Everett Renshaw

Brainstorming for my next writing project is scheduled to begin in June. I intentionally left a month of “space” between projects because I figured I would need time to recharge, but I realized I didn’t want to stop writing altogether, so, when last we left our intrepid hero, I had decided to revise Kubak in this “off” month of May.

I’m relatively pleased with the revisions so far. At one time I thought I needed to break it into two novellas, but then I realized that I couldn’t query two novellas, so I went back to working on it as a single novel. That basically meant trying to shift the focus of the first half of the book a bit more toward Caudren than Fen. I moved some Caudren scenes to the beginning, and wrote some new ones. I also re-wrote some scenes that were from Fen’s POV to make them Caudren’s POV. So far so good.

But, as it’s now the 23rd, I won’t be finished with these revisions before June. I might have 45k words ready for an alpha reading by then. Which leads me to wonder whether I should continue Kubak revisions into June or press onward with the new project.

Or perhaps I need to rethink my entire schedule. Perhaps I should be writing new material and revising old material at the same time. I think I read somewhere that Stephen King writes in the morning and edits in the afternoon. That’s probably what I would try to do if I were a full-time writer, but right now my time is a bit more limited. Most days I only have a maximum of 2 hours of writing time, and I can’t see myself splitting that in half. But what if I were to write new material on weekdays, and then work on revisions on weekends?

“What’s your book about?” It seems like a simple question, until I, as a newbie author, try to answer it.

In my mind, my book is about 100,000 words of carefully interwoven plots that took months to get right, complex characters that grew and evolved on their own, colorful and exotic places and worlds, literary devices, clever uses of punctuation, good parts, bad parts, terrible parts, loathesome parts, unfinished parts, and a title.

Strangely, casual readers aren’t interested in those things.

They want to hear something like, “It’s about a farm boy who blows up the Death Star,” or, “It’s about a badass archeologist with a gun and a bullwhip.”

What’s up with that?

Read using a Seinfeld impersonation: What’s the deal with first person writing?

It seems like nearly every popular book these days is written in first person. And it seems to be a mandatory requirement for the Paranormal/Urban Fantasy genre. They all have the same sort of dry sarcastic narrator. It’s almost like reading a blog post, except a really long one. It’s getting to point where I groan whenever I see another first person book.

This rant was inspired by my reading the the first chapter of Twilight. I figured, since I recently read and liked Hunger Games, I would look at another popular YA book. I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy it, though, so I just got the Kindle sample chapters. It’s in first person. I groaned. Another first person book? With the same dry, sarcastic narrator? Again?? (Twilight also starts out with high school drama, so I won’t be reading any more of it unless I can get it at a serious discount.)

The first first-person books I can remember reading were Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat books. So I’ve always considered first person narration to be a device for comedy.

But now there’s Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Name of the Wind*, The Dresden Files, Kushiel’s Dart*, I am Not a Serial Killer, Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs, The Iron Druid Chronicles – these are all first person books I’ve seen recently. There’s some comedy, but it’s not really the point of them.

* Kushiel’s Dart and Name of the Wind aren’t comedic, but still first person.

I really don’t get the attraction. Is it easier to write first person narratives? It’s always been pretty easy for me to do so, but then I tend to write in my own voice, which does happen to be kind of snarky. Sort of like this post. I consider it more of a challenge to write in third person, particularly with shifting perspectives. Maybe it’s just that there have been so many commercial successes now with first person sarcasm that everyone is just following the crowd.

Maybe it’s simply impossible to write a first-person narrative without humor. But then I thought about Sherlock Holmes. That’s first person, and there is no trace of humor in the narration. Moby Dick is also first person. I’ve only read the first few pages, but there’s nothing remotely funny about it.

Shrug.