Stoker-ization

I’ve set down most of the events of the story by this point, with just a few crucial plot points missing. There are quite a few non-crucial ones and elements that need to be reconciled for the sake of continuity, but I believe I’ve made the last major change that was needed for things to hang together.

Specifically, Edgar tries his Mesmer tricks thrice (in the source), being thwarted twice by Mimi on the first two instances, and murdering Lilla (while Mimi runs around England) on his third attempt. I feel like he may have even had a “try 0” at the introductory party, but the main issue is that after two (or three) attempts Lilla invites Caswall over when Mimi is out of town while dreaming of a potential marriage!

And then, when he accepts the invitation, she behaves for all the world as though it were something she were forced into “for her father”. Who, by the way, is not around. (And is her grandfather.) This is something I’ve been struggling a lot with: An unmarried, unescorted minor female does not invite a man to her home, right?

But I can make no sense of the manners in this book. And while I’ve been researching it heavily, I’m more interested in Lilla having a reason for continuing to confront Edgar. I think I’ve managed that, but there was one bit of shifting that was necessary: There had to be some time between the first and second battles (which are definitely distinct in my telling) and there has to be: continuing pressure on Lilla to see something salvageable in Edgar; continuing pressure on Edgar to drive him away from any chance of being salvaged, no matter how badly he wants it.

Anyway, the doves & kite plotline has been moved up, or at least the second battle has been moved back, and that gives me the timeline to make the story more convincing, at least to my modern mind.

Anyway, I did all this to get the story down, and without regard for emulating Stoker’s writing style, though I have found in certain details that I have written elements more like Stoker than Stoker himself allegedly did in LotWW. (Yes, I think we can believe safely that the book was not entirely written by Bram in his final year. The degree to which his wife or publisher filled in increases in my mind the more I read and re-read.)

I’m currently re-reading Dracula, because I don’t think LotWW is representative of Stoker much at all, much less his best work, and am picking up on some very distinctive stylistic elements. Certain sentence structures, and particular details noted, things like that.

One thing that caught my eye right off was a reference to the calèche Jonathan Harker takes on his journey. A calèche is a style of horse-drawn carriage (four in an open cabin with a driver at the front), of which there were many, many styles, naturally, many of which—if one reads pre-20th century literature at all—one becomes familiar with. So it surprised me that Lair simply uses “carriage”—especially, as previously noted, when a carriage chase is so important to the third act.

So, yes, I have been quite particular about this in my writing.

Now for the more problematic parts: Grammar, food and travelogue.

It must be confessed that, even in my prolix style, adding vast swaths of missing backstory, characters, and plot points, I would probably not touch the 75-80K words of the original text. The sentences in Dracula are, shall we say, rich in structure. I may have to diagram these.

That said, I also, almost certainly, will have to dumb them down. This as less of a concession to the readers than to the writer (me) as I make it a rule not to (deliberately) write any sentence I can’t understand. I will try to capture the flavor of the style without slavishly adhering to it.

Food: I am struck by how, early on in Dracula at least, Jonathan Harker is pre-occupied with his meals. I attributed the constant focus on food in LotWW with Stoker’s advancing age, and that may still be the case, recalling that one was certainly on the wane by his 40s back in Victorian England. On the other hand, Stoker was Irish and lived in London, so it may be that the concept of having food with flavor was sufficiently startling to require mention in Dracula.

Which brings us to the travelogue stuff. As interested as readers used to be in descriptions of landscape and foreign lands, modern readers are generally not.* In LotWW, the geography is critical, and the plan all along has been to lay it out clearly, perhaps even drawing a map. (Gasp!) The chase scene basically mandates it, and I’ve screwed some of that up by mismatching the descriptions of the countryside with what is (or would have been) actually there, but that’s all fixable.

A fourth point, I think I’ve commented on previously, is that Stoker seemed to find real estate transactions a fruitful literary device. I’ve subverted that somewhat: There is a real estate deal in the offing but nobody suspects the true motives.

My goal is to have the not-too-rough draft finished this month!

Yrs,

===Blake===

*Mrs. Radcliffe filled her pages with rich, heavily detailed text descriptions of places she had never been. That’s why she was the J. K. Rowling of the 18th century.