Reveal and too much talking about Reveal

[seekingferret]

So for Yuletide this year I wrote "The Music Speaks for Itself", a nonlinear multimedia narrative about the twisted relationships of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Emma Bardac. It was a tough nut to crack and it's not at all the story I would have wanted it to be if I'd had a few months to throw at it, but I think it does work pretty well.

I knew instantly what I wanted the story to be- jumpy, impressionistic, and all about the intersection of music and kink. I just didn't know how to get there and have a story that made sense. So I started outlining. The last day of NaNo, after I'd thrown in the towel, I sat in a Barnes and Noble with other WriMos for several hours and wrote out three different outlines, trying things out. One designed the piece as a rondo on three key moments in the relationship of Ravel and Debussy, but it just wasn't coming together right. Another idea built it based on the stuctured cycling of three sensations- sight, hearing, and touch, but it didn't seem substantial enough of a form. I played with going straight through and it didn't feel like the characters made sense.

And then I called mithrigil and we talked about the piece for half an hour and she said "Maybe you should try using a da capo structure. And listen to Debussy's piano miniatures to hear what I mean." And I played with that and soon I had an outline that seemed to work, an outline that let me write with a little more confidence that the scenes I wrote wouldn't go straight to the discard pile. I still ended up with a massive discard pile, though. "The Music Speaks for Itself" left a lot of deleted scenes on the cutting room floor.

This was writing by trial and error. It was writing by gut feeling. I tried to make second person work several times, sometimes for just as short as two or three sentences, but they all ended up cut. I tried every kind of third person narrator I could think of. I wrote internal monologues and internal dialogues. I wrote from the perspective of an ant on the ground, I wrote from Claude's perspective and Maurice's perspective and from the point of view of numerous outsiders. I played with simulating glissandi by manipulating font size. No idea was too crazy. And I discovered a really neat trick for organizing a story like this: I highlighted passages in my Word document in different colors based on theme, and used that to look at the story and visually see if I had spent enough time on a theme, if the thematic passages segued correctly, if my arrangements made sense. I don't usually use a word processor when I write fiction, (I usually use a text editor and LaTeX, because I'm a nerd) but it was helpful here.

But what I'm most proud of on this piece is my restraint. Unlike "The Petro Dynamo", which I wrote unrestrainedly and filled with all of my pet obsessions, I threw ideas out there and then knew to get rid of them. I got Mithrigil to talk me down when I fixated on Emma Bardac's Judaism. I got some perspective from Alai after I contemplated the visual glissandi and kept them out of the story. This story had the potential to be a mess of ideas, and instead it's a pretty tightly controlled story with a clear set of narrative directions, and that is a major step forward for me as a writer. That's what allowed me to use images and embedded sounds in a way that I think enhanced the story instead of distracted from it, and I know from experience how fine a line that is.

In any case, this is not a story I would have imagined writing for Yuletide. I'm not sure what possessed me to even offer the characters, other than an assumption that I wouldn't have to write them together, but I pulled my act together, crammed a lot of research into a small amount of time, and really fell not just for Ravel and Debussy but for the whole scene they were part of. My major regret on this story is that I didn't have time or space for Gabriel Faure, Mary Garden, Lilly Texier, Ricardo Vines, Robert Casadesus, Pierre Lalo, and all of the other fascinating people involved with the Paris music scene of the 20th century's first decade. This story wanted to be a lot bigger than it was: again, restraint prevailed, miraculously.

But Emma Bardac... Oh man, Emma Bardac, I have the hugest crush on her now. She was not part of the original request, but I couldn't keep her out of the story, not only because I don't like the kind of slash where you write out canonical SOs without giving them any thought, bu also because she's so fucking amazing. She's gorgeous, but she's not as gorgeous as Lilly Texier, whose body was so amazing that straight women stared at her chest in awe*. But she was brilliant, independent, and incredibly chutzpahdic, and that combination was enough to move Debussy away from the most beautiful woman in Paris. She had to be part of the story. Any attempt to look at the way Debussy engaged in relationships of the mind and body had to examine the way he fell for Emma Bardac. And any attempt to slash Ravel and Debussy had to look at how Emma and Maurice felt about each other as much as it looked at how Emma and Claude looked at each other.

Anyway, that's the story. I'm incredibly grateful to Mithrigil, without whose guidance this story is nowhere. And I'm pleased to have tackled a scary and foreign fandom and emerged with something this singular and unique. yuletide is a pretty amazing event.



Also, it would appear that my gift was by peroxidepirate, so thank you so much for giving me a beautiful Marriage of Figaro story. This seriously was exactly the story I've been asking for for the past three years and I was so excited to get it, and have read it numerous times in the past week .




*This was the best thing I read as part of my research. Mary Garden, the original Melisande, wrote a tell-all biography in the late '50s where she wrote this about Debussy's first wife Lily, from when she visited her after Lily had attempted suicide: "the surgeon came in to dress her wound... and opened her nightdress, and in my life I have never seen anything so beautiful as Lilly Debussy from the waist up. It was just like a glorious marble statue, too divine for words! Debussy had always said to me, 'Mary, there's nothing in the world like Lilly's body.' Now I knew what he meant." Um... yes, I read divas' tell-alls as part of the research for this. Obsessive about research- who, me?

Comments

[mithrigil]

Seriously, no need to thank me--it was boss to help you out with that fic.

[seekingferret]

I just know how much of a disaster the fic might have been, and it makes me keenly appreciative of every piece of help I received.

By the way, Billy Budd tickets are for May 10th show. Check your calendar?

[mithrigil]

It's a Thursday! First comes to absolute worst, I tap out of work early. Count me in like flint.