The stories we read and write

Revision update: It’s coming along. I’m still working on the first eight chapters, where I split one chapter into two, and cut down the others a LOT. I still have some research to finish up that could mean I’ll be making changes, but I feel like I’m making some progress, although small steps. Would still love to have it finished by the end of this month, but time is going by so fast, the end of the year is looking more and more reasonable.

I added a new link to my blogroll of Blogs By Writers today, for MiG Writers, written by the members of a critique group of MG and YA writers.

I found it through a link to their post about the difference between middle-grade and young adult. It’s an older post, but still relevant, interesting and well-researched, but my take away from the whole thing is that definitions are only guidelines.

The article discusses word counts a lot, and I’ve talked about word counts a lot on this blog. Some commentors said word counts don’t matter because the Harry Potter books weren’t within the recommended word counts, but that is only true for the first book, and by the time the first book became a bestseller, J.K. Rowling could write an encyclopedia and the publishers would probably have welcomed it. Well, maybe not, but you get my point. Established writers have different rules.

Another interesting part of the post is what constitutes an MG vs. a YA story-wise. Mostly, it was a coming-of-age-type theme for YA and protagonist around 16-18. For MG, theme is learning about yourself and age is 10-12. Now, again, there are always exceptions. I just finished Suzanne Collins‘ Underland Chronicles series and, although her protagonist is 12, the themes and subject matter are decidedly YA. An editor recently told me that she considered that series YA. It’s much more cut and dry in Collins’ newer books, with her Hunger Games protagonist at 16.

For me, I don’t believe writers should shape their story to these guidelines if something else will work better. I don’t think of middle grade or young adult when I get story ideas. The character’s ages are dictated by the story. I didn’t start my books thinking I wanted to write for a middle-grade audience, it just sort of worked out that way, and one of the book ideas I have is definitely a YA.

The story ideas I get coincide with the kind of stories I like to read, and as a big child myself, I lean toward stories that are fun and take me to another world (not necessarily high fantasy, but something that changes my idea of the current world). To me, Terry Pratchett’s Disc World series fits that bill, even though all those characters are adult. The stories are simple, exciting, funny and touching. That’s what I love in a story, and most of those kind of books, I’ve found, are middle-grade.

Do you read what you write? How do you think of your stories before you write them?

Write On!

First lines, first impressions

I’m behind on my blogging about the North Texas SCBWI conference from this past Saturday. But I have lots of good stuff to tell you about.

Today, I’m starting with first lines. Editor Lisa Yoskowitz, with Penguin’s Dutton Children’s Books imprint, began her presentation by showing a number of first lines from classic books. These first lines introduce the reader to the book and — hopefully — pull them in. The lines Lisa showed were brilliant, and they made me realize something: This is what I’m striving for in my writing.

Here are two of my favorites from Lisa’s presentation:

“Where is Papa going with that ax,” Charlotte asked her mother as they set the table for breakfast. — Charlotte’s Web

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” — Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Both of these are brilliant in different ways, but they both pique interest enough to keep a reader reading.

Here’s what I found so amazing about these two:

Charlotte’s Web:

• With the ax comment, a reader is immediately interested in what’s going on.
• Introduces three characters right off the bat and their relationships.
• Brings the reader smack back into the middle of the action of the story; no need to introduce Charlotte and say she lives on a farm, etc. Just straight to the ax.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

• Introduces the main character and the type of boy he is swiftly and effectively.
• Intrigues the reader because we want to know why Eustace deserves his name.

With a book, there are lots of first impressions that encourage a reader to spend their money and take the story home: the cover art, the jacket copy, the authors name. But if readers are like me — and I suspect there are a good many out there who do this — no matter how interesting the front picture and jacket description are, they won’t buy the book unless that first page, sometimes first couple of pages, draw them into the story.

That first page begins with that first line, and it should make a great first impression.

These kind of first lines are what we should be striving for in our own work. And then, of course, the rest of the book should live up to that.

What’s your favorite first line of a book?

Write On!

Wild Things

Done today: Still on first five chapters

Revision remaining: 149 pages

Daily pages needed to be finished by end of November: 3.5

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about the new Where the Wild Things Are movie, which my husband and I saw last weekend, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Mostly, my feelings of the film go against all the critics who have praised it.

