Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 38

Love Stories

I don't write love stories. I like breaking up characters much more than letting them get together. I like when characters realise that they're over that ex they've been obsessing over (like Danielle and Mark in Memories), or when they hook up with a friend and then realise it's just made things more complicated (like Emily and Barry in Good Girls Don't. Or Emily and, um, everyone). I like when characters like someone who ends up with their best friend (Abi, Shane, and Sarah in Stereotype), or when they have an unfortunate crush on someone who's never going to like them back (Lynn and Neil in Every Summer). I like people who get involved in relationships for all the wrong reasons (Chloe in Every Summer). I love writing about crushes and obsessions, but they're not all I write about – there are many flavours of angst to play with – so maybe that's why having a romantic happy ending isn't always that important to me.

The exception is That Girl, and if I had to pick a Fictional Boyfriend it would be Michael. (He is gossipy, argues with her about music, is good at birthday presents, and thinks coffee cures everything. Apparently these are qualities I find appealing.) But most of the time I'm sceptical about romantic happy endings. I'm sceptical of the whole idea of soulmates, and finding True Love, and love-at-first-sight. On more cynical days I am sceptical about Romantic Love, full stop.

But. All of my characters can't be cynical grumpy types, in the same way that they can't be hopeless romantics, either. I've just finished the first draft of a book about a romantic. In some ways she is like me. And in other ways she is not, not at all. This is the same with most characters, really – you need to get inside their head, and part of that is about them having a trait that either is an exaggerated version of part of yourself, or something that just fascinates you. But you also need to distance yourself from them – because you're not writing a memoir, you're writing fiction. My main character in that book says things I do not agree with. And from the very beginning, my cynical side stepped in and argued with me over the ending. She wanted the miserable ending, the one where instead of things ending up happily, not happily-ever-after but happily-now, things go horribly wrong and it doesn't work out and the main character's learned a valuable lesson and grown terribly jaded. "That's much more realistic," said my cynical side, smugly tapping her fingers on the desk. I think she is right, to a certain extent, and one of the things I'm going to be looking carefully at when I start revising is how to balance the romance with realism. But my cynical side needs to remember that this is not an author's manifesto. It's a book about a particular character, and the way she thinks, and the way she lives her life. It's a love story. Much as my natural inclination is to write about things going dreadfully wrong, a couple of happy endings aren't going to kill me. Probably.

Book-post!

Jeff Kinney – Diary of a Wimpy Kid (series)

A bit late to the party on this one – after various recommendations, including from young students, I picked up the first book and loved it. Greg's journal – not a diary! – is a mix of written entries and comic strips, which breaks up the pace nicely and adds to the humour. The drawings are simple but effective – and often hilarious. Greg is a real kid – no overly-mature insights or realisations, just authentic observations on middle-school life and the zany antics that go on. Loved it. Then onto books two, three, four and five – which I zoomed through in a weekend. I would say 'highly recommended', but I am pretty sure everyone else in the universe has already figured out that these are brilliant, so… yes. I've seen the light and am eagerly awaiting book 6.

Hannah Moskowitz – Invincible Summer

I've been following Hannah's blog for a while, and this – her second YA novel – sounded mightily intriguing. I can't think of anyone else writing like this in the YA field at the moment – this is a story about a family breaking apart, brothers, summers, innocence, sign language, and Camus. Definitely recommended for anyone interested in dramatic, realistic, smart fiction about teenage boys. My own favourite character was their younger sister, Claudia – I live in hope of a Claudia-POV sequel.

Cat Clarke – Entangled

Cat Clarke's debut novel grabs you right from the start. Seventeen-year-old Grace wakes up in a white room, no idea of why she's there or how to escape. She recounts the events that led up to the night she met her captor, involving betrayal and angst and self-injury and all kinds of fun stuff (oh, not one for the faint-hearted). A page-turner that has me excited to see what this author does next.

Sarah Dessen – What Happened To Goodbye

Oh, Sarah Dessen. You can do no wrong. This is the story of a girl in her senior year of high school who's reinvented herself every time she and her dad move to a new town – it's easier than making real connections with people, which is the last thing she wants after her parents' messy divorce. But then – of course – there is a boy. And there are new friends. And our heroine, Mclean, finally finds herself belonging somewhere – though this is not without its own complications. While I would have loved to have seen more of the supporting characters and their backstories, Mclean's journey is a compelling and authentic one, with all the gorgeous details that Dessen fans are used to.

Patrick Ness – A Monster Calls

Completely lives up to the hype. And I hate hype. It makes me grumpy and cynical and sceptical and convinced that everyone's just jumping on the bandwagon. I had heard so much about how brilliant this book was. How moving and heartbreaking and all that jazz. But yes. Yes it is. And the illustrations are an additional strength. Go read. Now. Now. Now.

