Words vs. Stories

I spent yesterday editing the first fifty-three pages of my novel, distilling what I could, pouring on a few more sentiments, adding words, changing words, turning sentences around. After I let it sit for a few hours, I sat down and read it through. What I found was a story that was perhaps too tight.

As writers who are not yet considered authors, have we forced ourselves to rein in our true narratives due to an obsession with word counts, by trying to write a 250 page novel when it might need to be 295? How I long to step out a little, say another thing or two about my characters, give the reader more clues or put in more historical references. The books I’ve been reading lately are in the 400-500 page range and feel complete. I don’t put the book down and think “I wonder about X.” The author has delivered the full story, taken his or her bow and made me happy.

We’ve gone to so much trouble creating all our fictional worlds, let’s revel in them a bit longer. The publishing industry is in such a state, why should we care what their guidelines are? Are we writing pop songs or symphonies, painting Elvis on velvet or God in the Sistine Chapel?

Write for your own satisfaction, for the joy of creating something from nothing, and in the end, whatever the word count, you will have told the story you wanted to tell.

Amy

Ode to the Minor Character

For six months I have been trying to find my way through a crisis in my novel without much success. I have written three different versions with Giles interacting with a different major character each time. There were aspects of each version that I liked, but none of them delivered the ultimate closure to a pivotal scene. Each major character brought their own stresses to the situation that distracted from Giles’s reaction to the point of crisis. Because of this I could not make the following scenes run smoothly, the mood that lingered rang false.

Then, in the middle of the night (lying awake, listening to the wind), the answer came to me: the valet! Here is a minor character close to Giles who will not complicate the situation. He knows Giles with profound intimacy, but their dealings are ritualized and professional. The valet is the one person who in all likelihood knows what has transpired, but would never denigrate Giles for it.

Like a starburst, the scene formed in my mind. Giles, realizing his mistake, alone in a hallway, in despair. The fact that the valet is the first person to happen upon him keeps the reader’s attentions focused on Giles’s emotional trajectory. It also helps Giles keep those emotions under control. The interaction between them is no more than a few sentences long, but it feels powerful and, most importantly, honest. I think the reader will have a deeper understanding of what follows.

This brings up a chicken and egg sort of question. Do we create these characters knowing deep down they will pay off their presence at some point? Or by creating a few named minor characters does the writer’s universe bend inexorably towards using them? More simply, do we create them because we need them, or do we need them because we’ve created them?

Having posited that question as a difficult one, I will now take a side and defend the "intelligent design" case for minor characters in fiction. Writers of fiction are a bit deranged overall, but I think we are clever enough to know who stays and who goes in our work and we know it early on, even if we don’t know where everyone is going to end up. A novel doesn’t have extras in the sense a film does, but it needs a support staff to keep things plausible and we have to choose carefully who we name and who we skip past, lest we find ourselves spinning side stories into infinity.

I will close my ode to the minor character with this: don’t always look to your main characters to do the heavy lifting in a novel. Sometimes the elephant in the room requires a mouse to get it moving.

Amy

Multiple Points of View

This past week I have started re-reading the sea-faring Jack Aubrey novels of Patrick O'Brian. Even though I read all 21 novels about 3 years ago I still find them interesting and gripping.

For those who are interested in a floating point of view (forgive the pun), the author O'Brian does a masterful job that is worth studying. His writing is in the stream-of-consciousness style. One almost feels the camera panning from one character to another, the thoughts and words of the major characters being spooled out easily, with the point of view sometimes following the camera and sometimes remaining with one character. Because the O'Brian novels are packed with action, it helps to be able to see the scene from several different eyes, without a single point of view bottling up the excitement of panoramic sea battles.

The multiple point of view also helps ratchet up the personal interactions between characters. The reader is able to see instantly the internal reactions that lead to the external response, saving the writer from having to do flashbacks or spin out long actionless prose to keep the reader informed of the characters's motivations.

Not all novels need to use many points of view to tell a story, but I have concluded that the fast paced novel benefits from it.

Amy