Category: Writing

It’s Upside Down, Isn’t It?

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be blind. This has led me, naturally, to thinking about how people who are blind, and more broadly, how people with disabilities, are represented in fiction.

 

I am by no means well-read on this topic, though I should be, but the answer that I’ve come up with is it’s difficult to write characters with disabilities for many reasons and so they aren’t represented nearly as much as they could or should be.

 

In writing, you want your characters to have agency. They are the ones who push the plot forward. They take action. And let’s face it, because it’s true, there are some things that people with disabilities can’t do. That doesn’t mean they can’t have agency in the story. That doesn’t mean they can’t affect the plot or be the catalyst for their own change or anything like that. But unless it’s contemporary fiction or science fiction, the technology and services often don’t exist in the world of the story to allow that character to have their own agency, and unless there are superpowers involved, that character won’t be able to do what is required to move the plot along and be an active protagonist. And you have to be careful about having a disabled antagonist, because that can turn the disabled into the Other, which is bad. It’s possible to have a side character who’s disabled, certainly. They don’t affect the plot as much, but they’re still important. But you have to be careful that they don’t turn into merely a token character—”Look, I have a disabled character!”—or the comic relief. So it’s not impossible, but it’s difficult, and you have to be careful.

 

But I mentioned superpowers as a possibility.

 

Yes, I did. And it is an option. Give a disabled character a magical ability of some kind, and suddenly they can take action themselves no matter what. But there’s a problem with that. If they have a power that means they can take action no matter what, then why does it matter that they’re disabled at all?

 

This is not an easy line to walk. I’m blind myself, and even I struggle with it. I’m writing a story for this contest. My main character is blind. I have plans to write more stories about this character in the future, stories in which she has the ability to see the future but doesn’t know how to use it—because I enjoy messing with stereotypes. So, I’m working on this story, and I think, this could be the story where she gets these powers. She finds the confidence in herself to solve her problems on her own and finding that confidence unlocks her powers. I thought this was a good idea. She was accomplishing things without her powers. She gets powers, because she will need them for other stories, but she knows that she doesn’t need them to live as a person who is blind. Only, in practice, it didn’t work out that way. She gains her magical power at the end, as I planned, and all it really does is damage the value of her accomplishments, because theoretically she’s had this power all along even if she didn’t know it, so maybe the magic had something to do with it. Also, just from the point of view of good storytelling, if the power isn’t supposed to be important to her accomplishments in this story—which is meant to stand alone—then why do I have it at all? At first, I was reluctant to illiminate the magical power, but I realized if I do write other stories about her, there will be time to explore her agency outside her magic. So I cut it, and it’s a better story for it.

 

The point is, it’s really hard. I’m blind, and I’m having trouble with it. I only recently even realized the importance of writing about characters with disabilities. But it isn’t impossible. I’ve seen a few good examples of people who are blind in fiction. And what they all have in common is that the character who is blind is part of a group hero—more than one character is the protagonist of the story.

 

In All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Marie-Laure is blind, but she is not the only protagonist in the story, and therefore the plot does not only hinge on her actions. She is able to use the agency she has to save the other protagonist, who in turn is able to save her.

 

The other excellent example I’ve seen is Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Toph has earth bending, and this bending allows her to “see,” because she can sense the earth around her. This gives her agency in the plot and power within the group, but at the same time, she’s still blind, because there are situations when she cannot see what’s going on, and she was raised in an overprotective household. And everything about Toph, from her desire to take care of herself at the expense of her friendships, to her dislike of libraries, to her difficulty with hanging posters correctly—as in my title quote and image—is all spot on.

 

There are probably other good examples out there. I just haven’t seen them yet. But I intend to find them, and I intend to contribute more myself. I have been reluctant to write about characters who are blind, because I was afraid that would come to define me. She’s blind,

so she writes about blind people.

 

But it’s important that people with disabilities are represented in fiction the same as any other group. People with disabilities are a part of our world. They have always been a part of our world. They will continue to be a part of our world. And if one of the purposes of literature is to tell the human experience, that experience should be for everyone, not just a few. People with disabilities deserve to be represented. Their stories deserve to be told, upside down posters and all.

Can You Feel the Secrecy, Suspicion, Discovery, and Love Tonight?

