What's up with Teamwork?

[askerian]

So... this moment in Teamwork, with Kyuubi rampaging happily, it's pretty much the scene I came up with the whole Teamwork 3 fic for.

Except I came up with it two years ago, and the world evolved, the characters evolved, and as I refined the scenes I realized I had HUGE plotholes incoming if I went with it exactly as planned.



This fight scene is messy. Very messy. Everything happens very fast, Sakura is on the verge of saying "fuck it" and running for her life, except she can't because that's her teammate going crazy there and she needs to make sure to keep the damages to a minimum.

Balancing Sakura-who-tries-hard-to-stand-her-ground and scared-Sakura and still-feeling-too-weak-to-actually-DO-anything-Sakura is difficult. She doesn't even know whether she wants to hide from Kyuubi or cling to him and hope he settles down or fight him or beg and hope it flatters him enough that he considers calming down. Nothing she can do at the moment seems like it could help, and I have some ideas as to what she can really do but there's no clear cut action to take for her and that's very hard to write properly.

Also, there are several opposing forces -- Kyuubi should be pretty simple, he wants to play and hunt, except there's the cub Sakura carries to consider and fuck if he doesn't want to consider it. Also he's an insane juggernaut of playful DEATH and keeping him from just bulldozing over everything is hell. (Also I'm forgetting the way he speaks, which doesn't help. ~__~)

Maneki the healer wouldn't mind cooperating on getting Kyuubi contained if he could do it safely but Kyuubi for some reason decided to go after him first, Kon the fox guy would cut a bitch if he could move his toes without bleeding and he wishes his teammates just grabbed him and ran like hell already, Zenko the ice bitch is as likely to use the confusion to stab Sakura if she gets a chance as she is of going after Kyuubi with serious intent to kill -- the team summon kids all have conflicting impulses that also make their action difficult to determine.

Then there's Sasuke, who -- I have no CLUE what he's doing. I think Kyuubi found he was too tired to be fun to play with and since he doesn't want to break him, he put sasuke in storage. Under a tree. Yeah. Sasuke comes back all pissed, great! and ... I dunno. He's probably going to try to come back and fight Kyuubi some more, but would that help? Probably not. It would only make the scene even more confusing. Anyway my inspiration regarding him in this fight approximates zero, which is really wrong because no way in hell would he not be right there.

Frankly, this scene is completely chaotic. It would be okay if it was only chaotic for a few seconds, but the chaos lasts and lasts until I can't even visualize what I just wrote anymore.

And I've recently realized that what I wanted to happen when I came up with the scene -- well, if I allow that to happen, there will be severe consequences I really do not want to deal with because it would make the whole universe way too dark. As it is, I already have heavy consequences planned, but consequences they can recover from. If I push it farther, ow. Broken.

But that means something else should happen to counter it and I'm still not too sure what.

So... The characters all have too many conflicting impulses for me to just let them go where they want to and see what happens, which I like to do usually; and I'm not even sure what I'm working TOWARD so I can't even build the scene from the other end.

Recently I've been trying to redefine more precisely and more believably what should happen next, so that I have a better idea of what I need to do to get there. But it's hard, and it's confusing, and it's a real mess.

But I have to keep trying because the payoff, oh, the payoff is shiny.

Hopefully. >_>

So at the moment I'm deleting ideas I had of what happened in between two must-have moments and trying to rebuild different, better bridges between them. Easier to comprehend. Not so emotionally exhausting. but that means I have to analyze the themes I want and then build actions and emotions on them and, just, that's so clinical and not the way I usually write and... Augh.

But hell if I don't want to start tearing off clumps of my hair and scream FUCK IT sometimes. I already find fight scenes confusing to write clearly when I have an exact idea of what happens and why, so a melee where the narrator doesn't even know for sure what her priorities are... ~__~




Edit: ALL HAIL QUEEN book_people!

Booyah.

Not sure it's ALL fixed yet, i'll have to let it settle, but it seems to be unstuck!

I should have complained earlier, it seems that's the pattern -- I get stuck for weeks and months on end, then the second I give up and mention I'm stuck, BAM. XD But if I deliberately tried to use it then maybe it wouldn't work anymore... >__>

Anyway all that's left now is to actually get the inspiration to find the right words for those scenes so nicely outlined. Which. um. we'll see. >______>