Process Essay: Locked Inside the Facade
Special thanks go out to my beta readers, Kathy and Debbie!
Process Essay: Locked Inside the Façade
Introduction: The Origin of the Story
I got the idea for Locked Inside the Façade in July of 2005. To put things into context, at this point, Batman was on the outs with the GCPD. Nightwing, or "Crutches" Grayson, was in the mob, or had possibly just started calling himself Renegade. Jack Drake and Spoiler were dead and Robin and Batgirl had just moved to Bludhaven. The Birds of Prey had left Gotham and their only fixed address at the time seemed to be a state-of-the-art jet. Former Commissioner Gordon had moved away from Gotham to be near Barbara (which made things a bit confusing, seeing as she hadn’t taken up residence anywhere at the time). Oh, and the JLA had just disbanded, due, in part, to Batman remembering that he'd been mindwiped.
If you were talking about "Countdown", you were referring to four miniseries leading up to Infinite Crisis. Jason Todd was alive, Maxwell Lord was dead, and Superman had just taken fists and heat vision to Gotham's favorite Bat.
And in the middle of all this, CBR's "Lying in the Gutters" column posted the following rumor: One Year Later, Dick Grayson will be Batman and Bruce Wayne will be in Arkham.
To be honest, when I read that bit of gossip, my initial reaction could best be paraphrased as “That has to be the dumbest idea DC has come up with so far!” Let me be clear: it wasn’t that the idea of Bruce Wayne in Arkham didn’t have potential. What bothered me about the concept could best be summed up as follows:
In the normal scheme of things, Bruce Wayne would not end up in Arkham Asylum. If he did have some sort of breakdown, he’d be sent to some quiet rest home upstate.
If, by some bizarre happenstance, he were to end up in Arkham and he didn’t want to be there, he’d break out in fairly short order.
Going in undercover wasn’t as easy as they’d made it appear back in Shadow of the Bat. I could still remember the reader comments in the lettercols for “The Last Arkham”; incarcerating someone indefinitely without a trial or hearing was a rights violation.
What it boiled down to, in essence was that in order for Bruce to end up in Arkham:
He would have to really snap. Which meant that…
He would have to be revealed as Batman. Then, Arkham-as a maximum security facility-would make sense.
He would have to be in a situation where he would not escape. Which meant that he would either have to be heavily drugged-which wouldn’t make for a very satisfying story-or he would have to believe that he belonged in Arkham.
Now, while I was mentally head-desking and detailing everything that was wrong with the above-mentioned rumor, and trying to get a handle on just what would be involved in handling the concept credibly, a new thought surfaced.
What if?
What if Batman were arrested?
What if he were unmasked?
What if he really did suffer a breakdown of some kind, and, wracked by guilt...
What if he did decide that Arkham was the best place for him?
I had a new thought: that could actually be one heck of a good story…
In very short order, I had the bare bones of an idea. It occurred to me that there was a way to break Bruce, get Dick into the suit, and, while I was at it, fix a few of the things that had been bugging me in the Bat-books for the last little while. I had my beginning, my ending, and some key points to work with in the middle. And all I needed to start things off was one little death…
Building the AU, Setting the Stage
The way I saw it, there were two ways to go about breaking Batman. I could have done what I think of as “The pre-Knightfall buildup”. In other words, I could have started small, then slowly, but surely piled the stresses on until he snapped. That could have worked fine-if I wanted to build to the arrest. The thing was, that method worked in the comics because we got about eight months of seeing Batman struggle harder and harder to fight weaker adversaries. But each issue (or arc) was a self-contained story with the weakness a unifying subplot. I needed to do something more dramatic in the first chapter. It had to be something that could conceivably stop Bruce in his tracks, and knock him cold.
So I killed Alfred.
Well, technically, I killed Alfred and Jason. Then, on top of everything else, I gave Batman a compound fracture of the tibia. At that point, getting him arrested was fairly easy.
What I find when I start writing a multipart story is that there are certain scenes which spring to mind fully-formed and sharply focused. The arrest was one of those. I could hear Montoya’s voice in my head, hear Batman’s ragged breathing, smell the mix of smoke and blood and refuse in the alley. Honestly, it scared me.
Once I had Bruce under lock and key, my next move was to bring the family back to Gotham-and to unmask the Batman. In the process, I also set Montoya up for a fairly large role in the fic, which somehow didn’t quite develop as intended. (There were two reasons for this: first, too much of what I wanted to do with her character would have brought her squarely into canon-sue territory. Second, I’d planned for her to be a major part of Dick’s redemption-but, as it turned out, there was a better character to use for that. I just hadn’t realized it yet.)
I wrote the first two chapters in a blaze of adrenaline and creativity, and posted them within days. And then, I hit an impasse. I was out of ‘write what you know’ territory and trying to figure out how to get from where I was to where I needed to be. In short, I needed a scenario where Dick could walk down a street in Gotham without getting arrested. Because once Batman's mask was off, unless the GCPD had traded places with the Keystone Kops (Sennett Studios, not Flash!), they were going to connect the dots. Plus, I had to know exaclty what to charge Bruce with, and a host of other details that I would have had at my fingertips-had I a working knowledge of US law.
