new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: behind the book, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 29
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: behind the book in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Megan Morrison and I met in 2003, via our mutual friend Melissa Anelli of the Harry Potter fan site The Leaky Cauldron, and I read an early draft of
Grounded in 2004. I liked its characters and action a lot -- Rapunzel descending from her tower against her will, and traveling across the land of Tyme with a thief named Jack -- but to my eye, it didn't have enough emotional and world-building depth to elevate it from "cute and smart" to "real and meaningful," and I thought Meg could do more with it. So I told her that, in a three-page editorial letter, and offered to look at a revision when she was ready.
I did not think at the time--and nor did Meg--that this readiness would take eight years. But when she contacted me about the ms. again in 2012, she said that she had rewritten the book, "revised the rewrite, plotted the entire series in detail from back to front, and then revised it again. . . . Though the plot sounds similar to what it was, the book is very different, with a cast of characters who are fully realized and motivated, including the peripheral characters, who don't come to the fore until later books in the series. I love it and believe in it." I had never forgotten
Grounded--and in fact had been hoping for this e-mail for eight years--so I asked to see it again.
And this time, I loved it and believed in it too, as Meg was 100% right in her estimation of her revised novel. I adore fairy tales in part because the transformations they contain speak to some of our deepest human stories and relationships, and my favorite retellings round out those transformations with complex psychology and world-building, while honoring the readerly pleasures of wonder or romance or connection at their heart. The new
Grounded kept all the charm of Rapunzel and Jack's banter and the cleverness of the land of Tyme, whose history, geography, and even the resulting economics and sociology have all been fully thought through. But it achieved the reality and deeper meaning I'd been hoping for, thanks to Rapunzel's complex relationship with her Witch, whom she truly loves, and who has good reason to keep her in the tower; and Rapunzel's own process of growing up, finding out hard truths, and yet moving forward into wholeness. The book made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me intensely happy as a reader; and since it came out earlier this month, both Meg and I have been delighted by its critical reception -- including two starred reviews! -- which has praised both its many pleasures and that emotional depth. (It's also an
Amazon.com Best Book of the Month for May.) Publishing it has reminded me yet again: Good things come to editors who wait.
Four more notes, before I share Meg's Five Questions:
- You can actually see a rare scene of the editor and author at work, sort of, in Melissa Anelli's Harry, A History. Page 79 documents a writing weekend among the three of us that took place at my apartment, where Meg was working on Grounded, Melissa was writing for the Leaky Cauldron, and I was editing A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth Bunce, another great fairy-tale retelling. (And also making pancakes.)
- This entire series of five-question posts was actually inspired by Meg herself, as she's written "Five Reasons to Read _________" posts like this one on her blog for years.
- Meg wrote about her side of this story at Literary Rambles and in this interview, which also reflects on her experience as a Harry Potter fan and a fanfiction author.
- And Meg and her friend Kristin Brown, who's a professional geographer, talk about their collaboration in creating "plausible geography" for Tyme in this fascinating interview.
Five Questions for Megan Morrison
1. Tell us a little bit about your book.
It’s the story of Rapunzel – the hair, the tower, the witch – except that my Rapunzel loves her tower and doesn’t want to leave it. She has everything she wants and thinks she is the luckiest person in the world. Until things go wrong, and she learns otherwise.
2. If this book had a theme song and/or a spirit animal, what would it be and why?
If I were to choose just one song, it would have to be “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell). This is Witch’s promise to Rapunzel: that she will allow nothing to divide them – that she’ll rescue her from anything. It’s a very different song at the beginning of the book than it is at the end.
3. Please name and elaborate upon at least one thing you learned or discovered about writing in the course of creating this book.
Sometimes, the idea for a story will come before the writer is ready to meet it. That doesn’t mean that the writer should stop writing or give up on the idea, but it means that the story won’t mature until the writer does. I had the idea for Grounded long before I was equipped to write it well. Life experiences – in particular becoming a mother and a teacher – were necessary. Not that those particular experiences are prerequisites for writing. Far from it. They were just necessary for me. They changed me in big, important ways, and strengthened me as both a storyteller and as a professional. My work ethic and my openness to criticism are vastly improved over what they were ten years ago. I have hardened and mellowed both, in the ways that I needed to.
4. What is your favorite scene in the book?
Rapunzel’s conversation with Witch at the end.
That’s a hard question, though. Whenever Rapunzel and Jack are talking to each other, I am delighted.
5. What are you working on now?
The second book in the Tyme series! A different fairy tale, set in the same world. Many characters who appear in Grounded will show up again.
(The first in a new series of brief interviews with authors of forthcoming books)
1. Tell us a little bit about your book.
Burning Nation is the second book in the Divided We Fall trilogy. It continues the story of seventeen-year-old Idaho Army National Guardsman PFC Danny Wright and his friends as they are stuck in the middle of a tense stand-off between the state of Idaho and the federal government of the United States. In the first book,
Divided We Fall, Idaho has voted to nullify the Federal Identification Card Act. When Danny’s National Guard unit is sent to quell a protest/riot resulting from this nullification, he accidentally fires his rifle, which causes other people to shoot, leaving twelve dead and nine wounded. The president demands an investigation and prosecution. The governor of Idaho refuses to cooperate, saying that he gave a lawful order to the National Guardsmen under his command.
