December 7, 2005
That title might suggest I'm asking whether I'm like my main character, but that's not what I'm going after at all.

Something interesting happened while I was writing yesterday. I'm working on a novel featuring the main character Joanna Dancing. For the first eight chapters, which are all written in the third person, single POV (hers), I've referred to her as Dancing. Other characters, and she's really only interacted with a couple, might call her Joanna or they might call her Dancing, but I as the narrator called her Dancing.

Then boom, I start chapter 9 and suddenly I start calling her Joanna. It wasn't completely intentional, and I struggled with it a bit.

You see, how close do I bring in the reader? How far out do I keep them? I like the intimacy of first-person, but for a number of reasons I don't want to use that for this book, mostly the nature of the book, which is very action and suspense oriented. Yet I want readers to know Joanna and like her and have sympathy, etc. At the same time, she's a woman who keeps her emotions very tightly wrapped, repressed is a good word, for a number of reasons.

This goes all the way back to college when I studied Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls" in 20th Century American Lit and this issue of why Hemingway only referred to the main character by his last name. It was a distancing technique.

So here's a question I need to ask myself. I kept the reader distant for a good 60 pages or so. Now I brought them in. Partly this may be in response that the first 60 pages or so are non-stop action, and I do mean non-stop. Joanna and the other character, Dan Webber, are on the run from what appears to be three separate groups of bad guys, all intent on either kidnapping or killing Webber, or perhaps even one of them wants to protect Webber and get him out of harm's way.

So should I, when I re-write, shift all the early "Dancings" to "Joannas?" Or does this shift reflect a shift to a more internal period in the book, where it's now less about moving the story along and more about breaking down the wall between Joanna and the reader--and not coincidentally, about breaking down the wall between Joanna and Dan Webber. He has to decide whether to trust her and vice versa, and not just a little bit, but all the way. He's reluctantly trusted her with his life up to this point, but if they're going to continue, he needs to trust her with everything else--why they're hunting him and possibly who they are. But in order for him to do that, he wants to know more about Joanna other than her obvious survival and defense skills.

It's a trick, actually, a balancing act, and what I can only really operate on is gut instincts. At the same time, I have some idea what I want to achieve, and it's likely that my subconscious has some notion how to achieve it without the more conscious assistance I can offer.

Or at least, I hope so.

Best,
Mark Terry