Jennifer R. Hubbard's Blog, page 79

Love triangles

The other night on #yalitchat (the Wednesday night Twitter chat about YA), when we were talking about romance in YA, the subject of love triangles came up. When you talk romance in YA nowadays, the subject of love triangles always comes up.

I'm not going to recap the whole discussion. Suffice it to say: some people are sick of them, and some people think they're unrealistic because how many of us had two smoldering-hot guys pining for us and competing for our attention when we were teens? But most people agreed that they're compelling, while pointing out that there are other ways to ramp up romantic tension.

The romantic situations I saw in real life generally looked less like triangles and more like knots. As in: A likes B; but B likes C; and C is using B while secretly wanting to go back to the ex, D; and D is bouncing back and forth between E and F. G thinks they are all too immature, and H likes A but is seeing E when E takes breaks from D. I likes J but is scared to approach; J is involved with K, who wants to end all relationships and be alone for a while. L and M are madly in love, and everyone expects them to marry, and flips back and forth between envying them and wondering whether that much security in a relationship isn't a bit boring. N likes M but knows it's a hopeless cause, so pursues I instead.

But, yanno, that can get a little complicated to write, unless you're doing a series. Or a soap opera.

There are endless variations. Relationships are complicated, and they're not easy, and they often don't work out. I wouldn't tell anyone you can't write a love triangle nowadays, because I don't believe in absolutist rules like that. But I would encourage people to think about the pattern of relationships in the book, and why people are coming together or separating, and how the timing works, and what the best point of view for the story is. Cupid rarely shoots straight, and he's a bit of a prankster, if you ask me!

Break time

This afternoon, I sat on the porch and read for half an hour.

I don't often take time to do that. Usually I read on the commuter train, or while eating lunch, or just before going to bed, when I'm too tired for anything else. My days are packed with chores and obligations.

But it was close to eighty degrees (F) out today, and it won't be this warm again for at least a week (probably longer). And everything is blooming: hyacinth, daffodils, cherries, myrtle, violets, forsythia. And I'm not on a writing deadline at the moment. And life is short.

Sometimes, you just have to put everything down and enjoy the moment.

A blog sampler

Tabitha Olson of Writer Musings picked my blog for the "Sunshine Award," which was quite nice of her. I don't usually participate in blog awards, and I'm not going to officially "tag" anyone. (Yes, I'm a meme rebel! That's how I roll.) But I've actually been wanting to make a few blog recommendations, and this gives me a nice opportunity to do so.  There are many, many blogs I read and love and would recommend, but here's a small sample:

Cynsations. Cynthia Leitich Smith posts in-depth interviews and guest posts. Every Friday she features a weekly roundup of news and links from around the kidlit blogosphere that is truly amazing in its breadth.

Between Fact and Fiction. Natalie Whipple blogs about the ups and downs of trying to keep in touch with one's creative wellspring while coping with the business side of publishing. Candid and relatable. Includes a regular count-our-blessings feature called the Happy Writers Society.

The Contemps. A group blog. Discusses what's new in contemporary YA. A great place to find books for your reading wishlist!

An Englishman in New Jersey. Jon Gibbs, organizer of the New Jersey Authors Network, chats about writing and publishing, often with humor (including peppery advice from his gran, and regular appearances by "I Are a Writer" swag). Every Friday, Jon posts links to a nice cross-section of blogs about various aspects of writing or publishing.

Jama's Alphabet Soup. Jama Rattigan covers an interesting mix of food, poetry, book reviews, and the occasional travel piece. Her blog is one of the coziest corners on the internet, and her online launch parties (celebrating the work of other authors when their books release) are special favorites of mine. The food photos alone will make you drool.

Careann's Musings. Carol J. Garvin posts a mix of beautiful photographs, quotations, and brief, thoughtful posts on writing. This blog has an inspirational bent. Even if you're not religious yourself, the gentle and inviting style is welcoming to all.

