‘Natural History’, by Andrea Barrett: How is fiction written?

The naive writer can believe that this is done directlysimply saying things. Words are common to all, after all, and we all know what they mean. But in literature, especially in the narrative, things do not work that way. The phrases of a story, one by one, cannot transmit ‘information’ or ‘data’ about this or that. Only at certain times, at certain angles of certain places of the paragraphs it is possible to give information, and only in a certain way.

For a narrative text to be understood and Have emotion and meaning And, especially, truth, it is necessary that the phrases are linked to each other and that each phrase, although apparently say something new and different, is an amplification of the previous one. The work of a writer is not ‘saying things’ but, if he is lucky, create sensations and moments of life.

If we do not understand how language is used in the narration, then our story may be an externally ‘well written’ but will produce the reader a feeling of anger, of difficulty, it will continually call their attention to what their phrases and their words say (which is The worst that can happen) and will force him to reread each page twice to try who IVVY was and who Hester was and who Aurie was, since Human attention and perception do not work through information bits that they accumulate and order (the typical Anglo -Saxon puzzle that forces the reader to pass thirty or forty pages simply trying to remember the names of a lot of strangers of those who know nothing and discover who is the son of whom, husband of whom, etc.), but perceives totalities. That is why to tell a story it is necessary to find a center around which the phrases are constellation.

Only in this way is it possible to create in the reader the feeling that what is reading is real. Andrea Barrett is A prestige authorwinner of National Book Awardthe most important literary prize in the United States and has also been a finalist or winner of other important awards. I don’t like it. The stories of ‘natural history’ seem boring, artificial and, sincerely, poorly written. As much as they possess, externally and in a deliberate and learned form, all the famous “details”, the colors, the sensations, the interesting scientific information, the curious historical recreation, in addition to the appropriate topics (the situation of women of science In the nineteenth century) that is, the ingredients that in theory should produce a good book.