my "bad novel in a drawer"

so i've been wrestling with the voice of what i have been calling my new novel. voice is not usually an issue for me. plot is. length is. so i worked this time to find the bones of a story complicated enough to sustain a regular-length novel. i thought i had. but then i struggled over who was telling my story.

an old actress dies hard, i guess and as the storyteller of this tale, i wasn't sure who i was playing. not good = bad voice. i started with a "spoonriver anthology" approach where everyone tells their part. nope, not this time. next i tried an "our town" style omni narrator. huh-uh. now, i am trying it from the perspective of the main character, third person. hm. third person, not first? that voice? maybe.

yesterday i was ready to give up. i hated the story. i didn't want to "play" the part of my main character. i wanted to toss the whole thing out and start over. but then i remembered that i had felt that way with my first novel and so i wondered if there was a way to carry on. and so i did what all terrified writers do, i took a breath and wrote another chapter.

and you know what? scenes happened. my characters showed up and surprised me with what they knew about themselves, begging me to trust them with their story. where do these people come from that live inside my mind? and where do they go? and more importantly will any of us care that they have appeared for a moment in a story that i have written? there is no way of knowing until too much agony has transpired.

i've heard that every good writer has at least one bad novel hidden in a drawer somewhere. so after i wrote that new chapter, i shut my computer and made a deal with myself that i this one was mine.

and so for now i am working my own "bad novel in a drawer." it is my rite of passage after all. and, if in some wonderful turn of events, this novel should turn out to be something beautiful, well then, won't that be nice.