Zoë Marriott's Blog, page 36
August 14, 2012
GIVEAWAY WINNER!
Hello, my lovelies! The Olympics is over, the sun has taken his hat off and gone back to bed, and I, for one, am feeling a tad down in the dumps.
But never fear! Today is the day when I select the winner of the Foyles Summer Scream Giveaway and hopefully light that person's life up once again.
So, without further ado (and with the help of the random number generator) I pronounce the winner to be:
SUZANNE!
Suzanne is the lady who quoted me talking about magic under the kitchen sink directly from the Sugarscape article . I hope you're happy to have won the grand prize, my dear! Just to remind you what you've won:
Happy Tuesday to everyone else. Sorry if you didn't win this time, but there will be more giveways at a later date, I promise.
But never fear! Today is the day when I select the winner of the Foyles Summer Scream Giveaway and hopefully light that person's life up once again.
So, without further ado (and with the help of the random number generator) I pronounce the winner to be:
SUZANNE!
Suzanne is the lady who quoted me talking about magic under the kitchen sink directly from the Sugarscape article . I hope you're happy to have won the grand prize, my dear! Just to remind you what you've won:
A signed copy of UNREST by Michelle HarrisonSo get in touch ASAP, Suzanne, to let me know your address and also which other one of my books you'd like a copy of! You can broswse down the sidebar of the blog on the left there if you're unsure.
A signed copy of THE IRON WITCH by Karen Mahoney
Signed copies of ANGEL and ANGELFIRE by L.A. Weatherly
A signed copy of FROSTFIRE by me
A signed copy of any other one of my books that you like
Assorted swaaaaag...
Happy Tuesday to everyone else. Sorry if you didn't win this time, but there will be more giveways at a later date, I promise.
August 9, 2012
ULTIMATE FORM AND WHY IT DOESN'T WORK
Hi everyone! Thursday again, and I am having Thoughts. Thoughts which I would like to share with you.
This isn't really a coherent argument here, just me pouring out a sequence of quite random reactions to some of the generally accepted writing advice that I've seen bandied about and embraced online, and my inklings as to how accepting that stuff wholesale can result in writing which is...not so good.
It seems as if most people believe that the Ultimate Form (the best and most desirable state) for a YA novel is to be fast-paced, and sparely written, and 'immediate'. It's supposed to put you 'right in the action'. Which obviously can be a great thing for certain kinds of stories in certain genres - and certain kinds of scenes in any book. But I don't think that 'fast-paced' is, or should be, the go-to choice in how to tell *all* stories. I also think that the ways people attempt to create the Ultimate Form can be detrimental to the quality of writing we see in new books, no matter what genre they are.
For a start, I see quite a lot of well-respected sources (agents, editors, writers) blogging about cutting as a kind of panacea for books that aren't 'immediate' and 'fast paced' enough. There's this sense that cutting stuff out is always a good thing, whether it's cutting out adverbs and adjectives, cutting something people call 'filter words', cutting out 'unnecessary' words, cutting out 'unncessary' authorial intrusion. A sense that any and all books can be improved by lessening their extent.
Which makes writers who resist suggested cuts to their work babies at best or unprofessional prima donnas at worst. Which means your editor or agent or critque partner is always right if they think you should cut, and not applying the scalpel forthwith is like letting the side down, failing to rise to the challenge.
But cutting isn't always the answer. Cutting lots of words from a scene (even if many of them are adjectives and adverbs and these 'filter' words that I'm still a bit unsure about) will not necessarily result in something fast paced and immediate. Especially if the scene was not intended to be - or even needed to be - fast paced and immediate. Instead it often results in something that feels bland and lacking in personality, as if it might have been written by the Ultimate Form computer rather than a person. Or worse, sometimes you end up with a scene from which the sense has inexorably disappeared until it's not only hard to understand what is actually being felt or expressed by the characters, but empty of any emotional resonance for the reader.
Why does 'fast paced and immediate' have to be the Ultimate Form in the first place? I think the idea behind creating immediacy and putting the reader right into the action is to create a strong sense of empathy between reader and characters. But there are many, many ways to do that. I worry that a lot of these slightly more subtle, interesting, skillful ways to create empathy and identification between the reader and the characters are being stamped out in the rush to create books which conform to the Ultimate Form.
All writers have - or should have! - different styles. The methods that I employ to create strong empathy between characters and readers are varied. I try to immerse the reader an emotional atmosphere - to show the unique way my point of view character interacts with their world and the other people within it. I try to gradually explain who they are, laying their deepest vulnerabilities open to the reader so that they can see who that character is, flaws and all, and how they came to be that way. I try to create a strong sensory impression in my writing, so that hopefully the reader experiences a ghost of what the character feels and smells and tastes and touches. And I glory in using language to its full extent, searching for imagery and descriptions and similes and metaphors which will create an 'eyeball kick' - that is, a phrase so beautifully expressed that for a moment the reader literally *sees* what I want them to see.
My work is not fast paced at all. I hope that it has immediacy where that is necessary for a scene to resonate, but that is not my primary goal in anything I write. That's just not who I am as a writer, and those are not the stories I want to write. And although my editor certainly asks me to cut as part of the editing process, usually we end up adding more scenes and increasing the word count of my books. Not because I 'write short' as some authors do, and turn in very spare first drafts. Just because cutting is not the only way to improve a book and my editor knows that.
I'm not saying anyone should look at my description of the way I write and try to imitate it. My way is not only way to write or the right way to write - in fact my methods are the merest tiny selection of a myriad of methods. That's the point. I'm still learning, and I'm still making mistakes, and I'm still figuring out which of the myriad of methods work for me and my stories. When I try something ambitious and different and mess up that teaches me a lesson and improves my skills so that next time I either know better than to try it again, or know much better how to go about it. Writing is an art and a craft, and that means it should always be an ongoing process. Each of us has our own unique ways of expressing our ideas, and each of us has a unique take on the ideas that it would be interesting to express, and figuring that out is also part of the process.
But It's very hard to develop such an ongoing process if you're wholly devoted to honing your work to the pinnacle of Ultimate Form instead of honing it to the pinnacle of Ultimate YOU.
Sometimes when I read books, I'll frown over stuff that strikes me as really weird. And as I look at it, all puzzled, I'll realise: this is another case of someone trying so desperately to get to Ultimate Form that they have butchered their own writing to get there.
For instance:
"Never!" John gritted.
He gritted what? His garden path? That piece of dialogue has no connection to the speech tag. 'John gritted', if taken at face value, would conjure up an image of John, as he is speaking, scattering salt/grit crystals. Of course, what the writer actually means is that the character is speaking through gritted teeth. They may even have originally written 'John said through gritted teeth'. Which is a plain, functional sort of speech tag that at least conveys something relevent about what John is doing as he speaks. But then the search for Ultimate Form interfered and it was cut down - probably at first to 'John gritted out' (which isn't great) and finally to 'John gritted' (which is even worse). Not only is it grammatically incorrect and rather silly, but it honestly conveys nothing worth conveying to the reader at all.
I know most readers can most probably work out what the writer intends to say here. But it's rather along the lines that most people can understand my meaning if I type: tihs snetecne is bdlay msipeleld.
Yes, you can figure it out. But as a professional writer, should I really be asking you to?
Similarly, when reading novels with romantic scenes, I've been struck by how many male leads do an odd thing:
John fisted Mary-Beth's hair...
My friends make very rude jokes when they see this sort of thing. But the sadness of it, for me, is that I can see the faint ghost of what this used to be. What it should be: a lovely image, a strong, sensory image, something along the lines of:
John's hands curled into fists in the heavy waves of Mary-Beth's hair...
When you read the second, you can imagine, if you have longish hair, the little tug as those fingers curl up against your scalp, and the way it would tilt your face up, just a little. If you're someone who likes playing with long hair, you can imagine the silky strands winding around your fingers and the way the person you touched would maybe shiver just a little.
You don't get that from the first description, do you? It's been robbed of its poetry, and its sensory strength and becomes, frankly, a bit laughable.
We also get presented to us as unassailable wisdom: Show, don't tell.
It's a fair enough comment. Some things *must* be shown. Something things are so thrilling or vital or moving that to merely recount them is a tragedy for the story. But not everything. Sometimes telling - whether in plain language or with evocative lyricism, is the best and only thing to do. And tying yourself into a pretzel to avoid it results in craziness like Stephenie Meyer punctuating her main character's suicidal depression over her boyfriend leaving with blank pages with the name of the month on them. She certainly showed us something; but did that showing, at a technical level, create any kind of empathy or connection with her character? Show us the day to day realities of living with suicidal depression? Show us any hint of insight into Bella's world during those months? No, it did not.
Why couldn't she just have told us that for four months Bella barely lived? Barely noticed the passing of time, hardly remembered to eat, couldn't bear to sleep but only just found the strength to force herself out of bed each day? That she wandered through the days with no awareness of anything but longing for her pain to end and the vague wish that maybe, the next day, she wouldn't wake up at all? See how SIMPLE that was?
Following the Show Don't Tell rule leads many writers to go way over the top in how they convey an idea to the reader. Instead of telling us about a character's mood with a simple:
A deep, sucking void seemed to yawn open in Mary-Beth's chest. It hurt so much; she was sure, in that moment, that she would be better off dead.
And then moving onto the actual crux of the scene, they get stuck showing us everything in excruciating detail. But the thing is? There's no real way to SHOW this emotional reaction. I mean, maybe Mary-Beth gasps, goes pale, staggers back... but those reactions are cliched and don't truly convey the depth of her despair. In order to 'show' how significant this moment is, you have to amp up Mary-Beth's reaction, make it something that can be expressed physically. Thus, you get:
Tears dripped down Mary-Beth's face as she rubbed compulsively at her aching, empty chest. Tiny whimpers fell from her lips and she rocked backward and forward, seeking comfort in the repetitive movement.
Which immediately turns Mary-Beth from a normal girl experiencing horrible grief into someone who, regardless of her grief, probably needs psychological help if she's to function in normal society.
But even that transformation isn't enough! You see, there are adverbs and adjectives in that description, and that authorial intrusion too, because I'm interpreting Mary-Beth's actions to you! So in order to achieve Ultimate Form we have to revise again - replacing ad/verb/jectives with 'stronger' verbs and nouns to make up for it, and allowing only SHOWING, with no hints from me, the author:
Tears drizzed down Mary-Beth's face as she scrubbed at her chest. Whimpers fell from her lips and she rocked backward and forward.
The impression that Mary-Beth is unhinged is even greater and we have literally no idea what she's feeling anymore, or why she's reacting this way to her grief. The fact is, this isn't a piece of good writing for a novel.
It's an instruction from a screenplay.
As soon as I began to think that way, I realised that a lot of the tenants of Ultimate Form seem to come from the school of good screenwriting. Fast paced? Check. Immediate? Check. No authorial voice-overs? Check. Only show the character's external reactions? Check.
Ultimate Form - ultimately - wants us to write a book that is as much like a screenplay as possible. Dialogue heavy, fast moving, with directions for the actors on how to show the reader what they're feeling. But books are not screenplays and although all forms of writing can improve when they borrow the best techniques from other forms, this inexorable drift toward books which have as little personality and input from the author as possible is resulting in books that are less, much less, than they could be.
