Greatest strength / greatest weakness

I am about a third of the way into writing a young-adult novel called Blue-Eyed Wolf, far enough in to feel a sense of accomplishment, far enough from the end to still have some apprehension about making it the whole way.  But a problem has begun to develop. As I sit down to work each day I find myself feeling increasingly claustrophobic, as though I’m being caught into a place I don’t especially want to be.
I sent these early pages to a friend, a fellow writer whose judgment I trust. “Should I keep going?”  I asked. “Or am I wasting my time?”

“Keep going,” she wrote back.  “I was so sorry the story stopped . . . definitely worth the huge amount of work.” But then she went on to say something else. “I wonder,” she said, “if Angie’s internal life isn’t a bit too pervasive.” And I thought . . . “Bingo!  That’s the problem.  I’m trapped inside the psyche of a fourteen-year-old girl, and even if I like Angie–which I do–I’m suffocating.”

One of my greatest strengths as a writer of fiction has been the ability to inhabit my main character deeply, to see through her eyes, hear with his ears, think with his thoughts, feel with her feelings.  Often my young readers write letters that say, “I always knew what (insert name of character) was thinking.” And those letters have pleased me, because that was precisely what I had set out to do, to give my readers the opportunity to climb inside another human being, to experience the world through someone else’s psyche. It is, I believe, what fiction does best.

But every strength, it seems, has a shadow side. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing. Your very strength becomes your weakness. In this new novel, at least, I have been giving my readers–and myself–too deep a plunge, getting trapped in my character’s internals at the risk of losing the momentum of my story.

The last novel I wrote, Little Dog, Lost,  was written in verse. It’s a medium I had avoided–both reading and writing–because I had found most verse novels unsatisfying. The technique rarely seemed to permit as deep a journey into character as I seek in fiction.

When I began to write Little Dog, Lost, though, I was pleased to find myself carried along by language and rhythm the way I am when I write a picture book. Next I fell in love with the complexity of a story woven from the lives of several different characters. And because it is the most natural thing for me to do when I write fiction, I still dipped into important characters’ psyches. But I dipped with the lightest touch. I wrote almost as though I were revealing these characters on a stage, and yet I still took peeks inside. And what fun I had with the world I could create out of these intertwined elements!

Now I’m faced with a very different novel requiring very different techniques. As I return to Blue-Eyed Wolf with my friend’s encouragement, I realize that I must apply some of what I learned in Little Dog, Lost to this more familiar medium, to plunge more lightly, to move forward more surely.

Inhabiting my main character. My greatest strength. My greatest weakness.

I guess that means I’m still learning.

And if I’m still learning, I guess that means I’m still alive.