The Midnight Dance — Behind the Scenes: Chapters 5 - 7
Chapter 5
In this chapter, Charles reacts to what he just shared with Elam.
One of my favorite narrative devices is when an author uses form to reflect function. In other words, when they vary the styling or length of a chapter to reflect something happening in the narrative. The first time I encountered this was in Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone and it blew my mind at the time. She has a chapter that’s just one word long! But it says everything it needs to, and the reduced length really serves to emphasize how impactful that word is.
I tried out that technique in The Spindle’s Curse (a sentence, though, not quite a word!). This chapter isn’t quite that short, but I was trying for something similar with emphasizing the depth of Charles’s emotion by constricting it to a few paragraphs.
Chapter 6
In Chapter 6, Elam leaves Charles and meets Cynthia.
The opening scene of this chapter was written to match a stock picture I liked and wanted to use in promo material.
Elam’s walk
I’m a nerd so I can get pretty extra about research. To make Elam’s walk from Charles’s place to Brian’s apartment as realistic as possible, I googled what time the sunrise would have been on that day (which we established previously is Halloween 2018, but none of the characters know that because it would have been too complicated to add Halloween into the plot!). I then found a YouTube video of someone walking around New York at around the same time at the same time of year. You can watch it here:
Chapter 7
The gray man
How do you say “I have depression” without saying “I have depression”?
Charles is like that guy in Blue by Eiffel 65, except instead of Blue his life is gray.
Yo listen up, here's the story
About a little guy that lives in a gray world
And all day and all night and everything he sees is just gray
Like him, inside and outside
Gray his house with a gray little window
And a gray Lexus
And everything is gray for him
And himself and everybody around
'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen
We’ve already established all the external gray, but now we see the internal gray as he wakes up in a world once more devoid of color (Elam). His greatest fear is that he peaked too young and life has already gotten as good as it’s going to get and that he will die without ever being able to know love.
“Every day it’s more difficult to win this game I play with myself. It used to be as easy as going into the study and looking at the Forbes 30 under 30 piece from a year ago (“Charles White, 26, Founder, Hedgemoney Investments”), or my degree from Princeton [...] But these days all my little shrine to me does is make me feel panicky. ”
I struggled to figure out how old to make Charles. He had to be old enough to have achieved his “prince” status, but not too old for Elam. He bounced around between 27 and 32. When I realized Elam’s age couldn’t shift (because he had to be 18 to still be at the School of American Ballet), that meant I couldn’t really make Charles older than 27 without risking a squick factor. (I love me a good age gap romance, but Elam’s still so very young here). If I made Charles any younger, it would have been too much of a stretch for him to run Hedgemoney.
I also spent a lot of time (far more than necessary I’m sure) deciding where Charles got his degree. I had to decide what degree he had and then find an institution that offered it. I toyed with the idea of having him and Philip do the same degree at the same school, but decided against it because they probably would have recognised each other as they’re only a year apart in age. I also already had plans for Adam to be a person from Philip’s past, so it would have seemed too much.
The fake ID
Don’t laugh, but figuring out what type of ID Americans carry around in their wallets was a whole thing. I had to ask an American friend to read this scene and tell me if it sounded right. In researching fake IDs and whether it was plausible for Elam to have one, I discovered that Ohio is a common one to have because it’s one of the easiest ones to fake, unlike New York and Virginia for instance. The sites also said it’s better not to have a fake ID from your home state because bouncers are more familiar with those. Now you know!