The Author in Training. Mieke Zamora-Mackay includes short features on various aspects of writing, but the feature that always sticks in my mind is Inspiration Sunday, where she posts a photograph to use as a writing prompt. Excellent for those who want visual prompts to write from.

The Innocent Flower. Michelle Davidson Argyle blogs about various aspects of writing, from interesting tidbits turned up in her research, to the idea of turning fairy tales on their heads, to the emotional challenges that come with putting our work out there in the world.

Finding Wonderland. Tanita S. Davis and Sarah Jamila Stevenson (Aquafortis) post in-depth reviews of YA books, interviews, thoughtful discussions, and--one of my personal favorite features--Toon Thursday, featuring Aquafortis's original cartoons about the writing life.

So many books, so little time. April Henry, author of fast-paced, suspenseful novels, posts brief links to interesting stories and features around the internet: the amusing, the newsworthy, the bizarre. For those writing mystery or crime fiction, her blog also contains valuable research tips, including information about the Writers Police Academy.

And of course a shout-out to the person who started me down this link-coding path today: Tabitha at Writer Musings, who posts writing tips, thoughtful reviews, and all things related to the craft and business of writing. She also runs monthly book giveaways.

Do you have a favorite blog to recommend?

Dealing with ugliness

In the foreword to Rereadings, a collection she edited, Anne Fadiman writes of reading C.S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy to her young son, and of her shock at seeing things she hadn't noticed when loving the book as a child. She was troubled enough to try to discuss this with her son (e.g., "'Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy isn't really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?'"), although, as Fadiman says, "He didn't want to analyze, criticize, evaluate, or explicate the book." He was far more interested in the plot. He wanted to find out what happened to the main characters.

I suspect most readers have had these encounters with celebrated literature from the past, either recommended by others or fondly remembered by ourselves: the shock of finding sentiments and prejudices that stick in our craws. I grew up reading books that often treated girls and women as foreign creatures, not quite human. Whenever I encountered an offending statement, it would jerk me out of the book for a moment, and then I would shrug and think, "That's what they believed then, but we know better now," and go on to get whatever I could from the book. Which was often quite a lot. When I was a girl, the Second Wave of feminism was in full swing, in plain sight, in your face, and so the culture around me affirmed what I knew inside me: of course I was a person, no less real and valuable than a boy. And so I wasn't much shaken by any bigotry to the contrary in my literature.*

It's difficult, however, to know whether to recommend books with such anachronistic views in them, especially in the cases where we ourselves are not members of the group that's being disparaged. People have struggled with the depiction of American Indians in the Little House books, for example. Colleen Mondor discussed some of these issues when she blogged about reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek. I look at Booth Tarkington's Penrod and Alice Adams, the latter a recipient of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize. Both are delightful and wonderfully written books in many ways--except that much of what Tarkington writes about his African-American characters is cringe-inducing. Therefore, should we forget these books? Does the bad overshadow everything good in them? Or is it better to read such books with today's children and discuss history, and the books' flaws and misconceptions forthrightly? And who decides?

I don't know. I've wanted to blog about this issue for a long time, but since I obviously have a bunch of questions and no answers, I hesitated. Now I've decided I might as well put the questions out there, for what it's worth.

One thing I am cautious about is getting on too high a horse about any of this: "We were so ignorant in the past, but we're so enlightened now." I believe and hope we are more enlightened, but I always wonder what in today's literature will make our children and our grandchildren cringe when they read it decades from now.


*Which isn't to say that I thought chauvinism was completely dead, completely a relic of the past. But overall, there was a sense that the tide had turned, that the full empowerment of women was, if not a present reality, inevitable in the not-so-distant future. These days, I'm not so sure. But that's another story.

Retreats

If you've ever seen writers talk about retreats and wished you could do one, except that you don't have money, or a crowd of like-minded friends, or a glamorous location to visit ... well, you don't actually need any of those things.

You only need two things: time and space.

