Deleted passage
12 April 2024 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeAll right, I *think* I've finished my rewrite of the start of "The Remorse of Others" -- whether it will be adequate enough to meet the various concerns expressed I don't know :-(
But here is one of the many, many deleted sections, most of which were multiple abandoned attempts at rewriting the same thing; this one I was quite pleased with over the two days or so during which I worked at it, because it was actually striking off in a new direction of creative fanfic possibility rather than simply summarising canon. (I even did hours of research and read an entire novel on Project Gutenberg in an attempt to find out what the historical facts were concerning the position of former combatants in the year 1800; this particular uprising seems to be so obscure, at least where English-language web pages are concerned, that D.K.Broster's novels themselves get cited as one of the few available sources! I'm afraid all the popular history of these months appears to be focused on Napoleon's rise to power, rather than on the conditions agreed to in the peace treaties, or on the degree of reprisals that were to be expected in the former Royalist districts and upon those known to have taken part in the rebellion of the previous year...)
But I eventually scrubbed out this entire line of progress on the grounds that it made no sense in the context of this scene -- or of this entire story as a whole -- to spend time speculating on what *would* have happened to Gaston and/or Roland after an escape to England, when the entire focus of the story is on his failure to make such an escape, and when the reader already knows fron the very first paragraph that Gaston is in fact dead. Roland's theories about the future are just a completely irrelevant deviation from where the chapter is meant to be going, and as a result they are damaging the tension and pacing of the passage.
(It occurs to me that half the reason why I have such horrible trouble with rewrites is that the process basically involves trying to replicate by means of conscious intellectual analysis those judgments that when writing I normally leave almost entirely to the workings of my subconscious; it's the equivalent of trying to catch a ball by laboriously working out the equations for a parabola in your head, as opposed to simply sticking out your hand to where you 'know' it is going to fall... :-O)
Anyway, this is the only passage out of all that mass of crossings-out which I felt was worth saving in any form; it belongs instead, I think, with my speculations about a possible AU future in which the cross-Channel escape actually succeeds...
(I also noticed a plot hole in which the Comte de Brencourt takes a jibe at Roland's ill-fated riding expedition without actually ever having been told about it, so that needed to be patched!)
But here is one of the many, many deleted sections, most of which were multiple abandoned attempts at rewriting the same thing; this one I was quite pleased with over the two days or so during which I worked at it, because it was actually striking off in a new direction of creative fanfic possibility rather than simply summarising canon. (I even did hours of research and read an entire novel on Project Gutenberg in an attempt to find out what the historical facts were concerning the position of former combatants in the year 1800; this particular uprising seems to be so obscure, at least where English-language web pages are concerned, that D.K.Broster's novels themselves get cited as one of the few available sources! I'm afraid all the popular history of these months appears to be focused on Napoleon's rise to power, rather than on the conditions agreed to in the peace treaties, or on the degree of reprisals that were to be expected in the former Royalist districts and upon those known to have taken part in the rebellion of the previous year...)
But I eventually scrubbed out this entire line of progress on the grounds that it made no sense in the context of this scene -- or of this entire story as a whole -- to spend time speculating on what *would* have happened to Gaston and/or Roland after an escape to England, when the entire focus of the story is on his failure to make such an escape, and when the reader already knows fron the very first paragraph that Gaston is in fact dead. Roland's theories about the future are just a completely irrelevant deviation from where the chapter is meant to be going, and as a result they are damaging the tension and pacing of the passage.
(It occurs to me that half the reason why I have such horrible trouble with rewrites is that the process basically involves trying to replicate by means of conscious intellectual analysis those judgments that when writing I normally leave almost entirely to the workings of my subconscious; it's the equivalent of trying to catch a ball by laboriously working out the equations for a parabola in your head, as opposed to simply sticking out your hand to where you 'know' it is going to fall... :-O)
Anyway, this is the only passage out of all that mass of crossings-out which I felt was worth saving in any form; it belongs instead, I think, with my speculations about a possible AU future in which the cross-Channel escape actually succeeds...
[out of France altogether, beyond the reach of Bonaparte, the First Consul, and anything he could do.]
Quite what would happen next Roland did not know. His imagination, normally so fertile, came to a blank stopwhen faced with England and an exile into the unknown. It was impossible, somehow, to imagine the leader he had only known as a brilliant, incisive general in time of insurrection sitting down on foreign soil to grow old in peace... but while such small fry as himself might perhaps be permitted to lay down their weapons and remain, no enemy as formidable as the Duc de Trélan could possibly hope to do so.
(I also noticed a plot hole in which the Comte de Brencourt takes a jibe at Roland's ill-fated riding expedition without actually ever having been told about it, so that needed to be patched!)