Who Tells Your Story?

Okay, so this past week I had the chance to go to a bookstore. This shouldn't be, like, a planned outing, but in our household it totally is. See, my hubby and I are both teachers and we both adore books. And we're poor--mostly because of spending too much money on books. So a trip to an actual bookstore is a rare activity just on principle alone.

I always carry a notebook with me, and this day at the bookstore was no different. I usually jot down titles I want so I can research them more or put them on hold at the library or whatever.

This particular trip, however, something struck me. Who's telling the story? Who tells the story has always interested me, so much that I've read over my notes from writing conferences on this very subject.

I'm very comfortable writing in first person (three novels done in first person), and I absolutely adore present tense (one in third person, present tense). But I'm trying to stretch myself both as a reader and a writer. Well, maybe not too much stretchage. I still pretty much only read (and write) YA paranormal / fantasty / science fiction.

So here are the novels I was considering and I jotted down who's telling the story. I'm calling this market research instead of Elana-is-the-biggest-geek-on-the-planet. So stick with that, okay?

1. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan: First person / present

2. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare: Third person / past (multiple narrators)

3. The Dust of 100 Dogs by A.S. King: Third person / past

4. Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson: First person / present

5. I.Q. by Roland Smith: First person / past

6. SilverFin by Charlie Higson: Third person / past

7. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: First person / present

8. Need by Carrie Jones: First person / present

9. The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld: First person / present

10. Feed by M.T. Anderson: First person / past and present (Can I just say that I l-o-v-e this approach? I can, cuz it's my blog. And this is what I do in Control Issues. Looove it. ETA: And you can see what I mean by this by clicking here. Not a link clicker? Well, that's the announcement saying I won a runner-up prize in MSFV's secret agent contest! Then you can click on mine and read the first 250 words that [literary agent] Ms. Kate Schafer Testerman liked enough to request to see the first five chapters! It's now a Squeeeee! day!)


Market Research Findings:

• Out of these ten YA novels, which I know is an extremely small sample size, 7 of them are written in first person, 3 in third person. That's a wow-moment right there.
  
  
• 5 (and part of a sixth) of them are written in present tense. Hmm...is this a new trend? I can think of a few other books that are present tense (A Great and Terrible Beauty, for one) or first person (The Hollow).
  
  
• I have actually only read 1 1/2 of these books, I merely flipped them open and read the first page or so to see who was telling the story. My husband sets a time limit when we go to the bookstore. No, really. He does.

So, since my "market research" I'm seriously considering who's going to tell my next story. I'm leaning toward a first person / present tense story, but that won't work with the sequel to Control Issues. So I may be going all chick lit on you, which sort of seems to lend itself to first person / present tense. Who knows?

But here is a question you should know the answer to: Who tells your story? How do they do it? Why did you choose them?

Revisions

I've been waiting for my turn in the blog chain before I posted again, but it looks like it's going to be a few more days. I'm relieved, actually, because I have nothing of value to add--yet. I keep thinking that something awesome is going to hit me. Hopefully, it will be something about writing, and not something like, I don't know, a car or a bus or something. We'll see.

So I've been thinking a lot this week. More than my usual quota of deep thoughts. :D It's time to revise ye olde manuscript again. Just when you think you've got something good, you realize you really don't. I received a great suggestion this week, something I knew needed addressing, but didn't quite know how to address.

Thus, the thinking. I couldn't work on the revisions, because I didn't know how. So I thought and thought and thought about how I could make the revisions without rewriting everything. I can't. Part of the story is going to be lost, well, at least lost to the reader. Of course, I have the original on my computer. But after all the driving and thinking, eating and thinking, making dinner and thinking, I finally concluded that the suggested revisions are A) necessary, B) worthwhile, and C) an incredible amount of work.

So I rolled up my sleeves and tackled the project. The first thing I did was make a spreadsheet where I could write in word counts, POV, and a snippet of the plot for each chapter. I methodically went through the manuscript filling out the sheet with title chapters (yes, they change and I don't fix it), word count for each chapter, each point of view character, and the plot and sub-plots. I could immediately see why the revisions were suggested. I could see places to cut, things that weren't necessary. But I still didn't know how to do what needed to be done.

Several hours of stewage later, I decided that the only way to make the manuscript better was to rip it apart and attempt to put it back together again. And it hurt. A lot. I started yesterday and each scene gets copied and pasted into a new document. Analyzed. More thinking. Stewage over a grape soda or a popsicle, depending on my mood. Then some rewriting. Major rewriting.

I made it to chapter three. Whew, only thirty-three more to go. If I can keep up the pace, this should only take me eleven days...yeah, right. It took me five just to get started, so I'm sure it will be a lot longer than that. Hopefully, every minute will be worth it in the end.

Reading: SABRIEL by Garth Nix.