Embarrassments of my Youth

There is a popular saying which goes something like this: Once it’s on the internet, it’s on the internet forever. I happen to know this isn’t true; in 2008 my main online journal, Copperbadge on LiveJournal, was hacked and completely erased. Five years of journal entries and their comments were deleted. Using various caching services I managed to reconstruct about 80% of the journal posts, but some were gone forever, and most of the comments were as well.

One of the fortunate things I had done before this took place was to shift all of my fanfic, including fanfic that had been posted on my main journal, to a separate archive on a second LiveJournal account, Sam_Storyteller (this archive is now housed under the same name at Dreamwidth). So all my fanfic was preserved. I say this is fortunate, but in retrospect, I’m not entirely sure it was.

My archive houses work that began in 2003 and runs up to the current day; I just posted a story there last week, and will be posting a few more in the coming weeks. I’ve been adding these stories to my Archive Of Our Own account (I can be found at AO3 under the username Copperbadge), because it offers features like better tagging systems and the ability to download the stories as PDF files.

The problem I’m coming up against, now that I’ve added most of the stuff I’m really proud of, is what to do with the stuff that I’m…less than proud of. There are various reasons for not wanting to add certain stories. Some, by my standards now, are not very well written, though most hold up surprisingly well to the test of time. Some just don’t seem to be that entertaining. Some are so short I don’t feel I ought to bother.

And the question becomes, what do I do with these stories? I’m not especially sentimental about my work in the general sense; I’d be happy to remove them from all archives everywhere. On the other hand, it seems wrong to keep them on one archive and not on another. I know in the past I’ve gone looking for stories I really liked only to find the account deleted or the story locked, and I don’t want to deprive anyone of a story they like, even if I no longer think it’s very good. We all have different tastes, after all.

In a larger sense, there’s a question of completism, and of owning the work I did which was less, for whatever reason, than the work I do now. Is it correct to erase what I’m no longer fond of or proud of?

This is a question professionally published writers face, to be sure. Writers have tried to disown their work, or have publicly said they hated something quite popular with the reading public.  Sometimes a story comes out of a trauma or a situation that the writer would prefer to keep in the past, and the story haunts them with the memory. Sometimes they just don’t think it’s any good. Once in a while it’s a question of shifting ideology; Maurine Watkins, who wrote the play that inspired Chicago, later became a born-again Christian and spent years paying fees to prevent the production of the play because she felt guilty about making money from the stories of real-life murders. Anne Rice has never renounced any of her books, but questions about her views on her past work have arisen in the course of her public struggles with her faith.

My own dilemmas are less dramatic. I’m proud of my original work and I only put my name to work I feel is the best I could possibly do — which happily means that even if I find in later years it’s not very good, I know I was doing my best at the time. With fanfic, it’s different. Some stories I wrote just to entertain friends, or on stupid ideas that in retrospect don’t work as well as I thought they would.

I don’t really have an answer yet. For professionally published writers, the story is out there, and they can’t just pretend it isn’t. For me, I have to work out whether I want to continue to claim this work, or quietly tuck it away, or simply not move it over to the new archive, letting it languish in the convoluted navigational web of the current one.

How do you solve a problem like a Fall Out Boy/Heroes crossover? I’m still working on that one.

Playing A Book

A couple of weeks ago, at the London Book Fair, Faber & Faber announced that it was creating a “fully playable, fully immersive product” when it came to ebooks. It was working with software publishers and a developer, The Story Mechanics, to produce a reprint of John Buchan’s early 20th-century serial novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, which most of us — if we know it at all — know from Hitchcock’s film adaptation.

My knee-jerk response was that any book which has achievements you unlock, items you collect, and music which plays at points during your reading is not a book — that’s a video game. But I reined in my what the hell is wrong with you almost immediately, because whenever I find myself saying “that’s not the thing it says it is, it’s some other thing” I usually end up having to have a long argument with myself (occasionally even other people) about definitions.

Besides, there’s nothing wrong with video games. I know I’m not the only person who does this, but I enjoy video game narratives without needing to play the game. I don’t especially want to play Assassin’s Creed, but I am entranced by the story, so I enjoy watching other people play it. If they made a movie out of the cut scenes, I would probably go to see it. I actually got frustrated that there was no way to pause the cut scenes in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess because when I was playing that game, people would invariably try to talk to me during a really long cut scene. I failed the final level of Braid so hard and so often that it soured the whole game for me and I no longer even care how it ends (apparently it’s incomprehensible anyway) but the only reason I played it as long as I did was the story.

It’s not like a video game has never been based on a book before, either. And there are books you can “play”, like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. But these ebooks, which have a soundtrack and achievements — and maybe levels? Do they have bosses you have to defeat? — blur the line a great deal between what a game is and what a book is.

