Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2009-08-29 01:30 am
edenfalling) wrote2009-08-29 01:30 am
Entry tags:
outline process for "Cast a Long Shadow (We All Meet in the End)"
I find writing processes interesting, both in open-ended situations -- i.e., making up a story with no constraints (other than canon, if you're writing fanfic) -- and in more constrained situations -- i.e., writing to a prompt or a challenge. And I said a while ago that I might post the record of my battle with Cast a Long Shadow (We All Meet in the End), so.
Warning: these attempted outlines contain spoilers for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
osmalic's stories Sea Call Burn and Points Where All Shadows Meet. So if you want to read them unspoiled or want a better understanding of what I was attempting to remix, go read them now. (Actually, go read them anyway; they're very good!)
Anyway. Here is a month's worth of me fighting my remix.
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Friday, 6/19/09
So. Basically, what I really, truly, desperately want to do is remix "Sea Call Burn," which is a story about Ron Weasley traveling the world in search of a place to bury Harry's ashes, after both Harry and Hermione died in the final battle against Voldemort. It's not DH-compliant -- it was written in April 2006 -- but I can work around that.
Here are my notes from work this evening:
Central idea: After the war, Harry and Hermione are dead; Ron searches for a place to bury Harry's ashes, and is reluctant to let go of his last connection and promise to his friends.
Subsidiary ideas:
- each country or region has its own way of expressing magic, and they feel different
- Ron meets people who give him advice
- Ron is being a tourist in some senses, and looks at Muggle places and people as well as magical ones
- he left his family behind and feels cut off and drifting
- vivid descriptions of the Philippines
What I want to do is take that basic plot -- Ron searching the world, not quite wanting to find what he's looking for -- and apply the sense of place to Ithaca and Seneca Falls, and more generally to America.
The thing is, I am not sure if I want to have Ron end his search here -- to change the plot, in other words -- or to have him end in the Philippines anyway. In that case, I might want to do some scenes in England as well, to balance out the trip -- England to America to the Philippines back to England.
What I realized just now is that what I need to do isn't to write about Ron. I need to flip the story altogether and write a mirror version about Hermione surviving and looking for a place to bury Harry's ashes, because she promised Ron. This very neatly explains why she'd go to Seneca Falls -- Hermione is nothing if not a feminist -- and allows me to follow the same general character arc (realization that the search is futile and she must get on with living) without needing to use the same places or feel as though I am betraying Ron's arc by ending it in a very different cultural and geographic area.
I want to talk about the muddled magical system of America. I want to show that the history in JKR's books is surface-only and very, very European-centric. I want to have someone explain to Hermione that, "The Statue of Secrecy was a European treaty. If they didn't even bother to invite people from Turkey, for God's sake, why should we pay any attention here in America? The Indians never cared, the Africans and Asians had their own traditions, and the rest of us came here to get away from fucking stupid attitudes like that."
"But the Salem witch trials--" Hermione begins.
"Yes, the Salem witch trials," the other person says. "If you bothered to exercise critical reading, you'd know there wasn't a single true witch or wizard accused in that entire mess. And do you know why? It's because we don't keep ourselves apart. If you don't act like you have a dangerous secret, people don't get suspicious and try to kill you to find out what the secret is."
Um. Or something like that.
I am not sure what time setting to use. It would be interesting to go directly after the war -- maybe show the difference between the paranoia in Britain and the unconcern of America (which, in my headcanon, has never had a Dark Lord and probably never will; the culture is all wrong for that sort of thing; there are the equivalent of race and culture wars instead) -- but it would be equally interesting to have Hermione already tired from years of traveling and to work in the very non-magical post-9/11 paranoia in early to mid 2002. I am leaning toward post-9/11, if only because it could get interesting with travel restrictions and allow me to talk about war and terrorism and how getting rid of Voldemort was very small beans, overall. And I think that might be useful for helping wake Hermione out of her rut.
...
But, you see, the thing is... this story would be going very far afield from osmalic's story -- though it would echo all the way through, and it's clearly not something that would have occurred to me otherwise -- and it's also going to be long and difficult and possibly would require me to take a day trip to Seneca Falls (again), so my thought is that I ought to write a different remix first, just to be sure of having something done and completely compliant with the rules. And that would probably be a remix of "Points Where All Shadows Meet," which is genfic about Petunia Dursley and Severus Snape missing each other at various points in their lives, written in November of 2007.
I think I can whip out a Petunia fic in a day or two, so I will work on that this weekend and start doing serious local research for the other idea next week.
