July 16th, 2013
YA Roundup
Over the past 6 or 8 months, I’ve been reading a lot of YA (young adult) novels. This is something I haven’t done since I was, in fact, a young adult. Very young, actually, since I more or less stopped reading this sort of fiction when I entered high-school, before my critical skills were really up to par. A lot of what I was reading back then was pretty bad. Which is fine–I totally endorse a tween’s right to read crap, and I doubt it did me any harm (though I have an unquenchable desire for a red Spider Fiat).
But when I restarted YA reading after that 20-year hiatus, I wanted to read the good stuff, because someone had asked me if I could write a YA novel and I had no idea. I figured I would try to read the best of the genre and see if it inspired any ambition in me. No one wants to write trex, and while I probably can’t be the best myself, if you aim for the moon and miss, you are still among the stars, right?
The learning curve has been steep, because YA has *way* evolved since 1992–earnestness is out, drugs and sex aren’t just for bad girls (what, you think Jessica Wakefield had sex????), and the slang is all different now. I know, I know, there’s lots of good books from back in the day, but why not look at the current context, the one in which I could conceivably be writing in.
At first, I also had lots of other rules: no sci-fi or fantasy (because I can’t write that), all Canadian, a few others I can’t remember. Those went by the wayside–I don’t have a tonne of people in my life to recommend these books, so if it looks promising I go for it. Also, I can read a YA novel in a day or two, so they don’t take up much time (and make me feel smarty!) so why not try everything.
Here’s what I found out about the state of the YA novel in 2013. Please keep in mind I’ve only read a dozen or so books so far, with new ones regularly, so these impressions could change… Also I think I will break this post up into installments because, as ever, I am chatty.
Cad dads and trampy moms
If you trace the evolution of YA back to The Grimms’ Fairy Tales (I don’t know if anyone else does that, but it makes sense to me), you’ll see authors have been desperate to knock parents out of the picture for a long time. Moms are always dying in childbirth, dads off to war in the Grimm days. In mine, it was divorce and absentee dads–lots of sad moms drinking wine in the kitchen when their kids got back from the court-ordered non-custodial parent’s weekend. I know that that is a reality many kids face now, and always have in its various forms, but I do think it’s often a writer’s way of not having to write so many darn characters!
That is still going on, but it’s way dirtier now–if you’ll pardon the image, moms and dads are getting laid now. While plenty of dads ran off with mistresses back in the day, now it’s way more explicit: in one of my favourite reads so far, Dear George Clooney, Please Marry My Mother, Violet’s dad runs off with a big-breasted starlet (standard for me) and her mom dates a string of losers and flashes her thong in a Facebook photo. NON-STANDARD.
Now, instead of writing parents out of the action, authors are writing them off–I came across so many stupid, self-absorbed, slutty parents in my reading. I think this is a convenient way for authors to clear a path for kid characters to have adventures no parents would sanction if they were decent at the gig. In the incredibly far-fetched Saving June, Harper drives across the country with a stranger because her sister died and her depressive mom is so useless. Dad’s out of the picture. In the much more realistic Red Rage, Mara spirals into tragedy because her parents are basically the worst people one earth (but realistically depicted, I swear). In The Hunger Games (yes, I said no sci-fi, but who can stand up against that kind of hype?) Katniss’s mom is, again, a weak idiot who relys on her teen daughter to keep her from ruin.
When I complained to a friend who teaches grade 6 about this “all parents are losers” theme, she said I don’t know how bad some kids have it, and fair enough–I have good parents who never appear on Facebook. But I still think making a teen protagonist essentially parent-free is cheating. Like I’m not saying Jillian’s situation in Wicked Sweet–abandoned by her evil-incarnate mother day after day to take care of half a dozen siblings under 8–would not have happened in real life. I’m saying it would be an emergency and Children’s Aid would’ve shown up in chapter 2. A lot of these books give the false sense that 16-year-olds can do anything, and parents are just dead-weight.