Sarah Rees Brennan – The Demon's Surrender

The conclusion to the Demon trilogy, this time focusing on Sin, the dancer at the Goblin Market. Plenty of drama, intrigue, fighting, and fabulous one-liners in this book, but mostly – ALAN. Oh, Alan. (With a dash of OH, JAMIE!) One I stayed up late reading, needing to see how it all ended.

Things I have loved on TV recently…

I adore musicals. And television. And Glee. Now, I admit that Glee can be fairly hit-or-miss. There are the episodes which make sense, which pick up on plot points that they've been playing with for a while, that reveal something surprising, that do something fantastic. And then there are those that have lots of songs for any old reason, barely nod to continuity, and do gimmicky things with guest stars.

The season 2 finale has many things wrong with it. Oh, so many. But it also has Kurt and Rachel on the Wicked stage doing 'For Good'.

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Five reasons why this made me squeak in delight and then gaze at the screen in a sort of rapt wonder:

1. WICKED!

2. With the SET!

3. With Kurt and Rachel, so it's like a sequel to their 'Defying Gravity' duet of Season 1.

4. Lea Michele singing Elphaba's part, completely in the style of Idina Menzel (aka original Elphaba, aka Rachel's-birth-mom).

5. 'For Good' is possibly one of the greatest songs in a musical ever. Oh. Swoon.

But I am also loving, as ever, The Big Bang Theory. Season 4 has just been terrific – so many great episodes, and a bigger focus on the female characters. Every time Penny, Bernadette and Amy get together, it is guaranteed to be delightful.

Oh, Amy Farrah Fowler. Five reasons why she is one of the most fabulous female characters on TV ever:



1. She sometimes gets drunk. And it is the best thing in the universe.

2. "I don't object to the concept of a deity, but I'm baffled by the notion of one that takes attendance."

3. She calls Sheldon a "sexy toddler". It, um, makes sense in context. Sort of.

4. She is totally and hopelessly out of touch with reality, as evidenced by… pretty much everything that emerges from her mouth. And yet…

5. … there is just enough quasi-human-ness in there to make her an empathetic character. Occasionally.

Laughter, musicals, and nerdiness. That seems to sum up the current televisual love.

Different ways to ask 'Where do you get your ideas?'

'Where do you get your ideas from?' or 'Where did you get the idea for this book?' They're questions writers get asked. A lot.

Ideas are everywhere, though, and there's also more to do it than that. What I always want to know about writers is not 'where do they get their ideas' but 'how do they transfer them onto the page'. I love hearing about writing routines. Word count targets. Tricks and tips. Places people go to when they write, and whether they write by hand or on computer and whether this changes from draft to draft.

I don't think 'where do you get your ideas from?' elicits the most interesting responses. It's too vague, and too big. So. Here's my list of suggested alternative questions – feel free to add your own.

Do you do anything – research, activities – to deliberately provoke ideas? Does this happen before or after you've started writing?
How much did you know/plan about this book before you started writing?
What aspects of the book came first and what came later?
How do you develop ideas? Do you jump straight into writing or do you plan?
How do you plan or outline? Does anything tend to change from the plan to the finished work?
What comes first – character, setting, story? Or is it all mixed together?
How much does your own life experience affect what you write?
Are there certain types of the day when you're more likely to get ideas or certain activities (even if not intentional) that prompt ideas?
What does 'getting an idea' mean to you? Is it vague and in need of fleshing out or do you get fully-formed plots popping into your brain?

Book-post!

Sophie Kinsella – Remember Me?

And so the Sophie Kinsella addiction continues – the mix of romance and drama and identity and surprise and laugh-out-loud funniness. In this standalone novel, Lexi wakes up at twenty-eight with retrograde amnesia – the last three years of her life are gone. And they're the three years in which her life has changed completely – she finds herself slim, married, successful and happy (or so it seems). But cracks start to appear – and even though her memory shows no sign of returning, she finds herself searching for ways to reclaim some parts of the woman she remembers being – while hanging on to some of what she doesn't remember becoming. I adored this book – there are moments of shallowness (is it really that big a deal that there are mint Kitkats? Really?) but the big emotional stuff is absolutely spot-on.

Ann M Martin – Main Street 10: Staying Together

The last in the Main Street series! This makes me sad – I adore Flora (not so much Ruby) and Willow and Olivia and the rest of the inhabitants of Camden Falls, and really enjoyed the way the series was developing, with the characters growing up and changing and moving on. I would have liked more Flora and Ruby in this, though the strain in their relationship was well-handled – as was the resolution. Liked reading it. Farewell, Camden Falls.

Sophie Kinsella – Twenties Girl

See above re: Kinsella addiction. This one is a ghost story – when Lara's great-aunt Sadie dies, she finds herself haunted by the twentysomething version of Sadie. Lara is twenty-seven, in business with a flaky and mean best friend, and struggling to get over her ex, who thinks she's too 'intense'. She's in the head-hunting business but wants it to be more about just salary but about finding people jobs that really fit them. I loved her. Sadie, not so much, but there was an aching poignancy to her story, too.