LAST year on Valentine’s Day, I co-led what was supposed to be a workshop on writing romantic subplots for the creative writing club. It turned into more of a group discussion and then Disney sing-along, because it turns out that on Valentine’s Day night, everyone on a college campus is either on a date or avoiding going out so they don’t have to see everyone on a date. Including me and my co-leader, there were five of us in the room, and we had a great time. We talked about the obvious pitfalls of romantic subplots. They need to be paced appropriately. They need to be relevant to the plot. They can’t take up too much or too little of the story, or they will either be seen as extra and unimportant, or they’ll consume the plot. There needs to be some sort of tension between the characters in the relationship. There needs to be character growth because of the relationship. There needs to be some sort of resolution to the relationship—either it continues into happily-ever-after-land, it ends, they decide to take things one step at a time, someone dies, etc. There are endless possibilities. Take your pick. But since we’re talking about romantic subplots and not romance as a genre, it’s important to remember that “subplot” is the key word here. All of this has to happen within the larger plot of the story.

 

The take-away: romantic subplots need to be relevant, interesting, and timely within the larger framework of the story.

 

Also, love triangles in young adult books are evil. They are overdone, and rarely done well, because they almost always make the character in the middle either look like a terrible person or just plain stupid. That isn’t to say that all love triangles are necessarily bad, but tread carefully. The only love triangle I actually enjoyed is the love triangle in the first three books of the Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare, but that has so many extra appendages it might be better described as a star.

 

Then we started talking about romantic scenes in particular and what made them work or didn’t work. I’ve read a lot of advice about writing romantic scenes, but the discussion we had and the conclusion we came to was entirely new to me, and it’s advice I apply to my writing all the time—and not just with romantic scenes.

 

We examined several successful examples in books, movies, and television shows, and we came to this conclusion: There is always more than one emotion. It isn’t just love. If it’s just love, it’s actually kind of boring.

 

And now for the Disney sing-along:

 

In every Disney love song, there is more than one emotion at play and more than one motivation for the characters. That’s what makes them so great as romantic scenes. For some, it’s very simple. In Aladdin, “A Whole New World” isn’t just about falling in love, though that’s certainly part of it. There’s also Jasmine’s discovery of Aladdin’s true identity and her wonder at seeing the world from a whole new perspective.

 

We see a similar scenario in Tangled. “I See the Light” is about Rapunzel’s realization of her dream along with her fear of realizing that dream, and, simultaneously, Eugene’s discovery that his dream was not actually worthwhile, and their mutual discovery of a new dream—each other. They are falling in love, but there are so many other emotions packed into the scene that make it great.

 

Hercules presents a very different and equally interesting case. In “I Won’t Say I’m in Love,” Meg is actually denying that she’s in love with Hercules not only because of her past heartbreak but also because she’s working for Hades to hurt Hercules.

 

Finally, consider “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” from The Lion King. There’s love, obviously, but at the same time, Simba is hiding that he killed his father (or so he thinks), and Nala knows it. Nala expects Simba to come back and save the pride from Scar, but Simba refuses, because he doesn’t feel that he can lead the tribe after what he did (not to mention the hyenas will kill him). So it’s actually a lot more complicated than just love.

 

These are just some examples, but beyond being fun, nostalgic, and musical, they really do teach us something. All successful romantic scenes, and indeed romantic subplots, are based on more than just love. It’s true of relationships in the real world too. It has to be, otherwise no one would believe it in fiction. A relationship that isn’t based on some other connection or emotion besides love won’t get far. So, whether that underlying emotion is friendship, discovery, secrecy, suspicion, wonder, fear, or anything else you can think of, that’s what will make your romantic subplot successful. That’s what will give you tension, character growth, and plot relevance. And that’s what will make your reader care.

 

So happy Valentine’s Day, and may your romantic subplots, fictional or otherwise, bring you happiness.

An Unexpected Writing Party

I am delighted to announce that my story “Naming Angelo” was named the second runner-up for the 2015 Dell Magazine’s Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Check out the official announcement here. I won’t be able to attend the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts this year, but I’m still very excited about this.

 

“Naming Angelo” takes place during the Italian Risorgimento, the fight for Italian independence and unity in  the 1860s, and focuses on what I like to think of as the dark underbelly of naming magic. It’s a little quirkier and more experimental than the stuff I usually write, and of the several stories I submitted , it was honestly the story I kept forgetting about, because I thought there was no way it would place. Which just goes to show that sometimes great things happen when you least expect them. You never know what will happen, so you can never count yourself out.

Choosing the Right Title (Hint: This Is Not the Right Title)

I just finished reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which besides being a great book, has an excellent title, the sort of beautiful and meaningful title that I aspire to write one day. Thinking about why this is such a great title and why I love it led me to thinking about titles in general.

