Author's commentary: Left of West
Jun. 7th, 2013 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmic_tuesdaysA 32,000-some-odd word fic is too long to write commentary on the whole thing, so rather than try to take it apart, I figured I'd write about the overall piece and process. Hopefully it'll provide some entertainment value.
-
One of the best pieces of creative advice I've ever seen is to be willing to get inspiration from bad works along with the good. It works to give me a good kick in the pants to get out of a creative funk - I'll go to the library, look at some of the terrible stuff in the fiction section, remind myself I can do better character development, and afterwards I'll feel better and be a bit more jazzed to write something.
This was one of the bigger reasons I had for writing Left of West: just being fed up with a lot of what I'd seen fandom do in a lot of areas. Not the general output of the House fandom, but AUs in general. I blame my upbringing by an anthropology professor for my worldbuilding kink. After having had conversations about subjects like the fact that the Quechua language doesn't have a specific term for "catch a fish" I've taken to wondering about that sort of thing as a conditioned reflex. I've seen some AUs with really interesting set-ups that, a few paragraphs in, had me shaking my head because it didn't feel like the authors had done any serious thinking about it. I tend to get frustrated and start to wonder how the societies are able to support themselves and how some cultural traits were established and developed to the point where I'm able to read about it in the story. And I recognize that a lot of fandom is people having fun and for them, figuring out the political situation of Southeast Asia or the gender dynamics of the medical profession isn't part of that. But for me it is, and rather than stay frustrated, I decided to write the sort of fic I wanted to read.
A lot of AUs bug me because there didn't feel like there was a lot of worldbuilding, so that was something I'd have to take care of. I knew I'd be taking a lot of liberties to say that there was still a Princteton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital where a Gregory House worked, a James Wilson for him to be friends with, and even a United States of America, but I also knew I had to keep up some sort of framework to stay inside that other people would recognize. It's one of my favorite things about the webcomic Questionable Content that there are lots of little robots running around and the main emphasis of the comic is on emotional conflicts. I wanted something kind of like that.
That it'd be a wingfic was a given from the beginning: wingfic is one of the categories forwtf27 and I figured I might as well use that subject as a jumping-off point to play with. I like to blame my love of crack on having read too many comic books and Greek myths as a kid, so when I saw the community I signed up immediately. I also like to blame comics and myths for how much I enjoy wingfic. Or at least the idea of it - all the good examples I can think of come from fandoms where characters already have wings and a couple of books I read when I was nine or ten. So, again, I used my frustration as fuel.
I didn't want a wingfic where wings sprouted, so the character would have to be born with them. I didn't want any feathers because I'm dealing with a mammal or hand-like wings because this isn't a bat, so I had to find a new way of describing them. I didn't want a story about that character being reported on in The New York Times science section or driven into hiding, so the character couldn't be the only one with wings. As far as I could tell, what I wanted to read was a story involving people who were born with wings as a natural part of humanity. Of course, this then had me consider how they'd be treated and where their place in society would be. Now, keep in mind I didn't want these people to suddenly spring up in New York City or Haifa or Perth in 1960 - I wanted to weave them in starting from around the Mesopotamian. Not something for a newspaper, but something that's part and parcel of the world like ginko trees or cowrie shells that's accepted as natural.
After I had that part figured out, I tried to think of which character I wanted to see wings on, and settled on Wilson for two reasons. One, he's a character whose issues are primarily internal, stealthy, and hard for the audience to see, so in a way I'd be playing with that by giving him a physical manifestation of what exactly sets him apart from the world around him. Two, he's Jewish, and there's a longstanding tradition of endogamy in Jewish populations. And by twisting the idea of population genetics just enough to make that the big starting point of difference, so instead of hemophilia and cystic fibrosis, genetically isolated populations would develop things like prehensile toes. And wings.