Fortunately, I had the next best thing.
Of Research and Betas and Getting Serious
Thank G-d for Char! What can else can I say? Among other things, she’s a practicing attorney, a fantastic writer, and the mod of Bludhaven, a Yahoo Group devoted to Nightwing (and Bat-family) fanfiction. I’d recently made her acquaintance on another list, now-defunct, which was maintained by Gina Ivy-and I was still in my awestruck fangirl phase. Truth be known, I still am, but it’s not as all-pervading as it used to be.
I started pouring my heart, my questions, and my frustrations out to her. And, in short order, I had a sounding board, a beta and a better idea of my options. I’d been writing fanfics for about a year and a half at that point, but I hadn’t yet worked with a beta. (Things change; nowadays, I usually have at least two or three!)
I also started working with an outline again-something I hadn’t done since my university term paper days. It was a very rough outline, basically a list of the plot points I intended to cover. Sometimes I have a tendency to go off on tangents or data-dump, and this technique helps me compensate for that problem.
The habit goes back to my academic days when ‘answering a question’ meant spilling absolutely everything I knew on the topic, and using up 75 per cent of the allotted time or page-space to expound on my first point. Mapping out exactly what had to be covered and how much space I wanted to devote to each point kept me on track. If I didn’t want this story to get weighed down by too much filler and banter, then it was time to get back to that model.
Methodology
Let me state for the record that a good chunk of my writing gets done before I ever put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). There are certain key scenes that are 'written' in my head and then transcribed almost verbatim. Other ideas suggest themselves during the course of the writing.
It helps if I think of a story like a road trip. To use a route I’m pretty familiar with as an example, if I want to go from Toronto to Montreal, I know that in the course of my journey I will pass Belleville, Kingston, and Cornwall. Consider these my key points-the ones I know I need to hit even before I start fleshing out the rest of the plot.
My next step is to plan the first chapter, or leg of the journey. So, I sit down and figure out that on my way from Toronto to Belleville, I will go through Oshawa, Bowmanville, and Coburg. Each station on the route has its own attractions-whether I want to linger over them, make a quick stop for refueling, or drive right on past, while noting that the trees are in bloom or the geese are flying overhead.
A sample chapter outline might read: Toronto--Metro Zoo, Casa Loma; Oshawa--antiquing; Bowmanville--stop for coffee, etc. For each plot point, I jot down a quick note about what I plan to cover.
Now, when I actually sit down to write, ideas frequently occur to me while I'm typing. Maybe while I'm figuring out how my character will get to the zoo, I get inspired to write a scene that happens enroute. Maybe between Toronto and Oshawa, I see one of those blue road signs highlighting a tourist attraction in Pickering and decide that it could be interesting. By the way, this is one of the main reasons that I use the outline-that tendency of mine to ramble. Knowing what I need to cover in a certain chapter helps me to stay (more-or-less) on track. Then, if I decide that I really do want to check out that petting zoo in Pickering, I can allow for it, provided that I don’t wander there for hours on end. Because even if Belleville ends up too far off for me to get to by chapter's end, I must at least make it as far as Coburg. That means that I can’t spend 6 pages out of 10 on an incidental side-trip. Now, if something happens on that side-trip that will have direct repercussions later in the story, it's possible that I might linger. That's how we end up with the 7 pages in chapter 6 in which Jim has it out with Akins.
The Story Takes Shape
With Char’s help, the bare bones started to get fleshed out. A quick look through her files provided a useful piece of canon which, while rarely mentioned, hasn't been retconned: Dick and Bruce, as JLA members (okay, one member and one reservist) are de facto Law Enforcement Officials, deputized by the UN. Although said status did cast some aspersions on the legality of arresting Batman in the first place, bringing Bruce’s mental competency into the picture gave it some credibility. This point was also the first step toward getting Dick out of the funk he’d been in canonically speaking, ever since Blockbuster’s murder.
“Grayson!” Captain Amy Rohrbach stood in the doorway of her office, arms folded; glowering like a certain bat was wont to do. “In here. Now.”
This didn’t look good. A thought instantly corroborated by the jeers and whistles of most of the office personnel. He squared his shoulders and strode toward the office. Amy let him pass, then shut the door behind them.
Once in private, she opened her desk drawer, pulled out a manila folder, and slammed it, opened, onto her desk blotter. “Crutches Grayson?” she demanded, scornfully. “Tell me this wasn’t some other way for you to… oh, what was the phrase you used, last time--gain atonement? One more crack at getting yourself arrested?”
Dick swallowed. “Amy,” he started to say.
She jabbed her index finger against his sternum. “Because, let me tell you something, right now, Dick. Your UN sanction with the JLA probably won’t stand up if you’re caught assisting a known criminal organization. So keep this up, and you might just get your wish.” Her lip curled in disgust. “And that would be a real waste.”
