The Darker Side of Sunnydale Interview with DreamSmith

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Interviews by Fans
Title: The Darker Side of Sunnydale Interview with DreamSmith
Interviewer: The Darker Side of Sunnydale
Interviewee: DreamSmith
Date(s): 01 November 2000
Medium: online
Fandom(s): Angel and Buffy
External Links: full interview is here; reference link
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DreamSmith was interviewed for The Darker Side of Sunnydale, a Buffy site.

Well, those stories are 'epic', in size if not in scope, mainly because I have a basic inability to gloss over even minor parts of whatever tale I'm trying to tell. I write EVERYTHING that's going on, at length, and that very quickly leads to a short story that's several hundred pages long. Along those same lines, you made an interesting comment; 'you never lose track of where you want the story to go'. You need to understand, if there's one single thing I DO know about a story I'm writing, it's where everyone will be when it's time for the end credits to roll. When I'm thinking of starting a story, that's the first thing I ask myself; 'Okay, what will have been accomplished, what will be different when the dust settles, how will they have learned and changed and grown? How does it end?' So it's never a question of struggling to keep track of where the story needs to go; I've already got that firmly in mind.

Once I know that, I can just pick a starting point, a point of view character to begin with, and then start typing. After the first scene is down, to establish where we are and what's going on, that's where the hard part begins. Outlines (at least, what I think of as an outline) are not a big thing with me. I tried one on this latest Faith story (Virtue of a Warrior), but it turned out not to be as helpful as I'd hoped. The reason why is that even though I know where the story is ultimately headed, things usually take a lot of unforseen twists and turns along the way.

Ever read a 'choose a path' book? My writing is a lot like that. As I'm working my way through the story, there are all these characters, each with a role to play, and I'm constantly shuffling them around, changing their actions in a given scene, and then trying to trace the consequences of that forward through the story to see how it impacts the rest of what needs to happen. Sometimes I'll do a little rewriting to accomodate an idea that occurs to me, sometimes the whole thing has to be redone, nearly from scratch in order to tighten things up and make it a better read. ('Interludes' is the best example to date of rewrite hell, though 'Virtue' is likely to eclipse it before all is said and done).

I never really considered Anime as an influence before, but it probably is. I'm not exactly an Otaku, but I am a fan of all that stuff. Shirow's Manga, Adam Warren's Dirty Pair, various Anime including (but not limited to): The Slayers (Heh; appropriate, neh?), Macross Plus, El Hazard, Tenchi Muyo, Lodoss War, etc. The action/adventure stuff is my favorite, especially where the hero/heroine is forced by a turn of events to discover something within themselves that then allows them to press on and ultimately prevail. The better anime can explore that theme very well. Japanese culture in general is something I know only a little about. In 'Virtue', I was trying to show that the 'bad guys' weren't, by their own lights, evil, just as Faith, at the time, felt that her actions in Sunnydale were justifiable. The Japanese in the story have a sense of honor and obligation, even though their ultimate goal is a selfish desire for power. Faith enjoys power too, but her ultimate goal, once she realizes it, is something very different.

Around eighteen months ago I was working on some background material for a ShadowRun campaign. I'd run various Roleplaying games for a longlong time, and in recent years I found myself growing more and more dissatisfied with them. I couldn't figure out why, until one day I was jotting down a few background notes on an NPC (My fellow gamer geeks will know what that means), when suddenly and without warning the notes turned into this stream of words. It was the oddest feeling, watching this little three page story flow through me, out of the back of my brain, down into my fingers and out onto the screen. When I was done I sat back and read what I'd done, and I thought 'Hey, that's pretty neat.'. I shared it with a couple of friends and they agreed that it was neat.

One of those friends, who goes by Candy Kane online, suggested I try a Buffy story, and so I did. The first couple of chapters of AToTB [A Thing of Terrible Beauty] followed, along with a couple installments of 'Ninety-Six Days'. Candy was also the one who introduced me to the concept of the mailing list. Until then, I'd had no idea that they existed. So I posted what I'd done on the first couple of lists I found, and soon some very nice feedback arrived, which led to more chapters, and more feedback, and it just went on from there.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that the reason I'd gotten frustrated with roleplaying games was that I'd been trying to tell stories there for a long while. Either through the medium of my own character, or through the campaigns I'd run, I was looking for a way to show plots evolving, to show characters meeting obstacles and overcoming them, becoming something greater in the process. Ultimately those attempts would always fail, just by the nature of the games they were in. So I more or less retired from gaming and concentrated on the writing, where the only limitation is the time and energy I put into things. (By the way, if you're interested in that first little story, I'll include it on the site after the upcoming reconstruction)

As for my friend's take on the writing....

They don't understand it, and they hate me. (Well, most of them do) They would much rather I kept on running games for them instead of doing something for myself.

Other Interviews in the Series

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