Making progress in Sleep
I am now nearly halfway through the final rewrite of my novel-in-progress, The Sleep of Reason. When I say “final rewrite” I mean of this narrative’s draft. The novel is currently in first person narration by the protagonist. After I get through this rewrite, chiefly to add seasonal and weather references and clean up whatever little problems I notice, I intend to recast the entire thing with a third-person, omniscient narrator. This will be a huge undertaking, but it is necessary in order for the story to have the more resonant ending I want to give it.
I’m going slowly, and I’ve given myself a good period of waiting between the fever of composition and the cold, dispassionate work of revising so that I can have the perspective I need to judge my own writing. This has been useful because it has pointed out a problem with my storytelling that I had completely overlooked in all of my earlier passes.
My protagonist asks himself a lot of questions. He’s in an altogether new and unforeseen role in his otherwise pathetic life, doing strange things for strange people, so he’s uncertain how he should proceed. Thus he asks himself a lot of question. The problem is that he asks too many questions. I have some paragraphs of five or six sentences that are all questions. And they’re rhetorical questions, so the poor reader doesn’t even get the relief of answers.
As much as he questions his role, my poor protagonist doesn’t ask enough of them in the end, but I don’t think I have to be so literal about that in the story telling. I’ve been reworking these question paragraphs to soften their force and frequency, and I expect I’ll erase their problem altogether in the third-person narrative.
Anyway, I attribute this late discovery to the fact that I’ve given myself some time away from the manuscript. I understand that one of the ancient Greek orators recommended allowing eight years to pass before attempting a rewrite. I don’t want to wait that long (though, in a way, I have since I began this story about a decade ago).
