All Eyes on Me

Forever Captain:
“The Show”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~

Summary: Steve’s teenaged great-granddaughter cajoles him into going with her to see Rogers: The Musical. And like any good theater experience, they’ll laugh and they’ll cry.

Previous chapters:
1. Balcony Seats
2. The Overture
3. Kids From Brooklyn
4. So Damn Lucky

Chapter summary: The performance’s showy style may serve some aspects of Steve’s early years of military service— but others, they don’t exactly do justice.

I realized recently I haven’t worked on the mainline entry in my MCU fanfiction series, Forever Captain, for like a year now, and I feel kind of guilty about that. Of course, I feel guilty when I spend too much time writing fanfiction as well, so I guess I can’t win. But I do want those stories to get finished eventually. Unfortunately, I always find plotting to be the most intensive work in writing, and in a plot-heavy story like that one, it makes it the number one barrier to making progress.

It sometimes helps when I’m stuck on a prose project to try drafting scenes as drama, to lower the barrier to getting them on the page. That’s not super helpful when I’m trying to just figure out what needs to happen structurally, but it occurred to me it might help on a lower-intensity installment in the series that hasn’t seen any updates recently either. So here’s a scene from The Show, the one where Steve’s great-granddaughter takes him to see Rogers! The Musical. The premise of that piece is that while laughing over the musical’s inaccuracies, Steve gets to reflect to his great-granddaughter about the trajectory of his life, so I can weave pathos into the humor, and I’m afraid this scene is a bit thin for that. But as I continually remind myself— draft now, flesh out later. If you can’t do something you want to with a scene, do the next-easiest thing to it, and fix it in the edit.

I shall definitely have to do that here.



( Day #9 – Singing and Dancing )

I was going like gangbusters on my fanfics, post-retirement Captain America and otherwise, at the start of the summer. I’d done several entries of the comedic shorts Texts from Avengers Tower, as well as chapters of the plot-focused adventure novella Boulder in the Stream, and the funny-sweet novelette The Show. I got stalled on them once it got close to shooting time for Mrs. Hawking parts 4 and 5, especially since Boulder in the Stream requires structuring and that’s always a particularly labor-intensive part of writing for me. Even The Show was tricky— because there’s a whole-ass musical going on in the background of it, and I have to figure out what happens in it!

But I have found in the past that sometimes drafting scenes in prose pieces as if they were scenes of drama can sometimes make them easier at least to structure. I’m a big proponent of when writing gets tough, you make it as easy as possible by committing to an iterative process where each round is made as EASY AS POSSIBLE. Then you just go back and add in the next layer of whatever it’s missing until it’s where you want it to be. I find that way more doable than trying to accomplish everything you want in the piece all at the same time. So this method allows me to worry only about structure and dialogue; I can flesh out the bones of it later.

So for today’s piece I took a shot at the next chapter of The Show, which has languished slightly-started for several weeks now. It’s pretty bare-bones, but that’s okay; I do feel like I figured out what the chapter is supposed to DO. While the story’s primary purpose is to be funny bagging on the ridiculousness of the musical they’re watching, the sub-story is about Steve reflecting on a long and full life by comparing his memory to its depiction in the show, which he endeavors to convey to his great-granddaughter. Like, for example, he tells her here one of my favorite things about Steve and Peggy’s relationship. <3

Also, the lyrics suck here and need to be punched up. They’re basically just placeholders for now.



( Day #12 – So Damn Lucky )

Forever Captain:
“The Show”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~

Summary: Steve’s teenaged great-granddaughter cajoles him into going with her to see Rogers: The Musical. And like any good theater experience, they’ll laugh and they’ll cry.

Previous chapters:
1. Balcony Seats

Chapter summary: Steve meets his great-granddaughter at the theater, but can’t quite make her get why he’s so reluctant.