Morgan Briarwood

Should I call this ‘experiment’ or ‘innovation’? I suppose the latter, but I’m not certain. Perhaps it’s both. 14,000 words into this novel, I find I’m writing in a way that is, well, new. At least for me.

Mostly, I am quite conventional in the way I write. I prefer past tense. I write in the third person. I write in sentences and – I hope – clear English. I don’t have much patience with the present tense. It can work in short stories but for anything of any length I find it intrusive. I would say the same of a lot of ‘experimental’ kinds of writing. James Joyce is supposed to be some kind of genius but I can’t read him. So, yeah, quite conventional.

What I’ve found so far in writing this novel is that there are a lot of small details I want to include that don’t fit in the main narrative. This isn’t unusual for me: my imagination is always bigger than the stories I write down and I always have scenes and details in my head that are not truly part of the story. They enrich the story for me and help me visualise and understand it, but they aren’t parts that the reader ever needs to see. That’s where editing comes in.

But this time, it’s not as simple as leaving these bits and pieces in my imagination. I am finding things that add texture, and that do enhance the story. But things that, technically, are irrelevant to the story I’m telling. I started with a simple flashback that I wanted to include, but couldn’t find a place where it would fit. Then there’s another sequence involving a minor character which I was thinking of as a sub-plot but isn’t really big enough for that. These things need to be included. But at the same time, the main narrative would suffer for it. A bit of a dilemma.

Like most novels, this one is divided into chapters. It has long chapters, on average about 8,000 words per chapter. So what I’m doing is placing a short scene in between each of the chapters. These scenes are written from minor character points of view. Some are flashbacks, illuminating the background to the main plot. Some take place concurrently with the main story but show a different angle on things. None will be more than 1,000 words.

I don’t know if it will work. The advantage of doing it this way is it’s easy to edit these scenes out if I decide in the end that it doesn’t work. It does break up the narrative, and some readers might find it as intrusive as I find, say, present tense. But to me it feels less like a digression and more like, sort of, a commercial break in a TV show. Yes, it breaks things up, but hopefully in a way that doesn’t spoil the flow. As I approach the climax of the novel, breaking up the story like this might not work. I don’t know. But for now…it’s an interesting solution