Newbery Picking

June 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

I decided as part of my continuing education in YA & children’s literature to read all the Newbery Award winners. The award has been given since 1922, so you can image the breadth of genre and writing styles encompassed by this list.

I’m nowhere near done the list, but I have been enjoying the adventure. I’m reading books I might not otherwise have picked up, and I can say that I have not been disappointed in any of them so far.

While I am enjoying them as a reader, I am also noting craft as a writer. I am always trying to improve my writing, so looking at how the best of the best wrote is a good education.

So far, three things have jumped out at me:

1)     In the Chronicle of Prydain series, Lloyd Alexander wowed me with his ability to have each character sound so unique that I didn’t need to read the dialogue tags to know who was speaking. This is something I struggle with—making them sound different and making the difference sound natural. I have not been captivated by a series so completely in a long time, and Alexander’s characterizations were a large part of my enthrallment.

2)     In Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse’s description of Dust Bowl Oklahoma blew me away. I could feel the dust smothering me, gritty in my eyes, mixed in my food. When I looked up from the book and out the window, the green grass and trees shocked me—I had almost expected dunes of dust. She wrote the novel in verse, so it is hardly surprising her descriptions are poetic, but I don’t think I have ever felt a novel so physically as this one. I have improved a lot in my description, but Hesse has set the new goalposts very high.

3)     Finally, all of the books could tell a story well. Obviously. But to read book after book where the structure is so solid and complete is a great way to “feel” structure. Some books had many action scenes and a breath-taking pace. Others not much “happened,” and the pace was leisurely (but never plodding). But with every book I feel confident and sure as a reader, safe in a skilled author’s hands, trusting them to lead me to a satisfying ending. And they all have. I believe my story-telling ability is strong, and although in my early drafts the beginning and end don’t always connect cleanly in the middle, I get there by the time I’m through.

This is homework I enjoy doing, and I look forward to learning much more from the remainder of the list.

What books have you read that stand out for you as stellar examples of some part of our craft? (I’ll add them to my reading list!)

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What Message Are You Sending in Your Writing?

May 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

I have a three-year-old daughter, and that has made me very aware of the messages we send our girls in literature, movies, magazines, etc. Our culture sends messages that are at best annoying and at worst destructive, not just to girls but to boys as well.

So I read Karen Jensen’s blog post about messages we are sending our kids in YA with great interest. She noticed a trend in YA where 2 things happen: 1) a girl tells a boy firmly and repeatedly that she does NOT want a relationship (not sex, just a relationship) yet he does not take no for an answer and she ends up capitulating, and 2) in the final climax, it is the boy that saves the girl—the girl does not save herself.

I decided to look at my own YA work-in-progress (WIP) to see if I fell into those traps.

First, did any of my male protagonists ignore my female heroine’s “No” to a relationship (thus reinforcing the “no doesn’t mean no” culture)? To my relief, this was not the case. There is a boy who pursues a friendship with my heroine, even though Polly is hard to get to know, but she clearly WANTS to be friends with him and she communicates that.

Whew. One down.

Second, does my male companion end up saving the female heroine? That one’s a little harder. In the end, Polly does end up physically saving HIM, so at first it seems like another win for me, but… There is a moment, a key moment, in the climax where Polly needs to have an insight in order to save the situation. And the key insight is made by…the male companion. But is this a problem?

Every heroine has their sidekicks. Buffy had her Scooby Gang, and Harry had Hermione and Ron. All the sidekicks chimed in with important information—often key information—at times. In the end, though, in that climactic moment, it was always Buffy or Harry who stepped up and put it all together to save the day.

So is mine a case of a sidekick bringing valuable info that the heroine then acts on? It could be interpreted that way. And none of my beta readers have flagged that moment as not working.

But.

I am going to change it anyway.

Why? Because I think it is important to Polly’s character that SHE be the one to have the insight. She needs to have the moment of understanding and then wrestle with the new knowledge herself. This revelation she has fundamentally changes her perception of herself and her relationship with the world. It will be much more powerful for HER to realize this than to have someone else tell her.

So I thank Karen for her article, because even though I got it about ¾ right in my WIP, this will enable me to get it right all the way. I try very hard to think outside the cultural messages we’re all immersed in all day, every day, but it seems even I fall back onto those messages unconsciously. That is why it is so important that as a writer of YA and middle grade I take a step back and objectively look at the subconscious messages my books are sending. Not that I want to moralize or lecture—far from it. I just want to show my readers what kids can be.

I want to show them that their greatest strength lies in being true to who they are.

What about you? Do you ever think consciously about what messages your writing sends? At what stage in the process do you think about it?

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Sickness as a Stakes-Raiser

January 24, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Usually I don’t have too much trouble coming up with blog posts, but this week was hard. Why? Because I’ve been sick all week and my head is as fuzzy as a Muppet (can you tell I have a toddler?). Feverish, sinus pressure, cold-then-hot-then-cold, runny nose, cough. Unpleasant, but not fatal in the course of my normal life. It’s just a cold.

