Office Hours

Two Voices Combining to Make a Slight Difficulty

First, before we launch into Office Hours, a quick warning.

There are a number of fake Facebook sites that are claiming to be me, and one in particular is selling blurbs that purport to be written by me but aren’t. I’m working with my publisher to get those places taken down.

So, please know:

I am nowhere on social media but right here on Story Club. Anyone claiming to be me is a shyster.

Second: over behind the paywall, next Sunday, we’ll be starting our exploration of Tolstoy’s great novella, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” It’s a dark, brilliant, disturbing work that many people, including me, have experienced as a life-changing event.

Join us, if you’re so inclined.

Q.

Hello George,

Prayers for your family and all that have been impacted in LA! Hopefully we will recover quickly in California and have a fruitful 2025!

I’m a physicist by training and work in STEM. I took up writing during Covid (can’t believe it has been 5 years) when I got bored sitting through online meetings, first only as a hobby but gradually have become more serious, especially after having found your Story Club! You analytical approaches (the P/N needle, the line-level edits) resonate with me so much as an experimental physicist! My PhD thesis (almost a decade ago!) was criticized by my advisor to be too active, too vivid, too story telling, which now I take as a compliment based on your teaching and George Orwell’s Essay “Politics and the English Language.” (Laugh.)

Here is my question.

How to effectively weave multiple narratives that intersect at appropriate times while keeping the word balance?

After the holiday break, I came back this week to the novel I’ve been writing and found that my story lines are proceeding at very different pace and would not intersect in time as I’ve planned? I have set a 2,500 words/chapter guideline, 300 ~ 500 words/day, 5 days/week goal for myself, but after 1 year, I think it is not working for me.

Mostly, character 1’s voice is succinct. His story paces well with lots of actions. Character 2’s voice is much slower (due to style choice). Her story paces much slower, though I enjoy writing her line as much as 1.

If 1 and 2 need to intersect at multiple points of the novel, then I need 2x amount of words for character 2 than 1, which kills the balance of the book.

Thank you so much!

A.

Thanks so much for your question and nice to hear that another scientist has found the glowing-but- gradual path of fiction.

Here are a few questions I might recommend you (lightly) ask of your book:

1. Although I started this book with the idea of having two voices, do I need them both?

2. What are the essential things that are happening in the book, and how are the two character threads contributing to making those things vivid and exciting and believable? (Is one contributing more than the other?)

3. Specifically, given what you’ve said above: Could there be a book that only has Character 1 in it? That is: what do you need Character 2 for?

I wouldn’t get too logical about it – maybe just read only the Character 1 sections in sequence and ask yourself (trying to inhabit the mind of a generous reader out there in the world) if what you have there is possibly sufficient, in and of itself.

And, if not: what else is needed, and might the Character 2 sections be a means of providing it?

Then (the hard part): Consider reducing/reshaping the Character 2 stuff to do that work (and only that work).

I’ve had cases like this, where I had two strong strands in a story but the strands weren’t playing nicely.

When I separate them (sometimes) they get happy. You know: “Aha! Now that that interloper is gone, the story is mine, all mine!”

And they both feel that way.

And suddenly I have two (2) stories.

This was the case with “Al Roosten” which, for a long, frustrating time, kept insisting it wanted to be part of “The Barber’s Unhappiness.” When I finally excised it, I found a way to finish the latter, and the excised section sat around pouting for a few years before realizing it was its own story.

I sometimes imagine this as being like two trees that are too close together and need room to grow organically, each in its own way.)

But, of course, not having read the text, I could be wrong.

Let’s assume that I am, and that both threads are going to be in your book, and then ask: How might you, dear questioner, work with the existing text, to eliminate the problem you feel that it has?

That is, let’s not excise Character 2, but try to get her to work more elegantly within the existing novel.