[one hour gap]
Okay, so I went back and reread "Points Where All Shadows Meet," and I think the important themes there are Snape feeling like an outsider, Snape obsessing ambivalently about Lily and Harry, and Snape letting go of the past. Petunia is also ambivalently obsessed with Lily and Harry, and lets go of the past. They snap at each other outside the church at Lily's wedding (which they both miss, incidentally), but they are (perhaps reluctantly) civil at Kings Cross, and their final parting happens pretty much in silence. Also, Snape is magically disguised during their last meeting, so Petunia doesn't recognize him.
I care more about Petunia than Snape. I think I would like to write about her simultaneous envy of and revulsion toward the magical world, as expressed in her relationships to Lily, Harry, and Snape. After all, she's known Snape (or known of him) for years. Osmalic has Lily dating Snape at Hogwarts and bringing him home to meet her family. And I am sure Harry has mentioned Snape's name at least once or twice over the years.
I think I would have Harry meet the Dursleys one final time, after the war, to inform them they can come home and to, oh, I don't know, get closure or something. But while he gets closure, Petunia does not, because she won't let herself admit she needs any. And so she wonders, over the years, and sees that Dudley writes to Harry and that her granddaughter may well have magic, and she learns from Dudley that Harry will be taking his godson to Kings Cross... and she decides to try reconciling.
I think she sees through Snape's disguise. He's changed his appearance, but Petunia noticed him, the way she noticed everything about Lily, and he can't change his expressions or body language or the particular scent of potions and flame than hangs about him even after all these years. But she doesn't challenge him.
And she sees Harry, with Ginny (whom she had never met), and she is reminded so forcefully of Lily and James that she can't move or speak. And Harry turns and stares at her, and then at Snape, and then back to her as if confused... as if waiting for them to speak... and Petunia's hand falls from her purse and makes a helpless gesture as she wonders what to say that could possibly be enough and still impersonal enough to shout across a train station.
And then Harry's wife touches his arm, and his godson tugs on his sleeve, and he shrugs and waves, once -- politely, impersonally -- and turns away.
Hmm. Yes, I think this will work. But I will let it stew another day or so before I try doing a scene-by-scene outline.
---------------
Saturday, 6/20/09
I went back and reread bits of DH to see how Petunia reacts to Harry on their departure from Number 4 Privet Drive, and to see the whole sequence of Snape's memories. And it is very clear that Petunia has mixed feelings toward Harry -- she loathed James Potter, she dislikes Harry, and yet he's her last connection to Lily. Snape is very similar, though his feelings toward Lily are less tangled.
You can also see that when they were children, they blatantly competed for Lily's attention and affection. And then she turned away from both of them, mostly because of attitudes they chose on their own -- Petunia chose to resent magic, Snape chose to hate Muggles and join the Death Eaters -- and they spent the rest of their lives regretting the break.
So I think my story will be much more about the Petunia-Lily-Snape triangle, and then the way it's mirrored by Petunia-Harry-Snape, with Harry as a sort of proxy for both Lily and James, and a focus of resentment more than love, whereas Lily was a focus of more love than resentment (though Petunia would never in a million years admit that).
My thought is to go chronologically, though perhaps also with flashbacks? Anyway, start with the wedding. Petunia dithers over whether to go at all, arrives late, sees Snape and has a sudden desperate longing for her childhood when things were simple and there wasn't this barrier between her world and her sister's world. Then everyone spills out of the church, Petunia is horribly embarrassed when Lily shouts her name, and seethes at Snape for being able to escape so easily.
Then a scene where Harry and the Dursleys return to Privet Drive after the war -- the Dursleys to come home, Harry to help them with any necessary repairs and then take away any of his remaining possessions -- and discover it somewhat ransacked. Petunia seethes. But as they clean, Dudley asks Harry about the war, and Petunia moves unobtrusively closer in time to hear Harry telling about Snape's death, and how Snape had always loved Lily. And she is horribly jealous that Snape was able to show someone in the end, that he was able to make a difference the way she never managed. Then she thinks that maybe she did make a difference. She sacrificed a lot more than that man -- she gave up her home and her life for sixteen years, raising Harry, whom Snape apparently couldn't bear to even look at for long. She managed. Or something like that.
Last we have the bit at King's Cross. Petunia has learned, via Dudley -- she quizzes him on every communication from Harry, but refuses to acknowledge that she cares, and also orders him never to tell Harry about her interest -- that Harry will be taking his godson to start at Hogwarts. And she thinks, what if she went there and met him and tried to get to know him as a person instead of an unwanted burden or a reminder of Lily? So she hovers near platforms 9 and 10, and notices a man sitting on a bench, also watching the area. He doesn't look familiar, but then he moves and something about the gesture -- and the lurking behavior -- is painfully familiar, and she thinks, Snape? She walks over and sits next to him, and yes, he smells the same, that odd mix of flame and char and sweet-sour herbs that had lingered around him the time he and Lily were fifteen and she dragged him over during summer holidays and introduced him to their parents as her boyfriend.
