#55 of 100: Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

This collection of short stories about written about real people in history is depressing. I hate these characters. They drive me crazy. I’m not the only one that feels this way, but it’s the craft that matters. The intricate beading of these stories inspires me. This week I’m weaving Act One of a novel together. The key for me as a writer is: what does the main character know, when does she know, and what does she not know. That’s pretty much fiction in a nutshell, even for YA, at least I think.

With my fiction, I tend to write forward motion and dialogue really, really fast. I can propel a story forward at a hundred miles an hour, but my reader is often left wondering what the context is, what’s the point, why should we care? I need to develop a unique interior voice a la Andrea Barrett so that my characters a) clearly don’t know something the audience knows or b) clearly know something that the audience also knows, or c) clearly know something the audience doesn’t yet know.

I’ve just confused half of the Internet. I feel your pain. It’s the difficulty, my writing teacher says, in writing a make believe world. Me as the creator of that world has to create everything, bring the characters to life, and then figure out what to give them and what not to give them.

Barrett’s collection is rich, but quite literary. So, those of you who need uplifting fare, don’t try this at home. The first story I read was The Littoral Zone, a backflash, flashforward waltz through a devastating affair between two scientists away from their families. Very uplifting. Ha! But the interior voice is impeccably strong. I couldn’t use that exact voice in my writing, but I know a fellow writer who lifted the inspiration into her historical novel with much success. However, the outline of this story screams hidden organization. The author must have sat for days thinking: what do these characters know and when and how do they tell each other or the audience? My brain explodes at the thought.

And now we’re working through The Behavior of the Hawkweeds, a short story about Gregor Mendel, but not really about Mendel, but about people around him, and how tragedy can strike at really inopportune moments and how it affects people. Again, the author must have sat for days thinking through this story, building and layering in the response and the theme and the response and the theme. It’s like fine strokes on a masterpiece canvas.

But for me, I’m not a huge fan of Barrett. I mean I admire her skill, her craft, her ingenuity, but I just can’t handle the depressing stories. Art lives in the hidden, the unconscious, the untold. I admit, I just really didn’t want to know any of what these stories told me about these people’s hidden and unconscious lives, but it made me think about what I’m putting into my books. Can the story be beautiful and soaring and still have these layers? I think so. That’s what Andrea Barrett’s book showed me. It doesn’t have to be always about the dark. There are multiple layers of light and I’d like to explore those themes in my writing.

Grade: A for craft, D for depressing

Tagged as: book record, Learning the Craft, writing