36 Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

That title has issues, but it’s a fantastic book. This is a middle grade novel by E.L. Konigsburg, one of my favorite middle grade authors—and we already know I adore middle grade. I think I have ten of her books.

This is a book narrated by a funny, self-aware fifth-grade girl, Elizabeth, as she enters a new school and makes a friend, Jennifer, who turns out to be manipulative and controlling. Jennifer says she’s a witch and does seem to have abilities and objects that make no sense in the world Elizabeth knows. Jennifer offers to train Elizabeth as an apprentice witch, leading to all sorts of requirements for Elizabeth, like having to eat a raw egg every day one week, or being forbidden to cut her hair.

Reading this as an adult is very strange because Jennifer is a whole field of red flags. But she also gives Elizabeth new self-worth and confidence. When things blow up finally, the girls become regular friends instead of this weird dominance and compliance game.

The ending has always troubled me because I don’t really see people giving up that need for dominance over others. But that led me to think a lot about the ending to Summerlands that I’m trying to write. During this recording I realized some huge things that need to change about the ending. We have to listen to a novel to see where it wants to go. It feels like I was fighting it and trying to steer it one way when it really wanted to go the other way. So we’re going the other way! You win, novel! And everybody lives happily ever after.

Sacred cheese of life!

 

 

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.