Maybe that’s because I went in looking for Where the Wild Things Are book, a delightful romp into a kid’s imagination when he’s sent to his room by himself. As an only child, I lived in my imagination for much of my childhood, creating new worlds, stories that I played a part in, and friends. I devoured books and imagined myself in those stories. And when I played with little action figures in our flower beds, I imagined myself that small looking up at the underside of the flowers.

That’s why I love Maurice Sendak’s original Where the Wild Things Are picture book — a look at a fun adventure in a kid’s imagination.

In the movie, I felt that was lost. Instead, it’s an examination of a kid who’s feeling angry because his sister didn’t stand up for him — after he picked a snowball fight, I might add — and his mother, who’s shown in a very sympathetic way and as attentive if busy, told him she was too busy to play with him at that moment. In my mind, the kid isn’t painted in a very good light, and when he goes on the Wild Things adventure, it’s after he runs away, not an innocent romp while he’s having a time out.

The best review of the movie I’ve seen is The Horn Book’s. Claire Gross says the best way to enjoy this movie is to view it as totally separate from the book, and I agree.

My wish, however, is that director Spike Jonze had come up with his own wild things and left Where the Wild Things Are for an adaptation that would more closely reflect the fun of the original book.

Have you seen it? What did you think?

Write On!

Winnie the Pooh on Nintendo DS

Done today: Chapter 1 (four pages)

Revision remaining: 165 pages

Daily pages needed to be finished by end of November: 3.5

Finally got down to some good revision this morning. Phew! Does it feel good to be working with the book again.

We’ve read that children’s books have been doing better than some other segments in this recession. Borders even took floorspace from CDs and DVDs to expand children’s books. However, in today’s culture, kids have so many more things calling out for their attention, and the most popular is videogames.

That’s why I LOVE what Egmont is doing. Britain’s Telegraph reported that Danish publisher Egmont (which has a U.S. division, Egmont USA) has signed a deal with EA Games to put children’s books on Nintendo’s DS handheld videogame console. The Telegraph reports that Penguin is involved in the deal too.

The ebooks will be known as Flips and will include Enid Blyton books (a favorite of mine was I was a tyke) and boys’ book Too Ghoul For School.

Egmont owns the rights to Winnie the Pooh (still a favorite of mine), the Mr. Men series (I love Mr. Tickle!!), Thomas the Tank Engine, Wallace & Gromit and Rupert the Bear, so I’d guess it’s only a matter of time before these are on the DS too.

Ereaders and ebooks have been gaining in popularity. The blogosphere and Twitter have been all, well, atwitter with discussions about them. Are they the future? Who knows. I personally don’t think paper books will ever go away completely, but maybe that’s my nostalgia talking.

But the interesting thing about ebooks is the opportunity to attract kids. Kids lock onto gadgets and new technologies faster than anyone, and what better place is there for a book than a handheld videogame console kids carry around all the time?

The key is making the ebooks as fun as the videogames, which could be a challenge with so much less interaction in a book. In the Telegraph article, Egmont’s Rob McMenemy said ebooks won’t be popular with kids until they have color and moving imagery. The Flips will have an interactive element.

I think he’s right. And my hope, is that kids who gain a love for these moving, interactive ebooks will grow up to enjoy the paper kind — or at least regular old digital kind — of stories only books can deliver.

What do you think? What’s the future?

Write On!

Day for bookstores and other links

Current word count: 44,261

New words written: 1,553

Words til goal: 0 / ? words a day til the end of September I finish

Got through most of the story climax today. Just have one more adventure part then the final wrap up chapter. I will DEFINITELY be finished by the end of the this week, I think.

I browsed through some emails today too and found some great links I wanted to share. First, a great idea from Publishers Weekly: National Bookstore Day. The day to celebrate book-selling and the culture of bookstores is Nov. 7, so get ready to party.

Writers Digest is holding a conference right now and, lucky for us, blogging about every minute. Check out the Official Writers Digest Conference blog. I haven’t had a chance to look through it all yet, but there’s plenty to chew on.

Finally, if you want to find out Dan Brown’s secret to success, Slate offers up an interactive Dan Brown plot generator that will give you a plot so you too can write a Dan Brown book. Have fun.

What have you been up to?

Write On!

Writing historical fiction for teens

Current word count: 39,771

New words written: 664

Words til goal: 229 / 19 words a day til the end of September

Yay! I finally got up and wrote this morning, and it feels good. I feel so much better when I’m writing. I’m so close to my goal of 40K now, but still two chapters away from the end of the book, so I’m going into overtime. I’d still love to be finished the book by the end of this weekend, but we’ll see.