But suppose you felt that way when your life WAS on the line?

A plain old cold can be fatal if it stops you from performing at your best in a life-or-death situation. And I got to thinking that I don’t see illness (other than fatal illnesses like cancer) in books too often. So maybe sometime I will see what happens if my character catches a cold at the wrong time.

You all know how you feel. Weak. Exhausted. Shivery. You can’t breathe properly. You can’t sleep. You can’t hear very well because your ears are plugged. You can’t think because the mucus is clogging your brain. Sometimes your eyes are sensitive to light.

Any one of those things can be a problem if you are facing a villain, but all of them together is formidable. I’ve seen plenty of books where INJURY gives the main character issues, but not illness.

So next time I need to raise the stakes, maybe I’ll just have someone get a cold.

How about you? Can you think of any books where a minor illness at the wrong time played a major role in upping the stakes for the main character?

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Preschool and the Craft of Character

November 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My daughter started preschool this month. Hard to believe she’s old enough, but she is. Watching her go into that school all by herself was a little surreal. She was ready, though—she turned and gave me a big smile, that smile that showed she was proud of herself. And she should be—she’s handled the new routine very well.

The really weird thing for me is that now she has this entire facet of her life that I’m not a part of. Seven and a half hours a week where she’s “off stage” to me and I have no idea what’s going on with her. My toddler is no help, either. When you ask what she did in school, she says, “I don’t know.” Sometimes I think 3-year-olds are really teenagers in disguise.

The point I’m making (there really is one) is that my daughter’s “off stage” activities will change her as a person and will change the way she interacts with the world once I pick her up. This is the same with all of our characters—they all have a life “off stage” in our stories, too. Or they should.

The main character, and perhaps some of the other leading characters, don’t have much off-stage time. But some of the supporting, recurring characters do. We need to remember that their lives continue even when we don’t see them. Every time they show up in our book, they should be subtlely different. Perhaps one time they’ve had a fight with their other half, the next they’re late for work, the next they just learned that they got the job they’ve been wanting. They don’t need to have experienced a life-changing event to be different. Maybe they simply haven’t had their morning cup of coffee.

We need to remember this for every character we see more than once in the book—even our main character. If there is a scene where they are off stage, take a moment to think about what they are doing while this other scene is happening. Are they sleeping? Driving in a car frantic to get somewhere? Having lunch? Talking to mom on the phone? Once you know what they’ve been doing, you can introduce the results of their activities the next time we see them.

The reader need never know what our characters do off stage—honestly, they never should know, because if it was important enough for the reader to know we probably should have shown them in the first place. But keep in mind that whatever it was will affect how that character interacts with the others. If their off stage activity has made them irritable, show it. If it’s made them happy, show it.

By shading our recurring characters with the impacts of their off stage activities, we add depth to them and give the reader a sense that their lives go on even when we’re not watching. After all, that’s what we want the readers to believe when they close the book: That our characters are real people whose lives continue after the story ends.

Villains and Writers: Why is it so hard to be evil?

July 26, 2012 By 8 Comments

One of the things I often read on agent and editor blogs is that the antagonist in a manuscript isn’t strong enough. That they are cardboard, nebulous, and somehow not as threatening as they should be. I’ll admit I struggle with my antagonists. Obviously, I am not alone. But why is it so hard?

I think it’s because most of us are decent people. We can’t fathom hurting others or blocking some event that is clearly a good thing for humanity. Sure, we all have our moments of making rude gestures to other drivers, or using words we don’t want our 2-year-old overhearing, or even thinking some very vengeful thoughts. But for most of us it stops there. The darkness we all have inside of us scares us to death.

When I see someone like the Colorado shooter, I cannot fathom his thinking. Sometimes with bad guys, you can see where they’re coming from, see how they are damaged emotionally, see how they think what they’re doing is the right thing. But by all accounts, this shooter had everything going for him. And yet he killed 12 people in cold blood. How do you get inside the head of someone like that? How do you write someone like that believably?

The key, as I alluded above, is to know their damage. When writing a villain, we must remember that he has his reasons for doing what he’s doing. And they make sense to him. He is the hero of his own story, and he believes HE is the one doing the right thing.

We as the writer must know the emotional driver behind our bad guy’s thinking, his actions. Only by letting the reader understand this will our bad guy gain the strength he needs to be a gripping antagonist. I think accessing the darkness inside terrifies a lot of writers. We don’t like to think it’s inside us. And once we unleash it for a book, can we put the genie back in the bottle?

While you may discover some uncomfortable truths about yourself during this process, writing the antagonist doesn’t need to be so gut-wrenching a process.

I have found some guidance by using Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. Maass walks you through the antagonist’s world. Outline the story from the bad guy’s POV. Justify his actions using literature, mythology, law. Justify them in such a way that for just a moment your hero can actually AGREE with the villain. In other words, don’t just understand WHAT the bad guy does in your story, but understand WHY.

How do you approach your antagonists? Do you ever scare yourself?

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