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Notes to self:
This mid-century setting needs more smoking.
Walt and Hilde are revised from two of my OCs in Tin Toys; I can’t figure out how to bring Austin and his family into this new plot, but leaving them out feels like erasure and only having them show in a couple of scenes feels like tokenism (I realise most readers aren’t going to know about the earlier work, but I'll know).
I need to use Find, go through the Word doc, and everywhere it says “[character] paused,” replace that with a short one-sentence description of something else happening in the room or nearby, so the reader experiences the pause instead of just being told about it.
How long would it plausibly take the New York Public Health Department, in 1950, to write back saying “sorry, your birth certificate isn’t anywhere in our system?” Are we talking days, weeks or a couple of months? I really need it to be two weeks or less—ok I guess Walt could just lose patience and try a different approach to digging up his past (note to anyone who looked at my last rough-draft excerpt: I’ve changed things slightly so Walt is now unable to recall *anything* prior to his tenth year; he’d just assumed that that was the case for everyone until he and Hilde adopted Anna, and during a talk about ways to help her settle into her new home, he shocked Hilde by off-handedly saying “of course, she’s just going to forget all this when she grows up anyway…”)
Shorter excerpt:
“I do like your accent—what is it?” A ring from Betty has invited Hilde over for Tom Collinses (“Better than lemonade, darling”) and chat. Unfortunately the chat is being mainly supplied by the irrepressible Daphne.
“Hungarian,” Hilde answers. “By way of Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and now here.”
“Oh, it must be wonderful to have travelled so much,” Daphne says.
“Yes.” Hilde gives her flattest smile, but she waits until Daphne is looking the other way before she exchanges eye-rolls with Betty, who tilts her glass thoughtfully, clinking the ice cubes.
“How…” she begins, and then revises her question: “Why did you decide to become a psychiatrist?”
Hilde grasps the conversational lifeline:
“My father, and several other relatives, were doctors. Also—” here she glances at Daphne, wondering whether the woman is going to be sentimental again, “I suffered a serious illness as a child. Pott’s Disease. If I had not found a peculiar fascination in its details, it would have been suffering and nothing more. I decided I wanted to understand how diseases worked.”
Seeing this revelation seems to have struck Daphne to a merciful silence, Hilde presses on.
“Later, at medical school, I remembered how my thoughts had been my salvation during that period, and decided I wanted to know how the mind worked. You see as a child, I’d almost been able to… will myself out of my own body, or so it felt at the time. Later, my studies told me this was called auto-hypnosis.”
“You can hypnotize yourself?” Daphne gasps. Hilde is unsure whether she’s speaking of the practice in general or of Hilda’s experiences in particular, but she’s warming to her topic so she explains:
“Quite easily. The public is apt to talk a lot of bunk (she savours the slang term) about hypnosis, and to regard it as a kind of sorcery— but it’s simply the exploitation of a natural reflex, a hole in the mind’s defences if you will.”
Daphne is awestruck, and Betty’s glance, above the rim of her Tom Collins glass, is amused; but she too is intrigued by Hilde’s impromptu lecture:
“Can you... hypnotize people? Would you do one of us?”
This mid-century setting needs more smoking.
Walt and Hilde are revised from two of my OCs in Tin Toys; I can’t figure out how to bring Austin and his family into this new plot, but leaving them out feels like erasure and only having them show in a couple of scenes feels like tokenism (I realise most readers aren’t going to know about the earlier work, but I'll know).
I need to use Find, go through the Word doc, and everywhere it says “[character] paused,” replace that with a short one-sentence description of something else happening in the room or nearby, so the reader experiences the pause instead of just being told about it.
How long would it plausibly take the New York Public Health Department, in 1950, to write back saying “sorry, your birth certificate isn’t anywhere in our system?” Are we talking days, weeks or a couple of months? I really need it to be two weeks or less—ok I guess Walt could just lose patience and try a different approach to digging up his past (note to anyone who looked at my last rough-draft excerpt: I’ve changed things slightly so Walt is now unable to recall *anything* prior to his tenth year; he’d just assumed that that was the case for everyone until he and Hilde adopted Anna, and during a talk about ways to help her settle into her new home, he shocked Hilde by off-handedly saying “of course, she’s just going to forget all this when she grows up anyway…”)
Shorter excerpt:
“I do like your accent—what is it?” A ring from Betty has invited Hilde over for Tom Collinses (“Better than lemonade, darling”) and chat. Unfortunately the chat is being mainly supplied by the irrepressible Daphne.
