not gonna tag u on every single post i talk abt u bc i discuss u constantly and i wouldnt do that to ur notifs)

disclaimer: i do not know how property law works. but lets just say it works like that

also mine is less sad than hers. and is somehow an even slower burn. (side note, is it just me or has my buildup to relationships gotten CRAZY long as of late??? tied together, flowers... these bitches arent allowed to kiss until theyve suffered for years)

15. have you ever purposefully written one fandom/fic idea over another because you knew it’d be more popular?

God I Wish I Had The Self Control To Do This. no i do what the adhd tells me to do. if i had this level of self preservation i wouldnt have written for aaip, a musical that has, as far as i can tell, three people who actively talk about it. i honestly wish i could do this because maybe then i would be able to like. Capture Lightning like some other folks have been doing to just get. insane feedback.

short answer: no, i am content with the me-and-the-mutuals echo chamber of validation

22. has there ever been anyone who’s made you freak out because THEY read your work and followed/favorited/reviewed?

hmm. well there’s you. i lost ALL of my shit when ella commented on my stuff bc i had been like. jonesing over her writing for a while. whenever jules (@timetogoslumming) rbs my writing i have a little momentary ��um. what” sort of moment. for a lot of other people its kind of worked in reverse? certainly with @benafee and @weisenbachfelded there was this situation where i got a really sweet comment and checked their profile and read their writing and then went. Wait. Me? You Took The Time To Compliment ME??? obviously kath @thefactsofthematter shocked the hell out of me by like. knowing i existed. idk all my mutuals/friends/weird circle of writers are very talented im just constantly impressed by yall <3

[benafee]

I have done nothing to deserve the response that “remaking the world” has gotten and continues to receive but I have resigned myself to the mystery and will simply write the rest of the fic in a constant state of bafflement 

[benafee]

I was so blinded by the satisfaction of finishing the most technically difficult chapter of “remaking the world” that I forgot I still have to write the most emotionally difficult chapter of “remaking the world”

[benafee]

someone tagged remaking the world as “impatiently waiting for updates” and, honestly, same

[benafee]

god bless fanfic commenters who quote your stories back at you because I absolutely forget half of what I write

[benafee]

So I’ve gone back and edited/extended the first 25 chapters of “remaking the world.” I wasn‘t going to say anything about it because I was doing this for me far more than I was doing this for anyone else, but then I realized that it would probably be bad form to add over 17k to an in-progress story without telling anyone.

[benafee]

Hi benafee! Here’s a few qs for ✨variety✨

If you had to pick a side character in one of your fics to write an entire long fic about, who would you pick? What would that fic look like?

What is your writing process like? How much do you prep/outline beforehand? Who are your style inspirations?

In Remaking the World, how is Sarah doing? Is she spiraling as badly as David, and does she know how badly or why he’s having a bad time? Does she know that he’s in love with Jack? Also I JUST noticed that this last chapter doesn’t have a word in the title- am I reading too much into it, or is that because David has lost so much control and can’t pin anything down right now?

Oh these are good.

First though, I'm just going to quickly respond to your answer about the most memorable scenes thing here

the scene describing Jack’s mom from his picture. Idk why it stuck so much with me, but I think about it all the time. It’s an imagined person from an imagined picture and neither of them knew her, but not even close to imaginary at all at the same time. I feel like I haven’t read an “I love you” like that before

I mean thank you so much. This was one of the first scenes I'd planned out for this story and I'm very happy the emotional weight I attached to this moment came through to you.

However my gratitude is somewhat tempered by indignity at the fact that I now must admit that I have spent an inordinate amount of time planning out a Kloppman-centric pre-canon (and pre-remaking the world) fic. I am writing it almost entirely for the sake of one (1) scene but isn't that always the case? Anyways, here's the rough summary:

All things considered, Bram knows he ought to be content with his lot in life. 

But Sister Martha keeps “checking in” and Mrs. Oliver’s on the warpath and Otto wants to introduce Bram to his sister and Danny won’t tell him what’s wrong and Nick and Louis aren’t being careful and Charlie keeps asking hard questions and and Patrick has it out for the new kid and Race keeps scamming Albert in the dice games they shouldn’t be playing in the first place and Jack’s up to something.

