July Featured Story: Tender Vengeance by margotlefaye
Once again, I’m humbled, thrilled and blown away by everyone’s response to my writing. Thank you to all of you who voted to make Tender Vengeance one of the featured stories for July
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As to your questions...
Which has been the hardest scene to write (up to now and/or of you think there are going to be harder scenes to write in the future)?
Hard is a relative term. If you're asking, where there any chapters that didn't come easily, where I was staring at a computer screen trying to figure out what came next, the answer is no. The core story of TV, start to finish, sprang into my mind more or less whole, at one point when I was sparking ideas from writing the other fics. The chapters all poured out of me, and while there were a few that ended up with large sections of excerpted material, stuff I cut from the story and put in a file to maybe be incorporated into some other story, some other time, none of that was particularly hard. Just part of my normal revision process, with a lot more ready to pour out when what had poured out before wasn't quite what I needed it to be. I has a false start with ATISNH-Maelstrom, because I originally opened it with the girls standing in the circle, and Hermione seeing the contract dissolve into gold dust in front of her eyes because it's been concluded and both she and Draco kept their ends of the bargain, and then the Auror was fighting with Molly about, were the girls really Polyjuiced Death Eaters and Madam Pomfrey trying to convince him that they were themselves and Healer Johnson needing to get rid of the Auror as well as Molly and going into detail about the Femme Coverte and the fertility aspect Voldemort didn't know about, and then I reread and I said, "No one freakin' cares about this stuff. We're getting away from the point, and we're not moving toward that hugely important confrontation between Draco and Hermione" so I threw everything out and started over. But that wasn't hard, it was just part of the process.
Now, there are other kinds of hard and all three parts of ATISNH were hard in that it was very emotionally draining to write. Because Hermione and Draco both go through such emotional extremes in that section, and I had to make that real for the readers and, well, that took work. I had to feel those emotions right along with my characters, or imagine what it must be like to be in their positions, go through what I was putting them through, so that I could properly convey it to the reader, make the reader feel it the way I did and the characters did. But, honestly, I think it was only so draining because I was doing it so quickly, I think it was four days of actual writing, to come up with over 20K words of, for the most part, pretty emotional stuff. It would have been much easier if I could have done it at my own pace, taking my time, polishing and revising, but that wasn't in the cards, so....
I think the epilogue is going to be a different kind of hard, because it'll be the end, it'll be over, something that's taken, literally, years to complete. Letting go of that, and at the same time, making sure the epilogue pays everything off, gives the fic the ending that I've always wanted it to have, with all the loose ends tied up and all the questions answered, and most importantly, giving the reader a satisfying conclusion, something that makes them say, "yeah, all the pain was worth it because this was a helluva ride" whether they love where the ride takes them or hate it, because it was a good ride.
Cut for length. The rest of the questions will be answered in the next post.
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