I wish I had something interesting or astonishing to report here about my life in writing. The fact is, I’m in the long grind of rewriting. As I’ve said here countless times (so why say it again, right?), I am now rewriting my novel with a third person narrator rather than the first person narrator I had used in the first drafts. This is coming along better than I feared it would, but at this stage it’s all very workmanlike writing. I’ll need to go through it again to enhance the voice of the narrator, and I’ll comprehend what that voice should be like better after I’ve been all the way through the novel.

I can sit down to an hour or so of uninterrupted time and finish the rewrite of an entire chapter. It’s tedious because I am re-keying every single word (and Chapter 1 was nearly 9,000 words), but I should not complain about the pace. To write a single chapter during the frenzy of the first draft (or the vomit draft as I’ve heard it called) required several weeks of steady work, and most of the chapters were not nearly 9,000 words. So a chapter in an hour, even a tedious hour, it lightning fast. I just wish I could find more of those uninterrupted hours. Even so, I expect to have the final final draft ready for submission well before the second anniversary of my commencement on the novel, which is far ahead of the goal I had set myself. (It’s funny that I had only embarked on this work — to be no more than a novella I thought at the time — merely to get it out of my head so I could work on other things.)

It’s also fun because I can see all of the foreshadowing and seeds of character development that I put in these early chapters. I know what’s coming, so I see how I have prepared the reader for what’s coming. But it’s all still nicely subtle. I’d like to think that my novel will bear careful reading.

So I keep at it. Writing is rewriting, they say.

I don’t think there is now a single character in my novel-in-progress who still has his or her original name. I changed my protagonist’s name from Frere (and old family name) to Frye because Frere happens to be the name of a 19th Century painter, and painting is important to the story. (I didn’t want readers to try to figure out a thematic connection between my protagonist and that painter since there isn’t one.) I changed an important character from Eve to Irene. A secondary character became Ms. Stoper, but she was Ms. Chambers before.

About the only character whose name was intact from the start was the antagonist, Edmund Bower. Bower also happens to be an old family name that I slipped in here. After fine tuning everyone else’s name with deep and meaningful intent, I really thought that I couldn’t leave him untouched. And so the other day I began fooling around with some possible name ideas. Nothing much was working. I’d find some thematic word and then translate it into a half dozen different languages, but the results were a) identical, b) obvious, or c) cumbersome. Then I tried to come up with some word that means “indeterminate color” (trust me, it makes sense), but I had no luck. The name Bower is perfectly fine, but with everyone else going around with double and triple meanings to their names, I thought I wasn’t being fair to my antagonist.

Then the perfect name just came to me. At face value it’s just a name, not common but not unheard of either. Given a little more attention though . . .

Update: I’ve since changed his first name too. It’s no longer Edmund.

Here I go again, giving a chapter-by-chapter account of my progress through yet another rewrite of my novel, The Sleep of Reason. As I said in my last post, I haven’t faced any severe difficulty in transitioning my text from first person to third person, but I’m sure it’s raw and clumsy. I’ll need to go through it again to polish it. Again. What a tedious word that has become!

I have two laptops before me. One has the text of the earlier draft on it. I type into the other laptop. You’d think that would be easy, but I’m making huge numbers of typing errors, especially missing the letter “a” when I type. I think it has something to do with having my eyes elsewhere than the screen on which my words appear.

The new chapter weighs in at 8,936 words. The first-person draft was 8,825, and the first draft of it was an anemic 8,768 words. The beast is growing more woolly. What’s more, somewhere in the middle of those words I realized that I am going to retype every single word, every single character. The last draft was more than 109,000 words. Every bit of it will be typed once again by my crabbed and aching paws. Oh, pity me!

Nonetheless, I still feel as strongly as ever about the worthiness of this novel.

I’ve barely begun on the rewriting of my novel to have a third-person narrator and  I already see how this is going to work. Basically, my rewrite of the rewrite is going to need a rewrite.

I’ve only made it through about a third of chapter one, but it went smoothly. Granted this is an introductory chapter where my original first-person narrator was providing a lot of back story, so it lended itself to third-person telling — I may have more difficult struggles in the later chapters where he is asking himself a lot of questions. Regardless, I think my worries about being able to re-imagine the story with a different story teller are mostly assuaged.

Still, I think it lacks the narrative voice I want it to have. It’s all very workmanlike, very direct but not very creative. And that is why I will rewrite the rewrite of the rewrite. Once I have the whole novel recast in third person, I’ll go through it one more time to see if I can render the voice with a bit more panache.

I like the voice I achieved in my recently published story, “Moron Saturday,” though that was intended to be comical. I don’t want that tone in this novel, but I think the voice has the right tone in that story. It gives me hope that I can do it.

