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Starting again
Right. I've discarded just about everything I've written on this chapter since the 5th of November.
First of all I wrote a version of the 'proposal' where Raoul tells her that his father is dying and he needs to marry and produce an heir, and got about 200 words into their early married life: Raoul's father lived to see the wedding. But he died quite suddenly three weeks later[...].
Then I decided that the prolonged mourning period really wasn't compatible with what I'd already published in the first chapter (and in any case I was getting very bogged down with the 'early marriage' stuff at this point, of which about 50% got crossed out). So I had the bright idea that I could salvage most of the existing material if I just tweaked the plot so that the old Vicomte was going senile, rather than at death's door; that way I could have an imminent requirement for a succession but the old man could hang around for the entire duration of the plot and expire at some more convenient moment offscreen.
So I rewrote the whole thing, elaborating and altering Tolkien-fashion to a greater and greater degree as I progressed through sections that I'd assumed would just be copying out. And I got some stuff I quite liked, including a lot more characterisation for Raoul's unfortunate father, who was a complete cipher before but now became a much more human and likeable character, and a whole new location at a small family estate north of Paris (Beauvais; a sufficiently generic-sounding name to be able to pass as a place I made up, but also a real place about fifty miles from the city; it has a chateau, but not the one on Wikipedia. I said it was a generic name -- there are lots of them!)
But then when I started trying to write a scene between Hertha and Raoul where she basically pushes him into dumping his senile father in this convenient backwater and going back to the glittering life of Paris, I realised that the whole thing had got completely out of hand, and definitely didn't fit as backstory for Chapter 1 no matter how I tried. I mean, you could, as I was somewhat desperately considering, depict this as the first signs of cracks in the marriage which the arrival of Christine will then exacerbate... but we've already got a problem with Hertha's backstory completely dominating this chapter and threatening to make Christine into a very minor character. (Quite apart from the fanfic-specific issue of whether anyone is going to be interested in a chapter which is all about the angst-filled childhood of an OFC specifically created to be paired off with the author's favourite canon character -- needless to say that is not what I had set out with the intention of doing, but with hindsight it could certainly be interpreted that way!)
If I create all this complex and not entirely happy relationship between Hertha and Raoul in Chapter 2, it utterly overbalances the intended arc of the story. It's far too much 'explanation' to justify what was originally a tiny problem.
It had occurred to me that in my initial cavalier concept of the story Raoul was being married off at a rather young age, so I thought I'd provide a reason why his family are keen on his reproducing as soon as possible. But the whole structure of this chapter was supposed to be 'well, we'd been married for nine months and...', then getting on with the scheduled argument about Christine. We simply do not want all these newly-introduced painful and lifelike complexities getting in the way.
The tendency to blow up a minor detail into a major derailing event in the name of clarification and completely ruin the pacing of the plot has been an authorial fault of mine since middle school. (The whole 'drifting hulk' section of Arctic Raoul is a potential issue in this respect, but I think it works, because it establishes the Raoul/Lancard relationship, demonstrates his growing up, and helps balance out the Raoul-chapters fairly equally with the chapters of Christine's imprisonment, even if the latter were far quicker to write....)
In addition, a further problem that had become all too evident at this point was that, given the amount of distress that we'd portrayed in the background of Raoul's family and his own formerly close relationship with his father, my depiction of the character in the published chapter was looking increasingly incompatible with his supposed backstory. I'd just spent pages and pages tweaking the version of Raoul from Hertha's teenage years into someone who could credibly grow up to be the happy-go-lucky and rather oblivious young Vicomte of the gala scene, and it really did not work at all with the Raoul whom I'd been developing in this account of their married life, whose 'voice' had changed completely. Moreover, if I attempted to square the circle by having Hertha browbeat him into running off back to the night-life of Paris, where he throws himself wholeheartedly into the plans for the Opera with no hint of his prior enforced maturity, plus a complete disregard for the father who was being hidden away as a shamefaced family secret, quite apart from the continuity issues this also turned both Raoul and Hertha into pretty unsympathetic characters :-(
At the point where I found myself writing of Beauvais as "a place where at those times -- more and more often -- when his mind did go wandering, he could be more securely kept", I took a look at where I was heading with something akin to horror and decided that this particular plotline was definitely not the solution I'd hoped.