That’s why I liked The Perks of Being a Wallflower so much (so did everyone, I guess). Charlie’s parents are present, his siblings are important parts of his life, grandparents, an aunt, cousins–he lives in a fully realized world that Steven Chbosky took pains to imagine in detail.
I guess what I’m saying is that I read as a writer, and as a writer summarily saying, “This person is bad, let’s not talk about them anymore” is sloppy writing most of the time.
***
Whoo, I have a lot to say on this topic–more topics soon!
May 7th, 2013
Windsor Review Best Writers under 35
The Windsor Review‘s Best Writers under 35 edition came in the mail yesterday, looking lovely and including lots of great folks, as well as yours truly. Please keep in mind that it’s an impressionistic “best” and also that I will turn 35 in 16 days (making me, I’m pretty sure, the oldest writer in the collection) but also that this’ll be a great read. I’m definitely flattered to be included with the likes of Souvankham Thammavongsa, Spencer Gordon, and Andrew MacDonald, among many awesome others. The whole show is curated by the lovely Jenny Sampirisi. On newsstands now, I believe…
April 23rd, 2013
Freedom!
So that stressful project at work is complete, I believe, so I’m finally on vacation this week and next! And for once, I’m not going anywhere or doing anything big on vacation. When I was younger, I mocked the concept of the “staycation,” but that was probably because I never realized how much I could like my own life. I have an amazing apartment, partner, friends, family, and city, not to mention gift certificates–why would I want to use my limited free time to leave all that.
So I’m here, enjoying my life (and accepting lunch dates, if you’re interested!) So far I’ve
–eaten Korean food and gone to a board games cafe
–gone to a farmers’ market
–built a nightstand
–watch a movie in a movie-theatre
–made soup
–walked all the way across downtown
–eaten Thai food
–bought a vacuum cleaner
Some of this is prosaic, I admit, but the chores need to be done and at least I have time to do them at my own pace. And most of it’s just been lovely–especially that long walk yesterday. I had an over an hour before a lunch date and nothing in particular to do, so I decided to walk it. The weather was stunning, I had nice music on my ipod, and the thing I was walking towards was such a pleasant prospect. I love walking in Toronto–it’s really how the city looks its best.
For my next trick, I will be experiencing my first spa, thanks to a gift certificate I got for Christmas. The treatment itself is very expensive, but there’s all kinds of extra stuff there you can do for free there, like work out in the gym and swim in the pool. So obviously I’m going to go 2 hours early and try everything, because why not, right?
I am also, of course, writing a bit on my break. I am so tired from work that I am not setting any huge goals, but it’s nice to be able to give writing some of the good part of the day, instead of getting to it when I’m already sort of miserable. I always write, but often in tiny bursts–my output has been pretty pitiful lately. I hope some leisure time will help expand it a bit.
Speaking of pitiful, I contribute a little bit to “Failure Week” on Hazlitt, in the form a comment in Jowita Bydlowska’s article “Where Do All the Dead Stories and Characters Go?” A fun and somehow inspiring article–so many brilliant writers have to kill so much of their work, and yet it turns out amazing anyway. Encouraging!
Anyway, so that’s the news with me right now–rather pleasant, and no griping for once. Hope it’s the same where you are!
April 11th, 2013
Dropbox treasure
I’m trying to find an old story fragment and I don’t remember what I called the file–or even any of the words I might’ve used–so I’m basically having to go through every file in my Dropbox whose contents I don’t recall by looking at the name. It’s annoying, but I’m finding lots of weird stuff I don’t remember writing, which is kinda cool. It took me a minute to recall what the bit below is…at first I had no idea. It’s actually a cut chunk of a story called “Massacre Day” that was in my first collection, *Once*. I think this piece got cut pretty early–it was too random–and that means I probably haven’t looked at it since 2007. But I like it, still, and since it’ll probably never have another home, I’ll post it here, below. The file name, for reasons that do in fact make sense but are incredibly obscure, was “couch.” It’s going to be a long search.
