Reach Out and Touch Faith is a canonverse pre-TFA kylux fic co-written with
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forautumnforautumn ,
currently being posted on ao3.
The below is an interview with me about the first chapter! Go read the chapter first...and then come back here for the behind-the-scenes content under the cut.
( Chapter One Interview... )
Our work process on Reach Out and Touch Faith has gone like this--we brainstorm in twitter, everything from aesthetics to scenes to character development, and we both talk about everything--Hux, Kylo, sex, costumes, settings, scenery, cameo appearances, any of that stuff. Once things start to take shape, autumn distills it into a chapter-by-chapter outline which she keeps updated, and ktula periodically downloads the relevant bits of the twitter chat into a document. (The document is now over 100k words, and that’s just up to October, in case you were wondering how much we talk about this. It’s a lot. The answer is a lot.) Then we break off, and write the chapter we’re responsible for. Chapters one and two were written simultaneously, and the remaining chapters have been written in chronological order. The person who is writing writes, and the person who is reading freaks out over how awesome it is, and then goes in later and adds concrit to the chapter. Once a chapter is drafted and we’re both happy with how it’s laid out, we send it over to Deadsy for a first pass at a beta read, and then whoever is responsible for the next chapter gets started on it.
As you can imagine, with that amount of chatter going on with the fic, there’s a ton of information that didn’t made it into the text. So--it’s interview time!!
Each week, the person who did not write the chapter is going to interview the person who did write the chapter to get some insight on authorial decisions that were made, how our discussions translated over into the actual text, and any other sorts of Easter eggs and that type of thing.
Without any further ado--here is autumn interviewing ktula for chapter one of RO&TF!
What made you choose Kylo’s POV? This is a complicated question to answer! It came out of a bunch of things, I think--initially, when we were trying to figure out how we were even going to structure this collaboration, we were talking about the merits of co-writing the entire thing, versus alternating chapters, and the more we talked, the more it seemed like we were talking about a longfic, rather than a one-off, and the process of blend-writing a longfic seemed really daunting. Plus, we’ve both got fairly different stylistic quirks in the way that we write, and we already knew that we wanted to write an alternating POV story--so it made a lot of sense to have one author take one POV, and the other the other. Each author writes in their own style, and each POV gets a distinct voice, so everybody wins!
As to how I ended up with Kylo--well, we were both kind of dancing around the subject a little bit, and I think I eventually bit the bullet and blurted out “I’m basically Kylo and I’m way more comfortable writing him” and you were like “huzzah, I have some things I want to explore with Hux here”--and, honestly, now that we’re 70k+ into the draft, I think that was a really fantastic decision, because you’ve done things with Hux here that I can’t even contemplate coming up with, much less trying, and I’ve been able to tap into a whole hell of a lot of Kylo characteristics that I’ve never written in any of my previous Kylos, and I’m really, really proud of how the whole thing shapes up.
How do you think the datapad got into Kylo’s possession? Oooh! I’m so glad you asked, I have an entire headcanon for this. As we can see in the text, Snoke is really pushing for Kylo to be isolated and dependent and focused on his training--but not pushing for him to be integrated in with the rest of the First Order, the ship he supposedly co-commands, or even any of the personnel on the ship. Other than overhearing General Hux’s suspiciously-timed comm to Snoke, there’s no indication that Kylo has seen or spoken to anyone else--so I don’t believe for a moment that Snoke thought to himself “hey, you know what my apprentice needs? A datapad.”
So, where the hell did the datapad come from? Honestly, I think that was an Armitage Hux plan of attack right there--getting everyone linked into the First Order intranet would be exactly the kind of thing that General Hux would have as part of his onboarding package, and he’s the kind of man that takes pride in his tech--so it would have been important to him to have a datapad ready for Kylo, to be handed over at the end of his initial Welcome To The First Order, We’re Glad To Have You onboarding session. You know, the session that Kylo skipped completely, because he didn’t even get off the transport when they stopped on the Finalizer after the massacre at Skywalker’s school. Anyways, I’m pretty sure Hux arranged for the datapad to be sent over and delivered to Kylo’s rooms, in a “no need to bother the Supreme Leader about this, we’ll just look after it quietly, but get this into his room ASAP and I don’t care how” sort of a way.
