My nightdress is too short, rain and thunder have scared my cats away, and once again it’s just me and my witch making it through the night together. This is exactly what my radical first-person-rewrite has felt like. Since it has gotten some surprised responses when I shared this sudden change of writing-mind of mine, I thought I’d share with you what it actually did to my witching novel to change from first person to third!
I enjoyed reading novels written in first-person ever since. For the witching novel, however, I had decided to write in third-person for several reasons. The most important being that I thought I’d needed this outside view. I thought to grasp the complexity of Dystopia, I needed to be able to escape into bird-perspective from time to time. The idea for the novel came to me, when there were two girls lying on the kitchen floor with a bottle of wine as the world had gotten mad, remember?
After a while however, I noticed that I ran into problems with the first 30 000 words of the witching novel. Yes, I know that’s a lot. And that is the problem. I needed to pick up pace, because things were taking too long. Now, there are several options to solve that issue. I, however, escaped into hibernating with a good book and a coffee, and I suddenly noticed something.
The thing I noticed was that I loved the statements first-person narrators could make. They could provide so much insight into inner monologues, and into emotions and atmosphere, I suddenly wanted all that for the witching novel. And I hesitated for a while. I thought that maybe there was another problem I was just avoiding. Or I thought that maybe it was just a confusion, because this project had been a huge part of my life for so very long. But then I also remembered my small but existing publishing history, in both German and English, and I realized that the stories which managed to get published were usually written in first-person! I had never thought about it that way. Sending your manuscripts out and getting rejected is so normal when you try to make it as a writer, I never searched for this kind of pattern! But, with a rather small sample-size so far, I think it is there!
So, motivated, excited, and scared to death, I began my rewrite …
… And suddenly, it all fell into place.
Things that took me half a page to tell, could be put into one sentence. I could dynamically switch in pacing, between memories, describe atmospheres just as if someone was sitting next to me in a nightdress much too short and shivering as the thunder outside is accompanied by a brutal hailstorm.
Or, a bit more pragmatically: I have reduced the word-count by half, which was what I needed, since I have a lot to tell. It is a biography, after all! Also, I think the novel finally found its tone. I could write passages that almost had rhythm, with language turning into images falling into each other. I had writing sessions that made me blink tears of relief away. Yes, I am that pathetic sometimes!
But most importantly, telling this story in first-person means something else for me.
It means that after all these years that I have spent with my witch, I finally gathered the strength to speak as myself. I am not hiding behind burrowed motivation anymore. I am not trying to impress people who turned on me any longer. I can wake up in the morning, and speak as who I am.
Maybe, I am a little to personal, a little to intense for some, and definitely wearing a nightdress too short at the moment, but I am feeling good. This is still new for me, and it feels much more wonderful than I ever thought anything could.
Bear with me! The witching novel is going to come!
My cats are fine, by the way.
Mistress witch writes 