Revision Donkey: Oh Dear Lord!
Dec. 8th, 2011 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caper_estKiller-Kate and Luke Lackland: Finished reviewing the plotline I'd been avoiding - the tale of the Young Duke, and his better and worse counsellors. Ngh. This may be the one in need of most work.
Not hard to see why - of all the elements in the tale, this one had the worst wellspring: neither a lively part of the original vision, nor a spontaneous outgrowth of the story's unfolding, but a rather passive and cartoony set of antagonists in the original plot, designed more to be important in their circumstances than in themselves. That changed rapidly from the moment the Duke himself burst onto the stage, but the changes are somewhat late-grafted and inconsistent, as I flailed around to make the matter come alive without completely disrupting the logic of the story. So now I'm going to have to go back and retro-fit the lords of Northdales as I came to know them, with the way they are on their first appearance.
I also detected a lot of questions I'd skimmed over, concerning how it makes sense for the struggles between the Duke's Evil and Mostly Okay Geniuses to have panned out the way they did throughout their joint regency. In particular, the book appears to contain two or three mutually inconsistent interpretations of Lord Evil, with something like the final one the most dangerous and sophisticated. Also, whilst just as wicked as the others, perhaps the least driven by malice; almost a tragic villain in his last, wisest, and weariest years, despite the fact that you still wouldn't want to scrape him off your shoe without a very long-handled implement. This is the dramatically strongest interpretation in itself if I can complete it - shades of a Falstaff clever and fortunate, but damned and damnable beyond redemption! - yet it might be worse for the strength and structure of the story than keeping him mostly just a glib, charming sociopath with certain unfortunate weaknesses. Aye, this will bear much thinking about.
I so need to make the diplomatic bear-dance clearer, shorter, and more logical, now I know where it's going and why it's going there. Motivations and plans in the first draft tended to fluctuate more than somewhat as my months and chatpers went by.
The other thing I got from this is that the mostly-offstage Beast of Langdale is probably not, for a lord, a particularly evil man. Everything he does can be amply explained by his possession of most of Kate's (common) aristocratic failings, his lack of many of her (uncommon) virtues, and his somewhat justified suspicions that everybody from the monarchy through his neighbours to his lowest serfs have had it in for him, one way or another, since before he took up the title and before he ever got a chance to earn their enmity for himself. For an unimaginative man brought up with an unfortunate code of noble honour, this could hardly have ended up better than it did.
If the depravity of the lords seems a little more circumstantial and a little less personal on this pass, one systematic driver of their oppressiveness stepped out at me from the bushes like a previously unnoticed giraffe. Northdales clearly has more problems this way than its neighbours, and there's more than reactionary backwoods aristocracy per se behind that. There is also the sheer expense of maintaining their monstrous march-castles, combined with - from their lords' point of view - their inescapable necessity.
For a hard-challenged and not especially rich region in the first place, that goes a long way towards explaining their recurrent habit of loading their people's backs with burdens until something or another snaps.
Not hard to see why - of all the elements in the tale, this one had the worst wellspring: neither a lively part of the original vision, nor a spontaneous outgrowth of the story's unfolding, but a rather passive and cartoony set of antagonists in the original plot, designed more to be important in their circumstances than in themselves. That changed rapidly from the moment the Duke himself burst onto the stage, but the changes are somewhat late-grafted and inconsistent, as I flailed around to make the matter come alive without completely disrupting the logic of the story. So now I'm going to have to go back and retro-fit the lords of Northdales as I came to know them, with the way they are on their first appearance.
I also detected a lot of questions I'd skimmed over, concerning how it makes sense for the struggles between the Duke's Evil and Mostly Okay Geniuses to have panned out the way they did throughout their joint regency. In particular, the book appears to contain two or three mutually inconsistent interpretations of Lord Evil, with something like the final one the most dangerous and sophisticated. Also, whilst just as wicked as the others, perhaps the least driven by malice; almost a tragic villain in his last, wisest, and weariest years, despite the fact that you still wouldn't want to scrape him off your shoe without a very long-handled implement. This is the dramatically strongest interpretation in itself if I can complete it - shades of a Falstaff clever and fortunate, but damned and damnable beyond redemption! - yet it might be worse for the strength and structure of the story than keeping him mostly just a glib, charming sociopath with certain unfortunate weaknesses. Aye, this will bear much thinking about.
I so need to make the diplomatic bear-dance clearer, shorter, and more logical, now I know where it's going and why it's going there. Motivations and plans in the first draft tended to fluctuate more than somewhat as my months and chatpers went by.
The other thing I got from this is that the mostly-offstage Beast of Langdale is probably not, for a lord, a particularly evil man. Everything he does can be amply explained by his possession of most of Kate's (common) aristocratic failings, his lack of many of her (uncommon) virtues, and his somewhat justified suspicions that everybody from the monarchy through his neighbours to his lowest serfs have had it in for him, one way or another, since before he took up the title and before he ever got a chance to earn their enmity for himself. For an unimaginative man brought up with an unfortunate code of noble honour, this could hardly have ended up better than it did.
If the depravity of the lords seems a little more circumstantial and a little less personal on this pass, one systematic driver of their oppressiveness stepped out at me from the bushes like a previously unnoticed giraffe. Northdales clearly has more problems this way than its neighbours, and there's more than reactionary backwoods aristocracy per se behind that. There is also the sheer expense of maintaining their monstrous march-castles, combined with - from their lords' point of view - their inescapable necessity.
For a hard-challenged and not especially rich region in the first place, that goes a long way towards explaining their recurrent habit of loading their people's backs with burdens until something or another snaps.
