Traveller's Tales

“So now that we have the interruptive crap out of the way, how the hell is the book coming?”, one might ask.

Were one to ask, I’d answer thusly:

The new version went out in mid-March and got read quite thoroughly.  There were a few basic bits of feedback which I agree with enough to accept, incorporate and move on without question, and they’re on the edit schedule right now.

And then there was one major piece of feedback that absolutely made me piss fire.

There’s been this bit in the story that I was always really in love with, but that I’ve always known was a bit of a controversial (and possibly foolhardy) thing to do.  While the rest of the story reads in third person past, the fellow I’ve always imagined as the primary character reads in first person present.  The story was, when it wrote it this way, more about him than any of the others, and he’s a more modern-feeling character, so having him available as a stream-of-consciousness narrative made perfect sense.  It’s always been important to me that people understand and empathize with him, and I figured the best way to do that would be to have the reader right in his head.

Naturally, the feedback this time, incontrovertibly and inevitably, was ‘Lose the first person crap for crying out loud.’  Nicer than that, of course, but that was how I decided to interpret it when I first read it, and boy did I get lit.  I probably set a personal record for chain bitchery that day.

And then I sat my sorry ass down and really thought about all of the feedback instead of throwing a little kneejerk tantrum.

The novel has changed considerably over the years.  Not so much the story itself, at least not since the first big rewrite, but the structure has had some serious overhauls.  What was once a story about one guy, with two other characters thrown in for timing and interaction, really had turned into a story equally about three main characters.

So point the first: I realized I was shortchanging two of my three favorite guys by making the other guy different.  This was bad enough to give me pause.

Point the second was a painful but necessary detail.  One of the readers revealed that she was so thrown off by the change of tone that she found herself wanting to skip the part of the story I’d once considered central.  She graciously added that she enjoyed how the other parts were written, but the change in tone whenever the main guy showed up completely put her off that part of the story.

Wow.

A few bumps in the name of artistic expression are warning signs.  An engaged reader wanting to skip an entire part of the story is a massive all-hands-on-deck this-is-not-a-drill alarm bell.  It doesn’t matter how much I love the concept of doing things my way, if it’s kicking a reader out of the story, it’s broken.

My bitching died off pretty quickly after that.  My story had evolved, and what I’d loved years ago just wasn’t working anymore — and it reasonably took an external reader to see that, since I’ve been reading it pretty constantly in its current form for the last 8 years now.

I feel good about this change.  It’s been a long time coming (sorry, Shelly, you were right!), but now that I’m at this stage I feel like it’s one of the last big hurdles I’ll have to leap — it really has come a long way in the last few months, farther than I ever thought it needed to, but excellent progress that has only made the story stronger.

So just a little longer… just a few more changes… just over the next hill…

TLDR: Big changes are big, but give it another two months and I’ll have something that looks a lot more like a final draft than I do right now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Editing, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.