Historical fiction author for teens JoAn Watson Martin is guest posting on Day By Day Writer. Historical fiction is a wonderful genre as it gives kids an inroad to really enjoying learning about history. I never liked the subject much in high school, but give me a good book the has a story weaved into all the history, and I’m all ears, or eyes…

Historical fiction blends the freedom of creating your own story with the responsibility of getting the non-fiction parts right, so it requires a lot of research and dedication. JoAn pulls a lot from her own family history, but I’ll let her explain…

Several years ago, I discovered An Uncommon Soldier, a non-fiction book that told the true stories of young women who fought in the Civil War. They disguised themselves as men to escape their dreary lives and earn $13 a month.

I had such admiration for those three hundred brave women from both the North and the South, who were under threat of death if found out. I based my historical fiction novel, Yankee Girl, on a composite of these women. Much research about battles, historic events, and real men was required to weave authentic, historical events into my protagonist’s story.

Historical fiction is written by authors who think in terms of “what if” or “could have been.” Everything in the book is not documented. We use conditional wording: probably, likely, perhaps, no doubt.

The battles were very difficult for me to write, having had no experience in a war. My research included movies, non-fiction books, novels, travels, Internet, geneology, personal stories, and photographs. The difficulty for me and for my teen audience was to put ourselves back 150 years. I drew on story writing techniques and strategies used in any genre:  set the scene, build the character, invent possible emotions and create interesting dialogue.

Yankee Girl begged for a sequel. After the Civil War my protagonist takes advantage of the opportunity to go to Montgomery, Alabama, hoping to “bind up the wounds of the nation.” For Alabama Girl, I researched how the Alabama towns would look during Reconstruction. What kind of clothes would they wear? Hairstyles. Transportation. Reading about the scarcity of food following the war, what provisions were available? The characters’ social life and manners had to fit the times. What were the politics – the medical beliefs?

I have inherited my Alabama family’s genealogy papers which had a wealth of material: stories about my grandparents or more distant ancestors, whether funny, tragic, interesting or ordinary. If possible I reveal secrets and scandals. Your ancestors’ mistakes and misdeeds make them human.

I include a true family story. During the Reconstruction the cotton that belonged to the family was confiscated by the Yankees and stored in a warehouse over on the Tombigbee River. Against their father’s advice, three brothers raided the warehouse and floated the cotton down the river to Mobile and sold it. Thus the family’s disclaimer handed down to present generations: “You can’t steal something that was stolen from you.”

I discovered incidents about my grandmother I never knew. Beginning with documented facts, I gently fictionalized the known facts. I tried to use the story to transport my audience into another era so the reader can actually experience the life of my ancestors. I had the freedom to fill in the gaps by researching an event.

When my family restored the log house my grandmother was born in, I wrote Homeplace. “I rested on a red clay hill completely covered with thick vines.” Thus begins the tale, told in the cabin’s voice, of a log cabin built in 1840.

I have found historical fiction a genre for experiencing the joy of really digging  out information and satisfying my curiosity about events of the past that fascinate me.

Show, Don’t Tell

Current word count: 37,548 

New words written: 1,722

Words til goal: 2,452 / 129 words a day til the end of September

My writing has been zooming along. So close to finishing. Yay! This word count is two days of writing, but I love to see that “til the end of September” number come down. Still hoping to finish sooner, and I’m on track. We’ll see.

Today, we have another great guest post, this week from author Gwen Cooper. You’ve probably already read a lot about her on this blog, as she’s a friend of mine, but if you haven’t seen previous posts about her, she just launched her second book, a memoir called Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, Or How I Learned About Love and Life With a Blind Wonder Cat. Here’s the post about her book trailer. Awesome news: Homer’s Odyssey made it to the New York Times bestsellers list shortly after its debut. Congratulations, Gwen and Homer!

Although Gwen’s first book, Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, it was a novel stemmed from her time growing up in South Beach. But Homer’s Odyssey is her first true memoir. In this blog post, on this anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York, Gwen talks about the challenges she found when tackling the chapters about Sept. 11, and how what finally helped her was the good old dependable writing advice of show, don’t tell.

And here’s Gwen:

Gwen Cooper

I moved to New York from Miami in the late winter of 2001.  Because it was located only a block from my office, I ended up taking an apartment only five blocks from the World Trade Center.