I suspect it looks as though I’ll never let go of this novel, that I’ll always have some fix I want to make before I dare to submit. I don’t think that’s true, but you’d be alarmed if you heard the cacophony inside my head. That will really only be my third true rewrite. The first was to get the story down and resolve all of the plot and character issues. The second, which I’ve just begun is to recast it in the third person. And the third will be to polish it. Our craft can grind exceedingly fine sometimes.

I embark on the third-person narrator rewrite of my endlessly in progress novel The Sleep of Reason today. I have no idea whether this will be an easy or difficult task. I want to think that I have finished the tale, now I must finish the telling.

I’ve long advocated, however, that a third-person narrator really must be another complete character of the story. Not necessarily a participating character nor even a named one, but a whole person in the mind of the writer (and in the mind of the more perceptive reader, too). He or she will bring a personality to the telling as much as any active character in the story has a personality.

I have mentioned here once or twice that a careful writer ought to have the sound of the narrator’s voice firmly in mind and “hear” it as the words are spilling onto the page. (That’s why it’s called “voice” after all.) Imagine, for example, your story — the very same words — if you heard them narrated in the voice of Sean Connery and then in the voice of Robin Williams. The very same words would have different nuances of meaning, I think, and a careful writer will know what nuance he or she wants to create when choosing the narrative voice. Importantly for my current endeavor, if I have a clear voice in mind before I begin, I will write more consistently, at least from the narrator’s point of view.

I think most of the fiction writing I have done has been with a third-person narrator, so I’m hopeful I won’t have too much difficulty mastering this significant rewrite. Yet I know it will be more than just replacing “I thought” with “He thought” and such. I have the story so firmly imagined with the protagonist telling his tale, that I may have a struggle before me as I try to make someone else tell his tale.

No doubt I’ll keep you up to date on my progress.

First Update: Not ten minutes into my first effort and I ran into a problem! I have TSOR backed up on a spare laptop (my old one), so my plan is to have the 1st-person draft open on it, and I can read the text from there while I type the new text on my current laptop. (I didn’t want to have to print the entire novel on dead trees so I’d have a reading copy at hand.) You’d think that would be easy, wouldn’t you. Two computers, side by side, running the same program. Not so! It seems that I cannot have the same Word program running at the same time on two computers in the same household. I had the blank Word page open on my newer laptop, ready to receive my precious words, but when I tried to open Word on the other laptop, I got a message saying I couldn’t have two incarnations running at once. How did the system know I had it running on two computers? I thought at first that they might be communicating somehow because they were sitting so close together. But then I realized what was happening. Both computers were talking to my home wifi network, and in some diabolical bit of coding, the system spotted this double teaming and disallowed it.

My solution? Disconnect the old laptop from the network. Once I did that, I had no problem having Word open on both computers. Now I need to figure out the subtleties of the screen saver. I thought I fixed the settings on the old laptop to give me a half hour before the screen save made the screen go black, but I guess not. Onward!

Second Update: It wasn’t the screen saver. It was the energy saver. I’ve changed the settings on that. We’ll see how it works.

The commedia issue of Danse Macabre (“the premier online literary magazine in Nevada”) is out today and it contains my short story “Moron Saturday.”

While I wrote this intending for it to be read as a comedy, I consider it one of my pieces of “serious” fiction. (Not that I don’t take all of my fiction writing seriously . . .) It’s my retelling of the Diana (Artemis) and Acteon story of ancient myth, a theme that has inspired much great art, and my story.

So perhaps you’ll like this piece. I worked hard on it for a long time.

I received a couple of comments from the folks over at LitList inviting me to take a look at their new layout. You can check it out here.

There’s apparently more to it than just a pretty face. I understand there have been some improvements to the coding and platform as well.

The number of listings (for short stories and poetry) is still comparatively small (compared to Duotrope’s Digest, that is). They’re still broken down between print and online publications (and I don’t see the point of that), and sorted alphabetically, but now you can specify whether you want only listings for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, or other.

The blog has also had some recent entries, and they’re eager for user input.

You might want to give them a look. The way I see it, if you find only one publication there that you hadn’t elsewhere, everyone wins.

I have done it. I have finished the final rewrite of my novel-in-progress, The Sleep of Reason. Now I feel the relief that I missed when I finished writing the first draft. I knew then that it needed work, which may be why I didn’t feel this way then. (Does that make sense?)

I have now what I consider a finished product, polished and ready to send to the cold, capricious agents and editors of the world to be awed. I have a whole novel here, one I feel confident and proud of, one that I am convinced can stand on the shelf with any other novel. It’s as good as I can make it, and it’s ready to test itself in the world.

Instead, though, I’m going to put it away. I’m going to copy these chapters to a subdirectory in Google Documents for safekeeping, then I’m going to abandon this draft.

Although it’s a good and complete story, there is a story behind the story that isn’t being told, and to present that I need to rewrite it with a third person narrator. (Trust me on this.) So I’m going to give myself a few days of respite, then I’m going to embark on the hard work of writing a fresh novel from a different point of view. I don’t know how hard this process will be, but I’m going to do it, and keep doing it, until I get it right because that is what needs to be done.

