Teaser and Revisions

Sorry, my blog is boring right now because I’m working hard on the edits for The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice. It will be a few more iterations, I fear. Since I don’t have the energy for a real post, I’ll give you an excerpt from the book. Here’s a rare scene with no spoilers, unless you haven’t read The Unfinished Song: Taboo yet, in which case go do so at once before you read this. (Just kidding.)

Vessia

Oh, and there’s this too, if you somehow missed it: J.K. Rowling is now an indie author.

Suffering for your art

“Suffering for your art is noble; making your family suffer for it is bullshit.”


http://www.apexbookcompany.com/2011/06/how-to-not-quit-your-day-job/

Should You Start At the End to Reach the Middle?

Beginnings are difficult. Endings are difficult. But connecting them is the most difficult of all.

As usual, a few plot holes have opened up during revisions, a few broken bridges between the Beginning and the Ending. To fix them, to tie up the loose strings, I am writing from the outside in…from the beginning toward the middle, but also from the ending toward the middle, until the two meet.

To to this, I take each character’s story arc and ask myself, Where does this person need to end up? Then I ask, where does this person need to begin? Then…in theory…it’s just a matter of figuring out the steps in between. Generally I try to have each major character show up once a chapter, and supporting characters at least three times in the book. I have a lot of characters, so this in itself can be tricky. My main characters have one to three scenes per chapter.

Designing each individual story arc is not too hard, in and of itself; the tricky part comes when I juggle them. I have to make certain the logistics are feasible. Scene X logically must come before Scene Y. But I also try to coordinate the themes of each scene, which should contribute to the mini-story arc and theme of each chapter. (Each chapter has its own chapter theme, which contributes to the larger theme of the book.)

For instance, the chapter theme in the first book of The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice, is “Recrudescence,” or the resurgence of a disease which had been dormant or cured. For a few characters, their recrudescence is literal, and they suffer a relapse of the disfiguring skin disorder they had when they were Shunned. For most of the others, however, the recrudesce plays out more symbolically. Kavio discovers an old enemy is back, in an unexpected position of strength. Brena meets the bear again and realizes her injury is getting worse. Gremo… well, I could go on, but I won’t spoil anything by saying that Dindi also finds something won’t stay down, so to speak.

Each scene focuses on a different character dealing with a relapse or reoccurrence of a problem or person who was supposed to be gone. The chapter as a whole contributes to the book’s overall theme of sacrifice because the each person will realize in their own way that to truly conquer their problems, they have to do more. They have to give up more than they thought to gain what they want… possibly much more than they are willing to give.

7 Ways To Beat Writer’s Block

1. Read a novel in your genre.
In the grossest metaphor ever, writing is like poop. (Yes, I have small male children. How could you tell?) What comes out reflects what goes in. If nothing is coming in, consider your diet. Your writing diet is fed by reading. Some writers stop reading fiction when they begin to write. This is understandable, maybe inevitable in small doses. But take it too far and you will starve your muse.

Read inside your genre. That will help inspire you again with the kind of story you are working on.

2. Read a novel outside your genre.
If you try reading inside your genre and everything feels hopelessly stale, read outside your genre. Read in a genre you’ve never read before, even one you swore you’ve always hated. Westerns, romance, literary. Try it. You might be amazed that stories feel fresh and unpredictable again. You might find yourself inspired to bring that strangeness into your work, bringing it back to life. Or you might even try writing in a different genre. It doesn’t mean you have to switch permanently. Just let your brain play with variety.

3. Read nonfiction.
Did you know most published books are nonfiction? If you don’t normally read nonfiction, try it. There are two variations. Research and Fishing Expeditions. When you read nonfiction for research purposes, you know what you need to learn more about to make your story work, so you find a book and read up on the subject. But if you have writer’s block, that might not be strong enough medicine. You might benefit from a Fishing Expedition. That’s when you read random crap off the internet, or strange books on bizarre topics, things that have no conceivable relationship to your writing or anything else in your life. You just find the topic fascinating. And eventually (trust me on this) you will see connections that you never imagined.

4. Watch TV.
Oh, no, girlfriend, you did not go there! Uh-huh, bitch, I did. Deal with it. Television is just another medium of entertainment. Watch different genres and take notes. (You knew there had to be a catch. Damn.) Analyze the stories as you would novels. If you can get ahold of the screenplays, read the show you watched. Think about how you would write up the novelization of the episode, if you were tasked with the job.

5. Exercise. 
I used to swim. Lots. I wrote stories while I swam and always had to have a notebook by the pool so I could dash down my ideas, often while my bathing suit still dripped all over the cement. Then circumstances changed and I couldn’t swim anymore. My writing suffered. I realized how important it is to the mind to take care of the body. Exercise also helps combat depression, which contributes to writer’s block. (And living block.) So get on a bike, in a pool, on your toes. Jump up and down next to your desk if you have to. Punch the air. Get yourself moving. Let your mind wander.

6. Doodle.
Many writers are also artists. I think the part of the brain responsible for the visual arts is slightly different than for verbal arts. Switching media is another way to keep your brain from getting bored with itself. Even if you can’t paint or draw, doodle. It can be about your book. It can be just for fun. Just don’t do it half-assed. Do the best you can; treat your work as art, no matter what your level of skill.

7. Break it down.
If you’re working on a novel, the sheer length can overwhelm you. Break it down. Don’t worry about the whole thing at once. Just focus on one chapter or one scene. This is probably what you’re doing anyway, but actually pretend for a while that this chapter is the whole story… as if you were writing a short story, not a novel at all. Craft the beginning, middle and end as you would a short story. If it’s a short story you’re writing, focus on just one page or one paragraph, as if it were a bit of flash fiction. As if it were just a character study, a set piece, a beautiful bit. A bonsai tree sized story. Rest. Then, tomorrow, do another beautiful bit. Another bonsai tree. Until you surprise yourself with a forest.

Why Have “Age Appropriate” Books?

In a previous post, I discussed YA literature, and whether it was merely an artificial publishing box. Today, as I sit with my one-year-old and listen to Barney sing about firetrucks, I wanted to ask how far that is true. When I was a tot, there were stories and television for children, but the diversity and volume of children’s media has certainly increased.

The research that goes into children’s television is also astonishing. One show my kids love is Blues Clues. The success of this show was not accidental. The producers did a tremendous amount of research into the cognitive abilities and attention span of three and four years olds to craft every show.

There was an interesting study of Romance heroes done by Daniel J. Kruger, Maryanne Fisher and Ian Jobling, which compared reader’s preferences for certain kind of romantic heroes. The heroes were coded according to whether they were dark and dangerous (anti-heros) or noble and chivalrous (traditional heroes). Female readers were’t told that the descriptions of the men were from fiction, and were asked various questions hinged on imagining themselves in relationships with these men. Most women preferred the anti-hero for a one night stand, but the chivalrous hero for a long term relationship. 

It is striking that 60 percent of women would prefer to have sex with [the anti-hero], a cad, but only 13 percent would prefer to see him engaged to their twenty-five-year-old-daughter….

You might think this was a generational thing, that of course old fuddy-duddy moms of an older generation would be more conservative, but in fact the participants of the study, as in most human-rat-maze experiments, were college students.

The women in this study were similar in age to their imagined twenty-five daughter, and yet they were able to state a preference that would be appropriate for a potential grandmother.

By the way, this shows that it’s not a matter of age, so much as relationship. It’s not that adults consider teens as other. It’s that people, as parents or even when they just imagine being parents,  look something different in literature for their children than for themselves.

Generations of researchers have debated whether violence in video games and on television causes a rise in criminal violence in society. Fretting over violence or “darkness” in literature has not been nearly as fevered. (Before TV, concern over literature occupied a greater fraction of the global reserve of Worry That Young Minds Are Going To The Dogs.)

These questions are not quite the same as asking what kind of literature is “best suited” to teens. The problem is that it is difficult to untangle what we mean by “best.” Is “best” mean most entertaining, best selling, most educational, most conducive to being a whole, rounded, compassionate and intelligent person? And how would we measure that? We can ask children to sing their ABCs or share toys, but its harder to evacuate the intellectual and emotional growth of teens and adults.

So Young Adult books are judged as effective by the de facto method our society uses for judging the success of most things: number of sales and final dollars earned.

What Is the Difference Between Young Adult and Just Adult Lit?

I found out about this article in the Wall Street Journal from Michelle Davidson Argyle when she responded to it on The Literary Lab.

I recently read a book by our one and only Scott G.F. Bailey, and I was shocked at the darkness in it. I wrote to Scott and said, wow, this is really dark. He said, yeah, I know. It’s an adult novel, and it disturbed me not with the subject matter, but the tones of the novel. Honestly, I have never read a YA book with such dark tones. Usually, even in YA novels that deal with darker subjects, the tones seem to be handled on a lighter level. Maybe, though, Miss Gurdon is really talking about tone in her article, not subject matter. Maybe there are YA books out there that I haven’t read that are really, really dark in tone. Teens can handle subject matter. Adults can handle subject matter. I think it’s tone that can really make the difference. I appreciated Scott’s book. It was amazingly well done. I appreciated the darkness he portrayed because it contrasted the world in a way that helped me appreciate what he was really saying in that book – and I think he did it through tone. I wouldn’t have seen those things otherwise.

