Wishing wells seem to know exactly what is needed to fulfill people's lives ...
im the best way possible. Of course it doesn't seem that way at the time!
Made this for Churchy, whom I hadn't made a caption for in like 4 years! Wow! Time does fly, doesn't it? I certainly once again crammed in quite a bit of set-up, and I actually whittled down a few paragraphs when I was almost done because I hadn't actually figured out exactly how to finish it.
At one point, the entire carnival was magic, and once they made their wish, I had an old lady wandering up to them, giving them a ticket to return the next day .. letting them relive the day/date from the other person's POV. But .. it didn't make the story any better, and it was just easier to cut her out and make them relive the same day once again. Replacing 8 lines of text with 3 lines, while tightening up the story was a win/win situation.
Most of the dialog I had in mind from the start .. well except for that last line. I thought about what would happen after "he" proposed. Would they change back or be stuck in each other's body? I had other questions (as tends to happen in my captions!) and knew I couldn't even answer one of them within the space I had left. I figured, "why not have THEM ask the questions?" and then leave it that way .. Churchy can figure out which direction her best ending would be. Each of us reading it would have the same option. What I think is cool about this that we hardly ever think to include that as an actual part of the caption, letting the characters ponder their own fate.
When I was done, it still didn't feel quite right. There wasn't enough weight to their destiny, in my opinion, to warrant the life-altering wish and have it fulfilled. Luckily in going over her preferences again, she said that she's really been into pregnancy captions lately, and that gave what I wrote much more gravitas .. and definitely gave more gravity to their lives before the carnival date happened.
Then the wish, giving them the chance to see themselves from the other side, really did matter. It could have helped save them from a forced marriage that might have given them resentment, which would have doomed it from the start. Now, they truly ARE sharing their lives .. figuratively and literally. They'll be much more together in that they'll never know if/when they are switching back.
Yikes! I didn't expect to type this much out in explaining all this! Hopefully we'll get enough views and comments to make it worth it for a Tuesday post.
Did reading this give you an idea that much more was going on in the caption than when you first read it? I like giving behind the scenes discussions about WHY the captions turn out the way they do, but it can be time-consuming, and often seems to slide by without much recognition by those who visit this blog, especially since I don't think there are as many of my captioning peers visiting as there used to be. I'd like to hear from anyone/everyone as I am still trying to figure out exactly what I would like to do with this blog moving forward.