***
The new hot thing was shop-lifting from garage sales. It was of course way easier, since there weren’t security tags or scanners or guards or anything. Also because people selling stuff at garage sales didn’t care much what happened to the stuff—if you’re selling a bunch of video tapes with mold on them for ten cents each, you just want them gone, and if some kid wants to put’em under his shirt instead of giving you the dime, you’ll probably just look out into traffic and let’em disappear.
So basically it was a dumb thing to do because there was no challenge or sport to it, and at first also it was dumb because you never got anything good. The tapes we smashed for the tape inside and then strung it around on trees for a while, which was boring and as old-fashioned as the tapes themselves. Then we tried tying Kaleigh up with it, because she never minds what you do to her as long as you pay attention to her.
The stuff turned out to be really strong, you wouldn’t think it to see it all flashy-wispy up in a tree, plus my dad said those tapes were always crap, the ribbon always snapping or twisting inside where you couldn’t reach it, even with a pencil. But I guess when you have the whole of “Return of the Jedi” to use and Kaleigh not being much more than bones in a hoodie, you could get her fairly settled.
April 7th, 2013
Fiction, Editing, and Polyvore
When I was teaching short-story writing to high-school students, the first exercises I asked them to do involved dreaming up a character. One assignment was to write a description of this character’s home (I also gave them the option of drawing the place, but few took me up on it). This assignment was amazingly successful–students wrote in great detail, especially girls. Some took it as a basically a shopping fantasty, stocking the fictional rooms with brand-name bling, but almost everyone was able to flesh out a setting to an extent that you could see it in your mind. I was impressed at how carefully they worked their way around a space, describing each piece of furniture in turn.
The reason I gave this assignment is it’s a good, concrete way to start developing character–showing the objects a character would acquire and keep close is a good way to start to edge in on who he or she is. If you were to realize that the only two items of furniture I contributed to the living room I share with my husband are an easy chair from my childhood bedroom and an end table my father got with green stamps in the sixties (like a prototypical Air Miles), you would know a few things about me: cheap, partial to nostalgia.
The problem was, I suppose, the leap I expected the students to be making when they did the exercises–I wanted them to use these bits of character development to guide the story they would write: a person who would dress like this, who would own furniture like this, would *be* like this and in certain circumstances… When it came time to put together a first draft of their stories, I said they could “draw on” any of the exercises they’d previously done. Mainly, this translated into a long, pointlessly detailed description of a room in every story.
I tried to explain that the room descriptions were for the *them*, the writers–a way to gain more insight into their characters. Once they knew enough, they could show the characters in tiny details a reader could absorb easily, and not need these towering stacks of details. If you know a character well enough, you barely have to describe him/her at all–you know exactly how to nail it down.
My students were pissed–the concept of writing for themselves, writing to make later writing better, writing that they got no marks for, all foreign to them. I could not convince most of them to remove these descriptions. Even when I suggested they didn’t need to replace it with anything, even when I said other character work elsewhere in the piece was strong enough to carry it, even with no word-count minimum, and my pointed comments that the description was making the story awkward and dull, they refused to take work they had done off the page.
Which is totally natural when you are 15 and never wanted to take a creative writing class in the first place. But it is a helpful reminder for those of us who are allegedly adults and writing for the love it, that just because I wrote it doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile, and just because it’s worthwhile doesn’t mean it needs to go *in* the story. I do a lot of writing *towards* a story–exploring backstory, motivations, minor characters–that seems to me as I write to in fact be part of the story itself. It will illuminate things for the reader, I tell myself, or else that this is part of the narrator’s thought process and should naturally be included. Then when I read it through, I realize I was just doing some kind of imaginative research in order to get to the point where i knew the characters well enough to write the scene and…chop, chop, chop.
It is too easy to leave that stuff in, because even unnecessary writing is hard and it hurts to kill something that took a long time to create. But it’s self-indulgent to do otherwise–ok for 15-year-olds, but not anyone who actually wants to be taken seriously.
