Fic progress
31 May 2021 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeRight, I think we've definitively finished Chapter Six of Hertha now, and have thus completed Act I. (I spent a couple of days fiddling around with the final line of the chapter -- in which Hertha is feeling insecure because Christine is featuring in Raoul's post-traumatic nightmares; admittedly they're nightmares, but Another Woman is in them and she isn't -- and am still not all that happy that it conveys the above sentiment effectively. But I have now written a hundred words or so of the next bit, which means the preceding chapter is fairly well 'set'.)
Now for the unknown territory covering the six months between the chandelier falling and the masquerade -- which is implicitly being held to celebrate "the new chandelier" and hence, I'm assuming, the reopening of the Opera Populaire after the structural repairs that would have been necessary. Although it's possible that the damage wasn't that great, i.e. the Phantom simply released the cables that would normally winch the chandelier down for cleaning/lighting... but I've written it as ripping through the plasterwork (based I think on a vague memory of the 2004 film!) and crashing through the timbers of the stage, so there would have been a lot of building work necesary to make the auditorium safe again in this version.
(In reality, the chandelier at the Palais Garnier was apparently raised up into the cupola above via a trap-door arrangement rather than being lowered all the way to ground level!)
Now for the unknown territory covering the six months between the chandelier falling and the masquerade -- which is implicitly being held to celebrate "the new chandelier" and hence, I'm assuming, the reopening of the Opera Populaire after the structural repairs that would have been necessary. Although it's possible that the damage wasn't that great, i.e. the Phantom simply released the cables that would normally winch the chandelier down for cleaning/lighting... but I've written it as ripping through the plasterwork (based I think on a vague memory of the 2004 film!) and crashing through the timbers of the stage, so there would have been a lot of building work necesary to make the auditorium safe again in this version.
(In reality, the chandelier at the Palais Garnier was apparently raised up into the cupola above via a trap-door arrangement rather than being lowered all the way to ground level!)
no subject
Date: 2021-06-02 11:18 pm (UTC)How did you create Hertha? I know where you got the idea for the fic, but how did you decide what her personality and background were like? Was it difficult?
no subject
Date: 2021-06-02 11:55 pm (UTC)The usual way, I'm afraid; like Lancard, Jos Perlman, Célestine Bribot and every other OC I've put into one of my stories, I quite literally made her up as I went along. I had the vague idea that Raoul had married the daughter of a Jewish banker, but the fact that her older brother had died in adolescence and her mother suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never really recovered -- save when plot-convenient ;-p -- simply emerged out of the blue as I was writing about the family leaving Vienna. So did all her backstory with Raoul. And this version of Raoul's family (his mother is an invalid too, so they have a fellow-feeling), and of Christine's background; it has to fit in with what is said in canon, but beyond that I can put in anything that feels like a good idea on the spur of the moment, and I do.
I started out writing her without knowing what she was like; I just sat down and wrote a description of the Opera House and its audience, and then started writing a description of Raoul through her eyes, without having any preconceptions of what sort of person she was and how it would sound. And a 'voice' came out, just as a 'voice' came out as soon as I started writing Durocq, the perpetual complainer of the "Requin".
It really is that basic, I'm afraid. No character sheets; no quizzes on favourite colours, how the OC would react under given situations, or what the 'strengths' and 'weaknesses' of your character are. I just do it the way I first started doing it back when I was five years old and nobody had ever told me any different.