The thing is? Books have have the ability to do something films and TV simply can't. Something that every actor and director and screenwriter and music director and make-up and costume and set designer is straining every nerve they have to try to replicate on the screen, but which they can never quite manage.
Books can tell you what's going on inside someone's heart.
Their mind.
Their soul.
That's why they call us story-tellers.
And sacrificing that for the Ultimate Form of a book which reads like a screenplay, with no trace of you as the individual author, and your unique hopes and dreams and fears and ideas, is the last thing any of us should do.
This isn't really a coherent argument here, just me pouring out a sequence of quite random reactions to some of the generally accepted writing advice that I've seen bandied about and embraced online, and my inklings as to how accepting that stuff wholesale can result in writing which is...not so good.
It seems as if most people believe that the Ultimate Form (the best and most desirable state) for a YA novel is to be fast-paced, and sparely written, and 'immediate'. It's supposed to put you 'right in the action'. Which obviously can be a great thing for certain kinds of stories in certain genres - and certain kinds of scenes in any book. But I don't think that 'fast-paced' is, or should be, the go-to choice in how to tell *all* stories. I also think that the ways people attempt to create the Ultimate Form can be detrimental to the quality of writing we see in new books, no matter what genre they are.
For a start, I see quite a lot of well-respected sources (agents, editors, writers) blogging about cutting as a kind of panacea for books that aren't 'immediate' and 'fast paced' enough. There's this sense that cutting stuff out is always a good thing, whether it's cutting out adverbs and adjectives, cutting something people call 'filter words', cutting out 'unnecessary' words, cutting out 'unncessary' authorial intrusion. A sense that any and all books can be improved by lessening their extent.
Which makes writers who resist suggested cuts to their work babies at best or unprofessional prima donnas at worst. Which means your editor or agent or critque partner is always right if they think you should cut, and not applying the scalpel forthwith is like letting the side down, failing to rise to the challenge.
But cutting isn't always the answer. Cutting lots of words from a scene (even if many of them are adjectives and adverbs and these 'filter' words that I'm still a bit unsure about) will not necessarily result in something fast paced and immediate. Especially if the scene was not intended to be - or even needed to be - fast paced and immediate. Instead it often results in something that feels bland and lacking in personality, as if it might have been written by the Ultimate Form computer rather than a person. Or worse, sometimes you end up with a scene from which the sense has inexorably disappeared until it's not only hard to understand what is actually being felt or expressed by the characters, but empty of any emotional resonance for the reader.
Why does 'fast paced and immediate' have to be the Ultimate Form in the first place? I think the idea behind creating immediacy and putting the reader right into the action is to create a strong sense of empathy between reader and characters. But there are many, many ways to do that. I worry that a lot of these slightly more subtle, interesting, skillful ways to create empathy and identification between the reader and the characters are being stamped out in the rush to create books which conform to the Ultimate Form.
All writers have - or should have! - different styles. The methods that I employ to create strong empathy between characters and readers are varied. I try to immerse the reader an emotional atmosphere - to show the unique way my point of view character interacts with their world and the other people within it. I try to gradually explain who they are, laying their deepest vulnerabilities open to the reader so that they can see who that character is, flaws and all, and how they came to be that way. I try to create a strong sensory impression in my writing, so that hopefully the reader experiences a ghost of what the character feels and smells and tastes and touches. And I glory in using language to its full extent, searching for imagery and descriptions and similes and metaphors which will create an 'eyeball kick' - that is, a phrase so beautifully expressed that for a moment the reader literally *sees* what I want them to see.
My work is not fast paced at all. I hope that it has immediacy where that is necessary for a scene to resonate, but that is not my primary goal in anything I write. That's just not who I am as a writer, and those are not the stories I want to write. And although my editor certainly asks me to cut as part of the editing process, usually we end up adding more scenes and increasing the word count of my books. Not because I 'write short' as some authors do, and turn in very spare first drafts. Just because cutting is not the only way to improve a book and my editor knows that.
I'm not saying anyone should look at my description of the way I write and try to imitate it. My way is not only way to write or the right way to write - in fact my methods are the merest tiny selection of a myriad of methods. That's the point. I'm still learning, and I'm still making mistakes, and I'm still figuring out which of the myriad of methods work for me and my stories. When I try something ambitious and different and mess up that teaches me a lesson and improves my skills so that next time I either know better than to try it again, or know much better how to go about it. Writing is an art and a craft, and that means it should always be an ongoing process. Each of us has our own unique ways of expressing our ideas, and each of us has a unique take on the ideas that it would be interesting to express, and figuring that out is also part of the process.
But It's very hard to develop such an ongoing process if you're wholly devoted to honing your work to the pinnacle of Ultimate Form instead of honing it to the pinnacle of Ultimate YOU.
Sometimes when I read books, I'll frown over stuff that strikes me as really weird. And as I look at it, all puzzled, I'll realise: this is another case of someone trying so desperately to get to Ultimate Form that they have butchered their own writing to get there.
For instance:
"Never!" John gritted.
He gritted what? His garden path? That piece of dialogue has no connection to the speech tag. 'John gritted', if taken at face value, would conjure up an image of John, as he is speaking, scattering salt/grit crystals. Of course, what the writer actually means is that the character is speaking through gritted teeth. They may even have originally written 'John said through gritted teeth'. Which is a plain, functional sort of speech tag that at least conveys something relevent about what John is doing as he speaks. But then the search for Ultimate Form interfered and it was cut down - probably at first to 'John gritted out' (which isn't great) and finally to 'John gritted' (which is even worse). Not only is it grammatically incorrect and rather silly, but it honestly conveys nothing worth conveying to the reader at all.
I know most readers can most probably work out what the writer intends to say here. But it's rather along the lines that most people can understand my meaning if I type: tihs snetecne is bdlay msipeleld.
Yes, you can figure it out. But as a professional writer, should I really be asking you to?
Similarly, when reading novels with romantic scenes, I've been struck by how many male leads do an odd thing:
John fisted Mary-Beth's hair...
My friends make very rude jokes when they see this sort of thing. But the sadness of it, for me, is that I can see the faint ghost of what this used to be. What it should be: a lovely image, a strong, sensory image, something along the lines of:
John's hands curled into fists in the heavy waves of Mary-Beth's hair...
When you read the second, you can imagine, if you have longish hair, the little tug as those fingers curl up against your scalp, and the way it would tilt your face up, just a little. If you're someone who likes playing with long hair, you can imagine the silky strands winding around your fingers and the way the person you touched would maybe shiver just a little.
You don't get that from the first description, do you? It's been robbed of its poetry, and its sensory strength and becomes, frankly, a bit laughable.
We also get presented to us as unassailable wisdom: Show, don't tell.
It's a fair enough comment. Some things *must* be shown. Something things are so thrilling or vital or moving that to merely recount them is a tragedy for the story. But not everything. Sometimes telling - whether in plain language or with evocative lyricism, is the best and only thing to do. And tying yourself into a pretzel to avoid it results in craziness like Stephenie Meyer punctuating her main character's suicidal depression over her boyfriend leaving with blank pages with the name of the month on them. She certainly showed us something; but did that showing, at a technical level, create any kind of empathy or connection with her character? Show us the day to day realities of living with suicidal depression? Show us any hint of insight into Bella's world during those months? No, it did not.
Why couldn't she just have told us that for four months Bella barely lived? Barely noticed the passing of time, hardly remembered to eat, couldn't bear to sleep but only just found the strength to force herself out of bed each day? That she wandered through the days with no awareness of anything but longing for her pain to end and the vague wish that maybe, the next day, she wouldn't wake up at all? See how SIMPLE that was?
Following the Show Don't Tell rule leads many writers to go way over the top in how they convey an idea to the reader. Instead of telling us about a character's mood with a simple:
A deep, sucking void seemed to yawn open in Mary-Beth's chest. It hurt so much; she was sure, in that moment, that she would be better off dead.
And then moving onto the actual crux of the scene, they get stuck showing us everything in excruciating detail. But the thing is? There's no real way to SHOW this emotional reaction. I mean, maybe Mary-Beth gasps, goes pale, staggers back... but those reactions are cliched and don't truly convey the depth of her despair. In order to 'show' how significant this moment is, you have to amp up Mary-Beth's reaction, make it something that can be expressed physically. Thus, you get:
Tears dripped down Mary-Beth's face as she rubbed compulsively at her aching, empty chest. Tiny whimpers fell from her lips and she rocked backward and forward, seeking comfort in the repetitive movement.
Which immediately turns Mary-Beth from a normal girl experiencing horrible grief into someone who, regardless of her grief, probably needs psychological help if she's to function in normal society.
But even that transformation isn't enough! You see, there are adverbs and adjectives in that description, and that authorial intrusion too, because I'm interpreting Mary-Beth's actions to you! So in order to achieve Ultimate Form we have to revise again - replacing ad/verb/jectives with 'stronger' verbs and nouns to make up for it, and allowing only SHOWING, with no hints from me, the author:
Tears drizzed down Mary-Beth's face as she scrubbed at her chest. Whimpers fell from her lips and she rocked backward and forward.
The impression that Mary-Beth is unhinged is even greater and we have literally no idea what she's feeling anymore, or why she's reacting this way to her grief. The fact is, this isn't a piece of good writing for a novel.
It's an instruction from a screenplay.
As soon as I began to think that way, I realised that a lot of the tenants of Ultimate Form seem to come from the school of good screenwriting. Fast paced? Check. Immediate? Check. No authorial voice-overs? Check. Only show the character's external reactions? Check.
Ultimate Form - ultimately - wants us to write a book that is as much like a screenplay as possible. Dialogue heavy, fast moving, with directions for the actors on how to show the reader what they're feeling. But books are not screenplays and although all forms of writing can improve when they borrow the best techniques from other forms, this inexorable drift toward books which have as little personality and input from the author as possible is resulting in books that are less, much less, than they could be.
The thing is? Books have have the ability to do something films and TV simply can't. Something that every actor and director and screenwriter and music director and make-up and costume and set designer is straining every nerve they have to try to replicate on the screen, but which they can never quite manage.
Books can tell you what's going on inside someone's heart.
Their mind.
Their soul.
That's why they call us story-tellers.
And sacrificing that for the Ultimate Form of a book which reads like a screenplay, with no trace of you as the individual author, and your unique hopes and dreams and fears and ideas, is the last thing any of us should do.
August 7, 2012
FOYLES SUMMER SCREAM EVENT REPORT
Hello and happy Tuesday to all, Dear Readers!
Today I'm going to try to sum up my weekend experience taking part in the epic Summer Scream Event at Foyles . It's going to be tough, because A LOT of stuff happened. And even more tough because, like the fluffy-brain fool I can often be, I remembered to take my camera, and remembered to take pictures in the green room before the event... then failed to take the camera to the event itself.
*Hangs head in shame*
Sorry! But I only realised once we had started, and it seemed a bit rude to ask everyone to wait while ran off to get my handbag. So I will have to paint you a word picture instead. No booing at the back! A WORD PICTURE I SAID I AM A WRITER DANG IT HAVE SOME FAITH.
