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  Lunatic Writer

MOVIE MAKER: More Confessions from an Unpublished Novelist

4/8/2014

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Feb. 17

Be more like Tolstoy.  That is the most recent lesson from my writing mentor.

Like any good teacher sending home a report card, my mentor begins with a positive note: “There’s good writing here,” but quickly he delves into the critical meat. “The constant bouncing around in POV and chronology is getting hard to follow.”

The thing that hurts most about this comment is that I thought I had fixed that problem (well, improved it anyway) in the last submission I sent—not enough, obviously—not nearly enough.

Then my mentor floors me with another staggering analysis of my work: “It’s as if you’re structuring the novel like a movie or TV show that’s constantly cutting back and forth from one setting/time/character-arc to another, as if you’re afraid [my italics] the reader will get bored if you stay in one place for more than a few pages.



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Well, I feel like the writer with no clothes. He has seen through me—I am constantly worried about boring the reader—and maybe just lack the courage to stick with a character long enough.  Now this structuring like a movie business—it is not something I consciously do, but that’s all the more worrisome, I suppose.  The visual movie format seems so engrained in my unconscious that this seems the natural way for me to tell a story. It’s never occurred to me that this might not work for a novel—oh, how little I seem to know about the craft!

Of course it’s the old story: the more you know, the more you realize how little you know.

I must credit my mentor with giving me a very constructive suggestion near the end of his comments. He suggests that if I MUST hop around in POV and setting so much (as Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina) then, like Tolstoy, I must immediately, generally within the first sentence, situate the reader.

Yes, I can do that (I think).


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Confessions of an Unpublished Novelist: THE GUILLOTINE DROPS

3/27/2014

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JAN. 22

My mentor has a great deal to say about the next submission I send him.  He starts off on a note that is not too devastating by saying “Overall I still have good feelings about the potential of the book.”  Which I translate to mean, he hasn’t given up on me completely. He goes on to say “I would say though that as a reader I’m feeling a little scattered.”

My mentor is just warming up.  He becomes very critical of how the time frame and POV switch so frequently in the story. He has no sense of where the story is headed. He goes on to state that my central character, Wernher von Braun, feels more like an archetype than a real flesh and blood character.  

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My mentor also laments how Lyndon Johnson, whom he calls the “most grounded and relatable character” in the story, is now dead and gone and, with his departure, “one of the sturdy legs of the story.”

Wernher does not compare favourably. According to my mentor he and all my major characters need more immediate motivations and conflicts to move the story forward.



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Conflict… it has been the most difficult concept for me to embrace as a writer.  I instinctively shy away from it. I have to force it into the story. I don’t seem to handle it especially well. It could well be that this weakness disqualifies me as a novel writer right from the start (playwright as well).  Sigh…

Well… I was looking for specific, no-holds barred criticism. I am certainly getting it.

It might not hurt so much if my mentor wasn’t fairly impressed with the first segment I sent, lulling me into a very false sense of security.  My mentor’s earlier words “you are clearly a skilled writer,” seem pretty hollow now and I’m sure he would take them back if he could.

I am left feeling deflated and fraudulent. I can almost tangibly feel my confidence wasting away. So MANY things to fix, and I’m not sure I have the skill to fix them.

I do not dispute any of the mentor’s comments. He is a pro; I am an amateur.  He sees with clarity far in excess of my own.  But I am left with the great fear that the entire manuscript is irredeemable, that no amount of editing can fix a story without a solid structure which might be a fair description of Lunatics at this point
.


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Nevertheless I have paid my money and I all shall forge on: making corrections and edits where I can, restoring chronological order, and trying to make my characters more believable.
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Confessions of an Unpublished Novelist:  FALSE HOPES

3/26/2014

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         JANUARY 7

“Wow, I’m very intrigued. You’re clearly a skilled writer. Reading these pages was entirely pleasurable.”  These were among the first words emailed to me by mentor, after reading the first 30 pages of Lunatics.

Needless to say, I was thrilled, flattered, feeling pretty good about myself. Maybe, I was thinking, this correspondence course was going to be a piece of cake—no deep editing required, just a tinkering with what was already a strong manuscript. I could easily endure thirty weeks of compliments and back-patting from a knowledgeable and appreciative mentor…

How do you spell "fool's paradise"?


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Besides very much enjoying the compliments, I was very impressed at the level of detail my mentor was reading my work. He noted many small inconsistencies that I had glossed over. Perhaps, I thought, my readers would simply give me the benefit of the doubt. After all, it was with such an attitude that I read many other authors—a bit of a softie that way, I suppose.

But no, that was not how this process was going to play out.  My mentor was not going to allow get me away with anything.  If something wasn’t entirely clear to him, if it struck him as an unlikely action for the character, or an unconvincing choice of words, he was going to let me know right away and expect me to fix it.

Good, I thought. Bring it on. I have been in a writing group for several years. It has been a valuable experience in many ways, but no member of the group has ever been prepared to challenge my writing with such vigour. 

And finally my mentor brought up the question of Point of View (POV), professing he was a stickler about keeping it absolutely consistent.  He had found at least one instance where I had strayed in this matter.

Okay, okay, little things… I would happily fix them up. No problem. The important thing was the mentor liked my work.

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Alas… the honeymoon was to be short-lived…
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    ​Author

    Brian d'Eon, fiction writer: whose work modulates between speculative, historical and magical realism.

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