This blog has been all very "onward and upward" since I started it - there is that feeling of progress towards the final goal of getting published. Well, I have now been checked in my advance.
Having completed the book I had another look at what the Agent suggested - and I see that I haven't fully fulfilled my brief - she wants a lot more about the adult relationship - and I haven't been willing to give as much of that as I might have liked... I need to work on that a lot more. But I am having another crisis - should I start all over again, from scratch, re-write every word, not re-cycle anything? The thought fills me with despair - I just can't bring myself to do it. I loved the original novel, it said what I wanted to say - it might not have said very much, it might not have had a really strong story - but I do think it had a beginning a middle and an end... and the character was changed by her experience and understanding.... However, the Agent now has a fantasy of what I could write - a view I initially shared, but am now finding hard to engage with. Yes, I have written it - but I have written it as a story to which the past, the underlying stuff, is very important - and the love story is the culmination of that... she says the heroine must be a changed person: is that essential - Madame Bovary is not a changed person - hence her tragedy... she has gone further and further into being herself - and has paid for that. I would like Lucy to stick to her guns - to be a romantic and a feminist... and not change, but still win... maybe there needs to be a discussion on "a sadder and a wiser man, he work the morrow morn"....
Anyway, the point of this entry is to say - it's all much more difficult than I thought, I need to write MY book, not her book... but on the other hand she is the expert on the market and what people want.
I want to write this book as a vindication of her position - to deal with these points satisfactorily but not to have to succumb to them. Maybe I should email her and see if she can discuss this...
Having completed the book I had another look at what the Agent suggested - and I see that I haven't fully fulfilled my brief - she wants a lot more about the adult relationship - and I haven't been willing to give as much of that as I might have liked... I need to work on that a lot more. But I am having another crisis - should I start all over again, from scratch, re-write every word, not re-cycle anything? The thought fills me with despair - I just can't bring myself to do it. I loved the original novel, it said what I wanted to say - it might not have said very much, it might not have had a really strong story - but I do think it had a beginning a middle and an end... and the character was changed by her experience and understanding.... However, the Agent now has a fantasy of what I could write - a view I initially shared, but am now finding hard to engage with. Yes, I have written it - but I have written it as a story to which the past, the underlying stuff, is very important - and the love story is the culmination of that... she says the heroine must be a changed person: is that essential - Madame Bovary is not a changed person - hence her tragedy... she has gone further and further into being herself - and has paid for that. I would like Lucy to stick to her guns - to be a romantic and a feminist... and not change, but still win... maybe there needs to be a discussion on "a sadder and a wiser man, he work the morrow morn"....
Anyway, the point of this entry is to say - it's all much more difficult than I thought, I need to write MY book, not her book... but on the other hand she is the expert on the market and what people want.
I want to write this book as a vindication of her position - to deal with these points satisfactorily but not to have to succumb to them. Maybe I should email her and see if she can discuss this...
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