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Meme: DVD Commentary
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notalwaysweak because evidently I need distractions from my all-consuming writers block.
Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the characters' heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
Master list of fic is here, aaaaaaand...I'll answer you soon-ish, although no guarantees on time, because I am a terrible procrastinating person. #sigh
notalwaysweak because evidently I need distractions from my all-consuming writers block.Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the characters' heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
Master list of fic is here, aaaaaaand...I'll answer you soon-ish, although no guarantees on time, because I am a terrible procrastinating person. #sigh
no subject
He takes her by the elbow and pulls her away to discuss something, he fidgets and then pulls a leaf from her hair, he hands her a pen and their fingers brush, he puts a plate in her lap and brushes her thigh, he sits down next to her knee to knee, and this wooing, it’s crap, because now she’s on edge for the barest touch, looking for the slightest excuse. She fixes his collar, tries to grab things from his hand, and keeps sitting in his seat with the almost subconscious idea that maybe someday he’ll just pick her up and move her out of his way. Or into his lap.
(she’s never been one for hand-holding before. leonard had tried to insist, all clammy palms and fingers awkwardly clinging together, and she’d always felt like a bitch when she saw him coming and put her hands in her pockets, but seriously)
When his tongue darts out to wet his lips, when he smirks, when he fricking types with fingers that are always sure, always purposeful in their movements, when he looks at her under heavy eyelids or shares a smile with her at someone else’s expense, and when he touches her, always when he touches her, she wonders if she’s imagining it, if it’s there, smoldering just under the surface, the tension that no one else seems to notice.
But the flowers in her mailbox are coming from somewhere. And the poems—Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Brown, and all the greats—slid under her door in the middle of the night.
[Can I just say that Sheldon sliding love poems under Penny's door is my single favorite wooing technique to come out of S/P fandom? That the ONE LINE in this fucking fic about it has embedded it in my heart so surely that I'm convinced if they ever got together it would be a necessary part of their falling-in-love experience? Because yes and yes and yes and yes.
And as for your writer's block, I sympathize, so much. I'm going to try to do some exercises today if you want to play. Just poke me on twitter or something.]
1/2 because I guess I don't know how to shut up
This fic was written (and really, honestly, jotted down in the space of hours one very late night) around the same time there was A Boy. And the Boy had a habit of always sitting next to me whenever we all went to grab food/etc in the car, and would have his leg completely against mine, from shin to thigh, and sometimes he’d be a little restless and his leg would rub against mine, and it would kind of drive me to all sorts of distraction, which may or may not have been his plan. The leg thing was deliberate, though.
The point of this little tangent, though, is that this was an example directly drawn from life, and around that time I was considering the implications and ramifications of touch, and what it can mean, and I’ve always noticed how handsy Penny can be, how she’s always been so comfortable invading Sheldon’s space (which is actually a theme in more than one S/P fic I’ve written). And I think touch is a really powerful thing that I love attempting to explore.
(she’s never been one for hand-holding before. leonard had tried to insist, all clammy palms and fingers awkwardly clinging together, and she’d always felt like a bitch when she saw him coming and put her hands in her pockets, but seriously)
This was also in this broad swathe of time in which I was trying to figure out who am I stylistically. So there’s fics written in second person, and present and past tense, and all sorts of varieties as I tried to figure out how I write. That’s where the style choice came from.
Other than that, this is the fourth S/P fic that I wrote (yes, I just went and double-checked), and the first three are all fluffy pieces that focus on the S/P relationship, without any real undercurrents, I guess this was the first time that I was really thinking about what makes Penny tick while I was writing. (I hadn't until this moment considered the correlation of me trying to figure out who I am, writing-wise, and then trying to figure out Penny while I write.)
Anyway, since I was considering what touch meant, I ~guess part of me figured that balancing that against Penny not being the romantic, and not wanting to hold hands with Leonard, would be interesting. I didn’t really put out-and-out thought into that, though…I kind of just wrote it.
2/2 because I guess I don't know how to shut up
But the flowers in her mailbox are coming from somewhere. And the poems—Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Brown, and all the greats—slid under her door in the middle of the night.
So this. This, painful as it might be to admit, again has overtones of the Boy. He’d made a habit of always looking at me after making a joke or a clever remark to (I guess) see my reaction. And I have an admittedly huge thing for guys wrists and fingers and forearms, thus the typing.
The flowers and poems…so this… It’s funny, because that’s a line that people really seemed to have liked, and I added it in without much thought. I don’t remember if it was added after the entire fic was finished, or just as I finished that section I threw it in, but I’m positive that it wasn’t planned, which is why there’s just the one almost throwaway line.
And not to sound like I’m trying to figure out all of my personal issues, but, because I was kind of thinking I guess about my life, and about the Boy, and about uncertainties and touch and trying to figure things out and being unsure, always being unsure, I threw in something that was more concrete. I wanted to prove that he liked her, and that she wasn’t a fool for imagining things that weren’t there, that he was trying, and he was terrible at trying, maybe, but he was.
And I could go on about how I thought it suited him, about how he wouldn’t have the subtlety to be able to carrying on a courtship based solely on smoldering looks and lingering touches, about how he’d want to give her concrete proof, because he deals in things that can be figured out, because he doesn’t like to give half-truths just as much as she wouldn’t want to be handed them. But the truth of it was that I wanted the proof.
