by request - how I wrote "True Gold"

[arduinna]

dorinda wanted to hear about the writing process for True Gold, the Peacemakers story I wrote for her for Yuletide 2007. I've never done one of these before, and am not sure I'm approaching it right, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

So, hm.

The process started before the writing, because it's always complicated (and fun!) (and scary!) to write secretly for a friend. Generally, my Yuletide process includes the traditional brief panic, followed by several weeks of immersing myself in source before I actually start writing. In 2007, I had an embarrassment of riches to pick from; ordinarily I only match on one fandom, and this time I matched on three (which later turned into four, as friends showed me the fourth source). So I immersed myself in a lot of source that November, waiting for an idea to gel.

At some point, I was looking at prompt pictures for A Picture is Worth 1000 Words (slodwick does awesome pic prompts), and came across this picture of fire on a wooded hill/mountainside, and it shouted to be turned into a Peacemakers story, so I put everything else aside and focused on that. This was already plottier than almost anything I'd ever written; usually I write character pieces, not case fic.

Given that I was already going to be writing a little differently than usual, I wanted to see if I could write a bit more in Dorinda's style, which I adore to pieces; she's better at understated yearning and emotion than anyone I've ever seen, and I wanted to try to build that in. This was the most nerve-wracking thing about the story; usually I front the emotional/relationship stuff, and it was hard trying to turn that into a more subtle, underlying emotional throughline while fronting the case.

The original idea was to have fires in the mines that Stone and Finch got involved in solving, and to somehow have insurance fraud be a part of it, so I started researching. I had to start with the show itself, to try to narrow down a timeframe so I could research the other stuff I wanted. It should have been a piece of cake; every episode had a new invention in it that could be dated precisely. Except for the part where the show writers paid no freaking attention to when things were invented, and happily mixed and matched whatever they wanted. My notes are an exercise in swearing and crying at unseen scriptwriters as I looked things up and realized just how wrong they got it.

Eventually I settled on ca. 1890 as the most reasonable period for the show to have taken place, and I started researching for real. I didn't have the time (or need) for very detailed info, but I needed a lot of basic background in various things, fast.

So I looked up the history of the U.S. Marshals; the Colorado silver boom and Cripple Creek, including the Cripple Creek miners' strike of 1894; fires in the 1880s, as well as a report about a fire in a Colorado mining office in 1890 (partially insured) and a report about a fire in a Colorado jail in 1898 and how the townsfolk responded; firefighting history; insurance companies of the time and how insurance agents worked.

(Yay for delicious tags! *g*)

The insurance was the trickiest part; I was sure that insurance companies were operating in the big coastal cities, but more rural mines? Turns out that yes! I even had names of actual insurance companies I could use (having just found what looks like my earliest, mostly-notes draft, looks like I was going for the Manchester Fire Assurance Company of England, which I picked because it was used in the area at the time. Go figure!)

Almost none of that made it into the story, of course; not even the horse-drawn carts of water barrels with hoses I'd planned on, since in the end I decided the town was small enough they wouldn't quite be there yet, and went for the bucket brigades after all. (Besides, I wanted Stone on the line. *g*) But it was all in my head for background, which helped tremendously.

Somewhere along in here, I realized placing the story in the mines would be a mistake after all; I needed it to be in the town. Mine fires were too awful and hard to control; I also wanted the townsfolk involved, and I wanted Finch and Stone to be right there, rather than coping with fires miles away.

Looking at my notes, I clearly had a false start here. I wrote a few paragraphs of an opening that had Finch and Stone fighting a fire in a crowd of men, then stopped mid-line; there's a break of several empty lines, then a very brief summary of the story I actually wrote, which amazes me - I almost never outline, and when I do I don't really stick to it. But clearly the idea had been gelling in the back of my head, and although I altered and expanded on it, the base story is pretty much there:

Fire, bad one -- Finch and Stone help put it out, along with most of the town. It's the third fire in the past four months -- all at businesses, all looking like accidents.

Finch: "Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times --"

"Is a pattern. "

It's been a dry summer, but not *that* dry.

No real connections between the businesses -- not the same kinds, owners aren't related or connected beyond living in the same town, and they check and none of them are insured. They don't like it, but they can't figure it out, at least not without more information.

Few weeks later, a new storefront opens up -- an insurance agent for the Manchester Fire Assurance Company of England.

