Italic Persons

...and now I'm back to hating it.

The problem I'm having with the novel, I've decided, is I'm not connecting emotionally with the character. I don't know if this is a flawed character, a plot that doesn't support her properly, or just over-familiarity on my part.

But I'm going to venture it might be voice and narrative problems. Because it has those anyhow and they need to be fixed.

I actually gave sincere thought to re-writing it all in third person. The discussion of the pros and cons and comparisons of the two is fascinating and writerly but I don't have time this morning to go into it (Brandon Sanderson has a two-hour lecture on the subject, and there's still much more to say.)

In the end, what has convinced me is a thought. Or rather, a bunch of thoughts.

This is a character who has a very verbal inner life. If her typical thought was "I have to get out of here!" it could easily be recast in non-verbal mode; "The water was rising. She had to get out of there."

Her thoughts tend to be more like, "...crossing my Rubicon. Or was that Hellespont?" And that needs to be directly quoted. There are two primary ways of indicating what most books call "direct thoughts," aka verbalized thoughts; as italics, and with dialog tags.

Italics are out; fortunately I'm not using them for foreign language excerpts but I am using them for text dialog. And dialog tags? Having endless "...she thought"s littering up the text wasn't going to fly.

Oh, and besides, going first person allows you to slip in and out of direct thoughts, putting the color of the voice in all of the narrative, "...the water was rising and I'd burned my boats. Damn you, Cortez! I had to get out of here."



So, yeah. On a surface level, there is a lot of passive construction....that is, "there" formations. That is to say; passive construction is all over the current draft! There...sigh...are also too many attribution tags. And "I" formations. You get closer and more emotionally connected when the narrative flows without the intrusive "I."

Related to this; this is a very thinky character. She is consciously observing the world and drawing conclusions. That means I am using -- over-using, probably -- constructions like "I saw," "I heard."

And maybe along the same trail as these corrections is the ways I can handle the problem of seeing the swan's legs.

See, this is an adventure. At the center of the adventure is a cool character; cool name, cool job, does cool things. Slowly, and often to her surprise, my protagonist is becoming this person. But that means she's on the inside, seeing the effort.

A swan is like a ballet dancer; moving gracefully, effortlessly, a light smile (well, not on the swan). Under the water, the swan is paddling away frantically. Just as inside, the ballet dancer is sweating and hurting and bleeding into her toe shoes.

So when Athena Fox smiles a dangerous smile, then launches herself into a death-defying leap, it looks different from the inside. Inside she's frantically bluffing and ever-so-conscious of faking it and terrified of the consequences...there's never the freedom of flight, the moment of grace.

So I'm going to hit the Notes section of my Scrivener document and see if I can't chart a path that allows the reader, and yes, Penny herself, to experience those moments when the theme song kicks in and Athena Fox proceeds to do what she does best.

And maybe that will finally let me like this story again.



(I have to say...I've got a really strong longing for the Bronze Age now, for Setna and Kes and the dour Mycenaean mercenary, for weaving and goat herding and the rocky slopes of Crete, for the relative simplicity of palace politics in the capitol of Egypt's New Kingdom.)