As the events of 9/11 unfolded, I was trapped in Brooklyn and away from my three cats, who were stranded in my apartment near Ground Zero.  It took me several days to reunite with and rescue them.  It’s an episode in my life that’s recounted in detail in two chapters of my new memoir, Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life With a Blind Wonder Cat.

Writing a memoir is never easy.  Possibly the greatest challenge is in constructing a cohesive, narrative thread from the seemingly random events that make up a life.  There were many places in the manuscript where I struggled with what to include, what to leave out, and how to frame things so that the book as a whole would stay focused.  The easiest thing to do in a memoir is meander.  The hardest thing is to make a life story read like an actual story.

Perhaps nowhere was that struggle greater than in writing the chapters that dealt with September 11th.  How could I keep my book on-subject when dealing with a subject that would so naturally overshadow everything around it?  And how could I describe in detail a three-day period during which I was separated from my cats (who were therefore absent from that part of the narrative), when my cats were the purported subject of my memoir in the first place?

I knew the trap I was most likely to fall into was the impulse to discuss the “big picture;” to talk abut the ways 9/11 changed us as a nation and me as a person.  Yet to do so would be a jarring departure from the tone of the rest of the book.

So I went all the way back to the basic rules of writing I learned in my first creative writing classes in high school.  “Show, don’t tell,” was the mantra of just about every writing teacher I had.  I realized that the best way for me to show it all (or, at least, as much of “it all” as one writer could accomplish) was to stay focused and tell almost nothing.  I spent almost no time describing my emotional state, the concerns we all had as a nation for what this event meant for us long-term, or any other “big picture” concerns.

Instead, I tried to show the reader my visceral and immediate reactions to the things I saw that day, as well as my actions and efforts in the subsequent days as I struggled to rescue my cats.  In this, I was very detailed.

There have been a small handful of readers who’ve taken exception to my recounting of 9/11—who feel that, because I didn’t talk about my emotional state, I didn’t have one, or that the one and only thing I cared about that day was reuniting with my cats.

But the overwhelming response has been incredibly positive.  I’ve received hundreds of letters from readers who’ve said they found the 9/11 chapters to be the most compelling in the whole book, and expressing great sympathy and anxiety for the emotional state I hoped to convey even while I was resolutely not “telling” it.

Writing those chapters was my first experiment as a writer with tackling a subject as big as September 11th.  But it’s reassuring to know that, no matter how large or intimidating a subject may seem to me as a writer, the elementary rules still apply: Keep your focus small.  Concentrate on the details.  Don’t exposit the thing to death.  Create a small window from which your reader can look out and see the whole view.

And, above all, always show.  Never tell.  Sometimes it’s good for us to remember that everything is possible as long as we don’t stray too far from the basics.

Tweeting an entire novel?

Bonus post today, because I just read something really cool and wanted to share.

Author Matt Stewart is releasing his entire novel, The French Revolution, on Twitter today — yep an entire novel in 140-character blurbs, lots of them.

Matt’s also offering the novel free just for today on Scribd. Why? It’s Bastille Day, the celebration of the first day of the French Revolution, and, as Matt says, “the perfect time to do something crazy.”

This is most likely a first, and it will be an interesting experiment. Check it out through the links above or search #ffrev on Twitter.

What do you think? Will you read this book? Will it catch on? Would you Tweet your novel?

I’m at least interested, and the publicity can’t be bad. Frankly, I’m really intrigued by the idea behind the new novel he’s writing, which he talks about on his blog. Wonder if he’ll Tweet that one too.

Write On!

Harry Potter Day!

I got up early and wrote this morning, and it feels good. After not writing consistently every day this week, and really needing a few more hours sleep, it wasn’t as easy as it has been to jump write back into the story. But once I got going, the words flowed, and before I knew it, I had almost doubled my daily goal, which was good as it made up for not writing anything yesterday.

Current word count: 11,633

Words written today: 570

Words to goal: 28,367/ 350 words a day til the end of the September

Today we’re calling Harry Potter Day around my house. With the movie adaptation of the sixth book coming to theaters on Wednesday, my husband and I invited a bunch of friends over for a Harry Potter mega marathon. We’re starting this morning and will watch all five movies already out. Lunch and dinner are being taken from the Potter books, with sandwiches piled high with roast beef, cheeses, etc., for lunch, Cornish pasties for dinner and lots of sausage rolls, rock cakes, scones (the proper British kind — i.e. like American biscuits but smothered in jam instead of gravy) and jelly beans throughout the day. In fact, I was up late making the Cornish pasties last night, and for my first ones (even though I am British), I think they came out pretty well.

