I’ve just cut to pieces, reassembled, re-read and edited my
next novel which still doesn’t have a title and if things go as they have been,
perhaps not even a life.
What happened to this story that I had created at my computer and
in bed at my usual wake-up hour of 3:00 a.m. is that I couldn’t decide at first
from which viewpoint I’d tell the story: the fifteen-year-old girl who was in
the middle of escaping an abusive relationship at a homeless camp under a local
viaduct or that of the seventy-year-old childless woman at whose door the girl
appears one night saying, “Hello, Grandma.”
An early morning inspiration decreed that I’d tell this
story from both viewpoints, alternate the chapters, and one would be told in
present tense, the other in past tense. A kind of challenge to me, the writer. All went pretty well. I had to keep track of
what was happening two chapters before the one I was writing and somehow keep the
timeline the same for each viewpoint version. When the girl opens the door and
sees her abuser sitting on the porch (her POV), the old lady will hear the
conversation and call the police (her POV), one chapter later.
I somehow did this for two hundred pages. Then I read what I
had written. The opening chapter had no hook, the story had an arc but it arced
weakly in two places and the tension I had hoped for dissipated into ho- hum. The
story might have been interesting, but the telling wasn’t.
So I did what I’ve done before with at least one other first
draft. I cut it into pieces and laid them out on our bed. I pushed the pieces
around, moving the third chapter (one that caught even my attention) to the opening
chapter of the book, and combined the two arcs into one big arc involving both
my characters. Then I gathered up the results of the efforts on the bed,
stapled the piles all together, and realized when I looked them over that I’d lost what I wanted to establish
when I started, POV and tenses. Plus, the story read as if I’d put it together
in a Sunbeam Mix Master
I have bandaged this sad wounded story with edits and re-writes
for more than two weeks now. It’s not healed yet. I’m almost sure its condition
is terminal.
Sometime this early morning I remembered a book written by
William Styron, I believe, describing his bout with depression during the
writing of a novel that just wasn’t going anywhere, no matter what he tried. He, or a writer like him, sat one evening, silent,
at a table as guests talked and laughed around him. Suddenly, the writer got up
from the table, went into his study, picked up his manuscript, grabbed a shovel
in the back hall, went outside, dug a hole, and buried the sucker in the
vegetable garden.
I guess my novel is lucky I live in a condo with four small pots
of geraniums on the terrace and no shovel.
Ha! Love that last line. Maybe you need a bit of space from ths project so you can look at it with new eyes? I miss you and hope we can do lunch soon.
ReplyDeleteJo, thanks for letting me know I'm not alone in the "cutting apart" of a manuscript. My memoir needs the same haircut as your book, and I'm about to dive in and do the rebuilding of it. Your post helped!
ReplyDeleteThe novel has been reviewed by three beta readers and will be entering yet another phase of becoming--not on the bed, this time, the printed copy in my lap, my pen in hand.
DeleteMy one of the hobbies is reading. I love reading novels. I want to read your novel also. I am not just reading the books to make time pass. I am reading the novels to get good messages. All novels are having some real characters those are helping to know about the real society.
ReplyDeleteMy other hobby is reading also, the messages are the important part of some stories. Sometimes they are clear and universal, other times they speak to me personally, and my thinking is nudged. I like that.
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