FFFX has finally revealed! Here is what I wrote this time around.
( Below the cut! )I thought the 2-week anonymous period was long, but it turned out to be just enough time to hit my usual comment goal of 10% of the collection.
I also thought the half-year writing period was long, but it— actually, yeah, it was really difficult for me to handle! This time around, I promised I wouldn’t start writing my assignment until 2023, but it still wound up being way harder than it should have been, maybe because I’d brainstormed the idea so long ago.
By contrast, I picked up a half-length pinch hit close to the deadline, and the ease of writing was like night and day. I basically churned the entire thing out in the short time it took to get beta feedback for my assignment. (The lower wordcount minimum probably helped.)
If I’ve learned my lesson properly, I won’t do this exchange again, but overall I’m pleased I got the opportunity to create the stories I did.
My assignment turned out much better than I thought it would at the end of draft 1, which was a major relief. While writing, I got really into
this Josh Ritter song (as evident from the title), and listened to it on repeat. The poetic lyrics and meditative atmosphere ended up significantly impacting my story: the tone, the way that it slipped in and out of dreams, the weightiness of the past.
The more I listened to it, the more beautiful I found the imagery. Floating on dark and perilous waters, stars "directionless and drifting" overhead, drowned sailors and ancient ships rusting below the waves. Throughout the verses, there’s the sense of how easy it would be to give in and sink right down with them, anchored by the past—a struggle that manifests in my protagonist, Tobias. Then there’s this chorus, "only a change of time", which to me can have two meanings.
Either that the only thing that has changed is time; everything else will go on just as awfully it has before, and there’s no use fighting it. (In Tobias’s case: that his second "time" being married will be no better than the first.)
Alternatively, it’s only a change of time that can heal the past, nothing else. It requires patience, but it’s also inevitable. In the song, the narrator is still cutting forward, despite the "white caps of memory" impeding the way—because barely visible in the distance is the shoreline: some unknown land, person, or future, some reprieve from the dark ocean of the past.
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ficinabox 2024 letter!
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branchandroot