So Petunia sits next to Snape, and doesn't challenge him -- maybe he wants closure too, she thinks -- and they wait for Harry together. When Harry appears, with Ginny (whom Petunia has never met), she is reminded so forcefully of Lily and James that she can't move or speak. And Harry turns and stares at her, and then at Snape, and then back to her as if confused... as if waiting for them to speak... and Petunia's hand falls from her purse and makes a helpless gesture as she wonders what to say that could possibly be enough and still impersonal enough to shout across a train station.
And then Harry's wife touches his arm, and his godson tugs on his sleeve, and he shrugs and waves, once -- politely, impersonally -- and turns away.
That's that, Petunia thinks. He doesn't care. I spent all his life trying to push him away, and I did my job too well. What was I hoping for, anyway? He doesn't know anything about Lily. He couldn't. I never told him. She looks sideways at Snape and thinks, he never told Harry anything either. Nobody did. Harry made his own life.
Well, so can I. It's awfully late to let go of the past, but if not now, when? And she says goodbye to Snape, using him as a stand-in for all her long, tangled relationship with the magical world and its inhabitants, and goes home to make dinner for Vernon, and call Dudley, and coo over her new granddaughter, Iris.
Maybe she uses Snape's name. Maybe she doesn't. I suppose I'll figure that out when I get there.
---------------
Tuesday, 6/23/09
That outline is not working. It is dead on the page. I need to pull the story apart some more to find what I really care about. My current thought is to write Petunia arranging Dudley's wedding to Maureen Kincaid and discovering that Dudley wants to invite Harry. And she is... ambivalent, I suppose. She tries to convince him that magic and normality don't mix, and brings up Lily's wedding as an example (I think it all went very wrong and a couple distant relatives had to be Obliviated), but Dudley says that he went to Harry's wedding and that was fine, and anyway, Harry and his wife and kids would be the only magical people around and for goodness sake, Harry knows how to act normal -- Petunia taught him herself.
And Petunia says that magic isn't something you can control -- that it bursts out and ruins lives, even wizards' lives--
What do you mean? Dudley asks.
And Petunia breaks off and refuses to explain herself, or comes up with some excuse about that horrible war when they had to leave their home for nearly a whole year, but she's thinking about Lily and James and Harry, and her mind drifts back to Lily's wedding and Severus Snape who'd been lurking outside, and she wonders what became of him.
A few days later, Dudley has persuaded her to invite Harry (but with an implication that if he can't guarantee a lack of magic from his children, perhaps he should leave them elsewhere), and he mentions, casually (since the topic of children and magical control is on the table) that Harry will be sending his godson to Hogwarts next week.
Harry has a godson? Petunia asks. Surely he isn't old enough.
Yes, well, I think it's to do with their war, Dudley says. One of his dad's friends -- Lumpish, maybe? Limping? No, wait, Lupin, that's it, Lupin -- got killed along with his wife, and since all their other friends were dead, he sort of passed the bag to Harry. And the kid's grandparents are on holiday in Provence, so Harry and Ginny have been looking after him for the summer.
Irresponsible, Petunia mutters, and changes the subject. But she starts thinking that taking in a friend's child is the sort of thing Lily would have done, and she wonders if perhaps she's been a trifle unfair to Harry all these years. Maybe she should try to speak with him before the wedding, to assure him that she... well, that she doesn't hate him, and doesn't strictly mind him being at Dudley's wedding. What she minds is the magic, and so long as he doesn't rub any spells in her face, she won't bring anything up either. They should try to get along, for Dudley's sake.
(For Lily's sake, she thinks, and then suppresses the thought.)
So Petunia turns up at King's Cross and then we run from there, going back to my first outline attempt. Maybe? At any rate, I hope that will work.
But I will leave off the attempt for tomorrow, when I am less tired.
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Wednesday, 6/24/09
I am trying to reread osmalic's story to pick out her character interpretations. It's... well, let me just say that I don't think she and I share quite the same interpretation of Petunia. I don't think she's as stupid as osmalic's narration makes her out to be. I think she knew perfectly well there would be wizards at Lily's wedding -- how, after all, could she not know?
