Chapter surgery
16 January 2018 12:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeAfter very laboriously finishing plot point five — in which the Phantom is wildly inconsistent in his reactions to the mention of Raoul and Christine is as well — it has become all too apparent that this really doesn't sit very well with the end of the previous chapter.
Hinting at a forthcoming change in the enmity between Lancard and Raoul just doesn't make sense in this context. It's not the sort of thing you would put in when you're about to kill both characters off, and the result is to engender at worst disbelief and at best a sense of confusion ('wait, what just happened there?') rather than the shock of the Psycho shower-scene shift I was aiming for, where you realise abruptly that the main protagonist so far isn't going to be along for the rest of the trip.
Maybe I need to cut off the whole end of that scene — with Lancard stopping Raoul diving overboard — off altogether, and just stop at the 'oh no, Erik knows where to find Christine' bit, i.e. before jumping to the scene of Erik doing just that. But then the the whole original point of that part, before Lancard got involved, was to get Raoul up on deck in order to demonstrate that they're already well out to sea and he's stuck on board. I mean, I've mentioned in a half-sentence earlier on that 'the Requin drew away from the shore' before Raoul goes below, but it's the barest mention; it's not exactly obvious that he can't just do a pier-head jump or get himself rowed off or something.
It might be possible to reuse some of the material as part of a later scene in flashback when Raoul and Lancard are stuck in the open boat... but not in the hectic stream-of-consciousness phrasing that I've used here.
I think I might be able to get away with the passage as it stands if I delete the last sentence (the one that was supposed to be a foreshadowing of a softened relationship — but it's not actually all that good) and substitute something else, in order to shift the focus of the ending into Raoul being carried off helplessly. I probably still need to work in some ominous foreshadowing about nasty things lurking in the bowels of the ship, though...
I'm not at actually at all confident about how clear Erik's rather elliptical remarks about Raoul's fate are: a "device set to burn through" that will have "run its course" :-(
(I'm imagining some kind of acid-fuse timeclock.)
In the end I resorted to having Christine explain it to the reader by immediately accusing Erik of killing "all the lives on that ship" and visualising it sailing off with a bomb on board, but it's not exactly obvious how Christine herself jumps to this conclusion.
Not a terribly satisfactory chapter.
Hinting at a forthcoming change in the enmity between Lancard and Raoul just doesn't make sense in this context. It's not the sort of thing you would put in when you're about to kill both characters off, and the result is to engender at worst disbelief and at best a sense of confusion ('wait, what just happened there?') rather than the shock of the Psycho shower-scene shift I was aiming for, where you realise abruptly that the main protagonist so far isn't going to be along for the rest of the trip.
Maybe I need to cut off the whole end of that scene — with Lancard stopping Raoul diving overboard — off altogether, and just stop at the 'oh no, Erik knows where to find Christine' bit, i.e. before jumping to the scene of Erik doing just that. But then the the whole original point of that part, before Lancard got involved, was to get Raoul up on deck in order to demonstrate that they're already well out to sea and he's stuck on board. I mean, I've mentioned in a half-sentence earlier on that 'the Requin drew away from the shore' before Raoul goes below, but it's the barest mention; it's not exactly obvious that he can't just do a pier-head jump or get himself rowed off or something.
It might be possible to reuse some of the material as part of a later scene in flashback when Raoul and Lancard are stuck in the open boat... but not in the hectic stream-of-consciousness phrasing that I've used here.
I think I might be able to get away with the passage as it stands if I delete the last sentence (the one that was supposed to be a foreshadowing of a softened relationship — but it's not actually all that good) and substitute something else, in order to shift the focus of the ending into Raoul being carried off helplessly. I probably still need to work in some ominous foreshadowing about nasty things lurking in the bowels of the ship, though...
I'm not at actually at all confident about how clear Erik's rather elliptical remarks about Raoul's fate are: a "device set to burn through" that will have "run its course" :-(
(I'm imagining some kind of acid-fuse timeclock.)
In the end I resorted to having Christine explain it to the reader by immediately accusing Erik of killing "all the lives on that ship" and visualising it sailing off with a bomb on board, but it's not exactly obvious how Christine herself jumps to this conclusion.
Not a terribly satisfactory chapter.