I keep thinking about Dara O’Briain’s comedy routine about video games: no other medium prevents you from experiencing it based on skill. He points out that music doesn’t make you dance competently before playing the rest of the album; books don’t stop you after chapter three to ask you what the theme of the work is. But we now have a fairly widespread platform for reading where a book could give you a test before allowing you to go any further. Which is a little freaky.

So with the production of books-as-interactive-experiences and video-games-as-narrative-media I suppose there are two questions left to answer: where does the line between story and experience fall? And, if we can cross or blur that line, does the line matter — do we actually need to know?

I am a competitive person and I frustrate easily, so I don’t want to play a book. I just want to read it. I’m also not that keen on paying for a book that has involved a software development team, because I suspect either I’m paying more or the author of the actual story is getting less for features I will not use. But that’s not a good reason to prevent the exploration of a new medium, or a melding of two older mediums, and it’s not a good reason to say that’s not a book — because what does that prove, anyway, and who told me I got to arbitrate what a book is? People have been “playing” murder mysteries for over a century, trying to solve the case before the detective does.

There’s a lot of fear in the publishing industry right now, that ebooks are going to kill paper printing, that authors who grew up in a video-game generation (authors who are — or will be very soon — the children of the MTV generation) don’t have as much invested in the written word. I can’t speak to the former, but I’m pretty sure the latter is bunk — or we wouldn’t get awesome stories in our video games.

So as long as they warn for video games in our awesome stories, I guess I’m good. Trepidatious, but good.

Science Fiction Does Not Require Grace

I made a post on my tumblr the other day reminding people (and informing those who didn’t know) that Ender’s Game is a great book, will likely be a great movie, and you should not pay to see it, because Orson Scott Card is a rabid anti-gay activist.

This isn’t about how Orson Scott Card has threatened to tear down the government over gay marriage. This is about the reactions I got, which were really interesting. The top two were:

1. How does a man who espouses such beliefs in real life write a book about acceptance and understanding like Ender’s Game?

2. How can a science fiction writer be so closed-minded?

I can’t answer #1. Best guess I have is “by accident” or possibly “his better nature had a brief moment of freedom”. The second question, however, I have some thoughts about. I spoke about them a while ago on LJ, but I’d like to see if I can vocalize them a little more clearly a few years on.

To be open-minded, in the way we generally define it, requires three things: imagination, empathy, and the willingness to accept you may be wrong. This is true whether you are being asked to accept two women getting married or whether you’re being asked to consider the idea that a sky-god actually did make the world in six days.

The writing of science fiction — the writing of most fiction — only requires imagination. That’s pretty much it.

Good writing generally employs a high level of empathy, of course. Not only the ability of the writer to put themselves into a situation strange to them, but to put the reader there as well. But it’s a very specific, very localized empathy, and it’s not strictly speaking necessary. If you’re a good storyteller, you can tell a story and even if it’s not true and people know it’s not true, they will still buy into it because you’re telling it in a compelling manner. Sometimes, science fiction is quite clearly a writer telling a story about something they desperately wish would happen to them — which requires very little empathy — and if they’re good at it, they get away with it. I’ve done this; I know there are professionally published writers who have. Talent can take the place of empathy when all you’re doing is sellin’ a story.

And writers of speculative fiction, of fantasy and sci fi, rarely have to entertain the idea that they might be wrong in their writing. Their world isn’t our world. If you set a story in the year 3000, you’ll be dead (presumably) by the time the year 3000 rolls around to prove you wrong. If you tell a story that opens after a massive alien attack has nearly destroyed humanity, you’re probably not going to be around when and if that actually happens. And if you are, people are going to have more pressing issues than whether or not you got the details right.

Science fiction writers don’t have to have the three key components of an open mind in order to tell a story. Some do; some don’t. But it goes beyond “people are different from each other”.

There is an expectation of science fiction writers that because they spend a lot of time thinking about potential futures, they will embrace the real future as it rushes towards us. This seems logical, but it doesn’t take into account the disconnect between what we want and what we get.

Writers like control. Even the ones who espouse chaotic theories like to hold the conversation with themselves. We call it “dialogue” but really it’s a monologue spoken by two different people. I love to write dialogue because I control both sides of the conversation, whereas in real life, about eight times in ten, I get wordless and stammery two or three sentences in. I’m not good at conversation with other people. That’s not the other person’s fault.

Science fiction writers control every aspect of an entire universe. They get to say who survives the apocalypse. They get to say who’s in space and why. They get to say whether the aliens are nice and what technology we’ve held onto. Have you ever noticed that in most scifi television shows, all aliens that come from one planet usually have the same skin colour? They have the same religion, too, and the same social structure. Minbari only have one faith. Klingons only have one social code. This isn’t a hard rule — there are exceptions. They’re just not terribly frequent.

