Fic: "Night Terrors" (PG-13 for violence)

[corvetteclaire]

Title: Night Terrors
Author: CorvetteClaire
Rating: PG-13 (violence)
Summary: Harry dreams of Azkaban.
Disclaimer: The characters belong to J.K. Rowling, not to me. I am borrowing them for entertainment purposes only, not for profit.
Feedback: Yes, please! I would love to know what you think.

Comments

[balfrog]

Thanks for carrying on this conversation- I usually leave about 3-4 sentences of comments when I really like something, and say nothing when I find it uninteresting or iffy, but I've been a fan of your writing for so long that I just had to *engage* with it.

As I said before, the first three paragraphs of Harry in his cell is just *perfect*. I've read enough bleak!fic and dark!fic to know what writing Azkaban is like, and a lot of them are pretty good. Sparse and unforgiving. But you have amazing "description" in this exposition that doesn't go the easy way of paring down the words to a minimalist puzzle, and gives a sense of the place- Harry thinking of Sirius and Hagrid (!! almost forgot about his brief stint- what a neat reminder) and feeling the chill, this is just so you.
(fangirls)
*picks self up, with false dignity*

(I mentioned this before) I'm impressed that your Harry actually followed his line of thought on who he'd choose to suffer- a weak moment for him, but o so honest.

OK. so I love this ficlet, and the universe it's in, so the critique is mostly just what I like about it.

I think in I mentioned how I love the two different modes of your narration, 1) the clear, perfect description (someone once described it as "simple as good fresh bread")
and 2) the narration that carries Harry over in it. It still has the restraint of your other narration, but with the touch of Harry!love that is the joy of reading your verse.

I thought (and this is just me)- with the italicized Harry thoughts, the tone shifted a bit to the twangy side- a bit *too* emotive: "where his silver-flame lover screamed and bled and died for Harry.
Draco. My dearest dragon. My warrior angel. Don't leave me!"
I think this part would have worked better, even in Harry's quite obvious anguish, with your tempered Harry narration, instead of direct Harry thought.

And then, along with 1)perfectly balanced narrative 2) Harry-touched narrative, you have that delightful Draco!dryness. I love his dialogue to bits- they're always so wry and enigmatic (you're always sure that in your fic Harry is completely, *purely* in love, and it's his POV that we're getting, because Draco's a puzzle- a marvelous one, at that).
Their first exchange when Voldemort brings them together, works well with distraught Harry and, at this point, your readers are bleeding along with Draco too much to care...
but when he "whispers" "Harry [-----]I thought you were dead," you just killed them; quiet, sad, desperate.
- "Look for me on the other side, will you?" I wasn't quite sure about.

- and a bit of a harsher note-
You can completely understand what's going on with Harry after Voldemort "kills" Draco- it's horrifying. But the Harry dialogue following that after Voldemort leaves him, might have sounded a bit *too* emotional. That would be realistic yes, but in the writing. mmm. Since this is a one-shot (part of your ending?), this might be a point where you up the ante a little- and go with your elegant, sparse style. Quieter, more anguish, narrative!Harry instead of dialogue!Harry, and to give the fic a point of "climax", maybe chill the reader a bit with ambiguity whether Draco was dead or not in a bleaker narration, by showing in the scene Harry left with (a possibly) dead Draco in a cold cell at night in Azkaban.

[corvetteclaire]

It took me awhile to unravel which response came where, since I got two copies of one of them, but now I think I've got it...

This is marvelous! I do enjoy this kind of discussion so much! Many of your observations strike right at the heart of why I consider this fic something of a "fluff piece" (I know it sounds silly to call a story about torture and nightmares fluff, but that's what it is).

The fic started out as a personal wallow in angst, sparked by the image of Harry sitting in a cell in Azkaban. It was hopelessly sentimental and self-indulgent, since I didn't intend to share it with anyone. You can see the traces of that original shape in it, very clearly I think, in some passages (more specifics on this later). But first, Harry's inner voice...

There's a very fine line to walk between sentiment and emotion, and it's one I take very seriously. What I'm hearing in your comments about Harry's direct thoughts is that I crossed that line. I agree with you. I rewrote those lines obsessively to get the right feel to them, but I was focused on getting Harry's thoughts on the page and didn't recognize that the problem was in the direct voice itself. (I sometimes do that when I'm cheating - I've exhausted myself writing the indirect thoughts, so I switch to direct voice to cut corners. It rarely works the way I want it to.)

That fine line gets even finer, when you're talking about an overwrought teenager in love, pouring his heart out to a ?dead? lover. The sentimental drip in me wants to put Harry's anguished words on the page. The writer in me ought to know better.

Your final comment above feeds into this same problem, I think. I need to back off on voicing Harry's angst for better effect. I'll try that last scene before Harry wakes without the dialogue and see how it plays.

Now on to your next post for more discussion... (ooh, this is fun!)