phantomtomato (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
phantomtomato) wrote2021-07-01 05:45 pm
phantomtomato) wrote2021-07-01 05:45 pm
Entry tags:
A conquest to convey
I finished a story on Tuesday. It was quite long, for me, and I am too greedy to let that be it. Below the cut, too many more words of reflection on it.
Before I wrote Made of Clay, I wrote Waterlogged.
In a practical sense, Clay could not exist without Waterlogged, because it was only thanks to Waterlogged that I investigated the character potential of Thoros Nott. But in a different sense, Waterlogged, and the short story I followed it up with, Busy Seeing Red, were the necessary emotional experiences I needed as a writer in order to produce Clay.
Clay was born out of two opposing impulses: I wanted it to have broad appeal, and I did not.
Waterlogged had broad appeal. It was tagged as a Tom/Hermione shipfic, and coming off of another successful shipfic in the same pairing, it attracted many dedicated readers. It was also a terrible candidate for devotees of the ship. It tore the pairing apart slowly, until the shreds were impossible to piece back together, and gave Tom a happy ending with another man. I ran afoul of some old fandom norms and some new ones. Readers were quick to share their disapproval with me. I was not eager to repeat that experience.
Busy Seeing Red had no appeal. It built up that pairing of Nott and Tom, which hadn’t existed on AO3 prior to Waterlogged. It was a quiet sort of story about apologies and forgiveness and it didn’t even have notable sex scenes. Just about no one read it when it was ongoing. I was also not eager to repeat that experience.
And so I was left in a state of frustration. Attention resulted in miserable interactions when I violated the expectations readers brought with them because of the pairing tags. A lack of attention felt like throwing my work down a well. Neither was fulfilling. I became despondent. If this sounds dramatic—it was. I was still happy with the products of my writing, with both Red and Waterlogged, but I was demotivated by the hot and cold response from readers, what felt like the impossibility of telling the stories I wanted to tell, and I thought about stepping away from writing entirely.
I wasn’t ready to quit, though. I considered my options. Tom and Hermione were a dead ship to me, after Waterlogged. Not only had Waterlogged served as a way for me to say goodbye to her character—the final chapter is quite an explicit allegory for this—but the reader response killed any chance that I might write them again. The other popular Tom Riddle ship is Tom/Harry, and that was a complete non-starter. I have negative interest in seeing Harry as a romantic protagonist, especially when paired with Tom, and cast it aside immediately.
I had been toying with the idea of writing a retired Voldemort, a Voldemort who survived the first war and had hidden himself away, who was found by his old lover and forced to confront his past. In this idea, Thoros had his canon son, Theodore Nott, with him. They built a family of three. I imagined Tom learning to love Theo as a son, accepting Thoros into his life again, and generally softening his reserved personality enough to allow a family to slip in. I didn’t want to rethink the ship.
But there was another construct I could use—less popular than a romantic ship, less likely to pull large numbers, but certainly more of a draw than yet another Nottmort alone: Tom raising Harry Potter.
Once I thought of it, the idea wouldn’t let me go. It created parallels between Thoros and Tom as single parents. It gave Tom something to have been doing for his years away from Britain, hiding out elsewhere. It provided a mystery for Thoros to solve, and offered complications to the two re-establishing their lives together.
It also put this idea solidly in the realm of kidfic. One child might be set dressing, but at two, they are necessarily characters in their own right.
I don’t read kidfic. I don’t have children. I am not jazzed about children, in general. To say that I was intimidated by this premise would be an understatement.
But what were my other options? I wasn’t going back to Tom/Hermione, I wasn’t taking on Tom/Harry, I loved Thoros too much for an alternative. I had been miserable for months, at this point, about my interactions with readers. If not for some very dear fellow authors and friends, I would have stepped away. And I had inspiration.
So I gave it a shot. I wrote the first twenty thousand words fairly quickly, letting the plot unfurl as it wanted. That turned out to involve a lot of unexpected things: a slower pace than my usual beat. Simmering tension, sexual and otherwise. Balancing multiple points of view so that the children might get their due. Writing America, writing the 1980s, writing something so domestic and so mundane that it barely resembled in-universe Harry Potter fanfiction. I felt deeply unsure of it. I asked for second opinions of bits of it from readers who weren’t familiar with my Tom. I showed the entirety of Tom’s first POV chapter to my husband, the first piece of my fic writing he’d ever read. Feedback was useful, and it wasn’t. People liked the emotions and the characters. People were baffled by the setting and context. I couldn’t tell this story anywhere else. I kept writing.
I grounded myself in the familiar. There were so many leaps of faith in the project that I used the mundanities of small-town upstate New York, a place that I know, to give me concrete details for Tom’s life. I own an old home. He lives in an old home. I know the culture of the Capital Region. He adopts the culture of the Capital Region. And I hoped that the details would offer comfort to readers, as well. New York might not be familiar, but running a household should be.
The domesticity was absurd, and it brought the story together. In my experience, when people read Voldemort, they’re waiting for the trick. He is crafty and conniving, and readers expect him to have the upper hand, especially if he is the protagonist. I weaponized that. In each banal daily chore, in those early chapters, I knew my readers would be looking for him to whip out a wand and show what he’d really been up to for all of these years. Every time he shows us that Harry has been raised with care in a normal life, it feels like a deception.
But the early chapters wear you down. By the time we finally get to see inside of Tom’s head, and we confirm how little to do with Voldemort is kicking around in there, it becomes possible to relax. To start to accept the comfort of this family. To want good things for them.
And so that’s when the story begins to shift. I stayed domestic for another quarter of the story, and the current of mundane life carries us throughout, but larger issues creep back in. Thoros, who had always been suspicious of Tom, begins to push for trust in their relationship, and it leads to complications. Tom reveals, in a slow-paced and non-magical scene, what happened in those early years after he abducted Harry. They begin to understand each other and acknowledge their attraction again, but there is a mounting sense that this idyllic privacy will end. By the time that it does, the emotional fabric of their lives has completely reknit itself. They are a family. We enter the challenges of the second half of the story not as a disparate group of four people, uncertain of what they mean to each other, but as a family of four, parents and children, whose affection carries them through.
And I began to shift. The discomfort I felt with kidfic at the start of this story had morphed into a deep well of interest in exploring fatherhood. I had touched on Tom’s relationship to his own father in earlier stories, but I was no longer avoiding the idea of Tom being a father. Thoros grew into more than I could ever have hoped—I created his character because I wanted a relationship for Tom where I could be equally in love with both parties, and in Clay, I realized how wildly I had succeeded. The children stood out to me, each precious, and I delighted in how their personalities shaped the story.
There were roadblocks.
I despaired at having to touch on the AIDS crisis, but it would have been unignorable as a gay man in 1980s America. I spent weeks seething over it, sinking into firsthand accounts and learning to embody the fear and anger that my characters would have felt.
I worried about the softness of my story. I promised an unredeemed Tom, a man who had been Voldemort and who did not second-guess that, and yet he was contentedly reading to his children after dinner. I wondered whether I had done enough to convey that a mass-murderer could be capable of this. I wondered who I was hoping to persuade when I worried about this.
I fretted to friends about my most dramatic arc resolving with a whimper and coming so far before the end of the story. I thought about ending sooner. I thought about pushing out the drama longer. I did neither.
I felt ready to quit at the penultimate chapter. It was impossible to contemplate the confrontation I had set up since the very beginning, and so I wrote around it. It wasn’t the screaming match that mattered; it never had been, in a story like this. Families fight with each other. They fight about big things. I wanted to show that the underlying love was solid enough to come through, and so it wasn’t the screaming that mattered, was it? It was the coming through. The coming after. The way they promised to keep caring for each other even when things were difficult, and the chapter wrote itself.
I listened to a lot of psych rock and synth pop in this period, dreamy things that offer a liminality, where you can exist inside your own head and outside of it at the same time. It’s where my characters needed to be: introspective and honest, but conscientious of those around them. I spent a lot of my writing sessions growing emotional. There’s a lot of grief in this, a lot of loss, even if it’s a hopeful sort of loss wherein you know better things will come next. Saying goodbye to difficult periods of your life can be a sad thing.
Made of Clay is named for one of those songs. I can’t hear it without crying.
And Clay ended up being that ball of opposing forces I had wrestled with when I started it. I love the characters, and I love my writing. It wasn’t popular. It wasn’t unsuccessful, either. It’s the story I needed in order to come to terms with being an author of quiet things, to let go of that drive for widespread recognition or understanding. I’m grateful for that.
I’m not ready to write my way into my next long story, the next thing that will be posted without being finished. These characters have ended their run in my head, and they’ve said their goodbyes, and I need to mourn that for a little longer. I think I’m ready to experiment more, having put aside the burdensome expectation of an audience.
When I finished Red, having not posted any of it yet, I was elated. I had no idea what disappointment was in store for the publishing process.
When I finished Waterlogged, I was relieved. I could finally cast off the weight it had become.
Finishing Clay… I am sad, and I am hopeful. I won’t write this version of the characters again. They’ll influence everything that comes after. I don’t want to put Tom and Thoros through new challenges. I’m excited to dig up the possibilities I had buried while my days were full of Clay.