Dick had stopped listening. He had almost stopped breathing. Amy was right! As a reserve member of the JLA, he was officially deputized by the United Nations! He held special status as a member of an elite international peacekeeping force! As long as he didn’t interfere with the police without being invited to do so… He wanted to cartwheel back to Gotham, triple-flip onto Akins’ office windowsill, and make faces at him through the glass. He wanted to kiss his married former captain. For the first time in--G-d, how long had it been? Months? Yes. For the first time in nearly five months, he felt as though his shoulders had come unstapled from his neck.
Amy stopped ranting and looked at the suddenly beaming young man before her with some annoyance. She was chewing the guy out, and he was grinning like an idiot. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Grayson?” She snapped.
His smile could not have been broader if he’d taken a full dose of Joker toxin. “Every word, Amy!” He whooped. “Every single word! THANK-you!” He raced out of her office, before he really did kiss her. Which turned out to be a good thing, as he nearly collided with Mr. Rohrbach on the steps outside the precinct. (LITF, Chapter 3)
One of the things that’s always impressed me about Nightwing has been his resilience. And, although that resilience had been missing from canon for about a year, I had a feeling that, faced with a real crisis, Dick was going to rise to the occasion. Sure, he'd need a little nudging from his friends, but he was going to pull through. Maybe he wouldn’t really hit his stride until Roy and Dinah started prepping him for his press conference in chapter 5, but he was definitely on the road to recovery.
That rehearsal scene, by the way, also came about through a discussion with Char. She pointed out to me that in any press conference, a reporter would be sure to ask about the "real" relationship between Dick and Bruce. The more I thought it over, the more I knew that she was right. It was exactly the kind of question some nosy so-and-so would pose--and if they did, Dick would go ballistic. I didn't want to duck the question, but I didn't want Dick charged with assault either. So, I cooked up the "press rehearsal" and let the question come from Roy first. That way, when it got posed in the actual conference, Dick's calmer reaction was much more believable.
Jim Gordon was another significant piece of the puzzle. After Bruce's arrest, a distraught Montoya contacted him, partly as a courtesy to let him know that the vigilante he'd worked with for years was behind bars, and partly to see whether he had any ideas of how to reach Batman's other allies. I took the tack that Gordon already knew that Barbara was Oracle (this story was written prior to the Birds of Prey arc when Barbara told him outright), and went from there. Jim became the catalyst to return the various 'bats' to Gotham.
There was another reason, too. Gordon was easily 25 to 30 years Bruce's senior--old enough to be Bruce's father, in fact. And ever since the Officer Down storyline, I'd had a feeling that Bruce recognized it. I don't mean to say that he saw Jim as his father, per se... but as a father figure? Thinking back on Killing Joke, the lead-up to Knightfall, the post-Prodigal period, No Man's Land, Turning Points, and Hush, it was clear to me that Jim's approval and support were crucial to him. Whenever Jim became angry enough or disillusioned enough to sever communications, Batman felt the lack and struggled to make amends. Groveling wasn't in his nature, by any stretch, but if Jim rebuffed him once, he'd try again at a later time, after he'd done something to "prove" himself once more. Contrast that with his reaction to Akins, post-War Games, where he figuratively shrugged his shoulders at the lack of police support and went back to stopping crime his way.
I needed Jim to get Babs to rally the troops, but I also needed him in the hospital room with Bruce in chapter 3. Unfortunately, for both of them, I also needed him there in the hospital room toward the end of Chapter 7 (another one of those scenes I knew would be in the story long before I sat down to write it).
I'd initially planned to make Romy and Akins the 'love-to-hate' villains of the piece. That resolve lasted until I actually sat down and started fleshing them out. The more I wrote them, the harder it became for me to dislike them. Once I started chipping away at the surface and trying to figure out what made them tick, I found myself empathizing with them. I realized that the main reason I'd had for disliking them was that they were ranged against my favorite vigilante clan. On analysis, however, it dawned on me that neither character had a real reason to be ‘pro-bat’.
Akins was a relative newcomer to the Gotham. He’d never developed the kind of working relationship with Batman that Gordon had. More to the point, during War Games, he had vetoed one of Batman’s plans; Batman had set it in motion anyway, and disaster had struck. Nearly thirty good officers were dead, the effectiveness of the GCPD was in question, and Akins had every reason to hold Batman accountable. And suddenly, he wasn’t some shortsighted, small-minded, bureaucrat. He was a decent man who had witnessed firsthand what happened when one of Batman’s plans went completely and utterly wrong. He’d made a decision in the heat of the moment: that a vigilante was a criminal and would be treated accordingly. After trying to look at the situation from his perspective, I couldn’t exactly blame him for making that call.
Romy’s partner had been killed in the line of duty. Batman hadn’t been able to save him. That much was canon (Gotham Central’s “Soft Targets” arc). I took things a bit further and gave her close friends among the officers killed during War Games. When we meet her in LITF, she’s stressed, angry, and falling apart. In other words, she’s a prime target for Hush’s schemes.
