Go Big, Go Home, Author's Note
Longest Author's Note Ever
So, this is mostly for my own benefit, as I started tracking some of this stuff partway through, but I thought some other writers might be interested in some of these thoughts. And I know some of you are detail-oriented, so might have been keeping score as you’ve been reading on canon vs. non-canon and what came first...
I started this just after Meet and Greet, and it was deeply, deeply weird to be writing this at the same time as the show was solving the same problems. The whole thing took easily 3X as long in number of months to finish as I thought it would, it was twice as many words/chapters as I’d ever have guessed, and I got stuck in the damnedest places. It’s the longest continuous piece of work I’ve ever done, barring my undergraduate thesis (yes, we had to write an actual thesis to get our BA, and yes, mine was awful, and no, it wasn’t in creative writing).
And reading back over it, it was pretty insanely ambitious. Especially in the middle chapters, where I’m introducing new characters and expanding out a few who exist in the show (Mr. Kernsten, Marcia Langman, even William and Elizabeth). I’d kind of painted myself into a bit of a corner with Leslie alienated from both Ben and Ann at one point, and I really wanted a slow-ish multi-stage reveal of what the hell she was up to with her house, so I had to have her interact with other people. Hence things like the scene at the old folks’ home. And Ben needed people to talk to, and people to observe him, so that led to the Donna and April POV scenes, as well as the scenes with his brother and sister-in-law, although they appeared early on.
Ann’s evolution seemed really popular with commenters. As did the MOAR DONNA. All of that was very gratifying, because they emerged fairly organically. I didn’t set out with the Ann ideas; they evolved. And once I’d introduced Donna’s and April’s complicity in the first chapter, it became Chekhov’s gun. What I did always intend to do was involve Marlene somehow, just with Ben and also with Ben/Leslie. Marlene ex machina.
I started out without much of an outline, just the broad strokes of wanting to solve the biggest Season 4 problems: Leslie and Ben can’t stay apart, but they also can’t both keep working at City Hall if they're going to be together. Plus, Leslie has this campaign which isn’t a problem (except as an obstacle to their relationship), but has to be addressed. I needed to create ways to keep them apart, despite the fact that at that point in canon they weren't really interacting much - because that was bugging me about the breakup. Until End of the World there were so few interactions between them, and especially in Pawnee Rangers Leslie just seemed fine! fine! fine! So I didn't understand that and wanted to write about that. I was only spoiled at that point to the extent that I knew the show wasn't going to go in the direction I was (because that would be the worst sitcom ever) and that by episode 9 or thereabouts they'd be together. I did know more or less how I'd end the fic from the beginning.
Once I got a couple of chapters in, I started to have documents for each chapter listing scenes, or at least things that had to happen in that chapter, and I’d write them as the mood struck. Some of the later chapters were much more thoroughly written way before some of the earlier chapters. There were a few scenes (Ben's exchange with Leslie across the room at Ann's house; the scene when Ben arrives at Leslie's house after she wins; I think the scene with Leslie and Marcia Langman) which were written shockingly early, or at least sketched out and I knew that's how I wanted to handle those particular moments. I think I had Ben's dialogue with Barnes about not being naive about municipal politics written long before I had the second chapter done.
I also had a few themes that I was playing with, which were there from the start. That's a part of it that I'm not at all sure worked, because I think that takes a lot of skill. I liked the idea of going big - at that time my life was getting bigger professionally and it was exciting, and I saw parallels with Leslie, running for office. And I wanted to address the fact that Leslie is a terrible chess player - she doesn't see the long game very often - and that's something she'll have to develop to grow professionally.
And then I've always liked that quote from Mike Schur about Season 3 being about Ben finding a home. I thought a lot about what you consider your home, and about how Leslie in the middle had this big, busy life, but without the person she wanted next to her at the centre of it, physically and emotionally, and about Ben wanting to build his home with her but that meant he'd have to build his home in Pawnee more thoroughly than he'd done so far. I also wanted to incorporate Leslie's physical home - and have her address it. I think that's a fascinating character element which the show hasn't capitalized on for boring reasons shooting locations blah blah blah.
Overall it was a completely crazy endeavour, and I would never, ever have finished it without some very smart beta direction early on, and great collaboration later . So thanks to stillscape, and to rikyl, who started out with me, and to craponaspatula for being game to jump in so late in the process, and to saucydiva who gave great guidance even later on than that.