Burning Nation begins right where the first book left off, with the president sending the military to force Idaho to comply with federal law. Right from the beginning, Danny and his friends are caught up in the fight, but as the country descends into the chaos of the Second American Civil War, losses begin to take their toll. It becomes hard to understand what has been won, but easy to see what’s been lost. As the sacrifices mount and betrayals abound, Danny and his friends begin to think about the wounds they’ve suffered, inside and out.
It’s an action-packed book that continues to explore what happens when America’s current political divide widens into tomorrow’s nightmare, and it’s alarming how many real-life headlines seem to have been predicted by
Divided We Fall and
Burning Nation.
2. If this book had a theme song, what would it be and why?
Ten years ago, when my fellow soldiers and I were serving in Farah Province in Afghanistan, we were struck by how much the landscape resembled that featured in the movie
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. That movie features a song by Tina Turner called "We Don’t Need Another Hero." My fellow soldiers would joke about this song, with one man saying, “We don’t need another hero” and another replying, “We don’t even know the way home.” The video is a bit dated and cheesy, but if you listen to the words, the song really fits as a commentary on the brutality and waste of war that is very appropriate for
Burning Nation.
3. Please name and elaborate upon at least one thing you learned or discovered about writing in the course of creating this book.When I began work on
Burning Nation, I was under the naive assumption that writing the book would be easier because I had already finished
Divided We Fall. I knew the characters, the setting, and at least the situation that led to the events in
Burning Nation. I should have known that
Burning Nation would be as significant if not a greater challenge than the first book. One of the challenges came from the situation the characters face. Throughout most of
Burning Nation Danny and his friends must endure a federal military occupation of their small northern Idaho town. With U.S. soldiers hunting for them all the time, their movements, and thus my options for the kinds of scenes I could include, felt rather limited. I began to feel almost as claustrophobic as Danny and his fellow soldiers.
Another challenge with writing
Burning Nation was that it was the second part of a story that already had its first part on the market. I was facing a situation that was new to me, that of having public feedback on characters and other aspects of the larger Divided We Fall story, while I was writing that story’s second installment. It felt like having many, sometimes too many, advisors in my office with me while I worked. Cheryl was wise, as she usually is, when she encouraged me to stop looking at reviews and reader comments as I worked on
Burning Nation.
4. What is your favorite scene in the book?
I’m really quite happy with a lot of the scenes in
Burning Nation, so I’m going to cheat and list two. First, since
Burning Nation isn’t merely an action/war book, but is a piece which, I hope, encourages the reader to think about the terrible nature of war and its effects on those who live through it, I’d like to point out a scene that happens after Danny Wright has been through terrible physical and emotional torture. He is out of his mind from sleep deprivation and other torments, and when his one-time rival TJ bursts into his cell to rescue him, Danny isn’t sure if what is happening is even real. He’s confused and kind of cries, “Travis?” Travis Jones realizes that Danny is seriously messed up and it’s going to be harder to rescue him than he and his friends supposed. It’s a small moment, but I hope there’s a lot of emotion in that simple question, that exhausted and near-breaking-point, “Travis?”
And since I love some good action, I’m also quite happy with a hand-to-hand fight scene near the end of the book. It’s a fight between Danny and a U.S. Army major, a desperate fight to the death where Danny has to make an important decision about how deep into the war he’s willing to go, and how much of himself he wants to save. In addition to the moral question the fight raises, I just think it’s a clear scene, a tense and suspenseful fight. And the conclusion of the scene is really quite chilling.
5. What are you working on now?I am hard at work on the third book in the Divided We Fall trilogy, entitled
The Last Full Measure. The story follows America’s further final decline into a terrible civil war, and the difficult consequences this has for Danny Wright and his friends. I’m having lots of fun working on it, and it’s on schedule for a 2016 release.
For more about this book, including an excerpt, reviews, and purchase information, visit the Burning Nation page on the Arthur A. Levine Books website.
Guess what? Those two things in my subject line are one and the same thing! We have a new episode of the Narrative Breakdown up, which also happens to be a recording of a panel I mentioned many moons ago: me, fellow editor and publisher Stacy Whitman, and our authors Eric Gansworth and Joseph Bruchac, respectively, discussing their books If I Ever Get Out of Here and Killer of Enemies, respectively. It was a really great, meaty, interesting conversation (IMO) about how Stacy and I came to edit these books, editor-author relationships in general, writing YA, privilege, and cross-cultural publishing. And now you can see a writeup of it from Publishers Weekly at this link, and listen to the full recording here. Thanks for checking it out!
PSA for Writers: Even if you usually skip the Q&As on this blog, you should read this one, particularly what Trent has to say about the Bechard Factor below.
Tell us the origin story and history of Stealing Air. Stealing Air is a story I have been working with on and off for about twenty years. It began as a very short and simple story that was my response to a sixth grade English class assignment. Our challenge was to write any story we wished about "Freaky Frankie," this cartoonish Frankenstein's monster we were shown. I knew all the other kids would come up with scary or Halloween stories, so I wanted to write something different. I wrote a piece called "Flyboys," in which Frankie was just a tough guy who picked on three boys whose passion was building a tiny skateboard-mounted airplane that two of the boys hoped to fly around on. "Flyboys" was a big hit, and I was asked to read it at a sixth grade Halloween party.
