[Admin] Analysis for Party Time

Original story here.

=====================================

=====================================

Party Time was a piece I had great difficulty with, and there are a few reasons why. The first reason was a small amount of burnout; at the time that I started Party Time, I had just written and released about 10,000 words in the course of a week, which is a bit of an ask, and I was in need of some time to recharge my batteries a little. The second reason was that the art I was being prompted by was relatively one-dimensional: it depicts a party being ruined in a comedic way, and unlike Lost Child, the previous Community Card Pack prompt, I couldn’t find any way to really spin it into a new direction without running afoul of problem number three: that the prompt called for quite a lot of characters being involved, and quite a few of them were ones I was dreading working with.

It’s difficulty to gauge the impact of burnout on a finished piece, because the usual consequence of burnout is that the piece just doesn’t get finished. You realise that you’re grinding your face against a mountain and put the idea aside for later; whether it eventually comes to fruition or not, it won’t be in the form you had envisioned when you first made the attempt. In a sense, that process did actually happen, multiple times; Party Time is in fact one of the stories with both the most drafts and the longest drafts, out of anything I’ve written. The good thing is that, like any writer, I’m a firm believer in recycling; Krila’s thoughts on cakes were rescued from a previous version, where Kai played a part in the story. The bad thing it was excessive drafting saps the willpower and leads to even more burnout.

I think the primary thing the story lost in the process of finally grabbing that last, definitive draft was language. When I write comedy stories, my focus is split between the procession of funny events, the humour of the characters, and on making the words turn tricks for my amusement. A comedy story in which I’m having fun is usually replete with ‘Vulp-isms’, little sections where I use language in interesting or unexpected ways. You can see examples of this in a few places, but the QPverse comedy stories in particular tend to have a fair few of them. While not unique to me, they’re something that I would consider a hallmark of my style. Sadly, they’re often the first thing to go when the story becomes a grind. While I kept in as much as I could, I was a little disappointed in how often I found myself relying on situational comedy. As funny as I find the idea of Sweet Breaker being a pro-wrestler, that segment is one of my least favourite in the piece because it’s a weak stretch linguistically.

How did I try to address the burn out problem, and how would I choose to address it in the future? Well, an obvious but unhelpful answer is ‘take a break’. In my experience, that leads to the break becoming a hiatus, and the hiatus stretching on ever longer until you’re sad and intimidated by your own craft. Not fun. What I’ve done traditionally is look over old comments or reviews on my work for motivation, and to remind myself that I’m not awful at what I do. (One of the main problems with burn out is that it makes everything feel harder, which makes you feel like you’re worse, which knocks your self esteem, which means you proceed more timidly so everything feels harder…) That’s worked in previous fandoms, but the OJ fanbase isn’t very big, and my readership isn’t even a large part of that – there isn’t much feedback to go over. What I did instead is work on something else that I would hopefully enjoy more as a project, which is why Speaking in Tongues came out before Party Time even though Party Time was started long before. In the future, I might try switching up my writing style to something that’s novel to me, or else just completely backing away and approaching the prompt from another angle – a tactic that has worked in the past, but wasn’t feasible for this story.

The second problem was that there wasn’t a great deal of scope in what I could make out of the prompt. The art is a specific set of characters in a specific situation, and if I wanted to use it as a prompt that gave me a limited amount of wriggle room. In particular, the premise of a party locked me into using a lot of characters; I tend to prefer to focus on one or two. There are places in the story where this becomes apparent – characters like Syura, Sweet Breaker, Poppo and Marc are present, but there just isn’t enough space to give them large roles in the narrative, so they feel tacked on.

There was also the problem of a lot of new characters being used. Characters in Orange Juice tend to be fairly simple and shallow; they have one large character trait, one role in the story, and then it’s on to the next character. That’s fine for a shooting game, but it makes writing stories difficult. Unlike a fan artist, a fan fiction writer is expected (or at least encouraged) to keep the characters in character; if they’re not, it’s seen as a lack of skill. Usually, I deal with shallow characters by starting at their canon personality, and then adding small details over the course of a few stories until I’ve arrived at a more cohesive, stylised interpretation of them that still feels in line with the original. That makes new characters a big challenge, since I have to start from square one, and introducing multiple new characters a huge challenge, since I have to give each of them enough time and space to start growing.

If I had gone with the prompt as given, I would have had to deal with Fernet, Kai and Poppo as brand new characters – all of whom I would consider particularly challenging to develop. Fernet hails from Flying Red Barrel, a game that’s flown largely under the radar and has no Steam release; her characterisations in 100% Orange Juice and 200% Mixed Juice are suspect as a result of the premise of the stories in those games. Because of that, I have very little idea of ‘canon’ Fernet; she’s rich, and that’s about it. Kai and Poppo at least have some kind of accessible canon since their 100% Orange Juice characterisations are applicable, but Kai lacks personality (without taking the voice pack into account, which did a great job in fleshing him out a bit) and Poppo has a fifty-fifty spread of being an irritating Poke-speak nonsense character and then actually existing.

Kai and Poppo did appear in one of the drafts, but didn’t work out. Rather than deal with their nonsense, I decided to try an alternative route and work with Marc, Fernet and Sweebo. Sweet Breaker I eventually just used for a cracky joke, but with Marc I tried to establish a sunny disposition, and Fernet got the lion’s share of characterising tangents. Poppo was relegated to a joke as well. I also tried to split the story up into various scenes, where characters I had worked with before – QP, Syura and Krila – could help to carry some of the narrative.

The issue of too many characters still remained, however, and prevented certain choices I might have made. For one, it meant I couldn’t pivot on the prompt and try something serious with it. A party that gets ruined could have been a serious source of angst for Fernet, and given me room to explore her personality… but there just wasn’t space when I had to have so many characters running around, and a party without people is not a party at all. A crowded narrative either becomes very long or very chaotic, and of the two chaos was probably my better option.

The best way I could have dealt with all this is probably just adjusting the timing on writing the story. If, for example, I had written Flowers and the Sky before starting Party Time, I would have felt much more comfortable about Marc as a character, and perhaps worked the narrative to include more interactions between her and Fernet. Or, I could have written a short preliminary story with Fernet as a main character to give me time to develop her a little. However, it’s sometimes hard to predict what you’ll want to write in advance, and I was trying to follow a schedule of one community card art piece to one normal story at the time. As the issue of having too many characters, there wasn’t really a way I could have written around that with the prompt.

Those are the main problems I felt I faced, and how I either tackled them or should have tackled them. As for things I liked about the story… With a little distance, I’m able to see that there were definitely parts where I made the language dance, which I’m proud of. The Sweet Breaker section has something of a drought, but the Sweet Breaker section is also one of the most zany and outrageous parts to begin with; although it would probably be better with some accompanying flair, I like it well enough on its own. The sketch of Marc’s character, however brief, planted the seeds for her further characterisation in Flowers and the Sky, which is a piece I feel quietly proud of – it unfolded almost effortlessly, and probably wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t taken a plunge on Marc beforehand. I also laid some decent groundwork for Fernet and her character quirks, so it was a developmental kind of piece.

Overall, although I think Party Time is not one of my favourite pieces, it was useful practice and definitely has some amount of charm to it; it was worth writing, and doesn’t have the outright clumsiness of my worst work. If nothing else, it shows that I can stick with a story even when it’s proving to be a pain in the rear, which is a valid skill in and of itself.