I’ve been having trouble with this one story in my vignette collection. So far it’s titled ‘Barrio Chases’ and I’m afraid it’s boring as all hell. I don’t know if it’s just today (where today just feels boring), or if it’s a boring story in itself. I’m afraid that it’s the latter, because I’m somewhat nearing the end of the vignette collection and this is a story that I keep avoiding to work on. A part of me gets slowed down, because I feel like I don’t have information about life in the Philippines beneath my fingertips. The other vignettes flow through me, because there’s not as much pressure to represent a culture accurately. The other stories stem from aspects of my experience, whereas ‘Barrio Chases’ feels difficult since I didn’t grow up in the Philippines.
The story itself feels heavy. It’s a story that’s kind of told from a bird’s eye perspective, almost like a fable or fairy tale. Think: “Long ago, in a village far away. There once was a young boy and girl who…” It’s not a style I naturally gravitate towards anymore. I wrote this as part of my senior thesis and in that project, it made a lot of sense to write in that way. However now, in the context of the vignette collection, the pacing feels slow and the tone feels really distant to me. Maybe I’m realizing that I’m a writer who likes her characters to feel quite personal, as if they are reaching out to you.
I’ve been adding segments to the story, but maybe I should just keep it simple. Go back to the original, and just fix small changes here and there. I’m worried that if I overhauled it too much, that it wouldn’t preserve the original heart of the story. The story isn’t something that I would have written now and maybe I just need to honor that.
Below is a part that I’m thinking of removing. We’ll see if that happens.
Florabeth was an severe woman. Nothing ever escaped her notice and under her keen observation, it felt as if the whole town was beneath her thumbprint. Wary looks exchanged between hair dressers, a shaky hand at the grocery checkout, fingers weathering against pesos, a hesitation when asked ‘And how is the family?’ She saw it all, still Florabeth held her observations close her chest, only displacing them only when absolutely necessary. People in her same position, with her same eyes, would not have hesitated to dispense their knowledge at the cost of another. Long ago, Florabeth had decided to use her eyes in only in the service of others. Still, it often gave the appearance that she was a cold and aloof woman, when the reality she retreated into herself because she was so exhausted from seeing it all.