Changing POV

So I have about 5000 words of my WIP written in first person and holy crap is the voice grating. It's this Italian woman from Brooklyn so if you can imagine that kind of accept, it's portrayed like that in my writing (not phoenetically). I was afraid, at first, that it wouldn't hold through 200-something pages and now I'm almost positive it won't simply because I'm starting to not be able to stand the voice.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? You got so irked with the voice that you had to change it? At least I'm figuring this out now instead of 50,000 words in but I'm going with my gut and my gut says change it except the real challenge is going to be telling the story in third person because I have it mapped out in first. Has anyone else had to make that kind of a shift in order for the work to be readable?

Bufty said:

Why is the voice grating? Fix it. No need to change the POV.

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To fix the voice means to change where she's from. I change where she's from I lose the story so just "fixing it" isn't an option if I want to write what I initially intended to write.

JeanneTGC said:

Also, you don't have to have a lot of vocal "isms" in there. Usually just identifying that someone is from, say, Brooklyn, and then giving her a COUPLE of vocal clues or tics is plenty. The reader will normally overlay the accent onto what they're reading.

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That's the thing. I don't have any colloquialisms in there. Maybe one or two but nothing like "Oh mwy gawd, Paulie Go ova thea and pahk the cah." It's nothing like that. The accent is purely structural. I should post a paragraph so you all know what I'm looking at. Can't do it at the moment since I'm as work and don't have it but maybe it's the voice that I don't like. It's something and it's grating on me. I just can't stand to listen to/read her. If you're at all familiar with Brooklyn Italian women, it's a meandering dialogue. They get sidetracked easily so they go off on little mini-tangents before coming back to the topic at hand. The writing couldn't get more authentic to the voice but I think that's what's it. Works in a movie, not in writing and I'm pounding my head on a wall because I had the work mapped out as a story told in first person POV but either I remove the Brooklyn (which I don't think would be as strong as originally intended) or I switch to third, that way I can keep the Brooklyn in dialogue that she has and have a more neutral 3rd person omniscient voice telling the story. But, again, the power was in her voice to tell it but I swear to god if I have to hear any more of it I'm going to scream. Ugh. I'll post a piece later and see what you all think.

JeanneTGC said:

You're writing a novel, not filming a documentary.

What you don't like about your character's speech patterns can, and should, be easily fixed by you removing what you don't like. Just because something is "authentic" it doesn't mean it's good, interesting or engaging.

You don't like the rambling tangents that go nowhere? Cut them out. The only words on the page should be words that move the story forward or show characterization. If you've over-shown characterization to the point of hating the MC, then cut back on that and increase the stuff that moves your plot forward.

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But when you see the novel as a film in your head, it's harder to differentiate the two but what you say makes better sense. What I think I'll do is trim out the crap I don't like in the first chapter and build it up from a different angle. Then I think I'll write it from the third person POV and see how that works so I can compare them side by side. I'd like to stamp down the voice now so I'm not doing this ten chapters in. I might really go insane then.

It's hard because everything that I've learned says that you want your characters to be authentic to where they live, that the place, if it's a real place, should be accurate and so on. While the place isn't a problem, like you said, Jeanne, the authenticity just isn't transforming onto the page for me. Perhaps I can modify her "authenticity" down to a few words instead of the entire manuscript and I know what you mean about "hearing" an accent once the area is introduced. Oye! I can listen to a Brooklyn accent all day but holy god I want to torch the paper it's written on.

Ok, I've posted some snips over in the SYW forum here. Let me know if you feel the same way about the voice as I do or if I'm just panicking about impending failure.