Re:Work

There is nothing quite like the experience of sitting at a round table of your peers and being told that the last four chapters of your novel don’t work.

Enduring an air strike by B-52s might give something of the flavor, but may be not.

In a recent post (“Creamy,” August 17), I discoursed on the art of the infodump, and the various narrative strategies I was employing both to convey information to the reader and to maintain the third person objective viewpoint that I had adopted (for good reason) in the early chapters. I thought I was doing pretty well with this.

And then— fwoom!— ARC LIGHT!

I participate in a monthly critique session with other writers. Really good writers like Sage Walker, Daniel Abraham, Sally Gwylan, Melinda Snodgrass, Terry England, and Steve Stirling. And when the entire group tells you that you’ve failed, you can pretty well believe what they tell you.

“I have no idea what’s going on.” Well, that one’s easy to fix. I’m forever telling other writers that “there’s nothing wrong with this piece that a few simple, declarative English sentences wouldn’t fix,” and I think I know how to write sentences like that. So: more, briefer, exposition. Less subtlety. Put up a big fucking sign to let even the bad readers know what the book is about. Check.

The larger problem, though, is the third person objective viewpoint. For the first three chapters I had good reason for not letting the reader know what was going on in the reader’s head. That reason ends in the fourth chapter, when actual exposition starts.

So I’m going to make it easy on everybody. I’m going to go back several chapters and begin to insert the protagonist’s thoughts, emotions, and sensations. This will have the fringe benefit of shortening the expository dialogues I’d written to explain what the poor guy was thinking. If I do it with sufficient subtlety, readers won’t notice that the point of view has shifted.

I just hope that the changes aren’t so comprehensive that I’ll actually have to rewrite the chapters in question, from first word to last full stop. But I will if I have to.

This isn’t one of those blogs where every post comes with a cute cartoon and a description of the writer’s mood. But if I had to describe the mood, it would be “squirmy.”