Musings on cliche bingo fics....

[tanaquiljall]

Possibly this is only of interest to me, but I felt the urge to ramble about each of my cliche bingo stories—what prompted them, what writerly things I learned from them, or what insights they gave me about the characters and plots I like. This project really unleashed my muses (or I ended up stealing other people's, I think) and has given me a lot of confidence to push on with stories when they're "stuck" or I'm less-than-inspired, knowing that something useful will come out of the process.

Title: Not In Kansas Any More
Fandom: Jericho/Supernatural Crossover
Cliche: Freestyle Crossover

scribblesinink and I have talked quite a lot about the similarities and differences between Johnston Green and John Winchester, and especially their relationship with their sons. I did try to push this plotbunny off on scribblesinink, but she claimed I had a better handle on John than she did (not sure that that's true) and I do adore writing Johnston, because he's such a distinctive voice. I enjoyed playing with the meta-ish nature of crossovers here by using the idea that people from different 'verses ending up in the same afterlife, and with the notion of them keeping an eye on the living through, essentially, "watching the show".

I've also just realized that I wrote something with a very similar theme for Boromir and Denethor, so I guess I think a good function for an afterlife, if such a thing exists, would be to give people a chance to come to terms with unresolved issues at their death.

Title: Good Intentions
Fandom: Tolkien
Cliche: Drugs

A suggestion from altariel and therefore one of the first plotbunnies I got given – and the last story to get written. I think, having written in modern American fandoms so much recently, I was a little afraid I'd lost my Tolkien "voice". I do know I had to stop myself correcting British grammar into American grammar at one point! I think the most valuable lesson I learned from this story was: don't leave off a story at the point where you got stuck, because it makes it really hard to pick it up again! But I was also pleased that once I focused and pushed my muse, she was able to finish the story in a reasonably satisfactory fashion, and quickly.

Title: Making History
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Fairy Tales and Folklore

This is a story idea I've previously played with a little in the Tolkien fandom: how do the children of people who've done extraordinary things deal with finding out about that? In Tolkien, when your parents are noble, I think it would seem much more natural to you that they were heroic and involved in the great events of the recent past. In a real-world fandom like Jericho, where the protagonists are, mostly, just "ordinary people" who did what needed to be done in difficult times, I felt there would be more unintentionl secrecy, and that it could be something of a shock for their children to find out.

The hardest part here was writing dialogue for a seven-year-old, and finding a way for his father to explain what had happened in terms a seven-year-old would understand.

Title: Honest and Indecent
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Habits and Routines

This was a follow up to a story by scribblesinink and is mostly PWP, but does have some relationship development in it, as it's about breaking/changing habits and routines and what that means for the couple concerned. It was a quick, fun piece to write. (I think I saw a first draft of scribblesinink's piece, chatted with her about it for a bit, she went to make dinner, and I'd almost finished the first draft by the time she got back....)

Title: Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Journeys & Quests

I was so pleased to write this story. It was one of the first plotbunnies I had in this fandom, but all the way through producing more than 30 other Jericho stories, I just could not work out how to write this one. Even after I realized I could use this cliche to "force" myself to write it, it was a tremendous struggle. And the first version was simply horrible.

Lesson leaned from this story: scenes generally work better if you find a way to put two people in them and not just one. (Or: interior monologues are hard, and it's better to find a different way to write something.)

It was also while I was writing this that scribblesinink and I formalized the term "puppyfic": a story which hassles you and beseeches you with big eyes to write it, because it's such a good idea—and then runs around uncontrollably and piddles all over the floor until you're at your wits' end. Eventually, with a lot of patience and work, it can be made to sit, stay, and possibly even fetch, and impress people with how charming it is. (The term was coined thanks to a troublesome story scribblesinink is still working on that actually involves a puppy.)

Title: Area of Vulnerability
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Vulnerability

I had some tricky moments when writing this, but generally it was quite easy to write. Even if it was my muse pulling her favourite trick in this fandom of making me write two inarticulate people (not) talking in a situation where the range of gestures available to them is limited. Because, yeah, that is so easy.... *glares at muse*

Title: If Y = X then....
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Genderswap

Something I never thought I'd write, but there it was on the bingo card.... If you can accept the crack!fic premise of how two guys get transformed into girls within the space of half an hour, I think it hangs together fairly credibly. Again, a plotbunny that hung around for a long while looking seductive but sidling away every time I tried to write it – until I got the opening line, and the next 1800 words practically wrote themselves over two days, and needed very little editing. The main headache here was making sure I got my pronouns right, since I can be flaky with those at the best of times, let alone when I have he who is a she....