First of all - London was gorgeously sunny and *extremely* hot on Saturday. I'm always caught off guard by how much warmer it is in London than in Lincolnshire, where I live. I had on a dress and some matching blue tights with ankle boots, and was perfectly comfy up until changing trains in Newark. Thereafter I got steadily warmer and warmer and by the time I got to London all the make-up had melted off my face and I was really wishing I'd put my hair up. Alas, my well-known travel jinx had also made me quite a bit late, so instead of having time to find my hotel and drop off my luggage, I was forced to haul my wheelie suitcase onto the Underground with me.
Here's a fact about the Tube, for those who don't live in or often travel to London: if you're not willing to discard all tenants of civilised, polite behaviour, you will never manage to board an Underground service. Or if you DO manage to get on the Tube, you'll never manage to get off again. Basically, this is because native Londoners cram themselves into the doors without any regard for their own safety or well-being, or the safety and well-being of others, and if you don't cram too, you'll still be standing there waiting for someone to let you in/out when you die of old age.
This sort of thing is hard for me, Dear Readers. I'm Northern. I'm the sort of person (some would say sucker) who lets the elderly and anyone who looks ill or disabled go in front of me in queues. I hold the door for everyone. I give up my seat for pregnant ladies. The idea of shoving and pushing and whacking people in the shins with my suitcase (and running over their feet with the wheels) makes me feel as if my mother is about to appear behind me, hissing, and clip me around the ear.
I just about managed to haul myself and my luggage from King's Cross onto the first leg of my Tube journey, but the next line was much busier and my natural politeness would probably have resulted in me being stranded on the platform for quite some time if (by one of those strange, it's-a-small-world miracles) I hadn't met a member of my writing group who lives in London and was intending to participate in the event in order to provide moral support, right then.
With her encouragement - which came in the form of her forcefully crying 'Go! Push in! Go on, NOW Zolah!' in my ear - I managed to board the Circle Line. I will gloss over the part of the journey where my hair got sucked through one of the ventilation windows and I was nearly balded, and move onto the part where we were met by Lovely Lass (who you may remember from this post about the FrostFire Trailer) at the station and led to Foyles. There my writer friend went off to the cafe to meet with another writer friend who was attending, and I was whisked, babbling and incoherent, up to the green room.
There I met lovely writers. I mean, really genuinely lovely. And gorgeous and kind and nice. Despite the babbling and incoherency, I managed to collect hugs from everyone, and took some pics.
Michelle Harrison with Dear Reader Becky who now works for S&S!
Lee Weatherly and Kaz Mahoney
The whole lot of us! From L to R - Michelle, Lee, Me, KazI also took pictures of Wonder Editor and Lovely Lass, along with a Walker person I had never met before - Designer of Delight, who had come along to show me some of her preliminary ideas for Katana Trilogy art (and by the way? OH MY GOD. Never been so excited in my entire life, GENIUS, I nearly did starjumps around the room, BEING A GROWN UP IS SO HAAAARD. Ahem). But I didn't think it was a good idea to ruin their super-identities here, so I'll keep those ones for myself.
Lovely Lass, rightfully alarmed by how shiny I was, swiftly arranged for some cold drinks, and I gulped down a bottle of lemonade and a glass of water as Wonder Editor (who had decided to attend probably to help Lovely Lass control the disaster that is me) gently asked me if I had remembered that we were all supposed to be doing a reading, and sensibly brought my copy of FrostFire with me.
Nope. And no, I had not.
Usually I am more professional than this, Dear Readers, I promise! I think I must have missed the email mentioning the reading aspect of the event - there were quite a lot of emails flying around at one point. So Wonder Editor hurried off and promised the lovely Neil, who was the event organiser, her first born child if he would lend me a copy from Foyles stock to read from. Which he did. Then we quickly decided that I'd just read the preface bit, which is very short and easy, since I've never actually read from FrostFire in public before and haven't perfected the rhythm and timing.
And then we were off! Giggling and a little nervous, we were ushered into a lovely room with walls covered in all different kinds of art (which I sadly never got the chance to examine as closely as I wanted) and this huge vaulted ceiling with exposed beams, and a stage and lots of readers all looking at us expectantly. Eeep.
We sat down, giving each other worried looks, as Neil introduced each of us and asked that we start with the reading. Brave Lee (that's L.A. Weatherly) started us off with a really horribly intriguing scene from ANGEL FIRE, which is the sequel to ANGEL. I haven't read it yet, so I had to remind myself (again) that I am a grown-up and it would *not* be mature to lunge across the stage and try to wrestle the book from her hands so that I could find out What Happened Next. Kaz Mahoney followed this up with an exclusive reading from her upcoming novel FALLING TO ASH, which is the start of a new series about a teenage vampire called Moth. It was an exciting action scene, but her delivery of the dialogue was hilarious. I loved it.
Then it was my turn. I'd swiftly realised that I was going to have to read more than the preface, since Lee and Kaz had each read for about four or five minutes. So I winged it by doing the preface and then skipping a spoilerific bit and going onto the first chapter. To be honest I'm not sure how it went - I was concentrating extremely hard on the page because I didn't want to trip over my own words (that would have been embarrassing). But when I was done, Michelle Harrison read a brilliant, spooky, atmospheric section from the beginning of her first YA novel UNREST, reducing the audience to terrified shudders.
Then we took turns to talk a little bit about our publishing journey. Lee told us that she had written literally dozens of books for young readers series and that when the idea for ANGEL came knocking she had three contracts on the go and really didn't have time. But the characters stayed in her head for years and eventually she just gave in and let them take over her brain.
Kaz talked about how she always wanted to be a writer, but how she struggled to finish stories (doesn't *that* sound familiar, Dear Readers?) and for a while got so discouraged that she gave up on writing and getting published completely. When she wrote THE IRON WITCH for NaNoWriMo it brought all her enthusiasm back, and she decided to really take getting published seriously.
I told my story - including how I, too, had often struggled to finish books - and how I eventually I managed to talk my way into getting Walker Books to take a chance on The Swan Kingdom .
Then Michelle Harrison spoke about how she always imagined she would write horror stories, but how this idea for a book about a girl who saw fairies had turned out to be the first thing she finished, and she described working behind the bar at her mum's pub and scribbling in her notebook between pulling pints.
When we'd all finished talking we took questions from the audience, who asked some brilliant questions. I chucked FrostFire swag at readers who addressed questions to me, and managed not to bean anyone in the head. Then we adjourned to the signing tables, where I finally got to glomp a whole bunch of blogger-friend and Dear Readers. It was so lovely to meet them all! I really wanted to just stand there and babble and chat to everyone, but Lovely Lass and Neil were making meaningful gestures at me, so I sat down and started signing (with frequent breaks for jumping up and hugging). The pile of books next to me disappeared at the most amazing rate, and I felt incredibly blessed.
By the time everyone had gotten all their books, postcards and signing books autographed Neil was needing us to clear out so that the next panel could come in and do their event. I said goodbye to everyone, hugged everyone again, picked on Wonder Editor a little bit (I'm so sorry Wonder Editor! I don't know why I always tease you - you're an angel to put up with it!) and then the two ladies from my writing group whisked me away, first to the Tokyo Cafe where I had bubble tea and got carried away and ordered a huge amount of food (I couldn't even eat half of it - luckily reinforcements arrived and demolished the leftovers for me) and then... to Haagen-Daz...
*Cue Angels singing*
Cookies and cream, pralines and cream, and butterscotch pancakes, along with a mango sorbet passion surprise. I ought to have taken pictures of this culinary art for you, but frankly I was too busy eating it. I probably consumed enough calories in that one sitting to keep me for the rest of the week and I DO NOT CARE.
If I ever get rich and famous, I shall hire a personal trainer - and move in next to Haagen-Daz.
And then I hauled myself back onto the Tube (carrying not only my swag bag, my suitcase and my handbag, but also TWO ADDITIONAL BAGS of books and presents and sweets from the best Dear Readers in the whole wide world) and went to my hotel and just about managed to have a shower before I collapsed to watch Britain win three gold medals in an hour. Whoot!
So yeah. It was pretty awesome. Invite me back any time, Neil! I'm there!
A thousand thanks to every blogger-friend and Dear Reader who turned up for this. You guys made the whole experience so special that even with my travel jinx (both my trains home were cancelled - no joke) and the heat and the suitcase I will still look back on this weekend as some of the best fun I've ever had. Snuggles for all.
And now! It's time for a Summer Scream giveaway! While at the event I managed to get Kaz, Lee and Michelle each to sign a copy of one of their books. Lee actually signed two, ANGEL and the sequel ANGEL FIRE. I am going to send these books (ANGEL, ANGEL FIRE, UNREST and THE IRON WITCH) PLUS a signed copy of FrostFire PLUS a signed copy of any other book of mine that you want PLUS FrostFire swag... to one lucky reader. It is the grand prize to end all grand prizes.
What do you have to do to win? It's simple. Sugarscape have just put up an interview with me in which I talk about FrostFire and love triangles and snogging Mr Darcy , and I want you to visit that article. You can tweet it or share it to Facebook as well if you like, or mention it on your blog - that would be awesome. If you already have a Sugarscape account you could comment on it. Any of that would be great. But once you've read it? Come back here and comment on THIS POST and tell me something you liked about the interview . Anything you liked, that made you smile or think, or whatever.
One entry per person, just to keep things simple. And I will pick the winner NEXT TUESDAY. So entries will be counted until midnight on Monday. To review: go here , read, share if you like, come back here and comment. That's all.
Okay, I'm exhausted after all this, my lovelies, so I'm going to slope off and quietly scribble some notes about flying monsters and rooftop battles and the like. What? It's how I relax! See you on Thursday :)
Today I'm going to try to sum up my weekend experience taking part in the epic Summer Scream Event at Foyles . It's going to be tough, because A LOT of stuff happened. And even more tough because, like the fluffy-brain fool I can often be, I remembered to take my camera, and remembered to take pictures in the green room before the event... then failed to take the camera to the event itself.
*Hangs head in shame*
Sorry! But I only realised once we had started, and it seemed a bit rude to ask everyone to wait while ran off to get my handbag. So I will have to paint you a word picture instead. No booing at the back! A WORD PICTURE I SAID I AM A WRITER DANG IT HAVE SOME FAITH.
First of all - London was gorgeously sunny and *extremely* hot on Saturday. I'm always caught off guard by how much warmer it is in London than in Lincolnshire, where I live. I had on a dress and some matching blue tights with ankle boots, and was perfectly comfy up until changing trains in Newark. Thereafter I got steadily warmer and warmer and by the time I got to London all the make-up had melted off my face and I was really wishing I'd put my hair up. Alas, my well-known travel jinx had also made me quite a bit late, so instead of having time to find my hotel and drop off my luggage, I was forced to haul my wheelie suitcase onto the Underground with me.
Here's a fact about the Tube, for those who don't live in or often travel to London: if you're not willing to discard all tenants of civilised, polite behaviour, you will never manage to board an Underground service. Or if you DO manage to get on the Tube, you'll never manage to get off again. Basically, this is because native Londoners cram themselves into the doors without any regard for their own safety or well-being, or the safety and well-being of others, and if you don't cram too, you'll still be standing there waiting for someone to let you in/out when you die of old age.
