Jennifer R. Hubbard's Blog, page 97

Monsters, and Story Structure

I've always said that I write contemporary realism, and I write in traditional forms, and here I have to provide a bit of a caveat. That is true of my novels, and for a long time it was also true of my short stories--until the past few years. After having written hundreds of short pieces, I started to stretch the boundaries a little. By no means do I feel that I've exhausted the possibilities of realism or traditional narrative forms, but it was fun to try something new. I started modestly: I wrote stories in the form of letters; I wrote in the second person; I wrote in verse; I wrote a story in the form of entries in an imaginary anthropologist's notebook; I wrote very short stories that required the reader to supply some of the details. 

One of those less realistic, more experimental stories has found a home. I'm honored to have it appear on the Hunger Mountain site right now. It's called "Monsters," and it actually started its life with a structure I borrowed from poetry. I was trying to write pantoums (which I will not inflict upon you), which are a form of poetry in which certain lines repeat in a prescribed pattern. That gave me the idea to try a short story with repeating sentences. Here's the first pattern I used:

1st paragraph.  Sentence A, Sentence B, followed by more sentences
2nd paragraph. Sentence B, Sentence C, followed by more sentences
3rd paragraph. Sentence C, Sentence D, ...

... and so on, until the last paragraph's second sentence was Sentence A again. Then I tried this pattern:

1st three paragraphs all begin with Sentence A.
2nd three paragraphs all begin with Sentence B.
Next three paragraphs all begin with Sentence C.
Final three paragraphs all begin with Sentence D.

Even though the sets of three paragraphs all used the same introductory sentence, each paragraph took that sentence someplace different. Often the second paragraph in the set would contradict what was said in the first paragraph. Using this form, I got the bulk of the material that appears in the final version of "Monsters."

But for the final version, I realized the repeating sentences no longer served their purpose--in fact, they had begun to confine the story. And so each of them now appears only once (and one got axed completely), and I no longer needed to keep the number of paragraphs so rigid. I edited for flow and sense.

And the only reason I'm going into so much detail about this process is in case you want to try playing with form or borrowing from poetry yourself, and maybe this will give you some ideas. For anyone who's curious, the sentences that originally repeated in "Monsters" were:
I was born a monster.
I put an ad on the internet, looking for other monsters.
I lived as a monster.
There are other monsters.

If you wonder what kind of monster I'm talking about in this story: that is one of the things I would love readers to think about. I can think of many possibilities, and I wanted to leave those multiple interpretations open.

Also appearing in the June 3 issue, on the theme of "The Varying Shades of Shadows:" Janet Gurtler's discussion of sisterhood in "Embracing Shadows;" Joe Lunievicz's essay "In the Half-Light," about the various resources he drew upon for his novel Open Wounds (also excerpted at the site), and an interview with Elena Mechlin and Joan Slattery about the latest at their literary agency, Pippin Properties. I hope you'll check it out!

Here we go again

Rather than comment at length on the latest internet kerfuffle (I've already done so, briefly, on Twitter), I'll just point you to people who are more articulate than I about the latest assertions that YA literature is destroying our young people:

Philip Nel's "Why Meghan Can't Read"

Laurie Halse Anderson's "Stuck Between Rage and Compassion"

On Twitter, people are using the hashtag #YAsaves to discuss the positive influence that YA literature has had on their lives. Because I'm a writer of YA--a writer of the dark realism that is the very sort of YA book deplored by the author of the Wall Street Journal piece that started this latest internet firestorm--one could view me as biased on the topic. So I'll let the young readers of YA speak for themselves. I encourage you to follow that hashtag for just a little while to see what's being said.

My only comment on the WSJ piece at this time will be on this paragraph by Meghan Cox Gurdon: "In the book trade, this is known as 'banning.' In the parenting trade, however, we call this 'judgment' or 'taste.' It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks 'censorship!'"

