"Let no one's work evade your eyes..."

[desperance]

...and if you're going to plagiarise, plagiarise the best.

I'm reading through and to some extent reworking the story I wrote last week, and I've just reached the scene where my best-ever eunuch dwarf is growing melancholy over a pipe of drugs, yattering with a sergeant about how the old times were better; and what he says is "We have seen the best of this city," and when I wrote it my fingers almost automatically went on to make it read "We have seen the best of this city, Master Sergeant," and I didn't really know why I'd done that, he hasn't referred to the man that way before; but Master Sergeant is of course a recognised rank, and it has a pleasing rhythmic ring to it, so I was happy to let it stand.

And now this evening, reading through, of course it's obvious where that came from: almost the same mood, almost the same rhythm,

"We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow."

And so the sentence stands, no question. I'm always suspicious when cinema gets self-referential, it's like it has nothing to refer to except its own brief self; but literature, now, when that reaches back to echo what has gone before, that just makes me feel at home and comfortable, settled in...

Comments

[fastfwd.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't see any plagiarism here. Not a match in word rhythm, either. Same mood? Well, hell--how many moods and stories are there, anyway?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's only in my head? But you go "We have [verbed] the [noun-phrase], Master [whatever]" and cast it in that retrospective melancholia, and it's going to trigger me every time. I have heard John Gielgud deliver that line, and I was never the same again. Like "I have known this before", which is the first line of the second act of Pinter's "No Man's Land", and I heard Gielgud deliver that live at Wyndham's Theatre in 1974, and it's still a living thing in my head and when I say it I hear echoes that no one else ever does. (I have a little Thing about Gielgud - I met him once, I shook his hand! - which is not the same Thing that I have for writers, for words, but it does lend added potency. If I had ever heard Gielgud read Gerard Manley Hopkins, I would have melted entirely away...)

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

The writer's existence is hearing echoes heard by none other, and then convincing them they have.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

...only be sure always to call it please, "research."

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

[lurking editor chortles in delight]