I just... I think I tend to see Petunia as a much stronger woman than she wants to admit to being. She lets Vernon bluster and order her around because she likes that -- perhaps because it's the opposite of her own parents (I confess to a private headcanon wherein Anthony Evans is soft-spoken and gentle and adores his wife and lets her basically do what she wants with the household and they only have serious discussions in private because he thinks it's important to present a united front to the children) and Petunia wants so badly to be 'normal' and she thinks a 'real man' is part of that. But when she puts her foot down, Vernon caves. And I think Petunia is perfectly aware of that in the back of her mind, and even counts on it. I think both she and Lily learned very young how to stand up for themselves and get their own way; it's just that Lily is much more upfront about that, more brash, whereas Petunia works from behind the scenes.
Lily's a Gryffindor. Petunia is as Slytherin as they come.
And I think she and Snape recognize that about each other, that manipulative streak, that need to know secrets and hold power over the people they care about, because they never quite trust Lily's open affection. They don't believe love lasts. And they make that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The difference is that Petunia turns away from Lily preemptively, while Snape refuses to be open and to listen (because he's afraid to sully Lily? because he doesn't understand that love and adoration are not the same thing?) and thus drives Lily to turn away from him.
This difference extends to the rest of their lives, too. Petunia has a life. An awful lot of it is built around the shape of Lily's absence -- she is trying to be the opposite of her sister -- but nonetheless, it exists and it's hers. She has a husband. She has a son. There is presence as well as absence.
Snape has nothing but a gaping wound. Petunia let go of Lily (or at least tried to). Snape never did. And this is why, at the end of the story, he is still alone and watching Harry hungrily, whereas Petunia can turn away and say, "That's that," and go back to the rest of her life. He has only shadows. She found a new sun.
That is what I want to say. I'm not sure how to express it best, but that is the point I want to get across in my remix.
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Thursday, 7/2/09
I have what I hope will finally be a functional outline -- unfortunately it came with a title that will not get out of my head, damn it all! Anyway, here it is:
"Four Weddings and a Funeral (Cast a Long Shadow)"
-scene 1: Petunia reluctantly drives to Lily's wedding, talks to Snape, and then has to deal with Lily embarrassing her in public.
-scene 2: Petunia's wedding. Lily and James come under strict no-magic orders. Lily drags Petunia aside to ask if she really wants someone like Vernon; they argue, and Lily leaves before the ceremony.
-scene 3: Lily's funeral, or a day or so thereafter. Petunia visits the grave alone and stumbles on Snape mourning and yelling at Lily, spilling out everything he can't tell her anymore. Petunia lurks until he leaves. Then she brushes fallen leaves and dead flowers from the grave and tells Lily she'll keep Harry -- "for you, not for that Bumbledore person" -- and if she has her way, he'll never get sucked into the madness that killed Lily and ruined that Snape boy.
-scene 4: Dudley, back at his parents' house for Sunday dinner, mentions that Harry is getting married and asked him to stand as a groomsman. Vernon is horrified. Petunia freezes for a moment, afraid her son will be humiliated like she was at Lily's wedding. "It's my choice, not yours," Dudley says. "We were all rotten to Harry. If he can put that behind him, so can I. Why can't you?" Petunia thinks about that and decides to give Harry some old photos of Lily and their parents, as a wedding present.
-scene 5: Dudley sends a wedding invitation to Harry. Petunia wants to see him beforehand, to make sure nothing will go wrong. Dudley mentions that Harry's taking his godson to King's Cross, and Petunia goes to wait. Play scene as in previous outlines.
The idea is Lily's effect on Petunia and Snape, and how Petunia lets go, moves on, and has a life, whereas Snape doesn't manage to build anything new but is always circling Lily's absence. The first and last scenes are mostly what osmalic already wrote, just flipped POV. The middle three are all me.
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Thursday, 7/23/09
I am not sure what my remix ended up saying about Snape. Maybe he moved on, maybe he didn't; it's hard to be sure when Petunia is so negative about and/or uninterested in him. I think that's what I like most about reading my story next to osmalic's story -- both Petunia and Snape persistently misunderstand each other, and are almost proud of their continued ignorance of each other's motivations. Each sees the other as a symbol of what went wrong in Lily's life, of the things she shouldn't have held on to.
I also think I made Petunia too nice. I sharpened her prejudice (based on Vicky's comments), but I think I didn't sharpen enough. I should have made her disagreeable traits more blatant, especially her mistreatment of Harry. She may have reasons for what she did, but that doesn't negate the awfulness of her behavior (or of Vernon and Dudley's behavior, which Petunia tacitly or explicitly condoned).