This sort of thing is hard for me, Dear Readers. I'm Northern. I'm the sort of person (some would say sucker) who lets the elderly and anyone who looks ill or disabled go in front of me in queues. I hold the door for everyone. I give up my seat for pregnant ladies. The idea of shoving and pushing and whacking people in the shins with my suitcase (and running over their feet with the wheels) makes me feel as if my mother is about to appear behind me, hissing, and clip me around the ear.
I just about managed to haul myself and my luggage from King's Cross onto the first leg of my Tube journey, but the next line was much busier and my natural politeness would probably have resulted in me being stranded on the platform for quite some time if (by one of those strange, it's-a-small-world miracles) I hadn't met a member of my writing group who lives in London and was intending to participate in the event in order to provide moral support, right then.
With her encouragement - which came in the form of her forcefully crying 'Go! Push in! Go on, NOW Zolah!' in my ear - I managed to board the Circle Line. I will gloss over the part of the journey where my hair got sucked through one of the ventilation windows and I was nearly balded, and move onto the part where we were met by Lovely Lass (who you may remember from this post about the FrostFire Trailer) at the station and led to Foyles. There my writer friend went off to the cafe to meet with another writer friend who was attending, and I was whisked, babbling and incoherent, up to the green room.
There I met lovely writers. I mean, really genuinely lovely. And gorgeous and kind and nice. Despite the babbling and incoherency, I managed to collect hugs from everyone, and took some pics.
Michelle Harrison with Dear Reader Becky who now works for S&S!
Lee Weatherly and Kaz Mahoney
The whole lot of us! From L to R - Michelle, Lee, Me, KazI also took pictures of Wonder Editor and Lovely Lass, along with a Walker person I had never met before - Designer of Delight, who had come along to show me some of her preliminary ideas for Katana Trilogy art (and by the way? OH MY GOD. Never been so excited in my entire life, GENIUS, I nearly did starjumps around the room, BEING A GROWN UP IS SO HAAAARD. Ahem). But I didn't think it was a good idea to ruin their super-identities here, so I'll keep those ones for myself.Lovely Lass, rightfully alarmed by how shiny I was, swiftly arranged for some cold drinks, and I gulped down a bottle of lemonade and a glass of water as Wonder Editor (who had decided to attend probably to help Lovely Lass control the disaster that is me) gently asked me if I had remembered that we were all supposed to be doing a reading, and sensibly brought my copy of FrostFire with me.
Nope. And no, I had not.
Usually I am more professional than this, Dear Readers, I promise! I think I must have missed the email mentioning the reading aspect of the event - there were quite a lot of emails flying around at one point. So Wonder Editor hurried off and promised the lovely Neil, who was the event organiser, her first born child if he would lend me a copy from Foyles stock to read from. Which he did. Then we quickly decided that I'd just read the preface bit, which is very short and easy, since I've never actually read from FrostFire in public before and haven't perfected the rhythm and timing.
And then we were off! Giggling and a little nervous, we were ushered into a lovely room with walls covered in all different kinds of art (which I sadly never got the chance to examine as closely as I wanted) and this huge vaulted ceiling with exposed beams, and a stage and lots of readers all looking at us expectantly. Eeep.
We sat down, giving each other worried looks, as Neil introduced each of us and asked that we start with the reading. Brave Lee (that's L.A. Weatherly) started us off with a really horribly intriguing scene from ANGEL FIRE, which is the sequel to ANGEL. I haven't read it yet, so I had to remind myself (again) that I am a grown-up and it would *not* be mature to lunge across the stage and try to wrestle the book from her hands so that I could find out What Happened Next. Kaz Mahoney followed this up with an exclusive reading from her upcoming novel FALLING TO ASH, which is the start of a new series about a teenage vampire called Moth. It was an exciting action scene, but her delivery of the dialogue was hilarious. I loved it.
Then it was my turn. I'd swiftly realised that I was going to have to read more than the preface, since Lee and Kaz had each read for about four or five minutes. So I winged it by doing the preface and then skipping a spoilerific bit and going onto the first chapter. To be honest I'm not sure how it went - I was concentrating extremely hard on the page because I didn't want to trip over my own words (that would have been embarrassing). But when I was done, Michelle Harrison read a brilliant, spooky, atmospheric section from the beginning of her first YA novel UNREST, reducing the audience to terrified shudders.
Then we took turns to talk a little bit about our publishing journey. Lee told us that she had written literally dozens of books for young readers series and that when the idea for ANGEL came knocking she had three contracts on the go and really didn't have time. But the characters stayed in her head for years and eventually she just gave in and let them take over her brain.
Kaz talked about how she always wanted to be a writer, but how she struggled to finish stories (doesn't *that* sound familiar, Dear Readers?) and for a while got so discouraged that she gave up on writing and getting published completely. When she wrote THE IRON WITCH for NaNoWriMo it brought all her enthusiasm back, and she decided to really take getting published seriously.
I told my story - including how I, too, had often struggled to finish books - and how I eventually I managed to talk my way into getting Walker Books to take a chance on The Swan Kingdom .
Then Michelle Harrison spoke about how she always imagined she would write horror stories, but how this idea for a book about a girl who saw fairies had turned out to be the first thing she finished, and she described working behind the bar at her mum's pub and scribbling in her notebook between pulling pints.
When we'd all finished talking we took questions from the audience, who asked some brilliant questions. I chucked FrostFire swag at readers who addressed questions to me, and managed not to bean anyone in the head. Then we adjourned to the signing tables, where I finally got to glomp a whole bunch of blogger-friend and Dear Readers. It was so lovely to meet them all! I really wanted to just stand there and babble and chat to everyone, but Lovely Lass and Neil were making meaningful gestures at me, so I sat down and started signing (with frequent breaks for jumping up and hugging). The pile of books next to me disappeared at the most amazing rate, and I felt incredibly blessed.
By the time everyone had gotten all their books, postcards and signing books autographed Neil was needing us to clear out so that the next panel could come in and do their event. I said goodbye to everyone, hugged everyone again, picked on Wonder Editor a little bit (I'm so sorry Wonder Editor! I don't know why I always tease you - you're an angel to put up with it!) and then the two ladies from my writing group whisked me away, first to the Tokyo Cafe where I had bubble tea and got carried away and ordered a huge amount of food (I couldn't even eat half of it - luckily reinforcements arrived and demolished the leftovers for me) and then... to Haagen-Daz...
*Cue Angels singing*
Cookies and cream, pralines and cream, and butterscotch pancakes, along with a mango sorbet passion surprise. I ought to have taken pictures of this culinary art for you, but frankly I was too busy eating it. I probably consumed enough calories in that one sitting to keep me for the rest of the week and I DO NOT CARE.
If I ever get rich and famous, I shall hire a personal trainer - and move in next to Haagen-Daz.
And then I hauled myself back onto the Tube (carrying not only my swag bag, my suitcase and my handbag, but also TWO ADDITIONAL BAGS of books and presents and sweets from the best Dear Readers in the whole wide world) and went to my hotel and just about managed to have a shower before I collapsed to watch Britain win three gold medals in an hour. Whoot!
So yeah. It was pretty awesome. Invite me back any time, Neil! I'm there!
A thousand thanks to every blogger-friend and Dear Reader who turned up for this. You guys made the whole experience so special that even with my travel jinx (both my trains home were cancelled - no joke) and the heat and the suitcase I will still look back on this weekend as some of the best fun I've ever had. Snuggles for all.
And now! It's time for a Summer Scream giveaway! While at the event I managed to get Kaz, Lee and Michelle each to sign a copy of one of their books. Lee actually signed two, ANGEL and the sequel ANGEL FIRE. I am going to send these books (ANGEL, ANGEL FIRE, UNREST and THE IRON WITCH) PLUS a signed copy of FrostFire PLUS a signed copy of any other book of mine that you want PLUS FrostFire swag... to one lucky reader. It is the grand prize to end all grand prizes.
What do you have to do to win? It's simple. Sugarscape have just put up an interview with me in which I talk about FrostFire and love triangles and snogging Mr Darcy , and I want you to visit that article. You can tweet it or share it to Facebook as well if you like, or mention it on your blog - that would be awesome. If you already have a Sugarscape account you could comment on it. Any of that would be great. But once you've read it? Come back here and comment on THIS POST and tell me something you liked about the interview . Anything you liked, that made you smile or think, or whatever.
One entry per person, just to keep things simple. And I will pick the winner NEXT TUESDAY. So entries will be counted until midnight on Monday. To review: go here , read, share if you like, come back here and comment. That's all.
Okay, I'm exhausted after all this, my lovelies, so I'm going to slope off and quietly scribble some notes about flying monsters and rooftop battles and the like. What? It's how I relax! See you on Thursday :)
August 2, 2012
SUMMER SCREAM EVENT AT FOYLES
Hello, hello, hello! Thursday is upon us and that means it is only two days until the fateful Saturday when I will hopefully be meeting some of my Lovely Readers for the very first time. Eeeee!
Just to recap: The Summer Scream Event at Foyles (in Charing Cross in London) is my first public event with other authors, and I will be doing a panel and then a signing alongside really amazing fellow YA writers Michelle Harrison (UNREST), L.A. Weatherly (ANGEL, ANGEL FIRE) and Karen Mahoney (THE IRON WITCH, THE WOOD QUEEN).
Our panel will be from 2pm-3pm. Later there will be another panel and signing with authors Laura Warburton (A WITCH IN LOVE, A WITCH IN WINTER), Laura Powell (BURN MARK) and Thomas Taylor (DAN AND THE DEAD).
I'm very excited about this! Living, as I do, in the farflung wilderness of the north, I don't get the chance to do many events, or meet many of my readers. And I'm especially thrilled that so many friends I know from online have pledged to come. I cannot *wait* to meet you guys.
I have a new dress! I have blue tights! I have a box of swag ready to give out to anyone who stands still long enough!
But I also have two simple rules for anyone coming to this event. Failure to comply will result in me throwing a tantrum of truly fantastical proportions. There will be screaming, arm-flailing, heel-drumming and possibly even foaming at the mouth. You don't want to see it. Trust me. You will be traumatised for life. So PAY ATTENTION.
Rule Number One:
If you are a Dear Reader or an online friend person? YOU WILL APPROACH AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF. Oh, yes you will. Yes you will.
You're all going to know which one is me because they're going to introduce me. Plus my face is up there on the event poster. But I'm not going to know who you are unless we've met before, which 90% of the time we have not. So I'm helpless to seek you out. Do not make me helpless. Do not lurk at the back of the room feeling unsure of your welcome. Do not Tweet or comment a week later to say that you were there all along but that you didn't know if I would want to be bothered. I do want to be bothered. I live to be bothered. Bother me! SAY HELLO TO MEEEEEE.
Rule Number Two:
Tell me your online name first.