 

Titles are hard. A good title, like All the Light We Cannot See, is meaningful to the work and also an intriguing, catchy, or beautiful phrase. Something else I like to see in titles is multiple meanings. The phrase “all the light we cannot see” literally refers to the fact that visible light is only a fraction of the light on the electromagnetic spectrum, a fact quoted by a professor who greatly inspired one of the main characters as a child, but it is also meaningful in a figurative sense, because the other main character is blind and the book takes place in France and Germany in World War II, a very “dark” time.

 

Obviously, it’s hard to hit all of these characteristics in a title at once. Most of the time, I don’t, but there are a few basic tricks I’ve found to finding a good title—if not a fabulous one—as well as things I always try to consider.

 

Use intriguing words:

 

Some words are intriguing, attention-grabbing, or else just plain cool. Some words are not. I want to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone and Throne of Glass not because I know anything about them but because their titles are awesome and full of intriguing words. “Daughter,” “smoke,” and “bone” are good title words. So are “Throne” and “glass.” On the other hand, some words, like “sludge” or “washing machine,” are not as cool and will probably not produce the same ring in a title (The Washing Machine of Doom just sounds silly). There isn’t really a formula to which words work and which words don’t for titles, and sometimes, a word that you don’t think is intriguing can work well with a word that is, as in the chapter title “An Excess of Phlegm” in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. You sort of just have to try out phrases and see how they sound.

 

Important names, places, and ideas:

 

This one is pretty obvious. Look through the story for important names, places, images, themes, and ideas. These are all important to your story, which makes them great title fodder. Look at phrases around these important bits and see if you see anything catchy and meaningful. Any phrases that you already repeat deliberately throughout the story are good for this as well, but be careful, because sometimes direct title drops—even if you used the phrase before you decided it was going to be your title—can sometimes come off as corny or groan-worthy.

 

Length:

 

Pithy one-word titles have been the style recently. Sometimes I like them, and sometimes I use them myself, but most of the time, I feel like it’s hard to capture a lot of meaning or be all that intriguing with just one word.

 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can have a really long title, like The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which is a fabulous book, or Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room), which I really want to read. The thing about long titles, though, is they’re not for everything. A long title usually indicates a specific tone that the story will have. Usually, when I try to come up with a title, I shoot for something with three to five words, a phrase that’s easy to remember, intriguing, and not a mouthful.

 

Consistency:

 

This is more useful if you’re planning to write a series of books or have a series of related chapter titles, but sometimes it’s fun to have related titles for projects. The Harry Potter books are a great example of this. Each book is titled Harry Potter and the… Another great example is the Mortal Instruments books by Cassandra Clare—City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass, etc. It’s not always necessary to repeat exact words to create a feeling of consistency, either. Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small books have the thematically linked titles of the stages of Kel’s training to become a knight.

 

Obviously, there’s a lot more to choosing titles than just this. You can have alliterative or rhyming titles—as long as their not too cutesy—like Etiquette and Espionage or The Eyre Affair. You can have really convoluted titles that only tell a little bit about the book, or really simple titles that speak volumes. You can title chapters or not title chapters (but that’s another discussion entirely).

 

Sometimes, when I’m working on a story, I’ll change the title three or four times before I’m satisfied—if I’m ever satisfied. Or sometimes I’ll hit on a title right away that’s perfect. No matter what, I always try to have a working title from the moment I start a draft, because having a title that expresses to me what the story’s about helps guide me and keep me focused as I write. That title might change when I finish the first draft and revise the story, or it might still work, in which I’ll keep it. Another thing I do is jot down phrases I see or hear around that might be good titles, even if I don’t have story ideas for them. Even if I don’t ever use them, it’s an interesting exercise to see what’s appealing to me and what’s not.

 

There are definitely things to look for in a good title and things to avoid, but there’s almost never a definitive right or wrong answer, because there’s also a lot of personal taste involved. For example, take the title of this post. I was going for obvious and a little ironic, but I’m not totally sure I nailed it, and actually I think it’s kind of a stupid title, and I could have done better. But someone else might think it’s hilarious. Or maybe before I post this I’ll come up with a fabulous, funny title in the middle of the night or in the shower—where all the best thinking happens—and I’ll change it, and this whole paragraph just won’t exist.

 

Or maybe not.

New Year: New Goals

Actually, they’re mostly the same goals.

 

In 2014, I graduated from college. I was third runner-up for the Dell Award, and my first story was published. I finished drafts of two novels. I was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship, and I traveled to Assisi and began my year in Italy. I applied to creative writing masters of fine arts programs for next year.

 

But now, 2014 is over, and 2015 is upon us.

 

This year, my goals are simple:

 

  1. By the time I return from Italy at the end of June, one of those aforementioned novels will be edited and ready to start submitting:

At this point, I’ve got three novels on my computer in varying states of desperately-needing-revision. So I’m going to revise. I’m going back to the small child magician novel, which I set aside before my senior year of college in order to work on my honors novel. I will definitely have this novel in submittable condition by June, possibly sooner at the rate I’m going. Maybe I’ll even get back to the honors novel too. But one thing at a time.

 

2.  I will keep this website updated on a semi-regular basis:

Really. I swear. It’s going to happen. I made myself a calendar of posts, and I always stick to my calendars.

 

3. I will actually use my Twitter account and tweet on a semiregular basis:

Last year it was Facebook. This year it’s Twitter.

 

4. I will continue writing and submitting short stories:

Pretty self-explanitory. I’m already doing it. So my goal is to continue doing it.

 

5.  I will make some decisions about what I want to do with my life:

I’ve had some experiences in the last few months that have changed my ideas about this. I’m not sure I want to get a doctorate in comparative literature anymore. I’m not even sure that being a fulltime writer is the best decision for me, even though it’s been my dream since I was little. Not that I wouldn’t be able to be productive, but I’m very close to being a full-time writer now, because I only teach in the mornings, and I feel like if all I was doing was writing, I might go insane. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep writing, because of course I do. And this also doesn’t mean that I don’t want to get an MFA in creative writing. I still want to do that, for myself and for my writing. But I need to make some decisions about what I want to do after that.

 

I have two other goals that are worth mentioning:

 

  1. To be accepted into an MFA program.

 

2.  To have another story published.

 

These are both obvious, based on what I already said. These goals are also out of my control. But that doesn’t mean I can’t take steps to accomplish them.

 

So here I come, 2015!

Here We Go Again: The Dreaded Revision

I am currently in the middle of some major revisions. In fact, I’ve been doing almost nothing but revisions for the last few months, first short stories to submit to the Dell Award and now my small-child magician novel. So I thought I’d take a moment to talk about how I revise. Over the past several years, my writing style has changed significantly, and so has my process for revising, but my goal has always been the same: to tell a good story.

 

For me, revising effectively has a lot to do with understanding how you write in the first place as well as how you read. Because once you’ve finished a first draft, you have to step back and look at it not as your baby that you slaved over but as an editor and as a reader. It’s an oft-repeated bit of advice, but revision does mean reseeing, looking at the work anew with time and perspective and then, of course, changing what you see to make it better.

 

So first, before I do anything else to a draft, I put it away. This is partly because I am a firm believer in writing shitty first drafts—it’s better to get the words down on paper and worry about making them the right words later—so I tend to hate most of my first drafts—sometimes unreasonably so—and I need time and perspective to see what is truly terrible, what needs to be fixed, what is not as bad as I thought it was, and what is actually really good.

 

But before I even look at the project again, I ask my writing buddies to look it over and give me some feedback. I am a very social writer. I do better writing in a group alongside others—even if that group is convening over the internet—than I do writing in a room by myself. I need the ability to ask questions and bounce ideas, and my ability to help others with their own stories can give me insight into my own work. The knowledge that I am not working alone, in short, helps me work more efficiently. And I have to revise in a similar way. I’m working on getting better, but I’m not so good at finding flaws in my own projects, especially when it comes to plot. I need feedback from other writers and readers to point out the things that need to be fixed, and once I know what needs to be fixed, I can usually come up with how best to revise on my own.

 

I am getting better at finding problems myself because I’ve started paying more attention to how I read. When I finish reading a book, I either loved it unconditionally, loved it with reservations, only thought it was so-so, or just didn’t like it. But I don’t just leave it at that. I try to analyze why I feel this way about the book. Why exactly do I love it unconditionally? Or what makes me have reservations about loving it? How come I thought it was only so-so? What about it was so terrible that I just didn’t like it? I examine a book from a writer’s point of view, looking at the choices the writer made and why I think they made them, contemplating what choices I would have made if I was writing it. To give an example, I recently read a book that I really loved, except after everything the characters had done to get this far, the ending fell kind of flat for me. When I thought about it, I realized that any other ending wouldn’t have been right for the characters, but it still felt wrong to me, because after so much excitement, this ending felt anticlimactic. So if I was writing this book, I wouldn’t have changed what happened in the ending between the characters, but I might have changed the setting or the events to make it fit better with the tone of the rest of the story. And by examining books and short stories that I read like this, I am practicing the skills I need to see the flaws in my own writing.

 

And once I see the flaws, I revise. Sometimes the revising is big. I have completely rewritten several stories several times. Sometimes the revisions are small tweaks that change the tenor of a character or a scene. Sometimes, I start at the beginning of the story and revise from there, but sometimes I jump around. There is advice all over the internet about how best to revise and rewrite. Some authors have detailed, step by step processes, complete with questionnaires or color coded outlines, that they use to revise every time. Personally, I try to listen to the needs of the story and the needs of the reader and find the place where those needs intersect and balance.

 

One thing I almost always do before I submit a story, however, is go through it and cut all unnecessary words, because I know that I tend to overwrite my first drafts. I set a target word count that I think the story should be based on its genre and what I accomplish in the story, then I do the math to determine how many words I should cut per page in order to reach that target. Then I use an abacus as a counter, and I start cutting words without actually changing the story. And I can almost always do it, and it almost always becomes a better story.

 

Revising isn’t always easy. Sometimes, it’s downright hard. Finishing a first draft of a project is not, in fact, the hardest part, and sometimes the thought of plunging back in, armed with my trusty toolbox of revising tricks, sounds like a drag: “And here we go again.” But whether I want to delete the file and burn all existing copies and pretend it never happened or else revel in the glory of finishing, there is always more work to do, and it is always worth doing. I try to view that work—revision—as a chance to get back inside my characters and my stories, to discover again why I loved this idea and why it was worth writing in the first place, and to make the changes that will turn my clumsy first draft into a story that shines, a story that others will want to read.

Packing for a Story

In the introduction to Theodora Goss’s short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, Terri Windling quotes Goss’s discussion of literature as a series of countries and border crossings:

 

As a student studying literature, I was told there were borders indeed: national (English, American, colonial), temporal (Romantic, Victorian, Modern), generic (fantastic, realistic). Some countries (the novel) you could travel to readily. The drinking water was safe, no immunizations were required. For some countries (the gothic), there was a travel advisory. The hotels were not up to standard; the trains would not run on time. Some countries (the romance) one did not visit except as an anthropologist, to observe the strange behavior of its inhabitants. And there were border guards (although they were called professors), to examine your travel papers as carefully as a man in an olive uniform with a red star on the cap. They could not stop you from crossing the border, but they would tell you what had been left out of your luggage, what was superfluous. Why the journey was a terrible idea in the first place. (Goss XII-XIII)

 

BTW  I’m only partway through In the Forest of Forgetting but so far it’s shaping up to be excellent.

 

I was struck by this quote not only because it is beautiful, inciteful, and witty, but also because this past week I was packing my luggage for a year abroad and at the same time having some literary border-crossing troubles of my own.

 

I recently wrote a short story that I worked really hard on and loved to pieces. (Note: Loving your own first drafts to pieces is usually not such a good idea. I do not recommend.) So, having completed this story, I asked some friends for critiques, and I was told that this was not a short story. This story was a novel, trying—and failing—to be a short story. Now, had I listened to the people I’d originally discussed this idea with—they thought it would work better as a novel too—I wouldn’t have landed myself in this predicament. But I’ve had too many short stories turn into novels that I still haven’t written yet, and I loved this idea. I wanted to write a short story, too, so I did, and now I had feedback I didn’t want to hear.

 

But of course, I did hear it, and since it jived with feedback I’d already received, I thought that I better at least consider it. And the more I considered it, the happier I became with the idea of this story as a novel. I could really explore the world, the characters and their motivations, the plot. I could dive into it in a way I really couldn’t do successfully in a short story. In a novel, I could keep all the intertwined plot lines I already had, whereas if I insisted on writing a short story, in order for it to really work I would have to dissect the plot lines and only focus on one, maybe one and a half. All of this seemed like strong reasons to make this short story a novel, so I set the draft I had aside and added it to my beist of unwritten novel ideas with only a little regret. The only problem was, I also had all these ideas for related short stories, and before I knew it, they had turned into novels too, and I was out of short story ideas.

 

Clearly, there is a lesson here that I understand in principle but still haven’t really learned: Short stories are not simply shorter novels. Short stories and novels are very different beasts.

 

Which brings me back to my thoughts on literature as countries and my struggles with packing. As I was packing this weekend—deciding what to bring and what to leave behind, what was necessary, what I would like to have, and what I could do without—I realized that in a way, planning a project is similar to packing for a trip. If you’re going away for a weekend or an overnight, you’re going to pack less than if you’re going away for a week or a month or a year. Similarly, if you’re writing a piece of flash fiction or a short story, you don’t need—and shouldn’t have—as much plot, as many characters, and as much information in general as you would include if you were writing a novel. When you’re packing for a year abroad, you’re not just bringing clothes and a swim suit and a few toiletries. You’re bringing clothes, some toiletries to start you out (but you’re planning to get more when you’re over there), your electronic devices like a computer or an iPod (though maybe you’ve left your phone behind), lots of books, and anything that is personally important to you (though not necessarily of much use). When you’re planning a novel, you need characters and plot and lots of room for those characters to develop, and don’t forget all that backstory that has gotten your characters to this point. A novel can have multiple plot lines and subplots and character arcs, but a short story can really only have a few characters, one plot and one character arc, and limited backstory. You can’t pack a novel into a short story, just like you can’t pack for a year when you’re really only going away for a week.