So yesterday I discarded another three and a half pages of laboriously-achieved manuscript, and started yet again to copy out what could be reused from the start of the same old scene, with the explicit aim of glossing over the material as quickly as possible. We've already established in this chapter that Hertha was thinking about marriage for herself at least a year earlier, so why would it occur to the reader to find it odd that Raoul's family are thinking along the same lines? They'll just go 'oh, people got married younger Back In History' [true-ish, but all those high-society heroines depicted as being left on the shelf at twenty weren't representative of the vast majority of the population].
Oddly enough, simply switching the order of a couple of paragraphs near the start of the section turned out to work quite well as a means of jumping directly into the scene, and I got through it in the course of a couple of days within the space of about a page and a half, admittedly a fair proportion of that having been more or less directly copied from the previous versions. Now I need to write a third passage summarising -- very quickly -- the state of their marriage over the intervening timespan, as originally planned. (Before I launched into all this flashback material I did, after all, start off the chapter with I'd been married to Raoul for nine months, but I'd known him since we'd first come to Paris... but that was 17 pages -- the majority of which have been subsequently discarded! -- and over a month ago.)
Of course my sense of chapter length has now gone entirely haywire, and I can't even resort to my usual method of ripping out and/or glueing up discarded pages, because I may yet need to refer to/use some of this material elsewhere. I've also completely lost track of which details are still officially included in the backstory and which will have to be explicitly written in again if I choose to adopt them :-(
I think the chapter currently stands at around six and a half pages, which is nearly three thousand words. So my instinct was right in that I need to start thinking about wrapping it up and getting to the end within a couple of pages or so -- and that the previous version was over-running at over eight pages and still stuck in flashback territory.
A few snippets from the 'deleted scenes' which will almost certainly never get used:
(from the additional dementia rewrite)
(Might be able to reintroduce descriptive elements of this section:)
At this point the manuscript breaks off in disgust :-p
First of all I wrote a version of the 'proposal' where Raoul tells her that his father is dying and he needs to marry and produce an heir, and got about 200 words into their early married life: Raoul's father lived to see the wedding. But he died quite suddenly three weeks later[...].
Then I decided that the prolonged mourning period really wasn't compatible with what I'd already published in the first chapter (and in any case I was getting very bogged down with the 'early marriage' stuff at this point, of which about 50% got crossed out). So I had the bright idea that I could salvage most of the existing material if I just tweaked the plot so that the old Vicomte was going senile, rather than at death's door; that way I could have an imminent requirement for a succession but the old man could hang around for the entire duration of the plot and expire at some more convenient moment offscreen.
So I rewrote the whole thing, elaborating and altering Tolkien-fashion to a greater and greater degree as I progressed through sections that I'd assumed would just be copying out. And I got some stuff I quite liked, including a lot more characterisation for Raoul's unfortunate father, who was a complete cipher before but now became a much more human and likeable character, and a whole new location at a small family estate north of Paris (Beauvais; a sufficiently generic-sounding name to be able to pass as a place I made up, but also a real place about fifty miles from the city; it has a chateau, but not the one on Wikipedia. I said it was a generic name -- there are lots of them!)
But then when I started trying to write a scene between Hertha and Raoul where she basically pushes him into dumping his senile father in this convenient backwater and going back to the glittering life of Paris, I realised that the whole thing had got completely out of hand, and definitely didn't fit as backstory for Chapter 1 no matter how I tried. I mean, you could, as I was somewhat desperately considering, depict this as the first signs of cracks in the marriage which the arrival of Christine will then exacerbate... but we've already got a problem with Hertha's backstory completely dominating this chapter and threatening to make Christine into a very minor character. (Quite apart from the fanfic-specific issue of whether anyone is going to be interested in a chapter which is all about the angst-filled childhood of an OFC specifically created to be paired off with the author's favourite canon character -- needless to say that is not what I had set out with the intention of doing, but with hindsight it could certainly be interpreted that way!)
If I create all this complex and not entirely happy relationship between Hertha and Raoul in Chapter 2, it utterly overbalances the intended arc of the story. It's far too much 'explanation' to justify what was originally a tiny problem.
It had occurred to me that in my initial cavalier concept of the story Raoul was being married off at a rather young age, so I thought I'd provide a reason why his family are keen on his reproducing as soon as possible. But the whole structure of this chapter was supposed to be 'well, we'd been married for nine months and...', then getting on with the scheduled argument about Christine. We simply do not want all these newly-introduced painful and lifelike complexities getting in the way.
