Hello subscribers, and welcome to the Circle of Trust! It's nice here, isn't it? So round, and so trusting.
So, as promised, some extracts from the project succinctly entitled 'Dwarfs' on my computer, now deceased and buried in a file named 'random ideas and dead ends'. This is going to be quite a long post; you might want to save it for when you've got time to sit down with a cup of tea, or perhaps for when you have got a really urgent and important piece of work to do which you need an excuse to avoid.
Anyway, it was interesting for me, rediscovering this stalled book a good couple of years since I last looked at it, because the first two chapters are pretty good, and I had a burst of excitement because maybe this project has legs after all, and then the minute that Snow White and the dwarfs turn up it all goes horribly wrong, which is obviously a bit of a problem, in an adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
I remembered a few other things about it that I had forgotten: that the book is narrated by the magic mirror, which was a nice touch, and that I named all of the characters after the cast and crew of the Disney film of Snow White. This led to one of the dwarfs being called Otto (after one of the writers, Otto Englander), and therefore my decision that there had originally been eight dwarfs, only one of them had died in a mining accident that left the Dopey dwarf brain-damaged, and ultimately led to the politicisation of the dwarfs. A key observation as I am revisiting all of this: the satire is perhaps a wee bit heavy-handed.
Anyway, the book starts with a description of the island of the dwarfs, and how it came to be colonised. (I'm cutting a lot out, for obvious reasons.)
If you asked the island’s original inhabitants what had happened, they would say that they had been invaded by a race of giants; but because the giants were in charge, they referred to themselves as people, and to the island’s original inhabitants as dwarfs. Seeing as the dwarfs had been too stupid to name their own island or learn how to kill each other, they could hardly be regarded as the benchmark of normal humanity from which the giants deviated. In fact there was much scientific debate, conducted by the giants, over whether the dwarfs could be regarded as human at all. The results were inconclusive...
Because the dwarfs were as unused to work as they were to war, they worked for the giants, who had excellent organisational skills. They hunted and fished and gathered for the giants, who were bigger than them and therefore needed twice as much food, although in fact they ended up having more than twice as much, because the giants, in the course of their scientific research, discovered that the dwarfs could get by on much less food than the dwarfs had ever thought that they could, which was just another example of how lazy and stupid the dwarfs were. All that happened when the dwarfs ate less was that they got even smaller, which, given as they insisted on being so proud of being small all the time, they should have been pleased about, instead of constantly complaining. Boy did those dwarfs complain a lot...
But the huge excitement came when the giants discovered that the mountains and hills of the island were full of jewels... The dwarfs clearly couldn’t be trusted with anything as valuable as the jewels, because they were too primitive to have notions of currency or wealth, and so the giants protected the dwarfs’ innocence by teaching them proper mine craft, while themselves taking care of the difficult business of dealing with the gems that the dwarfs found. They rewarded the dwarfs for their part in the process by giving them houses to live in, which the dwarfs built, and food to eat, which the dwarfs produced, and they told the dwarfs how very fortunate they were to have been saved from their own indolence without having been corrupted by money.
As I said, a wee bit heavy-handed, but fun, I think.
After we learn about the island, we get to know Lucille, Snow White's stepmother, and the only character in the entire draft who I now find at all interesting.
Was Lucille the most beautiful woman alive? Well, there is no doubt that she was exceptionally fair and had a perfectly proportioned body, which was why Wilhelm had made the mistake of marrying her. Beauty is subjective though, and if you ask me for my opinion, then I will tell you that there was something rather nasty about Lucille’s face, an intangible hint of cruelty about it when in repose. I didn’t like it at all. But Lucille didn’t ask me for my opinion; she asked me for the truth. The truth is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder, in this case, was Lucille; it therefore followed that the answer to her question - ‘who’s the prettiest?’ - was ‘you are’.
The truth can be a tricky beast.
Time passed. Lucille got older. The bloom of youth began to fade. That intangible hint of cruelty about her face got a lot more tangible. Wilhelm died, leaving behind his daughter from his first marriage, Snow White, who was getting prettier by the day...