He's concerned when he hears about fires, hopes it's not a firebug, trusts the Marshal will find out if it is and arrest the person behind it. Jared assures him they will, and mentions that they have a great asset in Finch, who's a detective who helps the marshal's office, and who can do marvelous things with his forensic science. Agent seems reassured.

Few days later, building near Finch's lab burns, threatens Finch's lab. Finch goes in to save things, Jared goes in after him, swearing head off. They both make it out singed and coughing (hm, maybe -- I want them TOGETHER, dammit)

Next day, they talk to store owner, who is relieved because he signed up with agent for insurance, so his losses aren't so bad -- he won't have to give up store, like others have. Agent has already talked to him and given him an advance on his payment, as sign of good faith while claim is sent in to company.

Jared jokes to Finch that maybe he should get insurance -- and they figure it out, it was the *agent* who set all the fires, to boost his sales (and commissions) when he finally arrived in town.

IIRC, my earliest town-based idea was to start at the very beginning, before any fires at all, and slowly work up to the case. But I decided that would be too slow for what I wanted (not to mention it was already about a week into December at this point, and my deadline was looming), so this outline was my next idea: start with the third fire and work forward, to lay the groundwork.

Almost immediately I realized that was no good, either, unless I wanted to keep writing fire-fighting scenes, which I didn't. What I needed was an established solid pattern, and to start out at a strong pace from the get-go. So my actual draft started in the middle of fire #4, the fourth in five months. I also realized I didn't want to have the insurance agent moving into town during the story -- way too obvious. I needed him there, and involved in the story, preferably without giving anything away.

I was nervous about that; I wasn't sure I could pull it off. But I got him involved from the very first scene, fighting the fire, then brought him in again for a face-to-face with both Stone and Finch to cement his identity and presence (and hopefully distract away from him at the same time, by having him fretting about how the fires would affect his job).

The first draft was a little different; I originally identified him on the fire line as someone Stone knew and recognized clearly, and I think maybe even had something in there at that point about how he'd tried to sell Stone insurance. But on a rewrite I decided that was massive, awkward overkill, especially since I still had the street meeting to provide more background. Better to start him off as an anonymous town-based fire-fighter among all these known townspeople fighting the fire, to help set him up as more town background, rather than singling him out as A New Person Who Means Something To The Story. *g*

I also wanted to really ground this story in the town, and with the townspeople, so I tried to keep the level of interaction up throughout, even though the main focus on was Stone and Finch together. The fire-fighting line in the opening scene wasn't just to introduce Morgan, but to show the townspeople working together and bring in people I probably wouldn't be able to during the rest of the story, like the preacher and the bartender. I knew I wanted Isaac as a solid anchor there letting Stone go take care of Finch, even if that was his only role in the story, and I decided Babbles would be a strong line-leader as well, although at this early point I didn't yet know he was going to be crucial to the plot. I also liked being able to ground the story in Stone's head here, as he sized up the people around him automatically, keeping an eye on his town and how it behaved.

There were other people I specifically wanted involved: the mayor, Doc Gates, and Chipper. (Originally Miss Luci as well, but that didn't work out.)

I originally wanted a scene mid-story with the mayor, with Stone and Finch reporting on their progress to date, but it bogged things down too much and I cut it; I much preferred the almost-random meeting on the street for him I wrote instead, where I could play up his concern for the town but his obliviousness to Finch's condition until it was pointed out to him, and how once he notices, he does what he can to help. It was just much stronger than the "reporting in" scene I'd planned, and I liked how it reflected the way the mayor so often shows up in canon to poke at Jared and demand he do more, faster, while not making a scene about it so the town's image doesn't get tarnished. It also sets up Morgan's approach a moment later as something par for the course, just one in a series of interruptions as Stone and Finch try to make it to the bath house - again distracting away from his importance to the story.

Doc Gates - heh. I just wanted as much of him being snarky and annoying-in-Finch's-eyes as I could get, as well as some silent bonding with Stone over their fear of losing more people to fire. When I worked out what was happening around Babbles, Doc Gates was the obvious answer to the problem, too; he's a good man, and would absolutely pull Babbles away from a potential mob and give him odd jobs to do until things cooled down.

Chipper was harder, as I wanted him involved in an official capacity, but didn't want him horning in on Stone and Finch. Originally all I had for him was the bath-house scene, where he turned out to be cleverer than I thought by bringing the clothes with him; in my first draft, he had to leave and come back, but that was incredibly ploddy and forced, and I really liked him being so on the ball as to figure out what they needed - he's a smart boy, he totally would.