I’m on this topic because I recently started researching clothing styles and brands. Normally, the characters I write about dress like people I know, so if clothing comes up I know how to describe it, and even if it doesn’t come up, I know how characters would react to, say, sitting on the floor, or spilled wine–I know what they’re wearing and how they feel about what they’re wearing. But I’m starting on a character whose clothes are a lot nicer than anyone’s I know, and they are important to her–important enough I can’t get away with a vague impression of silhouettes and shades. The Mighty J recommended a wonderful and addictive site called Polyvore. It’s basically paper dolls with current designer clothes, and it’s a wonderful way to make outfits for characters if you’re not too fashion-savvy and the characters are. It’s also SO fun playing matchup with unrelated clothes, and I’m saying this as a person who is currently wearing and orange skirt, orange tights, and one of her father’s dress shirts from the 60s.
Of course i spent a tonne of time playing around and I got to the point where I was able to imagine this woman’s clothes, her budget, her body issues, her brand awareness. I also had a couple nice outfits lined up and I knew where in the story she’d wear them. It is now *very* tempting to start putting brand names in the story, long descriptions of the exact sheen of shoe leather, the fit of a skirt. I need, largely, to resist this temptation. The character owns the clothes; she’s used to them, and not dazzled by how pretty they are because she has lots of pretty clothes. If I go all schoolgirl and start kvelling in detail about everything in her closet is, it undermines the character’s own take on things, which is much more arch and unimpressed. It will also take up a lot of space when the story isn’t *about* clothes; they’re really just a character detail that it was important to imagine correctly in order to imagine the whole woman correctly.
So, according to my 15-year-old students and sometimes my own interior whiny voice, I basically wasted several hours creating material–outfits–that can’t go in the story. Which is ridiculous–I couldn’t write about the character this well any other way. I’m guessing there are people in the world who are more efficient and don’t need to do this sort of research, and good for them, but I am learning to be accepting of my somewhat circuitous process. From talking to other writers, this is not so unusual, though they may be in the library, at an archive, or at a museum–it’s just hard to use most research most of the time. But it’s still really worth doing, I’d say (also, Polyvore=the funnest!)
November 19th, 2012
Meme Update
When I posted my Next Big Thing interview answers, I tagged a couple fine gentlemen to do the next round, and they have kindly complied. Please see Jeff’s responses and Andrew’s responses for more insight on books you might be reading a few years from now.
Other lovely folks playing this reindeer game include Julia and my very own Mark. Lots of good reading out there…and more to come!
November 13th, 2012
The Next Big Thing–10 Question Interview
This is a fun internet meme that’s going around where writers talk about what they’re currently writing. Shari Lapena wrote an interesting one and tagged me in the process. So follow the link to read hers, then look below to read mine.
What is your working title of your book?
So Much Love
Where did the idea come from for the book?
I don’t know. It’s one of those sticky ideas that I’ve had for a decade and never written successfully, despite many attempts. Over the years the events and characters have become pretty solid in my mind. I don’t know really where they came from–it feels like asking, “When did you first find out about your parents?” I don’t know what makes me think this time it will work, but I hope I’m right! If not, I guess I can walk around with all these people in my head for another few years.
What genre does your book fall under?
Literary fiction, I guess, for want of being anything else.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Uhhh…really? I feel like most actors are way more attractive than the folks I’m writing about–not that they’re ugly, just…normal? I guess this is why I’m not a casting director. Ok, an honest attempt–man, there’s really too many characters in this book.
[20 minutes of earnest googling later]
Guys, this is giving me hives! I feel like a skeeze looking at someone’s photo with my head cocked and thinking, “Well, if she was 10 years younger…” I actually googled “First Nations actors” and then just decided to junk the whole thing. Utter fail. Sorry.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Um…it’s the story of a guy obsessed with women who have been the objects of violence…and also the story of those women. That’s not a very good description, actually. Sometimes I just think it’s a set of stories, each about a different kind of love. Those two sentences sound like two entirely different books. I’ll keep working on it.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? My agent is the lovely Samantha Haywood at Transatlantic Literary Agency.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
What makes you think I’ve done that? I’ve been working on this version of the book on and off for a year and a half and I’m *maybe* 2/3 done the first draft. Of course, it’s stories, so the individual pieces are pretty polished (I hope) but the overall structure of the book is still in process.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I thought the structure of the book was fairly unique until I read A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, both of which won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc., which weren’t things I was necessarily planning on So Much Love doing. So then I was sad. I’m all right now, but I going to avoid Olive Kitteridge, which everyone says is another book in this category that would make me feel bad about myself (they don’t say the last part, but I infer).
