November 19, 2012
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Changing One Name
It is phenomenally quiet here right now. Annie is with Lisa on a play-date, Riley went to work to protect Nancy, Susan, who is visiting for the holiday, has gone to see her sister, writer’s group is over and here I am.
Home.
Alone.
No recuperating partner, no barking dogs: nothing but an abnormally skinny old cat and the blinking cursor.
I should be writing the Great American Novel.
I read a segment of the G.A.M. to my writers group today. As I was reading it it occurred to me that very likely unless my co-writers also live inside my head, they probably had no idea what that particular segment was about. They didn’t. I have the sense the entire book has that effect but they’re too polite to tell me. I have read 7 chapters to them so far, and by the end of chapter 7 they told me they get lost because two of the main characters have similar names.
So I changed one character’s name.
Which will, gradually, change his personality. I’m okay with that–in terms of the plot to the story he was barely more than a surrogate reader, the one who says, “Hey, wait–what the hell are all of you talking about?” But every name has a personality that comes with it, and a simple change of that one word can alter the course of the entire story.
But because I changed his name, and because there were only 4 of us at group today so it was a more intimate setting and each of us had a longer interaction time, we ended up in the inevitable discussion, “Now…who is Xxxx again?”
Try changing your younger brother’s name and then explaining how the people in your family are related to someone who has never met your family.
One of the problems with a writers group is volume. You only have so much time you can devote to each member before everyone else gets restless. So we read about 5 pages a week. If they sat down and read what I have of the manuscript beginning to drop-off, about half would lay it down, another quarter would be hopelessly lost and the remaining readers would have a steady incoming stream of information that would plug holes left by the remaining 6 days and 23-1/2 of every week. And we read our stuff out loud. I write novels for the reader’s eye. I have written stuff for the ear–it’s a different style. Different word choices, different sentence lengths. No short-breathed asthmatic writes stories to be read aloud in the style of Faulkner: they would eventually just turn purple and tumble off the stage.
This particular segment of the story has the main characters referring to a character who is not physically there. In fact, neither of them have seen him in a long time (nor have they seen each other in that same time period.) It strikes the listener as a shot out of the dark. Why?
Because they haven’t seen each other in that same period of time, and he was instrumental in creating that distance between them. Because when they were together, he was the third member of the Musketeers. For the same reason they referred to him six pages back and eleven pages back and 15 pages back… He was a part of their joint lives, which they are trying to either re-create or dispose of,depending on the clues they receive from each other.
However the questions are good because now I know what I need to go back and trowel into the cracks to support the bricks of the story.
As for you who haven’t read the story at all: now wasn’t that fun?
My dog has not called home. Perhaps I should locate my new cell phone which still does not have voicemail because I have flunked the intuitive directions of how to set it up. There’s a button missing somewhere. The last thing I want to do is leave my dog with her sitter too long–the woman is worth her weight in gold.
And on it goes…