The time can be of almost any length, although retreats commonly range from a weekend to a week. "Going on retreat" is just a way of formally carving out a block of time where writing comes first.

The space can be anywhere. In a pinch, the retreat can occur by barricading yourself into a congenial corner of your house or apartment. But generally it's best to get out of your usual living space, because otherwise the temptation will be strong to "just throw that load of laundry in," "just take that call," "just run that errand," "just open the mail," "just take the dog to the park," etc., instead of writing. The space need not be fancy. It can be a motel or a B&B in an area where such accommodations are inexpensive. It can be a room in a place that specializes in retreats. It can be a friend's or relative's vacation home in the off-season. It can be a house-sitting gig. You may even be able to win a fellowship to a writers' colony. My own preference is for a place that's soothing and attractive, with space for walks.

Beyond that, you decide: retreat alone, or with friends? Does solitude scare you or refresh you? Will the presence of strangers hamper you or stir your creativity? Will you be tempted to socialize instead of write? If you're sharing the space, have you all agreed on the "quiet hours" and the rules of the house?

Will you go in with a specific goal--finish a revision or a draft, complete certain assignments? Or are you going to let your imagination play? Are you going to start that idea you've always had in the back of your mind, and see if it works?

How many hours a day do you expect to write? What will you do on breaks, and how will you manage your time?

How available will you be to others? I typically would turn on my phone for half of every day, and would call my husband once a day while on retreat. I warned people in advance that I would not be checking email for a week, and gave out my phone number to those few people who might have an urgent need to reach me. (So far, nothing urgent has ever happened while I've been on retreat.)

Retreats allow us to put the rest of life on hold. The writing that we often fit in between a hundred other activities is given all the room it wants.

YA Books about Suicide

Since writing Try Not to Breathe, in which the main character recovers from a suicide attempt, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of YA novels that deal with suicide (or suicide attempts) as a major topic. There are many, many nonfiction titles out there; a simple search will turn up scores, including a book I mentioned earlier, Why Suicide? But for fiction, I've prepared this as a reference post. Suggestions for additional titles are welcome.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia PlathBy the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead, Julie Anne PetersCracked, K. M. WaltonCrash Into Me, Albert BorrisEvery You, Every Me, David Levithan and Jonathan FarmerFall for Anything, Courtney SummersFive Minutes More, Darlene RyanHold Still, Nina LaCourImpulse, Ellen HopkinsIt's Kind of a Funny Story, Ned VizziniMercy Lily, Lisa AlbertThe Opposite of Music, Janet Ruth YoungSaving June, Hannah HarringtonStay with Me, Garret Freymann-Weyr13 Reasons Why, Jay AsherTrigger, Susan VaughtTry Not to Breathe, Jennifer R. HubbardWhat They Always Tell Us, Martin WilsonYou Know Where to Find Me, Rachel Cohn
Note: These books deals with characters who have coped with thoughts and consequences of suicide. If you are in a similar situation, please talk to someone immediately.The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

It's been done before, or, the snapped twig

As writers, we're taught to shy away from cliches. We start out with confidence, thinking, "That's easy advice to take! I'm never going to say, 'red as a beet' or 'sweet as sugar.'" But then we learn, to our horror, how very many stock phrases are out there--"my stomach churned," "out of the corner of my eye," etc. We find more and more of them in our work, and we dutifully root them out.

Then we discover that people who read a lot see patterns that the average reader may not even notice. Oh no; it's another crop of cliches! Now we have more lists to remember, as we learn that red-haired characters, and characters describing themselves in a mirror, and best friends becoming attracted to one another, are situations to avoid.

The problem is, there are so many of these phrases and situations that have been done before. I reached a point where I began to feel overwhelmed by the lists, paralyzed by self-censorship. It was then that I thought: Enough. I have to go back to my gut check, and write what feels right, and not worry so much about whether it's a cliche to someone else.