Or: the longest six months of Bram Kloppman’s life. 

Should be fun!

My writing process is, in a word, involved. I do indeed work off a plan. Many plans. For long fics (all my fics) I like to develop a few outlines - one full outline of the work, separate outlines for each chapter which I will work into, a document for developing/tracking themes, recurring motifs, and other important elements in the story, a few documents about important background information and research, and then another document where I'll jot down lines, elements, and scenes that I'd like to include and have yet to find a place for. From there I'll either proceed to slowly write into the chapter outlines based on my whims or I'll let it percolate in the back of my head for months or even years, often feeling incredibly guilty about my lack of progress, only to have it come together when I least expect it. I'm learning to accept the latter as part of my process and trying to release the guilt aspect. Most of my fics are still largely a result of process rather than planning, and sometimes a not small amount of dumb luck - I'm still tickled that the Latin root words of one of my recurring motifs built into a full transitional section which included a reasonably good metaphor about David's complicated feelings towards his schooling. You can't plan that shit. Well you probably could but I sure didn't.

As far as inspiration... I'm not sure. I'd say my writing is pretty typical for fiction writing. It's likely that there are people that unconsciously influence my writing. I reread The History of Love by Nicole Krauss a while ago and noticed that she also has a habit of slipping deeply sad lines into the middle of her narration like they're innocuous sentences. I've also taken a lot of inspiration from poetry, but that's more contributed to an awareness of form and approach than any directly trackable path of influence.

As for Sarah... I mean she's already had two pretty major breakdowns during this fic so she's not doing great. As far as how much she knows... there's definitely more revealed over the course of the fic so I don't want to get too specific here. She definitely knows something is wrong and she definitely does not know the full story, and, combined, this will lead to problems.

And finally, you really should have more faith in your interpretive abilities ;)

[benafee]

I would love to know more about what we can expect in the next chapter of eternity is our friend. Do we have to wait much longer for Davey and Jack to reunite?

The next chapter of "Eternity is our friend" is titled "The Announcement," and will bridge the fic back into the plot of The Princess Bride. A lot of things are going to happen in this chapter. There are more than a few twists. I did have to go in and add few new tags.

The following chapter is tentatively titled "The Kidnapping." I say tentatively because if you have read the novel you know that canonically the entire middle part of the book is a single chapter. I have already broken this single chapter into three chapters, but I have chosen to keep the two full cut away backstory sections for the Inigo and Fezzik characters and slated them for chapter 5. I really like how Goldman formatted these sections in the novel, but I may choose to break them out into stand-alone chapters if chapter 5 ends up... over 40k? In any case, if you know the book or even the movie, you know what's coming in chapter 5 of this fic. Well... you sort of know.

[benafee]

After all of your meticulous planning - is there anything you've started to set up and then changed your mind about, or realized after the fact that you wanted to include but it was too late?

"Meticulous planning" might be a bit overgenerous, Finn. 

Under the cut because you gave me the opportunity for self-criticism so this got long. 

As is probably evident, "The Unvarnished Truth" and "Whatever way you have to love" have both been stalled because of exactly this. In terms of “The Unvarnished Truth” I realized that while there were a lot of forthcoming scenes and plot points that I was excited about, the actual sequencing of the plot I’d developed left a lot to be desired. My attempts to correct these issues revealed that it wasn’t just an issue with the story as it progressed but also an issue with the story as a whole - tone, writing style, relationships, plot limitations. As a result I’m basically going to have to rewrite the story. I kind of want to use this as an opportunity to challenge myself to write a story of a more respectable length. We’ll see how that goes. In terms of “whatever way you have to love” I pushed out the first two chapters faster than I usually would because it was supposed to be a holiday present (sorry Penzy). As a result, I wish I’d held back a bit on David’s internal monologue in chapter 2 and instead slowly revealed those reflections over the course of the story. Also, though the story was always post-canon canon-compliant, I’ve only recently realized the plot potential of revealing the full backstory of how my characterization of Jack and David connect to the original musical characters so that was a bit of a “duh” moment I had. 

You can see why I quibbled with meticulous now, huh? 