The tendency to blow up a minor detail into a major derailing event in the name of clarification and completely ruin the pacing of the plot has been an authorial fault of mine since middle school. (The whole 'drifting hulk' section of Arctic Raoul is a potential issue in this respect, but I think it works, because it establishes the Raoul/Lancard relationship, demonstrates his growing up, and helps balance out the Raoul-chapters fairly equally with the chapters of Christine's imprisonment, even if the latter were far quicker to write....)
In addition, a further problem that had become all too evident at this point was that, given the amount of distress that we'd portrayed in the background of Raoul's family and his own formerly close relationship with his father, my depiction of the character in the published chapter was looking increasingly incompatible with his supposed backstory. I'd just spent pages and pages tweaking the version of Raoul from Hertha's teenage years into someone who could credibly grow up to be the happy-go-lucky and rather oblivious young Vicomte of the gala scene, and it really did not work at all with the Raoul whom I'd been developing in this account of their married life, whose 'voice' had changed completely. Moreover, if I attempted to square the circle by having Hertha browbeat him into running off back to the night-life of Paris, where he throws himself wholeheartedly into the plans for the Opera with no hint of his prior enforced maturity, plus a complete disregard for the father who was being hidden away as a shamefaced family secret, quite apart from the continuity issues this also turned both Raoul and Hertha into pretty unsympathetic characters :-(
At the point where I found myself writing of Beauvais as "a place where at those times -- more and more often -- when his mind did go wandering, he could be more securely kept", I took a look at where I was heading with something akin to horror and decided that this particular plotline was definitely not the solution I'd hoped.
So yesterday I discarded another three and a half pages of laboriously-achieved manuscript, and started yet again to copy out what could be reused from the start of the same old scene, with the explicit aim of glossing over the material as quickly as possible. We've already established in this chapter that Hertha was thinking about marriage for herself at least a year earlier, so why would it occur to the reader to find it odd that Raoul's family are thinking along the same lines? They'll just go 'oh, people got married younger Back In History' [true-ish, but all those high-society heroines depicted as being left on the shelf at twenty weren't representative of the vast majority of the population].
Oddly enough, simply switching the order of a couple of paragraphs near the start of the section turned out to work quite well as a means of jumping directly into the scene, and I got through it in the course of a couple of days within the space of about a page and a half, admittedly a fair proportion of that having been more or less directly copied from the previous versions. Now I need to write a third passage summarising -- very quickly -- the state of their marriage over the intervening timespan, as originally planned. (Before I launched into all this flashback material I did, after all, start off the chapter with I'd been married to Raoul for nine months, but I'd known him since we'd first come to Paris... but that was 17 pages -- the majority of which have been subsequently discarded! -- and over a month ago.)
Of course my sense of chapter length has now gone entirely haywire, and I can't even resort to my usual method of ripping out and/or glueing up discarded pages, because I may yet need to refer to/use some of this material elsewhere. I've also completely lost track of which details are still officially included in the backstory and which will have to be explicitly written in again if I choose to adopt them :-(
I think the chapter currently stands at around six and a half pages, which is nearly three thousand words. So my instinct was right in that I need to start thinking about wrapping it up and getting to the end within a couple of pages or so -- and that the previous version was over-running at over eight pages and still stuck in flashback territory.
A few snippets from the 'deleted scenes' which will almost certainly never get used:
"Raoul!" I swung round and stared at him, conscious of the ill-concealed curiosity of the footman below us in the hall. "What on earth--"
He had the grace to flush a little. "Hertha, this is important, I promise. My father's health is failing, you see, and the doctors say he can't last out the year."
"I'm sorry to hear that." I held out a hand, softening a little, though the words and gesture of sympathy were more automatic than anything else. Raoul had been the belated heir of his father's final years, and the old Vicomte had long been ailing and rarely left his rooms. In the time I'd been in Paris, I'd barely made his acquaintance.
There wasn't much space inside [the flower-room]. The back of my skirt brushed against a shelf of empty vases as I turned to protest, and Raoul caught his coat-sleeve on a pair of scissors with an over-hasty movement that sent them tumbling to the floor.
