Jeri Smith-Ready

Shifty eyes

Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
--The Who, "Who Are You?"

Damn these multiple points-of-view. What was I thinking?

Every time I get swinging on my latest manuscript, -BOOM!- the scene ends and I'm in a different character's head. Someone who thinks, speaks, and acts nothing like the person I was just inhabiting. It's like Being John Malkovich, then suddenly Being Lindsey Lohan, Being Rob Lowe, and Being Anna Nicole Smith.

And no, I don't see any of those actors playing my characters, although I think Malkovich could play a five-year-old female Indonesian conjoined twin and still pull it off*.

It's a wee bit tempting to write all of one character's scenes throughout the book, then write each of the others'. It beats not writing at all, I suppose. I used to skip around all over the place within a manuscript, but the last two novels have been written straight through, beginning to end.

Sigh...guess I should follow my own advice and write each novel the way it demands, not try to cram it into an existing mold or assume that what's worked before will work again. What's that saying brokerage firms always use: "past performance does not guarantee future results"?

*And no, there are no five-year-old female Indonesian conjoined twins in my novel; it was a hypothetical.

Labels: writing life

• posted by Jeri @ 12:01 AM
• 1 comments