tierno fic notes / commentary

[liptinted]

i've tried a couple of times to start writing this post sooner and each time i've just stared at the blank grey space and just closed the text editor. and now it's mid-june. lol how has it been 2 months already since i posted this fic. but i will write this up since i do want to talk about it, belatedly, and it was born out of an au by a friend that i really had a lot of fun coming up with inspired by the lovely art.

cross posted on tumblr

concept

obviously this is all thanks to dave aka tumblr user penaltyboxboxbox. i distinctly remember looking at the piece and going 'WOW so cool! how would that work.' i moved along and went back to life. and then a week later i saw it reblogged again on the dash and got slapped in the face by the question. literally how would that work. how would it happen. i love canon divergence sooooo much btw even though i was worried about having to change the year in dave's work from 2017 to 2018 because lol, the fucking research threw me a curveball.

thought that this was going to be fernando pov because to upend and change his ferrari era from loser to championship winner with the red team, would be cool. and then i figured it couldn't work because i already knew what i wanted to happen anyway with him in the fic - that he'd retire after the championships, after ferrari just cannot keep up with the evolving changes in the sport over the years compared to their stronger contenders. retirement is all so anti-climactic and a given, so what the hell would even be interesting there lmao. it would feel like a weird fix-it and i have never done a fix-it fic in my life. let flaws be flaws etc.

so then i started writing this in lance pov, and told myself that this would just be me exploring how would lance be like in a team without his father's direct influence and hold. i say direct, because i'm always reminded of the rumours that lawrence funded some part of fernando's career as well while he was in ferrari, but don't quote me on that those are just (believable and unsurprising) rumours.

process

started writing this early january. and then i did not touch the wip at all or write anything for about 3 weeks in february?? i spent so long just casually trawling for research in between writing the first few scenes because i had not figured out what would be the conflict yet. i asked a couple of friends to read over some of what i had, just to help me point out any blind spots. sometimes i still can't tell how my tone comes off in early draft stages. i kind of knew what i wanted to do with it, i just didn't know yet how to execute it.

thing that never fails to surprise me about writing is that whatever i think would be so fun and exciting to do would STILL turn out to be excruciating and difficult on some days. i think i've made about 6 versions of the draft. i love research and i LOVED that this gave me an opportunity to dig into more things, but at some point, the research felt like too much, but i managed to spread it out in a digestible way in the story. it's challenging to glean what you can from actual canon to use in a fic without it sounding trite or boring, like some mechanical retelling.

ANYWAY. by the time i'd written the 2016 party scene where lance and his gf were eavesdropping on fernando having sex with not-linda, i still had no fucking idea what a good narrative here would be. i was distracting myself by making the playlist, and choosing to just move around parts of the wip here and there in the doc aimlessly just to see some things and hope that i'd figure it out. to put it simply: fernando wins a few championships (stared at some of the details in dave's art, and got tickled at the cards and their numbers) then retires. ok. and lance would eventually move on from ferrari, which he will at some point if they don't give his seat to someone else, but he'd have his father to fall back on so ok. how boring.

and then i realized, hold on, that SUCKS actually. that would kind of be a huge fucking bummer if you were already finally living out a childhood dream with the team almost every racing driver dreamt of. huge bummer when your big fat crush retires as well after a harrowing but magical year of finally getting the validation you wanted.

there's something devastating about how quickly athletes are forced to grow up, and with lance, the issue is both obvious but also it's complicated. it's not as if he doesn't possess any autonomy to make his own decisions, but there's a certain agency you're not entirely granted with when you do something with a parent, no matter how loving and giving that parent is to you. lance is like...the schrodinger's cat of an adult but i could say the same about all of these men and people born into wealthy privilege, or people who could never just bear to cut off their parents, to some extent. of course it's fernando who has to tell lance this in the story: "I will tell you something your father won't. You are upset because you know now what it feels like, to have people support you and your racing ability without him."

also something really devastating about how family is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. i love that word, self-fulfilling. i think it's tragic and i do think everything about ferrari is tragicomedy so it goes hand in hand.

this is why i also think andrea stella and fernando's driver-engineer relationship is compelling: fernando has everything he should have to win, except the one thing they can't grant him. but he thinks he should be grateful to be in the team, and he's teetered back and forth between demanding everything he should have and not wanting to fuck things up when he's fighting for championships, so he clings on to the belief that ferrari seems to carry, that ferrari makes you feel, and you can hear the trust in andrea stella's radio messages to fernando that i (and plenty of others) believed was kind and steady and almost nurturing to fernando in getting the most of the car and helping to fine-tune his strengths as a driver amidst the pressure. you can't truly say that luca baldisserri following lance to williams after the fda was even close to a similar parallel done entirely out of devotion, but i'd like to think it was duty, on luca's part. plus, if engineering young racers' wins in junior series gets you a nice salary from their dads, why not.

highlights of finishing this fic were:

• getting to see beautiful and harrowing fanart of the fic by dave.


• writing and getting to share the research and lore i gathered in this post. first time actually trying to put something like this together, and it was so fun... i love putting in my little captions under photos and adding in sources.

some of my fave lines from the fic:

"Thanks. You too," Lance replied, and Fernando's smile crooked up into a real one, sharp enough that it fish-hooked a fresh wave of fascination in Lance's stomach.
Perfect teeth, Lance thought to himself as he ran his tongue along the back of his own.

There's a saying that Fernando's mother taught Edoardo. The saying is Spanish, Edo's words lilting in a thin curl that Lance had to lean forward a bit to hear it again: La cabra tira al monte. The goat always takes to the mountains, which then means that you can hold down the goat in a pen but that won't change where it came from. "Fernando has always been who he is, and his heart, always up in the real mountains of his home," Edoardo said, raised his glass of lemonade in mock salute, and Fernando silently flicked a card at Edo's direction across the birch table almost childishly. That race weekend in Montreal, the weather stays the same, as clear and beautiful outside as it had been all week.

Lance stops idly rolling the pen he's been holding, a habit he'd gained from writing the confidence mantra they'd made him do at the academy. "Well. Can't beat a dead horse."
"Beat, what?"
"Luca was done here," says Lance, shifting in his seat. "So I'm saying that it's pointless because uh, the horse is dead and you can't like, get it to move." He makes a whipping motion with his hand.

As a teenager, Fernando had Ayrton Senna's picture stuck on the inside of his closet above his racing gear. For all of Lance's responses to the obligatory interview question that asked who his favourite driver was, he never had Fernando's picture up in his bedroom. Didn't exactly need it when Fernando's been around for years now, coming and going at Dad's invitations in the warmest season like object permanence developed through red-toned photos of a memory.

i love the theory of object permanence so much btw!! just saying.

writing anything new lately has been um...well. i thought i could do it again last week, but it turns out i'm still not fully back into it yet. and that's fine. i signed up for a fest (non-motorsport fandom) so...pray that it will help me kill the fears. guess i'll also go back to my attempts for other fic ideas, we will get through this. i'm trying to write more intentionally, less reactionary, so i guess if that means putting out less things then this is positive at least. hope i have fun along the way is all!