Anne Enright – The Forgotten Waltz

Gorgeous sentences, details, moments. Gina reflects on her affair with a married man, how his daughter complicates things, and her own family's messiness, against a backdrop of 'the boom years'. Lots of house prices and fancy drinks referenced throughout. I really liked it, but there are aspects I'd have loved more detail on – things there seemed to be enough room in the novel for. Still. Well worth the read.

Some links…

(With exclamation points)

Inis Magazine is online!

Aislinn O'Loughlin has a blog!

Find out who Laura Jane Cassidy's hero is!

(And I think that's about enough cheeriness for a Monday morning.)

A Very Special Musical Episode

Today: a tribute to musical episodes of TV shows.

I love TV. Love, love, love it. As I may have mentioned here once or twice. I love the scope for character and plot development, the threads that play out over months and years, twenty or forty or sixty or a hundred hours instead of the two you get in a movie.

And I love musicals. Ergo. Musical episodes of TV shows – they bring the happy. They bring the Glee, in fact, but that's a separate issue. But they can also be done horribly badly. One of the reasons Glee works is that every episode is the Very Special Musical Episode – the viewers know, and are tuning in, to see musical performances interwoven into the episode. When it's something out of the ordinary, you need a reason.

Grey's Anatomy used an out-of-body experience recently, and – oh, I had fears. I had fears when I heard that they were doing a musical episode, because it's not a musical episode kind of show. And then having it be songs already used in the show – when Callie (Sara Ramirez) started singing, I wasn't convinced. Even though she has a stunning voice.

Then Owen (Kevin McKidd) started singing. And oh dear lord swoon. It grew on me. I still think Addison (Kate Walsh) was underused. I think they used their strongest singers well though. It does not surprise me at all that Lexie (Chyler Leigh) can sing, and we'd heard Bailey (Chandra Wilson) on the show before. But Sara Ramirez and Kevin McKidd. Whoa.

It's not your typical musical episode – it's dark and twisty. It's an episode of sadness and angst and worries. (And Arizona having sadness and angst and worries, which is just extra-sad.) But it works.

I think the best musical episodes are the ones that take the best from the TV show and the best of what a musical can do, and merge the two. Another favourite is the Scrubs musical episode – which has a sort-of medical explanation for the singing, in that a patient (Stephanie D'Abruzzo of Avenue Q fame – part of the writing team were also involved in the music for this, which explains a lot) is hearing everything sung and it's actually a symptom. It's zany and wacky with some poignant moments – pretty much your standard Scrubs episode, so, except with singing.

And the standard amount of JD/Turk subtext. Or, um, text.

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Other TV shows have tried. Ally McBeal, for example, even though it didn't necessarily need it – it's a show that's so closely tied to music anyway, and has plenty of opportunities for getting characters singing. (Oh, Robert Downey Jr, your duet with Sting remains a favourite.) The Simpsons have had a variety of musical numbers. (Cartoons tend to be able to pull off musicals more so than live-action shows.) It's tough – you do need to justify it in some way, and to ensure that it works as an episode as well as a musical extravaganza, moving storylines along, making things change.

I think we all know where this is going. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 'Once More With Feeling' – one of my favourite episodes of anything, ever. From the moment Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) opened her mouth, I was there, ready to buy it, ready to love it.

Like the Grey's episode it does suffer from some cast members being weaker singers than others (oh, Alyson Hannigan) and doesn't always hide them away (I'm not mad about Xander [Nicholas Brendon]). But most of the cast do an extraordinary job – I especially love Tara (Amber Benson) and Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) and Spike (James Marsters), which actually is pretty much most of the rest of the cast.

There's a reason for the music – it's a demon! And one can actually dance oneself to death – the singing and dancing is out of control and needs to be stopped and might be bunnies. They can't help themselves – they just have to sing. And like any good musical it ends with a kiss – which, this being Buffy, is messy and complicated and vampiric. Oh. It is excellent.

I love musicals but like films they're only a couple of hours long – plenty of time for great music, but not so much for ongoing character development. With TV shows we get to see what happens next – and we know these characters already, so what they sing doesn't need to set them up for us but can move straight into their current predicament.

It can go horribly wrong. But sometimes, it can go so beautifully right.

Retellings

I love fairy and folk tale retellings, things that twist and turn familiar stories so that they become new or updated or offer new insights. Pamela Dean's Tam Lin retells the Tam Lin ballad at a small college and turns it into a campus novel with supernatural elements. Adele Geras's Egerton Hall trilogy, which I know I've mentioned before, blends the boarding school story with fairy tales, and transplants fantastical elements into the real world. This can make things more mundane, or it can work brilliantly – I think it does the latter in Geras's work, as does the Doc Marten boot in Siobhan Parkinson's Sisters… no way! Laurie Halse Anderson's Prom retells Cinderella in a nifty and realistic way, while Malinda Lo's Ash introduces a whole new mythical world to the familiar story.

