- Joined
- Jan 19, 2020
As somebody who writes by the seat of their pants, this isn't quite what Lily is doing. 'Seat of your pants' means that you start from a premise and see where it leads you organically. Part and parcel with that is that you AREN'T writing ahead; having a plan or a scene you know you're going to reach can be detrimental to an exploratory writer because it feels like you must work toward this point and when you actually sit down to write and your brain starts making connections and revealing the characters and their interactions with the world that scene you already wrote no longer works and you either wasted your time or you start forcing the narrative to inorganically reach that point.
The rest of your post is spot on, though. What Lily is doing is writing moments, vignettes, that she thinks are cool and then failing to figure out how to link them together. It's the worst of both worlds; she writes the 'fun parts' and then winds up with stations that she's obligated to hit and has to twist characters and plot to get there. She also winds up burnt out because she already wrote the 'fun parts' and it's a slog to connect them.
Honestly the way she's writing the Horde Champion stories is probably closer to what she should be doing, given her drive-- isolated moments and vignettes of somebody's life. Conceptually it's a pretty good way to paint a portrait of a character that lives as long as an elf does in order to highlight moments across decades or centuries of life (execution wise, she focuses on all the wrong parts and repeats herself constantly, so it doesn't work, but that's a failure of the writer, not the technique).
Fundamentally I think you hit the nail on the head here:
Precisely.
All stories are driven by conflict. Even slice-of-life. It's not major conflict, but a slice-of-life chapter usually has some mundane aspect of a character's life going wrong, or a little argument, or even just starts with somebody being motivated to buy milk and then incidentally running into a high-school friend and catching up. These are tiny conflicts and inconveniences, but they're still there, and they exist to motivate the character to action and resolution.
Lily's stories aren't without conflict, but it's clear she only includes it not to actually push the characters but to either make them look really cool (in the case of Aliana or Anevay) or make them sympathetic (G, C!Lily, also Anevay). In her HP proposals she's not only eliminating the central conflict but has already set up a system where Harry basically never needs to struggle; he's infinitely wealthy so he just buys his way out of conflict, House Elves are bound to the houses they elf so Harry is obligated to use one, Aliana is a teacher now so she'll just murder anybody who's bad, so on. This leaves Lily free to write and re-write the same scenes of conflict-free snuggling and hurt-comfort without actually bothering with the hurt.
This seems to be rooted in the fact that all of Lily's characters are just projections of her, whether direct self-inserts or Mary Sues wearing blackface so she can say 'nuh huh that's not me'. These are power fantasies in various forms, from obvious power fantasies (Anevay being the greatest warrior in the history of the Horde, Aliana being able to easily resolve every conflict from the movies and being proficient in every lightsaber style and having a super-cool old ship, G being not only a very powerful Gardevoir but also having illegal coverage moves that obviate her type weaknesses and also having a superpowered evil side) and in self-indulgent comfort (every character she projects the most onto is always in the right and deserves everybody love and comfort because they are also hurt and sad). These characters cannot face real adversity because it would be equivalent to Lily acknowledging that maybe they aren't perfect or maybe they have to take responsibility for their actions, which would reflect back on her, and that's unconscionable.
So now with her Harry Potter proposals she decides that, if she's going to project onto Harry/Jasmine, Harry can't have any conflict, either. He's infinitely wealthy so he can just buy his way out of every road bump (of which there are none because the plots of every book were driven by the looming threat of Voldemort). House Elves are now bound to the houses they elf so if Harry inherit a house with an elf, well, he's just obligated to make use of their services, isn't he? Aliana is a teacher there and a mentor to Harry so she'll be able to just murder anybody that might threaten stability (she would also probably wind up being more of a main character than Harry). No conflict, no adversity, no reason for anybody to change or be challenged... a reflection of Lily's ideal life.
(EDIT: Post got chewed on, that was weird.)
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