But by and large, the story does what I wanted it to do, which is to show how Petunia and Snape keep holding on to Lily -- to their ideas of Lily as much as to her actual self -- to explain Petunia's actions from her own perspective, and to tell a story about how family is both a weight and a support. Anything else is gravy.
Warning: these attempted outlines contain spoilers for
osmalic's stories Sea Call Burn and Points Where All Shadows Meet. So if you want to read them unspoiled or want a better understanding of what I was attempting to remix, go read them now. (Actually, go read them anyway; they're very good!)Anyway. Here is a month's worth of me fighting my remix.
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Friday, 6/19/09
So. Basically, what I really, truly, desperately want to do is remix "Sea Call Burn," which is a story about Ron Weasley traveling the world in search of a place to bury Harry's ashes, after both Harry and Hermione died in the final battle against Voldemort. It's not DH-compliant -- it was written in April 2006 -- but I can work around that.
Here are my notes from work this evening:
Central idea: After the war, Harry and Hermione are dead; Ron searches for a place to bury Harry's ashes, and is reluctant to let go of his last connection and promise to his friends.
Subsidiary ideas:
- each country or region has its own way of expressing magic, and they feel different
- Ron meets people who give him advice
- Ron is being a tourist in some senses, and looks at Muggle places and people as well as magical ones
- he left his family behind and feels cut off and drifting
- vivid descriptions of the Philippines
What I want to do is take that basic plot -- Ron searching the world, not quite wanting to find what he's looking for -- and apply the sense of place to Ithaca and Seneca Falls, and more generally to America.
The thing is, I am not sure if I want to have Ron end his search here -- to change the plot, in other words -- or to have him end in the Philippines anyway. In that case, I might want to do some scenes in England as well, to balance out the trip -- England to America to the Philippines back to England.
What I realized just now is that what I need to do isn't to write about Ron. I need to flip the story altogether and write a mirror version about Hermione surviving and looking for a place to bury Harry's ashes, because she promised Ron. This very neatly explains why she'd go to Seneca Falls -- Hermione is nothing if not a feminist -- and allows me to follow the same general character arc (realization that the search is futile and she must get on with living) without needing to use the same places or feel as though I am betraying Ron's arc by ending it in a very different cultural and geographic area.
I want to talk about the muddled magical system of America. I want to show that the history in JKR's books is surface-only and very, very European-centric. I want to have someone explain to Hermione that, "The Statue of Secrecy was a European treaty. If they didn't even bother to invite people from Turkey, for God's sake, why should we pay any attention here in America? The Indians never cared, the Africans and Asians had their own traditions, and the rest of us came here to get away from fucking stupid attitudes like that."
"But the Salem witch trials--" Hermione begins.
"Yes, the Salem witch trials," the other person says. "If you bothered to exercise critical reading, you'd know there wasn't a single true witch or wizard accused in that entire mess. And do you know why? It's because we don't keep ourselves apart. If you don't act like you have a dangerous secret, people don't get suspicious and try to kill you to find out what the secret is."
Um. Or something like that.
I am not sure what time setting to use. It would be interesting to go directly after the war -- maybe show the difference between the paranoia in Britain and the unconcern of America (which, in my headcanon, has never had a Dark Lord and probably never will; the culture is all wrong for that sort of thing; there are the equivalent of race and culture wars instead) -- but it would be equally interesting to have Hermione already tired from years of traveling and to work in the very non-magical post-9/11 paranoia in early to mid 2002. I am leaning toward post-9/11, if only because it could get interesting with travel restrictions and allow me to talk about war and terrorism and how getting rid of Voldemort was very small beans, overall. And I think that might be useful for helping wake Hermione out of her rut.
...
But, you see, the thing is... this story would be going very far afield from osmalic's story -- though it would echo all the way through, and it's clearly not something that would have occurred to me otherwise -- and it's also going to be long and difficult and possibly would require me to take a day trip to Seneca Falls (again), so my thought is that I ought to write a different remix first, just to be sure of having something done and completely compliant with the rules. And that would probably be a remix of "Points Where All Shadows Meet," which is genfic about Petunia Dursley and Severus Snape missing each other at various points in their lives, written in November of 2007.
I think I can whip out a Petunia fic in a day or two, so I will work on that this weekend and start doing serious local research for the other idea next week.
[one hour gap]
Okay, so I went back and reread "Points Where All Shadows Meet," and I think the important themes there are Snape feeling like an outsider, Snape obsessing ambivalently about Lily and Harry, and Snape letting go of the past. Petunia is also ambivalently obsessed with Lily and Harry, and lets go of the past. They snap at each other outside the church at Lily's wedding (which they both miss, incidentally), but they are (perhaps reluctantly) civil at Kings Cross, and their final parting happens pretty much in silence. Also, Snape is magically disguised during their last meeting, so Petunia doesn't recognize him.
