Okay, so last night was my turn again and I cut and pasted all the daily entries between my last one and yesterday’s so I could read them all together as one chunk of text leading up to what I would write to keep the story going.
Also, this allowed me to read the stuff without knowing who had written which segment, or even (most of the time) knowing where one segment ended and the next one began.
A few thoughts, in no particular order:
There’s some good dialogue being written, worthy almost of being called “Mamet-esque.” Clearly I’m not the only one who’s spent time in Chicago. You know who you are.
The chapter that was written from a different character’s perspective may have been my favorite, writing-wise, (and I was really surprised when I went back to see who had written it – it was not at all who I had suspected) but I felt that the shift of perspective from one character to another was distracting.
There are certainly books that operate that way, in a Roshomon-like constant change of narrator approach but I feel we’re too far into it for changes like that at this point to make it work.
As a “stand alone” short story or beginning to an entirely different book it would have been spectacular but I was confused by the change of narrator.
I’d be interested to hear from the author why they went in that direction.
If that was something we had established earlier on, as a group choice, it would have worked better.
I wonder why we haven’t been talking to each other about these things? Should we be?
Also interesting, (and I certainly fell into this with my own latest entry) is seeing individual authors include commentary or reflection about life in Iowa City, or in Iowa or just the Midwest itself through their writing a novel told in the first person from a fictional “heavy” out of Chicago.
Also, and I could be wrong, but I believe one author even commented on himself in one of their sections by including a description of someone in a scene who was (at least attire-wise) almost exactly who they are.
The only truly troubling development for me was seeing some plot points that went completely off the rails (i.e. having certain characters be in entirely different towns, etc, then they had been in the previous one) and I wonder if folks are reading everything that preceded their daily turn or just the single chapter that preceded it.
I tried to address these plot or continuity problems in today’s entry and even not-so-subtly made reference to them from the perspective of the narrator. How very “meta” of me, right?
Anyway, this is, indeed, a crazy “experiment” right? so I suspect issues like this were bound to arise when 5 people are working on something that’s, arguably, one of the most solitary endeavors known to man.
Nonetheless, I’m happy with how it’s going, appreciate everybody’s hard work thus far, and am excited to read the next chapter . . .
