Challenge Angstmongers Anonymous | Angst Challenge & Discussion Thread | Next Up: 50 Sentences!

Well, I rolled some random numbers and got #5 and #6: “Why won't you talk to me?” and “I have my orders.” And I have half an inkling of a story using those lines as the first and last lines respectively, but I'm not sure I can really write it, as it involves making one of my favorite characters dark and bitter. I've only written a couple things that could qualify as angst, but they've always been sort of the angst-leavened-with-hope sort of story, but this one wouldn't be, not with an ending line like that

So I wonder--how do you angstmongers do it? How do you put your characters through the wringer and not feel bad about it ( I once wrote a fairly angsty scene with a character and literally promised the character I would write some nice fluffy mush with him to make up for it). I also have a fair amount of angsty stuff going on in real life, and I can't decide if writing this story would be cathartic or just add to the general angst level.

Any words of wisdom for an angst novice?

 

I'm going to preface this by saying that Vi and Elli are the true angst masters in my book; they've been writing excellent angst for close to twenty years now, while I only write angst occasionally. But that perhaps makes me a little closer to your mindset, so maybe this will be helpful!

The way I write angst without feeling bad is simply by knowing that the angst didn't happen. Not really. This is all pretend - even the official stuff is pretend (though as someone who felt physically ill for three days when Mara was killed off, I'm not going to say it doesn't affect us emotionally). But the fanfic is way more pretend, so it's easier for me to emotionally compartmentalize. I can write an angsty story knowing that it didn't happen and no one suffered and in my head, the 'verses that are real are the ones where my characters are happy.

Adjacent to this, since coming back to fanfic a few years ago, I've seen a number of comments in various places along the lines of "I don't like the way canon went and it dampens my interest in writing because I don't want to take that into account," and that's entirely valid. It's roughly the way I felt during and after LotF. But for whatever reason, the ST annoyed me enough that I walked out of the theater after watching TRoS and just genuinely, sincerely, did not give one single hoot what canon said. I mostly wrote AUs before that anyway, but TRoS just cut any and all ties I had to canon and left me feeling entirely free to write whatever I want. (I'm bad at gifs on the boards, but imagine the Sound of Music Maria-twirling-with-arms-spread gif here.) NO CANON CAN HOLD ME, NOT EVEN MY OWN. I don't honestly know how that mental transition happened with me, but if you can find a way to get there, I thoroughly advise it. It's glorious.

But also? Angst doesn't have to be heartrending bleak darkness that leaves you and all readers depressed forevermore. It can be! But it doesn't have to be. Angst exists on a spectrum and even very mild angst is still angst, so don't feel like you have to go into graphic violence or existential despair just to write angst.

Do you know the comic Strange Planet, by Nathan W. Pyle? I highly recommend it if you don't. But there's one strip from it where the character is washing his hands in a public bathroom and saying, "difficult day yet I maintain my composure," then he reaches for the paper towel and half of it tears off instead of the whole thing, and he says "ha this small setback amuses me," then he reaches for what's left of the paper towel, but that tears off too, leaving just that tiny edge that you can't really grasp sticking out of the machine, and the character dissolves into tears. That's really mild angst, but it's one we can all relate to, where nothing terrible has happened but you're having a hard enough day where that one tiny thing going wrong is enough to tip you over the edge. That's still angst. You can write a story no darker than that, and it still qualifies as angst.

As to whether writing angst will be cathartic or be that last small thing that tips you over the edge, only you can decide. But if writing about your favorite character dealing with angst would be too much, there's always the option of writing some other character you don't care for as much dealing with some very mild angst; maybe that would give you the emotional distance needed to handle it. Regardless, if you do try writing angst, don't feel like it has to be super bleak, or some perfect jewel of despair, or anything else. Whatever story you want to write is entirely valid, and it doesn't need to be perfect to be worth doing and worth sharing.

Welcome aboard the angst train! I wish you much happy writing! Relatively speaking

 

Okay so listen.

Canon is rough on some of these characters. Canon is absolutely positively AWFUL to the Force's favorite child Anakin Skywalker, and quite often my perfect jewels of despair are from that perspective because two solid decades of that murder cyborg's life were absolutely atrocious. I feel absolutely no guilt in breaking him further because clearly this guy was already George's chosen angst magnet. You can go and wander over to the Wook page and just get lost in the absolutely bonkers medical malpractice lawsuit waiting to happen that describes Vader's suit.

And canon is rough generally on a lot of these characters, not just Vader! Leia lost her whole planet in ANH and the movie never gives her a proper chance to grieve. And then just keeps hitting her all through the OT and ST with more and more terrible things - I did not write those stories and I actually do kinda take issue with some parts of the narrative and I think writing some angst there is legitimate. I'm just adding to what canon gave us.