Katie was both the hardest and the easiest choice; I love her, but didn't want her in the middle of the investigation with them, which was another good reason to keep the story's timeframe condensed. I definitely wanted to keep the sense that she's an integral part of the town and their lives, though, and so Finch automatically considered staying with her when he was injured.

Luci was going to make it into the story when Stone went to her place after the fire, but by the time I got there, that would have bogged the story down too much, so I decided that instead of watching Stone hear first-hand, it would work better to have him simmering for a while, then watch Finch's reaction, putting them both on the same page (as always <3).

Okay, so, back to the actual story. I clearly changed my mind about both of them suffering from smoke; I wanted some h/c, and to bring out Stone's protective instincts. So Finch caught the smoke while Stone worried. This was one of the things I wanted to have running underneath the entire story: Stone's awareness of Finch's physical condition, and his efforts to care for Finch while never babying him. I'm really happy with how that worked out; how Stone was always aware, but didn't make a big deal of it unless he was blindsided (like seeing the sooty streak on Finch's skin and freaking out for a second).

That also gave me the infrastructure for how they move around within the story: get Finch to the doctor, go to the bath house, go to Stone's for the night, go back to the doctor, home for lunch. Within that, they were solving the case, and coming across various bits of information that they needed.

(The bath house nearly took over the entire story, because - alone in a bath house! It was hard staying on track there, rather than just going with a lot of looking and steam and slick skin and whatnot, and in a pinch, if I hadn't gotten the story written in time, I probably would have pulled the bath house scene and reworked it and posted that alone. But I like the way it worked out, too. *g*)

The case plot was the trickiest thing for me; it's hard for me to hold a case in my head like that, so I was really focused on making sure that worked. I was at an absolute loss for a long time on how to actually solve the damn thing; I knew who was responsible, I knew why he'd done it, but I didn't know how Stone and Finch were going to catch him. I was getting a little. Tense.

At some point, though, I realized that I'd off-handedly had Morgan going to Luci's after his chat with Stone and Finch on the street, just so he wasn't walking randomly away, and things started to click into place: what if he went to Luci's and tried to shift the blame to an "obvious" target?

It was plausible because the townspeople are as likely as any other group of people to turn into a mob of jackasses with only scattered voices of reason; he'd be able to stir things up, and it would never occur to him that anyone would want to defend Babbles. So there was my route to solving the puzzle, the mistake that the arsonist would never consider was a mistake.

Once I had that, the second half of the case plot began falling into place more cleanly - I admit, I particularly liked the bit where Verlinden is all "of course Babbles was there, he works for me every afternoon"; Verlinden was a cypher to me till then, after which I liked him very much. *g* Once I had Babbles as a suspect, Stone and Finch could reasonably ask for the list of people in the store, which cast suspicion on Morgan for the first time.

From there, I needed a way to tie in my original thought from my tiny outline, of Morgan looking suspicious because he'd wanted to know too much about the fires. But my original idea of him asking Stone questions was out of the question - way too obvious. So somehow I came up with the idea of Chipper overhearing him at Isaac's, which I loved as soon as I thought of it; it gave a deeper "town" background to have Chipper shoeing his horse at Isaac's, and Isaac was a perfect person for Morgan to be asking about it - again, someone Morgan would assume is so unimportant/outside society that he could get away with it. I also really loved Chipper being such a good deputy here, willing to pitch in with information that may be helpful even though it seemed innocuous, while listening to his two mentors talk.

So then it was just a matter of wrapping things up. I'd already planted loose buttons as evidence on hand; once they matched the buttons to Morgan's shirt, it was all over. I was a little worried that he would fall flat as a villain in the end, because he was so casual about it all, but that's how I saw him from the get-go: not really an arsonist, not a murderer per se, not passionate about anything, just an opportunist with no conscience.

And so there I had a story, at last!

But. In my efforts to make sure the case worked, I'd let some of the quiet emotional hints go unwritten; I wasn't happy with the balance. So I begged permission to have the file deleted so I could reupload with fixes, and set to work tightening up that throughline, to keep Stone's awareness of Finch going through the entire story, as well as the hints that Finch was just as aware of him.

The ending... hm. I have a suspicion it wouldn't work for a lot of fans, that it feels too abrupt. But I'm actually incredibly happy with that final sentence, even though it also seems like an odd place to break. I really like the hope in it, and the sense that of course Finch is going to say yes. The story is about the case and needed to end when the case did, but also it was about Stone's coming to grips with how he feels beneath the surface, and being ready to "solve" that, as well, by being willing to make the offer. It's not the response, or what comes later, that matters in the context of the story.