Earth isn’t like that. We have lots of different skin tones and faiths and sexualities and social mores and clothing styles and monetary systems. But a society so vast and complex is difficult to grasp, certainly difficult to encapsulate in fiction. When you do, you end up with the imaginary Princess Bride story where the “good parts” were edited together by the narrator’s father because most of the book is about boring stuff like economics. Economics is necessary but it does not make for compelling fiction.

This is where it gets scary. Because if you control the future in fiction, eventually you forget that you don’t control the future in reality. You want the future to be one way and then it turns out, whoops, cellphones. Whoops, the internet.

Whoops, gay marriage.

Oh snap, yo. Are two dudes kissing in space? I didn’t write that. Who gave the internet permission to happen? These damn cellphones, what the hell is SMS?

You can’t control the future. There are too many variables. And if you can’t control the future, but you desperately want to, the next instinctive, illogical step is to prevent it from happening. Keep things the way they are. Maintain the status quo and you don’t have to worry.

Ray Bradbury likened social justice to censorship, and was violently opposed to his book about censorship being turned into an e-book that literally could not be burned. Orson Scott Card is terrified that legalising gay marriage is going to screw up the social fabric of the entire country, despite the fact that gay people were happily cohabitating with each other long before he was born and will be long after he is dead. Science fiction writers don’t automatically want to see the future. Some want to script it. Some think the only way to do that is to prevent it from happening.

It’s okay to love fictional futures and to write them. It’s okay to be afraid of the real future. It’s also okay to want to guide that future.

But preventing the future? In the books, that’s the province of the villain.

The Touchiest Of Topics

This post builds a little bit off a previous post about sex in literature, and also a little off my earlier series on how to define a YA Novel. It’s about a hot topic in the literary world right now: YA Lit and Sex.

I think that the topic is hot because YA Lit is increasingly prominent in our culture, and because sex in literature is as well. There’s also been a lot of talk lately about how dark YA Lit is becoming, but even with books like the Hunger Games series, which is held up as the ultimate symbol (if not the only one) of dark writing for kids, sex isn’t often something that comes up. At least, I assume; I figure I’d have heard about it by now if all the starving kids were also having sex. And, in part, publishers are realising that literature aimed at young adults isn’t just being bought by young adults. They’re now working to satisfy the adult desire for something a little steamier. There are a lot of great reasons for adults to read YA; I personally used to pluck random YA novels off the shelf during exam time in college, because they were easy on the brain and could be read quickly.

But, yes. For all of these reasons and others, as well, sex in YA Lit is becoming a forefront discussion.

Sex was an issue I faced when I was writing fanfic, especially Stealing Harry and Laocoon’s Children, two stories that rewrote the Harry Potter novels within an alternate universe. Because I was writing fanfic and not trying to sell anything to children, I had more latitude than a pro-published writer would; I was already including sex scenes between adults even when I was writing about Harry Potter as an eight year old. But as the kids I was writing about got older, I wanted to reflect what everloving horndogs a lot of kids are in their teens. So I was glancing off the idea of teens engaging in romantic and sexual situations; I didn’t want to write kiddie porn but I did want to be honest about how teens behave. I lost my virginity in high school; presumably it wasn’t unlikely that a tightly-knit group of friends would have similar experiences. It’s not that I feel kids ought to, it’s just that I feel like whether or not they ought to, a lot do.

I never got there, because that story fell by the wayside, but it has stayed with me, the idea that people in their teens do have sexual urges and sexual encounters. It’s a tricky place to go, because most writers (quite rightly) don’t want to use underage people as devices for sexual titillation, and more importantly they don’t want to be accused of doing it whether or not that was their intent. And I don’t want to add to the weird societal pressures surrounding sex, the conflicting “Have sex now or you’re abnormal!” and “SEX ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE FUN, IT’S A SIN.”

I believe that people shouldn’t be ashamed of having sex, of choosing their partners and the number of their partners, as long as said partners are consenting and capable of consent. I believe people should be told that they’re supposed to enjoy the sex they have, and if they aren’t, they should be encouraged to stop what they’re doing and seek alternatives, be that different partners or different kinds of sex or no sex at all. And one of the things I discovered while exploring the nature of YA Literature is that it is predominantly about adults who have a message they want to convey to young people — like what we think about sex and how we deal with it as adults.

There’s a fantastic quote by a fellow WordPresser, fozmeadows, discussing adolescent sex in YA:

Sex/y scenes in YA matter because YA novels aren’t contraband. It’s not like sneaking a glance at the late night movie, then frantically switching channels when your parents inevitably walk in during the naked bits, or covertly trying to hide a Mills and Boon under your bed, or having to clear your browser history and check that the door’s locked if you want to look at porn or read slashfic on the internet. You can read YA novels openly – on the bus, at school, at home – and never have to worry that someone’s going to find your behaviour suspicious. Sex/y scenes in YA matter because, by the very nature of belonging to a permitted form of media, they help to disassociate sex from surreptitious secrecy: they make it something open rather than furtive, something that rightfully belongs to you, the reader, because the book was meant for you to read and remember.

