Story on the Brain

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 al...

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. N...

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 comp...

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.