Corny? Of course. But it should be fun. I even joked that all the Americans should speak with British accents all day and say they have to go the “loo” every time they need the bathroom, but that might get to be a bit much after a while.

For me, although I’m really looking forward to the food (I haven’t had a good sausage roll in years), I think mostly it’s going to be a blast being at Hogwarts all day. I think J.K. Rowling did a fantastic job with these books, building characters that we can identify with and care about, a story that’s adventurous, and a world that’s just pure fun. I think that’s one of the reasons the books have been so successful: They don’t try to be anything too grand, just deliciously fun.

In my research for the food for our marathon party (yep, I researched it, I couldn’t remember everything that was in the books, and look at this amazing list of Harry Potter food), I found this online essay that, while maybe wasn’t trying to be critical, says that the food at Hogwarts isn’t healthy. Here’s a quote:

“No little amount of imagination is required to explain why there are so few obese wizards and how come that they are not suffering from constant lack of vitamins, various heart diseases, glycaemia, strokes and other dreaded consequences of unbalanced diets.”

But that’s exactly my point. In Hogwarts and the magical world, the characters, and us as readers, don’t have to worry about how many servings of vegetables we’ve had that day. It also serves as a comparison to Harry’s world in his muggle home. Hogwarts is filled with lots of goodies he will never get at the Dursleys. And that’s a difference J.K. Rowling was trying to make, I think, to demonstrate the two worlds of Harry Potter.

But for us readers, it’s the same. In our real world, we have to consider our caloric intake (maybe not the yound readers, but their parents are considering it for them). Inside the Harry Potter books, however, we can imagine eating goodies and doing magic and battling evil (and winning, of course). In short, we can have fun. To me, that’s what the books are all about.

And that’s what Harry Potter Day is all about too.

Are you looking forward to the new movie? Got any plans to celebrate?

Write On!

Two more rules broken

Yesterday I wrote about the so-called “rules” of writing that are broken by many best-selling books on retail shelves now. Here’s two more:

Don’t date your story with product placement: Writing that your character has a crush on Zac Efron can give the story a touch of authentication, but the reason this is considered a no no is that in 50 years, Zac Efron might not be in the public consciousness anymore (no offense, Zac). So, by using something or someone in today’s culture, you’re dating your book to this time period, and one of the goals for a great book is to be timeless, to be the kind of book that can be read and enjoyed 70 years from now as well as it is today. C.S. Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950 and it’s still on shelves today, 59 years later — something we’re all striving for in our stories. So, the “rule” is, don’t limit the readership by dating the story with current people and objects. Yet, there are many books on shelves with these references. I just finished reading Alyson Noel’s Evermore — if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you get a copy. It’s a fun page-turner — and in it, Alyson has placed numerous references to things from today’s culture, for example a reference to Pirates of the Caribbean’s Orlando Bloom. Is Bloom going to be timeless? Will he be as memorable as, say, James Dean in 60 years? (No offense, Orlando.) It comes down to author’s choice. I have a reference to the tornado in The Wizard of Oz (another classic novel) in my novel and have been told the “rule” a few times. I’m happy with my reference because I think The Wizard of Oz is timeless enough that it doesn’t date the story. But it’s another “rule” that can be broken.

Don’t write sentences that are too long: This “rule” is for children’s books, which is what I write. The “rule” is based on the idea that kids won’t read a book that has long sentences. I don’t know if this is really true, but I hope that it isn’t. Personally, I don’t think writers should write down to children by keeping sentences short and words easy. As a kid, I remember looking up words in the dictionary many times when I read a book. The book expanded my knowledge, and that can’t be a bad thing. Now, here’s an example of the “rule” broken. Here’s a sentence from this year’s Newbery Medal winner, The Graveyard Book:

Then he moved through the night, up and up, to the flat place below the brow of the hill, a place dominated by an obelisk and a flat stone set into the ground dedicated to the memory of Josiah Worthington, local brewer, politician and later baronet, who had, almost three hundred years before, bought the old cemetery and the land around it, and given it to the city in perpetuity.

That’s a long sentence, and Neil Gaiman could have broken it up into shorter sentences, but he chose not to. And he has plenty more in the book — the Newbery Medal winning book.

So, again, “rules” are there for a reason but can be broken. First, of course, you have to know them and know why they’re rules, then you can make a choice about whether to follow them or break them.

Write On!