Fozmeadows is speaking primarily about the way young women are treated both in the world of YA lit and within the books that compose it, which is entirely appropriate given, well, how young women are frequently treated in YA Lit. But it has a broader application as well: the idea that imbuing the concept of sex into a YA book automatically gives the reader just a little more agency and ownership than they had previously.

It doesn’t matter if the scene is detailed or not, if it’s only fiery kisses or much, much more: the point is that you’re allowed to have it, allowed to enjoy it, and that perhaps for the first time in your life, you’re viewing something arousing that doesn’t make you out to be a sex object in heels, but an active, interesting heroine who also happens to have a love life.

It’s true, too — even books that discuss teens committing complicated crimes in an adult world, like the Heist Society series, shy away from teens committing sexual acts. What really hit home for me about that second half of the quote, however, is the concept of not putting an actual sex act into the book: not having to write explicit sex between underage partners — just the legitimate, unflinching potential for sex to occur, or the mention of it happening. Even the desire for it to happen unhampered by the usual “am I ready?” self-flagellating self-examination that media aimed at teens generally includes (almost exclusively with the eventual answer of “No” at the end) would be refreshing. And Fozmeadows is right: it is enough to show readers that they get to control what happens to their bodies and when, without necessarily baring everything.

I think this is important because even authors writing for adult audiences have trouble with sex scenes, as I talked about last week. So understanding that sex in literature is something that people look for and something that can positively influence the way young people see their sexuality (and those of others) is important. But it’s just as important for writers to know that there is space between “never talking about it” and “explicit sexual description” — that wanting sex and experiencing desire can be just as important as the sex that actually happens. It’s not just teenagers who could use a higher comfort level with discussions of sex and sexuality, after all.

Professionalism and Creativity

Sam’s love of comic books strikes again…

For those of you who don’t read comics or who don’t read comics news, there’s been a lot of fuss lately about working conditions at DC Comics. Rob Liefeld, an artist mainly infamous for being terrible, left in a storm of angry, aggressive, and insulting tweets that in any other field of work would have made him 100% unemployable. Gail Simone, a well-known writer who was working on Batgirl, was fired by email and rehired in the course of about two weeks — she was a lot classier about the whole mess than Liefeld. Rumors abound that scripts are accepted by editorial, only to be returned with complete overhauls necessary when the “editorial brief” changes. The implication seems to be that the direction of the overall story they’re trying to tell keeps shifting.

Which is a shame on a number of levels, including narrative. Because I really want to like DC Comics, and I want to read their comic books, but I can see in every issue I read that the writers are confused by what’s going on and the time they’re given to make their stories work is compressed. It’s difficult to plan long-term because their plans keep getting knocked off-kilter.

Creativity is difficult to regulate. You can’t dole it out from nine to five. Artists have a notorious reputation as flighty flakes (somewhat undeserved, but occasionally true depending on the individual). But here’s the thing: this is professional art and collaborative art. You actually do have to be a professional because other people are depending on you, and most artists — writers included in that term — who work in comic books or television or mainstream film have figured out how to keep their shit together for at least long enough to get the story told.

At first I thought, well, can’t we figure out who is actually fucking all this up and tell them to stop? Because Superman is sucking right now. But in all honesty, this is not just a problem with micromanagerial editors. It seems to be an overall problem with DC, and it has a lot to do with the brand.

A while back I read an article about ways Disney is marketing Marvel correctly, which I wish now I’d kept around but didn’t because at the time it was about ten bullet points to illustrate only two concepts: strong vision and brand coherence. And you can’t really talk about one without the other.

Disney, through Marvel, has developed a very specific vision for its Marvel films, and perhaps less specific but still directed vision for the comics. I don’t know what it’s like to work at Marvel-Disney, but I suspect there is a very strong culture of adherence to the vision. What DC seems to be lacking is either a vision that lasts past the next big storytelling event instead of into it, or the discipline to keep its higher-ups in line with the vision it has. There has to be one page, and everyone has to be on it.

Which sounds a little fascist, I admit. And certainly general consensus seems to be that while Marvel is more coherent, and its books have voices that sound individual, it’s less diverse overall in terms of content. But Marvel is doing well, and telling engaging stories, so…

Well, I don’t mean to criticise DC, that’s not why I’m here. What I mean to do is illustrate that most creatives who want to earn significant money from their creativity have to do the same thing. They have to have a vision of where they’re going and what they want, they have to have a brand that’s going to carry them there, and they have to be consistent in both. It’s no different from developing a prose style, in all honesty. It’s one reason the “copper badge” I’ve had since 2003 is still around, because it’s a major part of my digital brand. That badge is my avatar nearly everywhere, and people know as soon as they see it that they’ve got the right guy. My brand itself has changed dramatically, but there comes a point where at last you want to know where you’re going and have a plan for how to get there.

