Traveller's Tales

I’ve invested a lot of bitching into the painful process of ripping out a first person present tense  narrative and re-tuning it for third person past tense.  The tense is psychologically tough; the character has been a first-person thinker for quite a number of years now, so that’s what’s causing so much of  the ‘go back and re-read it, and correct all the tense mistakes’ process.  Maddening, as I generally consider my grammar to be moderately polished, and mistakes like those look seriously grade-school.

I think I’m done bitching about switching into third person though.  In fact, since I’ve already given away the game in the post subject, I’ll say I think it’s not only necessary, but it’s fixing a lot of what I didn’t realize was broken.

Yeah, stuff was broken.

Among many other things, I’m an actor.  Unlike my writing, which is on the brink of professional art, I’ve been paid many times in the past for my acting, and I’m told I’m pretty good at it.  Because of that skill set, I do a lot of dialogue in my head before I commit it to paper — give myself a little private performance, lay the characters and the scene out, figure out what dialogue sounds awkward, that sort of thing.

For the first-person narrative, I’d do the same thing to get the character’s thoughts nailed down before I wrote them.  Unfortunately, I now realize I was acting more than I was writing, and that’s where the bulk of the disconnect — which is resulting in the POV shift — took place.

It’s taken the last few reviews of the manuscript to realize it, but the first person POV was actually robbing that character of depth, because I was failing to weave external expressions and unconscious mannerisms into his internal ruminations.  I hadn’t realized it because, when I ‘did the part’ in my head, he was plenty deep, plenty conflicted, his physical confidence and mental competence short-circuited by severe disorientation, physical conflict and psychological horror.

But many of the acting cues I ’saw’ while I was doing my own internal performance failed to make it to the paper, because he was thinking to himself and I didn’t know how to fit the action into his internal dialogue.  The fidgeting, the nervous glances, the smiles a bit too wide — very, very few of these kinds of things made it to text, and so he came off as a much shallower jerk than he really is.

And really, turning people off from one of your primary POV characters isn’t such a smart thing.  Donaldson may have been able to do it, but I’m not Donaldson, and I did not want this character to be anywhere near as disliked as Covenant.

And so, I’ve made progress.  Much yet to do, but the work continues.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Editing, Musings, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.