I never let go of the core idea for that story, and sometime in my early twenties, I expanded "Flyboys" into a novel-length manuscript. In the novel version, I developed the skateboard-based airplane, added a neat friendship dynamic, and gave the protagonist a romantic interest. I had high hopes that this would be my first published novel.
However, when I was sent to Afghanistan with the Iowa Army National Guard in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, all of my plans changed. I became fascinated by the country I had been sent to help reconstruct, and I made a vow in my heart to one particularly inspiring Afghan girl, promising I would do all I could to tell her story. Thus, instead of
Flyboys, the adventure story of three sixth-grade boys from Iowa who become friends while building a plane in a secret workshop, my first published novel was
Words in the Dust, the story of a young Afghan girl who struggles to find peace and lasting meaning in post-Taliban, Afghanistan.
Writing
Words in the Dust was a very serious, emotionally demanding process, and so when I set out to write my second novel, I needed something more light-hearted and adventurous.
Flyboys was just the right story. However, reading that old novel-length story after all I had learned at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and after what I’d learned working with you, I realized
Flyboys would need to be completely rewritten. Most of the plot and characters remained the same, but the resulting novel
Stealing Air is incredibly different, a lot better than its prototype stories.
How was writing your second novel both different from and similar to writing your first?The process of getting a novel published can be very difficult and usually requires a lot of work. In my long journey to publication, I felt ready for the extensive revisions I would have to do to prepare my first novel
Words in the Dust for submission to publishers. There are many magazine articles and blog posts about this.
What the articles and blogs did not prepare me for was the awesome amount of work in revision that takes place after signing the book contract. The course of revisions and copy edits was exhausting but exhilarating. When it was over and
Words in the Dust was a real book on the shelf, I was pleased with the result, knowing I had done my very best with that novel.
In life we often have the tendency to look at the past with a filter that can remove from our immediate memory a lot of the difficulties and hardships we faced in a given time. This filter enables some people to long for the “good old days” of high school which can be remembered with fondness, as long as they don’t think about all the old social pressures and tedious homework assignments.
I think to a certain extent, I was looking back on my first novel experience with a similar filter. I dove into writing and revising
Stealing Air with the idea that I was a more experienced writer, thinking that the process should be smoother and easier. What I learned is that, for me at least, every new novel presents its own unique complications. It’s like starting over. And how wonderful is that? I loved the challenge of writing and revising
Words in the Dust. After the initial sense of surprise and frustration in dealing with
Stealing Air’s issues, I eventually embraced my chance to relive the “good old days” of preparing another novel for publication.
Who were your best friends when you were in sixth grade? What was the worst trouble you ever got up to together?I love that quote from the old film
Stand By Me: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve...does anyone?”
I’ve been blessed in my life with many great friends, so I don’t want to say that the peak of my friendships was in the sixth grade, but it was a special kind of friendship in fifth and sixth grade. Maybe it was because hanging out with the guys in those days was so new. For the first time, we didn’t need our parents looking over our shoulders so much. Everything felt very new and full of potential.
We’d head out of town on the old abandoned railroad tracks, and find our own world away from adult influence, at the Runaway Bridge, this limestone railroad bridge that crossed a little creek. There we would mess around, trying with little success to avoid falling into the water and mud. Unfortunately, this bridge has since been destroyed, but I keep a piece of its limestone on my bookshelf as a reminder of those times.
We never found ourselves in too much trouble, but I remember sometime around sixth grade, I was staying overnight at my friend Tim’s house. We always thought it was fun to sneak out after his parents had gone to sleep. I don’t know why this seemed like such an adventure. In a little farm town with just over 1,300 people, there wasn’t much to do late at night. I know that for some reason we were terrified of being caught by Dysart’s lone police officer. On one night we had sneaked out with illegal fireworks, a few “black cats,” and planned to set them off at different places around town. It was a breezy night, so we had trouble getting the fuse to light. Our bright idea was to simply shorten the fuse. As a result, the thing went off before we had our chance to make a getaway. It was a tiny little pop, really, but we were sure everyone in town had heard it, and that the cop was on his way. We sprinted away from the scene of our crime, running through the dark and crossing a street by the elementary school.
From behind me, I heard the sound of a traffic sign rattling as if Tim had slapped it while running past. I turned and hissed at him to keep the noise down, but he was no longer following me. I went back, and found him lying in a fetal position on the pavement. As I whispered frantically, trying to get him to get up and run so that we could avoid capture, he just let out the pained, sickening groan that all boys come to understand at least once in their lives. “I racked myself,” he said. Tim had hit the sign pole at a dead sprint, the steel crushing him all the way down to where it filled his whole body with a guy’s cold dull paralyzing pain. After a while, I managed to get him back on his feet so that we could go back to his house, but for the rest of the night he kind of just stared off into space, not the same guy.
Plot, character, stakes, voice, theme, setting . . . What aspect of the novel did you struggle most with, and how was that resolved? Which one came most easily on this book?One big advantage I had with
Stealing Air is that after so many years, I was very familiar with the characters and the settings, having lived in Riverside, Iowa for nine years, and small Iowa towns like it for my whole life.
