Palouse Writing Project - 9. August 2007 Progress Report

It’s summer. I’ve fallen off the page-a-day wagon, but I’m now have written seventy—that I’ve barely reread. I want to piece together a lot more of the novel before I do any major editing.

As I indicated in my June progress report, I’ve decided to make David, the friend of the genius musician—he still a violinist—a well grounded character. He’s out, he’s been out since early teens, his parents have accepted him, he has accepted himself and he’s a mature adult. Of course, once I’ve formed the character, I see the posting about too-perfect characters—aargh! So, is a well-grounded, out young gay man too perfect?

In recent days, I’ve been working on the earlier years of the Micah story, and I’ve taken him, his brother Kingman and Kingman’s lover to Seattle to spend a weekend with Jake and Robbie, from the Jake’s Hand series. I’m going to have Jake and Robbie be the benefactors to Micah, who is twelve at the time of the visit, and it will be they who are going to be hurt almost as much as Micah’s mother by Micah’s rejection of his music.

The trip from eastern Washington to Seattle with his brother and life mate to Robbie’s and Jake’s is intended, also, to give Micah a view of gay relationships that will affect his later life—in particular Micah’s relationship with his deeply religious mother and with David, who will become his lover and life mate.

I’m finding writing the story with an omniscient narrator—in third person—very rewarding. I can narrow the narrator’s focus to just one of the protagonists, so it’s almost like a first-person perspective, but when I want to expand the horizon—for a reaction that would be contrived to report if written in the first person—I can do so easily. Plus, I can switch to another protagonist’s POV without having to reset the whole story. In fact, as I think about it, I’m using the third-person narrative in a narrow way—to simulate a series of first-person points of view without having the awkwardness of breaking the story each time a new character is at the center of the narrative.

I miss the poetry of Jake’s Side. I read through a lot of poetry to find the right piece to fits Jake’s mood, but he was a character who loved poetry and would have found something that spoke to him. I suppose I could make David in Palouse a poetry lover, but that seems contrived and too much like my earlier work.

Till next time,

RE-C