Varian: And the moral of this story is...

(Note: Originally posted at Teenreads.com)

In my latest novel, SAVING MADDIE, preacher’s son Joshua Wynn struggles with himself, his parents and his religion during his quest to “save” his one-time best friend, “bad girl” Madeline Smith. Because of the various themes of the novel, I always try to prepare myself for a wide variety of questions before a book event. But out of all the strange, unusual, and uncomfortable things I’m asked, there’s only one question that really makes me squirm:

What is the moral of your story?

Sometimes parents (and it’s almost always parents who ask this) will pose the question in different ways. What will my child learn from this book? Is this book educational, because that’s all I buy for my children? Of course, it’s never lost on me that the parent usually asking this is carrying the newest romance novel, with a strapping duke and buxom duchess plastered on the cover.

But back to the question about morals --- once the parent asks, I usually hem and haw for a few seconds, trying to come up with a good answer. Then I break down and lay the truth on her:

“I don’t know.”

After the parent picks her jaw up from the floor, I go on to explain. I don’t think it’s my place as a fiction author to force a moral on my readers. And given that I write for teens, that goes double. I believe it’s my job to put the information out there -- to create fully-developed, three-dimensional, slightly-flawed characters, and let my readers decide for themselves what is or isn’t “morally sound judgment.”

Now, notice that I’m not saying that my novels don’t have a moral; I’m just saying that I don’t know what it is. Because truth be told, I want my readers to think about all of these moral questions. In SAVING MADDIE, I want readers to wrestle with the question of whom exactly needs saving in the novel. Of who’s good, and who’s bad. And I want them to make their own decisions; their own conclusions. Just like Joshua, and just like Maddie.

I welcome my readers to be active participants in the author-reader relationship. I want them to feel invested and reach their own conclusions about the work. I want them to form an opinion about the plot, the characters, the theme -- everything. Because at the end of the day, the reader’s opinion is the only opinion that really matters.

Brian M: WHAT’S IN A FICTIONAL NAME?

Giving your characters names can be:
A cause for writer’s block
An opportunity to say something about them
A chance to make a box of verbal bonbons
An opening in the fabric to weave in a mystery
All of the above

A: A CAUSE FOR WRITER’S BLOCK

Naming characters is no different than naming a pet, or a car. It’s a matter of trial and error until you finally come up with the one that fits. There’s no point in fretting about it, just keep throwing the name spaghetti against the wall until one sticks. And be damned thankful you write in an era that, should you decide to change the name of your character at the last minute, you have the technology to hit “find” and “replace.” Imagine what Dostoyevsky or Dickens might have faced if they decided to change their protagonist’s names at the last minute?

B: An opportunity to say something about them

Just as you give physical, mental, and emotional qualities to your characters, naming them is giving the reader a clue as to who they are, a little package for them to unwrap as the story proceeds.

For example, in my vampire spoof, SUCK IT UP, my protagonist, the most non-threatening vampire to ever stalk the earth, is named Morning McCobb. Should the reader care to, they can already decipher something about his name as they read/say it: “morning macabre.” He’s a creature of the night and he’s named “Morning?” What gives? He’s a morning kinda person but he’s also macabre? This guy sounds like a bit of a walking contradiction.

Of course, you don’t have to be that upfront about naming. I named a boy in a novel that has much to do with plumbing and toilets (OUT OF PATIENCE) Jake Waters. Waters is the obvious connection but Jake is not. Turns out, “the jakes” used to be English slang for the toilet. No one has to know that, but Jake’s father is so obsessed with toilets that it makes sense that he might have named his son after obscure toilet slang. Luckily, Jake never finds this out in the story.

Of course you can be even more murky and devious by using foreign languages to name characters. I named a Jay Leno-like late night talk show host, Gabby Kissenkauf, because 1) “kissen” in German means “pillow” and I find Leno pillow-like, and 2) I like the association with late night talk show hosts being our electronic pillow talkers. (You can really get carried away with this stuff.)

C: A chance to make a box of verbal bonbons

As the writer, you will have to repeat the names hundreds if not thousands of times. You are not only subjecting yourself to this potential for Chinese water torture, you are subjecting your reader to endless visual, and potentially auditory encounters with the name. That said, like fine wine, a name should have good “mouth feel.”

Think of famous characters that have nice mouth feel. Anna Karenina, Butch Cassidy, Dumbledore. Even Mickey Mouse.

So, name your characters with the same care you would name a child. You’re going to have to live with them for a long time to come.

