A challenging POV rewrite!

A Challenging POV Rewrite! by Maree Anderson for Writers Gone Wild

Do you remember a while back when I was in fits because I was writing a novella and the characters just wouldn't let me to write The End? (See my July 23rd post.) A few you you -- me, included! -- came to the conclusion that my characters demanded a longer story and I was just gonna have to suck it up and play the game.

Well, I did eventually manage to find a satisfying way to wrap things up and still miraculously keep to the intended word count, but that's not the end of the story. I submitted it for an anthology and it eventually got rejected. Oh well. Them's the breaks. And because it was written specifically for that one particular market, it wasn't really suitable for submitting elsewhere.

I figured it was just one of those unfortunate set-backs and I'd move on. Except I haven't.

I decided that I really did love the characters far too much to give up on them and leave them languishing on my hard-drive. And as I'd written the original story in 1st person heroine's point of view, I figured I may as well challenge myself a bit and treat it like an official revision. By that, I mean pretend that an editor liked the concept and the plot but just couldn't find a market for a 1st person POV story. I would pretend that this fictional editor asked me to rewrite it in 3rd person and re-submit.

Nothing like playing "let's pretend".... You always suspected that I live in a fantasy world, right?

Seriously, though, I like a challenge and I haven't tried to do anything like this before with my previous manuscripts. So first things first: change every single relevant "I" and "my" and "me" (etc) to "she" and "her" and... whatever. Not as easy as it sounds because I couldn't do a global Search and Replace without screwing up all the conversation excerpts. So manually it was. And I must admit, I'm still finding the occasional "She wrinkled my nose" and other delightfully incomprehensible bits and pieces, LOL. Hopefully I'll winnow them all out when I do the final edit.

The next challenge is of course writing in the hero. I mean, he's there in part, because obviously the heroine was already interacting with and reacting to him, interpreting what he might be feeling at any given time from his words, tone of voice, facial expressions and actions. But the reader would only know him through the heroine's eyes so at this stage he's pretty flat and one-dimensional. He's not his own man--or in this case, alien!--quite yet.

So now I'm fleshing him out, giving him his own thoughts and emotions, allocating him his own scenes. And the wonderful thing about it is that I'm learning more about him with each new excerpt from his POV that I write. (Or steal from the heroine and give to him, for that matter!)

I'm not saying that I'd want to write another story this way but it's a fun process for the most part. Even more interesting, since the novella had to be pretty tightly plotted, giving the hero his own voice is adding not only a new dimension to the story, but the wordcount is now edging toward novel-length and I'm only three-quarters done with it.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You guys were right all along: seems this story really didn't want to end, LOL.

Hey, any of you done this kind of POV revision for real? Would love to know how it turned out.... And if it's something you would ever want to tackle again!

Cheers,

Maree