Robin Layne's Blog: From the Red, Read Robin - Posts Tagged "insanity"

I was more prepared Sunday, although I did forget the guidebook I had marked up with my plans for both days because I'd left it by the computer to refer to while writing my last entry. In a way, that was all for the best, because I had wanted a fresh map for the new day. After I got my hand stamped with the trademark red chair and lamp (free admission for either day you pay for a workshop), I sat down to plan my second day all over again. At the same table sat a woman writer with her young bookworm daughter. The woman was impressed that I marked the intended stages on my map with the time for each one (having been confused Saturday by my earlier technique of numbering the events in chronological order starting with 1), and I was impressed that she writes children's books about animals for National Geographic. I had brought along Vampire Kitty-Cat to read on the way there and back, relieved to finally be reading fiction again instead of my editing tomes. I recommended it to the woman's daughter.
Again, I missed the 10:00 starting time. They ought to blow a shofar or something. I only missed it by a couple minutes this time, but it was enough time that I again waited in line for the Open Write--not for long, though. I learned that you could write as many times as you wanted in the day, which is not what I had been told Saturday. I didn't have time to keep trying, although it would have been fun to go several times. I was, as the Blues Brothers say, on a mission from God: a mission to get as much as I could from the book fair as a writer and reader, and to make contact with potential employers and clients. Writers, editors, and students have to eat, too, and years of dedicating myself to my schooling as prices have risen and food stamps lowered have slimmed my pocketbook considerably.

My prompt this time was more helpful, and my fingers were surer on the small laptop keyboard. I made fewer mistakes and spent less time correcting them. I wrote a halfway decent little story, stopping ahead of my deadline because I heard someone else's timer ring and mistook it for mine. If I hadn't sent the story in when I did, and if I had thought about it a little more thoroughly, I would have perhaps mentioned the actual spell that brought the dragon into my life before it singed my hair off when I was trying to teach it to light my barbeque. But maybe that's better left unknown. After all, it was obviously a magic book I was reading, and those things can be dangerous.

I wasn't around the Attic Institute booth when they announced the winners, so I had to wait for the email to find out. I didn't really think mine was that original, but there was a category (I think they made it up for the writer) called "Best use of mythical beast." For a millisecond, I wondered if I had my claim to fame, but of course it wasn't me. After all, there was nothing incredibly unusual about my dragon.

From there, I sat watching a panel on a large stage, called "Twisting the Tale," about putting characters into horrible situations to create an exiting story. The subject could have been exiting in itself, and useful to a writer, but in my view it was but mildly interesting, and became less so the more it went on. The authors simply read from and talked about their books; I didn't get any specific tips about how to torture my own inner people. I did hear a thought-provoking quote from Kurt Anderson, author of True Believers: "Her belief in her own sanity was so strong, it led to insanity." This leads me to respond with a couple more quotes: "It has the ring of truth." --Gandolf, in Tolkien's The Hobbit. "Sanity is overrated." --that famous poet, Anon. How many of us label ourselves sane and a certain minority insane--and how often are the labels really accurate? Is anyone truly and fully sane? How do we define sanity?

I left my seat and walked up and down the exhibit hall, my envelope of resumes and business cards in hand. My painful shyness of the day before had fled. Saturday, at the end of the day, I had approached a friendly man from Minuteman Press who invited me to spin a wheel for a prize. Since he printed books for self-publishing authors, I'd chatted with him and asked him if he referred clients to editors. He said he did, and I gave him my resume and business card and chatted with him for some time. Now, I was amazed at how many publishers in this exhibit hall expressed an interest in my editing for them. I also signed up to do reviews for The Portland Book Review in exchange for free books.

At noon, I went to the panel on teen thrillers, featuring April Henry, author of The Night She Disappeared (based on a true story), Jeanne Ryan (pronounced Jeanie), author of Nerve, about a deadly online game of Dare, and Kimberly Derting, who writes the Body Finder series, about a girl who can find corpses and their killers by their "echoes" and "imprints," respectively.

The authors said that there used to be a big leap from books like Charlotte's Web and Nancy Drew to adult thrillers like Stephen King's--nothing less scary for teens to read. Elsewhere in Wordstock, it was expressed that this jump tends to be the habit of young male readers, anyway. One of the authors in this panel said she found psychological thrillers more frightening than horror because they could really happen. (I'll make a note to include plenty of things that could happen along with my fantastical themes; this goes hand-in-hand with my philosophy that the more realism I can include, the more easy it is to imagine the fantasy elements as true also.)

