I started reading The Great Gatsby this morning, in the hope that it would cheer me up after last night’s footballing events. It didn’t- for the sole reason that after weeks of struggling, trying to find the correct voice for my first person narrator, Gatsby is an absolutely first class masterclass in that style. Why it is not even a masterclass, since I have no idea how you could even start to approach it.
Well that it is not quite true- I could make out a few lessons, how you can use the viewpoint to describe people and places so succinctly, the benefits of having the perspective of past tense and crucially ideas of how to start the whole thing off. I also read that even Fitzgerald had to endure a multitude of rejection notices he stuck to his wall… perhaps it doesn’t prove my work is good, but it does prove that publishers are dumb, that they are not some literary God. And that is after all why I write- not necessarily to get recognition but because when push comes to shove I believe I have something to say and are good enough to say it.
Another interesting point is that right up until printing, Fitzgerald intended to call his book under red, white and blue, and he blamed its early indifferent success to calling it Gatsby. I am currently- even at this early stage- thinking about changing them name, into something less abstract and more indicative of what the book is trying to say. As I said in an early post this week, I think the benefit from writing a first novel is that in the second you are more focus and less bashful about what you are trying to say. Whereas in Abstractions I felt the plot had to come first and any messages had to be subtle, I know I feel much more confident about what I want to say and how I should say it.
Every cloud and all that….
