Barb C’s Journal

There have been many posts lately about ideas, and how you get them. This post is about the next step: once you have an idea, what do you do with it?

Some time back, I got some feedback on “The Lesser of Two Evils” (the story where Spike kills Warren) which brought up, among other things, the fact that Warren had family in Sunnydale. And that gave me an idea. What if Warren’s mother came to Buffy and asked her to investigate her son’s disappearance?

The first thing to do when you get an idea is to figure out what your main conflict is going to be. In this case, I have several options. I could make the story about Buffy’s conflict between protecting Spike and following her calling. This is the obvious way to go. However, I already have several stories written or in progress about that, and most of the ground that I would cover in a story like that is ground that I’ve already covered, or will cover, in “Lesser of Two Evils,” “In A Yellow Wood,” and “To Grandmother’s House.” I don’t want to repeat myself too much. So in this story, I decided I wanted to focus more on Spike’s reactions.

Once you have a conflict, you need a resolution. In my case, since I’m writing a series, and often writing out of sequence, there are some resolutions which, while perfectly good in and of themselves, I can’t use because they would contradict already-established future events.

There are several options: A) Buffy kills Spike. B) Buffy puts Mrs. Mears off and hushes the whole thing up. C) Spike puts Mrs. Mears off and hushes the whole thing up. A) is one of the resolutions which future events constrain me from using. I know Spike has to survive this story. B) and C) would both fit into the existing timeline, but B) would be nothing more than a re-hash of LoTE, and C) doesn’t mesh well with the emotional arc spanning LoTE and IAYW, in which full disclosure plays an important part.

Since I don’t want to repeat myself thematically, I took a look at the stories that come before and after this one in the timeline. In LoTE, Spike does something awful, and Buffy ties to play the “If I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen” card. In IAYW, (the events of which take place during and after LoTE) Buffy decides that’s a bad idea, but, not without deep reservations, takes no action against Spike. There’s then a gap of six months or so in which Buffy’s doubts fester, culminating in the events of “To Grandmother’s House,” in which she settles in her own mind that Spike really is worthy of the second chances she’s given him. All this is simultaneous with Buffy’s pregnancy with Bill, which is a metaphor for her fears about her increasing involvement in things demony, and her resolution to change the system from within, and her radical revisioning of what it means to be a Slayer.

So ideally, I’d want this story to provide support for Buffy’s ultimate decision not to kill Spike in TGH. This fits in with my desire to keep the focus on Spike for this story: what if I make this one about Spike trying to use what he’s learned in LoTE and IYW to do better this time? Keeping in mind, of course, that this is Spike, and he doesn’t have a soul, and he’s essentially flying blind with all this morality stuff. So, I asked myself, how would Spike feel about Mrs. Mears’ request?

Barbverse Spike may be shaky on concepts like “two wrongs don’t make a right,” but he does understand the idea of tit for tat. While he doesn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about killing Warren, he does feel that he probably shouldn’t have done it, because in the long run, it’s made Buffy and Willow unhappy, and may lead to further problems for Buffy, jeopardizing her shaky rapprochement with the Sunnydale police if Mrs. Mears gets suspicious and decides to kick up a fuss. (Next time some berk messes with his family, he resolves, he’ll just keep the hypothetical berk in the basement indefinitely, or till he gets bored, and make them wish they were dead. Hey, for a soulless vampire, that’s a big improvement.) So it seems reasonable to me that Spike might decide that since he’s the one who killed Warren, the right thing to do would be to compensate Mrs. Mears for that loss - to pay her weregild, in other words.

The question then became “What would Spike have to offer, and what, if anything, would Mrs. Mears accept?” Much depends on what kind of character Mrs. Mears is. Is she aware of the fact that her son was, at best, a borderline sociopath? If she was aware, would that change her reaction to finding out he was dead, or how he died? Is she herself a not very nice person? I rejected that last option, because if she’s an evil old bitca, it makes things too easy. Mrs. Mears should be a sympathetic character, and repaying her should be a task which would cause Spike some serious trouble, pain, and inconvenience to accomplish.

The fanfic cliche would be for Spike to allow Mrs. Mears to take some form of physical revenge - whale on him with a baseball bat, or whatever. There was a certain subversive appeal to the idea of doing a blundering and completely unsexy torture scene featuring a middle-aged housewife who’s not really sure what to do and a bored vampire who’s lying there thinking of England. But it didn’t feel right, and there wasn’t any obvious emotional resolution - Spike wouldn’t learn anything from an experience like that. (And I am a little wary of the ‘vampires must pay for their sins by enduring torture’ trope that pervades the Jossverse, because I don’t really think it works that way.)

I tried looking at it from Mrs. Mears’ POV: what would she want? What if Mrs. Mears didn’t want anything, and an irritated Spike hung around pestering her to come up with something, until one day he realizes he feels sorry for her? Virtue is its own punishment: he gets to know her and care about her, and now he feels a bit cruddy about killing her son. I liked this better, but it still didn’t seem to have quite enough zing to it, and to be honest, I thought it would probably be a bit dull to write, not to mention to read.

As I was writing up this very essay, I had another idea: what if Mrs. Mears says, “All I want is my boy back?” Spike (after at a token effort to dissuade her), sucks it up and helps her get her boy back – maybe using the spell Doc gave Dawn. This scenario offers several possible resolutions, of varying creepiness: It could end with Mrs. Mears sending Spike away so she can live creepily ever after with her rotting zombie son, or with Rotting Zombie Warren attacking Spike and/or his mom, and Spike being forced to kill him again. Or maybe some combination of the two. Either way, Spike would end up forging some kind of emotional bond with Mrs. Mears, much to his own annoyance. Plus there are opportunities to draw parallels between Warren and his mother and Spike and Anne Pratt.

If/when I get the chance to write it, that last option is probably the way I’ll go, because action sequences = good. The story has informed me that it ought to be written in Spike’s first person POV. Which should be interesting – I haven’t written first-person SPike often, and I like stories in which I have to work out a way for Spike to sorta-kinda do the right thing, but not because it’s the right thing – it has to be for pragmatic (or, if you like, selfish) vampire reasons.

While I’ve written this up as if it all occurred in neat, logical order, it really didn’t. Bits and pieces came to me off and on over the course of a couple of years, or however long it’s been since I got that feedback which gave me the initial inspiration. Many of the pieces didn’t fall into place until I wrote this article, and there are still some plot holes to be dealt with – how, for example, does Spike present his compensation idea to Mrs. Mears in a way that will not get him and Buffy in trouble with the police? But there you go: How to turn an idea into a full-blown story concept. Now all you have to do is write it. *g*