It wasn't until I was nearly finished with Chapter 5 that I realized that my criminal mastermind wasn't Black Mask, after all. I hadn't planned to use Hush initially. Once the thought occurred to me, though, I knew I had to. Black Mask might have been a twisted, sadist, and he might have had enough of a mad-on for Bruce to kidnap Alfred... but Hush's forte was manipulation. He was perfect. The weirdest thing was that I got the idea to use him at the precise point that he had to enter the fic. Any sooner than that and he wouldn’t have fit in; any later and his appearance would have felt forced. But Chapter 5, just after the mid-point of the story, was exactly the time for him to show up. And he did.
Initially, I’d planned to keep Bruce depressed and uncommunicative throughout the story. I’m actually glad that didn’t happen. First, Montoya kept visiting. Second, Romy showed up and started snipping at him. Ironically, she was the one who got him to respond. Ironically, but not really surprisingly-Bruce is usually willing to help anybody but himself. So, Bruce does his best to tune out Montoya’s pep talks, but Romy gets his full attention-because he recognizes that there’s something that he can do to give her some peace. Now it would be great if Romy were to immediately do a complete about-face, and become one of Batman’s staunchest supporters. Wildly out-of-character and badly clichéd, yes, but great. Instead, she did her utmost to cling her earlier preconceptions. She wanted to blame him for everything that had gone wrong in her life recently. She wanted to demonize him. The problem was that she recognized for herself that she wasn’t being fair. She was, however, poised to drive the final nail into Bruce’s coffin, as it were.
Once I had Bruce coming out of his depression and starting to warm up to the people supporting him, it was just a matter of time before he’d try to fight back. True, with a broken leg, he wasn’t going anywhere fast, but once that leg healed, he’d be out of Arkham in a matter of minutes. That wouldn’t do. I had to twist the knife a little further, to make sure that Bruce would believe that he deserved the fate awaiting him. After asking a few quick questions at fanfic_med, I had my answers:
…The most usefull[sic] for your purposes would be Desoxyn, which in too high doses can cause paranoia, hallucinations and mildly psychotic behavior. But you can get this form [sic] all of the above stimulants, compounded by sleep deprivation which they will cause. All these stimulants are available legally on prescription, but are also dealt on the black market, so they should be found in the evidence vault. Desoxyn is normally dosed between 20 - 25 mg. Overdose symptoms are restlessness, tremor, hyperreflexia (overly strong reflexes), rapid respiration, hyperpyrexia (abonrmally [sic]high fever), confusion, assaultiveness, hallucinations, panic states. (Illman, Fanfic_med message 7331, September 7, 2005).
The next step was getting the substance to Bruce. And Romy was going to play a huge part, albeit an unwitting one.
At this juncture, I'd like to mention one key plot point that had been planned almost from the beginning. Judaism teaches that the way a person knows that he has fully repented for a past misdeed is that he finds himself once more facing the same test he failed--and passes it. The cliffhanger at the end of Chapter 7 had been plotted from the get-go with this in mind. Except that at the time, Hush hadn't been part of the picture. I'd expected Dick to face off against Black Mask. And I'd thought to use Montoya instead of Romy Chandler. Sometimes, the story does veer away from the plan. And sometimes, it works better when you let it.
For those who aren't familiar with the story, in canon, Nightwing had been beating himself up because, in a moment of weakness, he had stepped aside and allowed his sometime-ally, sometime-enemy, Tarantula, to murder his arch-enemy, Blockbuster, in cold blood. I wanted to recreate that moment for Nightwing. I wanted him to be the only thing standing between Hush and a small lead projectile. I wanted him to have every reason for stepping away and letting it happen again... And this time, I wanted him not to.
To that end, I felt that I needed to do something to make Montoya angry enough to want to pull a gun on Hush and be prepared to shoot anyone standing in her way. And here, I hit an impasse. I could kill her partner, Cris Allen. He'd just died in canon around that time anyway, and the loss was going to hit her hard--but how was I going to drag Hush into the equation? I could do the same thing with Daria, her then-significant other. Again, it felt wrong. No, it felt like I was going over-the-top and laying it on with a trowel in order to shoehorn Montoya into the Tarantula role. It was overkill. But the scene had to be there. I needed something solid to show that Nightwing had confronted his past deed, dealt with it, and moved on. But I couldn't do it without piling so much on Montoya's shoulders that she'd end up dead or sharing a cell with Harley Quinn. It was too out-of-character.
And then, I had an epiphany--I could use Romy. She was angry, she was volatile, she was on edge, and, once Hush set her up to take a fall, she already had an excellent motive to want him dead. Factor in her dislike of Batman, in particular and (one could argue) vigilantes in general, and it all fell into place. Why contrive a scenario to force Montoya into a role that didn't fit her character, when I had the perfect character and motive staring me in the face? Once the idea occurred to me, I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it from the start. The scene practically wrote itself.
And so, when I reached the final chapter, every game-piece was set up pretty much where I wanted it. The Bat-Crew was back in Gotham, rallying 'round to support Bruce if they could, and protect his city if they couldn't. Dick was Batman--and he had finally come to terms with his past mistakes and started moving on. Akins was out and Maggie Sawyer was in. Montoya had a promotion and Romy had a new direction. And Bruce? Well, I'd known where he was going from the start. I'd never pretended otherwise. About all I could do was end on a faintly hopeful note.