The biggest challenge was in determining what was at stake for the characters. My initial draft simply accepted that Brian and Alex would want to get their airplane flying simply because flying is so cool. That may be true, and it may be the way Brian, Alex, and Max would all really feel, but story reality is a bit different from real reality, and you helped me understand that for the reader to care about whether or not the boys could make their plane fly, there had to be serious consequences or rewards for success or failure.
We tried several different options before centering the stakes on the Plastisteel plane being the key to saving Brian’s and Max’s parents’ company. This worked out great, because it required that I keep bringing back Mrs. Douglas, a surprise character who hadn’t appeared in earlier versions of the book. I love that character, and my only regret with Mrs. Douglas is that I couldn’t figure out how to bring her into the book even more.
You and I talked a lot about what you call “the Bechard Factor” on this book. Could you describe that for me and how it played out here? 
I had the honor of working under the guidance of author Margaret Bechard in my final semester at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, while I revised
Words in the Dust. In that novel, a character named Meena befriends the protagonist Zulaikha, teaching the girl to read and write, introducing her to classic Persian poetry.
In early drafts, Meena had no name, was blind, and lived in a cave. Margaret asked me why she had to live in a cave. Why was she blind? Why did she not even have pencil and paper for Zulaikha to use in her lessons? I explained that the woman was old and her sight had just gone, that she lived in a cave because her house had been destroyed in the war.
Margaret Bechard patiently explained that she wasn’t asking me what fictional circumstances within the story made the nameless blind woman live in a cave, but that she wanted to know
why I had chosen to make this character be this way? What did the story gain by my making the character that way? She was asking me to consider how the story would be affected if the woman was very different.
I eventually named the woman after the Afghan feminist martyr Meena, letting Meena live in the back of her own sewing shop. This improved believability and made it much easier for me to get Zulaikha away from her house for her lessons. It was, however, difficult to make those changes, to look at the plot and characters from outside the story, to break away from the way the story was first written and revise for the best effect. The difficulty of the act of looking at the story from the outside to consider radical changes from early drafts is what I have dubbed the “Bechard Factor.”
Stealing Air had been with me a lot longer than
Words in the Dust. By the time I began revising it, I had been kicking around the original draft of the novel in my head for a decade. So when Cheryl asked me why Brian wants to fly this experimental plane, why Brian wanted to make friends so much, and why Brian’s family had even moved to Riverside, Iowa, I struggled to find answers. The answers had been so self evident in the story as it had been for so long that it was a challenge, once again, to step outside of the story and consider new possibilities.
Stealing Air is far richer after overcoming the Bechard Factor. In the original version, Brian moves to Riverside with his mother after his father has abandoned his family. Reasoning that such abandonment would be too emotionally heavy, I changed it so that the family moved to Riverside after Brian’s father lost his job. But then the father was too depressed. Finally, when I needed another reason for Brian needing to fly the experimental plane, it was decided that Brian’s father moved to Riverside to start a company with Max’s mother. That was a breakthrough change that really brought a lot of elements together very nicely.
If you could own any plane, what would it be? And what’s your favorite skateboard trick? There are a lot of planes I would love to try out, but if I could own one, I think I would absolutely love the world’s smallest twin-engine airplane, the low-winged Colomban Cri-Cri:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knb3qNq-UhoI really admire people like Brian who can pull off amazing skateboard tricks. When I was younger, I had a cheap skateboard that I bought secondhand. I would mostly challenge myself to downhill runs where the skateboard would be zipping down a steep hill very fast. Fortunately, I lived in Iowa where the hills aren’t too extreme. There are hills and mountains where I live now in Spokane, Washington that are tricky in a car. I would never attempt them on a skateboard. There are a lot of skateboard tricks I would never attempt, but I think the people who do are kind of like superheroes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_1Y8UoLIu4 Check out Trent's website for more on Stealing Air, Words in the Dust, and his videos and media!
A few weeks ago, I posted a request for the good people of the Pacific Northwest to come out and support Stephanie Trimberger at her book signing for The Ruby Heart. Said people responded in force, and you can see Stephanie, her father, Arthur, and footage from the event in this wonderful MSN.com video here. Have Kleenex at the ready:
"Harry Potter" editors make dream come true
Two and a half years ago, I received a few sample chapters of an unsolicited manuscript that made me laugh out loud from the very first page, so I immediately wrote to the author and asked her to send me the whole thing. It was called
The Encyclopedia of Me, and it was the brilliant story of twelve-year-old Tink Aaron-Martin. When Tink gets grounded, she decides to use the time to write an encyclopedia of her life, encompassing her family, with two loving parents and two older brothers, Lex and Seb (the latter of whom is autistic); her hairless cat, Hortense; her fickle best friend, Freddie Blue Anderson
; and, as the summer unfolds, a new interest in skateboarding and an equal interest in the blue-haired skateboarding boy next door, Kai (whom the much more assertive Freddie Blue just might like as well). The manuscript at that time alternated portions of the encyclopedia with straight-narrative sections. I loved the format, but what I loved even more was the voice, which was capable of hilarious observations like this one:
Seb frequently smells as bad as Lex, but different. This is mostly because he staunchly refuses to shower more than three times in a week. If you are ever not sure which twin you are dealing with, breathe deeply. If your senses are kickboxed into an eye-watering stupor by the stinging stench of cheap cologne, it’s Lex. If they curl up and die due to the overwhelmingly hideous moldy pong of sweat, combined with the antiseptic, lemony zing of hand sanitizer, it’s Seb. Easy, see?
