Primarily, let me say two things. First, this was based on the following prompt by Writing-Prompt-S:
Everyone has the name of their supposed soulmate printed on the inside of your wrist. You, however, are defiant, and begin dating someone that’s not your soulmate. It turns out that not meeting someone with the magic expectation that you’re ‘meant to be for each other and will get married and live happily ever after’ actually made you two get along pretty well, and you’re now deeply in love with them. However, after several years of dating this person, bot your and your S.O.’s real ‘soulmates’ find you, and they’re both furious that you didn’t wait for them.
https://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/
Secondly, I haven’t mentioned it before, but these prompts have been selected by my awesome partner, who I won’t link cause I doubt they want the press, but I wanted to give the shutout.
Okay, on to the fun part, let’s talk about this journey.
I will be one hundred and ten percent frank here. When I read this prompt, I though, “well this sounds like that one movie called ‘Timer,'” which I’m sure that no one has really heard about (bad research from my part shows that no one I know has ever seen that movie, therefore no one has). This immediately got me a little worried because I didn’t want to make this derivative of it, so I decided to try and take aspects that can only be specific to this story and then add another layer of character-centric details (which I hope was successful).
More importantly though, as I wrote this, for some reason I kept thinking about theater scripts I’ve written in the past, and I kept thinking about short quick scenes that some scripts will have. That got me thinking about the structure and format for this story, and it led me to experiment a little.
Since I had four characters, I knew that balancing and developing all of them would be incredibly hard for a short story (which is one of the reasons why this got so long, and even then I feel that Alejandra and Rosa don’t get that much development). So I decided that to alleviate that, I needed to chose my POV (point of view) very carefully.
In a rough brainstorm, I kinda toyed with Celeste’s (fun fact, Celeste, Alejandra, and Celeste swapped names in my head, but then it really just clicked. Those three in my head could never swap again) character a little as the MC. Then I switched to Salvador (fun fact, I kept writing Alejandro for his name at some point, which really confuses me). Then I kinda like Rosa. And as you might already know if you checked the story, I ended up swapping characters depending on the scene.
I did try to give a slightly different narrator to each one because I wanted a different voice. That’s why I have the writer having the most specific details, Salvador has some computer ideas and the horrible “man gaze” people talk about. Rosa was a weird one, since she was strangely enough the more emotional one in my head, or the one who existed more in her mind. I kinda liked the concept of a PI narrating her story. Maybe that’s why. And then Alejandra was just the oblivious, kinda conservative one who was kinda selfish.
Moreover, two characters have–what I think is anyway–very very obvious subtext to a lot of the descriptions that deal with the whole sexuality between them (Celeste/Rosa).
That all being said, I don’t know at what point this story seriously got out of control. The more I wrote, the less I wanted to leave this story unfinished. I seriously did not want it to feel incomplete and rushed, so I just kept going. Funny enough, the prompt’s main conflict is the climax of the story, much of the rest is build up.
Regardless, I hope that, if you’re reading this, you enjoyed or enjoy the story. Ah, and I haven’t really mentioned anything about this, but feel free to message me anything about the story!
Sincerely,
-e