Silver on the Tree

I remember loving these books as a child but I had forgotten how much I skipped over. Re-reading childhood favorites is dangerous, but in the case of the Dark Is Rising books, you really should not do it.

What I loved was the Drew children, because Stone Over Sea is a wonderful book and I kept reading to get more of them. But everything having to do with Will Stanton was so outrageously irritating, I nearly didn't finish the fifth book, Silver on the Tree. Good lord. He magically gets all these outrageous powers with no effort, goes through all this pointless contrived rigamarole, then is a rarefied Old One and crucial to the survival of the world. He's all smug and humble and knows more than everyone. I just could not stand Will Stanton.

First off, I hate it when people get superpowers without any cost. Second, Will is boring. He just is. He doesn't have to fight for anything and he gets all the credit, whereas the Drew kids are way more fun and do much more of the work. Third, his powers are awfully convenient, or inconvenient, and that's just annoying. Every E. Nesbit book is infinitely more careful about powers and rules and costs than these books.

Silver On the Tree was the worst offender, followed closely by The Dark Is Rising, for being full of convoluted and nonsensical challenges and mysterious labyrinths of guesswork. And staring wisely off into the distance while looking grim and sad. Gack. About fifty pages of Silver on the Tree, the part in the Lost Lands, could have been cut out with no discernible loss.

I went back to read these because of my own writing in YA, and I did learn a lot, but I never expected so much of it to be what not to do! I learned a tremendous amount about writing terror in children. Stone Over Sea is completely terrifying, Barney and Jane and Simon constantly in situations far beyond their understanding or capabilities. But that is nearly always human danger, danger from recognizable human sources, even when those are driven by the Dark.

When the danger is oversized and silly, it's impossible to grasp, like the absurd Tethys and the bellowing Greenwitch, who just become bizarre and almost laughable in Greenwitch, after a very promising beginning with an extremely frightening figure made of branches and leaves. Whereas by far the most terrifying thing to me in the whole series was the farmer who shot Bran's beautiful dog. I'm still in shock from that.

So when I write YA with supernatural elements, I want to be sure to keep my evil and my danger located firmly in the human. The supernatural is always a metaphor, somehow, isn't it? The supernatural Dark should stand for the darkness within us, not the other way around.

It doesn't matter to children (possibly not to adults either) whether someone is driven by a supernatural force or just a twist in the brain to do something evil to you. It's not a distinction that makes any sense. It's like trying to explain to a kid that the shot you're getting will make you not get sick later on. It just doesn't mean anything.

That whole area of adult life might even just be rationalization, I'm still not sure about that. When we start talking something away, something bad that someone did, we bring in psychology and a dark past and brain chemistry and he was on drugs and all, but it's all just to say: it wasn't him, it wasn't what a person would do, it was EVIL. It was THE DARK.

Well, take that away and you're left with humans who do terrible things for unfathomable reasons. They just ARE that way. It's a frightening and unpredictable world that children live in and we're always just one failed rationalization away from it. Lose that safe logic and you're into a terrifying land.

I still want to punch Will Stanton in the head and I said out loud about a hundred times while reading Silver on the Tree, "This is a terrible book," oh good golly, all the stupid convoluted tests and secret poems and depressed kings and magical trains and criminy, not to mention the most ridiculous anti-racism blurb ever inserted into a book for no narrative reason whatsoever, plus the worst ending ever, but I learned a lot from these five books and that is very far from nothing.

Not in a hierarchical way

But I DO have standards. And by "not hierarchical" I mean, my standards are not higher than someone else's, or lower, or whatever. They're just mine, see?

For instance I'll never read a Dan Brown book because a Trusted Resource told me they are incredibly badly written, along the lines of the Left Behind series, one of which I actually read once but it was because I was teaching a class called Heaven and Hell, okay? It was for work!

Oh good golly those books are so very very badly written. YIKES.

So anyway.

On the other hand, I read and adore a lot of things that your standard judger of literary quality wouldn't maybe find so very high on the list. Also I might punch out a judger of literary quality who said bad things about Meg Cabot or, I don't know, Stargate Atlantis. Which I realize is a tv show, but it's the same thing, see?

Here are my standards:

1) Things have to happen. I cannot stress this enough. There has to be a STORY. You have to be able to tell WHAT THE STORY IS. In Everything Is Illuminated, there is *definitely* a story. Chaucer rocks the story. (Shakespeare, not so much. Story-challenged, that guy.) In Stargate Atlantis episodes, there is definitely a story. Meg Cabot is an absolute master of the story. And so on!

2) The language/writing/style can't HURT. By which I mean, the writing style doesn't have to be elevated or fancy--I am a huge fan of accessible style--but it can't be bad. BOY is that a hard thing to get across to people sometimes. Left Behind? Accessible, yet so bad it hurts. Everything Is Illuminated? Accessible, glorious, rich, delicious, beautiful. Meg Cabot? Accessible, hilarious, fast-paced, sharp-tongued, brilliant. Stargate Atlantis? Accessible, funny, stressful, dramatic, heartbreaking, sarcastic, fantastic.

