(WARNING: I have no idea if this will be inter­est­ing or use­ful to any­one, but it is a look inside the process of a work­ing nov­el­ist. Pro­ceed with caution.)

It all started out so sim­ply. I wanted to tell the story of Ghost Ronin from the sidekick’s per­spec­tive, à la Wat­son & Holmes. The prob­lem is that while our pro­tag­o­nist and nar­ra­tor are together in the first chap­ter, they don’t share a scene again until act three. For most of the book, the pro­tag­o­nist (Mike) is act­ing alone, and the nar­ra­tor (Chris) is nowhere to be seen. So the end result is that we have one chap­ter of first per­son nar­ra­tion, then nine chap­ters of what appears to be third per­son, then back to first per­son again for the final five chap­ters of the book. The nine chap­ters in the mid­dle are tech­ni­cally still first per­son nar­ra­tion, still Chris telling Mike’s story, but it doesn’t sound that way because there’s no action for Chris in those chap­ters. The idea is that since the entire book is told in past tense, Chris is relay­ing all this to the reader at some point down­stream in the time­line from the events of the entire book and can tell us what Mike was doing with­out him because Mike clued him in to what he did first.

So here’s the ques­tion. Has any­one done this? And who’s to say the entire book has to be done in one point of view anyway?

Most books are, of course, because it’s the safe way to go. Any time we as writ­ers diverge from that we’re tak­ing risks. But some­times it works out pretty well. One of my favorite exam­ples is Stephen King’s Chris­tine. The first act is told from the first per­son nar­ra­tion of Denny, the best friend of Christine’s new owner. Denny breaks his leg and is out of com­mis­sion for the sec­ond act, where the story is told in third per­son nar­ra­tion, and we get to see what Chris­tine does when no one is look­ing. Then Denny comes back into the pic­ture for the third act to try to save his friend from the pos­sessed, demonic car and the last act is again in Denny’s first per­son nar­ra­tion. It works well, and I think that’s why this has always been one of my favorite King nov­els. But again, do you have to be Stephen King to pull this off? (I might argue that while not his first novel – that would be Car­rie–Chris­tine was com­par­a­tively early in King’s career and that he wasn’t then the 800-​pound lit­er­ary gorilla he is now.)

There are sev­eral ways I can go here. One way is to make Chris more of an active nar­ra­tor, com­ment­ing and insert­ing his own opin­ions into the nar­ra­tive while he tells Mike’s story. This keeps Chris in front of the reader while keep­ing it Mike’s story. It also makes the nar­ra­tive pep­pier, some­thing I’ve tended to avoid in third per­son nar­ra­tive. I’ve his­tor­i­cally tended more towards the Asi­mov, invis­i­ble nar­ra­tor side than the Neal Stephen­son Snow Crash in your face nar­ra­tor. Could be an inter­est­ing challenge.

Another sug­ges­tion I’ve got­ten is to jump straight from chap­ter one to their reunion in chap­ter 11, and tell the pre­ced­ing nine chap­ters in flash­back as Mike brings Chris up to speed. I don’t like this idea because I think it sucks all the momen­tum out of the story. Basi­cally we end up with two Army bud­dies sit­ting in a liv­ing room telling war sto­ries for the major­ity of the book. Not that you can’t make a com­pelling book that way, but that’s not what this story is about.

My some­times writ­ing part­ner Josh Curry (@tibbarerew on Twit­ter if you want to harass him) had a sim­i­lar, but much more com­pli­cated idea. (This sur­prises no one.) He also sug­gested I jump straight from the end of chap­ter one to the begin­ning of chap­ter eleven, maybe throw in a few graphs about Chris com­ing home from Afghanistan, strug­gling with PTSD, and then rein­tro­duce Mike and keep going with the story, drop­ping in the pre­vi­ous nine chap­ters I skipped in bits and bites of flash­back as our heroes go about their plan. This seems to me to actu­ally be doable, but I balk at it for two rea­sons. One, it would be really hard. And two, it would mean com­pletely restruc­tur­ing the book. Right now the book is set up as a playlist because I’ve estab­lished Chris as a grafted-​to-​his-​iPod music junkie, start­ing off each chap­ter with the lyrics of that track in the playlist. Each track ide­ally cap­tures the mood or events of that chap­ter in Chris’s mind. Josh’s idea com­pletely jum­bles that whole structure.

In the end, I real­ized two things. One, the Robots are right. The first per­son nar­ra­tive is an affec­ta­tion that not only isn’t nec­es­sary to the story, but in many ways obstructs it. In my readthrough, I noticed sev­eral scenes that I really shouldn’t lose, but that I can’t explain within my nar­ra­tive struc­ture since nei­ther Mike nor Chris were actu­ally there to wit­ness the scene. In order to do this story jus­tice, I have to tell it from the third per­son. I can still keep the playlist struc­ture, espe­cially if I start the book with a quote from Chris, some­thing along the lines of, “Life is a playlist. You just have to pick the right songs.”

The other thing I real­ized is that in order to do this prop­erly, I’m going to have to scrap the 20,000 words I’ve already got and start over. I know where I’m going with the story and how I’m going to get there, but very lit­tle in the draft I already have is usable. And if I’m going to start over, I’m going to need time to focus. Time I don’t have with NaNoW­riMo com­ing up. Bet­ter to spend Octo­ber ramp­ing up for Sins of the Moth­ers and record­ing podcasts.