It struck me, early on, that it'd be very easy to incorporate the wings into Jewish culture by way of the story of Hannah, a woman who prayed for a son and would give him up once he arrived. It fit better than anything else I could think of, or even make up, so in it went. Really, the thing that worried me the most was how other people would take my use of Orthodox Jewish culture in this fic. I went back and forth on worrying about people accusing me of appropriating something and telling myself it'd be fine because that's the culture Wilson's coming from and it's not fetishized. It also struck me that I'd be doing a disservice to the idea if I didn't bring the wings in full-force to Wilson's body language. They're an integral part of him, his brain's wired to accommodate six limbs - why wouldn't they be a part of his body language?
Oddly enough, I didn't use the word "angel" or anything related to it in the fic at all. Religious iconography is another thing that would be different, but hard to communicate with any presence, so I went by absence instead. The closest I came - and it's a very blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing - was when House said to Wilson and some of his friends that they could really host a party. Host being the collective noun for angels. But that's it, and that's as close as I got. Remember, in the show, Kirk never actually said "Beam me up, Scotty." Associations are funny things.
I started Left of West in June 2007 with plans to finish it by August; I managed that but was a year off from my predicted end-date. I'd wanted it as a birthday present toeuclase because she'd helped encourage me when I'd started, but it kept on going. I'd decided to make the story at least 10,000 words long, and possibly as many as 50,000 because I knew I'd love to read a long, character-rich AU with a strange premise that itself kept close to the ground. And I really liked working on it.
In part, I was writing a long story about House and Wilson's friendship as it developed under a very different set of circumstances and how that would impact the relationship and both their lives. In part, I was writing about a pair of outsiders who both look at the world very differently from most people. A big influence on Wilson's attitutes toward just about everyone else was an essaywal_lace wrote about Angel from the X-Men comics which I sadly can't find anymore, in which he pointed out that Angel's fundamental point towards the rest of the world is pity, because he knows what it's like to have this set of six limbs, and to him, that's the natural way of being - with Wilson, it's even more so, because he was born that way and literally has no idea what it'd be like otherwise. A lot of his point of view also comes from how he was raised: as someone who's told he's supposed to have a specific place in life and should devote himself towards that. And yes, his older brother also had wings. So when Reuben, the oldest of the three, was talking about Wilson and his friends he was mostly talking about James and Michael and how he was the one left out during their collective childhood.
It's one of Wilson's core character traits that he values who he is to others more than who he is to himself. This has changed somewhat since the end of the fourth season of the show, but it still stands that he's terrible at taking care of himself because he has so little experience at it. In the canon, he spent his life working on being the good son, being a respected professional, being the golden boy wonder. In Left of West, that's true too, although being a respected professional means "Torah scholar" instead of "oncologist." While it might be strange that he left that life behind, he got his divorce after he was friends with House for a while - if they hadn't met, he'd have stayed with his first wife until his death, and maybe they would've been able to be happy together and maybe not - and the shame and opportunity for an independent life worked together to drive him out into the secular world. There are hints he drinks a lot, that he hates his older brother for abandoning him to take all responsibility, and as in the show, he allows himself to live vicariously through House and access things he otherwise wouldn't be able to experience.
Playing with Wilson's new character and his contradictions was one of my favorite parts - he says his apartment's a place to sleep and doesn't hang up any art, but put up a mezzuzah and held onto the painkillers House prescribed. Like in the show, in a way. He's not a terribly straightforward person.
Playing with how House's life developed without Wilson there all the time for him was something I needed to get exactly right. It's been my experience that the more fantastical the idea, the more realistic the execution and characterization needs to be to pull the whole thing off. So I couldn't have House being at any extreme without due cause. Yes, he cries and shuts down, but in the context of either coping with the knowledge he'll be crippled and in chronic pain for the rest of his life and feeling entirely alone or feeling as though he's got nothing left to go on, it seems reasonable.
House might not be good with people, but he needs them and likes having a few around. At the beginning of the fourth season, he brought in a janitor to help him bounce ideas around; that's not the behavior of someone who utterly disdains humanity. I knew without Wilson around he'd still want and need a friend at the hospital. Cuddy fit the bill, and by bringing her in as a major force in his life I had a way to keep House's friendships neatly divided with Cuddy in the hospital and Wilson outside of it.