Can you talk about the time-skips in this chapter? Can I ever! Because yeah, there’s a lot of them. We’re missing days, we’re missing hours, we have an unidentified amount of time passing that is at least a couple of weeks, and could be a couple of months--and since Kylo isn’t marking the time very carefully, neither are we as readers. There’s some trauma that Kylo is dealing with in the very beginning of the fic, associated with his identity and the weight of the horrible things he’s done (mass murder is heavy, my dude, perhaps you should have considered that in advance of, say, committing mass murder), and it’s one of the contributing factors in him not marking the passage of time very carefully. I wanted to bring this sense of--timelessness, and the horrible stretching-out of a bad experience into his POV, and I especially wanted to capture that sense of long sleepness nights where nothing matters and time just keeps happening regardless of whether you’ve engaged with it or not.
Time skips are one of the writing techniques that I usually stress about--but I found them less stressful for this particular chapter, because we didn’t really need to be grounded in an exact length of time that was skipped. So while normally I worry about a) closing out a scene, and b) opening up a scene and immediately indicating how much time has passed, this time I mostly ignored b) completely, and just let the reader catch up as Kylo caught up. Plus, for the purposes of this chapter, it’s not like it matters to Kylo whether it’s this Primeday or last Primeday--he’s still lonely, and he still doesn’t know where his Knights are, and the feelings are more important than the chronology, so I let the chronology go. (Yes, I did. I hear you, anxiety brain, but I promise, I let it go. I am letting it go right now.)
In most fics I read, Hux and Kylo meet early on--what is the significance of a delayed introduction? I LOVE DELAYED INTRODUCTIONS, let me just get that out of the way first. There’s something endlessly fascinating to me about the way that we build people up in our minds when we only have access to some information about them, not all of it, and delaying a first meeting lets us build that partial data up further and further and further--and then the person either does or doesn’t conform to that image, and the story can spiral out from there.
Here, specifically, the fascinating thing about the delayed introduction is that it’s only delayed on Kylo’s side--Hux, obviously, was willing to meet immediately, and was disappointed that they didn’t. That discrepancy alone says so much about their characters--Hux is obviously more grounded in the practical of ‘I’ll be working closely with him, so we should get into a good working relationship immediately’, while Kylo is more selfish, and because he’s focused on himself, he “can’t” meet because he’s not living up to his potential, and obviously Hux will feel that way about him too, and Kylo can’t handle the possibility of having his own anxiety about belonging reflected back at him via Hux, so he keeps avoiding authentically engaging with Hux.
I love exploring the bits and pieces of each other that they’re able to get in this chapter, and all the implications of what they see and don’t see. Delaying that meeting as long as possible also puts a lot of pressure on it that they wouldn’t otherwise have had if they’d met right in the beginning--if Hux had, say, been on that transport, he would have seen Kylo as the mess that he was, and they would have built their working relationship based on that. But because Kylo shut him out completely, that added pressure to their eventual first meeting. Kylo then layered additional pressure onto that by staying out of frame during every single call that he and Hux were ever on, so by the time they get to their first in-person meeting, it’s not surprising that a) Hux breaks into Kylo’s rooms to get a look at him, and b) Kylo immediately goes straight for the mask, even though he knows Snoke hates it, just because it’s the one thing about him that Hux seemed like he approved of, and everything else about the encounter just seems way too risky.
What was the most challenging part to write? I’ve never written canon-verse longfic before! And I’ve especially never written post-massacre canon-verse Kylo, so those were the two things that I found most intimidating when I was getting into this, and one of the reasons that I’m so glad we’re doing this piece as a collaboration. When we were first starting to talk about this, we were leaning really heavy on the aesthetics of the piece, and that was a really good way to get pulled into it--but once we realized there was a hell of a lot of story here, handling all the emotions and that kind of thing without sugarcoating it got really intense and intimidating, and this would have been a really scary piece to tackle alone because it’s so outside of my comfort zone.
It helped so much just to start breaking it into pieces. We knew where we wanted to start the story, so I had a specific chronological point that I could start telling the story at--and I knew that I wanted Kylo to be in a specific mindset at the start of the story as well. If Kylo walks out of the massacre at Skywalker’s school feeling on top of the world, it’s harder to justify the dynamic we see him have with Snoke in the movies, specifically in TLJ. But if Kylo walks out of the massacre feeling not necessarily that he’s fucked up, but that he’s fallen short in a number of ways--and, specifically, if I make Kylo long for that version of him that did walk out of the massacre feeling on top of the world, and if Kylo feels that Hux would have walked out of the massacre that way if he’d committed it--then he’s got a good starting point for us to work with. The advantage of planning this fic in advance is that we know exactly what character arc Kylo is going to go on--so one of the primary focuses of this chapter is to set Kylo down on the track, make sure his wheels are pointing the right direction, and just kind of nudge him at Hux and watch him go.
(Not like that, Kylo, for fuck’s sake! Not like that!)