Because you know one thing that is on those lists of no-nos? Starting a book with a character waking up. And yet that's how The Hunger Games starts, and I think we all know how well that has turned out for Suzanne Collins.

I'm not going to say that we don't have to worry about originality and freshness. We do. But I want to look at the reason behind avoiding cliches. A phrase or situation becomes tired when it's done out of laziness. When we use it not because it feels true to the story we're telling, but because we've seen it happen that way before, so we grab the stock phrase or character or situation off the shelf and plug it right in, without asking,"Is this really how it feels, how it happens? Is this true?"

For example: One situation we've probably all seen is a character who's sneaking through the woods and is betrayed by stepping on, and snapping, a twig. That's a pet peeve of mine, in fact. But I'm not going to say it can't work in a story. To extend my "for-instance" by referring to The Hunger Games again: Collins establishes that Katniss and Gale, the hunters, are very quiet in the forest. But Peeta, who's been raised in town, has never learned to move with that sort of stealth. So if we had a situation involving those characters where Peeta snapped a twig, I would totally buy it. Not so much Katniss or Gale.

A character can snap that twig if he really would be in the woods and really wouldn't know how not to snap a twig, given who he is and what's happening. Maybe it's a little harder to sell a reader on a snapped twig, since that one has been done so many times before. But anything can work if it's right for the story.

Not standing still

I used to like the music of the Rolling Stones quite a lot, and then I got out of the habit of listening to them. Recently I've been listening again, only to discover that I still like the music.

It's interesting to hear songs recorded by one band over a span of decades. One thing that strikes me is the change in lead vocalist Mick Jagger's singing over the years. In the early Stones songs, he doesn't just sound young; his voice is more raw and uncertain than it became later. (For example, compare "Not Fade Away" and "Tell Me (You're Coming Back)," circa 1964, with later songs.) I don't find the young Jagger's voice unpleasant--far from it--but at some point, he hit his stride. By the time of 1972's Exile on Main Street, he was singing with power and authority.

According to Keith Richards in his autobiography, Life, Jagger began taking singing lessons somewhere along the line--partly, Richards believes, in an effort to preserve his voice, and make sure it would last. Not every singer who fronted a band as successful as the Stones would do that. It must be tempting to lounge atop one's laurels, but Jagger didn't.

Now, not being privy to the inner workings of the band, I don't really know why the confidence in this singer's voice increased. Was it from studying the craft? Finding his range? The fact that he began to record more songs he and Keith Richards had written themselves, instead of covering others' material? Was it just growing older? Whatever it was, the difference is noticeable.

I see the same growth in the lyrics of Beatles songs. (Compare the words to "I Saw Her Standing There" or "Love Me Do" with those of "Eleanor Rigby" and "Norwegian Wood.") The early Beatles songs were successful, but the band wasn't content to go on making the same album over and over. They changed and grew.

The challenge for any artist who produces work over years or decades is to grow, and to make sure the work grows. Not every experiment on that path will be fruitful. There are bound to be missteps. And it's tempting to stick with something that works once, to repeat it again and again. But if chart-topping musicians can keep working and growing, that might just be a good example to follow. Besides, it keeps us from going stale.

Treasures

I think I forgot to mention that while Judith Graves was here guest blogging for me about a favorite childhood book, I was over at her blog talking about fear, and how I used my character's fears in writing Try Not to Breathe.

The giveaway there is now closed, but if you're still in the mood for free stuff, don't forget Bryan Cohen's giveaway of his book The Post-College Guide to Happiness, plus a Kindle Fire.

And if you'd like to bid on some books and help a good cause at the same time, please hop over to the Authors for Henryville auction and raffle.

Around here, the earliest-blooming cherry trees have begun to blossom. (The cherries bloom in three phases: the early ones, like the Okame cherry; then the weeping cherries; then the late ones, like the Kwanzan cherry.) I know where all the early-blooming cherries are around here, and now that I know they're blooming, I seek them out. There's one particularly large, showy tree on a certain corner lot that I always make sure to see. If it were ever cut down, I would be dismayed. I would lose one little ritual of spring.