I think I’ve settled on the persona of my narrator: an omniscient, bemused gentleman telling the tale of a lost and foolish man. I’ll keep him just short of being devilish, but his all-knowing, detached attitude will reinforce much of the tale to be told.

Wish me luck. I intend to begin in earnest this weekend.

I just finished reading a novel that has left a lingering foul taste. I want to cleanse my creative palate now.

I came to this novel with great anticipation, even eagerness. It’s a debut novel by a writer who will probably have much success. I’d read an enthusiastic review of the novel online and then found a half dozen similar excited reviews for it, including one in the New York Times. The author’s next novel has already been snatched up by the publisher, and I understand the debut novel has been optioned for a movie. The novel sounded like winner, and I was hoping to write my own review of it on this humble blog.

That won’t happen. Although I found a few things I liked about the work, I found a far greater number of things that I hated. Chief among them was the writing; it was dreadful.

The writing is full of colloquialisms, the kind of cliched stuff that creeps into first drafts but needs to be cleaned out. The protagonist proceeded “with a spring in his step.” He found he was “sitting on a gold mine.” And so forth. Many sentences were obviously constructed so that they wouldn’t end with a preposition, and they read about as affected as you can imagine. “Big words” pop into the narrative that seem inconsistent with the narrator’s natural vocabulary.  Every single page had something like this. It was grossly amateurish; it was the kind of thing I saw from my students when they wanted to write “properly.” (An aside: at one point the character must do something “at 2:00 a.m. in the morning”!)

At first I wanted to attribute this sloppiness to the voice of the narrator, that the writer wanted the narrator to speak like a precocious middle school student, but I don’t think that’s it. I certainly didn’t see a reason for having the narrator tell the story this way. I really think it is due to a first time novelist (with little prior fiction writing experience according to the book’s website) who received inadequate editing.

But more than just the narrative bothered me. The protagonist begins to go through a profound psychological change with an almost arbitrary motivation. Or rather, the matter that sparks his change had been before him all of his adult life, and I don’t think the author did a very good job of showing why he was suddenly (and so extensively) affected by it. It seemed contrived. Other motivations needed for the character to take plot-required turns are presented when they are needed rather than woven into the character’s personality from the start. I felt as though this character could do just about anything, make any kind of decision, or reveal some hitherto-unseen-but-suddenly-necessary skill at any time. Throughout the story the protagonist had “never felt more frightened in his life,” or “never felt more happy in his life,” or “never felt more certain in his life,” and so on. Important characters are referenced but never introduced. Other characters are given extensive introductions and are never seen again.

The plot was clever, but it took a bizarre turn near the end that provided high drama yet didn’t seem necessary to show the development of the character. Like so much else in the story, the hand of the writer was apparent when, with good writing, the writer should disappear in the story.

In all, it was a big mess. I don’t know what the editor did for the writer (it is from a large, well known publisher), but some serious work with the red pen might have rescued the writing. Certainly if it were my story, I wouldn’t have submitted it in this condition. I don’t see myself reading this author’s next novel. Maybe I’ll pick up something of his a decade from now and see if he has improved.

As I said, I finished this novel with a bad taste. I always fear that by reading such writing, I will be influenced by it in my own writing. Fortunately, I have Philip Roth’s new novel on my reading shelf. I can tell that every single word in his fiction is chosen to do specific work. It will provide the corrective I need.

I continue on my rewrite of The Sleep of Reason, taking far more time at this pass through than I had expected I would. I have only four chapters left to go. I’m trying to consider each sentence and even each word to make sure it is the best that it can be for the work it has to do. Ironically, I’m giving this careful attention to a draft I pretty much intend to abandon once I am through it.

After this, I will begin the complete rewrite using a third person narrator. This is why, I suspect, I’m moving so slowly through this penultimate rewrite. I’m afraid to begin the third person version.

It’s going to be hard work to re-imagine a work that I have spent nearly the last two years imagining with a protagonist narrator. It took me until nearly the end of writing the first draft before I saw that the first person narrator approach was not going to work, and it was only after that, that I saw the deeper story within the story that a third person narrator would allow. Of course it would have been better to see from the start the kind of narrator I needed, but I didn’t, and I don’t think I could have. I simply had to struggle and earn this revelation. Now it is nearly time to roll up my sleeves and begin the hard work ahead.

I haven’t settled upon who this third person narrator will be. Omniscient, yes, but he will only get us inside of the protagonist’s mind. He’s not a character in the story himself, but he clearly will know every detail about it. Will he respect my protagonist or find him a fool? Is he a gentleman or a demon? Will he be telling the story over drinks at the club or around a campfire? Whose voice will I hear in my head when I have him telling the tale?

None of this will be shown in his narration, but it will color his narration. His attitude toward his subject, the words that he uses, even his sentence structure will be the result of who he is, even though he is not an active character in the story. And I still have to figure out this part.