I’ve been working on this YA fantasy for at least two years now, and although I know what’s going to happen, more or less, I’ve really struggled with finding the voice of the novel. I wrote it first in third person, then rewrote parts of it in first, then altered perspectives between two characters and… at this point, I’m super confused. So I set it aside, as one does, and worked on other projects.
Then I (finally!) got around to starting N.K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season.
(Which is, like, so good. So good. But you knew that.)
And a light bulb went off in my head. Because The Fifth Season has a voice that is so individual, and so self-assured, and so masterful, and so out of fucks to give, that encountering it was gloriously liberating. I found myself thinking, “I didn’t know you could do that!”
The Fifth Season showed me you can.
So now I’m psyched to get back to my characters, whom I’ve left abandoned for these past several months, because I think I know what’s been missing. My characters were aching to tell the story their way, and I kept resisting it, thinking it wasn’t “right.” Well, it’s right for them, and I should have trusted that in the first place.