There's a comment somewhere in Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree on a book that talks about how Jaws was a revolutionary movie for a number of reasons, not the least of which was "you could have finger-steepling and giant sharks in the same movie" with finger-steepling as in the sort of physical character touches you'd find in a high-minded drama. I liked that idea, and put some of it in. Both James and Reuben Wilson act the same way while drunk, House takes a pill while Wilson prays to illustrate their various methods for dealing with the world, that sort of thing.
The title comes from the R.E.M. song "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" which is the source of all of mywtf27 story titles. But even though the lyric itself doesn't have any particular meaning, I like to think of it as very obliquely referencing the Western Wall. And as long as I'm sharing secrets, the friend Wilson mentions who died of polycythemia vera was named Daniel Rydell - yes, from Sports Night, and in his spare time he's a regional marksmanship champion and got onto the show a couple of times. There's a story in that, but I'm not ready to tell it.
The ending wasn't something I was afraid of because I knew it was coming. I wanted to alter Wilson's body just enough that I could handwave away the impossibility; some of that came at a price. In regular people, gigantism tends to leads to early deaths from heart failure because the human body isn't designed to operate on that scale. Same with Wilson: for his heart to be big and strong enough to pump blood throughout his entire body means it couldn't last as long as a regular person's.
I didn't have much in the way of plot because I was just following House and Wilson as their relationship developed. What concerned me more was hitting the right notes for everything. Wilson's coming from a vastly different upbringing and can't function in regular society; how does that affect his day-to-day interactions with the rest of the world? House doesn't have a good friend around who's qualified to prescribe medication or be there for him all the time; how does that affect his outlook? The endogamy in the royal families of Europe produced some abnormal traits in the highest levels of society; what ripple effect would that have? Okay, so that last one didn't show up. But I did spend time pondering how the geopolitics of the Middle East and the state of Israel would be different. It's still there, but I know it's got a different set of lines on the map. Referencing the number of states in the USA, though, that was something I could put in with a reasonable context as a hint that, no, things aren't the same. There are people with wings flying around and the main emphasis is on emotional conflicts. So I guess I got what I wanted.
-
One of the best pieces of creative advice I've ever seen is to be willing to get inspiration from bad works along with the good. It works to give me a good kick in the pants to get out of a creative funk - I'll go to the library, look at some of the terrible stuff in the fiction section, remind myself I can do better character development, and afterwards I'll feel better and be a bit more jazzed to write something.
This was one of the bigger reasons I had for writing Left of West: just being fed up with a lot of what I'd seen fandom do in a lot of areas. Not the general output of the House fandom, but AUs in general. I blame my upbringing by an anthropology professor for my worldbuilding kink. After having had conversations about subjects like the fact that the Quechua language doesn't have a specific term for "catch a fish" I've taken to wondering about that sort of thing as a conditioned reflex. I've seen some AUs with really interesting set-ups that, a few paragraphs in, had me shaking my head because it didn't feel like the authors had done any serious thinking about it. I tend to get frustrated and start to wonder how the societies are able to support themselves and how some cultural traits were established and developed to the point where I'm able to read about it in the story. And I recognize that a lot of fandom is people having fun and for them, figuring out the political situation of Southeast Asia or the gender dynamics of the medical profession isn't part of that. But for me it is, and rather than stay frustrated, I decided to write the sort of fic I wanted to read.
A lot of AUs bug me because there didn't feel like there was a lot of worldbuilding, so that was something I'd have to take care of. I knew I'd be taking a lot of liberties to say that there was still a Princteton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital where a Gregory House worked, a James Wilson for him to be friends with, and even a United States of America, but I also knew I had to keep up some sort of framework to stay inside that other people would recognize. It's one of my favorite things about the webcomic Questionable Content that there are lots of little robots running around and the main emphasis of the comic is on emotional conflicts. I wanted something kind of like that.
