Sometimes You Just Have to Start Writing

 That's what I got from these paragraphs from Marisa Silver on (Finally) Nailing Down Her Novel’s Point of View:

Mitzi Rapkin: The point of view you take with The Mysteries is overall omniscient. You move between so many people and explore many different mind frames, even though it’s clear it is Miggy’s story. Tell me more about that decision.

Marisa Silver: What I decided early on was that it couldn’t just be Miggy’s story because she’s not in charge of her story. I wanted to show the lives that were in charge of Miggy. So, I chose a kind of narrative stance—I love that we’re talking called geeky, writing stuff, my favorite—that was very flexible, that could survey the scene in an omniscient manner, but also then telescope right down to the heart of a character. And I wanted to do that in a really fluid way. I didn’t want it to be one chapter for one person, one chapter for the next person; I wanted to have a sense of fluidity that the camera, as it were, which is the narrative stance, was always shifting depending on where it needed to be and what it needed to let us in on.

***

Mitzi Rapkin: And did you make that decision before you even started writing? Or were you kind of playing around on the page when you then discovered or tried that out?

Marisa Silver: I discovered it only by writing. I almost never make any decision. Abstractly it’s all through the writing. I tried it a million different ways. I tried it in first person, third person, present tense, past tense, distance. I tried seven or eight different ways this book began. And then I finally landed on this, this particular tonal idea that seemed to be able to offer me all the colors that I needed to paint in this portrait. And what I mostly wanted to do was be able to express the kind of bodily unruliness of Miggy, but I didn’t want to do it at the expense of having any kind of ironic distance.

For me it is usually I don't really understand what the story is until I have done a draft or two.