Now, here I have to put on my very honest, perhaps inscrutable, likely indefensible, Practical Writer’s Hat and just blurt out what I would do, with the usual proviso that it might be exactly the wrong thing for you to do.

But: I’d chart out (even if only mentally) what and where those necessary intersection points are, exactly. The implicit idea of a two-voiced novel is that both voices are needed – they support one another somehow. And this work is done (or is signaled), we might say, at those intersection points.

Then I’d look very fiercely at Character 2’s sections, to see why he or she is dawdling. That is, I’d be asking: how much of this slow-but-good writing is really needed, to justify Character 2’s presence in the book? (This is the part where we, as Faulkner put it, “kill our darlings.” Just because a swath of writing is good, this doesn’t earn it entry into a beautiful book. It has to be useful as well.)

Part of your design sense seems to be the desire for the Character 1 and Character 2 sections to be of equal length – a proportion-honoring decision I recognize, and like. This gives you a nice way to cull Character 2’s sections, roughly something like this:

1. Identify the intersection/crossing points.

2. Hone in on one in particular.

3. Look at Character 2 and say: “Hi, Character 2, this is your author speaking. Since Character 1’s section just after the intersection point is 3,000 words, and your section leading up to it is 15,000….I’m afraid that, for reasons of proportion we’re going to have to trim your section down.”

One way I sometimes enter the process of revision is to say this to myself, “If you HAD to cut this down by half, how would you do it?” And then I rush to assure myself: “We aren’t doing that. We’re just trying it.”

So, a playful exercise, that might light up the science part of your brain:

Compute the average length of Character 1’s sections. Then impose that on all of Character 2’s sections. Say the average length of a Character 1 section turns out to be, as above, 3,000 words. Just go in one day and very quickly make some experimental strikeouts in Character 2’s sections to take them down to that length. (You don’t have to do that (i.e., keep that version). You’re just trying it.”)

With all of this radical editing stuff, there’s always a moment where we have to decide it the editing we’re doing is good or insane. So, once you’ve done the above (and after saving the result in a file called “LikelyInsaneCutsJan2025”), take a day off, then read the whole thing again, with the cuts, and see how it makes you feel.

That’s the big thing, for me (as I keep saying here at Story Club in one form or another): these decisions are made, ultimately, by feeling – by feeling, while (re)reading. Not by logic, or per writing dictums (even if these come from Story Club, ha ha). But by the process of the author squirming out of his Author Costume and putting on her First-Time Reader suit and just…honestly reacting, for better or worse.

When this approach (of radical restructuring/cutting) is working for me, I feel, after that fresh read of the new monster I’ve made…elated, just a little.

I don’t feel: “It’s perfect!” But I do often feel that the big restructuring has made a field of potential for me. I can sense some future perfection, in that messy, reduced text. The result feels cleaner, clearer. The shape of the thing is more elemental and easier to grasp. The cause-and-effect is more evident. I see more precisely where the places are that will someday (after much more revision) be wonderful.

I hope some of this helps, dear questioner – and, as always, feel free to follow up again by email if I can clarify or, you know, entirely retract, this advice.

What do you think, Story Club? Care to share any adventures you’ve had over there in the land of two-voiced novels? Are there classics to which we might refer here?

Finally, I feel like saying, apropos of this unusual week in American history: whoever you are, whatever your political inclinations, we are in a rough patch BUT you’re not alone. You’re not. If nothing else, please take this away from Story Club: the more intelligently and kindly we learn to discuss things (literature, here, but it’s applicable more generally) the less alone we are. That’s literally true: speaking intelligently, technically, specifically about any topic says, to the person with whom you’re talking, that you value them and that the apparent separation between you is, though sometimes painful, ultimately delusional. By being in touch with our inner wisdom, via talking about stories, we remind ourselves that yes, outward conditions notwithstanding, wisdom does exist, and we can get at it (and get better at it).

That’s the theory, anyway. :)

Have a good week and see some of you again on Sunday.