35 The Almost Year

Florence Engel Randall’s novel follows a traumatized black teen who gets sent to live with a white suburban family in the early 70s. She didn’t want to go, nobody wants her there, and she has a bad time. She also will never say what’s bothering her or what’s wrong. Troubled teens as always lead to poltergeist activity.

What a fantastic book! I loved it as a kid. It’s weird to read it as an adult. It’s beautifully written but also not much happens. She reads Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” in class. I had forgotten that’s where I first read that! I memorized it from this book. When I say this book meant a lot to me, I am not overstating. I didn’t even realize I had essentially quoted the girl’s mom to some students a few years back. Hey, it was good advice.

I look at the fish out of water or stranger in a strange land story trope, with reference to The Martian which I also just read, even finished it, miraculously, since I’m so on edge that I didn’t finish about six books I started.

Nobody’s writing anything, either. Maybe this coming week! I sure hope so. I need the dopamine, or do I mean serotonin? Whatever it is, that good chemical that floods my brain when I write. Ahhhhhh.

Hope you’re hanging in there! Read to avoid things you can’t change! Sacred cheese of life!

 

 

34 WYSIWYG

Levels! Layers! These are traits of good writing that can be hard to talk about. I read a book this past Friday that drove me wild with its constant WYSIWYG 1:1 saying exactly what message it wanted to get across. Maybe it was a little more profound than that, but it was on the level of a grade school skit about bullying. Here's what bullying looks like. It's bad. Don't do it. 

I know WYSIWYG is a coding term and has a specialized meaning there, but writers use it to refer to scenes that are extremely on the nose and say things flat out in ways humans very rarely do, but especially not in fiction, where it's so boring and bland and even embarrassing. 

We like more complexity than that in writing, truly. Even in middle grade chapter books there is more complexity and more of a nuanced presentation of material. We like to participate, which means interpretation. We're really not passive absorbers of information from fiction. We enjoy the tricky puzzles of it, the complications, thinking out what comes next, considering lies and half-truths and mistakes and all.

Also? Don't preach at your readers. Nobody wants that. We don't get persuaded by preaching. Either we already agree or we get defensive and resentful and don't listen. Most preaching is to the converted, as it turns out.

Even a preachy story like a parable can make people defensive, though less so than this WYSIWYG type of writing. 

Suppose someone really is wicked racist. Are you going to talk them out of it by showing them scenes of the people they hate not doing the things they say they do? Or scenes of racists being racist? The logic is a problem. They'll just agree with the racist people and they'll argue that those people do those things when we're not looking. 

It's a hard job! So many ways to do it wrong. I'm not even sure how to do this right, and can't think of any examples offhand that do, except maybe The Almost Year, a chapter book that I loved and own in hardcover. Good book. Maybe next week, since this turned up as a theme in this week's random oh this is on my phone, why did I dislike it again reading.

Well, a rhetorician would be able to convince someone that it's in their own best interests not to be that way, but I'm not sure that translates into fiction.

Mentioned in podcast: this brilliant taxonomy of Yankee Candles, 100% applicable to on the nose writing and flat scenes.

 

33 Objective Reading

Yeah, I accidentally read the Thrushcross trilogy this week and ended up with startling new insights into what makes writing work, so let’s talk about objective reading.

The novels are: Leaving Thrushcross, The Icarus Triptych, and Mazewood.

I always forget just how much I like these books.

I also always forget that I did not write the books you and I read. I wrote DRAFTS. Then I had to turn the drafts from giant messes into actual books, through many many many rewrites. It’s a long process. It’s hard. It sucks. It’s not as rewarding to the brain chemistry as writing a first draft, at least for me.

As I’ve been doing rewrites of Summerlands and was getting all bummed because it wasn’t as good as those books, this was an enormously helpful reminder that we don’t write books. We write drafts and make them into books.

And the only road between drafts and books is objective reading. It’s true. How do you do it? Here’s how.

 

32 Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Coming soon to an auditory system near you!

I read Laini Taylor's brilliant and category-defying novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone. 

It's part one of a hefty trilogy that is on my must-keep list. Like if I imagine moving to Norway or Finland and only taking a few books with me, this trilogy is on the list. Even though e-book is probably smarter. Definitely lighter. 

These books! Are so! Good! They're like literary high fantasy science fiction young adult. See what I mean about category? I think they get shelved with Young Adult. 

Fine, I'll list the books I'd take:

these three and Laini Taylor's duology (is that a thing?) that followed, about Lazlo Strange

Rainbow Rowell's collected works except for Landline because I hated it, but maybe should reread

Joan Aiken's collected works (except the Jane Austen continuation ones and the cynical New Yorky modern ones)

probably a lot of William Mayne even though he turned out to be a convicted serial child rapist (super went to jail and now deceased) because they're wonderful (Also there's a bizarre thing where what he did to those little girls happens to a character in one edition of one of his books [off screen obviously] but it's been removed from later editions so it's very weird to read that book now and know that this awful thing happened, so to speak, in a narrative sense, but got expunged from the record. RIGHT???)

