... having been breathed out

Cross-posting my response to this excellent writing ask I received on Tumblr, since I am still not really Over There. But I do occasionally check my messages, and this one was too good to pass up.

@tractata said: Hey, I love your writing posts & they’ve helped me think about writing in a new way, so thanks so much! I was wondering if you’ve covered narrativizing the plot of a story anywhere. Once you’ve established the characters’ urges/motivations, plot beats, main conflicts, etc., how do you decide which scenes to depict (vs summarize/allude to/interweave somehow), the chronological span/pacing of the narrative/sections, the order of the scenes, flashbacks, etc.? No worries if you can’t answer!

Hi there! Aw, I'm so glad my writing posts have been useful to you! I'm not generally on Tumblr anymore (... *looks shifty*), but this is such a great question I'm answering it here as well as mirrored on my Dreamwidth, which is my current main internet home in the wake of CensorGate 2k18.

I've been turning it over in my mind, and I think the answer is that this kind of thing isn't really separate for me, from—certainly not from establishing the plot beats, and not really from the rest of the aspects you mention, either. Since I see that you reblogged this post in its original Tumblr incarnation, I'll continue with the development of the Rambouillet story to try to dig in a little deeper.

( Literally 3,000 more words about this: )

During a rather burning season of jealousy, I myself ran some risks. A rival of mine, very insecure in her happiness, thought of me strongly, and strongly I thought of her. But I made the mistake of letting myself go back to my writing, which demanded my attention, and to abandon my other task of antagonism, of daily and secret defiance. In short, I postponed my curses during three or four months, while Madame X continued hers, devoting her long hours of leisure to this. And I soon became aware of the results of such inequality. I began by falling into a ditch in the Place du Trocadéro, then I caught bronchitis. Then, in the Métro, on my way to the publisher, I lost the last part of a manuscript of which I had not kept a duplicate. A taxi driver short-changed me, leaving me on a rainy night without a sou. Then a mysterious epidemic bore off three of my Angora kittens…

To put an end to the series of misfortunes, I had only to arouse myself from an inexcusable negligence and to return once more to an even exchange of mental trajectories with Madame X. And we lived on mutually bad terms until the bond between us was worn out and space ceased to be a pathway of wicked beams of thought, a harp of resonant waves, a starry ether hung with signs and portents. I was not the only one to regret it, for we had quarreled without feeling any fundamental antipathy. Time recompenses honorable adversaries. Mine, as soon as she stopped being an adversary, had some delightful anecdotes to tell which could amuse only ourselves.

“One day when I was going to Rambouillet to murder you…”

The rest of this story was a gay vaudeville, an involved tale of a missed train, a stalled car, a gold-mesh handbag that burst open at the bottom, spilling out an indiscreet revolver upon the Rambouillet pavement, of inopportune encounters, of a friend who read in the periwinkle blue eyes of Madame X a homicidal intent and by some fond diplomacy diverted her from it…

“My dear,” she exclaimed, “just count all these little happenings which raised chance obstructions between you and me in the town of Ramouillet! Can you deny that they were providential?”

“God forbid! There is one, especially, that I would hate to forget.”

“Which one?”

“You see, I wasn’t in Rambouillet at the time. I didn’t set foot there that year.”

“You weren’t in Rambouillet?”

“I was not in Rambouillet.”

“Well! That is the absolute limit!”

This limit revived, for some unknown reason, a little of the former resentment in the periwinkle eyes that questioned mine. But it was only a fleeting gleam. In vain we tried—in vain we still try—to upset each other by violent arguments, a tone of defiance quite out of keeping with our calm remarks: we soon recover our cordial relations. The powerful bond that was our youthful and mutual hatred can no longer unite us.

With that beautiful blue-eyed woman, whose light chestnut hair was exactly the shade of mine—and with such and such another and still another woman—I have ceased to exchange, shall never more exchange because of a man and through a man that menacing thought, those reflections from mirror to mirror, that tireless emanation which the wronged lover himself… “What are you thinking about?” he asked them. They were thinking about me. “But where are you, please?” he asked me when he saw I was not listening to him. “In the moon?” I was in spirit close to some woman, my invisible presence was upsetting her. We lacked nothing, these women and I: we had every kind of trouble.

—Colette, The pure and the impure

LET'S ALL JUST REVISIT THIS AMAZING PASSAGE which I still plan to expand into a novel someday. I still love every. Single. Thing. About this.

(I'm also about to archive the story-planning exercise I did with this passage as a model)

… for mine is the very human pleasure of witnessing catastrophes.

—Colette, The pure and the impure

It was impossible for Colette’s contemporaries—and Freud was not the least of them—to conceive that a young woman might yearn for the freedom symbolized by a pair of trousers, a sailor suit, or a short haircut without yearning to be a man. Women themselves—Colette included—were confused and troubled by such yearnings, and that, in part, would be the subtext of the Claudines. Indeed, Colette’s early work is a fascinating and baroque form of transvestism. She is a woman writing as a man, [her husband] Willy, who poses as a boyish girl, Claudine, who marries a “feminized” man, the aging Renaud, who pushes her into the arms of a female lover, Rézi, with whom she takes the virile role.

—Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

I love the breakdown of all the gender play involved in the act of writing the Claudine novels here, but maybe even more I love how Thurman points up female unease around the at-the-time daring act of usurping male dress and male behaviors. What was it that women wanted when they put on illegal trousers? What did it mean about them as women? Did it mean they were practical? That they were lesbian? That they wanted to be men? That they were merely publicity-savvy? (In fin de siècle Paris there was always a market for a spectacle.) The lines were often less than clear-cut–not only for people observing these women from outside (who often leapt to grievous conclusions), but also for the women themselves.

Of course this is still true, but I imagine it was even more so at a time and place when a) gendered codes of dress were actually enforced by law, and b) so little language existed to articulate the subtleties of these desires.

[Sharing with folks' reading pages since this may be of interest again in the wake of the Colette biopic, which I quite liked. The original post was part of my research leading up to writing Chez les bêtes and A hundred hours. This section doesn't really touch on her relationship with Missy, who was some way further along the "identifying as/wishing to be a man" spectrum than Colette—today she might have identified either as a butch lesbian or as a trans man—but these same anxieties come up for the pair of them as a couple.]