The revised manuscript for Adverse Possession has been back with my agent for a few weeks now. The first two weeks of waiting are pretty easy, but at this point I could either hear from her any day now or have a few more weeks of waiting ahead of me. So now is the antsy part. The creeping anxiety part. The growing urge to email her to noodge her part. (I resist that, for the most part. Though she’s very patient with me when I give in to the noodgy urges.)
What, exactly, am I waiting for? Those of you who’ve been around for a while (or have agents yourselves) know the deal. Waiting to hear if she wants more revisions, or if she thinks the manuscript is ready to go out to editors. This was only the second round of revisions for her on this manuscript, so, knowing Gail and having worked through revisions on my first novel with her (three rounds with that one), I’m expecting to have more work to do. But hey, you never know.
In the meantime, I’ve let my brain wander back over to the next novel. I haven’t had actual writing time in weeks, so all I’ve been doing is teasing around the edges of it while pretending to be fully absorbed in whatever non-writing task I’m supposed to be doing. I had an awful realization yesterday: the new novel might need to be written in first person. Why is this awful? Well, I hate writing in first person. In part, I hate it because I don’t often enjoy READING first-person narrative, particularly over the long haul of a novel. I think it’s an easier thing to do well in short fiction. But the bigger reason I hate it? Because it’s scarier (for me, anyway) to write in first person. And it hurts more.
This new book needs (I think) to be in first person because of the particular story I want to tell, and how I want to give the reader access to it. I need the pov to be very intimate–at times uncomfortably so, and I need it to be extremely limited. See, I’ve realized this book is a confession. How else do you confess, but in first person? Well, I could imagine a confession in second person, but that’s even more tiresome to read at length than first. An entire novel in second person? I know it’s been done, but not my style. (Until, of course, it is. You never know.)
My fiction isn’t autobiographical (with the exception of two short stories), but that doesn’t mean the characters aren’t me. They’re all me, to the extent that they were all created from bits and pieces pulled together in my own mind. They don’t know anything, at least on the page, that I don’t know. They don’t experience anything that I can’t imagine experiencing. My fiction reveals much more of me than this blog, which shares pieces of my real daily life, does. At least, it feels more revealing to me. In my fiction, the reader sees the way my brain moves, sees the things I’m capable of thinking. And therefore (perhaps?) capable of doing?
So when I write in a close third person pov (point of view), I get to put myself out there, move through the lives of these characters, with the distance of he and she and they. It’s not so hard to trick myself into believing that the thoughts and feelings and deeds I’m exposing on the page are not at all my own, but rather belong to these other people, these characters. Which is bullshit. Because I’m the one inventing those thoughts and feelings and deeds. And you damn well better believe that for as long as I’m writing them, I’m feeling them too. (At least, when I get it right, I do.) To write in first person is to remove that illusion. I can’t pretend these feelings aren’t mine. I can’t pretend the thoughts aren’t mine.
Which is not to say that I believe everything my characters believe, or agree with them all the time. The thoughts and beliefs are particular to the characters and spring (ideally) organically from them, growing as the story grows. But still, they’ve got to come from somewhere in me. And if I’m going to write it in first person, I’m going to have to accept that. All that dark stuff that bubbles up inevitably in my books? It’s all in me already.
This is news to no one. I know. But still. If I go back to the beginning with this book, starting again in first person, and it works, I’m in for one hell of a ride this time.
I really love how transparent you make your process with this, Cari — it makes me really reflective about my relationship to my own work.
Actually, I think what you’ve described here would be news to a lot of people, people who aren’t writers, I mean. Many writers work very hard to separate themselves in the public mind from their characters, and some for good reason. But that’s something else.
I have started a new book, too. Here’s what happened:
The earliest work, the first words to come out, were in the 3rd person, although the narrator’s voice was extremely limited, mainly seeing through the experiences of the protagonist. I wrote about 50 pages this way.
Then I found that I was no longer excited to face the page each morning, that in fact a couple of weeks went by as I made the usual dumb excuses to do anything else but work. Maybe, I figured, problem was that the narrator’s voice was the protagonist’s voice after all, and therefore, the problem was I should be writing the story in 1st person, and in the present tense.
So I started again, and over a few weeks, wrote almost 70 pages. Then stopped again, stalled, looking for any excuse to avoid working.
A number of long walks in the park led to the realization that my initial instinct had been correct, that 1st person would not allow the story-teller enough distance to keep the reader both informed and compelled forward.
So, yes, of course, I tossed all that out and started again … in the 3rd person, and giving the narrator a bit more room to maneuver than he had in the first attempt; it remains in the present tense (for now, at least).
I don’t find this unusual, even if I do find it a pain in the ass, work-wise. I have in the past written an entire novel in 3rd person, past tense, only to start all over and write it in 1st person, present tense, only to change present to past again, and finally, the novel eventually published, had two narrative voices, one writing in the 3rd person past, the other in the 1st person present.
What you are doing is just part of the job. It’s how we make our work better, how we make it the best we can. People who don’t understand this, don’t understand because they don’t or can’t do this kind of work. The rest of us are about as empathetic as one can be.
I think lots of us have stories in our heads, but very few of us are brave enough to put them to paper. I admire all who are courageous enough. Keep at it!
I like (and appreciate) the way you’ve described it as autobiographical but not. It’s a bit unnerving for us to acknowledge that the dark thoughts that we plant on the page really are growing in the stony soil in the hidden parts of our psyche. I’ve got at least three stories percolating that I’ve been putting off specifically because they expose several of the uglier, more sinister thoughts–those thoughts we have and then dismiss, telling ourselves “I don’t really mean that” except in that moment we do, but we resist it. Our rational humane selves brush away these thoughts as fleeting because we don’t want to believe that we really are-or could be- “like that”.
And I agree–if the book is a “confession” it surely must be written in first person. Such a point of view is more conducive to the reader connecting with the character, willingly or otherwise. Of course, I don’t know the nature of your character or the confession but some of my favorite stories are those that manage to wring sympathy from me for a largely unsympathetic character. It’s powerful stuff when you can feel the pain and angst of a villian and have that juxtaposed with the fear or revulsion of the same.
Good luck!
You’ve gotten farther as a writer than I could ever dream of getting — just sending a book out into the world, no matter how far it gets, seems incredibly brave to me.
But I understand your struggle with a first-person point of view. Even if the character isn’t completely you, you’re putting something out there that folks unfamiliar with the writing process might assume is 100 percent YOU. That’s scary stuff. No one wants to be that naked, that exposed in front of another person…yet alone a community of readers!