The other night, I finished reading a young adult novel that contained some amazing writing but whose 100% epistolary format, in my view, caused major problems for its credibility.
We Contain Multitudes is the work of a talented writer, Sarah Henstra, whose previous (unread-by-me) novels are Mad Miss Mimic and The Red Word. The former is categorized as YA fiction, while the latter is adult fiction.
Earlier this year, I completed the Editorial Freelancers Association's Introduction to Line Editing Fiction and Creative Nonfiction course. I have a good deal of experience as a line editor of nonfiction, but I'd never line-edited fiction. The exercises we were given were challenging, especially because, like several of my fellow students, I was tempted to fix some copyediting mistakes our instructor said we should ignore.
A big takeaway I got is, above all else, to be respectful of the writer's voice because writing is really damn hard and her words shouldn't be changed except to make them more in keeping with that voice. I've always prided myself on not overediting—changing something just because I would have worded it slightly differently. But I gained knowledge about how to better work with writers so they can feel my contributions made their creations more like how they would have wanted them to turn out, not less.
If I were Henstra's editor, I would have had lots of praise for her writing, but I would have said I didn't think the book worked as (just) a series of letters. There were too many recountings of events the two protagonists were both present for—with exact dialogue. People don't write letters describing situations the recipient already knows everything about: "Saturday night, schnitzel night! You arrived at our house tonight laden with shopping bags, embarrassed, apologizing for not asking ahead of time, saying you'd planned to cook at home but your uncle Viktor wasn't feeling well, and your mom had decided to go visit your aunt Agata at the nursing home."
The book starts out as exchanges of letters for a seemingly legitimate reason: Jonathan Hopkirk, an out-as-gay high school sophomore who wrote the passage above, and Adam "Kurl" Kurlansky, a former football player who is repeating his senior year, have been made pen pals by their mutual English teacher. The first letters, before they start interacting in real life, work as they're intended: to give us glimpses into their personalities, show us how they fit into the school's culture, and let us see them beginning to understand and even like each other.
The assignment itself doesn't make much sense, however: The teacher makes it clear she's never going to read the letters, so writing them seems like only so much busywork. Nonetheless, Kurl's failure to write any letters the previous year was one of the reasons he didn't graduate. So it's a crucial but ungraded project. That doesn't track.
Both Jonathan and Kurl are great writers, which brings up a problem that's almost always present in first-person fiction: How did this person telling the story come to write as well as a professional novelist? In the case of WCM, a guy who didn't bother writing any letters a year ago is now writing lots of letters, even more than required, and with great eloquence. Jonathan is a big fan of Walt Whitman—the title references a line from "Song of Myself"—and of poetry in general, so it makes sense that he has a way with words, but he's a far better writer than a kid his age is reasonably going to be.
One reason Kurl is inspired to write after a while is because he and Jonathan have become a couple. That's not a spoiler because the book jacket says they develop "a friendship that eventually grows into love." I really enjoyed their love story, which, naturally, had a ton of complications, one of which I saw coming ahead of time. If I were Henstra's editor, I would have asked her whether it might be better to leave out one of those hardships; it felt like one too many.
I would have loved to have had the chance to help turn the novel in its present state into a partially third-person and partially epistolary novel. There are whole sections of the letters that could be converted into the third person and placed before the letters they came from, to explain ahead of time what Jonathan and Kurl are referencing in their shortened-and-now-less-expository missives.
Actually, a better solution might have been to switch back and forth between third-person explication in roman type and fragments of letters in italics (or vice versa). Henstra and I could have experimented with that format, and I believe we could have made it work—together.