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Starting again
30 November 2020 10:10 pmRight. I've discarded just about everything I've written on this chapter since the 5th of November. ( lengthy summary of rationale )
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.
( deleted scenes )
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.
( deleted scenes )