I care more about Petunia than Snape. I think I would like to write about her simultaneous envy of and revulsion toward the magical world, as expressed in her relationships to Lily, Harry, and Snape. After all, she's known Snape (or known of him) for years. Osmalic has Lily dating Snape at Hogwarts and bringing him home to meet her family. And I am sure Harry has mentioned Snape's name at least once or twice over the years.
I think I would have Harry meet the Dursleys one final time, after the war, to inform them they can come home and to, oh, I don't know, get closure or something. But while he gets closure, Petunia does not, because she won't let herself admit she needs any. And so she wonders, over the years, and sees that Dudley writes to Harry and that her granddaughter may well have magic, and she learns from Dudley that Harry will be taking his godson to Kings Cross... and she decides to try reconciling.
I think she sees through Snape's disguise. He's changed his appearance, but Petunia noticed him, the way she noticed everything about Lily, and he can't change his expressions or body language or the particular scent of potions and flame than hangs about him even after all these years. But she doesn't challenge him.
And she sees Harry, with Ginny (whom she had never met), and she is reminded so forcefully of Lily and James that she can't move or speak. And Harry turns and stares at her, and then at Snape, and then back to her as if confused... as if waiting for them to speak... and Petunia's hand falls from her purse and makes a helpless gesture as she wonders what to say that could possibly be enough and still impersonal enough to shout across a train station.
And then Harry's wife touches his arm, and his godson tugs on his sleeve, and he shrugs and waves, once -- politely, impersonally -- and turns away.
Hmm. Yes, I think this will work. But I will let it stew another day or so before I try doing a scene-by-scene outline.
---------------
Saturday, 6/20/09
I went back and reread bits of DH to see how Petunia reacts to Harry on their departure from Number 4 Privet Drive, and to see the whole sequence of Snape's memories. And it is very clear that Petunia has mixed feelings toward Harry -- she loathed James Potter, she dislikes Harry, and yet he's her last connection to Lily. Snape is very similar, though his feelings toward Lily are less tangled.
You can also see that when they were children, they blatantly competed for Lily's attention and affection. And then she turned away from both of them, mostly because of attitudes they chose on their own -- Petunia chose to resent magic, Snape chose to hate Muggles and join the Death Eaters -- and they spent the rest of their lives regretting the break.
So I think my story will be much more about the Petunia-Lily-Snape triangle, and then the way it's mirrored by Petunia-Harry-Snape, with Harry as a sort of proxy for both Lily and James, and a focus of resentment more than love, whereas Lily was a focus of more love than resentment (though Petunia would never in a million years admit that).
My thought is to go chronologically, though perhaps also with flashbacks? Anyway, start with the wedding. Petunia dithers over whether to go at all, arrives late, sees Snape and has a sudden desperate longing for her childhood when things were simple and there wasn't this barrier between her world and her sister's world. Then everyone spills out of the church, Petunia is horribly embarrassed when Lily shouts her name, and seethes at Snape for being able to escape so easily.
Then a scene where Harry and the Dursleys return to Privet Drive after the war -- the Dursleys to come home, Harry to help them with any necessary repairs and then take away any of his remaining possessions -- and discover it somewhat ransacked. Petunia seethes. But as they clean, Dudley asks Harry about the war, and Petunia moves unobtrusively closer in time to hear Harry telling about Snape's death, and how Snape had always loved Lily. And she is horribly jealous that Snape was able to show someone in the end, that he was able to make a difference the way she never managed. Then she thinks that maybe she did make a difference. She sacrificed a lot more than that man -- she gave up her home and her life for sixteen years, raising Harry, whom Snape apparently couldn't bear to even look at for long. She managed. Or something like that.
Last we have the bit at King's Cross. Petunia has learned, via Dudley -- she quizzes him on every communication from Harry, but refuses to acknowledge that she cares, and also orders him never to tell Harry about her interest -- that Harry will be taking his godson to start at Hogwarts. And she thinks, what if she went there and met him and tried to get to know him as a person instead of an unwanted burden or a reminder of Lily? So she hovers near platforms 9 and 10, and notices a man sitting on a bench, also watching the area. He doesn't look familiar, but then he moves and something about the gesture -- and the lurking behavior -- is painfully familiar, and she thinks, Snape? She walks over and sits next to him, and yes, he smells the same, that odd mix of flame and char and sweet-sour herbs that had lingered around him the time he and Lily were fifteen and she dragged him over during summer holidays and introduced him to their parents as her boyfriend.