Working on it.

An Author In Search Of A Novel

I am picking up today where I left off a few days ago, with my examination of YA literature; you can read part one (the problem) here, and part two (the research) here.

After months of trying to finish the essay that those two parts began, I realized that my search for a definition was in fact the wrong search. I should have been searching for a process, because process often defines product. So, thinking as a creator of literature rather than a consumer of it, a few things became clear.

I decided that marketing, definitions applied by others, and even adolescents’ self-definitions don’t matter to the creation of this particular form of novel. In this sense, a YA novel is not a book about something. Except in the rarest of cases, a YA novel is an adult talking to a teenager. Everything else is window dressing.

So I thought about motivation and message and after that came a very simple three question formula (I do love things in threes).

1. Why do I, an adult, want to talk to young people?
2. What do I want to tell them?
3. Why do I want to tell them that?

Mind you, calling them “young people” makes me feel so very old, but I am more than twice the age of the youngest readers on this blog, and I was an adult before some of my presumed target audience was born.

Here’s the kicker about these questions: they are sequential. Each question leads to the next and you can’t get to two without answering one. Question one is vital because I have, in fact, heard writers answer it with “That’s where the money in publishing is”.

That’s a bad answer. Possibly not the only bad answer, I haven’t been through every answer, but certainly a bad one. Even if the statement itself is true — there is a lot of money in YA lit — it’s not the way you ever want to answer a question about your passion.

Anyway, it’s a good question to keep one honest, because it’s the first step in not condescending to your audience. It’s what sticks me down, because initially I thought I don’t want to talk to “young people”. But then I thought, really, it’s more most young people. The Dead Isle came as a surprise YA Fiction to me — I’ve had many parents buy it for their kids, or to read with their kids. It does carry a message that is not exclusively for the young, about compassion and justice and the power of creativity, but that message is conveyed by young characters.

The characters I created for The Dead Isle are the kind of kids I want to talk to. Shy, nerdy, brilliant Jack. Affectionate, cheerful, isolated Clare. Independent, aggressively sensible Purva, who has no patience for the games of others.

But the question isn’t who, the question is why, and I suppose the answer is

1. I want to talk to young people who are who I was: shy, nerdy, smart, independent, relatively happy despite my isolation, old before my peers were, already sick of the bullshit. Because I’ve been there.

I didn’t get very many books about me. Catcher in the Rye was one. Ender’s Game (despite Card’s horrible politics) was another. The Magician’s Nephew, my favourite of all the Narnia books. Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey, which might not be highly acclaimed literature but was valuable to me. These are books of varying quality and era and genre, but they were books about me and they gave me comfort. They taught me about my future.

So assuming those are the kids I want to talk to, the kids like me, what do I want to tell them? I’ve got friends with kids, Olivia and Irene and Harry and Vivi and Little Sam and Noel and Gabriel and a handful of others. I can’t lie to them or be cruel to them. For one, I will get totally busted by their parents.

What do I want to tell them?

2. Well, basically, what I want to tell everyone: that compassion is a high and difficult art, that greed is insidious and cruel, that the world is waiting for people to discover it. I want to explain how the wonder of discovery makes compassion easier and greed more difficult and how the more those two balance out, the closer you come to justice. And sometimes I want to tell stories just plain ’cause I like telling stories.

Three is a little more abstract, because the answers lie in the first two questions. Why do I want to tell kids that?

3. Because people told me about compassion and greed and wonder once, and I believe strongly that what they said was true. If we as a species are going to do more than murder each other and destroy our only home, I think everyone has to understand it. I don’t have all the answers but I have the tools to get us there if kids who are smarter than me take the philosophical hand up that I’m offering them.

So in the end, I don’t know if I want to write a YA novel, or I should say another YA novel. If I did, I doubt it would be one any trad publisher would be interested in. But if I do want to, now I have the knowledge necessary to lay it out.

Really, it’s what I’ve been doing all along.

Failing At Wikipedia or, It’s YA Because It’s YA

This is part two of my exploration of YA Literature and how to define it in a useful way, as a writer who may be interested in writing it. I’ve talked a bit about the initial problem, which is not only a broad one of definition but also, in my case, a specific issue with experience. When last we left me, I was stuck without a formal conception of what YA Lit was.

And so I went to the internet, looking for how they defined it. Sometimes, the best way to define something is to find someone else’s idea of the thing and figure out where you disagree.

When in doubt, start with Wikipedia and a skeptical expression.

Wikipedia says that YA Lit is literature written for, published for, or marketed to adolescents between the ages of 14 and 22 (22, Jesus, that’s an old Young Adult) but really that’s not that helpful. It’s a book for kids because it’s written as a kid’s book, essentially, or even just because it’s sold as one. I could have gone full-out with The Dead Isle; I could have marketed it as a YA adventure, since three of its four main characters are under the age of twenty and the fourth is very much cast in the mentor role. But I wanted the story to present as a book with broader appeal — and while there’s no length limit on YA novels, it’s an awfully long book.

