Ask the Author: Ygrawn

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Ask the Author: Ygrawn
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	Ygrawn
Date(s):	February 9, 2009
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Supernatural
External Links:	interview and comments are here, Archived version
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Ygrawn was interviewed for Supernatural Roundtable.

Some Excerpts

I’ve been writing fanfiction since about 1999. (When I stopped to think about it I realised it will be TEN YEARS AGO this May.) I wrote for Dawson’s Creek, which is pretty embarrassing now, but no point denying your roots, right? There was a long gap when I wrote nothing and wondered if I ever would again, until I started writing fic for The West Wing, which is not even a little bit embarrassing.

I watched the Pilot episode of Supernatural with my sister, because there appeared to be hot boys, so we were in. We weren’t crazy-insane for it but it ran in a timeslot when there wasn’t much else on, so we kept watching. It was around Shadow that I got with the program, although I can’t say why it took all that time.

Fortunately, any number of brilliant people had already felt the love, so I gorged myself sick on the fic that was already out there, and eventually stumbled onto wincest. I remember reading Blurry by poisontaster, getting all dry-mouthed and thinking, wow, that’s all kinds of awesome. (I re-read it when I went to retrieve the link and it still is.)

In the past year and a bit, the boys have overwhelmingly dominated my output, almost exclusively Dean/Sam, with a few gen stories along the way. I love J2 fic, but I’ve only written one J2 story.

Second Glance floated around in my brain for some time before I began to write it, and when I started to (in neat, short, structurally normal sentences) it didn't work. What I was writing wasn't what I was thinking or imagining about John.

Annoyed, I retreated from it, let it float around in my brain for a while longer, and then got so cross I got a blank piece of paper and a pen, sat at my desk and just started writing about John sitting in a bar near Savannah, staying away from the motel for some reason, and when I finished the thought and actually marked the period I realised I'd written a really long sentence! But it reflected my idea of John's jumbled thoughts in a way that the earlier attempt hadn't. So I took a deep breath and went for it.

I think I managed to keep it together because I had a very clear idea of where I was going with each scene; I knew what I wanted to achieve, the specific moments you asked about. (The scene with John in the bar and the scene where Dean misses Sam were probably the only two I wrote as they came to me, without really having a set idea of where I was going.) I think if I'd just started writing long run-on sentences with no real idea of what I wanted to hit along the way I would have got lost. I also think the concept worked with the structure, because I wasn't telling a straight narrative. Each segment is somewhat self-contained and the timeline shifts quite a bit. If I had a proper plot - A happens, B responds etc - I doubt it would work.

The active scenes were easier to write: John at the bar, the shaving scene, the pool hustling scene, because they were describing physical things, an event. The emotional scenes were harder - the scene that begins They share clothes... and finishes with the title concept was a bitch to write.

Editing it really *was* a nightmare until I decided to read each section aloud, which allowed me to work out where it was falling down, what wasn't working, which word combinations should be changed.

Eventually, I posted it and wondered whether anybody would actually read it...