I’ll almost definitely never write Tom cleaning a toilet by hand again. I’ve probably made you read it, though. That has to count for something.
Before I wrote Made of Clay, I wrote Waterlogged.
In a practical sense, Clay could not exist without Waterlogged, because it was only thanks to Waterlogged that I investigated the character potential of Thoros Nott. But in a different sense, Waterlogged, and the short story I followed it up with, Busy Seeing Red, were the necessary emotional experiences I needed as a writer in order to produce Clay.
Clay was born out of two opposing impulses: I wanted it to have broad appeal, and I did not.
Waterlogged had broad appeal. It was tagged as a Tom/Hermione shipfic, and coming off of another successful shipfic in the same pairing, it attracted many dedicated readers. It was also a terrible candidate for devotees of the ship. It tore the pairing apart slowly, until the shreds were impossible to piece back together, and gave Tom a happy ending with another man. I ran afoul of some old fandom norms and some new ones. Readers were quick to share their disapproval with me. I was not eager to repeat that experience.
Busy Seeing Red had no appeal. It built up that pairing of Nott and Tom, which hadn’t existed on AO3 prior to Waterlogged. It was a quiet sort of story about apologies and forgiveness and it didn’t even have notable sex scenes. Just about no one read it when it was ongoing. I was also not eager to repeat that experience.
And so I was left in a state of frustration. Attention resulted in miserable interactions when I violated the expectations readers brought with them because of the pairing tags. A lack of attention felt like throwing my work down a well. Neither was fulfilling. I became despondent. If this sounds dramatic—it was. I was still happy with the products of my writing, with both Red and Waterlogged, but I was demotivated by the hot and cold response from readers, what felt like the impossibility of telling the stories I wanted to tell, and I thought about stepping away from writing entirely.
I wasn’t ready to quit, though. I considered my options. Tom and Hermione were a dead ship to me, after Waterlogged. Not only had Waterlogged served as a way for me to say goodbye to her character—the final chapter is quite an explicit allegory for this—but the reader response killed any chance that I might write them again. The other popular Tom Riddle ship is Tom/Harry, and that was a complete non-starter. I have negative interest in seeing Harry as a romantic protagonist, especially when paired with Tom, and cast it aside immediately.
I had been toying with the idea of writing a retired Voldemort, a Voldemort who survived the first war and had hidden himself away, who was found by his old lover and forced to confront his past. In this idea, Thoros had his canon son, Theodore Nott, with him. They built a family of three. I imagined Tom learning to love Theo as a son, accepting Thoros into his life again, and generally softening his reserved personality enough to allow a family to slip in. I didn’t want to rethink the ship.
But there was another construct I could use—less popular than a romantic ship, less likely to pull large numbers, but certainly more of a draw than yet another Nottmort alone: Tom raising Harry Potter.
Once I thought of it, the idea wouldn’t let me go. It created parallels between Thoros and Tom as single parents. It gave Tom something to have been doing for his years away from Britain, hiding out elsewhere. It provided a mystery for Thoros to solve, and offered complications to the two re-establishing their lives together.
It also put this idea solidly in the realm of kidfic. One child might be set dressing, but at two, they are necessarily characters in their own right.
I don’t read kidfic. I don’t have children. I am not jazzed about children, in general. To say that I was intimidated by this premise would be an understatement.
But what were my other options? I wasn’t going back to Tom/Hermione, I wasn’t taking on Tom/Harry, I loved Thoros too much for an alternative. I had been miserable for months, at this point, about my interactions with readers. If not for some very dear fellow authors and friends, I would have stepped away. And I had inspiration.
So I gave it a shot. I wrote the first twenty thousand words fairly quickly, letting the plot unfurl as it wanted. That turned out to involve a lot of unexpected things: a slower pace than my usual beat. Simmering tension, sexual and otherwise. Balancing multiple points of view so that the children might get their due. Writing America, writing the 1980s, writing something so domestic and so mundane that it barely resembled in-universe Harry Potter fanfiction. I felt deeply unsure of it. I asked for second opinions of bits of it from readers who weren’t familiar with my Tom. I showed the entirety of Tom’s first POV chapter to my husband, the first piece of my fic writing he’d ever read. Feedback was useful, and it wasn’t. People liked the emotions and the characters. People were baffled by the setting and context. I couldn’t tell this story anywhere else. I kept writing.
I grounded myself in the familiar. There were so many leaps of faith in the project that I used the mundanities of small-town upstate New York, a place that I know, to give me concrete details for Tom’s life. I own an old home. He lives in an old home. I know the culture of the Capital Region. He adopts the culture of the Capital Region. And I hoped that the details would offer comfort to readers, as well. New York might not be familiar, but running a household should be.
