twovictorianladies

Remember I mentioned that I have two major characters eloping? In the original version, they’d only known each other a matter of months, and met as adults at the first ball of the London Season that year. But in the very early drafts, they’d been in love ever since they were children. I dropped that fairly early on. There was something of an age difference; he is six and a half years older than she is. That seemed to me to be a bit wide a gap. If they were only one or two years apart, I could see it. But when he was nine or ten, she’d be three or four. When he was just discovering girls, even if he was a late bloomer (and I suspect he was) she’d still have her age in single digits. Changing the age difference wasn’t an option.  It is important to his relationship to several other characters that he be through university so he can’t be any younger –  her age is actually a crucial plot element so she can’t be any older. It didn’t seem to work, so I dropped the whole concept.

The book didn’t.

In a new scene created for the new version, there is a conversation between he and her oldest brother. And in this conversation, he started talking about how long he’d loved her, and describes an incident from their mutual childhood when it started. I looked at what was appearing on the screen in front of me and asked myself, “Where did this come from?”

The story knows what belongs better than I do, it seems. So now, he was a great friend of the younger of her two brothers. She would follow them around like a little puppy in the way of younger sisters, and they both adored her – no doubt, as a little sister. When he went off to school, he didn’t see her very often, just once in a while in the village to say hello to. Then they met for the first time as a adults at that first formal ball, and he fell for her like a ton of bricks. She, on her part, had hero-worshipped him for as long as she could remember.

It took amazingly little re-writing of what was already there, to adjust to this new concept. Which only goes to show that when something is right, the book will not let go of it.