Jane Gardam's Bilgewater

Hammerfall

The Hobbit and LOTR

Rimrunners and a bunch of other C.J. Cherryh because I love them even though they're flawed and boy does she have certain kinks that keep cropping up

The Raven Boys series, despite the atrocious Latin and the way the plot falls apart in book three

Dorothy Sayers, all of her books

The Time Traveler's Wife

Code Name Verity

certain Agatha Christies

my books OBVIOUSLY

Well, I can't think of the rest right now, but I'll work on it. That's already a suitcase full. 

If I were a true minimalist (hahahahahahaha I'm so not) I'd only have those books and nothing else, but guess what. Nope. 

I just bought a whole lot of those black binding Bantam editions of Agatha Christie from Goodwill. Can I take a truck when I go? A largeish boat. How do I take my various beloved pieces of ludicrous furniture? Can I move somewhere non-fascist very soon indeed, though? I will learn the language. I already speak German, French, Norwegian, and a tiny bit of Finnish. Mostly I can talk about how the bunny is adorable and the dog is black, but I grasp the partitive and I've already been there and liked it and I AM READY is what I'm saying. Germany! Sure! I speak it first when my brain reaches for a second language! I like quark! I'm related to absolutely everyone in Steinbach-Hallenberg!

Too much coffee today. Zu viel everything, like I'm saying. Maximal instead of minimal. I'm having flight of the "fight or flight" variety due to the terrible state of things, though of course here where I live nothing at all has changed. I mean, I never leave the house, so. But a powerful urge to get rid of everything and flee has taken me over. Despite a dislocated shoulder, I'm clearing things out.

In German newspapers, the image of that stupid oligarch doing that fascist salute was blocked out because it's illegal to show that there. I would much rather live there, in that case. I lived in Germany for two months! I'm practically a local! Let's talk about Brecht! Let's talk about Günter Grass! Why did I read and see so many plays there? Every time I pick up a chair by its arms (I am always reupholstering chairs) I think about the Max Frisch play Andorra, in which a character is told never to pick up a chair by its arms.

Anyway I'd take Laini Taylor's trilogy with me, that's what I'm saying. That's how good it is. I'm halfway through the second book, so have to record this episode quickly before I get completely muddled about what belongs to which volume. 

Sacred cheese of life!

 

31 Liar

Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, at last!

This is such a good novel. You have to read it before you listen, though. I will RUIN it for you by spoiling every possible thing. This is a book you have to experience unspoiled! You only get one chance. So please go read before you listen.

I usually take five class meetings to discuss this novel, so I talked really fast and didn’t get to say most of what I would have wanted to say. Gaaaah! What can you do.

I would love to hear what you think of the novel once you read it, before you listen to this, so in the event you are that person, please get in touch! The students have more than once thrown their books across their rooms! More than one has come up to me after we’re done reading it and given me their copy to give to someone else, because it made them so wild. Yes, it’s frustrating. Yes, Micah is the champion unreliable narrator. And no, there is no narrative truth that’s out there!

This is a book that makes you question everything about the reading process itself, one reason I love to have classes read it. Such good times.

Features multiple guest appearances from Eleanor the cat and Tallulah the dog. So verbal today, those two.

The old cover art, the current cover art. You'll know when you listen. 

30 How to write a novel

Oh boy, I keep seeing people wish they could write novels but don’t know how, or where to start, or what to do, so here’s some advice about that.

You do not need to know how to do this before you start. You need a person with a problem. And you need specificity: what that person is like, their skills and weaknesses, their particular situation, plus the geographical location and things like time of year.

Then go ahead and go buck wild. Tell a story. They want to do this thing or solve the problem or find the answer or whatever it might be. Good! Take STEP ONE. Then take step two. What happens? Do it one step at a time. Listen to yourself. Is there a random mycologist in the forest? He turns out to be important later, so if he shows up, write him in!

Also, if you’re writing about a real place, like Eustis, Maine, the place in Landslide whose name I can never remember, then GO THERE. Reality is so much richer than your imagination.

Otherwise, get okay with making mistakes, being bad at things, and making a great big mess. It’s not just okay, it’s essential. You’re not writing a novel but a DRAFT. It does not need to be perfect. It can’t be perfect. You’re making the material now you will turn into a book later on.

Follow the story! Be there! Notice what things are really like! You’ve got this!

Sacred cheese of life!

 

29 A Worn Path

This week I get into the strange linear narrative of Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” not in the sort of high school New Critical way of x symbolizes y, but in the sense of episodic versus serial narrative structure.

It’s a very strange story in a lot of ways because we have no idea where Phoenix Jackson is going or why she’s going there. And in fact when she arrives, she doesn’t know either. This story subverts narrative so thoroughly it’s almost like Tom Stoppard. Ooh, we should talk about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at some point. And stories told from the other side in general.

I discuss what makes us get and stay interested in a story with NO PLOT and see how I can apply that to other writing. Normally we assume the plot is what makes us stick around, but it sure isn’t in this case, since we don’t know what it could even be.

Still one of my favorite stories, even if (or because) it’s so strange and in some ways baffling.

Sacred cheese of life!