I agree with Michelle, that there is absolutely a difference between tone and subject matter. I recently finished Speak a young adult novel (from about 10 year ago) that is about a girl who was raped just before she started highschool. So, the subject is dark, I suppose. Yet, I personally wouldn’t call it a dark novel.

You can have all sorts of horrible things happen in a novel: rape, torture, murder, the end of the world, etc. Yet it can still be an upbeat, heroic novel if the heroes win out in the end. Although, I should add that tragedy and melodrama can also appeal to young adults, anything with a grand gesture. What is not appealing are stories which are more ambiguous, and neither victory nor victorious martyrdom are achieved.

For instance, the young adult novel Unwind and the adult novel Never Let Me Go deal with the same subject, but in completely different ways. The characters are the same age. Yet the tone of the books are completely different. Unwind is all about the need to fight an unjust authority, and Never Let Me Go is about the impossibility of fighting an unjust authority. Unwind is about winning; Never Let Me Go is about losing.

What is likely to be darker — a grandiose dystopia, where robots tear the arms off of people and crowds cheer until a cyborg gladiator overthrows the master computer and liberates everyone? Or a story about a real estate agent who gradually realizes her cheating husband doesn’t love her anymore but is only staying with her because she’s dying of cancer? The first story would probably be gory and lurid and appallingly violent. The second could be tender and bittersweet and realistic, but it could also be much darker and more mature in a way that the cyborg gladiator story is unlikely to be. It depends on the writing, of course, and these are just hypotheticals. But just on that one line synopsis is it hard to guess which storyline is more likely to appeal to teens?

Of course, maybe more adults would be interested in the gladiator as well, and that’s the real problem with “Young Adult” these days. Its more a mood than a demographic. Plenty of adults read YA. Some adults exclusively read YA. So writers are basically forced to write YA even if they didn’t intend to, and often bring to it an alien mood. Do I have an example? You bet. Gifts, the first in a so-called Young Adult trilogy by Ursula Le Guin. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Ursula Le Guin, and Gifts was a lovely book. But I’ll be stuffed and dressed and roasted like a Thanksgiving turkey if this was a Young Adult novel. IT WAS NOT. It was about a young adult, which is not the same thing. I think it’s sad that these days publisher can’t seem to tell the difference. There was nothing gory or violent or profane about Gifts, and I doubt any parents would object to their kids reading it. But it struck me as a reflective, resigned book, not a victorious epic, and not something I would have enjoyed at all when I was a teen. I already bought the other two books in the series, but I’m not sure I’m ready to read them yet.

Why didn’t the publisher market Gifts as adult fantasy? I think it’s pretty obvious from a promotion perspective. I’ve been searching for book reviewers, for instance, and for every reviewer of mainstream, epic or adult fantasy, I’ve found two dozen YA reviewers. Maybe the numbers are even more skewed, even a hundred to one. So I decided my epic fantasy, The Unfinished Song, is YA. Since my protagonist is fourteen, I can get away with this, although the cagey reviewers have noted that the series is really epic fantasy. On some level I must agree with Gurdon, because I’ve found myself toning down some scenes that originally would have been a bit more, ahem, explicit. I just feel weird having things too explicit in a YA series. But I can only change so much without imperiling the integrity of the story, which I won’t do.

When I think back to what I read as a teen, I have to say it puts the whole brouhaha in perspective. I never read young adult novels. I started reading adult novels in second grade. I read books with rape, torture, death, concentration camps, fascism, adultery, murder, military coups, incest and infanticide. I preferred novels with happy endings. (Still true.) But I didn’t mind a rocky road on the way to that happy ending.

So, has YA literature become more explicit and violent? Probably. Are twelve year olds of today reading anything more explicit that what I read when I was twelve? Keep in mind my ninth grade reading list included The Gulug Archipelago, Slavegirl of Gor,  Clarissa, 1984, Patty Hearst Her Story, Lolita,  and a lot of other books, both trashy and classic, that were not aimed at fourteen year olds.

Just think. If Nabakov were writing Lolita today, he’d be told it’s YA because Lolita is twelve.

Some people are defending the content of YA novels because this reflects the darkness that invades the lives of teenagers. I question that theory. I didn’t read those books because they reflected my own personal reality, or situations I was likely to encounter. Fortunately, I was never sent to a gulag, kidnapped by terrorists, seduced by a sadist, or sent to a BDSM planet. I loved Clan of the Cave Bear, I hated Catcher in the Rye. Guess which one involved a character being raped by a Neanderthal? (Another teen experience I inexplicably missed out on.) I don’t think teens read for different reasons than adults. They read to find out about what it’s like to be human, to find out more about themselves, but also about people who are not themselves.