More plot nibbles

[igenlode]

More plot nibbles, now actually embarked upon (thanks to an extremely boring session chopping up many pounds of windfall pears — they were either ripe and full of bug droppings, or whole, underripe and extremely hard!)

The idea of Raoul surprising Christine by being good at dancing (having been subjected to mandatory lessons as part of his aristocratic education) is one that I'd had kicking around for some time, but never developed into anything beyond a vague idea that it would have to be at the masquerade. But while Leroux-Raoul and Christine never danced together in canon, Steve Barton and Sarah Brightman were both trained dancers, so their Raoul and Christine did dance (apparently more than in the current stage show). And in the course of my hours of pear-processing I managed to come up with some associated dialogue ideas that actually go somewhere; enough to make a scene, anyway.

What I hadn't planned for at that stage was Christine spontaneously getting naughty thoughts in the middle :-p

Comments

[sallymn]

I like that! It's the slice of life type of story that I always like :)

[igenlode]

Unfortunately, after doing some YouTube 'research' (actually managed to find a bootleg recording of the Brightman/Barton routine in its entirety, but the same seems to apply to more modern productions) it turns out that Christine and Raoul do actually dance together on stage for an extended period *before* their quarrel over the 'secret engagement', rather than entering only after the opening chorus is over. Which means that I need to rewrite all the stuff I wrote yesterday under the impression that this conversation was supposed to be their first dance of the night...

[sallymn]

Oh drabbit :( is there something else you can think of?

[igenlode]

Well, I've tweaked "Only this time Raoul was with her" to "Only this time Raoul was with her again", and altered "You can dance!" to "I can't believe how well you dance", and "Why else would I have asked?" to "Why else would I have come?", which I think is adequate in the surrounding context to shift the implications of the scene as written so far.
I'll just have to write the rest of it with the idea in mind that they've done all those lifts and stuff before, and that it's a question of this time rather than never having ventured to try; a bit awkward, given that the pivotal moment was supposed to be the parallel of trusting him to support her, but I think it can probably be made to work...

[sallymn]

Canon can sometimes be a pain, can't it? I know there have been times I have forgotten some point in my story... at least till a reader comes and TELLS me....

[igenlode]

I think I'm just going to have to keep things very general (that was the 'mistake' I made to start off with: trying to fit the story to a specific point in the scene), because I'm effectively attempting to novelise ballet at this point... and make it fit in with my predetermined dialogue, which is the problem.

There is no way, really, that this is going to work as 'what they were actually saying/doing during the dance sequence' once you look at it closely. But most people will be going from the same vague memories as I was ;-p

[betweensunandmoon]

I like that idea!

[igenlode]

Sadly I'm now running into some major problems due to having rashly elaborated the material I had in order to set the events at a very specific point during the Masquerade scene, rather than just generally while they are dancing as I'd originally envisaged it. I really don't want to lose this extra degree of detail, but it means I need to take an entirely different slant on my proposed finale.

A bit like the major changes to the framing-story of "In Regret, Always" that were necessitated by my discovery of the actual history of French WW1 mobilisation: Raoul ends up having actually gone to war and come back on leave, instead of anticipating a delayed call-up with dread. Because I managed to discover that particular plot-hole at an early stage before I'd written anything, the 'revised' storyline ended up thoroughly woven into subsequently-developed events to a degree that left no trace of the original (likewise the version of the Epilogue to "The Choice of Raoul", where there is no visible remainder of the 'South American' dust-and-adobe-church setting that I'd envisaged before I actually did some research on the banana boat trade and Surinam!)

Unfortunately in the current case I'd already committed ink to paper before discovering that what I'd planned is incompatible with canon (in fact, my planned finale turns out not to make much sense in the context of what we've already seen) which makes it much harder to revise seamlessly :-(