Accepting Change

Part of the exercise of writing something as large as a novel (current word count: 81,457) is being comfortable with change.

As a rule, I kind of dislike change. In my personal life, I mean. I like things the way they are because ... well, it's the way things are. You know what to expect (for the most part). Change brings the unknown. Change is the unknown.

But with writing, change is kind of necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as the story taking a direction you weren't intending (like I said before, that stuff about the characters writing themselves is no joke). Sometimes it's accepting the fact that a story just wasn't meant to be written in the voice you were envisioning.

I had intended on making The Witch of November read as kind of conversational, like you're inside the kids' heads or that the kids are telling you the story. I've successfully managed that voice once or twice before, but that's not my usual style.

Out of all the edits I've done, I edited the diary entries and letters from the 1870s the least. I actually like and am pretty proud of those, and I think it's because I let the voice fit the writing rather than trying to make the writing fit the voice.

Part of the reason I think I found the conversational kid voice so hard is because I was trying to make it funnier than I am. Because I'm really not all that funny. (Well, not consistently ... I'm funny in fits and starts ;)). Trying to force humor is never a good thing, and trying to force a voice on a story that doesn't fit it isn't a good thing, either. Even worse, every time I wrote and rewrote the first chapter (I seriously lost count on what revision I'm on), it sounded less and less like ... me.

So you know what? Screw that voice. I've decided to just write the dang thing in my own style, and in all honesty, it flows a lot easier when I'm just being myself.