Overhaul the way I'm writing my book???

Ok, I've written that a recent reading aloud of an excerpt from my novel put me in a moment of doubt (read here, if you wish), about everything from my ability to tell the stroy to wondering if it was after-all worthy of being told, or if I should be doing it differently. Then I read a column in Writer's Digest where debut novelists talks about how they broke into the business, and something one said tipped me off on a different way to structure my book.

For background info, what I've been doing is this: telling a story in 2008-2009 thru the points of view of 4 people--Ash and Ginny, a nearing-30 married couple, and Maizy and Curt, Ash's parents. One way of describing my novel is saying that it tries to show how Ash is affected by the way his parents lived their lives, and more specifically, how the choices they made surrounding his conception and his early childhood affected him.

How to start the story, as well as how to tell it, has been a problem from the beginning. Novelist Joyce Magnin read my prologue and didn't like how much backstory was in the opening (point well taken) and suggested maybe I'm trying to do what's a called a framing device, which she did for her first novel. I've determined I'm not doing that. Tracy Higley also read it, and I honestly forget what she said, other than that I should skip the prologue and just start it as chapter 1.

A writer's critique group has read the prologue and opening chapters, and I got a lot of negative feedback about the amount of back story there too. Also, after I'd reworked that prologue/chapter 1 ad nauseum to get it shorter, cleaner, I'd lost the immediacy of Maizy's experience. I'm writing in third person, so I can't use I to get the reader in her head, and all I'd done to shorten and cut backstory try to left my readers saying there was just too much distance between the reader and Maizy--exactly when I need to be hooking the reader, making it impossible for them to NOT turn the page! I cut so much out in my attempt to make backstory shorter, that I lost whatever good was going on before.

Then what hit me when I read the WD article was this: why does it have to even be backstory? What I've got is 2 stories, one suffering from the burden of being in the backstory, though I struggle and struggle trying to put too much attention on it, too many words in it. So why not have two stories running simultaneously, as if they are happening presnetly? That's not unheard of. All this time, I've been writing the 2008-2009 story, with the 1978-1979 story coming out in pieces as backstory through the remembrances of Maizy and Curt. But I've run into problems with this. 1) I regret that the 50-something year old Maizy and Curt remember their earlier life thru the lens of their experiences since--it's very difficult to get to the very naive and raw feelings they had in 1978 without casting whole long portions of the novel in flashback. My answer to this now is, why does it have to be flashback? I've read many a novel twining stories of two different time periods, each being told as if they happening in the present, and the reader can see connections as the 2 stories unravel, although they hardly comment on each other. I love stuff like that. Why can I not tell my story this way? Let us watch Maizy and Curt live their younger lives, and when the 2008-2009 story makes reference to them, we can see they are older and how changed they are. What I've been doing is backwards from that--all the present-happenings we witness are when they are older and I have to try to reach back in their lives to show readers why they are the way they are, when the real heart of the story, its impetus, is in the past.

2) Another problem I've mentioned before in this blog is that I like the germ of a gothic trope I've got going on with the house. But I didn't know how to carry it through in the second half of the book. I think I'm beginning to see though that if I restructure the telling of Maizy and Curt's story, that may be easier.

This is not a simple idea though. It's overwhelming. It requires I rewrite nearly half of what I've written!  (That's daunting when I was feeling I was barely 75% done with my first draft. But it also gives relief because it takes away some things I didn't want to do or didn't know how to do. I didn't really want to delve into Curt's inner world thru his long illness. If i have him be a teller of the story only in 1978-1979, then all I need write of his illness in 2008-209 is thru the eyes of his son and daughter-in-law. I won't have to be in the heads of them . Though I may miss being in Maizy's head at that age. I'll have to rework things I like about her so that other characters can observe them, if I don't let her eyes tell her part of the 2008-2009 story. (But then, who's to say I could have them as POV 2009

One thing I do see is that if I run both stories simultaneously, it will be very keenly dependent on how I interweave them, though initially it could be easy--I can just write each straight out without worrying yet for correlation points. I see already that the pacing will be very different between the two stories. The modern-day one covers a year, the second one may cover a few, but with more gaps, whereas the modern-day one will be a week-to-week plot. The big demand it will place on me, if I go forward with this overhaul, is that I will have to write a lot more of the 1979 stuff that I never did. I have a few scenes visualized--as much as I needed for flashbacks, but I've never really followed Maizy and Curt completely thru their experiences of that time. That will be demanding.

Right now, my principal characters are multi-generational--2 turning 30, 2 nearing 60. If I switch, all my characters will be in the same age bracket. That will definitely change the voice of the book.

But I'm really excited what this change could do for the one theme and using the house as a symbol of sorts.

What I dislike about big changes like this that get my juices flowing is that I can't really take advantage of it in one big gulp like my mind wants to. I'll just have to settle for working at it in sips, hoping the enthusiasm that will wane can sustain me thru the months of rewrites... And where do you start without feeling like whatever you do isn't futile?

I think I will start with my prologue/first chapter with Maizy. I'll see how i like the feel of just letting her story be the story, not backstory. (And here it is, the fruits of my short labor this afternoon: my new prologue. SO far, I like the new prospect. I feel better about this version of the prologue than I've felt about any. I'm hoping it gives the reader enough info to make them want to know more, with nothing extraneous. i want it to propell the reader to the next page.