Since Ms. Gurdon apparently cannot tell the difference between parenting and publishing, between judgment and censorship, I am happy to define them. Judgment involves deciding what you can't, or don't want to, read. Parenting involves deciding what your own kid can't read. Censorship involves deciding what everyone else can't read.

You're welcome.

I'm smoothing down my petticoats now.

Wisdom from around the internet

Today I have three links for you:

Kate Messner's poem about how the book in our heads is usually so much better than the book we write;

What April Henry says she learned from knowing (and losing) L.K. Madigan and Bridget Zinn;

Natalie Whipple's detailed post on what it's like when your book goes on submission to editors. (There's a lot of waiting. But you knew that already. Natalie covers all the stuff you might not know--or the stuff you know and will be relieved to recognize.)

Telling secrets

I guest blogged for the marvelous Eve's Fan Garden about secrets. In this case, it's about the "secret" relationship between reader and writer. The post is paired with a giveaway. I've been sponsoring regular giveaways since The Secret Year's paperback launch, but this is the last one I've scheduled, so it rates a mention here.

An excerpt from the post:

"... And often, what a book says to a reader is: Come closer; I wish to tell you a secret. From a young age, when we first learn to read silently, we experience reading as an incredibly intimate experience, one mind connecting with another."

For me, that was a big source of reading's power. I don't get quite that same level of intimacy from any other art form, maybe because I'm a word person myself. How about you?

Second-book survival

This is the latest in my series of guest posts on writing second books. Today's post is by Leah Cypess, author of Mistwood and Nightspell, and when I first read it, I said "Wow." It's a great reminder that as difficult as things can get backstage, ultimately you can still produce brilliant art. See for yourself:

“Every time I look at my revision letter, my stomach literally hurts.”

  “I think I'll ask them if I can just write a different book instead.”

  “Are all second books this hard?”

These are a few excerpts from emails I wrote while working on my second book, Nightspell. The last was to my editor, and her response was a simple, “Second books *are* hard.”
 

I’d heard that before, but I thought I would be different. When I sold my first book, Mistwood, my second book had already been written. It was only a first draft, true; even so, I should have been way ahead of the game. I assumed I would skip the deadline-driven second-book panic entirely.
 

Apparently not. Because even without deadlines, there’s another problem with second books: many writers find themselves writing them in the middle of a crisis of confidence.
 

This is no coincidence. I think there are probably two main causes:
 

[1] As an already-published novelist, you’re probably reading the reviews of your first book while you write the second (although I do hear rumors of authors with iron willpower who avoid reviews entirely). The rave reviews make you fear that your second book can’t possibly be as good as your first. The scathing ones make you fear that you don’t know how to write at all.
 

[2] By now you know a little bit more about publishing, and about how many opportunities this book will have to get rejected: by editors, by marketing, by the chain stores, by the industry reviewers, by book bloggers, by casual shoppers. When you wrote your first book, you were your main audience. Now you have a dozen shadowy readers hovering at your shoulders.
 

So did I overcome these problems? I’ll be honest: I’m not sure I did. I reminded myself, frequently, how lucky I was to be publishing even one book, let alone two. And then I just kept writing, kept revising, kept working until the book was done. If anyone has a better way, I would love to hear it.
 

The only useful advice I have is to make friends with other writers, especially those who are going through the same thing. Commiserate. Write a few self-pitying emails (see above). Hear that they’re going through the same thing. Maybe they’ll have better advice than I do. And even if not, at least you’ll know you’re not the only one struggling with Second Book Blues.
 

                 

Leah Cypess used to be a practicing attorney in New York and is now a full-time writer in Boston. She much prefers her current situation. Her first book, Mistwood, is a young adult fantasy about an ancient shapeshifter trapped in the form of a human girl. Her second book, Nightspell, a stand-alone companion novel to Mistwood, will be released in June 2011.

Being reread

There are books I read once, just to see how they turn out. But I reread most of my books. This was even truer when I was growing up: I would usually reread a book instantly if I liked it, and then I would reread it regularly, whenever the mood struck. Even though I am one of those careful readers who never cracks a book's spine or dog-ears pages, some of my books are falling apart.  (They're mostly paperbacks, since that's what I could afford growing up. The hardbacks I have are almost exclusively purchases I've made as an adult.)

