clunky writing at its finest

Here is a piece of writing that I had struggled with at the time. I am pretty sure I blogged about it - I was always trying to 'show not tell' but at some point, it became really hard to 'show' Seth's internal struggles. So, I just wrote it down the way I imagined it. If I were the type of person to edit, I would edit this part, but I'm not sure how I could improve it. How would I show the kind of complexity Seth was struggling with here? I tried to do a lot in other parts of the text to show her discomfort in social circles, and her tentative efforts to be something or someone different.

If anyone has any suggestions about how this section could be better, I'd love to hear them. I am sure I won't change it this year, but maybe for next year it'll improve. Although, I think that writing in the form of letters will make some of these problems go away.

Enjoy! This is from when Seth retreated to the farm with Reggie and Mary Kate and is trying to figure out what to do about Fernando.

“Did I tell you about King Lightning?” Seth asked suddenly, enthusiastic about Scrap’s magical ability to transform herself from one gendered extreme to another, and sometimes to exist entirely outside of what had used to seem, to Seth anyway, like a binary system. The three sat down again, and Seth told them about the night at Jackie’s Place, this time dwelling not on Fernando, her supposed brother. Instead, she talked about the people there, how free they had seemed, and how despite her discomfort and hesitancy about revealing her country ways, she had felt like a part of her fit there. Anyone could walk into that place, and be accepted, and any lovers were smiled on.

“Sounds like it really affected you,” said Reggie, examining Seth’s face closely. Seth had never had a happy life, and her face, before she left to find her fortune, was often creased with anxiety. Reggie couldn’t make out if she really had changed, but something seemed different. The anxiety had been replaced by a deeper sadness, but there was something new as well. She looked more peaceful than she had before. “Sounds like you should go back there,” Reggie continued. Mary Kate, who had been staring dreamily at their reflections in the window, and what she could see of the night outside, glanced back when she heard Seth’s sharp intake of breath.

“I want to go back,” Seth admitted. “And a part of me wants to get up on that stage and show them what I can do. If only I didn’t have to ally myself with either Katy ‘Sycophant’ Perry or Fernando to do it.” She shrugged. “I might as well just stay here for a few more days. I think he’ll be gone next week,” she finished hopefully.

Mary Kate shook her head. “Do you really want to hide from him?”

Again, Seth shrugged. She still didn’t know what she wanted, except that she wanted to be back at Jackie’s Place. Maybe Laura would take her dancing again, and she’d dress for it this time, and she’d meet some of the other bright young things who stayed out scandalously late and drank massive quantities of champagne every night. The dandelion wine suddenly seemed frightfully pungent and rough, unlike the dry, crisp taste of champagne.

This was confusing. Seth wanted to be in the city, and she wanted to be one of those cosmopolitan flapper girls without a care in the world. In reality, Seth was a country girl with one nice pair of pants, who happened to be able to dance passably well. Seth was shy and uncertain, and just wanted to fit in somewhere. Yet she wanted to fit in to be exactly who she was, not to change herself. So she was caught in the middle of these two opposite impulses – to try to change with the context, to always be the perfect person for every situation, and to just be herself, wear her tweed outfits and brogues, and let the world take her for exactly who she was.

She wasn’t exactly either of those things but sometimes she wished she were; rather than be a confusing mixture of opposites, she wanted to be just one thing. She wanted Fernando to be either nice, or awfully mean, and she wanted to love her family, or hate them, or ignore them, and nothing was as simple as she had hoped. She couldn’t hate Fernando, exactly, except that she did. And she did care about what other people thought of her, except when she defiantly turned up her nose at them.