But Tink's voice was also capable of great sensitivity and thoughtfulness, in contemplating Freddie Blue's behavior or her favorite tree. All the characters felt as rich and flawed and warm and complicated as many real people I know. Tink is biracial, but it's simply a fact of who she is, not the source of any angst (beyond an inability to get her hair to behave). And Karen fully dramatized some great set-piece scenes, like the one where Freddie Blue, Tink, and Kai try to spend the night in a department store. A terrific voice, wonderful characters, the ability to execute some great scenes, genuine emotion, and that aforementioned laugh-out-loud humor all made me fall in love with the book, and I signed it up as soon as I could.
Over the next year and a half, Karen and I worked together to absorb the narrative sections into the encyclopedia entries and turn the entire book into an encyclopedia, with the plot unfolding alphabetically from A-Z. This involved (nobody who knows me will be shocked to hear) a lot of outlines at first, as Karen cataloged all her plot events and encyclopedia entries and mapped them onto each other; and then a lot of cutting and adding, tweaking and refining right up through the proofreading stages, as we juggled entries, photos, and footnotes in within our allotted 256 pages. But the book remained both intensely emotional and very funny -- a perfect tween-girl smart read, and equally great for fans of YA writers like E. Lockhart or Jaclyn Moriarty. Recently I asked Karen some questions about herself and the book.
First things first: What would your own encyclopedia entry look like?
Rivers, Karen (June 12, 1970 - forever). (Karen prefers not to die.) Author of many wonderful novels for children, teenagers, and adults. Born in British Columbia, Canada, she went to college for ages and ages and studied a little bit of almost anything, having contemplated at various different times careers in theatre, journalism, law, and medicine. Then she worked at the phone company and some equally scary places before becoming a writer full-time. She has always loved giant sets of encyclopedias because they contain all knowledge! (As well as for their beautiful gold-edged pages, of course.) She has two splendid children who never fight or spill things, and a dog who -- if properly inspired by a squirrel -- can actually climb trees. (Only one of those statements is not 100% true.) She can usually be found walking slowly up or down the mountain behind her house, thinking things or taking photographs, or -- on a good day -- both.
Which came first with The Encyclopedia of Me, the story or the format? How did the other one follow?
I think the story came first, or rather, the character. At the time that I started to write this book, I think my kids were just babies. My older son, my stepson, is autistic. And at the time, his autism was really consuming our lives. Most of our waking hours were spent dealing with certain situations, supporting him, or talking about his autism and how we were going to deal in the longer term. One of the things we talked about was what it would be like for siblings to have an older brother for whom different rules applied. That was basically the germ of the idea of the story, simply that it would be the sibling's story and the autism would merely be on the periphery and normalized because that would be all the sibling would ever have known. It was so much in my consciousness, in a way I think it was my way of trying-on-for-size what that might be like.
When I began to write, Tink originally was going to read the entire set of encyclopedias, inspired by A.J. Jacobs's The Know-It-All. As I wrote, it seemed implausible that she would get past the first As (I started reading them again myself and was struggling by the third entry), so she started to make up her own. It evolved from there. I know people roll their eyes when author's say "It wrote itself!" But in this case, the format decided itself and it was something of an accident. Originally, it was straight narrative with the entries scattered throughout, but then we decided to take a stab at making the whole book fit the format. In addition to working well with the story (I think!), it was also fun and challenging to write. Sometimes it even felt impossible.
This is going to sound as crazy as the "It wrote itself!" comment, but I will say that it's much more satisfying to write a book that's really really hard to write, from a technical standpoint. It makes me understand, on a completely different level, why people climb Everest for fun. Having successfully done it once, I have all kinds of ideas for other novels structured like specifically formatted books, such as cook books and etiquette books and ... the possibilities are limitless!
What attracts you to encyclopedias?
The idea that a book holds all the answers. Of course, now I'm grown up, I understand that knowledge changes and evolves, and looking at old encyclopedias, you realize they are full of things that we subsequently now know more/differently/better. But as a child, they were flat-out the answer to everything. I think Wikipedia is similarly attractive now, but it isn't quite the same. You don't randomly flip through Wikipedia while lying on the hall carpet on an endlessly long summer day, discovering things about Sri Lanka or the endocrine system that you never knew. The magic of random discovery has pretty much been lost with the loss of print encyclopedias, which makes me sad. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't currently HAVE a set of encyclopedias, but I wish that I did. I'm slightly hoarder-like and collector-inclined, I think I would like to have sets from various different decades, just to play compare-and-contrast with them (I have dictionaries and etiquette books and medical books across decades, which are lots of fun). But I live in the world's smallest house! So that might not work.
What sort of challenges did you face in working the story into an alphabetical, encyclopedic form?
