Inconsistent Voices

The feeling of victory has faded, the next battle has commenced.  The process of editing and revising is now under way - and what a task it is!  In many ways, getting the story written is the easy part, even when it did not always feel that way. It is when I sit down to revise and edit that brain fatigue becomes a much larger problem than it did during the first draft.

Voices - which one for the narration - which one for which character.....  which characters are more important?  When the story was flowing onto paper or screen, there was a no time to consider "voice" or "style" - the important thing was to get down the facts and conversations as they appeared, and the voice happened instinctively.

In some places, the flow was so smooth that the style was elegant, the language was evocative, and the images were clear; elsewhere, it was clunky and flat.  I knew where I was going, more or less, but the prose was wooden, the conversations between characters were stilted or forced.

In some places, narrative and conversation are sparse but good, almost in the manner of Hemingway while in other parts, a degree of poetry has entered the flow, and the prose and dialogue become almost lyrical - at least, until it becomes overly ornate, veering towards florid.  Re-reading the draft, I can't help wondering if whatever I might have been reading the night before had entered into my work, much like the way that the spices and flavours of supper can haunt the bathroom the next morning.  I suppose such flow-through is unavoidable, but is it good?

In this novel, the first character to come to mind - the one who provided me with the spark for theme and story - is dead very early in the story, glimpsed only briefly.  He never speaks directly from the page, instead, his words and actions are known by the traces, even the scars, they leave in the lives and words of the other characters.

The character first conceived of as the protagonist - the person who will pursue the truth - remains important, and I have a solid image of him in my mind.  However, two other characters appear, at first in minor roles, but soon become equally significant and interesting - they need their voices and their back stories too.

Inconsistencies need to be located and eliminated, or smoothed out - unless, of course, they are essential ones in the sense of the different versions of an event told by witnesses, or different assessments of a character by other characters.

Are the clues too obvious?  Or are there too few?  It is a very delicate balance between leaving the reader feeling that the ending is just right, even if unpredicted, and feeling that it is so "out of left field" as to be unfair to them and unsatisfactory/illogical/just plain wrong for the story.  No matter how illogical and inexplicable our real world may seem and feel, our reader expects us, our characters, and our story - especially the ending - to "make sense".

It leaves me wanting to bury the file for the novel and start writing short stories again - quick, simple and complex at the same time, and satisfying in that a job started in one hour can be finished in the next.

But that would be giving up on something that still has a lot of potential (not to mention that bane of the economist and psychologist - "sunk cost"), so, despite the battle cries of the warring bands of grandchildren who are circling my study, and the roaring engine of the mechanic - who knows what he is doing to that car? - only twenty metres away, it is "once more into the breach, dear pen, once more, and tighten up the narrative with our prosey skill"