"My father's sinking, and Mother"--Madame ma mère; it was the unthinking formality of long habit--"sees it as my duty to marry and to... to settle the succession as soon as may be."
He'd been studying his cuffs, avoiding my gaze; now he looked up ruefully, with a newfound maturity. "It's not quite what I'd dreamed of."
It would be some months yet before he was twenty-one, and few young men his age were eager to be tied down to a wife and child. I'd wondered, once or twice, if he'd got himself involved with some impossible female, a provincial femme fatale or neglected wife. But the law in France set family unity firmly above the passing fancies of the young, and there were six long years before he could hope to marry at his own whim. Duty could not afford to wait.
I'd pictured this moment any number of times to myself in the past, like every young girl. But the scene had never been set in a cramped closet, and the suitor had always been rather more ardent for my hand.
Mama had warned me of certain moments that would be awkward and embarrassing at first; she had not mentioned the impossibility of meeting one another's eyes at the breakfast table afterwards, or of finding that someone had quietly come to change the sheets.
(from the additional dementia rewrite)
"He never once raised his voice to me when I was small," Raoul said quietly. "I remember how meticulously dressed he used to be, and how he would always spare a courteous word for the servants. Now he wanders the corridors half-clad, and flies into weak rages. Sometimes he doesn't even seem to know who I am."
As a small girl on the Kampferstraße, I'd watched, uncomprehending, as a neighbour in our building slipped into second childhood, a brisk, decisive old lady who'd once been a Professor's widow, and who had slowly dwindled into a confused, dishevelled creature dependent on her devoted maid. I could still remember the vague fear with which she had blinked at the world, as if aware of what she had lost but helpless to find it.
There was nothing I could say. I pressed his fingers and felt them tighten about mine.
I'd always known I would be married. I'd never -- until the implications sank in -- thought of being married to him.
There was a moment when I was aware all at once that we were alone, and altogether too close for comfort; but it was Raoul, only Raoul, standing there with an anxious look and clearly unsure of my reaction. In my time I'd indulged like any other young girl in tales of impassioned declarations and storybook romance. If ever I'd imagined this scene, it had been in rather less mundane surroundings.
"That... wasn't quite the way I'd dreamed it, either," I managed at last, and knew relief at his shaky laugh.
"You don't have to say yes." He was quick in reassurance as if I were still that halting Viennese exile, new to Paris. "For my family any heiress would do, and no-one can force you into it. But we know each other and... well, after I'd got used to the idea, I thought-- it seemed to me maybe we could make it work."
Life with Raoul would be a clumsy, eager venture, where we'd stumble together with linked arms through whatever pitfalls awaited us. He would dash off on instants of inspiration, and I would follow to hold him back from breaking his neck.
(Might be able to reintroduce descriptive elements of this section:)
It was an early winter wedding, with the first faint frosts on the ground and the horses' breath steaming as the coaches drew up outside. Raoul's father smiled at me and signed the contracts with a steady hand, and led my mother out on the dance floor later as if he had been forty years younger and she a graceful girl of eighteen.
A week afterwards I happened to catch him asking of Raoul, audibly, who had invited that pert foreign girl into the house, and even though I understood, the blood still rushed to my face as if it had been a blow. The previous night we'd played a game of chess together, and I'd held my own and won his praise. It made it all the harder to face him at dinner-time and watch him clearly wondering in confusion where he was and why I was there. And Raoul-- Raoul of all people should not have to wear that silent, stricken look.
I could not confide in [Mama] or my father about this. It would be disloyal to Raoul's family... and, though I did not admit it to myself, it came too close to speaking of her own troubles.
By midwinter we were at Beauvais, where the Vicomtes de Chagny had long owned a small, pleasant property not too far from Paris. There were wide grounds in which one could wander, and ancient trees, their bare limbs black against the sky, and little low-roofed farms that had outlasted centuries of war and revolution to remain unchanged.
I'd lived all my life in the clamour of cities, and Raoul teased me a little at my discomfort with empty hours and drab country ways. I was a brightly-coloured town-bird hankering after the return of her gilded cage, and I was more conscious than ever that my face and my accent did not belong.
But there was no denying that the old Vicomte seemed more at ease here, in a place that had barely changed since his boyhood, and that at those times -- more and more often -- when his mind did go wandering, he could be more securely kept.
At this point the manuscript breaks off in disgust :-p