There was a very real risk that the plot was going to be compromised by trying to force it into a mold. Making the story flow was incredibly tricky (as you know!). The last thing we wanted was for anyone to read the book and be conscious of the manipulation of the plot to fit the alphabet, so we made a real effort to simply tell the story as a straight narrative that incidentally was displayed in alphabetical order.
Describe your favorite writing space and time.
I love to write during the day because it's a novelty. For the last seven years, most of my writing has been done at night on a laptop in bed (for warmth), after the kids are asleep. I've seen more of 3 a.m. than I'd like to have seen! Now my kids are in school full time and I can sit (!) at the dining room table and write while actually properly awake. It remains to be seen if this improves the quality of my work.
What novels were the biggest influence on you when you were a young reader? And what encyclopedia did you grow up using?
I read so voraciously as a child and a young adult that isolating books now to say they were more or less influential than any others feels like I'd be contriving an answer to fit what I feel an author should say, as opposed to the truth. The truth was I read everything, absolutely everything that I had access to, in massive volumes. We did not watch TV (or at least the TV we had had a blown picture tube, so we could only watch about 30 minutes a day before the tube gave up, and it involved using pliers and getting electrical shocks to turn it on). We read. I read between seven and ten books per week for most of my childhood/teen years.
When I say we read everything, I really mean it. My mum was briefly in a Danielle Steele phase, and I read those as eagerly as I read Little Women or A Wrinkle in Time or Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. Or Flowers in the Attic, for that matter. My dad read mostly books about war and tall ships, so I have this absurdly detailed understanding of tall ships based on reading the Horatio Hornblower series repeatedly. There was never really a distinction made between "adult" books and "kid" books in my family; nor was there any fuss made about genre fiction vs. literary fiction. They belonged to Book Of The Month club, which I don't think exists anymore, but involved getting condensed versions of popular books in a bound volume every month. We loved those. It's impossible not to be influenced by everything you read; whether it's good or bad, there is something you can take away from it. I suppose it's only a matter of time before I write a tear-jerking romance that is set on a brigantine.
As an adult looking back, I'd say if I wanted to be inspired by anyone's career, I'd pick Judy Blume. She really perfected the whole "You are going to be OK" genre of realist YA. Madeleine L'Engle I think redefined the parameters of middle-grade fiction, blurring lines of fantasy and reality, and I love her for that. I love everyone who tried something new or different and just really went for it, both back then and now.
You’ve written a number of novels about this preteen/early teen stage of life, and especially the family/friends/young romance conflicts that I think are the bread-and-butter of older middle-grade. What attracts you to writing about this time period? Was it a significant time in your own life?
I learned a while ago (after I was already writing YA) that a person's frontal lobe doesn't fully develop until they are in their early twenties. I'm paraphrasing (and possibly mis-remembering), so don't quote me on this, but I believe the gist of it was that until the frontal lobe finishes developing, people are actually biologically unable to view the world in a not-entirely-egocentric way. The idea that people (and characters) are limited by this brain development to seeing the world in this utterly up-close way at all times is fascinating to me. It explains why I can remember with 100% clarity, things that happened to me, who I had a crush on, what I wore, and how I felt when I was young, but I have only vague recall of what I said or did or wore in the intervening decades. The intensity of that stage of life is what draws me to it again and again. The first time you feel something, it's so powerful. Kids are figuring out who they are, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, except more like a Choose-Your-Own-Character. The possibilities are endless, which makes teen and pre-teen characters so much fun (and so endlessly interesting) to write.
As a teen/pre-teen, I never felt quite comfortable in my own skin. Now, when I talk to the kids who I perceived as problem-free and popular and perfect, I find out that they struggled with similar feelings. Who knew? It seems as though everyone always feels like they are slightly on the outside, looking in. In a way, I want to send a missive to my younger self that effectively says, "Look! Everyone else feels the same way! You are going to be OK!" Except maybe now I can send the bulletin to my readers: You ARE going to be OK. I promise.
Links:Giveaway! Even though the hardcover is now in stores, I have a few ARCs of this still lurking around my office, and I'd be delighted to see them go to good homes. Your challenge: Write a brief encyclopedia entry either for yourself or for the main character of your work-in-progress, and post it either in the comments below or on your own blog/journal/Facebook. (If you do it on your own website, please leave a link here.) I'll decide a winner by the 15th. Thanks!
Earlier this month,
Francisco X. Stork's much-acclaimed
Marcelo in the Real World came out in paperback. Francisco and I are working on our third book together (after
Marcelo and
The Last Summer of the Death Warriors), but I had never actually hosted him for a Q&A here, so I asked him to answer a few questions for me, and he was kind enough to agree.
Could you tell us a little bit about how Marcelo came to be? Marcelo had a long journey before it came to be in its final form. The first version I wrote was not about Marcelo but about his mother, Aurora. In this story, Aurora enters Marcelo’s room a year after his death and discovers his journals. The journals reveal a very special young man. It was when transcribing the journals of Marcelo that his voice became very powerful. It was as if Marcelo was urging me to write his story. So I wrote about him, a book that I initially intended as an adult book. It had Marcelo traveling to Mexico in search of Ixtel, the young woman whose picture he discovers in his father’s files.
