Editing blues

'Unreliable narrator' by Mike Howland

2017 was a tough year for my poor fantasy novel! I had my heart set on editing my monster pile of notes/drafts/scribbles into a decent novel, but unfortunately it didn't work out.

My main problem has been that the novel started in "third person" form. Specifically, it was a third person narration about Calvin (a poor orphan boy who, as you might expect, is probably going to find treasure, beat the bad guy, get the girl, and just generally do quite well by the final page).

So that was the story I was originally trying to write...

But then I added a dragon.

Crimble is a tiny tree dragon with a personality bigger than the sky. She quite literally takes over my writing and it's damn hard work trying to get her to follow the plot.

I added her as a minor character at first. She was just going to be a friendly little dragon sitting on Calvin's shoulder.

It didn't work out that way.

Crimble, it turns out, has a mind of her own. In my story, she's still sitting on Calvin's shoulder, but she spends much of her time berating him with sarcasm, ear flicks, and the occasional whack from her tail on the back of the head. Often all these at once.

And Crimble, I discovered, wants to be written first person.

THAT was the big problem. Everything I'd written was "third person Calvin"... and suddenly I found myself with a stack of "first person Crimble" chapters.

I tried for ages (weeks, months, years... I don't know!) to merge my old "third person Calvin" story with the new "first person Crimble" chapters. Have you ever read a book that jumps between first and third person? Ugh. Some authors have done it... some have even done it well... but I still don't like it. In fact I've yet to read such a book without feeling a big jolt every time the author jumps from first to third. Try as I might, I couldn't rewrite my chapters well enough to remove that "jolt".

Do I want my readers to feel jolted from first to third person? NO I DO NOT!

So this year, I tried to edit my novel to remove this dreaded jolt. I've tried plenty of different ways before, and this year I decided to give up on my "first person Crimble" chapters, and just rewrite them in third person.

My internal voice kept shouting "THIS IS THE WRONG THING TO DO!" but I ignored it. After all, what writer doesn't have that internal voice shouting-shouting-shouting all the time? Isn't the normal writer life purely about having a voice in your head telling you that everything you write is bad? (Please reassure me that happens to you too!)

Anyway, six weeks later, after much misery and ignoring that infernal internal voice, I finished my new "purely third person" draft and re-read it.

Ugh.

I hated it.

But I'm a writer and I was reading my own writing. It was NATURAL that I hated it, right? So I put the whole thing aside and spent a month playing with smaller pieces. Hooray for flash fiction and poetry - the perfect way to procrastinate on novel writing! You're writing, so you're not procrastinating, right?!! :-)

Eventually I re-read the novel again. Yep, I still hated it. Rewriting Crimble in third person was a horrible idea. Wrong, wrong, wrong. For once, the doomsayer internal voice had been speaking the truth.

What was missing? I'm not sure I can be specific... but it was that elusive quality that turns a book from "just a book" into "something you actually want to read", or at least "something you actually want to write".

Energy - maybe that's the word? Crimble's "first person" voice has a definite energy to it. She has verve. Panache. Snark. And all of that had been stripped out when I rewrote her in third person.

It took me quite a few weeks before I had the heart to attempt another rewrite. Actually, it may have been months. I seem to have lost quite a large chunk of this year - quite possibly to moping around after realising my rewrite hadn't worked!

Anyway... I started rewriting everything in "first person Crimble" voice again. I knew that at the very least, I wanted a few chapters to be told in Crimble's voice. She's sassy and she's sarcastic and I have had GREAT feedback on her voice. (Adults have told me they love Crimble... but, more importantly, KIDS have said so too! And kids are the best critics in the world because if they don't like something they'll quite happily tell you, regardless of how it crushes your soul!)

Crimble's voice HAS to be part of my novel. This is one thing of which I'm certain.

So I rewrote Chapter 1. It went well, and Crimble was her usually sassy self as she chatted to the reader about a dragon called Puggle running in to wake her up. (Yes, I know what you're thinking... I do indeed start my novel with a character waking up... and I like it, so it's staying... for now!)

Then I started rewriting Chapter 2 (the first chapter focuses purely on Calvin). And something magical happened. It felt as if the back of my brain had been working on a new solution, without me being aware of it doing so, and suddenly it presented a new solution... I'd rewritten Chapter 1 (in which Crimble is woken up by Puggle) and then, suddenly, I wrote a line at the start of Chapter 2 (in which Calvin is digging his own grave) that opened up a whole new possibility...

Earlier that day, a few hours before Puggle had woken me, a boy called Calvin was digging his own grave.

Okay, I'm not saying this is a great line. For all I know, this line will be cut from the final draft. HOWEVER... this line has done something wonderful for my novel. It's allowed me to travel in time and space!

