That Writing Meme

[sharkflip]

Stolen from avocado_love and like everyone else.

I think it would be fun to talk about stories, but the usual memes are like, "What happens next?" "Tell me about Character A?" Which isn't so much talking about stories as it is writing more of a story. But you know how sometimes you read something and you're like, "I got ___ out of this story, I wonder if I have

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[sharkflip]

First, who's daddy what?

Second, oh, let's see. When I realized that Enslaved wasn't just a drabble, I outlined all the steps/chapters that it would take to tell a "complete" story. Part of the challenge that made it so enjoyable was that I could not see a romance from that original story -- to keep them in character, there had to be so very many steps to take.

The first two steps -- and the first two major things driving the story -- were that a) Zuko would have to learn the language, and b) Zuko would have to get himself freed. Oh, and c) Zuko would have to have some reason to stay in the water tribe for long enough to have those both happen.

So I outlined the steps to get the story there, and that's where the bones of the story I've thus written came from. It had the summer fishing, and the slave raid, and the visit from Aang, and the visit from Jet which was the device that I would use to get the two of them together.

Then from there, I wrote out the next logical steps in that story laid out, and marriage was the first part of that process.

Writing Enslaved has very much been figuring out how to balance the tension that keeps the story moving forward. The hostility between he and Katara gave way to grudging respect, which gave way to the series of Stockholm syndrome and denial, which gave way to Zuko having "earned" his freedom and having to choose what to do with it.

The tension of "foreplay" -- of UST and "oh, should I or shouldn't I" -- just wasn't interesting enough, or fresh enough, to drive the story past that particular point. Plus, they are both rather dense and oblivious, but not that dense and oblivious to realize their attraction to each other.

I decided to marry them because I wanted to keep the story true to the cultural norms that I had established, and because all the complication of marriage provided a good tension to drive the story. I didn't want to do a "and they confessed their love to each other, and all was happy and squishy" because that's not what this story is about. They could have just slept together on their canoe journey, but I couldn't figure out a way for Katara to do that, and return to the village and explain to her children and family that she'd had sex with her former slave. The relationship needed to be more formalized than that, even if her family really already accepted him.