At the time, I had no plans to write a sequel. I'd set out to prove to myself that one could plausibly write a story that would put Bruce in Arkham and Dick in the Bat-suit, and I felt I'd done that. A sequel would involve a knowledge of psychology that I didn't think I possessed. So I left the story alone and went on to write other things. At the back of my mind, I knew that I was probably going to return to this AU, but it took me almost a full year before I started Lost to the Night, otherwise know as, "You've made your point, now get me out of here!"
That, however, is another essay for another time.
Process Essay: Locked Inside the Façade
Introduction: The Origin of the Story
I got the idea for Locked Inside the Façade in July of 2005. To put things into context, at this point, Batman was on the outs with the GCPD. Nightwing, or "Crutches" Grayson, was in the mob, or had possibly just started calling himself Renegade. Jack Drake and Spoiler were dead and Robin and Batgirl had just moved to Bludhaven. The Birds of Prey had left Gotham and their only fixed address at the time seemed to be a state-of-the-art jet. Former Commissioner Gordon had moved away from Gotham to be near Barbara (which made things a bit confusing, seeing as she hadn’t taken up residence anywhere at the time). Oh, and the JLA had just disbanded, due, in part, to Batman remembering that he'd been mindwiped.
If you were talking about "Countdown", you were referring to four miniseries leading up to Infinite Crisis. Jason Todd was alive, Maxwell Lord was dead, and Superman had just taken fists and heat vision to Gotham's favorite Bat.
And in the middle of all this, CBR's "Lying in the Gutters" column posted the following rumor: One Year Later, Dick Grayson will be Batman and Bruce Wayne will be in Arkham.
To be honest, when I read that bit of gossip, my initial reaction could best be paraphrased as “That has to be the dumbest idea DC has come up with so far!” Let me be clear: it wasn’t that the idea of Bruce Wayne in Arkham didn’t have potential. What bothered me about the concept could best be summed up as follows:
What it boiled down to, in essence was that in order for Bruce to end up in Arkham:
Now, while I was mentally head-desking and detailing everything that was wrong with the above-mentioned rumor, and trying to get a handle on just what would be involved in handling the concept credibly, a new thought surfaced.
What if?
I had a new thought: that could actually be one heck of a good story…
In very short order, I had the bare bones of an idea. It occurred to me that there was a way to break Bruce, get Dick into the suit, and, while I was at it, fix a few of the things that had been bugging me in the Bat-books for the last little while. I had my beginning, my ending, and some key points to work with in the middle. And all I needed to start things off was one little death…
Building the AU, Setting the Stage
The way I saw it, there were two ways to go about breaking Batman. I could have done what I think of as “The pre-Knightfall buildup”. In other words, I could have started small, then slowly, but surely piled the stresses on until he snapped. That could have worked fine-if I wanted to build to the arrest. The thing was, that method worked in the comics because we got about eight months of seeing Batman struggle harder and harder to fight weaker adversaries. But each issue (or arc) was a self-contained story with the weakness a unifying subplot. I needed to do something more dramatic in the first chapter. It had to be something that could conceivably stop Bruce in his tracks, and knock him cold.
So I killed Alfred.
Well, technically, I killed Alfred and Jason. Then, on top of everything else, I gave Batman a compound fracture of the tibia. At that point, getting him arrested was fairly easy.
What I find when I start writing a multipart story is that there are certain scenes which spring to mind fully-formed and sharply focused. The arrest was one of those. I could hear Montoya’s voice in my head, hear Batman’s ragged breathing, smell the mix of smoke and blood and refuse in the alley. Honestly, it scared me.
Once I had Bruce under lock and key, my next move was to bring the family back to Gotham-and to unmask the Batman. In the process, I also set Montoya up for a fairly large role in the fic, which somehow didn’t quite develop as intended. (There were two reasons for this: first, too much of what I wanted to do with her character would have brought her squarely into canon-sue territory. Second, I’d planned for her to be a major part of Dick’s redemption-but, as it turned out, there was a better character to use for that. I just hadn’t realized it yet.)
I wrote the first two chapters in a blaze of adrenaline and creativity, and posted them within days. And then, I hit an impasse. I was out of ‘write what you know’ territory and trying to figure out how to get from where I was to where I needed to be. In short, I needed a scenario where Dick could walk down a street in Gotham without getting arrested. Because once Batman's mask was off, unless the GCPD had traded places with the Keystone Kops (Sennett Studios, not Flash!), they were going to connect the dots. Plus, I had to know exaclty what to charge Bruce with, and a host of other details that I would have had at my fingertips-had I a working knowledge of US law.
Fortunately, I had the next best thing.
Of Research and Betas and Getting Serious
Thank G-d for Char! What can else can I say? Among other things, she’s a practicing attorney, a fantastic writer, and the mod of Bludhaven, a Yahoo Group devoted to Nightwing (and Bat-family) fanfiction. I’d recently made her acquaintance on another list, now-defunct, which was maintained by Gina Ivy-and I was still in my awestruck fangirl phase. Truth be known, I still am, but it’s not as all-pervading as it used to be.
