Commentary on Day Nineteen

Am I failing?

That’s the question that often arises around this time in a novel. I have not been as productive on this novella as I hoped and so on day nineteen of the month I’m probably around 12,000 words into it. Having only written eight of these nineteen instead of the planned nineteen puts a dent in such things. But that’s life, especially with a family.

But here is where doubt begins to rise, somewhere in the backhalf. The beginnings are sometimes tough because you’re learning the novel as you go. I’m not one of those people who makes outlines or comes to understand their characters well before I start. Rather, I learn them on the page as I invent them. This presents immediate challenges but it also leads to the fun of discovery. I learn the characters, the setting, the history as I’m going, inventing all the while.

This is a bit of a different case since I’m using one of literature’s most well known characters, but I am taking my own license with wily Odysseus. The same is true of our Calypso, but I did have to come to understand who she really was as a person.

The style of storytelling in this novel is considerably different than I typically use and I’m sure I’ll come to rewrite many things. Or, not rewrite so much as add scenes with more specificity. Scenes of the two of them.

And I suppose that’s one of the trickier elements of a novella like this. I’m juggling the invention along with the emotions. And I don’t know if the emotions will be here properly in this first draft, which may mean it will initially be a failure, but that’s what the editing process is for. Because I do think specificity is the heart of the matter.

One thing I may do is just shift the whole thing to first person.

I almost certainly will do this, honestly. But we’ll see how the third person narration carries me along for now.

That being said, I think I’m walking this tightrope correctly, at least so far. The narration is leading you to believe one thing, so long as you trust Calypso, but there are plenty of clues and hints in the text that she is understanding things incorrectly, blinded by her own desires.

She projects her feelings into Odysseus and interprets them the way she needs them to be seen, even though the careful reader will see the pain here, the many ways she’s wrong.

But that’s really the whole of the novel. This double helix approach to the narrative which will hopefully work both as a romance but also a horror.