/therapy session
(looking back, that’s also probably one of the main reasons why I feel so meh about this fic)
no subject
She blinks sated eyes and sees Sheldon looking down at them, apparently thoroughly intrigued.
“Gorgeous,” he murmurs, and the complete unexpectedness of such a statement from him, of such a thought from Sheldon, has her simultaneously wide-eyed and amused.
Wil stretches, a Cheshire smile on his face. “I needed that,” he says.
Penny, splayed out naked with two men she was certainly not planning on seeing naked tonight, rolls her eyes and then gets up, slow. Oh, she knows what she’s doing, she knows just what she’s doing.
She bends and grabs her clothes from off the floor, her movements deliberate.
“Where’re you going?” Sheldon asks, and from Wil it would’ve sounded arrogant, but from Sheldon it sounds almost…plaintive. She turns, an eyebrow cocked, and Wil looks…
“Stay?” Wil asks, his voice soft, and she stills.
“Come here,” Sheldon orders, and there’s demand in his voice where there wasn’t before, need that she wasn’t expecting.
She drops her clothes back on the floor and let’s them pull her in close. Sheldon drags off the comforter and the three of them fall onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets.
no subject
She blinks sated eyes and sees Sheldon looking down at them, apparently thoroughly intrigued.
The hardest thing about this was trying to keep a balance between all of them. I wanted to have them all interact with each other, and be into the others, which is why Sheldon is actively watching (and appreciating) them.
“Gorgeous,” he murmurs, and the complete unexpectedness of such a statement from him, of such a thought from Sheldon, has her simultaneously wide-eyed and amused.
The whole fic is such a departure from, erm, canon, and really such an abrupt departure of canon (lol no explanations whatsoever), and I wanted to touch on that if only slightly, because the entire thing is kind of ridiculous, and I wanted Penny to kind of acknowledge that, even while she’s appreciating the hotness of it.
Wil stretches, a Cheshire smile on his face. “I needed that,” he says.
Penny, splayed out naked with two men she was certainly not planning on seeing naked tonight, rolls her eyes and then gets up, slow. Oh, she knows what she’s doing, she knows just what she’s doing.
She bends and grabs her clothes from off the floor, her movements deliberate.
There’s kind of a power struggle the entire fic between Penny and Wil—not out-and-out, but it’s still there. And Penny, in this case, knows how to keep the top hand at this point. She knows that she’s hot, she knows that she just turned Wi into an incoherent mess, and yeah, he might’ve returned the favor, but Penny very self-assured in her sexuality imo, and isn’t above using it to gain the top hand.
“Where’re you going?” Sheldon asks, and from Wil it would’ve sounded arrogant, but from Sheldon it sounds almost…plaintive. She turns, an eyebrow cocked, and Wil looks…
“Stay?” Wil asks, his voice soft, and she stills.
Again, this was just me fiddling with the balance—Sheldon’s arrogance and neediness by turns, as well as Wil’s. Since Wil had been fairly bossy during the actual sex, I wanted him to bend a little, here. And Sheldon sounding plaintive…well, he’d been far more passive during the sex, and I wanted her to see that he did want her.
“Come here,” Sheldon orders, and there’s demand in his voice where there wasn’t before, need that she wasn’t expecting.
And again, this just ties up with the balance issues, with Sheldon being bossy just as Wil is willing to step back a little and be needy.
She drops her clothes back on the floor and let’s them pull her in close. Sheldon drags off the comforter and the three of them fall onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets.
Penny, of course, had just walked in and gotten completely blindsided by Wil and Sheldon making out, and somehow that had ended up with the three of them having sex, but Penny is very much in control of her own desires (imo), and while in the beginning Wil had (admittedly) been a bit manipulative, I wanted it to end with Penny making the decision to stay.
Threesomes I think can be hard to write (and I’ve read a lot of not good fics) because there are these issues of balance and power dynamics and what role people play in the relationship, and whether they’re constrained by those roles or are able to change them, whether they can adapt and be fluid. And guess that’s what I was trying to look at toward the end, here, because I wanted them all to have as equal and unequal footing as the others.
That and the sex. We mustn’t forget the sex. That was a major thing I was trying to get across ;)
no subject
Of course…
Of course, these are the mating requirements for homo sapiens.
Sheldon is not a homo sapien.
Perhaps…perhaps it is different amongst homo novus. Perhaps a relationship can be built upon science rather than emotion. A meeting of minds, rather than bodies.
Perhaps that moment, when they reconcile, is not underlined with emotion (ridiculous), but with the intellectual fact that they share a mutually beneficial friendship that would be unfortunate to sever over such differences.
Perhaps, over dinner, as they discuss those things they have in common (those things that they alone seem to share in a world of homo sapiens, a world of strangers), perhaps he can admit that she is beneficial to him.
This does not have to be a friendship with a girl, this does not have to be a relationship with a girl.
Perhaps this is natural selection. Perhaps this is evolution at work.
(This is not love, because he does not believe in love, he believes in neurons and adrenaline, he believes in science and science alone.)