It's Stanislavsky's word for the thing you imagine that suddenly makes a situation real to you (he's talking about actors, but it applies just as much to writers, really). I have a hard time seeing "Horror horror horror etc" as an appropriate reaction to seeing a dead bloke, especially when the person doing the seeing is an experienced soldier, but when I imagine he's just realised he's got a splodge of Green Death on his arm that's already starting to spread, then I know exactly how he says those lines.
You once gave me a Magical If for Bunter in BH, when you pointed out that he must be worried about losing his job now that Harriet was Lady Peter, and that he must also feel that all these things going wrong on the honeymoon would be seen as evidence that he wasn't doing his job properly. I'd always thought of his overreaction to the bottles of port as one of DLS's poke-fun-at-Bunter (of which there are several in 5RH), but as soon as I saw his lines in the light of a man afraid of dismissal, it didn't seem like an overreaction at all. Everything fell into place and it made perfect emotional sense.
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Date: 2011-05-04 03:54 am (UTC)You once gave me a Magical If for Bunter in BH, when you pointed out that he must be worried about losing his job now that Harriet was Lady Peter, and that he must also feel that all these things going wrong on the honeymoon would be seen as evidence that he wasn't doing his job properly. I'd always thought of his overreaction to the bottles of port as one of DLS's poke-fun-at-Bunter (of which there are several in 5RH), but as soon as I saw his lines in the light of a man afraid of dismissal, it didn't seem like an overreaction at all. Everything fell into place and it made perfect emotional sense.