I started pouring my heart, my questions, and my frustrations out to her. And, in short order, I had a sounding board, a beta and a better idea of my options. I’d been writing fanfics for about a year and a half at that point, but I hadn’t yet worked with a beta. (Things change; nowadays, I usually have at least two or three!)
I also started working with an outline again-something I hadn’t done since my university term paper days. It was a very rough outline, basically a list of the plot points I intended to cover. Sometimes I have a tendency to go off on tangents or data-dump, and this technique helps me compensate for that problem.
The habit goes back to my academic days when ‘answering a question’ meant spilling absolutely everything I knew on the topic, and using up 75 per cent of the allotted time or page-space to expound on my first point. Mapping out exactly what had to be covered and how much space I wanted to devote to each point kept me on track. If I didn’t want this story to get weighed down by too much filler and banter, then it was time to get back to that model.
Methodology
Let me state for the record that a good chunk of my writing gets done before I ever put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). There are certain key scenes that are 'written' in my head and then transcribed almost verbatim. Other ideas suggest themselves during the course of the writing.
It helps if I think of a story like a road trip. To use a route I’m pretty familiar with as an example, if I want to go from Toronto to Montreal, I know that in the course of my journey I will pass Belleville, Kingston, and Cornwall. Consider these my key points-the ones I know I need to hit even before I start fleshing out the rest of the plot.
My next step is to plan the first chapter, or leg of the journey. So, I sit down and figure out that on my way from Toronto to Belleville, I will go through Oshawa, Bowmanville, and Coburg. Each station on the route has its own attractions-whether I want to linger over them, make a quick stop for refueling, or drive right on past, while noting that the trees are in bloom or the geese are flying overhead.
A sample chapter outline might read: Toronto--Metro Zoo, Casa Loma; Oshawa--antiquing; Bowmanville--stop for coffee, etc. For each plot point, I jot down a quick note about what I plan to cover.
Now, when I actually sit down to write, ideas frequently occur to me while I'm typing. Maybe while I'm figuring out how my character will get to the zoo, I get inspired to write a scene that happens enroute. Maybe between Toronto and Oshawa, I see one of those blue road signs highlighting a tourist attraction in Pickering and decide that it could be interesting. By the way, this is one of the main reasons that I use the outline-that tendency of mine to ramble. Knowing what I need to cover in a certain chapter helps me to stay (more-or-less) on track. Then, if I decide that I really do want to check out that petting zoo in Pickering, I can allow for it, provided that I don’t wander there for hours on end. Because even if Belleville ends up too far off for me to get to by chapter's end, I must at least make it as far as Coburg. That means that I can’t spend 6 pages out of 10 on an incidental side-trip. Now, if something happens on that side-trip that will have direct repercussions later in the story, it's possible that I might linger. That's how we end up with the 7 pages in chapter 6 in which Jim has it out with Akins.
The Story Takes Shape
With Char’s help, the bare bones started to get fleshed out. A quick look through her files provided a useful piece of canon which, while rarely mentioned, hasn't been retconned: Dick and Bruce, as JLA members (okay, one member and one reservist) are de facto Law Enforcement Officials, deputized by the UN. Although said status did cast some aspersions on the legality of arresting Batman in the first place, bringing Bruce’s mental competency into the picture gave it some credibility. This point was also the first step toward getting Dick out of the funk he’d been in canonically speaking, ever since Blockbuster’s murder.
“Grayson!” Captain Amy Rohrbach stood in the doorway of her office, arms folded; glowering like a certain bat was wont to do. “In here. Now.”
This didn’t look good. A thought instantly corroborated by the jeers and whistles of most of the office personnel. He squared his shoulders and strode toward the office. Amy let him pass, then shut the door behind them.
Once in private, she opened her desk drawer, pulled out a manila folder, and slammed it, opened, onto her desk blotter. “Crutches Grayson?” she demanded, scornfully. “Tell me this wasn’t some other way for you to… oh, what was the phrase you used, last time--gain atonement? One more crack at getting yourself arrested?”
Dick swallowed. “Amy,” he started to say.
She jabbed her index finger against his sternum. “Because, let me tell you something, right now, Dick. Your UN sanction with the JLA probably won’t stand up if you’re caught assisting a known criminal organization. So keep this up, and you might just get your wish.” Her lip curled in disgust. “And that would be a real waste.”
Dick had stopped listening. He had almost stopped breathing. Amy was right! As a reserve member of the JLA, he was officially deputized by the United Nations! He held special status as a member of an elite international peacekeeping force! As long as he didn’t interfere with the police without being invited to do so… He wanted to cartwheel back to Gotham, triple-flip onto Akins’ office windowsill, and make faces at him through the glass. He wanted to kiss his married former captain. For the first time in--G-d, how long had it been? Months? Yes. For the first time in nearly five months, he felt as though his shoulders had come unstapled from his neck.
Amy stopped ranting and looked at the suddenly beaming young man before her with some annoyance. She was chewing the guy out, and he was grinning like an idiot. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Grayson?” She snapped.