I mean, if your name is Sarah-Beth and your online name is Sarah-Beth37, great, not an issue. But if you have been chatting to me for a year under the name HermioneGraingerOK and then you bounce up to me and say 'Hey! It's Janice!' I will be confused and bewildered and give you the polite handshake, and you will walk away sadly thinking 'Oh, I suppose I'm just one of her legion of fans and she doesn't really care about me...' I DO CARE ABOUT YOU. In fact, I want to give you a huge hug, because I don't have a legion of fans and even if I did I would still love each one like I love fluffy baby kittens. But I'm not psychic. Online names first. Then tell me your real name. I can't promise I'll remember not to call you HermioneGraingerOK for the rest of the event (because I am somewhat senile like that) but I can certainly promise that it will be a pleasure to meet you. You are the reason I am there in the first place. Capiche?
Eeeeexcellent.
I am very much looking forward to seeing you, my duckies. If you do not like hugs you might want to wear a sticker saying that in a prominent place on your body so that I get the idea, because I plan on physically snuggling as many people as they let me before someone threatens to call the police. Make a note...
Just to recap: The Summer Scream Event at Foyles (in Charing Cross in London) is my first public event with other authors, and I will be doing a panel and then a signing alongside really amazing fellow YA writers Michelle Harrison (UNREST), L.A. Weatherly (ANGEL, ANGEL FIRE) and Karen Mahoney (THE IRON WITCH, THE WOOD QUEEN).
Our panel will be from 2pm-3pm. Later there will be another panel and signing with authors Laura Warburton (A WITCH IN LOVE, A WITCH IN WINTER), Laura Powell (BURN MARK) and Thomas Taylor (DAN AND THE DEAD).
I'm very excited about this! Living, as I do, in the farflung wilderness of the north, I don't get the chance to do many events, or meet many of my readers. And I'm especially thrilled that so many friends I know from online have pledged to come. I cannot *wait* to meet you guys.
I have a new dress! I have blue tights! I have a box of swag ready to give out to anyone who stands still long enough!
But I also have two simple rules for anyone coming to this event. Failure to comply will result in me throwing a tantrum of truly fantastical proportions. There will be screaming, arm-flailing, heel-drumming and possibly even foaming at the mouth. You don't want to see it. Trust me. You will be traumatised for life. So PAY ATTENTION.
Rule Number One:
If you are a Dear Reader or an online friend person? YOU WILL APPROACH AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF. Oh, yes you will. Yes you will.
You're all going to know which one is me because they're going to introduce me. Plus my face is up there on the event poster. But I'm not going to know who you are unless we've met before, which 90% of the time we have not. So I'm helpless to seek you out. Do not make me helpless. Do not lurk at the back of the room feeling unsure of your welcome. Do not Tweet or comment a week later to say that you were there all along but that you didn't know if I would want to be bothered. I do want to be bothered. I live to be bothered. Bother me! SAY HELLO TO MEEEEEE.
Rule Number Two:
Tell me your online name first.
I mean, if your name is Sarah-Beth and your online name is Sarah-Beth37, great, not an issue. But if you have been chatting to me for a year under the name HermioneGraingerOK and then you bounce up to me and say 'Hey! It's Janice!' I will be confused and bewildered and give you the polite handshake, and you will walk away sadly thinking 'Oh, I suppose I'm just one of her legion of fans and she doesn't really care about me...' I DO CARE ABOUT YOU. In fact, I want to give you a huge hug, because I don't have a legion of fans and even if I did I would still love each one like I love fluffy baby kittens. But I'm not psychic. Online names first. Then tell me your real name. I can't promise I'll remember not to call you HermioneGraingerOK for the rest of the event (because I am somewhat senile like that) but I can certainly promise that it will be a pleasure to meet you. You are the reason I am there in the first place. Capiche?
Eeeeexcellent.
I am very much looking forward to seeing you, my duckies. If you do not like hugs you might want to wear a sticker saying that in a prominent place on your body so that I get the idea, because I plan on physically snuggling as many people as they let me before someone threatens to call the police. Make a note...
July 31, 2012
A QUESTION OF DISABILITY
Hello, Dear Readers! Happy (Olympic) Tuesday! I hope you all had a better Monday than poor Tom Daly and Pete Waterfield, bless them.
Today I decided to address a question that I got in my comments in late June. I made a note of it, but stupidly forgot to write down the commentor's name, so my apologies to you, unknown commentor, for that. I hope you're still around and that you see this!
On the other hand, if you've made the choice to leave that disability in there rather than having the heroine heal up without consequences, you do need to consider how this will affect her in her day to day life. You're saying here that it doesn't... but how can it not? Her body has changed.
In your (completely understandable) quest to keep your story chugging onward, please don't minimise the reality of living with a disability. That not only makes it rather pointless to have decided to give the heroine one in the first place, but it also runs the risk of being upsetting to people to have a similar difficulty in real life and who have to struggle to cope with it each day.
You say here that you're worried you'll overthink things? Please, don't worry about that. Pretty much one hundred percent of the problems I see with the way that diverse characters are depicted come from people putting in little to no thought about the realities of life for people who are different from them. Thinking about this stuff is *good*. We all know that the more we get into our characters heads the better (the more realistic, complex and fully realised) they will be. That doesn't change if the character is disabled.
I'd urge you to think deeply about the little, ordinary activities that your heroine does, her hobbies and her habits, and how this change to her body might affect them. You don't have to change who she is, but you might need to alter what she does in this story, or how she does it.
I'll give you an example of this from my own life. I suffer with a condition called IBS. This means that certain foods make me violently ill and there's nothing I can do about it - apart from not eating them. Some of my favourite dishes are no longer available to me, and as a foodie who loves to cook, this is hard. It can sometimes be hard even to find an item on a restaurant menu that doesn't contain at least one thing that will make me ill. It also means that I suffer with sudden, crippling cramps in my abdomen which are so bad that sometimes I nearly pass out.
If I was your character, you could show the way that my IBS effects me with a scene where my friends and I order breakfast at a diner together, and I'm sadly forced to pass on the eggs and mushrooms and even baked beans, because those things all make me ill. As the other characters chow down on a huge meal, I'm nibbling sulkily on a piece of toast, and someone gives me a hug to cheer me up. That's just a tiny human moment which sheds light on the disabled character, the disability, and the other characters present too.
Or maybe my character knows that those things will make me ill, but I just can't resist ordering them anyway. I eat the eggs, beans and mushrooms and then end up being stuck in the bathroom for hours, causing my friends to get angry and exasperated, both at being trapped out of the bathroom and the way that I refuse to take my condition into account. Again, a great insight into all the characters and the illness.
How about if you need to get my character out of the way for a certain scene? Instead of having me lose my cellphone so that no one can get in touch with me (or something equally cliched), maybe I get left behind because I'm curled up on the bed with a hot water bottle, suffering from terrible cramps? Or, flipping this on it's head, maybe you need to get my character into a perilous situation alone without friends for back-up. Instead of having me behave like an idiot who runs of off by herself 'just because', you could have all my friends incapacitated by terrible food poisoning from the mushroom ravioli they made the night before, leaving my character (who didn't eat it) as the one person who is able to go to the abandoned warehouse to investigate the strange noises.
The more you know about the character and the disability she has, and the more you think about the ways this would affect her, the more possibilities open up in your story.
No, everything in the plot should not be influenced by the character's disability. And it shouldn't change who she is. But if you put good, careful thought into it, it might be that this unexpected change in the character's life will give you a really great chance to show - though the character's own reactions to her disability and the reactions of the people around her - just what she and the rest of the story's cast are made of.
I hope this is helpful! If anyone has any more questions about this or any other writing, reading or publishing related topic, go ahead and pop them in the comments.
See you on Thursday, when I'll be talking out the upcoming author event at Foyles !
Today I decided to address a question that I got in my comments in late June. I made a note of it, but stupidly forgot to write down the commentor's name, so my apologies to you, unknown commentor, for that. I hope you're still around and that you see this!
I am writing my first book and out of nowhere my character did something very unexpected and now she has a slight disability. It will not affect her general day to day life, but it does affect her. At the moment I am writing it by instinct. I want it to be accurate, but I'm worried that I will overthink it if I find out too much about it. Have you got any advice on writing about somebody with an injury?Well, it sounds to me like you're on the right track, in that you have conceived of an interesting, active character, who just happens to end up with a physical disability throughout the course of the story. Since that's what often happens to real people in real life - they're just going about their business, some accident or illness strikes, and suddenly they have to cope with different physical limitations - that's a great, realistic way to include a disabled person. It means she should already be a fully rounded person, and not any kind of an offensive stereotype or cypher. Yay!
On the other hand, if you've made the choice to leave that disability in there rather than having the heroine heal up without consequences, you do need to consider how this will affect her in her day to day life. You're saying here that it doesn't... but how can it not? Her body has changed.
In your (completely understandable) quest to keep your story chugging onward, please don't minimise the reality of living with a disability. That not only makes it rather pointless to have decided to give the heroine one in the first place, but it also runs the risk of being upsetting to people to have a similar difficulty in real life and who have to struggle to cope with it each day.
You say here that you're worried you'll overthink things? Please, don't worry about that. Pretty much one hundred percent of the problems I see with the way that diverse characters are depicted come from people putting in little to no thought about the realities of life for people who are different from them. Thinking about this stuff is *good*. We all know that the more we get into our characters heads the better (the more realistic, complex and fully realised) they will be. That doesn't change if the character is disabled.
I'd urge you to think deeply about the little, ordinary activities that your heroine does, her hobbies and her habits, and how this change to her body might affect them. You don't have to change who she is, but you might need to alter what she does in this story, or how she does it.
I'll give you an example of this from my own life. I suffer with a condition called IBS. This means that certain foods make me violently ill and there's nothing I can do about it - apart from not eating them. Some of my favourite dishes are no longer available to me, and as a foodie who loves to cook, this is hard. It can sometimes be hard even to find an item on a restaurant menu that doesn't contain at least one thing that will make me ill. It also means that I suffer with sudden, crippling cramps in my abdomen which are so bad that sometimes I nearly pass out.
If I was your character, you could show the way that my IBS effects me with a scene where my friends and I order breakfast at a diner together, and I'm sadly forced to pass on the eggs and mushrooms and even baked beans, because those things all make me ill. As the other characters chow down on a huge meal, I'm nibbling sulkily on a piece of toast, and someone gives me a hug to cheer me up. That's just a tiny human moment which sheds light on the disabled character, the disability, and the other characters present too.
Or maybe my character knows that those things will make me ill, but I just can't resist ordering them anyway. I eat the eggs, beans and mushrooms and then end up being stuck in the bathroom for hours, causing my friends to get angry and exasperated, both at being trapped out of the bathroom and the way that I refuse to take my condition into account. Again, a great insight into all the characters and the illness.
How about if you need to get my character out of the way for a certain scene? Instead of having me lose my cellphone so that no one can get in touch with me (or something equally cliched), maybe I get left behind because I'm curled up on the bed with a hot water bottle, suffering from terrible cramps? Or, flipping this on it's head, maybe you need to get my character into a perilous situation alone without friends for back-up. Instead of having me behave like an idiot who runs of off by herself 'just because', you could have all my friends incapacitated by terrible food poisoning from the mushroom ravioli they made the night before, leaving my character (who didn't eat it) as the one person who is able to go to the abandoned warehouse to investigate the strange noises.
