First Draft Voice

Every book has a voice, at least from my perspective. I’m working on the sequel to Dream. Invest. Live. (From Middle Class to Millionaire to (Mostly Muddling By, which is becoming A Rollercoaster Ride Through America’s Wealth Classes because it is sorta shorter.) But something didn’t feel right. Now, it feels better because I found a voice for the book.

My apologies to writers who plan everything. They have outlines, arcs, flows, climaxes, etc. I knew I was going to write the book, so my first step was to start writing. 

Something didn’t feel right, but at least I got past the guilt of having told folks I was writing the book by ignoring what the first draft would be like. 

Write. I started writing with a general idea in mind. I’ve lived through enough wealth swings to suggest getting counseling, and have seen the extremes of people who had much less and much more. It is no wonder that the two ends can’t understand each other; one’s hanging onto a cliff, and the other’s so far back that they might guess there’s a dropoff on the horizon. That became my start. Details are what chapters are for.

Eight chapters in, and I realized my internal tension was between making it all about me versus generalized experiences. Me, me, me isn’t exactly inviting, and not the way I prefer to write. Them, them, them is remote. We, we, we makes too many assumptions about the variations on ‘we’. There are lots of ways to be poor, or middle-class, or rich. Poor can happen from luck at birth, to bad luck along the way, to making progress but not quickly enough. Middle-class now ranges from being able to rent somewhere to homeownership to slowly climbing. Rich can happen through hard work, but inheritances happen. Lotteries do, too.

It was as I started writing chapter 9 (which will really be chapter 11 because it is about bankruptcies) when I realized there is probably some optimum for the reader, but what is more optimum for this writer now is to write about me. Anything besides first-person is too big and therefore takes too long for a rapidly changing world. Books have to live with the speed of society. First-person singular also makes sense. I’ve had other people in my life (duh) but I respect their privacy, so I’ll just have to write around them and use pronouns whenever anything gets too specific.

The book’s voice choice seems obvious now, and yet, I might not have started if I’d waited for that insight. Life keeps me busy, so I’m only managing a short chapter every other day. But those voice-confused chapters helped me gain momentum, kind of like trying to get a car out of a snowbank; sure, steering is important, but get the wheels unstuck first. 

Another consideration that most writers don’t have to worry about is the US Government. This book will be about personal finance. I am not a certified finance professional. I can’t give advice. I can, however, use myself as an example of situations, circumstances, choices, and consequences. It will be harder to make the book a commentary on general experiences, but my example will have to do what it can.

One advantage of a first-person singular narrative is being freer to tell the good, and the bad, and the weird. And this ride has been weird. At times it has been more like a Halloween haunted house than a rollercoaster, more like a rollercoaster at night with the lights out and random things flying onto the tracks. But that’s beyond this post, but also why I am writing the book. At least I know its voice, for now.