Title: Nothing can be said to be certain
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Cliche: Taxes

I laugehd my head when this turned up on my card, because I got teased a lot when I wrote more frequently in the Tolkien fandom for having "Must. Have. Taxes." as my motto. (I have a story somewhere in which Faramir is asking Aragorn to settle an argument over tolls between the Steward of Gondor and the Prince of Ithilien – yes, both of whom are Faramir!) This started off as quite snarky, and ended up rather poignant.

Title: No Contest
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Cliche: When I'm 64: Futurefic

Another request where I got a fairly strong idea early on for how the story might go, but which didn't get written until near the end of the challenge, when it came out almost complete. (I'm beginning to think it's a good tactic to sit on plotbunnies for a while!)

Title: Eye of the Beholder
Fandom: Supernatural
Cliche: Beauty

An idea I'd had for a while before cliche_bingo came along, inspired by some wonderful art by stereowire of the Impala as a woman. Invaluable help on this one from scribblesinink to get the little details right, improve the plot in a couple of places, and make what had happened clearer without whacking the reader over the head with a cluebat. Dean was surprisingly easy to write.

Title: More Than Skin Deep
Fandom: Supernatural
Cliche: Physical Imperfections

I was kicking myself, because I'd written a story for scribblesinink's birthday that fitted this cliche perfectly, but already posted it. What I like about this story, I think, was that I came up with the premise all on my own (so apparently I was paying attention watching Season 4!), although I had to check with scribblesinink that it made sense and I wasn't about to commit emo!Dean.

Title: Ain't Dead Yet
Fandom: Firefly
Cliche: Diaries and Journals

All I can say is: muse, what were you thinking? This prompt and a request for Firefly, and you gave me Jayne?!? The dialogue bits were easy; working out how to present and frame it was much harder.

Title: In the deep places of the world
Fandom: Tolkien
Cliche: Tentacles (wildcard middle square)

Blame elena_tiriel for this oddity.... More of a prose poem (if squicky) than a story, I think, and possibly better as an idea ("hee! let's subvert the tentacle porn trope with real octopus mating!") than in the execution.

Title: The Devil Is In The Detail
Fandom: Tolkien/Harry Potter Crossover
Cliche: Crossover: Books and Literary

I seem to have a weakness for writing crack!fic about the bad guys that turns them into petty bureaucrats and middle managers with a grudge against a universe that did them wrong. Possibly some traumatic employment experiences when I was younger. (But mostly I suspect because my ideas of evil and tyranny were shaped primarily by the twentieth century history.)

I found it hard to sustain this level of silliness for very long (my admiration to authors who write whole novels in this style) but I did enjoy thinking about these two Dark Lords and what they had in common and what was different about them.

Title: Cold Comfort
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Sleeping Arrangements

This story builds on a few hints in canon that there was maybe something going on between these characters in the time they were absent from the show. I'd never been able to make up my mind whether anything happened between them or not until I wrote this. When I started, I really did want the two characters to be able to find comfort with each other, but it simply didn't feel emotionally honest to have one of them go there when I got to that point. The net result is that I found this story much more emotionally bleak on reading it back than I originally intended it to be.

Title: Between a rock and a hard place
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Trapped!

I chose to write about someone metaphorically "trapped" between divided loyalties rather than physically trapped, because it gave me a chance to write a missing scene that must have happened but which we never saw. The most difficult part about this one was working out the timeline in the episode to understand where it would fit in. (Jericho has notoriously nonsensical timelines, which tend to involve implausibly long days or managing to lose whole weeks.)

This seems to be one of the most popular stories I've written, judging by the votes on the private archive that scribblesinink and I archive our Jericho stories at. I suspect because it's an emotionally charged scene between the two characters in one of the show's major ships, and because other people wanted to know how the characters would react in this scene, too.

Title: Dangerous Liaisons
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Historical AU

Since Jericho is set against a background of an America in civil disorder/civil war, going back to the American Civil War was the obvious choice for a Historical AU.

I had far, far too much fun writing this, to the point that I would like to do a novel-length historical AU of the show at some point, although I'd set it a few years earlier than the Civil War in a period when Kansas had a kind of dress rehearsal for the main event.

Because how can frocks and lashings of UST between people being uber-polite to each other ever not be fun?

Title: Four Times The Atlantis Expedition Was Convinced John Sheppard Was Seeing Someone And One Time They Didn't Have A Clue
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Cliche: Everyone Thinks We're Doing It

I had lots of different ideas for lots of different fandoms for this prompt, but none of them really gelled, because I think it's a very difficult cliche to carry off as the sole point of the story. (Although I love it as a subplot.) Then I got to thinking about how John Sheppard gets paired with pretty much everyone on Atlantis, and what a gossipy place that is, and the idea came together as a Five Things series—which is another cliche, of course! And this is me: there had to be some drabbles in here somewhere, didn't there?

