NaNoWriMo Part III

I hadn't intended for this subject to have so many parts but this last installment is the one that most profoundly affected me as a writer.

I have been a working journalist for more than two decades. On more than one occasion -- generally when I'm walking Pluto -- I have tried to calculate in my head how many words I have written over my career as a reporter. I really haven't an idea but I'm sure it's well over a million words.

As a reporter, I have generally been an observer, not a participant. I have never been a columnist. Thus, the vast majority of the articles I have written were in third person. I can count on one hand the number of articles I have written from a first-person singular point of view.

(I need to clarify a point here. When I was an editor at The Philadelphia Tribune, I was on the editorial board and wrote editorials at least once a week for nearly four years. And the editorials were written in first person. But I was writing for the group -- and not necessarily expressing my own opinion -- and it was first-person plural, not singular.

One final word. The awards I have as a professional journalist were all for editorials. Now that is ironic!)


My point is that as a reporter and an author, I am most familiar and comfortable with writing in third. As an author (as with being a reporter) it has allowed me to be intimate with the story and the characters but still able to stand back and separate myself from the elements of the story. I could get caught up in a story but it was never MY story. I was just an observer, not a participant.


POV is the story-telling element about which members of my critique group criticize me the most. They say my POV shifts a lot. I rarely see it. To me, I am always the fly on the wall viewing the action. And I always know if the Marines are coming from around the corner to save the hero. You can't do that in first-person POV.


But in AN UNTIDY AFFAIR, I was immediately faced with the prospect of a story from a single POV, that of the novel's hero, private eye David Blaise. The entire story would be in first person.
I didn't plan for it that way. It just developed in my head that way and I couldn't get it out of my head. So, I went with in, although I knew it would be a tremendous challenge for me to write that way.


In this story, I identified with the main character more than I have with any other character I have created -- and there have been some in earlier works I have identified with a lot. I was in Blaise's head all the time. I, in essence, was him. I could no better determine the motives and actions of others in the novel than he could. Certainly not immediately. His life was very intimate to me. I felt uncertain when he was uncertain.


And, as a writer, I felt far more exposed, although I also felt that writing from that POV was limiting.


Members of the writing group who have seen the novel said it was the best they had seen of my writing. I'm not so sure of that but it was interesting and personal to me. Not sure if I will do it again. I may just retreat to the familiar. But I have mentally outlined two additional David Blaise stories, and, if I write them, they will be in first person.


Maybe I am changing. May not. But it was interesting, though not necessarily comfortable. Good thing it only took me 19 days to write it.


Thanks for reading and keep writing.