I would like to write the kind of stories that people read over and over. I don't know if any other writers care about that at all. After all, to be read even once is an honor.

And yet, I wouldn't mind writing a book that turned out to be someone's favorite, that could stand up to multiple readings. Do you want your work to be reread?

Being alone

Are you lonely when alone, or do you treasure your solitude? Or sometimes it's the former, other times the latter? I guest posted about these issues, and the difference between solitude and isolation, over at Shrinking Violet Promotions (the blog for introverts).

Tension

In my current project, one of the things I'm working on is making sure there's enough tension in every scene.

"First we did this, then we did that," isn't necessarily compelling. So I'm trying to make it, "We did this because we wanted that." "We tried for this, but we didn't expect that." "We did this in spite of that." "We had to choose between this and that."

I'm asking what's at stake in each scene, and what changes, and how the story moves forward. Looking beyond what happens to why it happens that way.

Celebrating, waiting, & a laugh

A few items from around the internet:

--I guest blogged today at Natalie Whipple's blog "Between Fact and Fiction," as part of the Happy Writers' Society, on the topic of celebratory files. Here's a taste:

"True happiness only comes from within, and it doesn’t depend on external success, and nothing outside ourselves can give us a sense of wholeness...
"All true. But that doesn’t mean we don’t crave a pat on the back sometimes ..."

--I greatly enjoyed Saundra Mitchell's take on waiting, which is something writers do a lot of: "... Something MIGHT happen, so you stop doing and start waiting. You burn up your creativity with scenarios. They’re reading it right now. They hate it right now. They’re going to make an offer. They’re spilling coffee on the pages. It’s going to sell! It’s never going to sell; your career is over, never going to start, and this is worth a million dollars and will be a bestseller. ..."

--Then there's this piece I ganked from links via Stephanie Burgis. It's called "humor from historians," but anyone who's ever done academic research and seen peer-review comments may get a chuckle out of it. It's a thoroughly, wonderfully ridiculous answer to the question, "How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?"

The front burner

I appreciate the concern shown by some readers over my last post. At the moment that I wrote, "Some days are for acting more than reflecting," I was actually in the midst of celebrating something nice in my personal life. But I try to find some universal point in my posts, and the idea that sometimes we write, and sometimes life keeps us a little too busy for that, can certainly apply to the not-so-fun events in life as well. In fact, earlier in the week, I didn't post because I was temporarily under the weather. And during a brief internet check last night, I saw the sad news about the untimely passing of author Bridget Zinn, which only reinforced my feeling that yesterday was a day for me to dive into life with both hands. Which I did.

Not that writing isn't an important part of my life. It's always been there, ever since I could wrap my fingers around a crayon, but I moved it to the front burner shortly after I finished graduate school. For years, I had been writing "on the side," with the main course being school, or work, or romance, or travel. I wrote short stories and I would try a novella-type book draft from time to time. Writing a book was always something I was going to tackle seriously "someday." There came a point, though, where I got tired of having writing on the back burner of my life. I moved it to the front burner and committed to daily writing. And it's probably no coincidence that that's when I started seeing more progress in my writing, too.

Sometimes people ask how I can write after a full day at another job, and it's because writing replenishes me. Hiking is the same way. These activities may tire me physically and mentally, but they recharge my emotional and spiritual batteries. We all spend parts of our days on some things that drain us and others that restore us. I have plenty of obligations, plenty of things that I must do, plenty of things that I do for my own or someone else's good. Those things drain me, even if I enjoy them and find them worthwhile. But writing is one of the fun parts of my day. Writing gives me back some of the energy that other parts of my schedule take away. And so I give myself permission to make time for it regularly.

At some point, we realize life passes quickly, and if there's something we've always wanted to do with this life, we should start on it now.