So all in all, I'm pretty damn proud of this story. *g* It was a lot of work, but very worth it! All the more so because Dorinda got everything I was trying to do in it. ♥

My betas, as always, helped hugely; I'm terribly hard on betas, because I write till the last minute and don't generally want in-progress help, I just want responses to my final pre-beta draft. therienne and sakana17 both went above and beyond with this one, and made it all better.

... that's a completely unbalanced writing process writeup, isn't it? The truth is, once I hit those two weeks or so of actually writing, much of it is a blur; I was writing as fast as I could, and gnashing my teeth as I yanked paragraphs and scenes out because they were pulling the story out of true, and there was a lot of desperate 2am inspiration, especially toward the end. So my memories of my process per se are clearer for the planning and research end of things. *g*

I should probably take the time to go through and organize this better, but if I do, it'll be days (or weeks) before I post. I'm happy to answer specific questions to clarify things, if I can, though. *g*

(It has just now occurred to me that I am 2 for 2 in writing Peacemakers stories where a nice hot bath is part of the plot. But the bath house is the more fun one. *g*)

Comments

[dorinda]

(No Finch/Stone icon just yet, but here's another western pair all aglow with lurve.)

Thank you so much for this post! It's wonderful. And of course, thanks for writing the story in the first place, and working so hard (and stealthily!) to make my Yuletide ultra-special. It certainly was. You DECEIVER. :D And your awesome betas too!

I like your decision to go with circa-1890. I shall feel safe stealing borrowing your decision when I eventually tackle Peacemakers. *g* Also, I am toooootally bookmarking your research links! (*steal, steal, steal*)

I also think that's a good point in the plot to start the story. It's in medias res, of course, but more than that, it's at a handy spot to get momentum going right away--that's a crucial fire in itself, both for the case-plot (it's the one with the most clues in its wake) and for the emotional plot (it gets Finch hurt and finishing bringing Stone's feelings to the surface at long last). The other fires are important mainly due to their piling-up, so they're fine to have in the past.

I also wanted to really ground this story in the town, and with the townspeople,

Mission successful! Though their 'onstage' appearances are usually brief, so many of the side and background characters are there, living their lives, making up the town. To my mind, it's a strong thematic backbone, both in a more concrete sense (like the one-made-of-many physicality of the bucket-brigade, Stone working there among them while also observing the others and worrying, the descriptions of the others in particular Isaac) and in a more abstract sense (Morgan fails in his plan because he doesn't understand the town as a group, despite his surface participation in it, in the bucket brigade, etc.--as you mention, for instance, he thinks *all* the townspeople will very easily be fractured apart and turn on Babbles as a scapegoat; he drops the wrong word at the wrong time, not realizing how quickly and widely information spreads among them; etc.).

This was one of the things I wanted to have running underneath the entire story: Stone's awareness of Finch's physical condition, and his efforts to care for Finch while never babying him.

I definitely nommed that up like ID CANDY. The awareness thrummed along underneath, woven with (and indicative of) that understated yearning I like so much. And it does some character-work, too--it's like Stone's eyes keep telling him he's looking at Finch, and Finch's body, and Finch's health, as a purely surface exercise, while the reader can see that he's looking deeper than that, and more...obsessively than that, perhaps, and certainly more emotionally than that. It's very Stonelike to keep his emotions from himself like that--not too terribly far beneath by now, but still seemingly safely covered with practical concerns. And it takes till the end of the story for Stone himself to admit what the reader already knows. I like that dynamic in fanfiction very much. (I know this surprises you.)

And I must agree--the ending line, while it might not be a lengthy wallow for the id (though it does have id candy packed in there, embedded in that long moment, and with his voice gone hoarse), is in fact a solid ending for the story. Because the story is about Stone finishing his realizations (which surely started in the Pilot the minute he and Finch stopped butting heads for two seconds and really paid attention to each other) and opening up that deeper emotional level to admit it to Finch as well as to himself. We already know how Finch is going to respond, given his half-asleep readiness to reach out to Stone himself. (♥)

(It has just now occurred to me that I am 2 for 2 in writing Peacemakers stories where a nice hot bath is part of the plot.

I APPROVE OF THIS TREND. *cough*