So Petunia sits next to Snape, and doesn't challenge him -- maybe he wants closure too, she thinks -- and they wait for Harry together. When Harry appears, with Ginny (whom Petunia has never met), she is reminded so forcefully of Lily and James that she can't move or speak. And Harry turns and stares at her, and then at Snape, and then back to her as if confused... as if waiting for them to speak... and Petunia's hand falls from her purse and makes a helpless gesture as she wonders what to say that could possibly be enough and still impersonal enough to shout across a train station.
And then Harry's wife touches his arm, and his godson tugs on his sleeve, and he shrugs and waves, once -- politely, impersonally -- and turns away.
That's that, Petunia thinks. He doesn't care. I spent all his life trying to push him away, and I did my job too well. What was I hoping for, anyway? He doesn't know anything about Lily. He couldn't. I never told him. She looks sideways at Snape and thinks, he never told Harry anything either. Nobody did. Harry made his own life.
Well, so can I. It's awfully late to let go of the past, but if not now, when? And she says goodbye to Snape, using him as a stand-in for all her long, tangled relationship with the magical world and its inhabitants, and goes home to make dinner for Vernon, and call Dudley, and coo over her new granddaughter, Iris.
Maybe she uses Snape's name. Maybe she doesn't. I suppose I'll figure that out when I get there.
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Tuesday, 6/23/09
That outline is not working. It is dead on the page. I need to pull the story apart some more to find what I really care about. My current thought is to write Petunia arranging Dudley's wedding to Maureen Kincaid and discovering that Dudley wants to invite Harry. And she is... ambivalent, I suppose. She tries to convince him that magic and normality don't mix, and brings up Lily's wedding as an example (I think it all went very wrong and a couple distant relatives had to be Obliviated), but Dudley says that he went to Harry's wedding and that was fine, and anyway, Harry and his wife and kids would be the only magical people around and for goodness sake, Harry knows how to act normal -- Petunia taught him herself.
And Petunia says that magic isn't something you can control -- that it bursts out and ruins lives, even wizards' lives--
What do you mean? Dudley asks.
And Petunia breaks off and refuses to explain herself, or comes up with some excuse about that horrible war when they had to leave their home for nearly a whole year, but she's thinking about Lily and James and Harry, and her mind drifts back to Lily's wedding and Severus Snape who'd been lurking outside, and she wonders what became of him.
A few days later, Dudley has persuaded her to invite Harry (but with an implication that if he can't guarantee a lack of magic from his children, perhaps he should leave them elsewhere), and he mentions, casually (since the topic of children and magical control is on the table) that Harry will be sending his godson to Hogwarts next week.
Harry has a godson? Petunia asks. Surely he isn't old enough.
Yes, well, I think it's to do with their war, Dudley says. One of his dad's friends -- Lumpish, maybe? Limping? No, wait, Lupin, that's it, Lupin -- got killed along with his wife, and since all their other friends were dead, he sort of passed the bag to Harry. And the kid's grandparents are on holiday in Provence, so Harry and Ginny have been looking after him for the summer.
Irresponsible, Petunia mutters, and changes the subject. But she starts thinking that taking in a friend's child is the sort of thing Lily would have done, and she wonders if perhaps she's been a trifle unfair to Harry all these years. Maybe she should try to speak with him before the wedding, to assure him that she... well, that she doesn't hate him, and doesn't strictly mind him being at Dudley's wedding. What she minds is the magic, and so long as he doesn't rub any spells in her face, she won't bring anything up either. They should try to get along, for Dudley's sake.
(For Lily's sake, she thinks, and then suppresses the thought.)
So Petunia turns up at King's Cross and then we run from there, going back to my first outline attempt. Maybe? At any rate, I hope that will work.
But I will leave off the attempt for tomorrow, when I am less tired.
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Wednesday, 6/24/09
I am trying to reread osmalic's story to pick out her character interpretations. It's... well, let me just say that I don't think she and I share quite the same interpretation of Petunia. I don't think she's as stupid as osmalic's narration makes her out to be. I think she knew perfectly well there would be wizards at Lily's wedding -- how, after all, could she not know?