That said, I absolutely do sometimes feel guilty whammying Luke with "RotJ AUs where Luke falls" angst bombs, because that lovely sunshine boy does not deserve it, and someone should probably just take him away from me once I finish my current projects. And then I'll usually write the character some fluffy cracky humor as my version of an apology so I also relate to that completely

To summarize: sometimes they deserve it, because they were awful. Sometimes they deserve the chance to process the angst because the existing narrative hit them with trauma that I'm writing them through processing. And then sometimes they absolutely don't deserve it and I'm doing it anyway and I feel just a smidge guilty.

 

I love this whole response, Elli, but I just want to pop back in to say that this part in particular really resonates with me, and this is the sort of angst I usually write, because yes, in the movies/shows/books usually the plot just steamrolls right on ahead and the character who just got hit with this massive emotional trauma never really works through it, they just soldier on because the plot (or sometimes characterization! Some characters are stoic, or repressed, or capable of that sort of emotional compartmentalization just as part of who they are! Leia and Mara are shining examples of this!) demands it.

Which okay, those mediums only have so much run time/pages to give us this whole big story. But sometimes I don't feel like that story is complete until the character in question has a chance to work through all of this trauma so that they can be a truly functioning person again, and I find writing that sort of angst deeply cathartic and satisfying, and even if the character suffers during that angst, they're going to be mentally and emotionally healthier in the long run if they actually process all of the angst that already happened to them.

 

Thanks to everyone who's responded, I appreciate your perspectives on this.

Ah, this is me with Kanan! I felt the same way after watching "Jedi Night". Now, my Marzra-verse where everyone lives happily ever after is my "prime universe" (and the Marzra-verse itself started with me saying, "Well, it it's all just Legends now, then kriff it, Mara gets to stay with these cool OCs I created as her parents, oh and she gets two siblings including this fluffy, girly-girl little sister.")

I did this in my last story, "After the Battle". Kaz is another character who gets hit with incredible trauma (watching the First Order broadcast of his home world, Hosnian Prime, being destroyed) that never really gets dealt with in the course of the show, so it was satisfying to be able to give him some sort of resolution. It's one of those angst-yet-hope stories, because even though he's dealing with a lot of heavy emotions, he finds some comfort in finally being able to address them.

I share your feelings about that particular Redemption Arc and I know that it was very satisfying for you to be able to work out those feelings in your story. My difficulty here is that it's almost the inverse: my story isn't so much correcting an area of canon that bothers me as it is embodying some of the things that bother me about canon and my worries about the direction canon might take. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about my story idea here

Spoiler

basically, I hate the idea that it's apparently taken Sabine and Ahsoka ten years to getting around to looking for Ezra, and my idea is that he's been a prisoner in Thrawn's Mount Tantiss cloning facility during that time, slowly losing hope that anyone will ever come. Sabine is the one who says "Why won't you talk to me?" to Ezra...and he is the one who says "I have my orders" at the end. so yeah, pretty bleak and I'm not sure how that idea can be leavened with hope. [/spoliers]

 

Just to clarify a tiny bit: there are certainly various ways to handle this scenario, but what I intended to convey was less a way of dealing with a specific character that one doesn't care for, and more that if writing angst with a character you love is too hard to deal with at the moment, you can always give yourself a little more emotional space by writing an angsty story that simply features/centers on a character that you aren't super emotionally attached to

 

Well, I started writing a reply last night, ran out of time, and then the conversation marched on while I was away, so I’m still sort of gathering my many, many thoughts here. This will be nowhere near as organized as I would like it, but here we go.

I guess the way I see it is that there’s a difference between feeling bad because of complex and often sad emotions that are stirred up in the process of writing the angst, and feeling guilty because you wrote said angst. I have a lot of feelings when I’m writing angsty stories. I fairly frequently find myself in tears over these characters and their tragic lives and the terrible things I’ve put them through. When I write something sad or scary or intense or horrific, I channel those emotions as best I can, and sometimes that leaves me feeling emotionally drained in the same way that reading a really good but devastating book does. Like, I’ll get over it, but the emotions still linger a bit. But I think that’s different from feeling guilty for writing angsty stories. I don’t think I feel guilt for writing what I do, at least not toward the fictional characters I’m abusing. (I sometimes feel guilty for making my lovely beta read about vivisection when I know she has an intense aversion to it, but that’s an entirely different matter... )

I will say, it’s easier for me to write terrible things happening to canon/EU characters – and much less likely that I would feel any guilt – because like Gabri said, fanfic isn’t the official story, and a lot of those characters’ official stories end happily, or at least in a narratively satisfactory manner. So no matter how many times I turn Luke and Leia to the dark side or keep Luke and Mara from being together or have Palpatine adopt Anakin after TPM, that doesn’t change what happened in the original six films (and whichever other films/novels you hold as your personal canon); Leia and the Rebels triumph over the Empire, Luke becomes a true Jedi Knight after refusing to kill his father, and Anakin finally makes the right choice and throws the Emperor down a hole and he stays dead forever and ever.

