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frith_in_thorns) wrote2019-10-26 05:33 pm
[fic: guardian] Above all shadows rides the sun
Title: Above all shadows rides the sun (7 Chapters, Complete)
Fandom: Guardian | 镇魂
Series: Part 3/3 of Beneath the sun
Word count: 29,900 words
Characters/Pairing: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, SID team, the Regent, An Bai
Content/Tags: Dixing politics, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fixit, Plot, Hurt/Comfort, Cultists, Canon-Typical Metaphysical Bullshit
Summary: The pressures in Dixing and on Shen Wei are being stoked to a boiling point. It's getting harder to hold things together. Maybe impossible.
On AO3: First chapter | Last chapter
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Well, I finished the fic, and the series! Including re-writing a key scene just before I posted at 1am last night. If you count the three parts in the series together the story comes to 58k, which is the longest complete story I've yet written. It is my actual baby and I'm really proud of it.
I have... lots of thoughts about it, since it fully ate my brain for two months. Which I wanted to share, although feel free to skip because I'm not sure this is interesting to people who aren't me?
I didn't know it was going to be a series! In fact, I have continued to mourn the fact that I didn't know this until a few days after I'd finished and posted Darkness, because although I do like that fic I would have written it substantially differently. Like, it's basically an extended hurt/comfort wallow (which is fine!) but it sits a bit oddly next to the other two parts, which are much more plot focused. I'm pleased with how I wrote Towers, but in terms of metrics it only does half as well as Darkness, which I'm sure is partly to do with how it's very different tonally.
...Also when I wrote Darkness I completely had no idea what was going on with Shen Wei apart from the vague handwave I put in the fic (maybe Ye Zun did something!) and... didn't really care all that much XD I started writing it in August a backpacker hostel in Gothenburg when I was feeling a bit lonely and what I was planning was very much focused on "Shen Wei doesn't get his powers back after whatever handwave fixed canon, and he's hiding this from Zhao Yunlan. In a cave." Twitter encouraged me so I started writing. I used Ye Zun cultists because... I'd used them in the fic I'd just written during the first few days of my holiday and I was pleased with myself for coming up with some easy low-stakes villains I didn't need to explain very much. And I threw in Ye Zun's mask because it seemed like a good idea at the moment I wrote that section. (I think I was on the plane home by then.)
Confession: when I write longer fic I spend the first half just throwing out random threads as they occur to me with no idea what they'll become and trusting that I'll be able to wind them back in and combine them with other threads in interesting ways. This approach hasn't failed me yet, although I do worry about it sometimes.
Anyway, so I posted Darkness and then spent the next few days continuing to think it over, including having some great discussions with people in the AO3 comments about what was actually going on with Shen Wei. And I decided it would be a great idea to write a follow-on fic with the Regent as the antagonist. While still not knowing what was going on with Shen Wei. Also Ye Zun's mask stayed in a box and I never explicitly said it was in there. I meant to, I just never found the moment where it would fit! I'd told naye I was going to write this thing with the Regent as the baddie and she was wonderfully encouraging. Towers turned out really differently to Darkness, not least because of all the relationship stuff. None of which I plotted out in the least, it just sort of occurred to me as I was writing bits. I... also hadn't intended to burn down their home? It was only going to be a little fire, but this fic sort of built itself along the axiom of "what's the worst thing that could happen at this point?" and then writing that. (Also how Zhao Xinci ended showing up in the hospital room.) Towers actually had something of an overview before I started writing, incredibly unusually for me, because I knew there was loads of stuff I wanted to get in. And also when I made an overview I realised how much I needed to leave out, aka the entirety of the Ye Zun feelings, because no way could I fit them all in at the same time.
(My wife Ellie also reads my fic as I write. Which is great because it then amuses me to draw from life for relationship stuff and have her be very exasperated when she sees it show up in fic. I am basically Shen Wei with the emotions bits (and people trying to HUG you when you're CLEARLY BUSY) and Zhao Yunlan in terms of keeping a household functional and why would you not dump stuff all over a bed and then just shove it onto the floor, who stops to consider actually putting things away?)
It was somewhere while I was writing Towers that I figured out what was actually happening to Shen Wei's energy, which was that it was going to the Lantern but he didn't know about it. (This was after I had already started to write weird-memory-sharing in the Dixing portal. Again, I had that idea and it seemed interesting!) So this series turned into an explicit fixit absolutely despite me. I didn't intend that at all! I was also regretting that I'd told naye about the Regent being the antagonist because then I couldn't judge how well it worked as a reveal. So I didn't tell herabout the Lantern. I did, however, crack soon after and rope xparrot in because I was too impatient and needed to tell someone and also wanted the idea validated.