Reading onwards, Wikipedia diverts fairly quickly into a discussion of the most prominent member of the YA Lit family: the “problem novel”.

Problem novel refers to young adult novels in the realistic fiction category that “addresses personal and social issues across socioeconomic boundaries and within both traditional and nontraditional family structures” (Cole 98). Some of these themes include: identity, sexuality, science fiction, depression, suicide, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, familial struggles, bullying, and numerous others. Some issues that are talked about in young adult literature are things such as friendship, love, race, money, divorce, relationships within families.” [....] In a paper written by April Dawn Wells, she discovers seventeen common traits of young adult novels. These include: “friendship, getting into trouble, interest in the opposite sex, money, divorce, single parents, remarriage, problems with parents, grandparents, younger siblings, concern over grades/school, popularity, puberty, race, death, neighborhood, and job/working.”

Thanks, Wikipedia. You just defined all of literature. Subject matter, it seems, is not going to be much help. It’s all very well to say that YA Lit concerns identity, of which many other aspects including sexuality, class, family, and race are a part, but if that were true I wouldn’t have been the only kid in AP English who liked The Great Gatsby.

Primarily, the focus is centered around a young lead character and the reader experiences emotions, situations, and the like through this character and is able to see how these problems/situations are resolved.

Also that sounds like an invitation to “write down” to the reader as you instruct them on problem resolution, and we’ve discussed “writing down” already.

Granted, I think the above is important because it can expand. I haven’t read The Hunger Games, but I understand that they are in major part about the resources that teens have at their disposal with which they can help repair damaged societies.

So there was my first answer, but not a particularly satisfactory one.

I considered a survey of the “big names” in YA Lit, but that has shifted over time as well, from the in situ dystopia of SE Hinton to the imagined dystopia of Suzanne Collins, from Catcher In The Rye to Go Ask Alice to the pulp suburban horror of my generation’s teens. Even defining Catcher In The Rye as a young adult novel will probably get me some flak, but most people I’ve met who love it do so because they read it as teenagers and could relate to Holden’s attitudes and predicament. That says something to me about the audience it got, whether it wanted it or not. And given that it is now marketed to teens in the form of classroom reading…

So I could have gone all out, but a survey of the world of YA literature just sounds exhausting. I thought I’d set that aside as a last resort. I hit upon the idea to look at contests — competitions asking for YA submissions with the winner being published or a published story being rewarded with publicity. Surely those would have decent quantifications for YA; they’re looking for the next big thing, after all, they should know how to ask for it.

The work cited will illuminate the teen experience and enrich the lives of its readers through its excellence.

Uh.

To be eligible, a title must have been designated by its publisher as being either a young adult book or one published for the age range that YALSA defines as “young adult,” i.e., 12 through 18.

Guess not.

Other websites were a little more helpful — or more cynical, depending. An article at Jezebel states:

Since as far as I can tell, these categories exist primarily for schoolteachers, booksellers, and award-givers, Fine Lines will from now on define “YA” as any book read in one’s own company from the time one learns to read to the time one pays one’s own rent.

That’s actually quite useful. As is this quote from a school library blog critiquing a story that is only YA in the sense that it’s marketed to teens:

this journey doesn’t feel like the teen journey (from acted upon to acting upon).

In that vein, James Dawson, who I quoted in the first essay, has a novel theory about children:

I had a recent conversation with a librarian concerned at the number of year 10 and 11 pupils reading EL James’s erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey. However, she also admitted that many realised early into the book that it “wasn’t for them” and chose to pursue it no further. Teenagers are as capable as any reader to decide what is right for them. As a 12-year-old, I had no access to young adult fiction because it didn’t exist. Instead I went straight to Stephen King and James Herbert. I was able to choose what was suitable and unsuitable.

But none of this is all that helpful in giving me a framework.

Which is where this essay stalled for months.

And then last week I thought, I’m going about this wrong. I’m coming at the problem as a consumer, not a creator. I am both; most of us are. But I was using the wrong half of me for this particular issue. I’d been looking for what a YA novel is, when I should have been looking for how a YA novel comes to be.

When I finally swapped over, the solution to the problem was a delightfully simple series of questions, and they came very easily. I’ll be discussing those on Friday, so stay tuned!

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Everyone Under The Age Of 22

I keep circling back to this essay. Every time I put it away, I eventually come back to it. It is the essay in which I try to define YA literature.

And it got really long, so this is the first of a three-part series in my examination of YA lit. This is a rough essay, and certainly some of you out there are more well-versed, so suggestions (not for books to read, oh god, please not for books to read) and critique are welcome.

So today’s topic is an introduction of the problem.

