Claire wrote: Sun Apr 06, 2025 2:22 pm
I want to try something. Let me share with you how my planning process for
You worked and how that informed the decisions I made for the story. I'm curious whether you find that interesting.
It all started with the idea that I wanted to go for maximum immersion with the goal to make readers, but especially men, feel implicated by the rapist's action. Liking that story should feel uncomfortable. Then I asked myself: How do I do that? And I thought that the
second person narrator is ideal for that purpose. What better way to implicate someone than to directly address them with "You are doing this."? The reader either accepts the premise that they are the one acting or they stop reading.
Then I knew that I need to make the rapist relatable in some sense at least. I presume that nobody here is an actual rapist, so let's make the rapist inexperienced. The methodical hunter, the cold blooded serial rapist as the main character wouldn't work for this story, that is to unrelatable. To convey that inexperience,I wanted the rapist to act spontaneously, not planned, and I wanted him to struggle, I wanted him to not know how to do this.
I also knew that for the rapist to stay relatable, I could not have him be completely unaffected by the suffering he inflicts upon his victim. Therefore, I decided early on that the story would end with the sentence "What have you done?" as regret catches up to him after he has finished.
Next I decided to keep both the rapist and the victim totally vague in their descriptions. No names, no age, barely any description of their physical appearance. You, the reader, are supposed to project yourself onto the protagonist. So I can't describe him as a 47 year old software engineer who is 1.87m tall with a small belly and grey long hair. He is just some guy who took a detour through a park on his way home from work, that's all you know. I needed to avoid the thought "That guy is not me." to pop up in the reader's head.
I approached the victim similarly. I wanted him to see someone in her he knew, someone he misses. But again, I never specify whether this is an ex-girlfriend, a dead wife, a woman he loved but never had the relationship with he wanted. When I asked people in a poll on RavishU whether they had a specific woman in mind while reading, 50% of those who voted said yes (small sample size though). So that worked pretty well I think.
Then I decided to make loneliness the motivating factor for his actions, the desire to matter in someone else's life. I think that is deeply human and very relatable to many people. Who hasn't felt lonely at some point in their life, right? So the story sets the tone with the first sentence "You are alone."
From that it follows almost naturally to have the story and him climax with the realization that in this moment that he rapes her he is not alone. I knew this would have to be the thing that sends him over the edge.
With all I have said so far, I was naturally restricted to write a short story. That might seem obvious, but the vagueness of the character descriptions and motivations commited me to keeping the story short. How do you keep this vagueness up in a long story like Record Chaser without it becoming absurd? Better writers than me might be able to do it, but that would be beyond my abilities as a writer I think.
Let's take stock: I knew that I wanted to write a second person short story about a man raping a woman during a chance encounter with the intended goal to have (male) readers project themselves onto the main character and feel implicated by his actions. I knew that the story starts with "You are alone", climaxes with "You are not alone" and ends with "What have you done?" The two characters in the story would stay as vague as possible to allow the reader to project themself and a woman they know/miss onto the characters. Loneliness would be the defining motivation for the protagonist's actions and he would be inexperienced at what he does. The woman he attacks would feel familiar to him without being someone he actually knows.
Then I started writing. Everything else you read in the story are details that are informed by that framework.
). 