The more you know about the character and the disability she has, and the more you think about the ways this would affect her, the more possibilities open up in your story.
No, everything in the plot should not be influenced by the character's disability. And it shouldn't change who she is. But if you put good, careful thought into it, it might be that this unexpected change in the character's life will give you a really great chance to show - though the character's own reactions to her disability and the reactions of the people around her - just what she and the rest of the story's cast are made of.
I hope this is helpful! If anyone has any more questions about this or any other writing, reading or publishing related topic, go ahead and pop them in the comments.
See you on Thursday, when I'll be talking out the upcoming author event at Foyles !
July 26, 2012
THE STATE OF THE WRITING CAVE
Today's blog title comes from the 'State of the Nation' address made by the President of the United States. Obviously the work that goes on in my Writing Cave is far more important than running a country or whatever, so I thought I'd flatter that poor Obama guy with some imitation. It'll make him feel important.
Aw. You can tell he's moved.Anyway! Happy Thursday to all. Since the
FrostFire
Blog Tour is now officially over we're back to our regular posting schedule of Tuesday and Thursday, and it seemed like a good time to update you on what's going on around here and what I'm working on.
So back in this post I told you that my editor decided to do a sort of awesomeness-overhaul of The Night Itself (Katana Trilogy Book #1) at pretty much the eleventh hour. Working on that has kept me extremely busy for a large chunk of time (and I went through four highlighter pens. Dude) but I finished the initial - and hopefully most difficult - revision and returned it to my editor. She's going to collaborate on marking up the new version of the manuscript with my U.S. editor, because Walker and Candlewick have been working closely together on this project in the hopes of reducing the wait between the book coming out in the UK and being published in the U.S. I probably won't hear anything back about the improved version of The Night Itself until late August.
I imagine there'll be another run through of the book then in order to smooth it and polish it and make it as good as possible. I'm really crossing my fingers that I'm not asked to make any more major changes, re-think any characters or add any more new scenes at this point. Not because I don't want to do the work on TNI, but because I'm obviously trying to work on the second Katana Book (which does have a title, promise - I'll probably share it when I have a cover design for The Night Itself to show you). Before I was asked to revise the first book I was about 65,000 words into the second one, which I expected to be about 73-80,000 words long in total.
With all the changes that I made to the first book, the second one now not only needs to be finished, but also completely overhauled itself (above and beyond the normal revision process) because in many key areas it no longer matches the first book, and THAT means large chunks of action and plot and characterisation no longer make the slightest bit of sense.
The problem is that because I'm not entirely sure if the new version of the first book that I've turned in will be the FINAL version (or if I'm likely to have to make more radical changes) I don't really know how to overhaul book #2 yet. And it's hard to imagine being able to push on and finish it without overhauling it, knowing that everything I'm writing is most probably fundamentally *wrong*.
I've got a fat manuscript of the incomplete second book printed out here, in a smart plastic document holder. It's been my constant companion for the past few weeks, but I've not yet been able to bring myself to open the holder and look at it because I literally have no idea what to do with or to it. Not to mention that printing it out breaks my Number One Cardinal Rule for myself when I'm writing, which is DO NOT LOOK BACK.
Looking at any part of an unfinished manuscript has been known to cause total paralysis in my writer's brain (accidentally reading a page from the beginning of the first draft of Shadows on the Moon caused writer's block that lasted for SIX MONTHS). In this case I know I have to re-read the manuscript before I go on. There's no way I can move forward with it otherwise. But that doesn't stop my whole brain from lighting up with red flashing signs saying DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
So... *Sighs* I've basically spent the last few weeks grinding my teeth and procrastinating to the utmost extent of my ability. Which is great. Finally acknowledging that I've also been ill for a bit (once again, kids: denial doesn't work like antibiotics!) and getting some pills has helped, because it's made the headaches, dizziness and constant nausea (which my other insisted was caused by stress - thanks mum!) go away and now I feel slightly better. I think I'll most probably bite the bullet and try to start re-reading this weekend. Eeep.
In the meantime! Remember the Summer Scream Event in London on the 4th of August, at Foyles Bookshop at Charing Cross ? Where I will be part of a panel event also staring mega-stars L.A. Weatherly, Karen Mahoney and Michelle Harrison? Well, now some new authors will also be coming along to take part in a second panel event - Ruth Warburton and Laura Powell. And this is happening - Good Lord - SATURDAY NEXT WEEK! Where did the time go? I'm getting more and more excited the closer it gets. I'll probably do a post about it on Thursday next week, just to give a bit more detail for anyone who is coming - and I promise to take pictures and write up a detailed event report on the Tuesday after I come back so that even if you couldn't attend you'll get a flavour of the whole thing.
My publisher has been kind enough to get me a later train back from London on the Sunday and I'm hoping to use that time to do some Katana Trilogy research, specifically for locations I'm planning to use in the final book, which is brilliant and I'm really looking forward to it. It will, of course, be even more brilliant if I've managed to un-chicken myself and re-read Katana #2 by then. Wish me luck with that...
How are things with all of you, Dear Readers? Unload in the comments!
Aw. You can tell he's moved.Anyway! Happy Thursday to all. Since the
FrostFire
Blog Tour is now officially over we're back to our regular posting schedule of Tuesday and Thursday, and it seemed like a good time to update you on what's going on around here and what I'm working on.So back in this post I told you that my editor decided to do a sort of awesomeness-overhaul of The Night Itself (Katana Trilogy Book #1) at pretty much the eleventh hour. Working on that has kept me extremely busy for a large chunk of time (and I went through four highlighter pens. Dude) but I finished the initial - and hopefully most difficult - revision and returned it to my editor. She's going to collaborate on marking up the new version of the manuscript with my U.S. editor, because Walker and Candlewick have been working closely together on this project in the hopes of reducing the wait between the book coming out in the UK and being published in the U.S. I probably won't hear anything back about the improved version of The Night Itself until late August.
I imagine there'll be another run through of the book then in order to smooth it and polish it and make it as good as possible. I'm really crossing my fingers that I'm not asked to make any more major changes, re-think any characters or add any more new scenes at this point. Not because I don't want to do the work on TNI, but because I'm obviously trying to work on the second Katana Book (which does have a title, promise - I'll probably share it when I have a cover design for The Night Itself to show you). Before I was asked to revise the first book I was about 65,000 words into the second one, which I expected to be about 73-80,000 words long in total.
With all the changes that I made to the first book, the second one now not only needs to be finished, but also completely overhauled itself (above and beyond the normal revision process) because in many key areas it no longer matches the first book, and THAT means large chunks of action and plot and characterisation no longer make the slightest bit of sense.
The problem is that because I'm not entirely sure if the new version of the first book that I've turned in will be the FINAL version (or if I'm likely to have to make more radical changes) I don't really know how to overhaul book #2 yet. And it's hard to imagine being able to push on and finish it without overhauling it, knowing that everything I'm writing is most probably fundamentally *wrong*.
I've got a fat manuscript of the incomplete second book printed out here, in a smart plastic document holder. It's been my constant companion for the past few weeks, but I've not yet been able to bring myself to open the holder and look at it because I literally have no idea what to do with or to it. Not to mention that printing it out breaks my Number One Cardinal Rule for myself when I'm writing, which is DO NOT LOOK BACK.
Looking at any part of an unfinished manuscript has been known to cause total paralysis in my writer's brain (accidentally reading a page from the beginning of the first draft of Shadows on the Moon caused writer's block that lasted for SIX MONTHS). In this case I know I have to re-read the manuscript before I go on. There's no way I can move forward with it otherwise. But that doesn't stop my whole brain from lighting up with red flashing signs saying DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
So... *Sighs* I've basically spent the last few weeks grinding my teeth and procrastinating to the utmost extent of my ability. Which is great. Finally acknowledging that I've also been ill for a bit (once again, kids: denial doesn't work like antibiotics!) and getting some pills has helped, because it's made the headaches, dizziness and constant nausea (which my other insisted was caused by stress - thanks mum!) go away and now I feel slightly better. I think I'll most probably bite the bullet and try to start re-reading this weekend. Eeep.
In the meantime! Remember the Summer Scream Event in London on the 4th of August, at Foyles Bookshop at Charing Cross ? Where I will be part of a panel event also staring mega-stars L.A. Weatherly, Karen Mahoney and Michelle Harrison? Well, now some new authors will also be coming along to take part in a second panel event - Ruth Warburton and Laura Powell. And this is happening - Good Lord - SATURDAY NEXT WEEK! Where did the time go? I'm getting more and more excited the closer it gets. I'll probably do a post about it on Thursday next week, just to give a bit more detail for anyone who is coming - and I promise to take pictures and write up a detailed event report on the Tuesday after I come back so that even if you couldn't attend you'll get a flavour of the whole thing.
My publisher has been kind enough to get me a later train back from London on the Sunday and I'm hoping to use that time to do some Katana Trilogy research, specifically for locations I'm planning to use in the final book, which is brilliant and I'm really looking forward to it. It will, of course, be even more brilliant if I've managed to un-chicken myself and re-read Katana #2 by then. Wish me luck with that...
How are things with all of you, Dear Readers? Unload in the comments!
July 24, 2012
THE SADNESS OF A READER
Hey everyone. Tuesday again. I'm battling a nasty infection, which got to be so nasty because I've been ignoring the symptoms for nearly a month, hoping it would go away, asking myself 'Who else is going to look after my dad?' Yeah, don't try that one at home boys and girls. Turns out that determination and denial don't actually work like antibiotics. Frankly that, on top of this new sweaty, dog-breath weather, was already making me wish that I'd never been born.
And then I woke up this morning and learned that Margaret Mahy, the author of The Changeover, and The Door in the Air, and The Great Chewing Gum Rescue, and so many other books that expanded and informed my imagination as a child, has passed away at the age of just seventy-six (she should have had at least another ten or fifteen years in her). And I cried.
The fact that I already feel terrible might have made the tears a bit more violent than they would otherwise have been. But maybe not. I was only writing about Margaret Mahy recently as part of the FrostFire Blog Tour - listing her as a fantasy writer who had inspired me and explaining why. Which means thoughts about how truly important she was to me are still fresh in my mind. All my reading life her books have been there. Knowing that she is gone, and that there will be no more books, ever, feels like losing a part of myself, my own identity as a reader. It feels like an earthquake in the landscape of my imagination.
In the last couple of years so many of the authors that I relied on as a child - that I still love as an adult - have been slipping away. The most notable for me up until now was the legendary Diana Wynne Jones. When Diana Wynne Jones died many writers blogged tributes to her, and it was wonderful to see the astonishing, inimitable impact she had on the world. But I couldn't bring myself to write about it. I had never met her, but I had always hoped that I would be lucky enough to one day. That possible one day was suddenly gone. I would never now get the chance to tell her how much she and her stories had meant to me.
It's such a strange thing to regret, because even if I had been able to meet her, I would never have been any more than yet another devoted reader to her (and she had thousands), telling her the same old things about the books she had written. She might have been happy to hear it, or tired and bored and thinking about her lunch. It would have been a huge moment for me, but not for her. Her life was not lessened by not having met me, even if mine was lessened by never meeting her.
