This is gonna be a rocky ride.
Posted by: Finch in Editing, Musings, Writing, tags: process, structure, stupid human tricks, TGKI’m editing. I like what the results look like, and I think I’ll be very, very pleased with the end result.
But I am fighting a pitched battle with one of my lead characters, and he’s not giving an inch without inflicting pain or drawing blood.
This is the guy I had originally written in first person, present tense, as a way to make his thinking more accessible to the reader (this was my theory, and my thought experiment has officially backfired and gone horribly wrong; lesson learned, mea culpa, see my other post about that). Now I’m wrangling him into third person past, like the rest of the narrative. What’s coming out, I like — but Oh My Freaking God he’s taking For Bloody Ever to make the transformation.
I keep re-reading the chapters I think I’ve just wrangled, only to find massive errors in tense and in person, even in the brand new stuff that’s gone in to replace the first-person ruminations. Beyond that, I have to write, put it away, and re-read it fresh the next day because I’m not sure it’s reading true until well after I’ve written it. The shift in POV is so jarring to me, after living with this character for so long in first person, that it’s even tough to be certain I’m writing well, and that’s not something I usually worry too much about.
I’m finding myself very interested in this phenomenon. I’m fascinated that a mental construct like a character can associate itself so strongly with linguistic concepts (tense, point of view) that the process of revising those concepts can so thoroughly screw with my head. It’s a serious crash course in pragmatics (not pragmatism), which I may have to dig into a bit deeper after this edit is done.
Wacky stuff.
May 12th, 2009 at 11:12 am - Edit
The mind is a funny thing.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:53 pm - Edit
interesting viewpoint in arguing within your own head… they have names for that sort of thing!
What I especially like is that each character has its own personality within you, that’s really rather interesting and I’m sure that alone is worth some sort of study in its own rights!
May 20th, 2009 at 6:31 pm - Edit
You think that’s tricky – I once wrote a dialog in the style of Plato, in which the characters turned on me and demanded by their rights as conscious entities that I keep thinking their thoughts for them to continue their existence.
but I could never keep on topic long enough to finish a story!
And no I’m not nuts
May 26th, 2009 at 6:43 am - Edit
Ahhh, far too insightful, SaintXi — you’ve accurately identified my deeper psychosis. That’s one of the reasons I write: if I don’t, I’m the only one in ‘my’ real world who’ll ever hear these stories, and that wouldn’t be right.
Yeah, it’s a bit nutty, but I’m okay with that!