End of the story
16 September 2015 02:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeFinally managed to finish my Carmen fanfic, after getting seriously stuck on the last page: I'd come up with a whole theory as to what becomes of Micaela, and it just wouldn't 'go'. The whole thing was seriously unbalancing the end of the story by involving a lot of extra exposition (all of which was supposedly being fitted in during the time it took the priest to come round the corner and walk towards her!), was distracting from the climax of the original canon and was in danger of making Micaela sound self-pitying and pathetic.
In the end I decided to ditch the whole thing and abandon the question of what happens to Micaela as the last character left standing, and immediately felt much happier about the entire ending, which confirmed my instinct that it simply hadn't been working before. (I'd spent hours and hours working over it very laboriously and got practically nowhere.)
Ironically enough, as soon as I crossed out my last few hard-won sentences and sat down to write the 'original' ending, the first two lines I came up with turned out to lead most invitingly into precisely the material I'd just resolved to ditch because I couldn't find a concise way of working it in... so I ended up using pretty much everything I'd planned after all!
The element that was throwing everything off was the idea that Micaela was actually living with José (before he joined the army) and his mother, which was the 'domestic scenario' that I couldn't find any backing for in canon earlier; my idea had been that Micaela would hence be left homeless and destitute when everything goes wrong. However, it's practically impossible to introduce this as a revelation without having her seem to blame José's mother for the situation, which really isn't appropriate to either character and definitely doesn't work at that stage in the story -- all this canonically-dubious poverty and suffering is a serious distraction. So I simply crossed out the relevant section and had Micaela take off into the wide blue yonder of her own accord in search of freedom, rather than as an escape from scraping a living out of her neighbours' reluctant charity.
The concept of 'freedom', of course, takes us neatly back to José and Carmen, thus making the whole thing look neatly arranged instead of being an added-on excrescence, and enabling me to tie up the story on a note of quiet hope rather than of self-pity -- much more in character for Micaela (who is essentially unselfish).
The provisional title is The Girl He Left Behind Him, according to my longstanding habit of recycling titles that were previously considered for other stories; that was one of my rejections for the concept that eventually became Teach Me to Live, rejected because it gives away too much about Anne's existence in that context. Here, it serves neatly as a double reference to Micaela's status first as abandoned fiancée in canon and then as 'relict' after José's act of murder...
In the end I decided to ditch the whole thing and abandon the question of what happens to Micaela as the last character left standing, and immediately felt much happier about the entire ending, which confirmed my instinct that it simply hadn't been working before. (I'd spent hours and hours working over it very laboriously and got practically nowhere.)
Ironically enough, as soon as I crossed out my last few hard-won sentences and sat down to write the 'original' ending, the first two lines I came up with turned out to lead most invitingly into precisely the material I'd just resolved to ditch because I couldn't find a concise way of working it in... so I ended up using pretty much everything I'd planned after all!
The element that was throwing everything off was the idea that Micaela was actually living with José (before he joined the army) and his mother, which was the 'domestic scenario' that I couldn't find any backing for in canon earlier; my idea had been that Micaela would hence be left homeless and destitute when everything goes wrong. However, it's practically impossible to introduce this as a revelation without having her seem to blame José's mother for the situation, which really isn't appropriate to either character and definitely doesn't work at that stage in the story -- all this canonically-dubious poverty and suffering is a serious distraction. So I simply crossed out the relevant section and had Micaela take off into the wide blue yonder of her own accord in search of freedom, rather than as an escape from scraping a living out of her neighbours' reluctant charity.
The concept of 'freedom', of course, takes us neatly back to José and Carmen, thus making the whole thing look neatly arranged instead of being an added-on excrescence, and enabling me to tie up the story on a note of quiet hope rather than of self-pity -- much more in character for Micaela (who is essentially unselfish).
The provisional title is The Girl He Left Behind Him, according to my longstanding habit of recycling titles that were previously considered for other stories; that was one of my rejections for the concept that eventually became Teach Me to Live, rejected because it gives away too much about Anne's existence in that context. Here, it serves neatly as a double reference to Micaela's status first as abandoned fiancée in canon and then as 'relict' after José's act of murder...