Why do these authors write their thrillers for young adults? They said it was their natural voice, they liked the pacing, and that teen experience is fresh, new, and always on the surface; a teen's best and worst day in life can be in the same hour. (Sounds to me as if teens are all bipolar--speaking of the fluid definitions of sanity.) Teen years are full of firsts: first kiss, first job, first day of high school . . . Writing (or reading) YA, you get to experience it all again. Teens also make enthusiastic fans. One author said they will come up to her and say theirs is the best book they have ever read . . . although she may find out later they never finished it.

Sorry I didn't sort out who said what here. I suppose I was more interested in the flow of the conversation and the information itself, since I am writing YA myself.

One of the authors said she wrote what she thought was an adult book, but because it had a teen protagonist, her agent said it was a teen novel.

But one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that some things can be too grisly for teens. The next matter is what not to include in YA books and why. They said that the books can teach but that learning should not be their main purpose. They should entertain. They should be pretty clean. A teacher was fired over some language in books. The author didn't want to make that happen to a teacher. The panel also said a YA book should not be a "problem novel," simply a book showing that a teen is not alone in being in a certain situation.

Publishers can grow looser in their standards as a series goes on. And teens like dark subjects. If they cannot find them in YA books, they will go to adult ones.

Tips for writers of teen thrillers and other books:
1. As I wrote in a special note to myself at the top of the page, when you leave one character on a cliffhanger, try to switch points of view to another character.
2. No matter how much you hear or read from and about other authors, there is no right or wrong way to write a book! This advice was so freeing to me, I wrote a big YES! in the margin.
3. For those who can afford it: I have heard more than one recommendation at this Wordstock of a computer program called Scribner. They said it's ideal for writing books. You can keep applicable photos, web pages, and index cards on the pages you are writing on and you can move them around.
4. If you can't get Scribner, you can cut out pictures from magazines that look like your characters. I have done this at times. It helps if you have some art ability of your own and can draw them, either from found pictures or from your own imagination. Then you can put those pictures up where you can refer to them and be consistent about their features.
5. Regarding research: If you are fortunate enough to get to North Carolina, you can take advantage of the Writer's Police Academy, started by a retired officer tired of writers making mistakes in their fiction. It sounded like a stupendous opportunity.
6. Also regarding research: Although Google is extremely useful for finding all kinds of facts, Phillip Margolin (who moderated the panel and also happened to speak at Willamette Writers this month)prefers to call and visit detectives and other professionals people in person. He finds that he or they will think of things he wouldn't have come up with otherwise. Margolin says these professionals love to help out.

The next panel I attended was "The Heart of the Matter," which according to the guidebook was concerned "compelling characters and stories . . . born from painful emotions and events in the author's life." It turned out that the panel didn't talk about writing fiction but memoirs. Although it was moving and empowering, I came away wishing I'd heard something about how to transfer my pain into fiction, and feeling slightly guilty that I'm not pursuing memoir. I could relate to the writing of a memoir book but not to the publishing of it. These writers pretty much said, Screw what your family thinks; you owe it to the world and yourself to open up and spill your darkest secrets and let others out there who have experienced similar abuses know they are not alone (yeah--the opposite of what the last panel said about "problem stories," it seems). I feel alone in that the things I most want to keep to myself are not among my sufferings but among my joys. I am considering letting my own memoir be read and possibly published posthumously (assuming the end of the world, so to speak, doesn't come first; dystopias was one of the themes at Wordstock this year, and I think it's an appropriate year to focus on them).

I felt a little guilty that I spend so much time writing fiction and letting the depths and heights of my experiences and emotions weave into them. I have fun skewing and exaggerating them beyond recognition and find catharsis in the midst of it. Why whine about victimization in my dysfunctional family and elsewhere in my life when I can take those experiences, add those of others I have met and read of, mix in a healthy dose of dark fantasy, and empower my characters to do things I could never do in my mundane life as a kind, gentle person? Wow, I've really turned this part of my report into a rant. This is not to say that anything I heard at said panel was invalid or unhelpful; it's just that it wasn't what I expected.

Since I find myself loving to write fiction more than nonfiction, I will talk about how fiction and fictional techniques figure into memoir.

