I briefly mentioned in the first post that these characters came from one-shots I’d written before. In that sense, you could say this fic was eight years in the making. I’ve been thinking lately about how much the three eponymous Kids in particular have changed in those eight years, so if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share that story and get a little meta, too. Here we go:
Every year the PokeCommunity forums have this big, fun shindig called the “Get-Together,” and the most prestigious event of the Get-Together is beyond a shadow of a doubt (imho) the Small Writing Contest, in which you get one week to write a short story from a one-word prompt. Jason, Krissy, and Travis were born because I was writing my first entry and I felt the story called for Two Guys and a Girl™.
So, I wrote the tiniest little one-shot (1,371 words, because I had
no sense of how long the story needed to be). The prompt was "time," and my entry was about a terminally ill early-teen trainer in Kanto who wanted to spend his last day alive walking the trail with his best friends (so yes, a few days after the last line of the story, Jason fuckin’
diiiiiieeeed (don’t cry, Chibi, it’s not canon anymore)). Although it was short, it had some passable emotion-work, one decent idea, and it seemed to strike a chord with readers.
It got fifth place, which is a result I should have been thrilled with in hindsight, as I was new to this and the field of participants was especially strong that year (Negrek tied for first place with Shrike Flamestar). But all I could think was, “Damn, I got close. Maybe I can take the whole thing next year...” Fast forward to next year, and I’m getting really, really competitive about this. You can take all that stuff about "just having fun with participating and creating" and throw it out the window. I wanted to
win, dammit.
Now understand, my "Original Vision" for Jason, Krissy, and Travis was that they were tied to this one tiny fic and wouldn’t appear anywhere else. Their story had been told, and anyway it didn’t feel right to dilute Jason’s inevitable death. But I used them again anyway in the 2010 contest for one reason and one reason only:
Strategy.
I knew from just a little experience that the toughest thing about a one-week writing contest was rapidly coming up with a good idea that fit the prompt, and good characters to go with it. So using original characters was a not-insignificant handicap for those of us who never really used canon characters. But now, I already had these three characters in my head, along with a vague but real knowledge of what made them tick and how they interacted with each other, and better yet, their backstory was so vague that they could fit into almost any situation. That was my plan: reuse the same characters, expand on them a little, and save myself valuable time for writing.
Tied for sixth that year.
(Fuck!)
I stuck to the plan, though. Fast forward to 2011, and this time I got really serious. I came up with more details to flesh out the three trainers, such as
what their Pokémon are (it literally took two years for this to come up) and getting more into their strengths and weaknesses. Krissy’s really good at battling, Jason’s not and has trouble connecting with his Pokémon (later this weakness would be transferred to Krissy because she had no weaknesses), and Travis is all about water and named his little Horsea Wyvern to compensate for how unintimidating Horsea are. I spent more time than ever in the planning phase, and paid special attention to working multiple threads and resolving them together organically. Then came a writing blitz, extensive proofreading and revision up until the last minute, and finally the waiting game…
And it won!
(Yes!!)
Not gonna lie, that was one of the best days of my life. I don’t think I’d ever gotten first place in anything before. Maaaybe it felt like using the same OCs for three contests in a row gave me an unfair advantage, but I figured if those other writers wanted to win, they should have committed to their
own two-year strategies to win a fanfic forum contest. So! Here I had a story I was proud of with three characters whom readers seemed to connect with and who had grown into a real trio. As far as I was concerned, the book was closed on them, and it turned out there was no need to ever dig into the inkling I’d had about Krissy’s familial ties to organized crime.
In short, that victory came
this close to killing these characters.
If I'd lost in 2011, I'd likely have realized years sooner than I did that they still weren’t great characters, not yet. What they had going for them was an emotionally resonant (if unoriginal) dynamic, but there was still very little else to say about them. Krissy especially was this Little Miss Perfect and
nothing besides. Her dearth of development was partially due to how much I still needed to learn about writing female characters who were actual human beings, but there wasn’t much to Jason or Travis either. And this reality completely skipped my notice since hey, they won, they did their job, they were my proudest achievement as a writer. I’m glad I eventually looked back with a more critical eye, because they deserved better. That was a big part of my motivation for writing
WSSTK.
That said, I don’t think the lesson here is “Competitiveness gives you tunnel-vision, and winning makes you complacent.” The fact remains that if it weren’t for my obsessive drive to win this silly contest, the trio wouldn’t have come as far as they had. Shallow as they were after three shorts, after the first they were simply vague archetypes who lived only to serve a single abstract idea, and one of them had to die for it. The next two shorts did give them some kind of vitality and made me care a lot more. Winning was a setback on the way, but if I’d been at peace with losing in the first place, there would have been no progress to interrupt.
And hey, that’s life. What trips you up at one point is exactly what you need at another. I think think principle is best seen in children, if I may clumsily tie this essay back to the whole point of the fic. Much of what children eventually need to outgrow is a necessary component of what makes them such a blessing in the first place. They find adventures where adults are too smart to look for them, and come up with valuable insights that adults are too wise to think of. If the kids in this story had been thinking like adults when it came time to decide whether to go save Derek, Derek would be dead, and Wyvern may never have been rescued. It may have been a bad gamble on their part, realistically speaking, but it is adult pride and arrogance to think that kids only prove adults wrong in fiction.
With the caveat that sometimes we need to nudge them in the other direction lest they run headlong over the edge of a cliff, my firm belief is that we stand to lose more by habitually Stopping These Kids rather than by letting them surprise us.
That’s about it for author’s notes. Before I go, here are the one-shots on PokeCommunity that the six main characters first appeared in for anyone who’s interested in checking them out:
