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thebreakfastgenie · 3 years

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ik i already said chianti was my favorite, but please talk abt writing emergency room!!!

thank you for indulging my obvious fishing you're a real one <3 I did not expect this to get this long I'm so sorry I'm gonna put it under a cut

The Emergency Room is the only one of my "renaissance" fics I spent a lot of time on or really... worked at. Chianti, The Apple, and Campfire all came easily and unexpectedly. Normally I think I do some of my best writing that way and I am pleased with the writing on all of those but I do think The Emergency Room benefitted from the amount of time and attention it got.

I started writing Emergency Room on Christmas. It might have been Christmas Eve or the day after but I'm pretty sure it was Christmas itself, because I was trying very hard to finish a new draft of a Christmas themed WIP six years in the making (I failed. I'll try again this year.) and this other thing kept wanting to be written instead. So I was like, fine. So technically Emergency Room predates Chianti, at least everything up through the waiting room scene because those were all written first and then edited only a little later. I was on a role and I was so excited to get to the scene with the doctor and then when I got there it became impossible to write. I still don't know why this happened, but it did, so I had to stop writing it for a while.

But I never really stopped because I was thinking about that scene all the time and working on phrases and sentences. The way I write, a lot of the process is invisible. I work out full sentences and sometimes paragraphs in my head and then I write them down. (Most of the first half of Campfire was written in my head while I was in the woods and I was so anxious I would forget it before I got to my phone to write it down.) I do make changes at this point, but it's rare for them to be significant. I basically use my WIPs as my daydream scenarios for any time I need something to think about. I also write in chronological order, so this scene I was stuck on became my mental backdrop for months. I really wasn't planning to pick it back up when I did, I was supposed to be working on a different WIP, but it happened.

The conversation with the doctor is one of my favorite parts, but the farthest I had gotten during these months of rumination was this part:

“I thought your name sounded familiar,” she sounded apologetic, almost embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I need to pick my metaphors more carefully.”

“Don’t be,” Josh shook his head. “You’re the first doctor I’ve seen in months that hasn’t opened with it. It’s... kind of nice.”

The next line, where she talks about the patient's role in surgery, was unplanned, but it ended up being pivotal to my understanding of this scene. The subtext of

“But there’s something else, something intangible, that comes from the patient. For all our scientific advancements, there’s still a lot we don’t understand about the body,” she paused, then added, “and the mind.”

is you lived because you wanted to live.

I actually worked out this subtext and I had a sentence that I thought sounded nice, but I didn't write it down because I knew I wasn't going to use it, and what I recall doesn't sound quite as nice, but it was basically "You were teetering on the brink of life and death. Dying had never been easier. If you wanted to die you would have done it then."

It's supposed to be a counterpoint to "He could have died happy," from the previous scene.

So, I hope someone picked up on that.

One of the things I knew about that scene all along is that when Josh tells the doctor what happened to his hand he's really telling Donna. Hopefully saying it to her shoes got that across adequately, lol. That moment was painful to write because I had already way, way committed to past tense but that one little line sounded so much better in present tense and there was nothing I could do about it. I still like the sound of:

"I broke a window," he tells Donna's shoes.

but there's nothing I can do about it!!! I'm not going to rerelease the Special Present Tense Edition although that sounds kinda fun, I have no desire to rewrite the rest of it in present tense.

Also I forgot about this when I was being annoying about wanting people to pick up on my favorite parts, but the thing about comparing the innards of the chair in the waiting room to organs is something I (surprise, surprise) thought of while looking at a cracked chair and I still adore the concept but I'm satisfied but not thrilled with the execution.

It's worth noting that even during the literal months I was stewing over the doctor scene, everything that comes after that was planned in excruciating detail. I even had specific phrases; the hug and

"I'll be right here when you get back." "Promise?" "I promise."

were one of the first scenes I thought of and anchored this fic the whole time I was writing it. That moment is the companion to

"I am very glad that you're alive." "Me too." "You are?"

in Fortune Cookie Wisdom.

Because that's the other thing about this fic. From the beginning, I was envisioning it as the night before Fortune Cookie Wisdom. This caused me a few minor wrinkles, like the space heater. I was writing along assuming it was already there, when I went back and checked and realized that I established that Donna was the one who put it in the bedroom, so I came up with a compromise. I also deliberately avoided saying what time it was throughout Emergency Room so we can all convince ourselves Josh got a few hours of sleep before already being awake at 7:30 AM in Fortune Cookie Wisdom.

But the biggest influence from Fortune Cookie Wisdom is the phone call in K-Mart. I had established that Donna got a last-minute flight home for Christmas and that Josh arranged it with Leo's help, and I knew I wanted the scene where he convinces her to go. But I had to figure out when and how he actually managed to pull it off and so the mysterious K-Mart phone call was born. I got a kick out of an AO3 comment that highlighted finding out who Josh was on the phone with because it meant that part actually worked.

And then there was the ending. At this point it was 2 AM, I had been agonizing over this fic nonstop for the last couple days and intermittently for months, and I wanted it to be done so I could post it. The ending was torture. I kept writing and deleting things. I kept staring at it trying to get the perfect last line, trying to convey the same general vibe as the end of Noël itself. I'm still not sure I didn't need one more sentence of buildup before putting the button on it, but everyone seemed to really like and respond to it, so I'm happy!

If you actually read this whole post congratulations we're friends now.

Also if you've read both I'd be very curious to hear how anyone thinks Emergency Room and Fortune Cookie Wisdom work together because I wrote them three years apart and the style is very different.

#adventures in fanfic writing with sarah #there's probably more shit I could say about this it was a fucking misery half the time #I just want to reread the emergency room so i can Perceive it #I reread my fics all the time #but I spent so much time with that one I'm still too deep in it #I've reread campfire already because it was such a different experience writing it

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