I just... I think I tend to see Petunia as a much stronger woman than she wants to admit to being. She lets Vernon bluster and order her around because she likes that -- perhaps because it's the opposite of her own parents (I confess to a private headcanon wherein Anthony Evans is soft-spoken and gentle and adores his wife and lets her basically do what she wants with the household and they only have serious discussions in private because he thinks it's important to present a united front to the children) and Petunia wants so badly to be 'normal' and she thinks a 'real man' is part of that. But when she puts her foot down, Vernon caves. And I think Petunia is perfectly aware of that in the back of her mind, and even counts on it. I think both she and Lily learned very young how to stand up for themselves and get their own way; it's just that Lily is much more upfront about that, more brash, whereas Petunia works from behind the scenes.
Lily's a Gryffindor. Petunia is as Slytherin as they come.
And I think she and Snape recognize that about each other, that manipulative streak, that need to know secrets and hold power over the people they care about, because they never quite trust Lily's open affection. They don't believe love lasts. And they make that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The difference is that Petunia turns away from Lily preemptively, while Snape refuses to be open and to listen (because he's afraid to sully Lily? because he doesn't understand that love and adoration are not the same thing?) and thus drives Lily to turn away from him.
This difference extends to the rest of their lives, too. Petunia has a life. An awful lot of it is built around the shape of Lily's absence -- she is trying to be the opposite of her sister -- but nonetheless, it exists and it's hers. She has a husband. She has a son. There is presence as well as absence.
Snape has nothing but a gaping wound. Petunia let go of Lily (or at least tried to). Snape never did. And this is why, at the end of the story, he is still alone and watching Harry hungrily, whereas Petunia can turn away and say, "That's that," and go back to the rest of her life. He has only shadows. She found a new sun.
That is what I want to say. I'm not sure how to express it best, but that is the point I want to get across in my remix.
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Thursday, 7/2/09
I have what I hope will finally be a functional outline -- unfortunately it came with a title that will not get out of my head, damn it all! Anyway, here it is:
"Four Weddings and a Funeral (Cast a Long Shadow)"
-scene 1: Petunia reluctantly drives to Lily's wedding, talks to Snape, and then has to deal with Lily embarrassing her in public.
-scene 2: Petunia's wedding. Lily and James come under strict no-magic orders. Lily drags Petunia aside to ask if she really wants someone like Vernon; they argue, and Lily leaves before the ceremony.
-scene 3: Lily's funeral, or a day or so thereafter. Petunia visits the grave alone and stumbles on Snape mourning and yelling at Lily, spilling out everything he can't tell her anymore. Petunia lurks until he leaves. Then she brushes fallen leaves and dead flowers from the grave and tells Lily she'll keep Harry -- "for you, not for that Bumbledore person" -- and if she has her way, he'll never get sucked into the madness that killed Lily and ruined that Snape boy.
-scene 4: Dudley, back at his parents' house for Sunday dinner, mentions that Harry is getting married and asked him to stand as a groomsman. Vernon is horrified. Petunia freezes for a moment, afraid her son will be humiliated like she was at Lily's wedding. "It's my choice, not yours," Dudley says. "We were all rotten to Harry. If he can put that behind him, so can I. Why can't you?" Petunia thinks about that and decides to give Harry some old photos of Lily and their parents, as a wedding present.
-scene 5: Dudley sends a wedding invitation to Harry. Petunia wants to see him beforehand, to make sure nothing will go wrong. Dudley mentions that Harry's taking his godson to King's Cross, and Petunia goes to wait. Play scene as in previous outlines.
The idea is Lily's effect on Petunia and Snape, and how Petunia lets go, moves on, and has a life, whereas Snape doesn't manage to build anything new but is always circling Lily's absence. The first and last scenes are mostly what osmalic already wrote, just flipped POV. The middle three are all me.
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Thursday, 7/23/09
I am not sure what my remix ended up saying about Snape. Maybe he moved on, maybe he didn't; it's hard to be sure when Petunia is so negative about and/or uninterested in him. I think that's what I like most about reading my story next to osmalic's story -- both Petunia and Snape persistently misunderstand each other, and are almost proud of their continued ignorance of each other's motivations. Each sees the other as a symbol of what went wrong in Lily's life, of the things she shouldn't have held on to.
I also think I made Petunia too nice. I sharpened her prejudice (based on Vicky's comments), but I think I didn't sharpen enough. I should have made her disagreeable traits more blatant, especially her mistreatment of Harry. She may have reasons for what she did, but that doesn't negate the awfulness of her behavior (or of Vernon and Dudley's behavior, which Petunia tacitly or explicitly condoned).
But by and large, the story does what I wanted it to do, which is to show how Petunia and Snape keep holding on to Lily -- to their ideas of Lily as much as to her actual self -- to explain Petunia's actions from her own perspective, and to tell a story about how family is both a weight and a support. Anything else is gravy.