Scaffolding 3 - Streamlining

In my last entry when I wrote “streamlining emotionally” as part of the process of writing the novel, I did not mean limiting any emotional content within the story.  No, I was thinking about my choice to write the novel originally in the first person.  

Calling this decision a choice (or even a decision) is disingenuous in that, I never considered any other option when I began writing.  Or, if I did, the choice was lightning quick, feeling as opposed to thinking.  In retrospect I knew (or hoped I knew) that the intensity of the first person would bring an energy and momentum to the story.  And it did work: using the first person helped me get the story onto the page.  

As it turned out, the first person narration was scaffolding.  When I began revising, I could feel that there was something scattered and diffused about the text that was preventing me from pulling the pieces of the story together.  The focus shifted all the time in a way that didn’t feel right.  Early readers saw and pondered the problem.  I remember sending one of these brave souls a section both in the first person and the the third and getting a resounding response: “Go for the third!”

Dismantling the first person, shifting the story to the third, made me examine every sentence and allowed magic to happen.  As I changed the pronouns and made verbs agree I found again and again that I had to do much more than that as new ideas flowed in, along with descriptions, dialogue, and action, you name it.  I had to rewrite whole sentences and paragraphs and as I did, I began to see how the stories within the story were intuitively linked to the larger story of Poppy’s day.    

Is there a theme here?  Yes.  Getting the story out is only the first step.  You must be willing to re-examine every aspect of your first draft willing to question every choice you’ve made and in the process take the scaffolding down letting the story stand on its own.