Archive for » October, 2008 «
Ally Carter is a YA author that’s represented by Kristin Nelson. One of her books, I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have To Kill You, is sitting in my to-be-read pile. It’s not something I would normally get excited about reading but with the way Agent Kristin raves about the book (she sold it, why shouldn’t she?), the fact it’s doing quite well and it screams ‘teen,’ it nagged at me enough to pick up. Mainly because I’m trying to read as many teen voices as possible, across all genres of YA, to get a better feel for it. But don’t hold your breath that I’ll be buying a Gossip Girls novel any time soon. I just can’t bring myself to do it.
This post, though, it about asking the right questions when you have the opportunity to do so. Why reiterate the same old thing over and over again when you can present yourself as being up to speed on the genre and in-tuned to what agents and editors are looking for? Makes sense, right?
Ally fairly recently (the post it from the cusp of beginning to mid-September) went to a writers’ conference and realized that she’s in a different place than many of the writers there and fairly so. She’s an author with a few published books under her belt. I think it’s safe to say she has a little more knowledge about her than many of the fledgling writers that attend those conferences.
While she was there she took notes while biting her tongue and has highlighted on her blog the wrong questions being asked and what to ask instead (because she couldn’t do it there). They’re fairly simple questions, just worded differently and skewed slightly to the side so you better yourself wholly instead of superficially. I’ll highlight the questions and give my two cents but be sure to read Ally’s post in full. There’s a lot to be learned from an already published author. I know I learned a great deal just from reading her post.
And have the freakin’ blister to prove it. I went to a local farm with my friend and her kids on Saturday where I dated myself. I remember the farm having their own cider mill and hay rides into the field so you can pick your own pumpkin right from the patch. We get there and “oh we stopped doing that years ago!” *gurgle*
Nevertheless, we got some good pumpkins at some amazing prices. I ended up overpaying (it’s a self serve with a money box, now who does that in today’s time?) just because I like supporting local farmers.
So I got me my big ass pumpkin and I set out for a design. I found this one and went mine! It’s a pay site but I’m considering joining anyway because they have some awesome stencils. Regardless, I went a little sneaky and printed the picture and drew my own stencil. Believe it or not, I can recreate something really well, be it from a picture, magazine page, print out, life, whathaveyou. But try and think something up? It gets lost in translation between my brain and the page I’m trying to draw on.
So I drew my stencils and went and bought a kit while my mom disemboweled the pumpkin for its seeds. Needless to say, that’s something else I’m allergic to. And they’re so nice and salty. Blast. Of course, this pumpkin has the thickest flesh in the world. No less than an inch and a half at the thinnest spot. I was carving for about two hours before I snapped the second knife in the set and gave up for the night, with two fingers left to go.
The next morning I went to the store, bought a sturdier looking set and tried to set back to work. Notice I said tried. The blister on my finger was so raw I couldn’t even split my fork-split English muffin let alone finish carving that beast. So my mom finished up those two fingers. I rejoiced when it was done and took pictures when it got dark so I could get the full effect. If I do say so myself, it came out damn good from a hand made stencil.
So that took up most of my weekend. But on Friday or Saturday night (can’t remember which now, of course), I had a dream that’s stayed with me. Now I’ve never written a story from something I’ve dreamt but I woke up knowing that it had to be written. When it started writing itself in my head, I had to do something about it. I know it was a male POV but I was going back and forth between first and third limited. I’ve started writing in first and I’ll see how that goes. Another first for me, I’ve never written a story about werewolves before. This one . . . it’s still embedded in my mind and I’m rolling with it. I’m well aware enough of signs not to blow them off anymore.
Write, write, write, write . . . softly because I have an open blister on my writing finger. Ouch!
If you’re even considering the thought of editing your own work, whether it’s a full length novel, novella, short story, flash or whatever other piece of fiction you have, go out and buy this book now. Read it cover to cover. Take notes. Read it again. Do the exercises. Relate it to your own work. Read it again. And again. And again.
This book highlights was really are some of the most obvious fallacies a writer can make and it does it in the most poignant of ways. Everything they say is in the simplest terms. No bushes are being beaten and they don’t cut any writer any slack. Chances are, your manuscript has at least three of the fatal errors outlined in this book. At the very least. More likely, it has nearly all of them. I’m unashamed to say that the latter is me, to one extent or another.
Probably one of the greatest things to come out of this book is the acronym R.U.E., Resist the Urge to Explain. This carries over in multiple chapters, from reiterating explanation in dialogue to redundant points being made and back again. I found that a common theme in many of the editing points they make boils down to over-explaining. Writers want to press the point so badly, and make sure the reader understands exactly what they’re saying that that they’ll flog the dead horse explaining it. Often the author, usually subconsciously, doesn’t trust the reader to get it so important points are reiterated at the expense of the reader’s intelligence.
When I get a chance I like to skim over the Children’s Bookshelf section of Publisher’s Weekly and see what’s going on in the world of children’s literature. Since PW posts their newsletters weekly (obviously), I came across King’s Entertainment Weekly article about mid-September which reviewed a YA novel called The Hunger Game by Suzanne Collins.
King goes on about the plot, the characters, making a couple of snide remarks on the “standard teen fare” of relationships and names but then he mentions this–
And although ”young adult novel” is a dumbbell term I put right up there with ”jumbo shrimp” and ”airline food” in the oxymoron sweepstakes, how many novels so categorized feature one character stung to death by monster wasps and another more or less eaten alive by mutant werewolves?
Then a Livejournal blogger and fellow YA writer decided to expound on King’s comment by sort of coming to her own conclusion–
Does he mean that YA can never be a “real” novel? Is that the “airline food” joke, that food on an airplane is not real food and a book called YA is not a real book? Because if that is what he meant, that is *so* not cool.
