If you build it, they will come
Mar. 29th, 2011 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo there I was, fuelled for once in my life by toast and marmalade, engaged today as every day in the walk from home to library, fretting as I have been for a week now about the End that Would Not Come. This book needs a big dramatic climax, right now, thanks: and I had no notion what or where. When you know how, you know who - that's Peter Wimsey's mantra, and it's good for me too. I had no worries about either of those. But it's no good having all your ducks in a row and no pond to sail 'em on, no bread to fling. As it were.
So there I was, fretting. I could set it in the house, in that big ballroom I've made so much of. That would do. Or up in those increasingly-spooky attics. Or outside, that might be more dramatic: in the stable-block, to catch that hint of former trauma? Or in the bath-house, to link it more thoroughly to The Keys to D'Espérance? Or in the woods beyond, or...?
It crossed my mind that what I was working my way towards here, what this would be is a big set piece; and my mind is more supple than my body and more greedy too, quicker to snatch.
It grabbed at that word set and I saw it in literal theatrical terms, a thing you build, knocked together out of timber and flats; and - well, there you go. There we went. If you want a set piece, build a bloody set.
So that's what I have them doing now, all these men: building the very thing on which they will act out their drama. It's perfect.
Perhaps I should eat marmalade more often?
So there I was, fretting. I could set it in the house, in that big ballroom I've made so much of. That would do. Or up in those increasingly-spooky attics. Or outside, that might be more dramatic: in the stable-block, to catch that hint of former trauma? Or in the bath-house, to link it more thoroughly to The Keys to D'Espérance? Or in the woods beyond, or...?
It crossed my mind that what I was working my way towards here, what this would be is a big set piece; and my mind is more supple than my body and more greedy too, quicker to snatch.
It grabbed at that word set and I saw it in literal theatrical terms, a thing you build, knocked together out of timber and flats; and - well, there you go. There we went. If you want a set piece, build a bloody set.
So that's what I have them doing now, all these men: building the very thing on which they will act out their drama. It's perfect.
Perhaps I should eat marmalade more often?