I am the first person, you are second, they are third and we are all (omni) present.

{word count: 30,354

rough chapters done: 5/9}

"Who is the main narrator?"

This is a question I left behind last post, in part because it deserves its own space. This has been a tricky question to answer but the process of answering it has forced me to actually write this book as opposed to just thinking about it. As this blog can attest to though I have done a lot of thinking about this book. In fact I have done mountains worth of thinking to about a skipping stone's worth of writing.

This over-thinking, under-working might seem to go against the age-old wisdom that 'genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration'. I have come to learn though that that one percent better be some damned good inspiration. Otherwise you're left with 99% hard work (that is a LOT of smelly perspiration) for some half-bake inspiration that is either

i) an inspiration you don't fully believe in

or

ii) an inspiration that is not well thought-out leaving you unsure how to perspire to make it happen.

Either way not having a good 1% inspiration leaves you screwed.

How does this relate to my book's narrator? Well the choice and discovery of my narrator embodies the moment where I transitioned from inspiration to perspiration. In other words I had spent the better part of six years thinking about this book but in order to actually start writing it I really needed to work out the details of this narrator voice. Choosing and fleshing-out a narrator then was the first 0.001% of the 99%, because the only way to do this was to start racking up a word-count. In other words, the narrator could only come to exist through their narration (cue the sound of a tree falling in a forest). Whereas a tree has a physical existence apart from that sound, a fictional narrator has no bodily existence. Their only existence is made through language, through their words on the page.

I won't go too deep into the nit or the grit here but the only solid idea I had for the narrator was the it could not be comrade herself. To understand why put yourself in my position: you are writing a novel that has a pretty 'out there' premise that requires a lot of rhetorical work to seem somewhat realistic and on top of all of that you now have to tell your entire story through the in-no-way-normal voice of an organic robot who can live forever built far in the future but that has been alive for a few human generations. That's a bit tiring no?

Even worse put yourself in your own position: say you're reading this wacky book and the whole thing is written in the flat-out-strange descriptions of someone built to calculate infinity, someone who by nature has to ignore beginning and end. It's just not going to work.

And so I set about finding someone more relatable, more human, more me (but clearly not me. clearly.). Keep in mind that I have never done this before and so I wanted a narrator who I felt comfortable writing through, who I felt an affinity with.

Well it just so happened to be comrade's boss. As always I do not want to publish any spoilers but comrade ends up (near the start of the book) working in a Museum exhibit about the history of calculation, the same Museum where she finds/starts smoking. The curator of her exhibit is in many ways like me. We both want to use comrade to create a public display, we both can never really understand comrade since we are both mortal humans, and we both love caramel.

Just kidding about that last one. I hate caramel.

In conclusion I am not the narrator of the book... or am I? Well, no, actually I am not, but that has not stopped a strange thing from happening. As a student of literature I am very used to the phenomenon of starting to think in the language of a book or an author. For example read enough Willy Shakespeare and you eventually will start thinking in iambic pentameter. It really just the effect of immersion.

Well the reverse has been happening with me, just a little bit. In the process of writing this novel in the narrator's voice I have had to adapt my narrator's writing style. Well one specific aspect of this style, an aspect I definitely do not use in my writing, has been creeping up in my words more and more when I am NOT writing the book. I will be reading over an email before I hit send and then I notice something sounds funny and then I spot it: I am still writing like the narrator.

Even now that I'm looking out for it, I am still echoing my narrator's style. Even in this post...