So I went into Shadows with a pretty good plan! ...No I didn't, this is a total lie. As always, I went in with One Focal Scene, which was the bit where Shen Wei is functionally dead and the Lantern goes out. So I spent a week writing up to that scene, and then just... kept going. Including all my Thoughts On Dixing since I was already going down the fixit route and thus wanted to fix everything! Until I figured out my ending bits and thankfully had something else to write towards. The original climax had them sort of throwing the energy trail up into the sky and xparrot suggested recently that I bring the Lantern down instead. I dithered about this, because it had a lot more moving parts to control than the original plan, and this was the rewrite I ended up doing literally right before posting last night.
...I had written a few thousand words of Shadows when I suddenly had a panic and went running to naye to say "You know when their apartment burned down? I just realised I forgot to consider what happened to Zhao Yunlan's dark energy gun!!!" I just totally forgot about it. WHOOPS. I panicked briefly and then had the fire department deliver it in the scene I'd been currently writing. And why not have it show up broken? :D Then it could cause drama and ultimately go BOOM when fired by a cultist. Then I realised I was going to have to do something about the Regent eventually and decided that this would absolutely work. So actually my last paragraph wasn't quite true since I did know I wanted to have an eventual scene with the Regent trying to shoot one of the pair with the gun and it going boom instead. I know I could have had him on trial and in prison or something but I'm sure he'd wriggle out of it. A poetic-justice sort of death seemed the best way to go.
Lastly, Ye Zun stuff. Judging from the AO3 comments a lot of people expected me to bring Ye Zun back. And I did and still do feel a bit bad because I never had any intention of that and didn't mean to give such a strong impression of it. I'm sorry, Ye Zun fans, I just don't find him very interesting. Shen Wei's thoughts about him, otoh, I find extremely interesting, so the cultists and mask etc were mostly just vehicles for that.
At no stage did I realise how long any of this was going to be, including this ramble. I'll stop here. Thanks for reading if you did, feel free to ask me anything else about my writing process -- I really enjoy talking about it, apparently!
A final final thought: I hate coming up with titles nearly as much as I hate coming up with summaries. (I know the summaries for these three fics are especially useless.) It was a great relief to realise that since I'd gone with In darkness buried deep for Part 1 I could just use other bits from the poem for all the rest! Definitely something to remember if I ever do another multi-part series like this!
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I write longer fic just because I never really figured out how to write short fic, ha. Along the way I work in various details that occur to me just because they make things seem richer, and I'm always surprised when the tie together. (Sometimes it works really well, like how my character deals with silence in the silly thing I'm currently working on, which all came off of one passing line and ends up explaining him really well. Sometimes I'm annoyed because it makes a bit I intended for something else seem more like awkward structuring for the new revelation or contrived in some other way, like the specific timeframe I ended up having to choose for my setting. You can't win them all, I suppose.)
The Lantern reveal was epic, btw.
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Anyway, that's to say I'm so happy you enjoyed this one! And thanks for reading my very long ramble! I always find writing process posts interesting to read so I thought I'd do my own.
I have very luckily not regretted any random detail thing I've thrown out so far -- although some of them have been harder than others to tie back in -- but this has probably given me a certain degree of overconfidence!!
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And I love these stories in general, of course, and am so happy to have had a role in their development.
Also, FWIW I like that the first story has the somewhat different, less-plotty more-personal focus, it gives a bright starting ember for the other stories to develop out from. (And oh I'm glad that they do get the happy ending after that! ^^)
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I do like the first story in itself, but I really wish I'd made a smoother transition between the style of it and Towers, I think they're probably a bit jarring together. (And probably a bit disappointing for people who were expecting more of the hurt/comfort than Towers then had.) Ah well, I shall just quietly stress over it forever I'm sure XD
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I am definitely going to have to reread these stories to see how they do transition together. And then I can let you know! ^^
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Thank you for writing this! It's both very interesting as an insight and, uh, really reassuring given how much time I spend looking at the concept of Long Fic With Plot going "but...planning it all out in advance? how??" and you definitely managed to pull off just looking like it was all planned ahead of time.
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you definitely managed to pull off just looking like it was all planned ahead of time
Really, what I do when I start writing is have a Key Scene in my head along with the fic concept. (Darkness: caves + Shen Wei healing Zhao Yunlan to the point of falling over to avoid having a conversation, Towers: their apartment being on fire, Shadows: Shen Wei hurt to death and the Lantern going out.) Then everything I'm writing is setup to justify that scene in my head. I generally know that it's going to fall about halfway through the fic, because it's going to be something that will then have to be Dealt With, but I don't worry about the aftermath until I've literally got there. Then I just write logical next steps for a while until I've decided a Final Climactic Scene for everything to join up towards. Every longfic I've written has worked like this.
...For instance, in the fic I'm currently writing, my Key Scene is Zhao Yunlan drinking Shen Wei's blood in circumstances where they both know this will be an Utterly Terrible Idea! :D It's taken 20k to get them to this point and I finally wrote that scene last night. ETA: It's not the bit that was in my Sunday Snippet. Everyone was much more functional at that point. Now I'm excited to find out what happens next! :D