 

It sounds ridiculously obvious when I say it like that, but as I said, it’s a lesson that I feel I understand in principle but am only just beginning to really learn in that way that will make my writing better. I started out writing novels (bad ones, it’s true, but novels nonetheless). So I naturally think big, and it’s an effort for me to pare something down to the size of a short story, but effort or not, I still love it. And if packing for Italy has taught me nothing else, it has taught me that some suitcases just aren’t built to hold certain things, and you can’t always fit everything you want into the bag, and you can’t force it. You can sacrifice the thing you want to bring, or you can pay the price of bringing a larger bag, but whatever choice you make, if the story is important enough for you to write it, you’ll find the bag that fits best so you can have the trip of a lifetime.

 

Now, back to packing! Next stop Italy!

Books for ALL the Ages

Over the last few weeks, I have found myself involved in several discussions about the differences between young adult and adult literature and the validity of both. I read both, and personally all I really care about is whether it’s a good book or not, but I also tend to write YA, and as a writer I’ve found that I sometimes get confused about where exactly that oh-so-fuzzy line dividing the age ranges is. And what about the subcategories like middle grade and new adult? So, partly because I wanted to iron out my own confusion and partly because I wanted an organized response to all these discussions I’ve been involved in, I decided to write out what I see as the differences between the two.

 

Character’s Age

 

The age of the main character is perhaps the easiest and simplest way to define young adult fiction. Generally speaking, if a character is between the ages of ten and nineteen, the book is young adult, with ten- to twelve-year-old protagonists largely falling into the middle grade subcategory. There’s also this new-ish category called New Adult, which is generally about characters from nineteen to twenty-five years old. Adult books are about, well, adults.

 

But the key word here is “generally.” As with every pattern, there are exceptions. With this one, there are a lot of exceptions. The main character of Janice Hardy’s series The Healing Wars, for example, is fifteen, but the books are classified as middle grade. Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a middle grade book, but it alternates between the story of twelve-year-old Henry and Keiko’s forbidden friendship during the time of Japanese Internment in World War II and the story of Henry trying to find her forty years later. And a large part of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner is about Amir as a young boy, but The Kite Runner is an adult novel. And these are just the exceptions I came up with off the top of my head.

 

So while age is a good rule of thumb, it is by no means the only criteria for young adult literature.

 

Character’s Place in Society

 

Along the same lines as the main character’s age, the protagonist’s place in society is also important. Let’s say to simplify things that the main character is a teenager. What being a teenager means varies greatly depending on where and when the novel takes place. Throughout most of history, and even in some cultures today, a teenager might already be married, managing a household, and have children. This would place the teenager in the adult sphere of society and therefore make it ambiguous whether the book would be adult or young adult. Conversely, there could be a young adult novel about a twenty-something just finding their way into adult society (I’ve never read such a book myself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one exists).

 

Young adult books tend to involve characters who are just moving into society. They are on the edge between childhood and adulthood, or they are forced as children to take on the responsibilities of adults, usually without the support of family members or other adults. As John Green said, teenagers in any setting are going through so many new experiences—first love, first heartbreak, first encounter with the death of someone close to them.

 

Content and Themes

 

As you can see, the dividing line between young adult and adult is already fuzzy, but this is the part where it becomes even fuzzier, because none of this is easily definable. Adult books are supposed to deal with more “adult” themes than young adult books, which seems obvious when you say it out loud, but young adult books often deal with similar themes as adult books. Young adult confronts these themes differently from adult, but young adult’s approach is typically just as complex and thoughtful as the adult approach. There isn’t a limit on topic or theme for either young adult or adult literature. Lois Lowry’s book The Giver, for example, deals with the euthanasia of those who do not fit into or function within society’s standards, and that’s a middle grade book. Jay Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why confronts a teenage girl’s reasons for committing suicide. And The Hunger Games is about a bunch of teenagers forced to fight to the death to preserve peace.

 

Guys, this is deep stuff.

 

There does, however, seem to be a spectrum of what content can be shown and what can’t, particularly concerning explicit sex and violence. As I understand it, middle grade books have limited explicit violence and no sex at all—kissing is the limit. Young adult books can have more explicit violence and limited explicit sex—they tend to fade to black before actual sex happens. New adult books (and I know very little about this) have more explicit sex and violence than young adult books. And I’m pretty sure almost anything goes in adult books. Personally, I’m vague about where exactly all of these dividing lines are, and there are always exceptions.

 

This brings me to my last, and to my mind most important, distinction between adult and young adult literature.

 

Restraint

 

To me, the biggest difference between adult and young adult books is the restraint shown by young adult books. I’m using the word “restraint” loosely here, but there isn’t one all-encompassing word for what I’m talking about, and it gets the point across. In a young adult book, everything the author does has to matter to the story. The majority of young adult books are shorter than adult books (this has changed since Harry Potter but it’s still largely true), and this coupled with the limitations on content means that everything the author chooses to include in the story has to matter. If characters are going to fall in love and have sex, that’s fine, but it needs to matter to the characters’ growth and overall arc over the course of the novel, if not the plot itself. If Character X is going to beat up Character Y, it has to change things. On the other hand, the lack of limitations on adult books has resulted in far too many novels that, to my mind, are full of needlessly explicit sex and violence that has very little or nothing to do with the actual story and is only present because people believe a book needs to have these things to sell. (Note: I like adult books, and this is, of course, not true of all of them, but I’ve seen it enough that it frustrates me).

 

A great example of this is the difference between Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Mary Doria Russel’s A Thread of Grace. Both books are set during World War II and involve Jews fleeing the Holocaust. The Book Thief is young adult, and A Thread of Grace is adult, and in my opinion, Zusak’s restrained way of confronting the reality of death, the war, and the Holocaust is more emotionally powerful than Russel’s excessively violent and almost chaotically complicated narrative.

 

In general, young adult authors show more restraint than adult authors, and sometimes I feel it makes for a stronger book.

 

All of these distinctions, however, mainly exist so that publishers and bookstores know where to put books on the shelves, and for each difference I just listed, there are probably a dozen books or more that prove me wrong.

 

And as for those who think it’s immature—at best—for an adult to read young adult, all I have to say is that while there are certainly books that give young adult a bad name, there are definitely books that give adult a bad name too. It’s also important to note that many books called “serious” or “Capital L” literature that we read in high school, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, would actually be considered young adult literature if they were published today, but they were published before young adult was created.

 

But what does it matter who the book was written for, anyway? I read everything I can get my hands on, and some of the best books I’ve read are middle grade and young adult. If it’s a good book, where you found it in the bookstore shouldn’t matter.

New Years Resolutions Take 2

Back in January, I wrote a post about my New Year’s resolutions, and now, at the beginning of September, I thought it might be a good idea to check in on how I’ve done, celebrate some successes, and renew the ones that could use some renewing.

 

1.  Post on Facebook Every Day:

 

To be entirely honest, I haven’t posted on Facebook every single day this year, but I do almost every day, and I have gotten myself into the habit of actually using Facebook like a normal person, which was the goal underlying the “post every day” bit. So I declare this resolution a success.

 

2.  Reach 200 rejection letters or get published, whichever comes first:

 

I’m not going to say exactly how many rejections I have because I don’t want to share and no one really wants to know that, but in all likelihood, I will reach 200 by the end of the calendar year.

 

On the other hand, I have made 200 a moot point. After 137 rejections, my story “The Year of Salted Skies” was named the third runner-up for the 2014 Dell Award, and after 150 rejections, my story “The Collector” was accepted for publication at Cast of Wonders! And it was published .

 

Victory!

 

3.  Blog semi-regularly:

 

So…

 

About that…

 

I could make all sorts of excuses for why I haven’t blogged—finishing my thesis and taking my honors exams, applying to graduate schools, waiting to hear from said graduate schools and from the Fulbright, graduating, preparing for a year in Italy, expanding the World War II Italy novella into a full length novel, all that important stuff. But I am not going to bemoan or attempt to excuse my lack of blogging activity. Instead, I am going to renew this resolution. 2014 is not over yet, and the new school year is about to begin. This year I will be teaching instead of learning, and this is strange and a little scary to me. Also Italy, which is awesome and must be blogged about. So I will make a new school year’s resolution to blog more. Please pester me if I don’t.

 

But, lack of blogging aside, I have to say, this has been the year! I graduated from college! I got a Fulbright scholarship to teach in Assisi, Italy! And I got published! And if I did all that—and kept my Facebook resolution—then I will get better at blogging.

 

And once I get better at blogging, maybe I’ll figure out this thing called Twitter.

It’s Getting Eerie What’s This Cheery Singing All About

The other day, I was listening to David Arkenstone’s “The Painted Seals” on my iPod, when I looked up and said to my parents, “If I ever have a book that gets made into a movie, I want this guy to do the score.” This struck my parents as an unusual thing to say, until I pointed out that many of my writer friends pick out their ideal casts for the possible movie of their books.  Having an ideal cast for your novel does a lot of things.  It gives you visuals for your characters, and it can also help you narrow down some basics about your characters’ personalities—if you pick an actor who always plays a certain type of character or a certain role in a movie, then you’re saying something about your character.  But creating an ideal cast for the hypothetical movie of my novel has never really worked for me: Besides the fact that I can never remember actors’ names, the visualization is sort of a problem, but that’s an entirely  different topic.

 

So I work with music.  I create soundtracks and scores for my projects, and I listen to them while I’m writing.

 

I’m a very musical person: I sing in my college’s community choir, I’ve played clarinet for twelve years, and before that, I played piano for ten.  I also come from a very musical family.  Everyone in my family can play an instrument and sing.  My older brother was the lead in all the musicals in high school, and don’t even get me started on my cello prodigy younger brother.

 

But being a musical person and coming from a musical family is only part of it.  Yes, I identify with music as a tool to help me focus my writing, but I’m certainly not the only one.  This Writer’s Digest post about writing routines that work talks about using music as inspiration and focus.  There are projects like David Arkenstone’s album Music Inspired by Middle Earth or The Hunger Games Music Project.  And most of my friends make playlists of some kind or another to listen to as they write.

 

What interests me is that there doesn’t seem to be one tried and true method for this.  What sort of music inspires you really depends on who you are and also on what sort of project you’re working on.  I know people who have playlists for specific characters, and I know other people who have playlists of songs that capture moods, themes, or specific moments in stories.  Some of my friends use solely instrumental music, or don’t use instrumental music at all, or use a mix.

 

What I do honestly depends on what I’m writing.  At first, I thought that I always did the same thing for each project, but I’m starting to realize that’s not true.  My playlist for the memory wiping academy novel is a mix of instrumental songs and songs with words, while there are no strictly instrumental songs in my playlist for the small child wizard novel.  For both playlists, I have arranged the songs in such a way that for me they tell the story.  I never shuffle these playlists and always listen to them in order.

 

For the World War II Italy novel, on the other hand, I have a giant collection of all the Italian music on my iPod in one playlist, including Italian pop and light rock, Italian Disney songs, the soundtrack to Life Is Beautiful, and two albums of fascist marches—oh, the glory of what you can find on iTunes! I almost always shuffle this playlist, and I listen to it more for the mood than for specific plot points.  This might be because my outline for this project is still pretty sketchy, and maybe I’ll go through and make a more coherent playlist as I flesh out my outline and start to write, but right now, this works.

 

There are so many good things about using music when you’re writing.  For me, songs contain little stories and moments in themselves.  Specific songs that I associate with specific points in my work can help me focus in on what I’m trying to accomplish.  What is the ultimate mood or arc of this chapter or scene or even this moment? What are the characters doing or thinking or feeling here? What part of the ultimate theme should come through?

 

It’s hard to describe exactly, but on a larger scale, I feel like my playlists for my two fantasy novels have a sort of continuity in the type of music and the feel of the music, and if a song jumps out as not quite fitting with that, maybe that says something about what I’m trying to do at that point in the novel.  I’ve even discovered repetition of earlier themes in my playlists that I hadn’t noticed before and decided to play up in the actual writing.  For example, in the small child wizard novel, the first song in the playlist is “One Jump Ahead” from Aladdin, and later, its reprise represents another character’s point of view.  Beyond helping me focus in on parts of the story I already know occur, I’ve sometimes even been inspired by songs.  I included “Do You Hear the People Sing” on my memory wiping academy novel’s playlist because that specific song and a joke someone made about the implications of my characters going caroling ultimately helped me figure out how my climax will play out when I get there.

 

I don’t want this to come across like I rely on music exclusively for these things.  I don’t.  I do visualize scenes like a movie in my head.  I’ve tried drawing my characters, which hasn’t gone very well.  I’ve considered writing a chapter in script form to see how it would be different—though I haven’t actually done this.  I did once translate the first few paragraphs of a story into Italian, which was a really interesting exploration of words and what words mean and the ultimate meaning I wanted to get out of the beginning of my story.  Most of the time, if I have a problem, I find myself talking my way through it rather than turning to my music.  On the other hand, listening to my playlists while I’m writing helps put me in the right mood and get ready to crank some words out and have fun doing it, which is ultimately the reason I write.

 

(Title Quote: “I’ve Got a Theory/Bunnies/If We’re Together”)