That it'd be a wingfic was a given from the beginning: wingfic is one of the categories for
wtf27 and I figured I might as well use that subject as a jumping-off point to play with. I like to blame my love of crack on having read too many comic books and Greek myths as a kid, so when I saw the community I signed up immediately. I also like to blame comics and myths for how much I enjoy wingfic. Or at least the idea of it - all the good examples I can think of come from fandoms where characters already have wings and a couple of books I read when I was nine or ten. So, again, I used my frustration as fuel.I didn't want a wingfic where wings sprouted, so the character would have to be born with them. I didn't want any feathers because I'm dealing with a mammal or hand-like wings because this isn't a bat, so I had to find a new way of describing them. I didn't want a story about that character being reported on in The New York Times science section or driven into hiding, so the character couldn't be the only one with wings. As far as I could tell, what I wanted to read was a story involving people who were born with wings as a natural part of humanity. Of course, this then had me consider how they'd be treated and where their place in society would be. Now, keep in mind I didn't want these people to suddenly spring up in New York City or Haifa or Perth in 1960 - I wanted to weave them in starting from around the Mesopotamian. Not something for a newspaper, but something that's part and parcel of the world like ginko trees or cowrie shells that's accepted as natural.
After I had that part figured out, I tried to think of which character I wanted to see wings on, and settled on Wilson for two reasons. One, he's a character whose issues are primarily internal, stealthy, and hard for the audience to see, so in a way I'd be playing with that by giving him a physical manifestation of what exactly sets him apart from the world around him. Two, he's Jewish, and there's a longstanding tradition of endogamy in Jewish populations. And by twisting the idea of population genetics just enough to make that the big starting point of difference, so instead of hemophilia and cystic fibrosis, genetically isolated populations would develop things like prehensile toes. And wings.
It struck me, early on, that it'd be very easy to incorporate the wings into Jewish culture by way of the story of Hannah, a woman who prayed for a son and would give him up once he arrived. It fit better than anything else I could think of, or even make up, so in it went. Really, the thing that worried me the most was how other people would take my use of Orthodox Jewish culture in this fic. I went back and forth on worrying about people accusing me of appropriating something and telling myself it'd be fine because that's the culture Wilson's coming from and it's not fetishized. It also struck me that I'd be doing a disservice to the idea if I didn't bring the wings in full-force to Wilson's body language. They're an integral part of him, his brain's wired to accommodate six limbs - why wouldn't they be a part of his body language?
Oddly enough, I didn't use the word "angel" or anything related to it in the fic at all. Religious iconography is another thing that would be different, but hard to communicate with any presence, so I went by absence instead. The closest I came - and it's a very blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing - was when House said to Wilson and some of his friends that they could really host a party. Host being the collective noun for angels. But that's it, and that's as close as I got. Remember, in the show, Kirk never actually said "Beam me up, Scotty." Associations are funny things.
I started Left of West in June 2007 with plans to finish it by August; I managed that but was a year off from my predicted end-date. I'd wanted it as a birthday present to
euclase because she'd helped encourage me when I'd started, but it kept on going. I'd decided to make the story at least 10,000 words long, and possibly as many as 50,000 because I knew I'd love to read a long, character-rich AU with a strange premise that itself kept close to the ground. And I really liked working on it.In part, I was writing a long story about House and Wilson's friendship as it developed under a very different set of circumstances and how that would impact the relationship and both their lives. In part, I was writing about a pair of outsiders who both look at the world very differently from most people. A big influence on Wilson's attitutes toward just about everyone else was an essay
wal_lace wrote about Angel from the X-Men comics which I sadly can't find anymore, in which he pointed out that Angel's fundamental point towards the rest of the world is pity, because he knows what it's like to have this set of six limbs, and to him, that's the natural way of being - with Wilson, it's even more so, because he was born that way and literally has no idea what it'd be like otherwise. A lot of his point of view also comes from how he was raised: as someone who's told he's supposed to have a specific place in life and should devote himself towards that. And yes, his older brother also had wings. So when Reuben, the oldest of the three, was talking about Wilson and his friends he was mostly talking about James and Michael and how he was the one left out during their collective childhood.It's one of Wilson's core character traits that he values who he is to others more than who he is to himself. This has changed somewhat since the end of the fourth season of the show, but it still stands that he's terrible at taking care of himself because he has so little experience at it. In the canon, he spent his life working on being the good son, being a respected professional, being the golden boy wonder. In Left of West, that's true too, although being a respected professional means "Torah scholar" instead of "oncologist." While it might be strange that he left that life behind, he got his divorce after he was friends with House for a while - if they hadn't met, he'd have stayed with his first wife until his death, and maybe they would've been able to be happy together and maybe not - and the shame and opportunity for an independent life worked together to drive him out into the secular world. There are hints he drinks a lot, that he hates his older brother for abandoning him to take all responsibility, and as in the show, he allows himself to live vicariously through House and access things he otherwise wouldn't be able to experience.
