THG fic: "Spin Control" [23/24]

[trovia]

Title: Spin Control
Pairings: Finnick/Haymitch, Kat/Peeta
Characters: Finnick, Haymitch, Chaff, Peeta, Gale, Kat; plus appearances by Mags, Johanna, Caesar Flickerman, President Snow, Effie, Claudius Templesmith, Beetee, Prim, Thresh, Rue, District Twelve ensemble and various OC
Rating: adult
Warnings: forced prostitution & non-con; people dealing

Comments

[roguedemon]

He thought of Haymitch leaving a bottle of booze in front of Chaff’s door, of how he himself had threatened the same man a year back that he’d do terrible things to him, expose him as an addict and exploit him as a cripple, because he’d so much needed Haymitch to be safe. He thought of Games school in Twelve. He thought of promises he’d made to Gale Hawthorne, of how he’d try everything to get Katniss home. He thought of Annie Cresta’s Games and of swimming and of how the one choice you had left if you battled it out with the ocean was returning back to the shore.

Finnick pressed his lips together.

“I want for us to be safe,” he said.

I love how you show the steps he goes through in order to make this decision -- it makes the cognitive psychologist in me so happy. You showed him reasoning and solving the problem! Yay! You showed how he got from A: stuck within the Captiol's rules to B: deciding to step off the playing field in a way he never would have considered in the beginning. But at the same time, he's still being proactive. And I loved the swimming metaphor. He's decided not to stay out there and tread water until he drowns. Because it doesn't matter how good a swimmer he is, he can't keep this up forever.

I have more thoughts, and I definitely want to answer some of the points you raised above, but I wanted to get some of this out of my head. I hope you feel better, because you're awesome, and not just because this fic is awesome. Hang in there.

[trovia]

Ahh, the swimming metaphor. Fun fact about the swimming metaphor: I've always alluded to it, even in MOTR, when Finnick uses breathing techniques learned from swimming to call himself down. (this is because I was writing MOTR while I was in burnout rehab, where they were a little obsessed with breathing techniques :p) When I outlined SP, I had this elaborate swimming metaphor in mind a little bit. (the idea that handling the Capitol media is like swimming in an ocean - you can't change either the forces of the media or the ocean, but you can work them) So I was writing SP, I was six chapters in, six chapters away from bringing up the swimming metaphor for the first time in a big way, and I wanted to start posting but I didn't have a title for the story. I was toying with a number of possible titles, all of which I've forgotten at this time. I had "Spin Control" but I wasn't perfectly happy with it. I knew that choosing the title "Spin Control" meant that I would have to commit to the swimming metaphor, which I hadn't even used yet. For me, that was a gamble. It meant that I would be stuck with a metaphor that might turn out to not work once I wrote it! But I picked the title anyway because nothing better was occurring to me. Eventually, the title did grow on me. The swimming metaphor worked out rather beautifully, just as planned, when I eventually dug into it. (in the kissing chapter, also called "Spin Control" and, I believe, one of only two chapter titles that I never changed after first making a note for them in the outline) However, I was rather surprised how versatile that metaphor turned out to be and how often I was able to bring it back and explore it in new ways. It grows through the story into a true allegory. It goes from this cautiously optimist beat of "You can't conquer an ocean, but you can ride the waves" to "Well yeah but eventually you run out of energy and then you drown" to "...so the smart thing to do is return to the shore." I also surprised myself by how I could connect it to Annie and her Games, since she survived by treading water. I hadn't planned on that. So I just got really lucky and it turned into one of my favorite metaphors that I've written. :)

Sorry, now I've just completely geeked out on you on writing meta. It's such a great example for why writers might choose to work with metaphors, though, and how they can advance the story.