A little bit longer now…

Wow, this sinus infection is really giving my word-count a beating. I am officially way behind my goal. But, my health is something I won’t sacrifice for my writing, so I am dealing with it. It is more important for me to take care of my body and regain my health than it is for me to get my 2,500 words in every day. Still, I miss the fierce pace I was at and can’t wait until I feel well enough to get back to it.

I have a few more answers for you all today. These ones took a little more thought on my part, but really the answers are not long enough to warrant a post each, so they are all getting jumbled together!

If A Train Leaves . . . asked:  Hey, which translation of Crime and Punishment is your most preferred, and why?

Of the translations I have read, the one by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear is by far my favorite. It seems to me to be the translation that holds the original voice that Dostoevsky was going for the best (of course, I could be completely wrong about this, and will have to reevaluate once I read the book in the original Russian).

For years, the standard for Russian to English translations was set by Constance Garnett. I would be willing to bet that if you read Crime and Punishment as required reading in high school, hers was the translation you read. Constance Garnett has a immense catalog of works she has translated, and she really opened the door for Russian to English translation. However, I find that many of the novels she has translated read too much alike. It feels as if the author’s voice has gotten lost and replaced with Ms. Garnett’s. Without knowing beforehand, if I read a piece by Dostoevsky and another by Tolstoy (both translated by Garnett, of course), I would not be able to tell which man wrote which book.

I find that with Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, the voice of the novel is preserved in the translation. It is difficult to maintain the unique voice of a piece while doing a translation that long, and I am very impressed by their ability to do so.

Jessie Sin has a couple of point-of-view questions, starting with:  When beginning another novel is it difficult to shift to a different character’s perspective after you have spent so much time on another’s?

I don’t really find that I have a problem with this. When I finish a novel, I usually take a break to catch up on all the things I neglected when I was busy writing-cleaning, cooking, spending more time with Bubba, reading books, whatever. This gives me some time to leave the first character behind and get acquainted with the next book before I write it.

Also, when I have a book in me that is just begging to be written, the character’s voice is incredibly strong. It is not difficult to get into a character’s perspective when it has been annoying me and eating away at my mind for so long, no matter what I was just writing.

and continuing with:

What is your preferred POV to write and why?

I don’t really have a preferred POV. I know I would not like writing a novel in second person (though it sure is fun for a blog, isn’t is readers?), because I really don’t enjoy reading second person. As for first and third person points of view, I don’t have a preference.

When I begin a book, I sit down and think about which POV will be best to tell the story. Sometimes that is easy. With Jack the Reaper, I knew as soon as I had the first inkling of a story come to me that it would be written in Jack’s first person point of view. Her voice was too strong to ignore, and it would not come through the same in third person. With other books, it is not so simple.

When I am deciding which POV to use, there are a lot of factors that come into play. I think about what the focus of the novel will be. Is is more important to get the inner thoughts of a single character or do I need to know what is in the minds of multiple characters? Can I write and rely on only what one character sees, or does the book need to explore scenes that the main character can’t possibly be there for? Is the novel more focused on the action and what is happening to the characters or is it more focused on the characters’ emotions and how they respond to what is going on? All of these things (and more) go into decided which POV is best for each book.

I have written in first; I have written in third. Each has things I enjoy and things I struggle with. I really don’t prefer one over the other, but I always know very shortly after I start working on a book if I have chosen the wrong one.

Okay, that is enough for today. Tune in again tomorrow for more answers to your most pressing questions. Same bad time, same bad channel.