Title: Walk a mile in another man's shoes
Fandom: The Kill Point
Cliche: Bodyswap/Bodyshare

Another thing I never thought I'd write! One of the first stories I wrote for this challenge (because scribblesinink is evil). Involves some fairly significant lampshade hanging of the premise, with the characters clearly stating they have no idea how the bodyswap happened, but it was fun to examine the POV character's strength, weaknesses and fears by putting him literally outside himself. Like the genderswap story, this was an interesting writing challenge from the point of view of finding narrative ways to convey that a character is no longer himself in some way, and the confusion that creates, without confusing the reader.

Title: In The Arms of Morpheus
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Cliche: Hey, it's that guy: Minor Chararacters

I've always liked writing minor characters, partly because there's a lot of leeway to develop an "original character" without scaring your potential readership off! (My original main voice in SGA fandom was a minor character.) I was quite pleased how many minor characters I got into such a short piece: Amelia Banks, Katie Brown, Evan Lorne and Radek Zelenka. I also surprised myself—and sgafan, who'd requested Lorne in the first place—by writing slash, since it's not usual for me, but it fitted the story too well not to use it.

Title: The Way Things Were
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Episode tags and missing scenes

This is a scene that I would have loved to see (in some form) in the show—although, when I came to write it, I understood completely how utterly boring it would have been on TV, since it consists entirely of two characters telling each other things that had already been shown. Of course, what's great about a written story is that you can get inside people's heads and look at their reactions. What most surprised me about this story was that when I was planning it out in my head, I expected the first part of the story (in the Sheriff's Office) to be over in a few lines, and the second part of the story (in Heather's house) to take up the bulk of the story, whereas it turned out to be quite the opposite. And made a better story for it, too, I think.

Title: Seven Hours And Fifteen Days
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: It's the end of the world as we know it: Apocafic

Any Jericho story would have fitted this cliche, as it's the premise of the show. However, I couldn't resist making this story about the break-up of a canon couple whose very long-term relationship is a "given"to everyone in the show, including themselves. Even though it's clearly not working. (And, no, not just because it gets in the way of my OTP.) So it was a personal end-of-the-world scenario.

This was also an attempt to be fair to the dumped character, whom I have very ambivalent feelings about: I didn't like her in the first few episodes of the show, but then I warmed up to her a little, because she does have some redeeming qualities and gets to be kickass, while still hating that TPTB were pushing this dysfunctional ship at us as if it was a Good Thing. Of course, I'm now grateful for the fic potential they provided (as well as the actors for performances that provide plenty of room for interpreting canon the way I want).

Oh, and this is, technically, songfic—although I was very careful not to quote the lyrics at any point except in the title, and the song is actually used in canon as a plot element, rather than being something *I* foisted on the characters. What I learned is you shouldn't write a songfic unless you want the song running through your head as you write—and that means you really shouldn't write a songfic with a song you find as annoying as I find this one!

Title: Relative Values
Fandom: Jericho/The Kill Point crossover
Cliche: What do you mean, we're related?

Tolkien could have provided a lot of material for stories for this cliche. (Aragorn and Arwen being the classic example, but also Galadriel and Celeborn, Faramir and Eowyn, and Eomer and Lothiriel to name just a few.) However, none of those inspired me: I couldn't make a dramatic situation out of them. On the other hand, realizing characters in two of my fandoms had the same surname while having nothing in common physically, socially, intellectually and politically offered a lot of potential, both dramatically and comically. That I could make the crossover "in 'verse" for the post-show continuation that scribblesinink and I are working on, and build on an idea she'd floated in a story she's currently working on, was icing on the cake.

Title: Thanksgiving Blues
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Religious and other festivals

I had a really lovely plotbunny from elena_tiriel for Second Age Númenor for this story, that I'd still like to write, but it required a lot of thinking and research. As I was seriously aiming for the cliche_bingo blackout at this point, my muse went for the easy route. Not that this was particularly easy to write – the second half of the story was a real struggle, for the same reason the Journeys & Quests story was a struggle: single character scenes full of interior monologues are hard to pull off. I was worried the solution I came up with (the character talking to pictures of her parents) was a little cheesy, but it does seem in character for her, and I've had a reviewer comment that it was one of the things they liked about the story, and that made them feel better about the show letting the poor woman spend Thanksgiving alone. Oh, and a shoutout to gwynnyd who kindly invited me to stay one Thanksgiving and gave me an appreciation of what the tradition means to Americans.

Title: The Lesser Sin
Fandom: Jericho
Cliche: Pretending to be married

The first story I posted for the bingo challenge, which was prompted by getting a soundbite of one half of the pairing quietly but furiously demanding what the heck the other half of the pairing thought he was doing claiming they were married (and not just engaged). And then rolling her eyes at his explanation. Fun to flesh out with some minor characters, to have the protagonists digging themselves into (and out of) holes as a result of the lie, and to make it it funny while not sending anyone out of character.


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