The domesticity was absurd, and it brought the story together. In my experience, when people read Voldemort, they’re waiting for the trick. He is crafty and conniving, and readers expect him to have the upper hand, especially if he is the protagonist. I weaponized that. In each banal daily chore, in those early chapters, I knew my readers would be looking for him to whip out a wand and show what he’d really been up to for all of these years. Every time he shows us that Harry has been raised with care in a normal life, it feels like a deception.
But the early chapters wear you down. By the time we finally get to see inside of Tom’s head, and we confirm how little to do with Voldemort is kicking around in there, it becomes possible to relax. To start to accept the comfort of this family. To want good things for them.
And so that’s when the story begins to shift. I stayed domestic for another quarter of the story, and the current of mundane life carries us throughout, but larger issues creep back in. Thoros, who had always been suspicious of Tom, begins to push for trust in their relationship, and it leads to complications. Tom reveals, in a slow-paced and non-magical scene, what happened in those early years after he abducted Harry. They begin to understand each other and acknowledge their attraction again, but there is a mounting sense that this idyllic privacy will end. By the time that it does, the emotional fabric of their lives has completely reknit itself. They are a family. We enter the challenges of the second half of the story not as a disparate group of four people, uncertain of what they mean to each other, but as a family of four, parents and children, whose affection carries them through.
And I began to shift. The discomfort I felt with kidfic at the start of this story had morphed into a deep well of interest in exploring fatherhood. I had touched on Tom’s relationship to his own father in earlier stories, but I was no longer avoiding the idea of Tom being a father. Thoros grew into more than I could ever have hoped—I created his character because I wanted a relationship for Tom where I could be equally in love with both parties, and in Clay, I realized how wildly I had succeeded. The children stood out to me, each precious, and I delighted in how their personalities shaped the story.
There were roadblocks.
I despaired at having to touch on the AIDS crisis, but it would have been unignorable as a gay man in 1980s America. I spent weeks seething over it, sinking into firsthand accounts and learning to embody the fear and anger that my characters would have felt.
I worried about the softness of my story. I promised an unredeemed Tom, a man who had been Voldemort and who did not second-guess that, and yet he was contentedly reading to his children after dinner. I wondered whether I had done enough to convey that a mass-murderer could be capable of this. I wondered who I was hoping to persuade when I worried about this.
I fretted to friends about my most dramatic arc resolving with a whimper and coming so far before the end of the story. I thought about ending sooner. I thought about pushing out the drama longer. I did neither.
I felt ready to quit at the penultimate chapter. It was impossible to contemplate the confrontation I had set up since the very beginning, and so I wrote around it. It wasn’t the screaming match that mattered; it never had been, in a story like this. Families fight with each other. They fight about big things. I wanted to show that the underlying love was solid enough to come through, and so it wasn’t the screaming that mattered, was it? It was the coming through. The coming after. The way they promised to keep caring for each other even when things were difficult, and the chapter wrote itself.
I listened to a lot of psych rock and synth pop in this period, dreamy things that offer a liminality, where you can exist inside your own head and outside of it at the same time. It’s where my characters needed to be: introspective and honest, but conscientious of those around them. I spent a lot of my writing sessions growing emotional. There’s a lot of grief in this, a lot of loss, even if it’s a hopeful sort of loss wherein you know better things will come next. Saying goodbye to difficult periods of your life can be a sad thing.
Made of Clay is named for one of those songs. I can’t hear it without crying.
And Clay ended up being that ball of opposing forces I had wrestled with when I started it. I love the characters, and I love my writing. It wasn’t popular. It wasn’t unsuccessful, either. It’s the story I needed in order to come to terms with being an author of quiet things, to let go of that drive for widespread recognition or understanding. I’m grateful for that.
I’m not ready to write my way into my next long story, the next thing that will be posted without being finished. These characters have ended their run in my head, and they’ve said their goodbyes, and I need to mourn that for a little longer. I think I’m ready to experiment more, having put aside the burdensome expectation of an audience.
When I finished Red, having not posted any of it yet, I was elated. I had no idea what disappointment was in store for the publishing process.
When I finished Waterlogged, I was relieved. I could finally cast off the weight it had become.
Finishing Clay… I am sad, and I am hopeful. I won’t write this version of the characters again. They’ll influence everything that comes after. I don’t want to put Tom and Thoros through new challenges. I’m excited to dig up the possibilities I had buried while my days were full of Clay.
I’ll almost definitely never write Tom cleaning a toilet by hand again. I’ve probably made you read it, though. That has to count for something.