Playing with Wilson's new character and his contradictions was one of my favorite parts - he says his apartment's a place to sleep and doesn't hang up any art, but put up a mezzuzah and held onto the painkillers House prescribed. Like in the show, in a way. He's not a terribly straightforward person.
Playing with how House's life developed without Wilson there all the time for him was something I needed to get exactly right. It's been my experience that the more fantastical the idea, the more realistic the execution and characterization needs to be to pull the whole thing off. So I couldn't have House being at any extreme without due cause. Yes, he cries and shuts down, but in the context of either coping with the knowledge he'll be crippled and in chronic pain for the rest of his life and feeling entirely alone or feeling as though he's got nothing left to go on, it seems reasonable.
House might not be good with people, but he needs them and likes having a few around. At the beginning of the fourth season, he brought in a janitor to help him bounce ideas around; that's not the behavior of someone who utterly disdains humanity. I knew without Wilson around he'd still want and need a friend at the hospital. Cuddy fit the bill, and by bringing her in as a major force in his life I had a way to keep House's friendships neatly divided with Cuddy in the hospital and Wilson outside of it.
There's a comment somewhere in Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree on a book that talks about how Jaws was a revolutionary movie for a number of reasons, not the least of which was "you could have finger-steepling and giant sharks in the same movie" with finger-steepling as in the sort of physical character touches you'd find in a high-minded drama. I liked that idea, and put some of it in. Both James and Reuben Wilson act the same way while drunk, House takes a pill while Wilson prays to illustrate their various methods for dealing with the world, that sort of thing.
The title comes from the R.E.M. song "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" which is the source of all of my
wtf27 story titles. But even though the lyric itself doesn't have any particular meaning, I like to think of it as very obliquely referencing the Western Wall. And as long as I'm sharing secrets, the friend Wilson mentions who died of polycythemia vera was named Daniel Rydell - yes, from Sports Night, and in his spare time he's a regional marksmanship champion and got onto the show a couple of times. There's a story in that, but I'm not ready to tell it.The ending wasn't something I was afraid of because I knew it was coming. I wanted to alter Wilson's body just enough that I could handwave away the impossibility; some of that came at a price. In regular people, gigantism tends to leads to early deaths from heart failure because the human body isn't designed to operate on that scale. Same with Wilson: for his heart to be big and strong enough to pump blood throughout his entire body means it couldn't last as long as a regular person's.
I didn't have much in the way of plot because I was just following House and Wilson as their relationship developed. What concerned me more was hitting the right notes for everything. Wilson's coming from a vastly different upbringing and can't function in regular society; how does that affect his day-to-day interactions with the rest of the world? House doesn't have a good friend around who's qualified to prescribe medication or be there for him all the time; how does that affect his outlook? The endogamy in the royal families of Europe produced some abnormal traits in the highest levels of society; what ripple effect would that have? Okay, so that last one didn't show up. But I did spend time pondering how the geopolitics of the Middle East and the state of Israel would be different. It's still there, but I know it's got a different set of lines on the map. Referencing the number of states in the USA, though, that was something I could put in with a reasonable context as a hint that, no, things aren't the same. There are people with wings flying around and the main emphasis is on emotional conflicts. So I guess I got what I wanted.