I wish I could have said those words anyway. I wish that I had written her a letter telling her, even if it would only have been one of dozens. Her loss was sharp enough that I fell into a melancholy that lasted a week or more, and I can still feel the echoes of that grief now whenever I remember that she is gone. No more Diana Wynne Jones in the world. The world seemed a less bright, less brilliant, less surprising place.
Now Margaret Mahy is gone too, and the world seems dimmer and duller and more predictable still.
I hope that their books will continue to be on bookshelves and library shelves for many, many years to come. I hope that children still whisper their words out loud while hiding under the covers a hundred years from now. And I hope that there are other, younger, newer writers out there who can do for generations of children growing up now what these two writers did for me. I hope that one day the world will glow bright and brilliant and surprising again.
In the meantime, Dear Readers? If there is an author who has moved you, transported you, transformed you? An author who you feel, deep in your heart of hearts, is special? An author who you secretly wish to meet one day? Write to them now. Or arrange to actually meet them if you can. Do it while you have the chance. That towering figure who cast their shade over your childhood isn't immortal, even if it seems that the sheer power of their genius must be. One day you will hear that they have gone, and you will realise time slipped away from you and it's too late. And you will feel sad. No matter what, you will feel sad. Don't add the sadness of never having said what you always intended to say to that as well.
And then I woke up this morning and learned that Margaret Mahy, the author of The Changeover, and The Door in the Air, and The Great Chewing Gum Rescue, and so many other books that expanded and informed my imagination as a child, has passed away at the age of just seventy-six (she should have had at least another ten or fifteen years in her). And I cried.
The fact that I already feel terrible might have made the tears a bit more violent than they would otherwise have been. But maybe not. I was only writing about Margaret Mahy recently as part of the FrostFire Blog Tour - listing her as a fantasy writer who had inspired me and explaining why. Which means thoughts about how truly important she was to me are still fresh in my mind. All my reading life her books have been there. Knowing that she is gone, and that there will be no more books, ever, feels like losing a part of myself, my own identity as a reader. It feels like an earthquake in the landscape of my imagination.
In the last couple of years so many of the authors that I relied on as a child - that I still love as an adult - have been slipping away. The most notable for me up until now was the legendary Diana Wynne Jones. When Diana Wynne Jones died many writers blogged tributes to her, and it was wonderful to see the astonishing, inimitable impact she had on the world. But I couldn't bring myself to write about it. I had never met her, but I had always hoped that I would be lucky enough to one day. That possible one day was suddenly gone. I would never now get the chance to tell her how much she and her stories had meant to me.
It's such a strange thing to regret, because even if I had been able to meet her, I would never have been any more than yet another devoted reader to her (and she had thousands), telling her the same old things about the books she had written. She might have been happy to hear it, or tired and bored and thinking about her lunch. It would have been a huge moment for me, but not for her. Her life was not lessened by not having met me, even if mine was lessened by never meeting her.
I wish I could have said those words anyway. I wish that I had written her a letter telling her, even if it would only have been one of dozens. Her loss was sharp enough that I fell into a melancholy that lasted a week or more, and I can still feel the echoes of that grief now whenever I remember that she is gone. No more Diana Wynne Jones in the world. The world seemed a less bright, less brilliant, less surprising place.
Now Margaret Mahy is gone too, and the world seems dimmer and duller and more predictable still.
I hope that their books will continue to be on bookshelves and library shelves for many, many years to come. I hope that children still whisper their words out loud while hiding under the covers a hundred years from now. And I hope that there are other, younger, newer writers out there who can do for generations of children growing up now what these two writers did for me. I hope that one day the world will glow bright and brilliant and surprising again.
In the meantime, Dear Readers? If there is an author who has moved you, transported you, transformed you? An author who you feel, deep in your heart of hearts, is special? An author who you secretly wish to meet one day? Write to them now. Or arrange to actually meet them if you can. Do it while you have the chance. That towering figure who cast their shade over your childhood isn't immortal, even if it seems that the sheer power of their genius must be. One day you will hear that they have gone, and you will realise time slipped away from you and it's too late. And you will feel sad. No matter what, you will feel sad. Don't add the sadness of never having said what you always intended to say to that as well.
July 20, 2012
FANTASY WORLDS
Hello, Lovely Readers. The dulcet tones of Friday have once again coaxed us (stumbling and grumbling, in my case) from our comfy beds - which means that it is time for the final stop on the
FrostFire
Blog Tour!
Today's post is entitled FANTASY WORLDS and explores some aspects of the work I do in order to create a fully realised setting for my stories. You can find it here on the lovely Emma's blog: Book Angel Booktopia. Emma also hosted a review of FrostFire by one of the pupils at her school (Madison) which you can see here. In addition, the lovely Vivienne, who was also part of the Blog Tour, has just posted her review of the book too . Do you agree with her?
Onwards, into the weekend!
Today's post is entitled FANTASY WORLDS and explores some aspects of the work I do in order to create a fully realised setting for my stories. You can find it here on the lovely Emma's blog: Book Angel Booktopia. Emma also hosted a review of FrostFire by one of the pupils at her school (Madison) which you can see here. In addition, the lovely Vivienne, who was also part of the Blog Tour, has just posted her review of the book too . Do you agree with her?
Onwards, into the weekend!
July 16, 2012
RETROTUESDAY: WHAT WOULD MARY SUE DO?
Happy Tuesday, my duckies! I hope the week got off to a really great start to you. The weather is apparently going to start to change for the better soon, and my event in London is coming up (details here), plus there have been two spectacular new blog reviews for the U.S. edition of
Shadows on the Moon
here
and
here
, so I'm thinking signs are good :)
And now it's time for RetroTuesday, when I drag a post kicking and screaming from the archives for your entertainment. Since the last RetroTuesday saw us revisiting my original Mary Sue post, I thought it only appropriate to offer the follow-up post to you as well. Read on!
WHAT WOULD MARY SUE DO?
I've decided that it's finally time to follow up on my most-read post ever. I have girded my loins, donned my flack jacket, and cautiously boarded the train back to Crazy Town (carrying some sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a spare pair of socks, in case of emergency, as all travellers to Crazy Town should).
Yes, Dear Readers. That's right.
Today, we're going to talk about Mary Sue. Again.
Many of you will be aware of the internet firestorm that descended on this blog after I made a post asking reviewers and critics to reconsider their use (and misuse) of the term Mary Sue - but if not, you can find the post, and read the extremely interesting comment trail, here.
In the wake of that post and the response to it, several other authors weighed in on the discussion, with their particular takes on why seeing 'Mary Sue' scattered all over the place like an unwise fashion epidemic (neon leg warmers? Puffball skirts? Mullets?) made their souls die a little. I'm isolating here the responses that particularly struck a chord for me and made me look at this whole debate from a different perspective.
Firstly we had the wonderful Sarah Rees Brennan (who-I-kind-of-want-to-marry-Omg) telling ladies that they are ALLOWED to be both flawed and awesome: in fact, flawsome.
Next Holly Black (Saint-Paul-on-a-pogo-stick-HOLLY-BLACK!) very thoughtfully pointed out that a Mary Sue is only a Mary Sue in fanfic because she's stealing the narrative from the true leading characters. In original fiction, where she IS the leading character, she's just doing what a hero or heroine does.
Then not long ago adult urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire (whose-October-Daye-books-are-literally-on-my-TBR-pile-right-now-holy-crap) made possibly the most telling post of all for me, wherein she teased out an aspect of the situation which I hadn't consciously analysed before: that reviewers are calling Mary Sue on any female character who is sufficiently heroic to actually carry her own story.
When I wrote that original Mary Sue post, obviously I had no idea how much of a landmine I was stepping on in terms of anger and defensiveness from certain readers (which is why I eventually stopped responding to comments and emails on the topic). But at the same time, I also had no idea how much of a groundswell of support there would be from other authors, authors who'd been witnessing this phenomenon themselves and feeling just as disturbed by it as I was. I had no idea, basically, how bloody right I was.
I rant a lot, about a lot of subjects, and I always believe in what I say. But as I saw the response to my Mary Sue post gaining momentum, as I saw more and more women writers admitting how sad and disheartened and hopeless this term made them feel, it began to dawn on me that this wasn't just me ranting about a pet peeve anymore. It wasn't just that Mary Sue was an inaccurate way to criticise female characters, that it was badly defined and contradictory and annoying.
It was that the overuse of Mary Sue was damaging the quality of critical response to original fiction AND encouraging anti-woman sentiment hidden under a thin veneer of concern for Strong Female Characters.
Mary Sue is a lot more important than she first appeared, Dear Readers. Not just in herself, but because she is symptomatic of a much wider problem: how women are treated and represented in our society.
And how is that? Well, to sum it up, let's take a look at this lovely little poster (which I know you've all probably seen before) which puts a series of male comic book characters in the same pose that artists chose for Wonder Woman (with WW herself at the bottom for comparison):
This has been doing the rounds on the internet for months, and we've all had a good laugh about it. Because that's what we socially aware Feminists DO when we're confronted with evidence of the over-sexualisation of women in the media. We laugh about it.
The problem is that it's not really funny.
If any male hero was really drawn posed like that on any page in any mainstream graphic novel, the words 'Ridiculous!' 'Inappropriate!', 'Demeaning!', 'Disgusting!' and most probably 'Gay!' (cringe) would get thrown at it so fast that you'd hear a wave of sonic booms. But female characters continue to be drawn this way. And female actors continue to be posed this way in films and on TV. And female models do the same pose in ads and on the catwalk.
Why? Because its OK for women to look ridiculous and inappropriate, for them to be demeaned and disgusting (and most definitely gay, so long as they're happy to let hetero blokes watch them at it).
In fact, it's more than OK. It's expected. It is REQUIRED. So much so that no one even sees it as demeaning or inappropriate or any of those other emotive words. They just see it as normal. *I* see it as normal. So what if I spend around a quarter of a film averting my eyes from lingering shots of a female actor's rear end, bust, legs and lips, and walk away without being able to remember the character's name? I probably don't even notice because That's Just How Films Are (this is called the Male Gaze and is a topic to be fully explored in another post, Dear Readers).
Basically: Male heroes get to save the world. Female ones get to stand there and look sexy, dammit.
Considering that we're constantly - but constantly - exposed to this worldview, is it any wonder that most of us have trouble clearing enough space in our heads to tackle female characters fairly?
I don't believe all reviewers (especially the female ones!) want to see women characters over-sexualised and treated as nothing more than unthreatening eye candy. But what I do believe is that this bombardment of EmptySexyHotObject images has made it hard for us to see women AS ANYTHING ELSE.
Which is why when female writers produce female characters with depth and agency, they get accused of wish fulfilment.
There's an unconscious assumption that any female protagonist or any important female secondary character written by a woman must necessarily be an idealised author insert/wish fulfilment character. Otherwise no female character would get to tell her own story in her own voice, and have her experiences treated as interesting and worthwhile. That's the real flaw with the term Mary Sue and the way that reviewers are applying it to original fiction. Female characters are not parasites sucking away the limelight that rightfully belongs to their male counterparts. Women do deserve their own stories. Their own voices. Their experiences are interesting and worthwhile.
