Hemingway or Michael Crichton?

I don’t know how often it’s appropriate to blog but I foresee these first few weeks being jam-packed with emotion filled, deeply fascinating endeavors to engage eager readers before petering off to a trickle of guilt-ridden obligatory posts fraught with grammatical errors and apathy. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen and sally forth once again.

Neuroses of the day-- I’m in quite a pickle. Two major issues plague my writing and I find myself staring at a blinking cursor which holds my destiny in its tiny electronic hands. Who do I want to be as a writer? My husband and I have been discussing it and he argues that I don’t have to choose before I’ve even published anything whether or not I shall end up a pulp writer, feeding the frenzied masses with melodrama, murder and mayhem, or whether I will be a literary goddess, comparable to my favorite literary gods and goddesses, with my name published alongside Lewis and Tolkien, Austen and Hardy.

So while working on my current piece I obsess, even during the shitty first draft phase (I’m only ten thousand words in) as to whether or not this first venture will define me as a mainstream author or a literary author. And it’s a ridiculous obsession but it haunts my dialogue, my plot choices, my characters… I cannot escape my own hubris. I am envisioning my press clips before I’ve even written ten chapters. It’s ridiculous.

My secondary dilemma has less to do with my own ego and more to do with actual writing. I have three strong main characters in my story. They are all very interesting to me and I completely love each of them with my whole heart. I started out writing in first person narrative and soon discovered that my secondary and tertiary main characters each have as strong of a voice as the first. I want to tell their back stories in their own words.

Several options have come to mind in order to accomplish this. One is to switch narrators each chapter, so that they all get a chance to speak in first person. I’ve seen this used as a technique-- it’s a trademark of author Jodi Picoult, for one. But do I want to be like Jodi Picoult? Is it perfectly legitimate to borrow her technique, even though Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy never did anything so blatantly outside literary rules? Would it make me a bad writer or a mainstream writer or a hack?

Another choice is switching the whole thing to third person omniscient. I’m not nearly as comfortable in this form of narration and it still wouldn’t give my characters a true opportunity to speak in their own voices, unless they go off in some sort of a thoughtful tangent which is italicized for pages on end. This doesn’t seem like an exceptionally good option.

Or I could have them tell their back stories outright to my main narrator. They don’t know each other so it works with the plot. I just don’t know if I wish to have them talk even on, ad nauseum either. I think that would be tedious. I could gradually reveal each one’s story but I think the stories themselves are so much more powerful in each character’s own words.

I’m just going to say screw the rules and write it however I want without thoughts of where it will end up, published or not, or how it looks to the public if I break literary rule or two and give each of my characters a voice and a feather boa if I so choose. That’s what I need to do, right? Feedback on this one would be much appreciated.

Thank you all so much for all the wonderful supportive comments, especially Tiffany… It’s pretty fantastic to hear encouraging words from someone you admire so much.

And now back to your regularly scheduled neuroses.