Duff Brenna, who dealt with an abusive childhood by writing Murdering The Mom: A Memoir, ended up using three points of view, with third person limited and second person voices to vary the distance for himself and his readers. Jerry McGill, who was shot and paralyzed by a random stranger, had to invent his unknown attacker and give him a fictional history in Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me. Truth, as the panel pointed out, has multiple perspectives. I have even heard this concept applied to our Maker: "Mister God hasn't got a point of view--only endless viewing points," says the little girl in Mister God, This Is Anna.

The panelists explained the notable difference between memoir and autobiography: in memoir, if you can't remember something, you can make it up. In biography (auto or otherwise), you are obligated to get the dates and facts right. Getting dates right may be attainable, but who really knows the facts of even part of a life, much less years of a life? Although the moderator said she knew that children remember well what happens to them, at least one panelist said memory is fickle. (Here is a demonstration of it: I'm not sure who or how many of the three expressed that.)

Another important difference to note may be particularly of interest to memoir writers: Small independent presses will publish dark themes. Large commercial publishers want no dark material and they want all to be transformational. I find this to be a contrast to trade fiction. Here we are lifting up the dark themes in fiction with such writers as Stephen King and ignoring the who-was-its of the truth that inspires such fiction when they write what really happened to them. If you doubt that dark fiction comes from dark truth, try reading Stephen King's On Writing, which relates many of the horrors of the author's own experiences from young childhood on that prove what I read once in a Writer's Digest article. Whatever happens to you, no matter how bad, if you are a writer, "It's all copy." (Again, my fickle memory lacks an attribution.)

Just a little was said about a work of fiction, Yuknavitch's Dora, a Headcase (which Goodreads doesn't have in its database). The author said this teen book gets a lot of "adult hoodoo" trying to keep secret what the teens experience. Again, no "problem books." By all means, keep those who suffer from abuse and mental illness isolated! After all, we have met the enemy, and it is us, so let's imprison ourselves.

A little free dark sarcasm for you there.

The dark stories of real life are tales you "can't wrap up into happy little endings," one of the authors said, adding that a good movie, play, or book makes you feel sick at the end, not necessarily happy.

A note of hope for writers: Although celebrities sell a lot of copies of a book fast, lesser known authors sell their copies of a book longer. The two types of writers even each other out over time.

From there, I rushed to my workshop, "Starting a Series," by April Henry, and found it had already started. Some of what I heard I had already figured out on my own. For instance, the first item in my notes: make careful decisions with the first book.

Good news: Series (serieses?) sell very well, especially among teens, who get used to the whole setup the first book and then the series doesn't require as much of the reader. Adults like a series because they like the characters, which "seem like old friends." A series is no harder to sell than a stand-alone.

Every good series needs a hook, an overarching idea, but each book must not be the same. Each book must be whole and complete in itself, with a conflict and a resolution and some anticipation of what is to come. Writers, don't let people feel like they just walked in when they pick up a later book in the series. On the other hand, provide background information only when needed. Trilogies often have the flaw of the second book ending on a "downer."

A series is much more character-driven than a stand-alone book. Try using things you know well and have an inside scoop on to round out your main characters. You may want to write about two or three main characters and switch point of view. Note: I went to a meeting last night in which a writer said she was forced to re-write her mystery because a an agent or publisher told her there are no multiple points of view in her genre. Her genre is the same as April Henry's--mystery. I wanted to talk to her about Henry, but the acoustics in the room made it impossible for her to hear me from across the room, my foot was hurting for unknown reasons, and I was suffering from a bout of shyness and social awkwardness. Maybe it's better I didn't challenge the poor woman. At any rate, one point of view you wouldn't want to include in a mystery is the murderer's. Need I say we don't give away who done it? (That keeps my current work-in-progress from being in the mystery category; who done it is pretty clear early on; how to stop her from doing it is the problem.) To continue with my notes from the workshop: The characters should be bigger than real life. We already have real life. Make their lives more interesting and exciting than ours. Turn up whatever is the character's thing, their job, task, hobby, etc. Give your character a special area of expertise, and explore a new facit of it in each book. Give them bad habits readers can relate to, whether small-range or serious, that they are always trying to overcome. For instance, your character could have an alcohol problem that fluxtuates with each book.