I made a post once about how I had difficulty with YA lit, both with writing it and plotting it. Most of the people engaging in the discussion at the time made a good point: I couldn’t very well be saying that if I didn’t have a good definition of what it was. Besides, defining a problem is the first part of solving it. But a definition of YA lit is like a definition of porn. Most people just kind of know it when they see it.

I thought a lot about how to define YA literature. I thought about discussing how I never liked children much even when I was one; about how I started reading “Tween and teen” books when I was eight, and how when I was a teen I was mostly frightened of the other teens around me. I fled to the adult company of the newly-minted internet, and avoided most of my peers. It’s not a particular badge of pride or shame, it’s just what is: I was never any good at being a Young Adult, and they still hold that mysterious power for me. A cool kid at the age of sixteen will always be cooler than I am no matter how old I am. I don’t especially have a burning desire to encounter many.

I also thought about the discussion that my readers had about “writing down”, a reaction to the condescending youth-aimed literature of the mid-twentieth century. SFNovelists had an essay on what YA is:

It described fiction written for adolescents, who weren’t quite ready to move on from Middle Grade books to more adult reading matter, but who nonetheless wanted more complex and challenging subjects. What this meant was that YA books had a more limited vocabulary and syntax than books written for adults, and it showed. We found the language patronizing, and the characters, often simplified to make the author’s point, annoying.  YA was for people who, we thought, didn’t really like to read, or they’d learn to do it properly.

One of my commenters posted a quote from a LeGuin essay from 1973:

All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words, and little dumb ideas, and don’t be too scary, and be sure there’s a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it. Write down. Right on. [...] But you won’t have every kid in America reading your book. They will look at, and they will see straight through it, with their clear, cold, beady little eyes, and they will put it down, and they will go away. Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them) but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic.

Now, on the one hand, good points all; on the other hand, see what I mean about how frightening Young Adults are?

It’s also easy to say kids should be treated like intelligent beings, because lord knows I wish I’d been treated that way more often, but it’s not the end of the story. Children aren’t miniature adults, even the really smart ones. I wasn’t any good at being a kid, but I would have made a shitty, irresponsible, miserable adult, too.

I considered studying the loud and vicious debate that’s going on right now regarding “darkness” in YA literature. It does look as though things have been getting darker, but I wonder. Kids half a generation below me get Hunger Games, but I got Christopher Pike novels — and we both get The Hobbit and the Narnia chronicles, just like our parents and grandparents did. They weren’t any less dark, really, they just had fewer televisions in them.

And I think it’s better to write dark books for youth and let their parents decide, rather than legislate what a writer can and can’t say to a fourteen-year-old. The publishers are already going to keep those gates pretty tight. One YA author, James Dawson, said that the things publishers keep from YA lit are the three S’s: “Shagging, swearing, and slaughter”. Despite, as he points out, these being three very popular things with teenagers.

And while Dawson doesn’t like being told what he can and can’t write, he’s aware that if he wants his books published, there are certain things that won’t fly. This isn’t necessarily a problem with self-publishing the way I do it, but of course traditional publishing still has perks that selfpub doesn’t, and one of those is a very strong connection to schools and libraries that buy YA literature.

At the start of this I was left with the problem that I am trying to understand books written, in the main part, for someone I never was, in a field (traditional publishing) to which I don’t fully belong. I could read a lot of YA Lit; in the past, I have, particularly in college where I used to pick books at random from the YA shelf and read them to relax. But I never read them at the right time, first too young and then too old, and finding the patterns and traditions is hard going.

So I turned to the internet, and we’ll be talking about that adventure on Tuesday.

The Madness Painting

Ivan The Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 16, 1581 by Ilya Efimovich Repin, painted 1885. (The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow)

I had the opportunity to see this painting on tour at the Royal Ontario Museum a few years ago, which was the first time I heard the story of how it drove Abram Balashev mad.

The painting depicts the real-life murder of Ivan Ivanovich by his father, the Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, in 1581. Supposedly, Tsar Ivan (known as Ivan the Terrible) had beaten his son’s wife for wearing immodest clothing, and had caused her to miscarry. His son apparently confronted him about this and, in a fit of rage, Tsar Ivan struck him on the head, killing him.

When it was first exhibited in 1885, it was considered obscene, ostensibly due to the graphic portrayal of the bloody wound, though I suspect the madness in Tsar Ivan’s eyes was part of it nobody wanted to even mention. Rumour says that it made women faint. There are whispers that it drove people who viewed it to suicide, but nothing recorded.

On January 13th, 1913, a young man named Abram Balashev, suffering from severe mental illness and supposedly obsessed with the painting, took a dagger to the Tretyakov Gallery and stabbed the painting multiple times, ranting about the blood.

You can see in the detail that he pretty much went for Tsar Ivan. Though, as has been pointed out to me, he missed the crazy, crazy eyes.

