Thursday, January 5, 2012

Changing Christy's Voice

Yesterday was my last day on the FamilySearch mission. Today was my first day on my writing schedule. Time to finish my novel, Family Secret.

I put in six hours total -- so far -- not including the half-hour break to unpack my new Brother PQ 1500S sewing-quilting machine (I love PayPal and their six months, no interest program. I love that I was able to find a quilting machine that did not cost more than my car.). That was enough to totally distract me from my writing for the day, but I did not allow it to happen. (Major victory!)

I set aside the chapter on Carp's Vietnam experience to work on Christy's story.Christy's story I wrote from beginning to end at the start of Family Secret. Since then, I have chopped her story up into five chapters.

The other issue is, I had not found my voice in this novel at the time I started writing Family Secret. The first several chapters I wrote in both first-person and third-person in order to see how I wanted the story to flow. Since then, I have decided that Jennie's voice -- the present-day voice -- will be in third-person. My historical voices are in first-person. Today, I converted a chapter of Christy's story from third-person to first-person, plus did some heavy rewriting. I have not looked at this part of the novel for at least nine month, so it needed it.

Lesson for today:  Try to figure out what voice to use in my novels BEFORE I get too far into the writing thereof. It is a mess to try to catch all the third-person language and change it at this point in time. And, as I read over some former chapters where I already made the conversion and did the proof-reading, I can see that it will take even more heavy-duty proof-reading to catch everything before I am finished.


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