His smile could not have been broader if he’d taken a full dose of Joker toxin. “Every word, Amy!” He whooped. “Every single word! THANK-you!” He raced out of her office, before he really did kiss her. Which turned out to be a good thing, as he nearly collided with Mr. Rohrbach on the steps outside the precinct. (LITF, Chapter 3)
One of the things that’s always impressed me about Nightwing has been his resilience. And, although that resilience had been missing from canon for about a year, I had a feeling that, faced with a real crisis, Dick was going to rise to the occasion. Sure, he'd need a little nudging from his friends, but he was going to pull through. Maybe he wouldn’t really hit his stride until Roy and Dinah started prepping him for his press conference in chapter 5, but he was definitely on the road to recovery.
That rehearsal scene, by the way, also came about through a discussion with Char. She pointed out to me that in any press conference, a reporter would be sure to ask about the "real" relationship between Dick and Bruce. The more I thought it over, the more I knew that she was right. It was exactly the kind of question some nosy so-and-so would pose--and if they did, Dick would go ballistic. I didn't want to duck the question, but I didn't want Dick charged with assault either. So, I cooked up the "press rehearsal" and let the question come from Roy first. That way, when it got posed in the actual conference, Dick's calmer reaction was much more believable.
Jim Gordon was another significant piece of the puzzle. After Bruce's arrest, a distraught Montoya contacted him, partly as a courtesy to let him know that the vigilante he'd worked with for years was behind bars, and partly to see whether he had any ideas of how to reach Batman's other allies. I took the tack that Gordon already knew that Barbara was Oracle (this story was written prior to the Birds of Prey arc when Barbara told him outright), and went from there. Jim became the catalyst to return the various 'bats' to Gotham.
There was another reason, too. Gordon was easily 25 to 30 years Bruce's senior--old enough to be Bruce's father, in fact. And ever since the Officer Down storyline, I'd had a feeling that Bruce recognized it. I don't mean to say that he saw Jim as his father, per se... but as a father figure? Thinking back on Killing Joke, the lead-up to Knightfall, the post-Prodigal period, No Man's Land, Turning Points, and Hush, it was clear to me that Jim's approval and support were crucial to him. Whenever Jim became angry enough or disillusioned enough to sever communications, Batman felt the lack and struggled to make amends. Groveling wasn't in his nature, by any stretch, but if Jim rebuffed him once, he'd try again at a later time, after he'd done something to "prove" himself once more. Contrast that with his reaction to Akins, post-War Games, where he figuratively shrugged his shoulders at the lack of police support and went back to stopping crime his way.
I needed Jim to get Babs to rally the troops, but I also needed him in the hospital room with Bruce in chapter 3. Unfortunately, for both of them, I also needed him there in the hospital room toward the end of Chapter 7 (another one of those scenes I knew would be in the story long before I sat down to write it).
I'd initially planned to make Romy and Akins the 'love-to-hate' villains of the piece. That resolve lasted until I actually sat down and started fleshing them out. The more I wrote them, the harder it became for me to dislike them. Once I started chipping away at the surface and trying to figure out what made them tick, I found myself empathizing with them. I realized that the main reason I'd had for disliking them was that they were ranged against my favorite vigilante clan. On analysis, however, it dawned on me that neither character had a real reason to be ‘pro-bat’.
Akins was a relative newcomer to the Gotham. He’d never developed the kind of working relationship with Batman that Gordon had. More to the point, during War Games, he had vetoed one of Batman’s plans; Batman had set it in motion anyway, and disaster had struck. Nearly thirty good officers were dead, the effectiveness of the GCPD was in question, and Akins had every reason to hold Batman accountable. And suddenly, he wasn’t some shortsighted, small-minded, bureaucrat. He was a decent man who had witnessed firsthand what happened when one of Batman’s plans went completely and utterly wrong. He’d made a decision in the heat of the moment: that a vigilante was a criminal and would be treated accordingly. After trying to look at the situation from his perspective, I couldn’t exactly blame him for making that call.
Romy’s partner had been killed in the line of duty. Batman hadn’t been able to save him. That much was canon (Gotham Central’s “Soft Targets” arc). I took things a bit further and gave her close friends among the officers killed during War Games. When we meet her in LITF, she’s stressed, angry, and falling apart. In other words, she’s a prime target for Hush’s schemes.
It wasn't until I was nearly finished with Chapter 5 that I realized that my criminal mastermind wasn't Black Mask, after all. I hadn't planned to use Hush initially. Once the thought occurred to me, though, I knew I had to. Black Mask might have been a twisted, sadist, and he might have had enough of a mad-on for Bruce to kidnap Alfred... but Hush's forte was manipulation. He was perfect. The weirdest thing was that I got the idea to use him at the precise point that he had to enter the fic. Any sooner than that and he wouldn’t have fit in; any later and his appearance would have felt forced. But Chapter 5, just after the mid-point of the story, was exactly the time for him to show up. And he did.