That might sound a bit far-fetched... but it's true! The first part of the line (Earlier that day, a few hours before Puggle had woken me) reminds the reader of the events of Chapter 1, and then ALSO manages to catapult them a few hours back in time. And it's done with such a tiny amount of effort that I can hardly believe it's so easy. Even better, there's NO JOLT! The whole of Chapter 1 is in Crimble's voice... and this new line is too... so the reader is simply continuing to listen to Crimble... it just so happens that Crimble is now talking about an event she wasn't involved in.

The second part of the line (a Mudville boy called Calvin was digging a grave) anchors the reader in the scene at the beginning of Chapter 2, and allows me to immediately start telling Calvin's story.

Even better, this line means that Crimble is my narrator. SHE is the one who will be telling Calvin's story. Rather than her narrating only her own chapters, she's now narrating everything. And you know what that means...

Unreliable narrator!

I love, love, love unreliable narrators. I love them because they're so true to life. EVERYONE you know is an unreliable narrator - you, me, everyone! Think of every time you've heard someone tell you a story... Did they stumble over their own words? Did they contradict themselves? If you pointed out inconsistencies within their story, did they just laugh them off? Did they get distracted while talking and go off on a tangent, talking about something else?

I'm guessing they probably did all those things. Because this is exactly how we tell stories every day. We get things wrong. We make up details that we can't quite remember. We go off on tangents. We contradict ourselves. We forget what we're talking about halfway through the tale.

Crimble won't be a totally unreliable narrator. She'll get things wrong, but for the most part she'll tell the story "as it happened". However, it'll be very much her version of events. Her own version of the truth. And Crimble has already proved to me that she enjoys talking herself up, so she's bound to show off throughout the whole story. I have a feeling this is going to be fun.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that Crimble can finally do what she's been wanting to do for YEARS. She can take control of the novel! She's been dying to tell Calvin's story ever since I first created her, and I'm finally ready to hand her the pen.

So that's my new plan.  I'm going to allow Crimble to write every chapter - even the ones that she isn't present for. It's the best possible solution I've come up with so far.

There's a tiny niggle/worry because I know people will tell me "if Crimble's alive to write the story then there'll never be a sense of danger, because we know she survives" but I reckon that argument was thrown out of the window the moment everyone was comfortable with American Beauty being narrated by a ghost and Black Beauty being narrated by a horse. Narrators can be anyone and anything - dead people, animals, or even a brain in a jar. Critics might not like it but readers don't mind... and it's only the readers who matter.

Admittedly I'm kind of annoyed I had to REWRITE THE ENTIRE NOVEL in order to reach this happy discovery. All that work just to write this one magic "Earlier that day" segue line! But writing is a journey, and it's a hard journey at that. Sometimes the only way to reach an epiphany is just to put your head down and power through. And that's what I did this year. It was horrible at the time but I kept going and I'm glad I did. Although I don't yet have a completed novel, I still feel like I'm hell of a lot closer to achieving that magic finished manuscript.

Unfortunately, what with the general shenanigans of life getting in the way, I've had to stop editing my fantasy novel at the moment... but as soon as I get back to it, CRIMBLE IS IN CHARGE!

Fingers crossed that this time I've finally found the perfect way to tell the tale.

A great summary of unreliable narrators by John Fox

2017 is the year of 'The Edit' !

Not sure everyone would agree with this, but I think creative writing breaks down into two very distinct stages:

1. Free-writing (manically splurge the words and ideas from your brain to the page)
2. Editing (turn the free-write splurge into something a human being might actually want to read)

Last year, I was definitely buried neck-deep in the first stage. The whole year was one long manic frenzy of typing. Somehow or other, I managed to produce a million words of free-writing. And before that, through a mixture of writing and plotting my fantasy series, I'd produced at least another million words.

What I'm trying to say is: I seem to have written a lot of words.

This year, 2017, I'm going to lock myself away from the world - as much as feasibly possible - and start on stage two: The Edit. I'm planning to dive headfirst into all those words, grab a handful or two, and then somehow shape those words into something readable. And then I'll do that again. And again... until I either:

1. Turn into a gibbering puddle of Mark 
2. Die in the attempt
3. Produce a novel
4. Produce several novels
5. All of the above

So... please send love, luck, and cookies. Definitely the cookies. 

Brain-Stanleys

No one knows what a Brain-Stanley looks like,
but this is probably pretty close

When freewriting, it's important to ignore the internal editor. However, the enforced word count on NaNoWriMo results in the writer-brain making some truly dumb decisions, all in the name of trying to squeeze a few more words into what you've actually written.