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Again, it was a long time ago so I don’t 100% remember. There are a couple other books that map this territory that I felt didn’t do it right, so that was probably a factor. Len Klimstra is definitely my most Updike-ian character, so there was probably inspiration there. As well, this is a book about people reading, at least to me it is. The characters live in and around and through books in profound and silly ways, something that has really helped me to understand them. So books inspired this book, I guess–not just their contents but their physical book-ness, too.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Two of the stories have just been published, in the most recent issues of PRISM international and The Rusty Toque.
Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.
Be sure to line up your five people in advance.
So, honestly, I couldn’t find 5 people. I don’t want you to think that this is because I’m a loser with almost no friends (well…) but this meme has been around for a while, especially in Toronto where most of the people I know live, so it was hard to find folks who wanted to do it that hadn’t already. I’m glad to be exporting this to other cities, and if I only have two meme-buddies, at least they’re pleasingly exotic in their non-Toronto-ness:
Have at it, guys–looking forward to reading!
October 4th, 2012
The Same Only Different
I have the gift and the curse of usually liking my own writing. If I was interested enough in an idea to write a full story about it in the first place(not the little abandoned snippets that litter my Word files), I’ll pretty much always consider it worth revising until someone else likes it too. This is a gift because it encourages me to keep on with stories that have a lot wrong with them, but a curse but I can waste a lot of time on something better left in the archives.
As I approach the fabled mid-thirties, I’ve found another wrinkle in this pattern of constant revision–my voice is changing, or rather has changed, a great deal. Well, a great deal to me–I find even the contrast between some of the stories in *Once* versus *The Big Dream* pretty dramatic, but I don’t expect anyone else to notice or care. But it’s one thing to read two stories written 5 years apart and notice a difference–it’s another thing to delve into a story written years ago and try to live inside it to a degree that I can write that way again.
And in truth, I don’t go back so terribly far. I’ve always written stories, but I rarely return to ones written before 2005-2006. There are simply issues of quality I cannot overcome in most of the stuff written prior to then, and issues of deceased hard drives don’t hlep matters. So really, we’re talking max 7 years, here. Have I really changed that much? I guess so. I’ve done it before.
The oldest short story I’ve published (that doesn’t qualify as juvenalia in some way–like being in teen anthology) is “If This,” originally written in 2000, published in The Puritan in 2009. It was one of pretty much two things that I wrote in university that anyone else ever understood, and I really wanted to see it published. But revising it was excruciating–my mind just doesn’t work that may anymore. Back then, I was writing in a style I named myself (I think?) called hyper-lyric. It was a maximalism, periodic, involuted style that was only one of many reasons most people found my work hard to follow, but I loved it and writing that way made me happy.
It no longer does. I wander into periodic sentences now, and then I try to get them out in the second drafts. I always want to say it more simply, and I actually think I am far more pretentious in conversation and personal writing that I am in fiction (I’d never use the word “involuted” in a story). I was never aware of jettisoning the hyper-lyric style, or whatever that was if you don’t accept my imaginary terminology, but it sure is gone now. I still *like* that story, and a number of others I’ll never be able to repair enough to publish, but I no longer possess the mind that wrote them. Weird, eh?
So revisions become a race against, well, not the clock but the calandar, anyway. These days, between work on the new stuff, I’m trying to revise work from that 2005-2006 period and send it out before I become so different from the lady who wrote them that I can’t revise them anymore. Am I being melodramatic? Maybe, but really, anything to encourage myself to work, right?
Anyway, all this is in my head today because an older story that I revised pretty heavily this past spring, called “Anxiety Attack,” has been accepted by Freefall Magazine, which makes me really happy. I’m so pleased that that story will get its crack at being read by a wider audience than me, and I’m glad some else agrees that it’s worthwhile. And I guess I’m glad too that this proves the slog of revising older pieces is worth it, at least sometimes. “First Afternoon,” another revisited and revised story, will appear in The Windsor Review next spring, too.