The painting has since been restored, but the legend hasn’t faded. On the one hand, it’s a cautionary tale: don’t look too closely at art, don’t listen too closely to the story, because if might show you something that you can never recover from.

On the other hand, it fascinates me. It’s not the only artwork to ever be attacked — the Mona Lisa has had more than a few — but it’s one of the few that people believe actually drove someone mad, like the legends that when the Furies appeared onstage in the Oresteia, women in the audience spontaneously miscarried out of fear.

That’s a strange sort of holy grail for any artist, visual or literary or otherwise. Certainly most artists don’t want to cause harm, but to make something out of yourself which has that much power is a temptation, and perhaps sometimes a desire.

Did the painting drive Abram Balashev to insanity? Probably not. We know now that most mental illness is caused by biological factors. It’s likely that Balashev was already on the verge when he became obsessed with the painting, and it simply became a focal point for his suffering. It’s not terribly likely that the painting itself ever actually drove anyone to suicide, either, even if it was more graphic and “obscene” than the culture of the day was accustomed to.

But as a story, it’s compelling. It’s mysterious. A magical object that has the power to alter reality simply by existing.

And it’s a dare: do you take the risk, look at the painting, and face the power it presents?

Don’t Know? Ask.

About a month ago I came across an article in one of the websites I read, and it listed a bunch of “tools for writers” and, more specifically, for self-publishing writers. These lists are sometimes really helpful, and sometimes not so much. This time, most of the sites were either ones I already knew about or ones that weren’t relevant to me — I don’t hire professional editors because I am poor, and some writing websites are fairly obviously aimed at people who are just starting out. It sounds like hubris but I don’t generally need tips on getting motivated to write or finishing what I’ve started or certain elemental tricks of the trade. They clash with my technique or talk about aspects I’ve already incorporated. Artists have very specific individual styles, and sometimes theirs just don’t mesh with mine.

I did come across one website that was by writers, for writers, which looked interesting and professional enough that I thought I’d give it a shot. Sometimes these things pan out.

This one is making me bonkers.

Many of the writers seem obsessed with what readers want, but they’re not very good at figuring it out. They have two essential pathways: shrug and admit that nobody knows what readers want, or do that and then try to write “universally”.

Writing universally is very difficult and very dangerous because trying to please all the people, all the time, generally makes you bland and boring. Nobody takes risks if they’re trying to make sure everyone loves them. Which is not to say that one should try to offend people intentionally, or shouldn’t care about giving offence, because causing hurt is the opposite of the goal of most art. Art is meant to elevate, not demean, or if it does take a shot it should be at the proper targets: hypocrites, the powerful, the cruel. Molly Ivins said “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.”

When I was in college I read an article about a production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” that had been translated into Japanese and performed in Japan. When the lights went down on the final act, the audience was in tears. It was described as the ultimate example of universal writing, that this quintessentially, forcefully American play could elicit such a reaction from people who came to it from a totally different culture. But it also made sense, because it is a play about the attempts of ordinary people to attain immortality, to leave their mark and be remembered, and how often our attempts are thwarted by the society we live in. It’s a lofty goal, to write about something so huge with such sincerity, but making it interesting and engaging requires a great deal of talent and skill that not everyone possesses. Certainly if I did, my books would sell better.

What makes me crazy about this website is that the writers seem to come at the question of what readers want with a degree of hopelessness, with the certainty that nobody knows what readers want. There are two problems with this hopelessness:

1. Writers are readers. We are “the public” same as anyone. We’re not isolated gurus on mountains. If we’re doing our job right, we’re eclectic readers, critical thinkers, and students of the market. There is no reason a writer should need to consult some mythical, homogenous “public” in order to know what to write about.

2. Everyone else is a reader too. Everyone around us reads something. It will rarely be the same thing. There is no single “public” to write for, because the public is made up of individuals exactly like us, who have different tastes, different cultural backgrounds, and different personal histories. That said, if we pay attention to the people around us and actually ask them what they think, we stand a very good chance of learning how to write for them.

I keep wanting to grab these people and yell extribulum at them, which would be funny seeing as how they’d have no idea what this means and I’d look like a crazy person. But it’s true: they’re so wrapped up in what people want, and meanwhile here I am, giving away my first drafts so that I can find out, deliberately asking people what they want, always trying to learn what stories people like to hear and how they like to hear them so that I can combine this desire with my own and make a good story that people want to read.

A lot of people, when faced with large and frightening problems, seem to forget they can ask questions. I don’t know why we’re so afraid to ask questions, though I suspect it has something to do with the assumption that a smart person will already know the answer. But the first thing I do when I don’t know where to start is to make a list of questions I have to answer. Usually asking the question shows me where I have to go to answer it.

The end result is, of course, that I removed the website from my reader feed. I’m busy reading books and industry news; I no longer have the time for people who keep discussing a question without actually asking it.