D: An opening in the fabric to weave in a mystery

This is my favorite aspect of naming characters because 1) I was cursed with the wordplay gene 2) I love history and research and 3) I want my readers to not only wonder what the etymology of the name might be, but maybe even become word detectives and go seeking for a deeper and/or hidden meanings. Oh, and 4) it’s just damn fun!

A couple of examples from SUCK IT UP include the characters Penny Dredful and Ikor DeThanatos.

Penny Dredful is a tough, take-no-prisoners, PR agent who handles the outing of the first vampire to the mortal world. “Penny dreadfuls” were also the cheap and gruesome crime-reporting tabloids sold in late-19th century England (when DRACULA was published). Give a kid a name, maybe he’ll learn a wee bit of trivia. And, in my estimation, the tantalizing term “penny dreadful” just shouldn’t the fate of being tossed on the archaic pile.

Ikor DeThanatos is an old-school vampire, a bad-ass, bloodsucking fiend. Thanatos is a Greek god of death, and “ichor” is the blood of the Olympian gods. Add the “de” and you have “blood of death.”

None of the above obscurities ever get explained in the story, of course; it’s there for the author’s amusement, and potentially a reader’s unraveling.

One last piece of advise when it comes to naming characters. Collect names, real or imagined. Ray Bradbury keeps a list of nouns that he feels might provoke a story someday. Intriguing names should definitely be tucked somewhere in a writer’s pigeon holes. The last name I added to my list was from a New York Times article about one of the first holdouts in the NFL: Pudge Heffelfinger. Not that’s a name! I don’t know if I’ll ever use it, but it’s there, in whole or part, waiting to be called into the game.

Oh and—that damned wordplay gene again—here’s my favorite name from a story in which the villain is a diabolical termite. Dividious Wood.

Sara: On requested manuscripts

This past weekend, I attempted to truly catch up on my requested manuscripts. This was actually my August goal, but, happily, I had many deliveries from my clients, and reading requested manuscripts just did not happen. (It did not quite happen on a large scale this weekend, either--- but I am at least caught up to July).

As I respond to the manuscripts that did not speak to me, I have received some polite responses back, mostly asking-- where did I stop reading and why? Which led me to thinking about how long it takes for me to fall in love with a manuscript. Sometimes it truly is immediate-- a stunningly written first sentence that shows me right away the kind of talent the writer has. More often, though, it's a slower build-- a great hook that makes itself known pretty early, along with strong writing and a voice I am connecting with-- keeping me turning the pages, until the story really gets going and I know I will finish the book. It may still be the wrong book for me, but when I read a requested manuscript to the end, it means it is not going to be an easy no. There will be things about it that I love, but I have to ask myself more questions: Can I sell it? Is it right for my list right now? Can I think of a good group of editors who I think will also respond to it? How much work does it need?

When I was at my first job and evaluating manuscripts for my bosses, I found it so hard not to finish all of them. At that point, right after college, I had pretty much finished every book I had started, whether I loved it or not. It felt like a rule. I loved books, and they had been so good to me that they all deserved that kind of respect. I still hate to give up on a book that is recommended to me, or that a friend loves, or one by an author I have enjoyed so much in the past, but this job and the amount of reading on my plate has made me more ruthless with my outside reading-- I no longer always read till the end. Now that my list is pretty full, and that I am not taking on many more new clients, I've also become more demanding of each requested manuscript. I know that for both the author's sake and mine, I have to fall madly in love with it to be the right agent for it.

For the first time I had an intern this summer reading requested manuscripts with me, and she read many more pages of certain books then I would have done. She read so carefully and reported on them with such enthusiasm that I had to read them, too. She convinced me. In the end my first instincts were right-- at least to the degree that I did not fall more in love with a manuscript by reading more of it. But, I did give feedback on two that I thought had so much potential. The one book I did take on while she was here, we were in immediate agreement on. I read a few pages at my desk- and had forwarded it to her to ask her to put it at the top of her pile as I thought it was going to be great. But then I couldn't stop reading, and by the next morning we had both finished it.

Another book she loved, that I then read and loved, too, we did not get. In the end I think there were seven agents competing for it. I am going to make sure she sees the announcement when the book sells-- as she should be proud that she pulled it out of the pile. She may have read a lot more of most of the manuscripts that came in, but we almost always came to the same conclusions.

And now I must get back to reading...

Megan: Back to School

As I write this, we have just completed opening day at the school where I work. The first day was just for freshmen, and I watched them wander the halls wide-eyed – or with a swagger that belies self-doubt.