“Hungarian,” Hilde answers. “By way of Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and now here.”
“Oh, it must be wonderful to have travelled so much,” Daphne says.
“Yes.” Hilde gives her flattest smile, but she waits until Daphne is looking the other way before she exchanges eye-rolls with Betty, who tilts her glass thoughtfully, clinking the ice cubes.
“How…” she begins, and then revises her question: “Why did you decide to become a psychiatrist?”
Hilde grasps the conversational lifeline:
“My father, and several other relatives, were doctors. Also—” here she glances at Daphne, wondering whether the woman is going to be sentimental again, “I suffered a serious illness as a child. Pott’s Disease. If I had not found a peculiar fascination in its details, it would have been suffering and nothing more. I decided I wanted to understand how diseases worked.”
Seeing this revelation seems to have struck Daphne to a merciful silence, Hilde presses on.
“Later, at medical school, I remembered how my thoughts had been my salvation during that period, and decided I wanted to know how the mind worked. You see as a child, I’d almost been able to… will myself out of my own body, or so it felt at the time. Later, my studies told me this was called auto-hypnosis.”
“You can hypnotize yourself?” Daphne gasps. Hilde is unsure whether she’s speaking of the practice in general or of Hilda’s experiences in particular, but she’s warming to her topic so she explains:
“Quite easily. The public is apt to talk a lot of bunk (she savours the slang term) about hypnosis, and to regard it as a kind of sorcery— but it’s simply the exploitation of a natural reflex, a hole in the mind’s defences if you will.”
Daphne is awestruck, and Betty’s glance, above the rim of her Tom Collins glass, is amused; but she too is intrigued by Hilde’s impromptu lecture:
“Can you... hypnotize people? Would you do one of us?”
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 06:26 pm (UTC)From:What about when the only reason my characters pause is to separate the lines of dialogue so it's not one giant block of text? ;)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 06:52 pm (UTC)From:Hm; that’s not exactly the explanation in Walt’s case. Or, well, maybe it is, in a way; at any rate it may be why he hadn’t thought it unusual (also it’s not like he and his work colleagues spend much time discussing their early childhoods). I’m sorry to hear it’s part of your reality.
Hilde has an ongoing project to dig up the paperwork on Anna’s origins because they might be needed for legal reasons someday, but she’s circumspect about questioning the girl herself too hard, and it’s possible she takes the same view of her husband’s past (she does essentially state she takes the “if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it” approach with people).
What about when the only reason my characters pause is to separate the lines of dialogue so it's not one giant block of text?
I’ve been intermittently trying to throw in mid-sentence “she said’s or “adding:”s for that purpose.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 07:50 pm (UTC)From:After putting some concious effort into it, I can remember a few snapshots of events that might have been before I was ten? Not sure though. But it never comes up, outside of therapy. And the only three times someone has told me it's not normal to not remember, once was a therapist when I was 29 years old (not close to my first therapist either, just the first one who told me this), once was a therapist at 32, and now you. Which means it's a topic that doesn't come up much, and when it does, people don't fuss about it.
Of the memories that I do have from my youth, at least some of them are fake, from hearing people tell stories about it or seeing photos etc. It's pretty common for humans to make up memories to match events.
I don't know if any of that helps for your characters.
--
My problem is that after a while of talking, I need a character to sort of change tone. "This thing is a big deal in my life." Pause. "Now unrelated thing." Or "But totally different way of looking at same thing."
Real humans do it. I swear they do. I have no idea how to express the little cues that humans use. Like, in your first paragraph of your comment, you had "thought about my story and my characters" pause "I'm sorry that happened to you". But since it was written, I added the pause in my own head when I was reading. I know there's body language to express it, but I'm not sure what!
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 09:06 pm (UTC)From:I don’t know how I feel about amnesia being that common, because I’d intended for it to be a somewhat startling revelation and the story’s tipping-point into the real weirdness (Walt decides to check family photo albums and public records and discovers there’s no paper trail for his childhood either...)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 09:31 pm (UTC)From:I'm sorry! Hm.
You know what would be really weird? If he couldn't remember his childhood phone number. Pre-cell phones, your parents drilled into your head what your phone number was. I still remember it. I know my childhood address. I know the name of my school. Not as memories, but as basic facts. I bet everyone who grew up without cell phones had their home number memorised, still knows it by heart no matter their age.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 11:27 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-08-01 12:08 am (UTC)From: