Michael: The Author Blog

Christine: The Movement You Need Is On Your Shoulder

When I worked on the copy desk of a daily newspaper several years ago, one of my favorite tasks was headline-writing.

Criteria included maximum impact, active voice and strict adherence to length. For instance, a headline may require three decks in a single column with a point size of 24. Or one deck spanning six columns with a point size of 48. Headlines couldn’t run short or long. You couldn’t skimp on the point size, for instance by shaving off two points to squeeze in an extra word. You couldn’t split a compound modifier, with one word being on one deck and the other on the next.

Such strict parameters have brought many a copy editor to their knees, but I loved the challenge. It was like completing a crossword puzzle, only I was both creating and solving it simultaneously.

Likewise, I've written lots of children’s stories in verse and am an amateur songwriter, priding myself on exacting standards. No weak rhymes. No flubbed rhythms. No skewed scansion. (Substitute the word “fellow” for “man” in the familiar Nantucket limerick, and you’ll see what I mean.)

I just love the “no cheating” requirement of such writing. It’s the sublime precision, the muscular economy, of crafting just the right thing.

And you know what? That just right thing always seems to exist. Think hard enough, rearrange your words enough, bolster your vocabulary enough, be willing to start from scratch enough, and you’ll eventually complete such an exacting writing task by feeling not that you’ve created something new, but that you’ve plucked an existing, exquisite star right out of the heavens. I love that feeling.

Of course, fiction-writing is all about no rules, no parameters. I love that process, too, but there’s something very satisfying about marrying imagination and creativity with structure and discipline. In fact, the first children’s story I ever wrote in verse came at the behest of my then-six-year-old son, Greg. We were waiting for our meal at a restaurant when he said, “Let’s write a story. And let’s call it I Can Read Books Upside Down.”

Ahhhh! I was in heaven as I grabbed a pen and a napkin. I’d never started a story with a title before, and certainly not a title as unwieldy and inscrutable as that one. Game on!

A few minutes later, with my son’s considerable help, we’d crafted twenty verses about a little boy’s topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down day. The bus took him to school in reverse. Kids ran the bases backward at recess. His ice cream cone was served bottoms up. And of course, he could read books upside down. I love our story, and it never would’ve been written unless I’d been open to a new set of rules.

Indeed, sometimes strict parameters produce the greatest poetry. I read once that Paul McCartney struggled for hours to complete the lyrics of his classic Hey Jude. He finally “settled” on one line as a throwaway lyric, a placeholder until he thought of something better. But Lennon told him that the throwaway line was the one the song was meant to have. Fittingly, the line is, “The movement you need is on your shoulder.”

Nothing is more transcendent than realizing the movement you need is on your shoulder … and was there all along, just waiting to be discovered.

Kristen: My Comfort Zone (it’s actually very tiny)

I am a freakishly private person. I like corners, dimly lit rooms, and my cat (I don’t even want to write down my cat’s name, because I consider that a privacy issue). As a writer, being freakishly private is not ideal. People often tell me that I need to suck it up and get out there and start promoting myself. Okay. But that is not how I am built. This year, my first middle-grade novel came out, Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus. Next year, my third teen novel will be published, A Field Guide for Heartbreakers, along with another middle-grade novel, Bessica Lefter Sweats Her Pants Off. This means that I am pretty busy writing. Every day. Even though I have a tough time with it, I understand that promotion is important too. Below is a list of all the promotion-type things I did this year that took me out of my comfort zone. I don’t know if they benefited me or my books in any way, though I’m pretty sure that my traveling caused great suffering for my cat.

I made a podcast about my latest book and put it on my website. My friend Mark who is a reporter interviewed me. He asked me questions about my life, which I hated answering, and he asked me to elaborate on the time I fell underneath my own school bus. I sort of freaked out when I heard my own voice. I didn’t sound like me at all.

I participated in a writing panel at the San Francisco Public Library for LitQuake. I didn’t really talk about my book though. I gave a demonstration on bear safety, and my friend Rachel wore mock bear paws (that my mother sewed for me) and pretended to attack me using a variety of paws: black, grizzly, polar and pizzly. This was really outside of my comfort zone. But I know a lot about bear safety, and it’s in my first book, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. Sadly, I recently found out that Rachel has photos of this event and that she posted them on Facebook (something I find myself emotionally unable to join). Upon learning about these photos, I freaked out and demanded that Rachel take them down. And she agreed. Even though she is currently using one of the photos as her profile picture.

I read at a Barnes & Noble. My friends came to support me. They are adults and had to sit in little chairs. I read from Camille McPhee. Afterward, I answered questions. One girl asked me what I wanted my children to be when they grew up. I told her that I didn’t have children. She insisted that I answer the question anyway. Tough crowd. Tough crowd.

I won a fellowship for poetry and attended the Writers@Work conference in Park City and instead of requesting a single room and avoiding people, I tried to build some community. I lived in a condo with a cool roommate named Sue and mingled and met a lot of talented writers. Also, I ventured into the wilderness and hiked. And got lost on a mountain. And was repeatedly lied to by mountain bikers who told me I was twenty minutes away from the nearest operating ski lift. Jerks. (I joke. I joke. I guess they measure distance in bike-time. Full throttle.)

I contacted media in my hometown in Idaho. My book is set there. And now I will be on a television morning show when I go home for Christmas. This sort of makes me want to avoid going home for Christmas. Also, I am probably going to have to buy new pants. I told a friend this and she told me that nobody will see my pants, because I will be sitting down. But I always see people’s pants, even when they sit down, so I don’t really understand what my friend meant.

I drove to my alma mater, Loyola Marymount University, and read to a room filled with college students and chilled shrimp appetizers. I read from my upcoming teen novel, A Field Guide for Heartbreakers. The rest of the lineup read poetry. It was an intimidating venue. And when an attendee tried to take my picture, I actually stopped reading and pointed at him and said, “No! You need to stop doing that!” And then I kept reading and stayed in my allotted time limit. Good times. Good times.

I served as a faculty member for a children’s writer’s conference at Book Passages in Corte Madera. I had to give a three-hour talk about something. Three hours is a really long time, even with a generous bathroom break. I talked about dialogue. Afterward, I ate the best cucumber sandwich of my life. Yum.

I am really surprised that I did any of these things. (I’m even surprised that I wrote this blog entry.) I’ll probably do a little bit more next year. But not a lot. And that’s okay. Because I don’t want to give myself an aneurism worrying about promotion. I think I’m one of those people who will always keep my focus on the writing. This might not be everybody’s formula. I know some people who are promotion machines (they’re pretty fierce tweeters, too). I’ll do what I can. And that’s okay.

Megan: The Myth of Reading Up

It is a truth universally acknowledged that teens read up. Your protagonist should be a couple of years older than your audience, or so the thinking goes. It's time to start questioning this assertion, at least when it comes to high school students.

I'm surprised how many times I'm asked what aged audience I was thinking of when I wrote Secrets of Truth & Beauty. Occasionally a parent or teacher has told me, a bit guiltily, that they liked the book but wouldn't give it to their fifth grader. That's fine, I think, I didn't write it for your fifth grader. I wrote it for high school students.

In my job as a high school librarian, I help teens to make their reading choices every day. For the most part, they want to read about other teenagers. When I look at the fiction on my return cart, I do not see a row of adult novels. Instead I see mostly YA, with a few Jodi Picoult and Stephen King thrown in – authors, it should be noted, who often feature teen characters.

It would be a reasonable assumption to think that since I am a YA author, I would be inclined to purchase and recommend YA books. However, my evidence is not simply anecdotal. Every year, librarian Jo Lewis asks members of LM-Net, a school librarian list-serv, to report their top ten checkouts. She collects and analyzes the data, and compiles lists for each type of school (elementary, middle, secondary). If you go to the list, and choose "secondary" from the drop down menu, you'll see that the top ten for high school students are all young adult novels.

So that's high school. What about younger teens? In 2009, the Twilight series was tops in middle schools as well as high schools – no surprise there. With a few notable exceptions (The Lovely Bones!?), the rest of the top ten are books with a middle school audience in mind. While it seems that younger teens may range both younger and older, they too, are eager to read stories about kids their age. Teens it seems, want to read about teens.

Thankfully the explosion in YA literature means that there are books for every age and interest. For me this is not simply a matter of curiosity, but one of equity. Teens, like everyone else deserve to see themselves in books. Sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen year olds shouldn't be forced to read about mid-life angst since the younger kids are reading about their lives.

As writers it's our responsibility to portray our world's honestly. If the stories we tell about teens also find resonance with a fifth grader, so much the better, but we needn't simplify or clean up because this younger reader might pick up the book. Write your story. Write the truth. Everyone will be better off for it.

Nina: HOLD STILL book trailer

In celebration of today--which is the launch day of my first novel, HOLD STILL--I'd love to share my book trailer with you.

I have to admit that I kind of live in fear of marketing tasks. I'm terrible at writing little blurbs about my book. I can't even describe what it's about very well. I have a former student who read an ARC and said, when she was finished, "I had no idea that your book was going to be like this!" When I asked her what she thought it was going to be like, she told me that all she had to base her expectations on was the answer I gave her a couple years ago when she asked me what it was about. Not surprisingly, all I had told her was, "It's about a girl in high school." Now, as she was telling me what she thought of it, she said, "I had no idea that anything was actually going to happen."

So, yes. I am not so good at this kind of thing.

But making a trailer was exciting. It was not a task, it was a project. I really, really like projects.

I especially like projects when they involve people I love. A lot of people who I love were involved in the making of this: The girls in the trailer are my mother's photography students (which is perfect for the book); the footage was shot on a Super 8 camera by my very talented wife, Kristyn Stroble; my best friend, Amanda Krampf, directed and edited; Mia Nolting (who illustrated HOLD STILL) provided the illustrations and hand lettering; and Emma Galvin (who is the reader on the audio version) is narrating. I stood off to the side and let it all happen.

Here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

Bouchercon is on!

You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little nervous.  In two days, I'm meeting up with 650 young readers, and I'm hoping to make a good impression.

It's all part of Bouchercon 2009.  What the bleep is Bouchercon, you ask?  Well, Bouchercon (bow-cher-con) is the world's biggest annual gathering of mystery authors and fans, drawing about 1,500 people every year.  It's a certified blast, for reasons that include but aren't limited to: (a) panel discussions with great authors; (b) evenings at the hotel bar (provided you're 21, natch) worth the price of admission alone; (c) and field trips like the one I took at last year's convention in Baltimore, where you see cool stuff like Edgar Allan Poe's grave:

Anyway, the convention's numbers will swell a bit when the convention hits Indianapolis on Thursday, because the conference organizers had the genius plan to include, for the first time, programming for kids.   

Baseball teams are smart enough to have "kids get in free days" -- which expose kids to the game, make some lifelong fans in the process, and bring their parents along in the bargain.  That's just what's happening at Bouchercon this year:  the convention is sharing the thrill of mystery novels in particular, and books in general, with mystery authors' future readers.

For YA writers, it's even better, because the kids coming out to the convention are our current readers.  

I hope they do this programming again next year, and if so I hope  more YA writers get on board.  (Although we've got a great group this year, including Chris Grabenstein and honored guest Wendelin Van Draanen.)  I underscore that point because I imagine many authors reading this might be saying, "yeah, that's great and all, but I don't write mysteries."  If you just nodded your head, don't be so hasty.  

Earlier this year, the Mystery Writers of America gave its prestigious Edgar Award for best YA mystery novel to the very deserving Paper Towns by John Green.  It's an excellent book, but one that most probably wouldn't think of primarily as a mystery.  

Similarly, I think for purposes of the Bouchercon conference, the definition of "mystery" is probably best left fairly open.  Open, that is, all the great YA authors out there writing stories that include foul deeds, hidden pasts, secret identities, microscopes, and/or fake mustaches. 

I mean, that covers most of the good books anyways, right?  In any case, there are a lot of you out there, and I hope to see you at Bouchercon 2010.

Marianna: Pleased to meet you -- fully exploiting a character's first scene

It's a cliche, I know, but you really do get only one chance at making a first impression -- in life and in fiction. From the moment a new character enters a book, the reader consciously and subconsciously picks up on clues about his nature and quickly forms an opinion. If details are not thoughtfully chosen, a character's first scene can be a missed opportunity or, more negatively, disruptively misleading.

Describing a character’s physical appearance is certainly one tool you -- the writer -- have at your disposal, but actions and dialogue are the keys to creating more complex, nuanced first impressions. Sarah Dessen’s enormously popular young adult novels contain excellent examples of how a great deal of information can be subtly conveyed through deceptively simple, short scenes.

Although the plots obviously vary, there are consistent themes in Dessen’s novels. One of the hallmarks of a Dessen book is that the narrator, a teenage girl, begins a relationship with a new boy during the course of the story. (If the protagonist has a boyfriend at the opening of the novel, you can rest assured that he’ll be gone in a few chapters to make way for the new guy.)

Because the protagonists are meeting these boys for the first time, Dessen always has a scene in her books with that initial, pivotal encounter between narrator and eventual love interest. Looking closely at these scenes, it is remarkable how many signals Dessen subtly incorporates to foreshadow what the boy is really like and where the relationship is headed. To highlight the fact that appearance is only part of this, the quotes included here omit all references to what the characters look like.

In Dreamland, Caitlin, the narrator, first meets Rogerson Briscoe at a gas station after she has come from a disastrous cheerleading experience:

He was standing next to the black BMW... As I passed he looked up and watched me, staring. “Hey,” he called out just as I passed out of sight… I took a few steps back and suddenly he was right there; he’d moved to catch up with me (50).

The most telling detail in this passage is the use of the phrase “suddenly he was right there.” Although it is not overt or heavy handed, there is a threatening undercurrent to Rogerson’s sudden appearance. It’s creepy.

The scene continues: “He smiled, then looked me up and down. Suddenly I knew I looked idiotic in my cheerleading uniform…‘Nice outfit,’ he said” (50). With one small gesture and comment, Rogerson brings out Caitlin’s insecurity. Dessen swiftly establishes his judgmental attitude towards Caitlin’s life, and her self-doubting response to his disapproval.

The climax of the scene – the moment when Rogerson has the most profound effect on Caitlin – directly follows his subtly demeaning comment about her uniform.

He glanced at the bandage on my upper arm, then asked, “What happened to you there?”…

“I fell off a [cheerleading] pyramid earlier tonight.”

“Ouch,” he said, and before I could even move he reached out and touched my bandage, running a finger across it…“You okay?”

“I… I don’t know,” I said. This was strangely true at that moment (50-51).

Rogerson’s gesture of reaching out to touch Caitlin “before she could even move,” though small, is presumptuous and aggressive. And although the reader knows Caitlin means she doesn’t know if she’s “okay” because she’s feeling so intrigued by Rogerson, her response shows that his action disturbed and unsettled her. Moments later, Rogerson makes his exit:

“I should go,” I said…

“Sure,” he said, nodding. “See ya around, Caitlin.” And he raised his chin, backing up, keeping his eyes on me (51).

Just that fleeting image of Rogerson says so much. The raised chin conveys cockiness; the way he keeps looking at Caitlin is subtly menacing. He will be watching her.

Caitlin and Rogerson’s romance begins soon after this first meeting. Following an initial happy phase, Rogerson becomes physically and mentally abusive. In that brief scene where Rogerson is introduced, Dessen foreshadows many elements of his character and of their relationship: Rogerson’s tendency to prey on Caitlin’s insecurities; his judgmental nature; the aggressive, presumptuous way he treats Caitlin’s body; his constant watchfulness; Caitlin’s attraction to his aggressiveness; and the strong emotions he evokes in her. Most importantly, Dessen conveys all of this without showing Rogerson kicking a dog, or anything so blatant. Dessen is able to straddle the line of having Rogerson be attractive to Caitlin while setting the scene for his cruel behavior later in the novel.

Dexter, the main love interest in This Lullaby, makes quite a different entrance. Remy, the narrator, is already known to the reader as being highly cynical about anything relating to love and relationships. And it’s through her eyes that the reader meets Dexter. Remy is sitting in a car dealership, already in a bad mood.

Just then, someone plopped down hard into the chair on my left, knocking me sideways into the wall… And suddenly, just like that, I was pissed…

“What the hell,” I said, pushing off the wall… I turned my head and saw …it was a guy…around my age… And for some reason he was smiling.

“Hey there,” he said cheerfully. “How’s it going?” (10-11)

Dexter’s cheerful demeanor immediately counteracts the fact that he bumped into Remy. The reader, knowing how cranky Remy is, doesn’t pick up on his physical contact as a threatening or violent action. Rather, it is clear that Remy is overreacting. Dexter seems happily oblivious, a stark contrast to Remy’s negativity.

Remy continues to give him a hard time. “’You just slammed me into the wall, asshole.’ He blinked. ‘Goodness,’ he said finally. ‘Such language’” (11). Dexter’s unperturbed response to Remy’s nastiness proves both that he has a sense of humor, and that he is not easily put off by Remy’s tough girl demeanor. Despite her abuse, he continues on in an enthusiastic manner.

“The thing is,” he said…”I saw you out in the showroom. I was over by the tire display?”…“I just thought to myself, all of a sudden, that we had something in common. A natural chemistry, if you will... That we were, in fact, meant to be together…”; “[Knocking into you] was an accident. An oversight. Just an unfortunate result of the enthusiasm I felt knowing I was about to talk to you” (11).

With this confession, Dexter comes across as an over-excited puppy. His enthusiasm seems genuine and his lack of pretension or cool façade is immediately appealing.

When Dexter touches Remy – uninvited – it makes quite a different impression than when Rogerson touches Caitlin:

“Just take this,” the guy said, grabbing my hand. He turned it palm up before I could even react…then proceeded…to write a name and phone number in the space between my thumb and forefinger…Talk about not respecting a person’s boundaries. I’d dumped drinks on guys for even brushing against me at a club, much less yanking my hand and actually writing on it (12-13).

The reader knows to take Remy’s reaction with a grain of salt – after all, she’s just said she dumps drinks on guys who brush against her. So instead of being threatening, Dexter’s action of grabbing her hand is simply endearing. Remy is not in danger; she can take care of herself.

Having established Remy’s cynical take on love, Dessen uses this introduction to show Dexter as the anti-Remy: a happy, bumbling, easily love-struck guy. In addition, the whole interaction mirrors Dexter and Remy’s relationship throughout the book. Dexter crashes into Remy’s emotional life, creating unwanted cracks in her self-protective armor. And despite her desperate attempts to push him away, in the end, she can’t help but be won over.

It might be argued that as long as the character acts “like himself” in his first scene, he will create a distinct and correct impression. But this is simplifying the matter. People are complex, as is a good character. In different scenes they will act many different ways. The scenes in Dreamland and This Lullaby show not just any one side of the character, but the side of the character that is most important to the narrative: the way he will relate to and treat the narrator, the character the reader is identifying with. This makes the introductory scenes highly effective.

The characters are not the only ones invested in the course of these romantic relationships; the readers are invested, as well. So Dessen is very smart to give such consideration to her characters’ introductions. She wants the reader to be wary of Rogerson, and to root for Dexter to cut through Remy’s tough girl façade. It’s not enough for her to describe the guys as good-looking. Of course they’re good-looking – these are fairly traditional teen romance novels. Dessen uses the actions of the characters to predispose the reader to feel excited and satisfied with the direction the relationship takes.

So, when you're in the revision process, go through and look at the scenes where you introduce new characters. Are there ways in which you can deepen/strengthen/complexify (not a word, I know, but it should be) the impression he makes? Are you giving the reader misleading clues? Remember -- no detail is too small to play a part in the overall opinion the reader takes away from her first meeting with your character. Use this to your advantage!