Out-of-Order Chapter, "Returning Were As Tedious" -- "Take Any Shape But That"
My original plan was to write the chapters to my Snape story in sequence, but I've also found that certain images keep crowding themselves into my head, and I know better than to ignore them. So I wrote what I thought was just a short snippet from one of the later chapters of the story (somewhere around Chapter 15), a pivotal moment in the story ( Read more... )
Start the story here? Aieeeeee! Now I'm not going to be able to get that idea out of my head. Witch, what have you done to me?
I think I have an aversion to flashbacks, although I can't give you a good reason why. I mean, you've already seen me resort to long speeches by characters telling others what happened in the far past, rather than resort to flashbacks. (Maybe I can blame it on having been forced to read The Spirit of St. Louis, a book that is nearly half flashbacks, when I was in the 7th grade.) I can see a parallel construction working, but I'd probably run it as two separate stories in tandem, alternating chapters or maybe dividing up each chapter into a "past" and "future" half. (Or -- this is even crazier -- run the whole story in reverse order, like Pinter's Betrayal, starting with Snape's death scene and ending with "Things That Do Sound So Fair", so that the last line of the whole story would be, "I was hoping you'd be my Maid of Honor.")
But I'm trying to create a sense of an unavoidable tragedy happening, a la Macbeth, where the protagonist, step by step, traps himself by his own bad choices -- and at the same time I want to show that Severus was forced into those choices by what happened to him earlier. I want the reader to wonder at the end, "How much is choice and how much is fate? How much is controlled by us and how much is forced on us?" ...Which is the key question, the only question really, in Macbeth. I think -- I think that I need a chronological sequence to make this happen.
Also, Snape's realization that Harry's face is "the Black Rooster" will have the impact I want only if the reader has already seen Severus give James that nickname and use it as a way of nursing his resentment.
Speaking of basilisks and roosters, have you read The Book of the Dun Cow? That's the first place I ever saw the word "basilisk," and its hero is a rooster.
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