What I'd already written before it emerged (or re-emerged) on the show:
And differences:
Stuff I grabbed from canon after the fact:
Things I can’t take credit for:
A real-world rule that I flaunted with glee:
A plane or two I didn’t quite land:
And a continuity shout-out to my own fiction:
Thank you so much for reading. Anything you want to talk about, in terms of this or maybe even your own writing process?
So, this is mostly for my own benefit, as I started tracking some of this stuff partway through, but I thought some other writers might be interested in some of these thoughts. And I know some of you are detail-oriented, so might have been keeping score as you’ve been reading on canon vs. non-canon and what came first...
I started this just after Meet and Greet, and it was deeply, deeply weird to be writing this at the same time as the show was solving the same problems. The whole thing took easily 3X as long in number of months to finish as I thought it would, it was twice as many words/chapters as I’d ever have guessed, and I got stuck in the damnedest places. It’s the longest continuous piece of work I’ve ever done, barring my undergraduate thesis (yes, we had to write an actual thesis to get our BA, and yes, mine was awful, and no, it wasn’t in creative writing).
And reading back over it, it was pretty insanely ambitious. Especially in the middle chapters, where I’m introducing new characters and expanding out a few who exist in the show (Mr. Kernsten, Marcia Langman, even William and Elizabeth). I’d kind of painted myself into a bit of a corner with Leslie alienated from both Ben and Ann at one point, and I really wanted a slow-ish multi-stage reveal of what the hell she was up to with her house, so I had to have her interact with other people. Hence things like the scene at the old folks’ home. And Ben needed people to talk to, and people to observe him, so that led to the Donna and April POV scenes, as well as the scenes with his brother and sister-in-law, although they appeared early on.
Ann’s evolution seemed really popular with commenters. As did the MOAR DONNA. All of that was very gratifying, because they emerged fairly organically. I didn’t set out with the Ann ideas; they evolved. And once I’d introduced Donna’s and April’s complicity in the first chapter, it became Chekhov’s gun. What I did always intend to do was involve Marlene somehow, just with Ben and also with Ben/Leslie. Marlene ex machina.
I started out without much of an outline, just the broad strokes of wanting to solve the biggest Season 4 problems: Leslie and Ben can’t stay apart, but they also can’t both keep working at City Hall if they're going to be together. Plus, Leslie has this campaign which isn’t a problem (except as an obstacle to their relationship), but has to be addressed. I needed to create ways to keep them apart, despite the fact that at that point in canon they weren't really interacting much - because that was bugging me about the breakup. Until End of the World there were so few interactions between them, and especially in Pawnee Rangers Leslie just seemed fine! fine! fine! So I didn't understand that and wanted to write about that. I was only spoiled at that point to the extent that I knew the show wasn't going to go in the direction I was (because that would be the worst sitcom ever) and that by episode 9 or thereabouts they'd be together. I did know more or less how I'd end the fic from the beginning.
Once I got a couple of chapters in, I started to have documents for each chapter listing scenes, or at least things that had to happen in that chapter, and I’d write them as the mood struck. Some of the later chapters were much more thoroughly written way before some of the earlier chapters. There were a few scenes (Ben's exchange with Leslie across the room at Ann's house; the scene when Ben arrives at Leslie's house after she wins; I think the scene with Leslie and Marcia Langman) which were written shockingly early, or at least sketched out and I knew that's how I wanted to handle those particular moments. I think I had Ben's dialogue with Barnes about not being naive about municipal politics written long before I had the second chapter done.
I also had a few themes that I was playing with, which were there from the start. That's a part of it that I'm not at all sure worked, because I think that takes a lot of skill. I liked the idea of going big - at that time my life was getting bigger professionally and it was exciting, and I saw parallels with Leslie, running for office. And I wanted to address the fact that Leslie is a terrible chess player - she doesn't see the long game very often - and that's something she'll have to develop to grow professionally.
And then I've always liked that quote from Mike Schur about Season 3 being about Ben finding a home. I thought a lot about what you consider your home, and about how Leslie in the middle had this big, busy life, but without the person she wanted next to her at the centre of it, physically and emotionally, and about Ben wanting to build his home with her but that meant he'd have to build his home in Pawnee more thoroughly than he'd done so far. I also wanted to incorporate Leslie's physical home - and have her address it. I think that's a fascinating character element which the show hasn't capitalized on for boring reasons shooting locations blah blah blah.
Overall it was a completely crazy endeavour, and I would never, ever have finished it without some very smart beta direction early on, and great collaboration later . So thanks to stillscape, and to rikyl, who started out with me, and to craponaspatula for being game to jump in so late in the process, and to saucydiva who gave great guidance even later on than that.