Some of the more obvious examples of this are things like always writing "Mr Ian Woon" instead of just "Ian", or not using contractions (e.g. always putting "I am" instead of "I'm"). Helpful for the initial word count, I guess, but really kinda useless in the long run.

But the writer-brain finds far dumber things to do - things that actually get in the way of freewriting. Take this for example:

She nodded for me to continue.

That's the line I was going to write. It's not amazing prose but it's perfectly acceptable, especially in a first draft. Anyway, it popped into my brain and my fingers obediently hammered at the keyboard. But as I typed the last word, a little piece of my brain woke up. For the sake of this explanation, let's call him Stanley. And remember, Brain-Stanley is a baddie in this story.

Stanley said, "Hey, if you type 'go on' instead of 'continue' then you get ONE EXTRA WORD."

The rest of my brain replied, "Oh come on, Stanley. Don't be a tit. What's the point of one extra word? Why can't I just put 'continue'?"

Stanley didn't care that the rest of the brain had just called him a tit. He stood there, with his tiny brain-hands on his tiny brain-hips, and said, "Because it's NaNoWriMo, you daft sod. We need all the words we can get."

There was a little bit of shouting, but Stanley won in the end. The line became:

She nodded for me to go on.

.... and I gained that one extra word.

So now I was a step closer to the end of my million words project. Hooray and hurrah?

No.

This is a worrying trend. If my internal-editor-dialogue ("ooh, we shouldn't write it THAT way; we should write it THIS way") is too loud, then creativity stops dead. The moment my various Brain-Stanleys wake up and start shouting editing suggestions, that's the moment I start struggling to freewrite. And all this 'second guessing myself' is what slows things down. It's hard enough to produce 2,000 words per day, let alone with a bunch of Brain-Stanleys shouting at me.

Dear Brain-Stanleys, I appreciate the occasional extra words, but they're really not worth the internal dialogue distraction. Shush for a few weeks, okay? Please? Pretty please with chocolate cherries?

Name your characters well! And quickly!

I tend to give a character a random name and then change it later.

Initially, this seemed like a good plan... because a quick, "oh, sod it, he's called Fred" meant that I could carry on writing and not start wasting my writing time by googling lists of names or rushing to a name generator.

However, this is turning out to be a terrible idea!

Thing is, every writer has their natural rhythm. Lines tend to dance out of the brain in accordance with a certain internal flow or pace or beat, and woe betide the poor writer who starts screwing around with that rhythm in the editing stage (I find it gets lost very easily when editing, and then the whole text starts to sound stilted and unpolished).

Another problem is that the character starts to become "whole" in your head once you name him. I have a character called Calvin and he will never, ever, be anything else to me. If an agent or publisher (assuming I ever reach that stage of the novel-writing process!) tells me to change his name, I'm going to have a lot of trouble adjusting. And if they want me to change Crimble's name then I'll probably cry!

I'd always thought I could do a quick "find and replace" once I'd decided on a better name, but I realise now that's not an option. Here's one of the reasons: internal rhyme. Changing a name can cause lines to start rhyming, and that'll completely change the feel of the whole story. Imagine having a character called Bob and then you change him to "Fred" at the last minute. Suddenly you have a ton of lines ending with "said Fred" or "Fred said", and that weird little rhyme is going chime in the reader's head (just like "rhyme" and "chime" just did in this sentence!) and quite possibly get annoying over the course of an entire novel.

Turn to blog post number 394

Here's a similar example: What if the goddess of writing, J.K. Rowling, had called the character something other than "Snape" in her first draft? For the sake of argument, let's say she called him Maurice. When the slimy potions teacher is being grumpy, JKR could easily have written first draft dialogue in this form:

"Turn to page 394," Maurice snapped.

And the thing is, once you've associated a character with a dialogue attribution/description like "snapped", it's easy to do that over and over again. That word "snapped" becomes part of the definition of your character. "Snapping" their dialogue becomes one of their natural characteristics. We know what it sounds like when someone snaps - it's spoken quickly and the words are almost bitten off like someone biting off a head. That gives us a strong sense of character.

Then, later in this completely fictitious example, let's say JKR was editing and finally decided on the name "Snape". One global-replace later, she'd have a ton of lines saying "Snape snapped". Ugh. That just sounds daft. Suddenly the manuscript is chock-full with dumb-sounding dialogue attributes, and this would only happen if the right name wasn't chosen early.

Okay, you can argue that "snapped" is a bad word to use because all the writing books tell us to stick to "said". Fair enough, but that's not really the point of the example. Pick your character names early, and pick them well. Getting the name right will change how they feel to you, and that'll come out in your writing.