I've been back at school for weeks now getting the library ready for students and staff. Like most people involved in education, I like the beginning of the school year. I like to see the sports teams in their pre-season workouts, reminding me of my own sweltering days on the field hockey field (minus, thankfully, the sweating and shin splints). The marching band rehearsed in the parking lot just outside my library. Students filtered through to pick up their schedules and compare teachers. As the smell of cut grass wafted into the building, I had the feeling that the world was filled with so much promise.

Working at a high school while writing YA Fiction is a terrific opportunity. I am often shot back to my own teenage years. At the high school where I used to work, faculty ate in the cafeteria with students and I was always pained on the first day of school watching freshman paralyzed as they try to figure out where to sit. Having those emotions right at the surface makes it easy for me to draw on them when I write.

As the groups of new ninth graders came through the library for their orientation tour, one of the teacher advisors asked me, “Can you imagine being a ninth grader today?” I replied that no, I wouldn't go back for the world. And it's true that I would not choose to relive my high school years. But imagine it? Yes. I do that every day.

Brian Y:IS YOUR STORY REAL &ARE YOU YOUR CHARACTERS?

My answer

I have a book coming out in about two months, ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES. My first two novels were somewhat realistic and I got the usual questions about whether I was my character and if my story was real. I gave the usual answer. Some of the story and characters, in a very changed form, have elements of autobiography but most is made up. In this new novel, aliens invade the world and conquer it in ten seconds and enslave the survivors. This time I have to admit it’s all real. Every word of the story is true. Also, I’m all the characters.

I’m the aliens who come to earth to colonize. Back in our solar system the sun burned out so we had to hit the road, ride the solar winds, find new worlds. Yadda. Yadda. Fortunately for us there are a lot of worlds out there. Unfortunately, for the inhabitants of those worlds we are quite advanced and think that primitive beings really don’t matter so we put most of them “to sleep” in a humane manner and enslave the rest to help our civilization, which is really, really great, move forward.

I’m also, as it turns out, the enslaved who are mostly young (*author’s note—I killed off most of the older people because, hey, most of them don’t read young adult fiction.) and who must find a way to adapt in order to survive. We’re not happy about this. Each one of us is unhappy in his or her own way. It’s never been all that easy to be a human but being enslaved by aliens (basically little green men whose power comes from their mind and telepathic abilities and not brawn and technology which is very confusing and certainly un-civilized by civilized Earthling standards) really sucks. We’ve lost our parents, our brothers and sisters and friends and dogs and cats. We’ve had a very bad time.

My main character is named Jesse and he is me. He’s only seventeen and I am, well, not. He’s a slave and I am, well, not. His father was in the military for twenty years and mine was in for three. Okay, some similarity there. He has a black belt in TaeKwonDo and so do I, but he’s much more advanced in martial arts than I will ever be. His mother was a teacher and mine was not. He grew up in Houston and I did not. But other than these differences we’re alike. Except in the ways we aren’t.

I guess, in the end, my answer to “is your story real and are you your characters?” , whether writing speculative fiction or somewhat realistic fiction, remains the same. I write what I know and what I know is that any story I write will have parts that are taken from real life and put into the Crazy Imagination Blender™ and used in the construction of character and story along with totally made up parts. In the end, they’ll be blended together in such a way that I won’t always be sure where something came from and what % of it happened and what % of it is made up. It’s all real though—to me—in a purely fictitious way. And thanks for giving me the chance to clear that up.

Nina: On Getting Out of the House

Before I published my first novel, Hold Still, in October of last year, I used to look at novels on bookstore shelves and think that it must be easier for published writers to write than it was for me. I thought that writing might be like making my mother’s (delicious!) buttermilk pancakes. The first try would be disastrous (somehow both burnt and undercooked); the second try, a little better (but too lumpy, with little clumps of baking soda); the next few attempts, just okay. But then, after a while: success! And then, each time that followed: more success!

If I hadn’t gotten the delicious novel recipe down by my first book, I certainly should have it down by the second.

So with inevitable ease and success in mind, last summer I wrote the beginning of my second novel and an outline for the rest of it. It’s a road trip story, and I determined where my characters would be on each day and what they would do and, of course, what would be done to them. My first draft deadline was in the winter, so over the fall, I followed the outline I made, checking off scenes as I wrote them. My outline became a giant to-do list.

Which was a problem.

Where did the inspiration go? The creativity? You know that feeling, when you sit down to write a scene and then, suddenly, it becomes almost a living thing, starts moving in unanticipated directions, surprises you in the best way possible? Well, I didn’t get that feeling. All of it felt like work.

