tommygirl | Commentary 2 - Cultivating Creativity

Okay, this one is much shorter than the first commentary, mostly because this story was pretty easy to write and not nearly as long as A New Future turned out to be.

Cultivating Creativity Commentary

Link: http://www.strawtogold.net/white/joan.html

Cultivating Creativity was my very first foray into writing in the Joan of Arcadia fandom and I wasn’t sure what would become of it. It formed out of my reaction to the “Devil Made Me Do It” episode and how things were left standing not only with Joan and Adam, but Joan and her own conscience. I loved the part of the episode where God tells Joan that it was a failure of imagination on her part (something she later relays to her parents), but never really see her dealing with that realization.

So that’s what the whole premise of this story stemmed from.

Because it was my first time writing in this fandom, I stuck with my safe POV as I like to call it. I’m most comfortable with 1st POV when I feel like I understand a character...so that was the simplest decision to make. I just started writing from Joan’s perspective with a vague idea of what I wanted to accomplish.

That tends to be a recurring thing for me. I don't usually outline for stories, aside from an idea of what's going on in my head.

It’s mostly a character piece interspersed with dialogue. It’s Joan dealing with the guilt and aftermath of destroying Adam’s artwork – thoughts about the fact that Adam means more to her than she realized (because, I admit it, I’ve always been a Joan/Adam shipper!), wanting to share with him her secret about God, and trying to make sense of why what she did was necessary.

I’d say the hardest part about this was writing Joan interacting with God. I wasn’t sure that I could pull off the tone that the show sets for Him, where a little bit of information is provided from him, but mostly Joan needs to cull out her own meaning.

Luckily, looking back, I don’t think I did too badly with it. I managed to get most of it down in the first draft, only requiring small touch-ups in revision.

There’s not much else to say about this piece. It was just an idea that I had after the episode aired, one of those feelings that something is missing from where the show ended, and a challenge to see if I could branch out to another fandom.

I guess y’all would be the best judge of whether it ended up working or not. Hee.