Female protagonists are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own stories.
And the more successful they become, the more female writers are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own industry.
Look at this. And some of the comments in this (brilliant) post by Maureen Johnson. Examples of people stating that they want women to stop all this silly writing of theirs, and let men do the job instead. Examples of people stating, without irony, that women need to stop producing these girly books full of girl characters for girls to read because that is somehow stopping BOYS from reading! Let the men write manly books for men because...well, just because! Boys are important! Stuff girls! Who cares if THEY read or not? They're just there to look sexy, dammit!
These are the attitudes and assumptions that all women, and all readers, are fighting against.
I'm not saying that the misuse of the term Mary Sue is responsible for All The Sexism. But it is a really worrying symptom. It's an internet term, mostly used by internet savvy folks - and the Internet is the place where, for my money, a lot of the really smart booktalk happens. This is the place where readers find like-minded networks of friends, where a lot of promising young writers get nurtured. And where you find courageous, honest reviewers who really know the YA category - reviewers whose reviews we NEED because they are willing to put their heads above the parapet and call out misogyny and racism and homophobia and bad writing and abusive fictional boyfriends (all stuff that worries me too)!
Let me make it clear that I love readers. I love reviewers. I love bloggers. I WANT you guys to keep doing your thing. I want to keep on reading reviews of my own work (positive and negative) which teach me useful lessons and help me to develop and improve as writer BECAUSE they are not written for my benefit. I want to be able to click on Amazon or Goodreads or Book Depo and see fifty different reviews of the books I'm thinking about buying from all different perspectives. If you think a character is badly written or developed or unrealistic? I 100% support your right to scream that from the rooftops.
But the unconscious cuckoo-in-the-nest assumption betrayed by the use of Mary Sue as a term to denigrate female characters (and authors!) in original fiction is stealthily poisoning a lot of that healthy, necessary debate about YA books. It's harmful to the young readers we should be encouraging, the young reviewers we should be embracing, and the developing writers we should be supporting online.
Why does it have to be this way, Dear Readers? What do you think?
What would Mary Sue (by which I mean a complex, fully realised, awesome female character) do?
(With thanks to the lovely writers who double-checked this post for me and stopped me from commiting pure Feminist Rage Smash. They know who they are!)
And now it's time for RetroTuesday, when I drag a post kicking and screaming from the archives for your entertainment. Since the last RetroTuesday saw us revisiting my original Mary Sue post, I thought it only appropriate to offer the follow-up post to you as well. Read on!
WHAT WOULD MARY SUE DO?
I've decided that it's finally time to follow up on my most-read post ever. I have girded my loins, donned my flack jacket, and cautiously boarded the train back to Crazy Town (carrying some sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a spare pair of socks, in case of emergency, as all travellers to Crazy Town should).
Yes, Dear Readers. That's right.
Today, we're going to talk about Mary Sue. Again.
Many of you will be aware of the internet firestorm that descended on this blog after I made a post asking reviewers and critics to reconsider their use (and misuse) of the term Mary Sue - but if not, you can find the post, and read the extremely interesting comment trail, here.
In the wake of that post and the response to it, several other authors weighed in on the discussion, with their particular takes on why seeing 'Mary Sue' scattered all over the place like an unwise fashion epidemic (neon leg warmers? Puffball skirts? Mullets?) made their souls die a little. I'm isolating here the responses that particularly struck a chord for me and made me look at this whole debate from a different perspective.
Firstly we had the wonderful Sarah Rees Brennan (who-I-kind-of-want-to-marry-Omg) telling ladies that they are ALLOWED to be both flawed and awesome: in fact, flawsome.
Next Holly Black (Saint-Paul-on-a-pogo-stick-HOLLY-BLACK!) very thoughtfully pointed out that a Mary Sue is only a Mary Sue in fanfic because she's stealing the narrative from the true leading characters. In original fiction, where she IS the leading character, she's just doing what a hero or heroine does.
Then not long ago adult urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire (whose-October-Daye-books-are-literally-on-my-TBR-pile-right-now-holy-crap) made possibly the most telling post of all for me, wherein she teased out an aspect of the situation which I hadn't consciously analysed before: that reviewers are calling Mary Sue on any female character who is sufficiently heroic to actually carry her own story.
When I wrote that original Mary Sue post, obviously I had no idea how much of a landmine I was stepping on in terms of anger and defensiveness from certain readers (which is why I eventually stopped responding to comments and emails on the topic). But at the same time, I also had no idea how much of a groundswell of support there would be from other authors, authors who'd been witnessing this phenomenon themselves and feeling just as disturbed by it as I was. I had no idea, basically, how bloody right I was.
I rant a lot, about a lot of subjects, and I always believe in what I say. But as I saw the response to my Mary Sue post gaining momentum, as I saw more and more women writers admitting how sad and disheartened and hopeless this term made them feel, it began to dawn on me that this wasn't just me ranting about a pet peeve anymore. It wasn't just that Mary Sue was an inaccurate way to criticise female characters, that it was badly defined and contradictory and annoying.
It was that the overuse of Mary Sue was damaging the quality of critical response to original fiction AND encouraging anti-woman sentiment hidden under a thin veneer of concern for Strong Female Characters.
Mary Sue is a lot more important than she first appeared, Dear Readers. Not just in herself, but because she is symptomatic of a much wider problem: how women are treated and represented in our society.
And how is that? Well, to sum it up, let's take a look at this lovely little poster (which I know you've all probably seen before) which puts a series of male comic book characters in the same pose that artists chose for Wonder Woman (with WW herself at the bottom for comparison):
This has been doing the rounds on the internet for months, and we've all had a good laugh about it. Because that's what we socially aware Feminists DO when we're confronted with evidence of the over-sexualisation of women in the media. We laugh about it.
The problem is that it's not really funny.
If any male hero was really drawn posed like that on any page in any mainstream graphic novel, the words 'Ridiculous!' 'Inappropriate!', 'Demeaning!', 'Disgusting!' and most probably 'Gay!' (cringe) would get thrown at it so fast that you'd hear a wave of sonic booms. But female characters continue to be drawn this way. And female actors continue to be posed this way in films and on TV. And female models do the same pose in ads and on the catwalk.
Why? Because its OK for women to look ridiculous and inappropriate, for them to be demeaned and disgusting (and most definitely gay, so long as they're happy to let hetero blokes watch them at it).
In fact, it's more than OK. It's expected. It is REQUIRED. So much so that no one even sees it as demeaning or inappropriate or any of those other emotive words. They just see it as normal. *I* see it as normal. So what if I spend around a quarter of a film averting my eyes from lingering shots of a female actor's rear end, bust, legs and lips, and walk away without being able to remember the character's name? I probably don't even notice because That's Just How Films Are (this is called the Male Gaze and is a topic to be fully explored in another post, Dear Readers).
Basically: Male heroes get to save the world. Female ones get to stand there and look sexy, dammit.
Considering that we're constantly - but constantly - exposed to this worldview, is it any wonder that most of us have trouble clearing enough space in our heads to tackle female characters fairly?
I don't believe all reviewers (especially the female ones!) want to see women characters over-sexualised and treated as nothing more than unthreatening eye candy. But what I do believe is that this bombardment of EmptySexyHotObject images has made it hard for us to see women AS ANYTHING ELSE.
Which is why when female writers produce female characters with depth and agency, they get accused of wish fulfilment.
There's an unconscious assumption that any female protagonist or any important female secondary character written by a woman must necessarily be an idealised author insert/wish fulfilment character. Otherwise no female character would get to tell her own story in her own voice, and have her experiences treated as interesting and worthwhile. That's the real flaw with the term Mary Sue and the way that reviewers are applying it to original fiction. Female characters are not parasites sucking away the limelight that rightfully belongs to their male counterparts. Women do deserve their own stories. Their own voices. Their experiences are interesting and worthwhile.
Female protagonists are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own stories.
And the more successful they become, the more female writers are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own industry.
Look at this. And some of the comments in this (brilliant) post by Maureen Johnson. Examples of people stating that they want women to stop all this silly writing of theirs, and let men do the job instead. Examples of people stating, without irony, that women need to stop producing these girly books full of girl characters for girls to read because that is somehow stopping BOYS from reading! Let the men write manly books for men because...well, just because! Boys are important! Stuff girls! Who cares if THEY read or not? They're just there to look sexy, dammit!
These are the attitudes and assumptions that all women, and all readers, are fighting against.
I'm not saying that the misuse of the term Mary Sue is responsible for All The Sexism. But it is a really worrying symptom. It's an internet term, mostly used by internet savvy folks - and the Internet is the place where, for my money, a lot of the really smart booktalk happens. This is the place where readers find like-minded networks of friends, where a lot of promising young writers get nurtured. And where you find courageous, honest reviewers who really know the YA category - reviewers whose reviews we NEED because they are willing to put their heads above the parapet and call out misogyny and racism and homophobia and bad writing and abusive fictional boyfriends (all stuff that worries me too)!
Let me make it clear that I love readers. I love reviewers. I love bloggers. I WANT you guys to keep doing your thing. I want to keep on reading reviews of my own work (positive and negative) which teach me useful lessons and help me to develop and improve as writer BECAUSE they are not written for my benefit. I want to be able to click on Amazon or Goodreads or Book Depo and see fifty different reviews of the books I'm thinking about buying from all different perspectives. If you think a character is badly written or developed or unrealistic? I 100% support your right to scream that from the rooftops.
But the unconscious cuckoo-in-the-nest assumption betrayed by the use of Mary Sue as a term to denigrate female characters (and authors!) in original fiction is stealthily poisoning a lot of that healthy, necessary debate about YA books. It's harmful to the young readers we should be encouraging, the young reviewers we should be embracing, and the developing writers we should be supporting online.
Why does it have to be this way, Dear Readers? What do you think?
What would Mary Sue (by which I mean a complex, fully realised, awesome female character) do?
(With thanks to the lovely writers who double-checked this post for me and stopped me from commiting pure Feminist Rage Smash. They know who they are!)
July 13, 2012
YA FANTASY
Hello, Dear Readers! Happy friday and welcome to the penultimate stop on the
FrostFire
Blog Tour!
Today's post is YA FANTASY (in which I ramble about the recent evolution of the YA publishing industry) and is over at the blog of the marvelous PewterWolf , otherwise known as Andrew, who happened to give FrostFire a glowing review just this week.
Also! I did a guest post on the blog of the charming Norman Geras, who is married to YA and Ch's legend Adele Geras . It's about one of my favourite books ever, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, so go check that out too :)
See you all on Tuesday, my duckies!
Today's post is YA FANTASY (in which I ramble about the recent evolution of the YA publishing industry) and is over at the blog of the marvelous PewterWolf , otherwise known as Andrew, who happened to give FrostFire a glowing review just this week.
Also! I did a guest post on the blog of the charming Norman Geras, who is married to YA and Ch's legend Adele Geras . It's about one of my favourite books ever, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, so go check that out too :)
See you all on Tuesday, my duckies!
