Juliet Waldron's Blog - Posts Tagged "opera"
Nanina Slips in the Window Again
The character who keeps coming back! Most writers have them. The book that can’t or won’t be finished--those too are on every writer’s hard drive. My particular dark horse always returns in the first warm weather, this year occurring in April.*
She’s here again, sucking up my waking hours. Needless to say, I’m reediting and reimagining scenes and conversations I’ve visited many, many times before. I’ve journeyed repeatedly to this world across a time which now spans thirty years.
Nanina's is the first story/book I ever wrote, although a satisfactory ending, I think, still eludes me. Like Constanze of "Mozart’s Wife," this young heroine insists on speaking in the first person, which both narrows and deepens her POV. It’s like writing while pinned inside her dress.
I’ve heard authors talk about “channeling” their characters. There are many accounts of automatic writing and spirit dictation, which sound as if they should be taken with entire handfuls of salt. However, after the experience I've had working on Nanina's story, I know it can happen.
Ordinarily it takes a period of study and focused concentration to make your "dolls" get up and show you where they want to go. In this case, however, it appears I was the vessel chosen by a voice from the past. She desperately wanted to tell me about her grand passion,about what happened to her after it ended, and about how she coped with the death of the man who was, to all intents and purposes, her only God.
So tulip-time April comes again, and her voice returns, calling for rewrites and editing. She insists I do my best work, despite the fact that the story is “romance.”
I hasten to add that it’s a “romance” in the broadest sense of the word, in the way "Romeo & Juliet" is a romance. I’m not using the modern commercial meaning. This is a tale of the old-fashioned bloody-insanity that a great passion can sometimes be, the kind which all too easily slides into tragedy. It’s the dark side of "Mighty Aphrodite," which makes completing this vulnerible young woman's story so difficult for me.
~~Juliet Waldron
*Finished at last, published in 2011 as
"My Mozart," Nanina's story now stands beside the story of "Mozart's Wife" as a kind of ecstatic flip side image.
She’s here again, sucking up my waking hours. Needless to say, I’m reediting and reimagining scenes and conversations I’ve visited many, many times before. I’ve journeyed repeatedly to this world across a time which now spans thirty years.
Nanina's is the first story/book I ever wrote, although a satisfactory ending, I think, still eludes me. Like Constanze of "Mozart’s Wife," this young heroine insists on speaking in the first person, which both narrows and deepens her POV. It’s like writing while pinned inside her dress.
I’ve heard authors talk about “channeling” their characters. There are many accounts of automatic writing and spirit dictation, which sound as if they should be taken with entire handfuls of salt. However, after the experience I've had working on Nanina's story, I know it can happen.
Ordinarily it takes a period of study and focused concentration to make your "dolls" get up and show you where they want to go. In this case, however, it appears I was the vessel chosen by a voice from the past. She desperately wanted to tell me about her grand passion,about what happened to her after it ended, and about how she coped with the death of the man who was, to all intents and purposes, her only God.
So tulip-time April comes again, and her voice returns, calling for rewrites and editing. She insists I do my best work, despite the fact that the story is “romance.”
I hasten to add that it’s a “romance” in the broadest sense of the word, in the way "Romeo & Juliet" is a romance. I’m not using the modern commercial meaning. This is a tale of the old-fashioned bloody-insanity that a great passion can sometimes be, the kind which all too easily slides into tragedy. It’s the dark side of "Mighty Aphrodite," which makes completing this vulnerible young woman's story so difficult for me.
~~Juliet Waldron
*Finished at last, published in 2011 as
"My Mozart," Nanina's story now stands beside the story of "Mozart's Wife" as a kind of ecstatic flip side image.
