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So the skeptics were right!

First Person Retrospective

Since I decided to write my Secret Novel in first person, I’ve been rereading some of my favorite first person novels. There are two major approaches to first person:

Immediate First Person: Sometimes this means first person present tense, which is as intimate and immediate as it gets. However, even first person past tense can feel very much “in the now”; the narrator tells what she felt at the moment she is describing, nothing more. She doesn’t “cheat” by implying she knows more about what happens next any more than the reader. If she misjudges someone, this is revealed only when she herself discovers it.

I turned around when I heard the shot, crying, “Edwin, don’t!”

My eyes fell on the smoking gun first, then the body, and in my shock it took me a dozen heartbeats to make sense of the French manicure on the hand holding the gun, or the fedora hat soaking in a pool of blood.

Gloria met my eyes. “That’s right. I was the one who went to the pawn shop last week. You never suspected. You dismissed me — just as Edwin did.”

Retrospective First Person: Many first person books, however, take the opposite tact. They are written as faux memoirs, in a retrospective mood, in which the narrator of the events slyly or absent-mindedly refers to future events. This kind of narrative voice can compare past knowledge and emotional states with future ones (the “present” of the narrator).

When I first met Gloria, I dismissed her in one glance as a mouse. She spoke only in monosyllebles at that first dinner. Her husband Edwin boomed over the platters of greasy food, and continued to rattle the empty glasses long after the wine ran out. I paid scant attention to his tirades after the first half hour.

“We have to get together again,” he promised when I finally begged the waiter to bring the check. He pumped my hand and clapped my back at the same time. “This was marvelous, we have to do this again sometime.”

I would have wasted less dread on the prospect had I guessed that would be the last time I would see him alive.

There are dangers of telling too much, becoming too conversational and chatty in any version of first person. Either method, handled well, can work. The question, as always, is what works best with this story?

How does one determine whether a sense of retrospection or a sense of immediacy is preferable for a story?

In my blog about first person vs third person, I recieved some wonderful tips from the commenters.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too.

blurb

http://www.redroom.com/blog/lauren-lise-baratz-logsted/blurbs-i-getting#comment-14158

Death’s Gift

My adored beta readers are starting to return crits to me on my extremely long manuscript for the story formerly known as The Corn Maiden.

At first, the discovery of fatal flaws in my baby drove me to despair. I planned to hack the whole thing in pieces and start all over. Further thought — and sobriety — offered an alternative solution, involving changes to key scenes. Hopefully this will save the whole thing from the scrape heap.

I’m impatient to gnaw on to fresh meat, so I want to get this book cooked and out of the oven.

In honor of the revisions, I toyed with a new title — which, of course, required new cover art.

Whatdaya all think of the latest title? Is it intriguing? Think it stinks? Prefer the other one? Like the title in theory, but for some completely other book besides the one I’ve written?

I have two variations:

Death’s Gift

Lady Death’s Gift

I like the starkness of the first one, but the second sounds more like a fantasy to me.

Any thoughts?

* * *

P.S. I have covers for the Secret Novel too, but I can’t show them yet! Damn!

The Secret Nature of Things

Everything looked beautiful, in the freshness of early spring. From a thicket close by came three beautiful white swans, rustling their feathers, and swimming lightly over the smooth water. The duckling remembered the lovely birds, and felt more strangely unhappy than ever.

“I will fly to those royal birds,” he exclaimed, “and they will kill me, because I am so ugly, and dare to approach them; but it does not matter: better be killed by them than pecked by the ducks, beaten by the hens, pushed about by the maiden who feeds the poultry, or starved with hunger in the winter.”

Then he flew to the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans. The moment they espied the stranger, they rushed to meet him with outstretched wings.

“Kill me,” said the poor bird; and he bent his head down to the surface of the water, and awaited death.

But what did he see in the clear stream below? His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan.

To be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg. He now felt glad at having suffered sorrow and trouble, because it enabled him to enjoy so much better all the pleasure and happiness around him; for the great swans swam round the new-comer, and stroked his neck with their beaks, as a welcome.

— by Hans Christian Andersen (1844)

Spring, and the holidays it brings, makes me think of this fairytale. Not just because it involves eggs and ducklings and blooming spring trees and swans, but because it seems to me to speak of older stories as well, of princes who are really slaves, and carpenters who are really princes. How many of the things we see around us have a secret nature, which we too often dismiss or despise? Yet if we looked closer, we would find true beauty.

May that also be true of our writing.

NY Times on Advances

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/books/review/Meyer-t.html

In the preface to “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Dave Eggers broke form by telling the reader he received $100,000 for the manuscript, which — after his detailed expenses — netted him $39,567.68.

…

As a payment to be deducted from future royalties, an advance is a publisher’s estimate of risk. Figures fluctuate based on market trends, along with an author’s sales record and foreign rights potential, though most publishers I talked to cited $30,000 as a rough average. In standard contracts, the author receives half up front, a quarter on acceptance of the manuscript and a quarter on publication, though that model is changing, said the literary agent Eric Simonoff, whose clients include James Frey and Jhumpa Lahiri. “Now we see advance amounts being paid in thirds, fourths and even fifths,” Simonoff said in an interview. “For a writer dependent on those funds, that’s not an advance, it’s a retreat.”

The numbers can sound much bigger than they are. Take a reported six-figure advance, Roy Blount Jr., the president of the Authors Guild, said in an e-mail message. “That may mean $100,000, minus 15 percent agent’s commission and self-employment tax, and if we’re comparing it to a salary let us recall (a) that it does not include any fringes like a desk, let alone health insurance, and (b) that the book might take two years to write and three years to get published. . . . So a six-figure advance, while in my experience gratefully received, is not necessarily enough, in itself, for most adults to live on.”

…

In 1971, for example, Viking sold paperback rights to “The Day of the Jackal” to Bantam for 36 times the $10,000 hardcover advance it had paid its author, Frederick Forsyth. “Agents realized that they should be the ones holding auctions for their authors and get advances more in line with the anticipated total value of their books,” Georges Borchardt, who brokered the hardcover rights, said in an interview. (Full disclosure: Borchardt, who is my agent, got me $50,000 for my first, nonfiction book.)

…The notion of the ‘first book with flaws’ is gone; now we see a novelist selling 9,000 hardcovers and 15,000 paperbacks, and they see themselves as a failure.”

…

At PublicAffairs, an independent house specializing in current events, advances are as good as capped, said its founder, Peter Osnos. Osnos paid an average advance of $40,000 for PublicAffairs’ four New York Times best sellers in 2008, including Scott McClellan’s “What Happened,” sums greatly augmented by royalty payments when the books hit it big. “If the market says you need to pay $10 million to acquire a title, no one requires a publisher to pay it,” he said in an interview. “You’re not going out of business if you don’t pay that money.”

Today, some publishers are experimenting with low or no advances. In exchange for low-five-figure advances, the boutique press McSweeney’s, founded by Eggers, shares profits with its authors 50-50, as does the new imprint Harper Studio, which offers sub-six-figure advances.