Fic: The Last Secret [Merlin; Gen; PG]

[jadesfire]

merlin_redux reveals are up here!.

My story was The Last Secret, header below, and a few thinky thoughts on the whole thing under the cut. This fic took a lot out of me, and being able to claim it and talk about the writing process is hopefully going to mean I can get on with my life writing my Paperlegends fic.

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Title: The Last Secret
Rating: PG
Pairing(s): Gen. Background Arthur/Gwen, but focus is Merlin&Arthur friendship.
Word count: ~50,700
Warnings: Moderate violence

Summary: All confidence which is not absolute and entire, is dangerous. There are few occasions but where a man ought either to say all, or conceal all; for, how little so ever you have revealed of your secret to a friend, you have already said too much if you think it not safe to make him privy to all particulars. Francis Beaumont

Merlin has rescued Arthur from Camelot before it fell to Morgana, but when he is forced to reveal one secret, the others come tumbling out as well. Balancing his responsibilities as dragonlord, sorcerer and king’s manservant has never been easy, but doing it all at the same time is going to take a lot of work.

And there is always one more secret to be told.

Notes: Includes dialogue from ‘The Sword in the Stone’ and ‘The Diamond of the Day’, although the story itself is a fork in the road from ‘The Sword in the Stone.’ I hope that I’ve managed to include at least some of what my prompter wanted for their story. I also learned an important lesson while writing this: when in doubt, add more dragons.

With endless thanks to donutsweeper and thalia for putting up with my complaints, re-drafts and endless flailing. I could write another 50,000 words about how awesome they are, but suffice it to say without them, nothing. Remaining mistakes are all my own work.

Read it here on AO3

[When I have time, I will get around to splitting it for LJ, but I'm not there yet.]

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There's quite a lot of text below the cut, but my overriding thought after the whole thing is this:

If I've accidentally written 50,000 words (yes, it was an accident, I swear) for a fest with a 1,000 word limit, what on earth kind of word count am I going to end up with for Paperlegends...



I've actually done a lot of thinking and writing about this story in private already, not to mention the howling emails I sent to my betas. They took the brunt of it, so you don't have to - be grateful to them. Through all the process, I used them as sounding boards, agony aunts and people to just plain shout at when it was all going wrong. And it went VERY wrong. Quite a lot.

Lesson learned #1: Pick a prompt you can write.
I said to my flist at some point that I do very badly with general prompts. In one (memorable) SGA fest, my recipient had a 3 page document of things she did and didn't like. She was a friend, so I understood why, and it was kind of intimidating, but also very exciting to write. It was a real challenge to avoid the fandom tropes she hated and hit her kinks spot on. I still like the story, and that sort of thing works for me. Give me 14 unlikely words to include in a fic, and I'm there. Give me total freedom and a vague guideline? I get stuck and flail horribly. It was only once I put limits on myself - to follow the plot of the episode, to include plenty of flashbacks to dragons, to make the magic reveal different - that it started to come together. But in retrospect, I would have chosen something much more limiting in order to free my brain.

Lesson learned #2: Don't sweat the word count for Merlin fics.
One thing I know about myself is that I cannot write to an outline (which is probably why I need all the limits to get my writing going). But I do usually have a sense of how big a story I'm writing when I start. Not this time. Even slightly. My first guestimate was, I think 10-15K.

*pauses for hysterical laughter to die down*

Once I hit my writing rhythm, though, I knew that each chapter needed to be in the 7Kish region for the pacing to work, and I had the episode to tell me what plot to include. And about the middle of chapter 4, I realised that I wasn't going to get away with 5 chapters and an epilogue. I needed a 6th to make it work. Which meant I wrote 50,000 words in about 12 days. Well. I wrote it in 10 days, then edited for 2, but for me, that's the same thing, since I massively expanded in some parts and took myself over the 50,000 mark.

Which is a lot in a short time, by anyone's standards. Maybe I should reconsider NaNo after all.

But the point isn't 'ooh, aren't I clever', the point is that all the way through, I was complaining about the word count, and it didn't matter. That was just the number of words I needed to tell the story I wanted to tell. I shouldn't have stressed so much about the length.

Lesson learned #3: Write for yourself.
I've never been someone to do this. I like fests and exchanges and comms because I like to write to entertain. I don't think that's a bad thing - fandom is a communal activity, and I like sharing my love of it with others, and making them happy.

But (and this is a bigger BUT in Merlin than in previous fandoms), if you're writing wordy Gen, you have to write, first and foremost, the story you want to tell. It has to be *yours*. Because hardly anyone else is going to read it compared to shorter, Merlin/Arthur stories. That's not 'woe is me', it's just how it is. I don't begrudge it, but I have to be aware of it for my own self-esteem. It is frustrating sometimes, but in putting some of those older fics up on AO3 recently, I found myself reading them through and enjoying them.

You're not supposed to say that, of course, but I do. They're not all brilliant, some of them I'd like to rip through with a red pen, but overall, I remember the impulse that made me write them in the first place, and I'm satisfied with how I scratched that itch in my brain. I can't really ask for more than that.

Lesson learned #4: Know your writing process.
This isn't about writing style. I'm too much of a sponge to think that I have my own voice as a writer. But I do have a very specific process when it comes to constructing a story: start in the middle of the action; include plenty of dialogue; don't outline, but have scenes to aim for. That last one is most important. It's fine for me to have images or scenes that I know I want to include, because the fun is seeing how I get there. But if I plan too much, everything dries up and my writing feels dull.

Planning nearly scuppered my whole story this time out, because I thought I'd do it 'properly' for once. It turns out that's not 'properly' for me, and I can't break my brain trying to do differently.

Oh, and the one thing that I thought actually went right about this story? The quotes as chapter headings. That's another important part of my process that I blame on too much Dorothy L Sayers at an impressionable age - I always have to begin my stories with an appropriate quotation. Sometimes they work, sometimes they're a bit shoe-horned in. This time, I really feel I hit them spot on, and that's a damn good feeling.

Lesson learned #5: Love your betas (even when you hate them).
To be fair, I never hate my betas, but I do have occasions when I open a document, see the number of comments/amount of red text, silently curse them and close the document again. That's okay. I'm not always ready to hear everything that's wrong with a story and fix it. But when I am in the right frame of mind, it's immensely satisfying to rip through a list of problems and fix them all.

Betas are the unsung heroes of fic. donutsweeper and thalia are not only sounding boards and copy editors but friends, confidantes and shoulders to cry on when it's all going wrong. I meant it in the notes to my fic: without them, nothing. How else do you get the confidence to continue when things are a slog? And who else will thwap you upside the head when you have the sudden revelation that the story might not suck after all? The first place I'm going when I finish this is my AO3 summary to add in proper acknowledgements, because this is as much their story as it is mine.


And finally...

Lesson learned #423456: When in doubt, write.
You'd think I would have learned this by now, but no.

The thing I find really, really effective for writer's panic? Writing *something*. I'm rarely so blocked that I can't put any words down at all. What does happen is that I reject everything I start within a few paragraphs, which is, in many ways, more depressing than just not writing at all. But it works, because 8,000 rejected words later (no, I'm not kidding), I hit on the story I want to tell, and it all comes rushing together and things just start to flow.

And then, it's worth it.