Then there's Jane Yolen's stunning Briar Rose, or most of the adult works of Gregory Maguire. And numerous retellings from Francesca Lia Block, Emma Donoghue, Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, and last-but-not-least Roald Dahl.

Retellings are popular, whether it's fairy tale or myth – something familiar which nevertheless presents the opportunity for a unique slant on it.

But if you're doing this – where do you start making changes? Where do you stop? If you're explicitly invoking a particular story, what do you have to do in order to convince the reader of your version, particularly if it deviates significantly from the original? Do we find loose adaptations 'sloppy' or 'refreshing' – or does it depend on how well they're written? What expectations does it set up for the reader when they're viewing something as a 'modern version of' or a 'retelling of' something?

Of the retellings I've mentioned here, it's Lo's Ash that surprised me the most. Not because it's a 'lesbian Cinderella' (Donoghue's 'The Tale of the Shoe' does that and yet feels far closer to the familiar story) but because there's so much else in it. The prince is not especially important, and there's magic and history and a richness to the book that makes it in equal parts a fairy tale retelling and an original fantasy novel. Parkinson's Sisters… no way!, despite being set in 1990s Dublin, feels far closer to the original – there is a richness to its world, too, but there are key elements in place that seem to confirm that it's still basically the Cinderella we know and love (it has all the right characters, even if things are less black-and-white).

It can sometimes, in less skilful hands, feel like 'cheating' if it's set up as a version of something and then the rules change midway through. I don't think we necessarily need a Happily Ever After – but we need something consistent with the fairy tale or mythic elements we've selected and the way we've used them throughout.

Making A Book

Young readers tend to talk about 'making' books. 'Are you going to make another book?' 'Would you ever make a book about…?' This is often because they have an image of the author as the sole creator of the book – the one who not only writes the book, but prints the pages, binds them, designs the cover, etc.

Still. Does it help us to think about 'making' a book instead of 'writing' one? We understand that with 'making' there are often mistakes and bits that need to be thrown out. 'Making' sounds more practical somehow. More doable, maybe. Demystified. More about being lots of different activities instead of just 'writing', like planning and thinking and outlining and daydreaming and despairing.

It might be a better way to think about it.

Plus I'd stop gritting my teeth every time I hear the phrase. Because at the moment it just sounds wrong.

Excuses Vs Reasons

We hear it all the time: a writer writes.

(We hear it all the time because it's true. We don't yet have a consensus as to how often a writer writes, though. But most of us are fairly certain on this point: talking about all the great ideas you have or the special and unique way you see the world does not a writer make.)

But sometimes a writer doesn't write. I'm not talking about a day off – I'm talking about months off. Months of not-writing. Years, perhaps. Sometimes this is necessary – it might be editing-time, or idea-incubation time, things that are writing-related. Sometimes they're publishing-related, if promotion-time or paperwork-time is consuming them. There are things related to writing that mean that the actual putting-words-down-on-paper doesn't happen.

And then there's everything else. Our reasons for not writing, our too-busy too-stressed too-uninspired too-crazy too-sick reasons.

So I'm curious, because it's an immensely personal thing – for you, what's an excuse and what's a reason?

I don't have children. But from what I gather, the first two years of your child's life, particularly when one is a mother, leave your brain in a melted mess. It's not the case for everyone, I'm sure, but I've met a lot of women who've only really got back into their writing after that two-year mark.

I read a (locked) blog post recently about mental health and writing. And while it helps to be a little bit crazy as a writer, serious mental health issues (and what's 'serious' might be different for everyone) obviously impact on one's writing. Writing is sometimes used in a therapeutic way, of course, but that might be a different way of conceptualising it for someone who's been writing for other reasons.

The same goes for physical health, of course. Physical health issues are often, but not always, more visible than mental health issues, and we tend to accept them more as valid reasons for not accomplishing certain tasks. Both are distracting and draining – while some people find solace in writing, it's off the table for others.

Then there's bereavement, illness of someone close to you, being a caregiver, financial pressures requiring long work hours… lots of things to take away the headspace or the time for you to write.

But then there are excuses. And for some people, I know, some of the above things are to them excuses – they know their own limits and the way they work.

The number of excuses we make when we feel like we 'have' to do something, or we're unsure about where to start, are why bits of writing wisdom like 'If you want to write, you'll make the time' exist. They apply to lots of things – anything in life we want to pursue while also meeting the necessary demands of life.

We have to decide for ourselves what's an excuse and what's a reason – no one else is going to do it for us, or should. What are yours – and how do you decide?