Lucille had met Wilhelm six months after the death of his wife, at a party thrown by her parents with exactly this intention in mind. At fourteen, she was too naive to see anything other than his handsome face and his money, and to enjoy the obvious power that her new attractiveness had over him. The story of his widowerhood was appealingly tragic; the baby, she thought, was cute. Within only a few weeks of their wedding, she realised, firstly, that the baby was not cute, but a stinking, shrieking ball of need; and secondly, more fatally, that the death of Adriana had chopped at the root of Wilhelm’s heart as surely as an axe fells a tree, and that while his body was still capable of lust and his mind could appreciate the virtues of having a decorative replacement wife, the two added up to something far less than love. Maybe a kinder and more patient woman could have found some slow, curving path into his affections; or, failing that, at least have made an ally out of the motherless child with the cold, distant father. But while Lucille was clever, she was also spiteful. She was furious to be shut up in a cavernous house with nothing but a screaming child and some resentful half-dwarf servants for company, while her husband disappeared further and further into his work. Whatever warmth she did have was killed with the suddenness of a late frost.
Lucille is great. I want to write a whole novel about Lucille. Unfortunately, that is not the novel I set out to write, and so we have the problem of Snow White and the dwarfs that comes along and wrecks the whole thing. I was completely incapable of coming up with a good personality for Snow White; maybe she could have been sweet but stupid, or so good-hearted that she is almost impossibly irritating. I can't remember what options I considered; in the end I made her bratty and teenage. And vegetarian. It's never a good sign when your key character trait for someone is 'vegetarian'. Similarly, my entire character plan for Otto the dwarf appears to have been 'secretly alcoholic'. I can't remember which of the dwarfs he was meant to be, which is a major issue when I was supposedly basing him on one of the Disney dwarfs who are literally named after their personalities. Perhaps he was Doc. [Edit: I've got it! He's Bashful.] Anyway, here's the moment when they meet. This is one of the best bits of writing about them that I could find, and it isn't great:
Otto shot backwards, letting out a yelp that was more of a maiden’s scream than a manly shout. He tripped over the edge of one of the other beds and fell, dropping his candle as he sprawled. The candle didn’t go out, and he gathered it up in a panic, lest something in the mess and dust of the floor should catch alight and burn him alive.
It was a giant. A giant in his house! Otto gripped the candle, pushed his free hand against the floorboards, splinters needling his palm as he struggled to get to his feet.
“Who is that?” said the giant. The giant was female! There was nothing about this situation that could be more wrong.
Who am I?? Otto wanted to say. Who in the name of hell are you? But the words, as so often, refused to come.
“You disturbed me,” said the giant. She sounded cross. “I was asleep. Well, sort of. These beds are extremely uncomfortable.”
“It’s…” Otto managed to say, “not… your… bed.”
“I don’t see why you can’t get a normal-sized one,” said the giant...
Giant or not, she was the most beautiful girl that he had ever seen. She had taken the rough blanket from Harry’s bed and wrapped it around her shoulders, and somehow the dull brown wool set off the gentian blue of her eyes. Her cheekbones were high, her nose strong, her full lips the elemental red of blood. Her black hair fell in perfect, shining locks, and as for her flawless skin, it was as white as clouds, as white as a lily, as white as milk, as white as oh stop it, you’re making a fool of yourself, Otto told himself, feeling, as usual, that his inner thoughts were obvious to everyone. (Was she really that beautiful? Yes. But she had bad breath. Looks aren’t everything.)
Can you tell that later on they are going to fall in love?
The bad breath joke isn't bad, actually, but the stand-out word that tells me that I really lost my way with this is 'gentian'. What the choice of 'gentian' tells me is that I am trying to distract you with the force of my descriptive powers from the fact that I have absolutely no idea what is going on behind those 'gentian' blue eyes. I actually remember googling gentian blue to make sure that it really was a shade of blue, which tells you how naturally I came to that particular image.
Anyway, there's a bit of tomfoolery after this with the rest of the dwarfs, and then the book comes abruptly to an end, aside from one last line about Lucille, opening a new chapter that I never wrote. This is the last line in the entire draft, I had totally forgotten about it, and it might be my favourite. Maybe one day I will have to go back and write my book about Lucille. But for now, this is all that's left:
Lucille had indigestion. She wasn’t a natural cannibal. She’d had to force down the stew made from Snow White’s heart, and even then she’d mainly eaten the mushrooms.
Next update, we'll be back outside the Circle of Trust with more about Oh, I Do Like To Be...