What I'd already written before it emerged (or re-emerged) on the show:
- Leslie having a small business-oriented session for her campaign
- George the maintenance guy being their Achilles’ heel.
- Ann and Leslie fighting over Leslie being too domineering.
- Leslie taking Ben for granted and assuming he’d be there for her after they broke up.
- Ann noting that Ben has in fact won an election in the past.
- Donna Meagle, transpo (aka giving them a ride in her Benz).
- Ann Perkins, volunteer coordinator.
- Leslie needing to connect with seniors for the campaign.
- Perd moderating the debate.
- It’s true that I had Donna doing Leslie’s makeup before I saw the deleted scene with Chelsea Peretti from The Comeback Kid, but the reality is that often in the background Donna’s putting on lipgloss, so the show came up with Donna/makeup OTP before I did.
- APRIL CARING. There was a lot of discussion with the beta readers about this, becuase we hadn't really seen it from April (except to Andy and a bit to Leslie) previously.
- April knowing about Ben and Leslie (isn't that canon from a deleted scene now?)
- Leslie winning!
And differences:
- Of course, in my head, Paul Rudd is Ben’s brother, not Leslie’s opponent.
- Leslie’s opponent Forbes is more of a Stephen Root kind of guy with a one-track mind. Or maybe Darrell Hammond. Not even remotely Bobby Newton-esque. He’s “inspired’ by Rob Ford, current mayor of Toronto. (Google him. It’s depressing.)
- Parks, where the hell was Marlene?
- I let Leslie lose the debate.
- I let Ann have some professional success, and a life.
- I'm hinting at Ann/Ron because I like that idea, but I didn't actually write it because I'm not sure if I love that idea.
- One difference that sorta bothers me is that the show didn’t really demonstrate Leslie’s connection to the community - she never interacted with people at the victory party aside from existing characters. Nobody in the crowd even paid special attention to her, which I thought was poor direction. I’ve been to local election victory parties and that’s just not how they are. The candidate has some star power; people watch them move through the crowd and want a piece of them, but Leslie never once interacted with an extra and when the results were announced nobody was looking at her except Ben and Ann. Throughout the campaign, she talked with the odd power-broker (e.g. Carl Reiner), and sometimes spoke to a crowd, but she didn’t form any new relationships. Maybe Bradley Whitford’s character, but even then, he was a firmly-within-City-Hall character. I get TV budgets etc. but that seemed a bit off to me. If you run for office, you have to meet a bunch of new people and your contacts list and the Rolodex in your head is going to explode.
Stuff I grabbed from canon after the fact:
- Leslie screwing up a line at a key moment (in the debate, in my case; at the trial in canon)
- I think I had Shauna Malwae-Tweap flirting with Ben after canon did. But the timeline is fuzzifying and I'm not entirely sure about that now.
- Ben/Donna.
- Beta readers, do you remember anything else I stole incorporated?
Things I can’t take credit for:
- Seriously, the balls jokes. I wrote maybe 10% of those. That was a truly ridiculous series of comments to get that chapter done. stillscape, rikyl, saucydiva, and craponaspatula are dirty, dirty birds.
A real-world rule that I flaunted with glee:
- Apparently a real small-town reporter often won’t even take a cup of coffee from anyone they are covering, so we decided (we being me and rikyl) that we would just assume that the Pawnee press is not as ethical as some former reporters in this fandom (ie rikyl).
A plane or two I didn’t quite land:
- As far as we know, Tom is still unemployed by the end of this fic, even though I specifically wrote about him looking for work. I can think of a few things he might have been doing but it would have felt like jamming in an extraneous detail. But I didn’t get him back to the Parks Dept. Because that’s not how government jobs work, Mike Schur.
- Anything else? I’m sure there are others.
And a continuity shout-out to my own fiction:
- I wrote a fiction about Ben buying a bunny to send to his new niece here, and then wrote in the 5th chapter of this that the baby’s favourite toy is a bunny. I also reference Ben playing Mario Kart in the first chapter of this fic, which also comes from that same one-shot.
- I just noticed that I have Ben remember the night before they broke up when he’s back in Leslie’s bed both here and in my Behind Closed Doors fic. I’m terribly repetitive.
- Internal continuity is fun - it’s like reinforcing your own cleverness. Excuse me while I jam my head even further up my own ass.
Thank you so much for reading. Anything you want to talk about, in terms of this or maybe even your own writing process?