You know, it’s kind of hard to rally for the notion of being taken seriously when you type like a stereotypical fourteen-year-old girl but that’s besides the point. I think she missed the mark that King was trying to make.
First, what is an oxymoron? They’re two words that are contradictions in terms. King gave an excellent example in jumbo shrimp. Shrimp, by definition, means tiny or small. Jumbo means excessively large. So how can you have a jumbo shrimp? Well, I guess if you compare them to standard sized shrimp they are much bigger but by pure definition, you can’t have jumbo shrimp.
Airline food is much more facetious. I don’t know too many people that would call the slightly edible stuff they get served on a plane food, hence the joke. I like to use rap music as my facetious oxymoron of choice. Regardless, I think the blogger missed the point.
So why would King call ‘young adult novel’ an oxymoron? Is it because young adults can’t have novels or because a novel is a novel so why narrow it down even more? Or is he saying a young adult novel isn’t really a novel? Considering the tone of the statement, I really don’t think so. Considering King’s past and how stigmatized he is by the “elite” of the literary world for being a genre writer (remember the uproar when he won the Booker Award? For shame! For the writing of horror is not lit-ra-ture!), to poo on another genre (the debate as to whether YA is it’s own genre will be left for another post) would be, for cliches’ sake, the pot calling the kettle black.
In the middle of September it was announced that J.K. Rowling won her suit against RDR Publishing and Steven Vander Ark of the site The Harry Potter Lexicon, successfully blocking him from publishing the site in book format. I’ve seen more feelings in favor of Rowling than against her but there are those that think Vander Ark should be able to publish the book since he spent all the time compiling the information. Never mind the time it took to write the books the information came from, right?
What do you think?
If you’re unfamiliar with this case, it’s basically this–Vander Ark wanted to get a jump on Rowling’s idea to publish an encyclopedia of her own work by putting the Lexicon into paper format, pretty much as is. The arguement on Rowling’s side was that it was copyright infringement since it offered nothing new to the world of Harry Potter. Books on the HP world that weren’t written by Rowling herself she gave the OK for since they offered clever, intelligent and original insight and theories into the world. Lexicon, however, was just reiterating information from Rowling’s books, completely lacking anything original to offer to the fandom or her.
Vander Ark’s argument . . . I honestly don’t know. I’m not sure how he was able to convince anyone that this wasn’t some kind of copyright infringement but he did. I think it was based on the notion that no other encyclopedia existed, there were original “essays” on the site and it took like a lot of laborious time to compile all of the information. Completely frivolous, I know, but there you have it.
I’ll be deviating from Kristin Nelson’s blog for today and visiting another blog that I read all the time and mention on here–The Bookshelf Muse. Angela highlighted some excellent points about what can stall out a story. Ironically enough, I just read those chapters today in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, the book she mentions towards the end of the post.
I think most of it can be summed up in a lovely acronym that Renni Brown and Dave King thought up in their book–R.U.E. Resist the urge to explain. I really think that’s a major crux when it comes to writing. When writers tend to explain too much, it bogs down their pacing, you have a tendency of getting repetitive descriptions and the bane that are info dumps plagues your pages.
Less is more. Usually. Of course, right? Like everything else in life, you need to strike a balance in your writing. The best way to do this is keep your words relevant to the story you’re telling. I have a little thingy in Diamond Crier that I like, the pachta bear (the world’s version of a teddy bear). When I first set out to write the story, the doll, the fur and its uses were pretty relevant to what I had set out to write. Now that it’s written, there isn’t much of a point to keep them in there. Although I really want to.
But I must resist. Kill your darlings and all that. I love the pachta to pieces but at this point, if I keep it in, it’ll just read contrived and pretty pointless. I don’t want to force it in there so I’m slowly acclimating to the fact that it’ll just be a piece of the world that helps give it its depth but holds no place in the actual story. Although my original intentions for the next story are still kind of fitting but the first DC will be out on submission by the time I get anywhere interesting on the second story. If it’s loved enough and I have a clearer idea of what I want to do with it, I can always add it back in; sprinkle it about inconspicuously but I’ll just have to wait and see on that.
Poof! Bestsellers all over the place! You blink and you got another J.K. Rowling on your hands. But is it really an “overnight success” or just a matter of becoming aware of the product? Definitely none of the former and more than likely some of the latter. Kristin Nelson talks about the pure fallacy of “overnight success” in the publishing world and how such successes actually work.
An overnight success in the publishing world is as oxymoronic a term as jumbo shrimp. That’s why when people say they want to get into publishing to “make a quick buck,” I try to smack some sense into them. And just outright laugh at those that “know” what they’re doing and are too pig-headed to learn right. *snerk* That can be a whole ‘nother rant.
First, just think about how long it took it write that first novel. Meyer doesn’t count because she put absolutely no care into the craft, just focused on telling a ridiculous story. Lets use Rowling. Much better example. She started writing Harry Potter in 1993, I believe. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first copyrighted in 1997. That’s when the book hit shelves. Give it at least a year prior to that to get into an editor’s hands , so 1996 it was sold to publishing. Not to mention the time to find an agent. Lets be generous and use 6 months.
But were there insane Potterheads right from the beginning? Certainly not like there are now. The fandom didn’t pick up until the second book, at least. And that’s not even when Rowling hit the mega-insanity that she has now in the publishing world (and, really, the world in general). The first movie based on the books was released in 2001. So lets say a good year range for the mania to hit was somewhere between 2000 and 2001. That would be 7 to 8 years after the writing started and three to four after the first book hit shelves.
Does that sound like “overnight” to you?