It got me thinking about characters and their rituals, their comforts, their treasures. My characters have just as many as I do. For Colt in The Secret Year, the river was the place that grounded him and meant "home." Ryan in Try Not to Breathe has the waterfall, the quarry, and a painting given to him by a girl he likes. The main characters in my work in progress have their own special places and items and activities.

This is actually a big part of the way I get to know a character. I always want to know what's important to him or her, where he or she turns for emotional nourishment. I may not know what he ate for breakfast or what her favorite teacher's name was, but I know what they can't stand to lose.

Guest post: Happiness

Today's post features a visit from Bryan Cohen, who has just written a nonfiction book about the quest for happiness.

Bryan Cohen here, guest poster and author, promoting my new book The Post-College Guide to Happiness for The Happiness Blog Tour. I'm giving away free digital review copies of the book and doing a giveaway for paperback copies, audio copies and even a Kindle Fire! Read on and check out the info below the post.

"Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone."
- Sigmund Freud

All the Eggs

One of my major interests during college was to learn the art of directing from some amazing theatre teachers. I'd always loved watching movies and plays, so it made complete sense that I'd want to create such work myself. A wonderful piece of advice I received from my instructors was that you shouldn't push a performance or production to go exactly how you see it in your head. This stifles originality and how organically the show can come together on its own. You might miss something truly inspired and amazing if you force it to be exactly one way or another.

It took me a long time to realize that this is exactly the way that life works as well. Even though I enjoyed writing, I assumed that a good sense of humor meant I should go "all in" when it came to improv comedy. I realized early on that I wasn't getting as much fulfillment as I wanted from these kooky comedic performances, but I continued to force myself to do it for years, ignoring the writing parts of me that were just waiting to get out. When I finally let go, the success I gained from my writing truly blossomed over the course of the next couple of years. By giving myself more freedom and not assuming that I would find success in a particular way, success found me.



Unsurprisingly, by permitting myself to have more leeway in my activities, I became happier as well. I always wanted to have a plan for my life and I wanted to hit every bullet point on my list. How many of us do that to ourselves? We said we wanted to have that huge job by the time we're 30 or to be married and have some amount of kids by a certain point as well. We figure that we'll be happy as soon as we fill in another check mark next to that aspect of our lives. There are two main problems with that. The first is that if you don't reach that goal, you feel depressed. The second is that even when you get there, it usually isn't quite as fulfilling as you expected it to be.

Instead of putting all your happiness eggs in one basket, it's best to go for a more well-rounded approach. Make your work life and your home life strong. Put time into good causes but also treat your body well with proper food and exercise. You don't have to be perfect in every area, but it's often the attempt to be flawless in one singular area that actually lowers your levels of happiness. Spread your eggs around a bit to lead a much more fulfilling and omelet-filled life.

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Bryan Cohen is giving away 61 paperback and audio copies of The Post-College Guide to Happiness and a Kindle Fire between now and May 7th, 2012 on The Happiness Blog Tour. All entrants receive a free digital review copy of The Post-College Guide to Happiness. Bryan hopes to give away at least 1,000 copies during the blog tour. To enter, post a comment with your e-mail address or send an e-mail to postcollegehappiness (at) gmail.com. Bryan will draw the names at the end of the tour. Entries will be counted through Sunday, May 6th.

Bryan Cohen is a writer, actor and comedian from Dresher, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 with degrees in English and Dramatic Art and a minor in Creative Writing. He has written nine books including 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More, 500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade , Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job and his new book, 1,000 Character Writing Prompts: Villains, Heroes and Hams for Scripts, Stories and More. His website Build Creative Writing Ideas helps over 25,000 visitors a month to push past writer's block and stay motivated.

Feel free to follow along with the tour at The Happiness Blog Tour Hub Page or on the book's Facebook Page.