Fragments From Floyd

I never write fiction. The closest I've come is to write just a few highly charged Fragments posts (like the one the day we put Buster to sleep) in third person. It gives some emotional distance, allows the writer (moi) to stand back from the scene as an observer, and it helps avoid the overuse of I/me in the narrative.

Well. My little experiment didn't work. The three people who have read the manuscript that I may eventually submit as a sample of my "book" all called me to task on a third-person true story, saying "Why did you do this? It jumps out at me as unnatural. It is obviously about you, and the voice is coming from outside the story. It is jarring compared to the other pieces in this collection. What would happen if you told the story in the first person?"

Since I have very few third person pieces, frankly, I've never had to try to change the voice from third to first. I am doing that this morning, and I want to scream or break something. It is not a simple of matter of going back and changing all the "he/him's" to "I/me's". The whole perspective of the voice and narration changes. It is easier to just start over rather than trying to cut and paste pieces of the old into the new. And yet I want the basic story told from the old version into the new.

After two hours (admittedly not well focused time... two hours of being "dogged" by you-know-who) I have four paragraphs of converted material. If I ever finish, I'll live to blog again. Meanwhile, "I" cannot say the gaggy, saccharine things that came out of "his" mouth. Sheessh! Did I write that crap?