Lessons of the Garden Party

I really enjoy old music. And when I say old, that usually means it was written before I was even a twinkle in my mother's eye. One of my favorites is Ricky Nelson's "Garden Party". The song talks about a concert he held that didn't go well at all. The song was his response to the criticism he received that night and afterwards. In the chorus, he teaches a valuable lesson:

But it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see you can't please ev'ryone so
You got to please yourself
(More lyrics: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/r/ri...)

Now sometimes we have to hit our heads into the brick wall to learn a lesson rather than learning it the easy way, like through song lyrics. Every now and again I feel like the queen of brick-wall-head-bashing. Let me give you an example.

When I was in high school I had a crush on this really great guy at church. (On the off chance that you are reading this, there are no hard feelings in the related story.) Just before he went on his mission, he made mention that he thought it was really neat that I was keeping my hair long and making it my "crowning glory" like the scriptures say. I'm sure you can guess what happened. For the next two years I avoided scissors like they were diseased. If I got split ends I trimmed only the very tips of my hair so it would stay long. As a result, when he came home my hair was so long that if I wasn't careful, I ended up sitting on it. My mother teased me that if I lived in New Zealand they would hire me as an elf extra for the Lord of the Rings movies. "That would be awesome!" I would reply with all the fervor of my teenaged heart. I had my ideas of what our first meeting would be like. Picture the sappiest, most awful romance you've ever seen and that's about what I envisioned. What happened was the total opposite. He came with his mom and the entire time looked at his shoes. I think he may have glanced up once in my direction. Now to be fair, when you're a missionary girls are strictly verboten, so I quickly forgave this unromantic first meeting. But subsequent meetings were much the same. And so a few months later after Halloween, when I had decided to be an elf for my dorm Halloween party, I decided to cut my hair. And not just a little bit. We're talking a twenty inch hack job. (And it really was a hack job since the hairdresser didn't listen to me tell her that my hair was wavy and unruly so needed to be cut at an angle, not a blunt cut straight across.) I continued on feeling smugly better about my little world and a little light-headed. I donated an eighteen-inch braid to Locks of Love and worked on finding a way to make my new 'do look decent. It was just long enough to pull back into a stubby ponytail which is what I did a week later for a regional Institute activity. To my surprise this young man was there. He saw me, smiled and then noticed that I was missing something.
"You cut your hair," he said, with the merest hint of disappointment in his voice.
"Oh, yeah, it was getting too long to do anything with," I lied (although it was too long and heavy to do a lot of the styles I liked so it wasn't a total lie). "Do you like it?"
A voice in my head chided, Really, Jessica? He tells you you have beautiful long hair, playing to your vanity perfectly. Then you chop it all off because he didn't ask you out and you ask if he likes it?
To his credit he smiled and said, "Yeah, it's cute."
While I bubbled over with girlish twitterpation because he said "cute" while referring to me, I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Liar!" In my bad haircut experiences, this was a solid number two. It would have been number one if not for the time when I was four and my best friend got her mother's sewing shears and told me we were going to play beauty shop. Never playing that game again!

But that night I learned the lesson "Garden Party" had been trying to teach me all those times it came on the radio. It had been silly of me to grow my hair out ridiculously long just because a guy said he liked it. Even if he was a really great guy! It had been even sillier to chop it off to spite him. The action hadn't hurt him at all. If anything it hurt me while I tried to figure out how to disguise the fact that the hairdresser hadn't known what she was doing. If I was going to grow it out, it should have been purely because I wanted to. If I was going to cut it, it should have been purely because I wanted to and I should have had it done in a way that I would truly like.

As a writer, I relearn this lesson a lot. I will never write a book that pleases everyone who reads it. I will always make mistakes. Despite reading and rereading and watching with an eagle eye, there will be typos and errors in my books. I had to giggle to myself the other night as I was reading The Titan's Curse to my son and saw a typo and realized that the pegasus from the previous book had suddenly changed gender. It was slightly gratifying to know that even a literary giant like Rick Riordan sometimes goofs.

When I submitted Finding Prince Charming to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest (because I'm a glutton for punishment), I asked a group of other authors to critique my pitch, hoping to get it fine-tuned and good enough to at least make the first round. The very first comment was an ad for Allegra allergy medication. Then it was a rampage on using the name Allegra. While a few well-meaning authors gave useful advice about my wording and ways to really make it stand out as an awesome pitch, 75% of the comments were about Allegra's name and the fact that I should change it or everyone would associate her with allergy medication. When I tried to point out that my readers thus far had not been confused, one commenter was so rude as to point out that they didn't count. The general audience would have difficulty separating the character from the medicine. Now, here's my problem with that. If the general audience would really have had this difficulty then surely at least one of my readers would have said, "Hey, isn't Allegra a medication?" I'm not best-selling by any stretch of the imagination, but I've reached a wide enough audience that I'm no longer just reaching my friends and family. Someone out there would have said something, right?

For a split second I thought about changing her name. It would be a lot of work because I'd have to mass edit not one manuscript but two since I had already introduced her in Charming Academy. I would also have to come up with some kind of explanation for why a main character's name had suddenly changed for my existing readership. I didn't know what I would replace it with because Allegra is kind of a special character. You see, usually when I'm writing, I develop the character's personality before I ever choose a name. I have an old, worn-out baby book and I search for a name that has meaning fitting to the character. But Allegra was the other way around. She came to me first as a name and then with all her personality traits. And Allegra fits her beautifully. She's lively, spunky and adventurous. In all of my writing she is one of two characters who came to me that way. The other is Lucian, her brother.

So hoping for a little reassurance, and some vindication, I went to my mom's house and before I even said hello asked, "Mom, when you hear 'Allegra', what do you think of?"
"Your books?" Mom replied. Loved that little bit of flattery, by the way.
"What else."
"It's a musical term isn't it?"
"Exactly!"
My brother heard me and came downstairs to be asked the same question.
"It sounds like allegro, the musical term for fast and spirited."
"Thank you!"
I told them my frustrations and when I stopped to breathe again my mother, wise woman that she is, asked, "Jessica, do you like her name?"
"I love her name! It fits her perfectly and she actually came with a name. I don't have a lot of characters who do that."
"Then why do you care what anyone else thinks? If you think her name should be Allegra, then leave it. It's a lovely name."

And once again the lesson of "Garden Party" was learned. Now as I'm working on the third book, I'm bracing myself for people to be disappointed. There will be elements that I'm sure will stir up some kind of discontent. The fairy tales I write aren't meant to be carbon copies of the ones you and I grew up reading. There will be differences, sometimes big ones. There will be things that make you think and question. My stories are just that, mine. And so I'm sticking with Ricky on this one.

But it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see you can't please ev'ryone so
You got to please yourself.