If there’s one canon/EU character that I feel any sort of guilt over writing the way I do, it’s probably Jacen Solo, and that has way more to do with the out-of-universe circumstances that led to his character assassination and in-universe death – and with his fans’ reactions to his treatment in profic – than with anything else. For some strange reason, I constantly feel like I need to defend the way I’ve written him in my Enter!verse, even though it’s an AU, and even though I have never felt the need to defend myself when I’ve written dark!Luke or dark!Leia AUs. (But maybe that’s because Luke and Leia are generally considered shining beacons of goodness in the official material, whereas Jacen’s Wook page still lists him as Darth Caedus and most people just seem to accept the terribleness of LotF as canon law – even the ones who genuinely hated it.) Anyway, like I said, that’s a weird guilt that comes from fandom, not from my writing itself, which I really enjoy doing.

My OCs are a slightly different kettle of fish, in that I created them, and the only “official” story they have is whatever I make up for them, so if that story is super dark and depressing, well… they’re stuck with it, and so am I, and so is everyone who reads it. Again, I will shed tears over how broken my characters are, and I will fret endlessly over some of the decisions I’ve made in writing my Enter!verse, but I still don’t think I actually feel guilty for writing the angst. Not even the vivisection. (Seriously, tell me a better way to turn that brave little introvert from The Lands of the Dead into the weird, manic, vivisection-fixated Sith Lord from Enter the Foreign. I could have kicked myself for only realizing it a couple years ago, it was such an obvious and perfect explanation.) And I don’t know, I wouldn’t be surprised if people thought I wrote things like TLotD to be shocking and depressing, but I’ve had a very specific ending in mind for those characters since before I even wrote that story, and it’s that narrative endpoint that allowed me to go as dark as I did in TLotD and in subsequent stories.

That probably doesn’t help you with the actual writing of the angst, but I figured it might help to know that despite our casual mentions of inflicting pain on characters and our abuse of the face_mischief emoji, we hardcore angstmongers can feel pretty broken up over the things we do to the characters we love. There are many different reasons to write an angsty scene or an angsty story, some of them more personal and emotional than others. My reasons tend to be a mix of “I enjoy the challenge of writing these difficult situations” and “I don’t see many stories that fit this niche in this exact way, and if no one else will write it, I have to” and “I had an idea grab hold of me and it would not let go until I wrote it” and “the darker the night, the brighter the light shines at the end” and “I’m a weirdo who likes finding the humanity in things we tend to shy away from”, with a hearty dash of “sometimes writing happy fluff actually makes me feel worse about my life because I’m such a mess/failure in comparison, but I can weirdly relate more to the really messed-up characters in the really messed-up situations,” and like… yeah, I turned one of my creepiest villains into a bookish, introverted kidnapping victim who was routinely tortured for years and then beaten down until he couldn’t see any other way out but to embrace the darkness… but he also survived it all, and idk, maybe it’s not exactly inspiring, but I’m also not done telling his story?

Wow, that meandered. Moving on!

I think it’s perfectly fine for us to discuss the particulars of our own stories when they relate directly to the topic at hand, especially since we’re specifically talking about how to write angst and how to deal with all the emotional stuff that that sort of writing brings up in us. You can use spoiler tags if you prefer, but it’s not necessary. I’ll put the rest of my comments under the cut, just in case you didn’t want the details of your idea to be spoiled:

Spoiler

Honestly, this sounds like a fantastic AU premise.

I guess my first question – from a brainstorming perspective – would be this: do you have plans for this story beyond the final line? Like, obviously Ezra is not in a great place emotionally, and I’m assuming things take a turn for the really bad at the end with “I have my orders”… but is that line the end of the story, or simply the end of that particular part of his journey? I’m not saying either option is inherently better, only that your goal in writing the story might affect how you feel about it and whether you’re able to write it at all. There’s nothing wrong with writing something with a bleak, depressing ending. Sometimes we need to get that stuff out of our system, for any number of reasons. And especially if you’re writing it as an AU one-shot, you can tell yourself that “no, this isn’t how canon is actually going to go, what I’m writing has no effect on the actual character, I’m just experimenting/challenging myself to write outside my usual box/interested in seeing how in-character I can keep Ezra while also making him really dark/etc.” (Speaking of stories that end on the bleakest note, ask @Gabri_Jade about why she wrote the incredibly dark Perversity of Life back around the time of the NJO series. )

