Wolf

Because I have other projects I’m working on, I haven’t been working as hard or fast on this as my wife would like, but I jumped back into it last night and now again today.

We got some interesting feedback from my sister in law, though.

While I was aiming for lush, evocative prose, trying to give a rich and personal story about a woman in a wild time, my sister in law and wife are looking for something more snappy and straightforward.

This is good feedback because you should know your target audience.

And prose is a tricky thing, since I honestly don’t think much about prose beyond a general kind of texture. My Howl novels are much quicker and declarative, lacking a lot of the richer feelings or the lushness of some of my other books. It’s a conversational, colloquial series, and I now understand that that’s the kind of book I should be writing here with Scarlet.

Which, obviously, is not how I pictured it or how I would have thought to approach it. To me, writing something inflected with the French Revolution had me wanting words that cling to you, that you swim in. And so there was a density to the sentences that turned out to be a bit too much, a bit overwhelming for the kinds of people we think will want this book.

That’s not to say that the novel will be without depth and beauty, but that the emphasis and placement of that will change.

Are you reading this for the sentences or the characters, the narrative?

That’s what I’m talking about.

I was too far into the sentences and it was distracting from the characters and narrative.

So what do we do?

We dial it in. We sharpen our knives.

But also, this bring me to something I often tell people about: registers.

A book can have many different registers. You can have the conversational alongside the epic and grand, the rich and evocative. The trick is figuring out when to use one and not the other. Which register belongs to which scene.

And so this was a very useful exercise for me, allowing me to shift the way this book is written. Which will, honestly, make it easier to write.