The Penny Has Dropped

My husband recently went away for two weeks so I took time off work (I work part-time) and dedicated the entire period to study. The aim was to draft ten thousand words. There was one point when I didn’t leave the house for three days but it was worth it and I achieved the word count.

Why did I want to do this? I wanted to get as much of the story down as possible (as well as the historical micro research that goes with it) so that I can then go back and focus on description, dialogue and character. This is just my way of working.

Character. Well the penny has finally dropped. I had another tutorial last week and I received the same feedback as usual – my protagonist is too distant. I was incredibly frustrated as I had really worked on this area. However, it’s all very well knowing there’s a problem but you need the tools to fix it. I clearly hadn’t got the right tools. There are reasons for this distance issue: my job requires very factual drafting with no emotion or bias; I spent last year reading 30+ novels which were mainly from an omniscient or distant third person point of view; and I naturally like to sketch in the story and then build layer upon layer of shadow and colour.

It’s all part of the learning process and I like a challenge. I went off to the library, took out every book I could find on the subject and read. My problem was understanding the difference between distant third person and close third person as well as everything in-between. For some reason I couldn’t see it from reading novels, I needed a detailed explanation. I now have it.

I am now going back through the first nineteen chapters and editing them with this in mind. I used to look at my writing but not see it. I found this frustrating because in my day job I could read a submission of my own and see a sentence or just a word that was incorrect because it didn’t follow the key principles behind that particular drafting style. Now I can see it with my creative writing. The thing I have to be careful with is how I move along the spectrum between close and distant; knowing when to do this and how.