With one mighty bound she was free

[nineveh_uk]

I forced myself to apply the bum to the seat this weekend*, and knocked off 1300 words of fanfic. I tend to think about fic a lot before I write it, which means that I end up with lots of alternative versions of scenes and things in my head that are not necessarily required for the story, but when they’re in my head/notes seem to weigh down the process of getting something on paper. How am I going to incorporate it all? Where does that bit fit? How do I include everything? Which version? Decisions will have to be made, I’ll have to commit to that one story, and even more I need not to include everything because no-one actually cares about quite a lot of it because it is entirely irrelevant to what the story is about**. Hence my notes not only include multiple versions of what the Wittenberg university porters are wearing, but are dotted with little things like “Reported speech!” and “conversation OR robes shop NOT both!!”

And then I sit down to write, and well, it’s easier. The story works itself out, often with something I haven’t thought of, and those three scenes that I worried were going to bog down the narrative however much fun they were to come up with are got rid of in half a sentence, “and then she left for New Zealand”.

Moral: stop worrying, sit down, and write. Though at some point you should probably check if that's a word.

*Except for when I was forcing my feet to the gym treadmill.

**What the story is actually about is of course open to question. As long as it doesn’t end up as “and so Lord Peter Wimsey realised how lucky he was and how he benefitted from an unequal society and decided that henceforth he would give his money to the poor and campaign for political and social reform in the UK, because he had learnt his lesson”.

Comments

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I like to imagine that during WWII Mary gets into local authority things and actually does start getting seriously involved in Labour party politics. But I admit it's probably a vain hope! Helen in the War Office, on the other hand, is one of the more plausible elements of Presumption of Death.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

Helen in the War Office was actually Dorothy Sayers, I believe, from the Wimsey papers or whatever that was called. I can definitely see her going that route, but it wasn't quite the sort of thing I mean. Helen going into "liberal" (lower-case L) politics would be all "Well, of course they act like animals if we treat them like animals. If we send them to good schools and give them economic opportunity they'll learn to act just like us."

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

But if they act just like us, who will we have to look down on?

Helen's line from Clouds, "The lower orders are so prejudiced" is one of my favourite in canon.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

But if they act just like us, who will we have to look down on?

The foreigners, of course! *grin*