On the other hand, if you think you might want to continue writing beyond this one story, my next questions are: where do you see Ezra ending up? Is there a possibility of him healing? If the answer to that last question is “yes,” then I’d ask why your current story needs to end on a hopeful note? Look at it this way – if you stopped watching the SW saga right after Luke falls from the gantry on Cloud City, that would be pretty damn bleak, wouldn’t it? (And yeah, I know the movie didn’t actually end there, but it was still pretty sad overall, and the audience had to wait three years to find out how it would all end.) By the time you get to the throne room in RotJ, with Luke throwing aside his lightsaber and refusing to kill his father, it’s a triumphant moment for so many reasons, not the least of which is because we’ve already seen him at such a low point in TESB, falling to what could have been his death in the wake of Vader’s revelation. Here’s the thing: we did have hope at the end of TESB, and even though I’m sure many people were worried about what would happen to Luke in RotJ, it wasn’t impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But imagine if TESB had ended with Luke hanging helplessly underneath Cloud City, broken and injured and in complete despair. You might wonder how he could ever recover from that. You might wonder how in the world there could be a happy ending, knowing that Luke might eventually have to kill his father, or be killed by him, or become him.

Apply that principle to your Ezra idea. If there’s a chance that he can heal, that he can come back from the dark and bitter place he’s in, then why rush it? Why not allow the readers to feel every bit of his despair, and let them wonder if there’s a chance he can recover? Let them root for him, and speculate, and imagine their own endings in their heads. And then you can write more stories that do have those bits of hope in them, until finally you get to the place where you want Ezra to be, whatever that is. I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with mixing a little hope in with the heaviest and darkest of angst; but I do think that sometimes the darker parts need time to marinate a little, in order for us to fully appreciate the happiness at the end.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on that. I hope it was helpful in some way, but feel free to ignore if I was way off the mark.


I still feel like there's a lot more I could reply to, but I've also only written like 168 words so far for the Word Race, and omg the mod!challenge is due in like three weeks, and I have to get some actual fiction writing done, guys, so I may or may not be back.

 

Vi, you wrote "vivisection" three times in that post, and that might be a record, I'm proud of you.

To expand on this - I write my terrible things happening to my favorite characters stories pretty much exclusively in standalone "and then everything sucked" AUs, which is exactly what it says on the label. Everything sucks for everyone, but especially my favorites. I know (to whatever extent you know things about fictional characters) that this is an AU, and everything is out the window plot wise as long as I can keep my characterizations feeling true to the character. And then they can go back to their canonical happy endings where the ST doesn't exist in my mind because it makes the OT retroactively a tragedy and I can't handle that that's too much angst for me.

 

~ v i v i s e c t i o n ~

But it was so artistically done

 

Guys, GUYS. Did you know I wrote a story that involves vivisection???

YEP.

 

If you're gonna scar your readers for life, those readers are going to remind you of it for life

 

Fair enough!

 

I'm in. Clearly my muse understands the concept of prioritization, with the mod challenge and OTP challenge fics due sooner. But I'm in, with "Inheritance."

 

> 1...20|Get-Random -Count 2;
3
5
3. “We're not alone.”
5. “Why won't you talk to me?”

If I may use an old expression... "Choice!" Let's do this.
##
Slight edit: My introduction - The Fanfiction Interview Thread - Things start getting Odd here.

#Discussion 1
I am drawn to angst because it salts life: the stretch and tug of handling fear and uncertainty. In life, should I battle anxiety great and small with ever quick Pride, or let meek Love radiate upon it? I hope as I walk on through, I toss that coin less.

The telling of angst—be it in music, movies, art, or in word—reveals the chef's deftness of hand in their seasoning to taste. I think of the two lovers in my profile pic forever frozen at the harshest moment, and my mind wades into the shallows of their tale, then dives beneath the rolling tide.

That is my angst—the fear that I'll never discover that far shore; swept away, away, away.

 

It's been quite a while since I posted a new thread. How time flies! I'll need to update my indexes now.

An Uncertainty in the Force for the Angstmongers Anonymous Angst Challenge #2; Angsty First & Last Lines (Dialogue Edition) hosted by @ViariSkywalker. Dialogue lines 3 and 5. Bonus words used.

 

Angst for one of my fire-fighters in Sleepless in Coruscant where he is seeing Palpatine and in the sequel 'Sleeping in Coruscant' where he is avoiding a visit to the Jedi-temple.
I got
2. “Wake up.”
18. “When's the last time you slept?”

 

I have been remiss in tending to this thread, and I apologize for that!

@vader_incarnate, @devilinthedetails, @Oddly_Salacious, and @earlybird-obi-wan - Sorry for not replying sooner; I did manage to index your stories when they were posted, so you're all set there

And we now have just under one week left until our target deadline for the First/Last Lines Challenge, Wednesday, December 28! We've had four stories come in; let's see if we can get any more before the New Year!

 

Angst certainly will come in some of the entries in my new challenges where Vlad Dooku is involved.

 

I've developed some angst over the conclusion to the Angst Challenge #2. DRL struck and I hope all is well with others following this thread. Carry on!