As far as “Remaking the world,” I think the 17k I recently added to earlier chapters shows that there were more than I few things I wanted to change. Because it was my first fic and I didn’t have a lot of faith in my storytelling, I did quickly rush through David’s first sixteen years on earth. If I did it again, I might have spent more time establishing David’s connection to his family and community, his experiences in school, and his past friendships. I’ve already developed a work-around for this, so it’s not the end of the world. Also for all that this story revolves around languages and words, I really don’t engage in the differences between Polish, English, Russian, and Yiddish in terms of fundamental structure and cultural background aside from the occasional joke and idiom? This is absolute laziness on my part, and there’s lots of really cool things I could have incorporated into the story to reflect this pretty fundamental part of David’s character but oh well. This is a hobby, I keep having to remind myself. Other than all that, there are still a lot of elements (particularly in terms of the social/political situation of the time) that I know I’ve been clumsy about. In all honesty - and sorry to all the folks that have praised me for “historical accuracy” - the social and political realities of this fic are of a very modern sensibility. The historical details I’ve added are more to establish ambiance and setting. So it’s very much not an accurate reflection of the period but... I’d argue that writing the story in this manner is the only way to keep it accurate to the original musical. I saw Katherine without a chaperone and decided anything goes. In any case, there are still a lot of elements that I could have handled differently and probably better. Also I did not mean to make it so long, but that probably goes without saying. 

[benafee]

i would LOVE to know more about The Jack Kelly Trauma Train 

Genuinely, my first reaction was "of course you would."

"The Jack Kelly Trauma Train" will be a stupidly long Jack-centric canon-compliant/remaking the world alternate POV fic where I delve into the backstory I invented for him and track how it shapes his actions in canon and in "remaking the world" (mind you, I will endeavor to make it a stand-alone fic, because no one should be forced to read my veritable tome of a fanfiction just to read a new fic). It’s... honestly, it’s going to be rather dark at some points. 

Here's a snippet:

“Refuge?” Jack repeated, testing the word on his tongue, see it that made them make sense. His voice was gummy, his tongue thick and shapeless in his mouth. He swallowed heavily, grimacing at the taste. “What’s-”

The man huffed and shut his eyes tight. He must be tired. Or tired of Jack. Tia Adelia did that when she was tired of Jack.

‘Hey!” The hands were back on his arms, warm and tight. Jack looked up. The man was glaring down at him. “We don’t got time for this kid; just get in the cart.” He jerked his head to where the other officer was loading the other kids into the carriage.

The Refuge.

A refuge.

Yeah, Jack needed one of those.

[benafee]

Also, memorable scenes, aka things in Remaking that I cannot stop thinking about: David in the laundry room before the boys find him, David telling off York at the meeting with Brooklyn/"they should", and that scene when Jack tells David about his family and their ankles are touching.

(Please know that this is an incomplete list of things you've written that haunt me, just the ones that come up first in my brain.)

I knew as soon as I requested these answers that you'd go for the laundry scene so thank you for fulfilling my expectations. And this is two for the ankles now so that's fun. I should make a chart. It's always good to make at least one ridiculous chart a month.

The York scene (that whole chapter really) is one of my personal favourites and one of the most difficult to write even though it is far shorter and more self-contained than other chapters in the fic. This is largely because of the confrontation aspect. I'm feeling a bit more secure in it now that I've gone back and edited/extended it. I'm happy to hear it stands up. "They should" was a moment I wanted to include since I planned out chapter 8 and I just bided my time until I could pull it out of my pocket.

Thank you, Finn :)

[benafee]

So quick question to readers/other fanfiction writers... I haven’t responded to most of the comments on chapter 3 of “eternity is our friend” for almost a year for various reasons. Now that I’m once again working on the fic in earnest I’ve reread the comments for encouragement I’d kind of like to respond. Would it be bad form to respond so late when I likely won’t be updating for at least a few months? Should I wait until I finish the next chapter so that people don’t get a disappointing ao3 email?

[benafee]

Had the deeply unfortunate realization that I need to re-order at least 50% of the next chapter of remaking the world so if anyone had “benafee doesn’t update her fics for over a year” on their 2022 bingo card, best get those daubers ready