Thank God You're Alive!

So…  Yesterday I was out on the patio having lunch, and reading some new book on Arthur Koestler (whom I’ve never read) in The New Republic.

Anyway, the critic was making a point about how Koestler (in Darkness At Noon) and Hemingway (in For Whom The Bell Tolls) used fiction to portray their “disillusion” with Russia’s experiment with Marxism.  (And I don’t want to get into that in this note: that’s not the point.)  These two writers, at any rate, as opposed to people like Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson who took the more obvious route: non-fiction.

What I suddenly realized, reading through it, is that I’d probably be better off writing THE TIME TO DECIDE in the first person.  Still as fiction– sort of– but not in the 2nd person.  That was– for me– an important realization.

A few months ago I gave one of our local high-school teachers, who teaches an ethics course, the first 20 pages or so of THE TIME TO DECIDE, and he said he liked the humor, and could appreciate the point I was trying to make, but he found the 2nd-person approach confusing.  As in: who are you (the author) talking to?  (And if he didn’t get it, I was making my attempt at communicating overly difficult.)

So just yesterday I realized that I’ve gotta switch to the 1st person.  Sacre bleu!  Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

So…  All I’ll have to do is re-write what I’ve already written in the 1st person.  Shouldn’t be difficult.  What I’m hoping for, obviously, is increased immediacy.  A storyteller with whom a reader can connect.

And “transposing” what I’ve already written of THE TIME TO DECIDE from 2nd person to 1st person reminds me of when J.S. Bach was putting together Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier.  The prelude and fugue in C-sharp major that we know was actually written originally in C (natural) major.  A big difference, from a sight-reader’s perspective, but from Bach’s point-of-view, all he had to do was add a key signature with 7 sharps, change a few accidentals, and viola! a piece in C-sharp major.  (This is the only key-change you can do that with.)  (My Peters edition gives an alternative in D-flat major, which with 5 flats is slightly easier to read.  In Book Two Bach didn’t even bother writing a C-sharp major version.)

So if you choose to take a gander at the opening chapters of THE TIME TO DECIDE here, for the time being at least they’ll still be the 2nd-person version, but the story will be the same nonetheless.

So all I can say, for the moment, is:

THANK GOD I REALIZED THIS BEFORE I GOT ANY FARTHER!

…