Initially, I’d planned to keep Bruce depressed and uncommunicative throughout the story. I’m actually glad that didn’t happen. First, Montoya kept visiting. Second, Romy showed up and started snipping at him. Ironically, she was the one who got him to respond. Ironically, but not really surprisingly-Bruce is usually willing to help anybody but himself. So, Bruce does his best to tune out Montoya’s pep talks, but Romy gets his full attention-because he recognizes that there’s something that he can do to give her some peace. Now it would be great if Romy were to immediately do a complete about-face, and become one of Batman’s staunchest supporters. Wildly out-of-character and badly clichéd, yes, but great. Instead, she did her utmost to cling her earlier preconceptions. She wanted to blame him for everything that had gone wrong in her life recently. She wanted to demonize him. The problem was that she recognized for herself that she wasn’t being fair. She was, however, poised to drive the final nail into Bruce’s coffin, as it were.
Once I had Bruce coming out of his depression and starting to warm up to the people supporting him, it was just a matter of time before he’d try to fight back. True, with a broken leg, he wasn’t going anywhere fast, but once that leg healed, he’d be out of Arkham in a matter of minutes. That wouldn’t do. I had to twist the knife a little further, to make sure that Bruce would believe that he deserved the fate awaiting him. After asking a few quick questions at fanfic_med, I had my answers:
…The most usefull[sic] for your purposes would be Desoxyn, which in too high doses can cause paranoia, hallucinations and mildly psychotic behavior. But you can get this form [sic] all of the above stimulants, compounded by sleep deprivation which they will cause. All these stimulants are available legally on prescription, but are also dealt on the black market, so they should be found in the evidence vault. Desoxyn is normally dosed between 20 - 25 mg. Overdose symptoms are restlessness, tremor, hyperreflexia (overly strong reflexes), rapid respiration, hyperpyrexia (abonrmally [sic]high fever), confusion, assaultiveness, hallucinations, panic states. (Illman, Fanfic_med message 7331, September 7, 2005).
The next step was getting the substance to Bruce. And Romy was going to play a huge part, albeit an unwitting one.
At this juncture, I'd like to mention one key plot point that had been planned almost from the beginning. Judaism teaches that the way a person knows that he has fully repented for a past misdeed is that he finds himself once more facing the same test he failed--and passes it. The cliffhanger at the end of Chapter 7 had been plotted from the get-go with this in mind. Except that at the time, Hush hadn't been part of the picture. I'd expected Dick to face off against Black Mask. And I'd thought to use Montoya instead of Romy Chandler. Sometimes, the story does veer away from the plan. And sometimes, it works better when you let it.
For those who aren't familiar with the story, in canon, Nightwing had been beating himself up because, in a moment of weakness, he had stepped aside and allowed his sometime-ally, sometime-enemy, Tarantula, to murder his arch-enemy, Blockbuster, in cold blood. I wanted to recreate that moment for Nightwing. I wanted him to be the only thing standing between Hush and a small lead projectile. I wanted him to have every reason for stepping away and letting it happen again... And this time, I wanted him not to.
To that end, I felt that I needed to do something to make Montoya angry enough to want to pull a gun on Hush and be prepared to shoot anyone standing in her way. And here, I hit an impasse. I could kill her partner, Cris Allen. He'd just died in canon around that time anyway, and the loss was going to hit her hard--but how was I going to drag Hush into the equation? I could do the same thing with Daria, her then-significant other. Again, it felt wrong. No, it felt like I was going over-the-top and laying it on with a trowel in order to shoehorn Montoya into the Tarantula role. It was overkill. But the scene had to be there. I needed something solid to show that Nightwing had confronted his past deed, dealt with it, and moved on. But I couldn't do it without piling so much on Montoya's shoulders that she'd end up dead or sharing a cell with Harley Quinn. It was too out-of-character.
And then, I had an epiphany--I could use Romy. She was angry, she was volatile, she was on edge, and, once Hush set her up to take a fall, she already had an excellent motive to want him dead. Factor in her dislike of Batman, in particular and (one could argue) vigilantes in general, and it all fell into place. Why contrive a scenario to force Montoya into a role that didn't fit her character, when I had the perfect character and motive staring me in the face? Once the idea occurred to me, I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it from the start. The scene practically wrote itself.
And so, when I reached the final chapter, every game-piece was set up pretty much where I wanted it. The Bat-Crew was back in Gotham, rallying 'round to support Bruce if they could, and protect his city if they couldn't. Dick was Batman--and he had finally come to terms with his past mistakes and started moving on. Akins was out and Maggie Sawyer was in. Montoya had a promotion and Romy had a new direction. And Bruce? Well, I'd known where he was going from the start. I'd never pretended otherwise. About all I could do was end on a faintly hopeful note.
At the time, I had no plans to write a sequel. I'd set out to prove to myself that one could plausibly write a story that would put Bruce in Arkham and Dick in the Bat-suit, and I felt I'd done that. A sequel would involve a knowledge of psychology that I didn't think I possessed. So I left the story alone and went on to write other things. At the back of my mind, I knew that I was probably going to return to this AU, but it took me almost a full year before I started Lost to the Night, otherwise know as, "You've made your point, now get me out of here!"
That, however, is another essay for another time.