Faye Bender, my agent, sent this version to adult publishers without success. I then decided to rewrite some of it and we sent it to young adult publishers and this is how the version you got came across your desk. As you know, there were major revisions after you accepted it. The trip to Mexico was canned. The story became more “local.” I think that with your help, I rewrote about sixty percent of the book.
[CK note: For my own account of the editorial process,
click here.
]The other thing I want to mention is that I never set out to write a book about a young man with Asperger’s syndrome. I created Marcelo, paying attention to the voice that was presented to me, and only later discovered that someone like him would probably be diagnosed with something. It was then that I connected him to Asperger’s syndrome.
Has there been a pattern to where your books begin for you? That is, do they usually begin with a philosophical idea to explore, or the characters, or the situation – or is it different with every book? Once you have the initial seed, whatever it is, where do you go from there? It is very difficult to tell just exactly how the seed for a novel is planted or where the seed comes from. It’s a combination of philosophical idea and voice. In
Marcelo, for example, I asked myself what would happen if a very innocent, saintly young man discovered a file that would show him the evil and suffering of the world. Once I started playing with this idea, Marcelo’s unique voice came into being. Then the philosophical idea was put aside and the character and the story took over. In the case of
Death Warriors, I asked myself what would happen if I put together two very different young men, one who was very down-to-earth, practical and consumed by revenge, and the other, idealistic, philosophical and also gravely ill. Then the voices of Pancho and D.Q. came into being and they led the way. It is very important to me to let character become the driving force of the book.
You often write beautifully on your blog about the act of writing itself. What is your personal writing process like? Do you draft longhand, or on a computer? Write a full d
Sometimes I receive manuscripts that I don’t want to love. Something in the agent’s pitch or the query letter rubs me the wrong way; I know the genre or the subject matter will make it a terrible uphill climb to and in the marketplace; it is the least commercially appealing subject ever (incest, kitten torturers). I still read these manuscripts, of course, because quality writing will trump everything else, but even more than usual, I go in thinking,
Convince me.
And though I’m almost ashamed to admit it now, one of these manuscripts was
Words in the Dust. When I received the agent’s pitch letter in late September 2009, it told me that it was the story of a Muslim girl in modern-day Afghanistan, which DID sound exactly right for me and the Arthur A. Levine Books imprint; given our international focus, and the fact that I’d just published Sara Lewis Holmes’s
Operation Yes (about Air Force kids with parents serving in Iraq and Afghanistan), it seemed like a good fit. But the letter then went on to explain that it was written by a guy from Iowa, with the decidedly un-Central Asian name of “Trent Reedy,” who had served in the National Guard in Afghanistan. I knew this agent had good taste and knew my tastes as well, that she wouldn’t be steering me wrong; but having long watched the kidlit authenticity wars with a fascinated and wary eye, I thought,
Well, that just sounds like nine kinds of trouble, as I put the manuscript in the e-reader queue.
A couple weeks later, I handed my e-reader to Christina McTighe, a lovely young woman (and occasional commenter here) then working for me as an intern, and pointed to the manuscript onscreen. (I do look at every manuscript myself, but given the volume of manuscripts and the loneness of me, smart interns are enormously helpful for triage.) I said, “Would you take a look at this? I have my doubts about it, but let me know what you think.”
And she came back a few hours later and said, “You HAVE to read this. I love it. It’s really, really, really good.”
Huh, I thought.
Who’da thunk? That was the most enthusiastic recommendation Christina had given anything in the six months she’d been interning with me; like the agent, she had good taste and knew
my taste, and so that was two people who swore to the quality of this book. On the subway home that evening, as I was scrolling through the manuscripts on my e-reader, I saw the title and remembered her endorsement. So I clicked on the document. . . .
And from the very first page, it was so exact about the heat and light and dust in Afghanistan, so honest about the good and bad, the dreams and frailties, in every single one of its characters, that I fell in love with the book too. Its heroine and narrator is Zulaikha, a thirteen-year-old girl with a congenital cleft lip, which makes the mean boys in her village call her “Donkeyface.” Her stepmother, Malehkah, likewise seems terminally disgusted by her, and no one, Zulaikha included, believes they'll ever be able to find her a husband--the only way most Afghan women can leave their father's house. But Zulaikha has a good attitude despite these difficulties, and her inner strength, unfailing hope, and occasional (internal) sarcastic remark instantly endeared her to me. When American soldiers arrived in her village, I shared her distrust and fear; when they offered to provide surgery to fix her cleft lip, I felt her joy and wonder—but that was a road not unmarked by trouble, and I held my breath with her through each turn in
When I was in Boise, Idaho, in September for the Idaho SCBWI conference, author Trent Reedy drove over from Spokane to film a video for the Scholastic Librarian Preview Webcast, promoting his wonderful novel Words in the Dust.
During a break in our formal video shoot, Trent and I talked at a little more length and in a little more depth about the book, its backstory, how it was written and edited, his friendship with Katherine Paterson (who wrote a lovely introduction for the book), and sundry other topics. You can see that conversation in two parts here:
(Aren't those just the most attractive stills ever?) There will be more excitement with this book coming later this week; in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this glimpse of the most excellent Trent and the book, and our conversation.
