If you take a look at the novel writing box in the lower right of my home page you’ll see that I’m writing two novels. A third person mystery novel for adults and a first person young adult urban fantasy novel. It’s not too hard to alternate between the two in terms of mood and vibe, but there is one difficulty that I’ll need to assess: I’m having trouble with the first person point-of-view of the young adult piece. My guess is that this has more to do with writing in first person than alternating from third to first.
The mystery novel is told in various close third person narratives, and I find that a very comfortable medium to write in for me. Writing in first person has proven to be more difficult, at least at novel length. I’ve written short stories in first person, but they are more experiential and scene-based, and that is much easier for me to grasp in first person, I’m guessing.
The reason I chose first person for the young adult piece is simple—I wanted to use a framing device as an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs. His fiction was a huge influence in terms of story telling when I was young. In The Land That Time Forgot he uses a framing device of a manuscript discovered in a bottle. As the narrator describes the situation of him finding the manuscript, he ends by saying the following, a bravura performance of storytelling:
You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself, you will want to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here, omitting quotation marks—which are difficult of remembrance. In two minutes you will forget me.
“In two minutes you will forget me.” Such confidence in the story telling abilities the author must have, I remembered thinking. And, it is true, in two minutes I had forgotten that there was a narrator framing the story. It was a spectacular bit of writing that I never forgot for the rest of my life.
I badly wanted to write something similar—and putting modesty aside—I wanted to duplicate the effect. In short, I wanted to create a nominal framing device that would be forgotten “in two minutes” due to the power of the story telling. So I started to write my young adult novel in this way. But I feel it is simply not working.
Actually, as I wrote the above I feel like I need to be more overt about stealing from the master—he started his novel not with the framing device, but with the story itself. He then pulled himself out to the narrator’s story in finding the manuscript, and then he plunged back into the story. I started with the framing device and then plunged into the story. I think what I’ll do next is move from homage to outright theft and do what Edgar Rice Burroughs did—start in scene, move out to the narrator, and then dive back in.
If that doesn’t work, I’m planning on just giving up and writing it as a straight third person piece. If that happens I’ll know that some mountains simply aren’t meant for me to climb!