Some flaws stay with a character forever; others are overcome. Perhaps the external problem is solved in one book while the harder, internal problems continue. The character could deal with a different problem each book. The characters must grow and change, with the main character most affected. A lot of life-changing things must happen. We want to read about people with a lot of trouble and problems--not like we want our own lives to be! She also said to make all the characters likable and important--although I wonder whether this is as true for villains as for heroes. There are, as you no doubt recognize, characters we love to hate. Perhaps if we really understood them we might like them to more or less of an extent, but fiction doesn't always allow us enough time to get to know them that well. If the same villain continues throughout a series, he may be sympathetic to the reader, though. One of my Goodreads friends suggests I strive to make a villain so sympathetic readers will root for him or her. I'm not sure whether I want to go that far, but I think I could strive for that with some of them, at least.

It is hard to avoid stereotypes. April Henry's suggestion is to break down stereotypes, mixing the traits up like a sectioned flip book. I can only hope I come to recognize stereotypes in the first place to that I can effectively mix their traits. Add the unusual, she said, and don't make characters too similar to one another.

Ask yourself what your characters love, what they are afraid of, and what they want. What do they struggle with, and what do they try to hide? Don't forget disabilities in the characters and their relations.

Oh, I see the suggestion about the magazine pictures was made in this workshop. You can also go to stores that match your characters' income level and pick out what they are likely to wear. I suggest taking pictures of them if the proprietors don't mind. You might even find otherwise expensive items in thrift stores and actually buy them. Yeah, I think cheap because I have to. I'm so glad my daughter isn't like my niece, who insisted on Dolphin brand shorts when they were the in thing; my daughter has always loved Goodwill, where you can find some of the coolest stuff for just a few dollars. I'm thinking of a few reasons why buying the clothes might be better than taking pictures of them: you can clearly see them from all angles; you can be familiar with the feel of the fabric; if they fit you, you can wear them and know what they feel like and look like when worn; if they don't fit you, perhaps you can find people they do fit who can act out the characters to help you write scenes, and to play out scenes as publicity gimmicks.

A new point of view in another book that has never been used in an earlier book can confuse readers. ("Uh-oh," I wrote in my notebook's margin; I have planned to write my second and third books partly using new POVs of some of my secondary characters, but as long as Book 1 already is, I can't go back and add those points of view--don't think I should, anyway, because it would make the story too complicated, especially for young adults. This is a rule I think I will bend, because I and others love some of my secondary characters and I think their POVs are aching to burst out. It helps that one of my POV characters in my first book reads some of another character's diary, which introduces her point of view a little. But I also want to bring new characters into the second book, and I feel I need the point of view of at least one of those to make the story work. I was thinking of introducing him through letters rather than the traditional POV narration.

Meyer Briggs and other online questionaires are good for characterization.

Unless you pick a specific year for your setting, try not to nail down time too much.

Consider stories that can go across several books. Leave some information fluid; you don't have to know everything in advance. You will have new ideas later. Don't save the good stuff for later. Use your good ideas now. You have a chance to get this first book book published. When you approach a publisher, she said not to try to sell on the series. Just try to sell the first book; with that in mind, write the ending on a strong note. My concern with this is that I would like my book cover to include the name of the series on it; I've even been working on a logo.

April Henry said to list things the character would never say, do, or think. Then find situations when they have to do these things. I guess writers have to be cruel to their darling characters. Henry says to make their lives as bad as possible for as long as possible; it makes reading more interesting.

Of course, we writers also have to figure out how to get our characters out of these scrapes so that they survive into the next book. Or do we? Shall we let them continue as vampires, zombies, angels, saints? Depends on the genre, I'd say. Probably best not to suddenly turn a standard mystery series into a paranormal one.

Because the workshop let out at 4:15, I was late for the next event on the Tri-Met YA stage, which had also switched topics with the one meant to come after it. I listened to David Levithan read a little from his novel, Every Day, about a boy who wakes up in a different body each day. My memory fails me at that point (did someone else take over my body for a while?); all I know is that Wordstock was soon to end and I had more tables to visit in the exhibit hall. I do remember while canvassing the place that I noticed I was too late for the beginning of "New Trends in Teen Paranormal." I figured it was more important to find work than find out what was being published now, because it's useless to follow or predict trends, and what does the knowledge of what is already being published really do for you, anyway? Even though I still didn't visit every possible market for my editing and writing in the hall, I came out confident, and I found a good magazine I might contribute to and make good money. It's a literary magazine for parents, called Stealing Time. They pay on acceptance, which is a good thing.

So much more I could have enjoyed. So much more I could say about the books I learned about. But that is enough for me to say. I can't blog my whole life away. Poor novel is being neglected, among other things.

Happy reading, happy writing! And enjoy your life as well!