And the race against the hands of time continues…(another thing I’d never write in a story)
September 3rd, 2012
I don’t even have to write this
So it turns out Andrew Hood has a blog. Did you know that? I didn’t know that until this week, despite the fact that there seem to be posts on there going back a couple years. Why don’t people tell me stuff?
Anyway, as with most fiction writers I admire who bother to blog, Mr. Hood blogs pretty well. And he wrote this post that pretty much encapsulates everything that’s wrong with my life right now (except quiche-related issues, which he doesn’t cover). You’ll have to strike out most of the history, as I have never done most of the things Andrew has, and nearly all the swearing, but what remains is super-true. I advise reading the whole post, but here’s the crushingly accurate kicker:
“Failing’s the worst, but it’s the only result that I can ever count on. Every fucking day I sit down and fail fucking miserably. I did this in my basement years ago, with late night softcore on mute. And I failed big time in university, though never as bad as the fuckfaces who were convinced the drivel they’d managed was tops. And when I got a fulltime job, my failure was contained to the pockets of free time I managed. So I suppose writing’s always been easy, but it’s the failure that’s gotten difficult. Somehow I’ve found myself in a place where I say that writing’s what I do and is a thing I’m supposed to be good at. So when, out of sight, I spend a day producing plodding, trite dreck, the consequences of that failure feels more severe, intractable, fucking absolute.”
April 27th, 2012
The real truth, and other kinds
This is a reworked distillation of the talk I gave on Tuesday at the Renison Writers’ Workshop. I thought I might as well set it down here rather than let it float off into the either.
I don’t do much in the way of autobiographical writing, but I don’t know that I entirely believe such a thing exists anyway. Even if you you wanted to lay out an event on the page exactly as it happened in real life, if you were at all creative or elegant in the presentation of that event it would elide certain truths, boring or irrelevant though they might be. Once you’ve edited out the lady sitting beside you in the emergency room who kept haranging you about Obama for no real reason, the twenty minutes you spent looking for your OHIP card under the seats in your car, and most of the hours you spent unconcious when you have no idea what was happening, the story looks radically different than how it was actually lived. Change everyone’s names for privacy, collapse three different nurses into a single character because they all said basically the same thing and who has time to develop so many characters–you have a convincing case that it’s not true at all, merely *based* on certain personal experiences you may have had.
Seriously, that’s too stupid a conversation to have, even with myself–though believe me, I’ve done it before. Narrative and 100% truth don’t really go together, but neither does (semi) realist fiction and 100% falsity. I think most writers use observation in their writing–the way the sunset looks out the window on the 9th floor, the way their cat tries to hop onto the counter but doesn’t make it, the way someone gets a migraine when she’s really mad. The world permeates fiction, fiction organizes the world, and the older I get the less alarmed I am about discerning the differences.
I sort of feel the same way about narrative non-fiction–there, the balance is probably tipped toward the truth, but you have the same sort of of constraints on you–that of creating a good story. And if you have to fudge a few details to give events the emotional impact they need to on someone who has never met the characters and never will (whether it’s because they don’t know them, or because the characters don’t exist)–that’s the art of writing well, isn’t it?
**
This actually came out pretty from the Tuesday talk, not sure why–maybe I should’ve actually referred to my notes once in a while. Anyway, I did write something of the pure-unvarnished-truth variety–a list of my most treasured possessions (well, some of them–I’m very materialistic). I actually don’t do much of this sort of personal writing very often–it’s not my scene–but Allyson Latta asked me, and she is both a life-writing expert and a delightful person of the networld, so how could I say no? Also, writing this helped me to notice that pure descriptive writing, without narrative, without plot or character, dialogue or “theme,” is far more likely to be empiracally truthful than it’s paragraphed kin. See for yourself–My Seven Treasure–I bet you can find all these things in my house, looking much as you’d imagine them to!
Buy the book: