MystiAnne
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Novel rewrite process
I just finished with the first meeting of our new writer's group, formed from students in the program we just finished, and I just wanted to share a helpful exercise, probably all you all know it already, but it's the first time I tried it on a work in progress directly.
Okay, so I have a historical setting, a different culture from mine but a real one that most folks don't know much about, and I've chosen to use a fairly close third person (of course distance varies over the course of a short story and especially over a novel, but most novels that I've read spend a majority of the time at a particular distance if 3rd person) instead of omnisicient POV (well, the prologue is omniscient, as is the first paragraph of chapter 1). But the feel of the novel after a solid second draft just wasn't right--too, something, or not enough something else. I was scared that I *had* to have an omniscient narrator, ala Clan of the Cave Bears, at least at the beginning, but was resisting it because that usually makes the beginning so hard to get through.
So, I took the first two pages, and rewrote them in several different versions, each time with a specific intention in mind. The one that was most successful was simply "make it closer to POV character." I had planned to write versions focussing on character's sense of loss, etc. etc., but hitting this one changed just the first two pages fundamentally, bringing not only the main character closer to the reader but the other chars as well. Probably only 30% of the words changed, and I didn't even do much re-arranging, but writing with that specific intention has made all the difference in the world. I can't wait to get at the other 200 pages over the next few weeks (accidental unemployment for a month! whew!)...
Anyway, I'd been fussing and bothering and fretting over "the voice" of the novel and how much I wanted to play with distance in POV, worrying about making it more "spiritual" or "magical" or shamanistic, and how the dickens to do that (it's a shamanistic culture with a strong record of religious tolerance). But lo, I discovered, nothing fancy was required, I just needed to go back and inspect every sentence, and recast some in the POV character's language, or from her point of view intellectually or emotionally. That will bring up her people's unique characteristics, as well as her own, judging by this first experiment. The best thing about the exercise was how *sure* I felt about making changes--loading the intention into my forebrain gave me the ability to edit in a flow that I usually only experience in first draft...pretty cool stuff.
It shouldn't surprise me, I'm used to doing drafts devoted only to continuity or only to spelling/punctuation, one for awkward sentence construction, one for excess adverbs/repeated words/is there a better noun or verb,
so why NOT a draft for POV? doh. It sounds so simple when I say it now.
If other folks have had similar experiences, please share! The more I write, the more plastic I realize my "darlings" are
Mysti
I just finished with the first meeting of our new writer's group, formed from students in the program we just finished, and I just wanted to share a helpful exercise, probably all you all know it already, but it's the first time I tried it on a work in progress directly.
Okay, so I have a historical setting, a different culture from mine but a real one that most folks don't know much about, and I've chosen to use a fairly close third person (of course distance varies over the course of a short story and especially over a novel, but most novels that I've read spend a majority of the time at a particular distance if 3rd person) instead of omnisicient POV (well, the prologue is omniscient, as is the first paragraph of chapter 1). But the feel of the novel after a solid second draft just wasn't right--too, something, or not enough something else. I was scared that I *had* to have an omniscient narrator, ala Clan of the Cave Bears, at least at the beginning, but was resisting it because that usually makes the beginning so hard to get through.
So, I took the first two pages, and rewrote them in several different versions, each time with a specific intention in mind. The one that was most successful was simply "make it closer to POV character." I had planned to write versions focussing on character's sense of loss, etc. etc., but hitting this one changed just the first two pages fundamentally, bringing not only the main character closer to the reader but the other chars as well. Probably only 30% of the words changed, and I didn't even do much re-arranging, but writing with that specific intention has made all the difference in the world. I can't wait to get at the other 200 pages over the next few weeks (accidental unemployment for a month! whew!)...
Anyway, I'd been fussing and bothering and fretting over "the voice" of the novel and how much I wanted to play with distance in POV, worrying about making it more "spiritual" or "magical" or shamanistic, and how the dickens to do that (it's a shamanistic culture with a strong record of religious tolerance). But lo, I discovered, nothing fancy was required, I just needed to go back and inspect every sentence, and recast some in the POV character's language, or from her point of view intellectually or emotionally. That will bring up her people's unique characteristics, as well as her own, judging by this first experiment. The best thing about the exercise was how *sure* I felt about making changes--loading the intention into my forebrain gave me the ability to edit in a flow that I usually only experience in first draft...pretty cool stuff.
It shouldn't surprise me, I'm used to doing drafts devoted only to continuity or only to spelling/punctuation, one for awkward sentence construction, one for excess adverbs/repeated words/is there a better noun or verb,
so why NOT a draft for POV? doh. It sounds so simple when I say it now.
If other folks have had similar experiences, please share! The more I write, the more plastic I realize my "darlings" are
Mysti