But worse than the work itself was the pressure. The pancake theory burned up, was replaced with the realization that writing is, at least for me, going to be an eternal struggle—and even more frightening than that, for the first time, people will be watching. So instead of only worrying about the book itself and whether it’s any good, I’m now also worried about how it will compare to my first novel. Of course, I want it to be better. I want to keep growing.

This summer, as though rebelling against my former stick-to-the-outline self, I began my revision and expansion work as haphazardly as possible, dipping into scenes at random, adding a few lines of dialogue here and there, letting my narrator think more freely. Upon re-acquainting myself with the novel, something good started to happen. In many scenes, moments that seemed unimportant became seeds of larger moments. I thought of a whole side trip that wasn’t there before, with new characters and new events solidifying the older themes that didn’t quite come to the surface in the first draft.

But I kept questioning myself: what if these new ideas weren’t actually that great? Maybe they were just new. So I decided to get on the road.

I brought music, a camera, and a few changes of clothes. I brought my wife, who is, among millions of wonderful things, a swift driver and a gifted exchanger of ideas. We drove where my characters drive, we saw friends, and we met new people, and through it all, I was open to everything. Just as my narrator is. Almost everywhere we went, I discovered something new to add to the novel. The restaurant in Medford with cinnamon buns the size of my face and impossible riddles as reading material. The farm on Vashon Island, where our close friends are living. The friend of a friend in Portland, who told stories about working jobs I never knew existed. Everything we saw out the window as we whizzed past it.

The trip revealed gaps in the story I hadn’t recognized, and then showed me how to fill them. I’m excited, now, about where the book is going and the ways in which it continues to grow. And, though certainly no replacement for the recipe I thought I would master, I learned something that I’ll be able to apply to the next book: in order to breath life into my work, I need to get outside and live a little.

Lisa: On learning how to write

I've been writing seriously for almost ten years, and during that time, I've often wished I could pursue a formal education in creative writing. But it's not something I've been able to do for a lot of different reasons.

So, I've had to learn the old fashioned way.

That is, by writing a lot. And reading a lot.

Oh, and there have been some conferences thrown in to the mix too, and I always make a point to attend more craft-oriented sessions than publishing-oriented ones.

Anyway, when I say writing a lot, what do I mean?

I mean that if I have an idea I like, and a character I want to get to know, I write the story. Sometimes I check with Sara about what I'm writing, but often times, I don't. Because for me, writing isn't simply about publication. Writing is how I learn. And, there's something sort of soothing about writing a story for myself, just because *I* want to find out what happens.

I wrote some books before I had an agent that didn't sell and I've also written books since having Sara in my corner that didn't sell. And although there may have been some disappointment at times about not selling something, I've never thought of those books as a waste of my time. They are my schooling. They are how I learn. With each book I write, I learn things, and I hope that I become a better writer.

Writers write. And so I do, again and again, each time thinking about my weaknesses and trying to improve in those areas.

I believe writers also read to help them become better writers. In fact, I'd argue, one of the best things a writer can do for his/her career is to read. Have fours a day to spend on your writing career? Spend one of those hours reading. And here's why:

Because I have learned about memorable characters from John Green, Gayle Forman, and most recently Matthew Quick.

I have learned about voice from Cheryl Renee Herbsman and Saundra Mitchell.

I've learned about humor from Kristen Tracey and L.K. Madigan.

I've learned about timing and pacing from Suzanne Collins and Neil Shusterman.

I've learned how to make a setting come alive from Heidi R. Kling and Christine Fletcher.

And I've learned about the importance of connections, big and small, that make all the difference in a story, from Sarah Dessen, Nina LaCour, and Cynthia Lord.

I read so much, I have my 14-number library card memorized. I figure over my lifetime, that memorization has saved me hours of time, since I don't have to find my purse to get my library card every time I want to reserve a book on-line. I visit the library weekly, and usually have two books I'm reading at any given time, one downstairs and one upstairs. Well, I mean, who wants to spend precious reading time climbing stairs?

Reading books also gives me something to talk about with other writers and bloggers. And sometimes, a book can be a point of reference when talking to Sara about a project I'm working on or about editors or whatever (and I'm so impressed that often times I'll ask, have you read XYZ, and Sara will say yes, when she is also reading a manuscript a night! Can you say agent extraordinaire!?).

So, I guess all of this is to say, when writers ask me what do they need to do to get published, I say these things, to start with:

Write a helluva lot, always trying to improve and grow. Don't write the same story over and over if it's not getting you anywhere.

Read a helluva lot, taking in what an author does well and how that can help with your writing.

And sleep with a rabbit's foot underneath your pillow, keep a four-leaf clover in your wallet, and wish on every falling star you see. (Okay, so that's just me, but it can't hurt, right?)