3) Characters you love. Even if you love to hate them, or want to smack them upside the head. You engage with them, one way or another. If your character is defined by his or her clothes, just stop right there. Yikes.

4) Ideas! Big ideas that you can really wrestle with and think about. If the author can wrap up the big idea with the story itself, oh boy, brilliant! As in, you are forced to decide what you think about the big idea because that is tied up in what you want to happen in the story. And the jackpot is when you really care about the big idea because it's what the character you're totally engaged with has to decide in order to resolve the big story. With awesome writing style! Yeah! Wooooooo!

There. That's all I want. Is that so much to ask?

Actually I came here to post a link to Maureen Johnson's play by play of the latest Dan Brown book, because it's so good and so brilliantly funny I couldn't NOT share it with someone.

You can tell just from the outline that this is a terrible, terrible, terrible book. Good heavens. But as soon as I thought that, I had to go and define what makes a GOOD book, or how much of a cheat is that? You can't just barge around making huge judgy statements like that without explaining yourself and backing it up. Hello!

So there you go!

Soon I will come back and stomp around and yell about Little, Big, the book that is making me so mad right now. Because a) there is no story whatsoever, and b) fairies and elves and mystical whatnot, man. If I'd known, I never would have cracked this cover open. Sure it's full of gorgeous writing but that is NOT ENOUGH.

Oh, I started stomping early. Well, sometimes it can't be contained. Raaaaaar!

Outline

Okay, I got the outline done at least in large strokes for the cozy mystery. It involved a lot of talking out loud to the computer and then petting the cat, who comes running if I talk out loud.

Also I invented the Bryson Grant, which sends people to travel around the world recording oral history, or in this case, oral mystery. I'm way too tickled about the Bryson Grant. Also, I totally want one!

Mostly I got things done because I was ranting and raving about how happy writing makes me, like happy in a slightly deranged way, like somehow I got cross-wired and writing presses the endorphin button and leans on it. Seriously, it's not normal. And then my friend said, "So what are you writing now?" and I gave the thumbnail, and then said, "But I'm stuck on the outline."

Then I decided I HAD to whack it into shape this weekend, before I get students turning in paper drafts on Monday. I need my road map!

It turns out I was trying to throw everything into the story at once and caused a giant bottleneck. Also I had not worked out exactly why the villain was doing the villainous thing. It's very odd because all the pieces were there, but I'd never drawn those last two tiny lines that connected everything.

This makes me very impatient with myself. GET GOING!

But now I have an outline I can stick to the wall and stare at when I get confused about what's what.

Next I just have to convert the many versions of this thing into...well, nothingness. Delete them, I guess. I should admit right here that I will never delete them. They're full of ideas I'm going to want later. But what I mean is, start over without them. It's a little crazy because there's at least 60K words but it's a mess, different false starts, massive changes to the story, all kinds of junk.

The main character's aunt changes names about a dozen times, for instance.

Now she's Aunt Adelaide.

From that and the Bryson Grant you can deduce not only what book I'm reading but which chapter I'm on. Don't you think Aunt Adelaide was very staid and then had a wild exuberant period and then settled down to become prosperous and respectable?

Never mind that there's a character named Melbourne in the last book. That book's main character misheard everyone's names and gave them the names she heard, so Melbourne's name wasn't actually Melbourne. Also she (the main character) lied about her own name to about the first seventeen people she met in the book, so you're not sure what her name really is until her cousin shows up.

Secretly of course I can never, ever remember characters' names, unless they're also names of towns or cities. There was a Macon in that book too, one of three leads, so to speak. Top billing! Macon was actually his name, though. I guess she heard that one right.

This current main character is named after a color of oil paint, abbreviated to a word I associate with chickpeas, though I'm not sure what language. Probably Spanish since it's on the can, though there's a cognate in German, which I remember from my German host family's daughter's art teacher's son.

That little boy went on and on about Kichererbsen and how they were giggle peas until his mom, possibly to shut him up, told him I was American, after which he sat perfectly still and stared at me wide-eyed until we left, because his father was an American soldier but he'd never met him. Only he was very confused because I wasn't black like his father clearly was, so how could I be American?

Anyway it's from cicer arietinum, the Latin name of chickpeas. Cicer/kicher/ceci and there you go.

Originally my character had all these aunts and siblings, but I got rid of everyone except the one aunt. Not *just* because I couldn't keep anyone straight, but because what an unholy mess! Also a big family made the story implausible.

So I'm pleased with my outline and ready to have this book settle down and become the thing I do every day instead of a big tangled knot of confusion. I can't believe it took this long, but then again our man Orson Scott Card says in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (which this isn't) that you're not ready until you're ready and if you write it before you're ready, it'll suck. I may be paraphrasing.

Rosemary & Thyme has me completely excited about the cozy mystery. I feel like staging a denouement in the drawing room over sherry. I feel like drawing maps for the frontispiece!

New story from Sarah

Go and read! You don't have to have read The Demon's Lexicon to read this, but the characters are mentioned or appear in it at a much later date.

This is a gorgeous, heart-breaking story. Sarah knows how to do it right!