Transition Girl

Why transition girl?... Best answered by a quote from the Iliad....."The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence."

Thursday, June 02, 2011

perspectives

I was so drained from my executive love in, I did not write very much at all last week. Still stuffed - completely. Why is it that introverts find being around people so exhausting?

I'm here now, wiping the sleep from my eyes, remembering just how hard it was to write anything last weekend but grateful I have an almost people free weekend (other than being triple booked on Saturday night and not entirely sure how to manage that) to focus on creative endeavours.

I 'lost' a couple of weekends of productive writing getting side tracked with the dilemma of pondering the question, just how many perspectives should I draw upon in writing the third novel. There are five key protagonists in the story who, between them, provide the spectrum of positions needed to generate the conflict that moves the plot along. The first part of the story is these five perspectives on a single event to set up the rest of the story.

When I started writing the second part of the story, my first draft had five scenes and five perspectives as the story unfolded but only one related to the main protagonists. I was quite happy with the draft but then wondered why I had gone to the trouble of choosing these five protagonists if they were not going to be my focus.

I spent time asking a few friends and a work colleague of mine who is an avid reader whether they would enjoy a book told only from certain perspectives or if pivotal but minor characters pushed the plot along on occasion. They all sat on the fence and did not offer any answers. (Aside: though the work colleague has asked me to dedicate the third book to him now!)

So I spent a couple of weekends reworking the first few scenes of the second part to change the perspective. In some cases, the end product was better, in others it was not. By the third weekend, I had reverted back to the original scenes for those scenes that were not working from the (constraining) perspective of limited eyes. Decided the development of the story would be more interesting if I continued to use some minor characters at times when the main characters were otherwise occupied.

Will need to do a serious amount of writing this weekend as next weekend I have to be at a writers conference. Still struggling with the notion of attendance at such a thing as my hermit leanings, and (some might say) slight paranoia at being forced to share some of my creative intellectual capital, make this a tall order. Comfort zone be damned? Wanted: an excuse to stay in the cocoon.

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