Neil Connelly is the author of three published novels and a professor of creative writing at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. For ten years, he directed the graduate workshop in fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He now lives in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons.
Fun fact: He is the youngest of ten children, eight of them girls.
What's your writing process like? Do you write in computer first or longhand? Morning, noon, night? Do you perfect every sentence as you go, or pound out a draft and then go back and polish it? Do you plan out a novel first or plunge in and see where the characters take you, or both?
When I'm writing, I write every day. It's like working out then, just a natural part of the morning. If it goes well, great. If it goes poorly, you just don't save the new version. The great benefit of this is that you've always got tomorrow. In seventeen years, through five full manuscripts, I've never written for more than an hour and a half a day.
Typically I go back to what I worked on the previous day, or start at the chapter opening, and read through the draft fine-tuning, then get up a head of steam and produce some new rough text, maybe a half page or page a day. If you're familiar with comic book artists' process of pencil and inking, it strikes me a lot like that.
I never plan my books out. Doubt adds too much spice to life, so why should it be any different for my characters? Really, that's one of the compliments I like to hear--"I didn't know how it would end." Me
neither. I write for the same reason I hope readers read--to follow the characters because I care.
What is your favorite part of the process (planning, drafting, revising) and why?That's like asking what part of being a dad is my favorite, like which age I enjoyed my boys the most. Every age is special, and every part of writing has some attraction for me. The earliest part, the chaos of raw creation, is exciting but anxious. You don't know what you're dealing with. But then you feel the kernel (typically an image) and it grows--you begin to see snippets of the characters in new situations, elsewhere in time, and they are mysterious and intriguing, and you start to try and connect a few dots from what you perceive as early in the narrative. And that's your opening, you hope. On my first book I was on page 80 when I realized I was starting my opening scene. Oops.
Drafting is fun because you have the extended thrill of finding out what happens next. Right now I have a forty mile commute to where I teach. And after I write, I play with my kids, then hit the road, and I spend the whole time letting my mind roam through the characters' imaginary world, wondering what will happen tomorrow. That's just cool.
Revising and editing are essential because, once you finish a thing, you know what it is. And as strange as this sounds, you have to go back and mechanically make it all organic. That may or may not make sense, but it's my experience.
Where did The Miracle Stealer start for you?As a proposal that I had to write to accompany my first book,
St. Michael's Scales. That book was about a kid who felt doomed, and I wondered about his opposite, a boy who felt blessed. There was a news story about a tornado that tossed a crib a m
Arthur A. Levine Books published
Neil Connelly's first novel,
St. Michael's Scales, nine years ago last spring. It was the story of a boy who was convinced he was doomed, and Neil says that writing it made him think about the opposite problem -- the burdens of being blessed, particularly with an unusual talent or gift. Thus emerged the story of the wonderfully complicated Andi Grant, who herself isn't unusually blessed, but who guards her six-year-old brother Daniel with all the fierceness of a mother lion. Daniel may not be a miracle worker, exactly, but strange things certainly happen around him; and when strange people begin to threaten him as well, Andi launches a plan to create an "Anti-Miracle" and give her brother a normal life forever after. I've previously blogged about this book (or the flap copy for it, rather)
here and
here, and as I said then, this is a great, twisty sort of philosophical thriller novel, where the tension reaches near-physical levels of stress as you turn the pages. . . . Perfect for fans of Francisco X. Stork (who blurbed it), Donna Freitas (likewise), or Sara Zarr. It's received a starred review from
Booklist and much enthusiasm from
Kirkus and
Publishers Weekly, the latter of whom called it "provocative and suspenseful," and concluded, "
Deftly avoiding stereotypes and caricatures, Connelly creates an alternately ominous and wholesome atmosphere in which the mysteries of friendship, hope, sacrifice, love, and prayer reveal a community's spiritual complexity." Look for a Q&A with Neil coming later this week, and I may have to post the first chapter too, as it truly does contain one of the most astonishing scenes I've ever read.
In stores now: Amazon.com | B&N | Borders | Powells | Indiebound
What were the initial seeds of StarCrossed? How long had the book been growing for you before you started writing it? A long time! I started drafting the manuscript right after submitting
A Curse Dark as Gold to you, in the fall of 2005. But I first heard Digger’s voice whispering to me more than ten years ago, when she was the main character in an adult novella that never went anywhere. And the seeds of her world and her story were much older still. Digger inhabits a fantasy world I’ve been tinkering with since I was a teenager, back when I first realized I wanted to write.
I can’t remember exactly what made me realize that my shiftless novella could be a much better young adult novel, but I do clearly remember deciding that
StarCrossed would be the book to follow
Curse. I was coming off three very intense years inside Charlotte Miller’s head, and I was eager to kind of shed that skin and work with a new character, a new voice—and especially work on a book that could be potentially lighter in tone. I remember telling my agent that I wanted to write A Fun Book, because as enormously proud of
Curse as I am, and as rewarding as it was to write, “nobody could accuse it of being rollicking.” My agent responded, “Yeah, it’s not a romp.”
As it happened, my idea of A Fun Book apparently involved the main character’s lover being murdered by secret police on Page 1, so clearly my Fun Meter still needs some calibrating!
A Curse Dark as Gold was loosely based in the historical real world and on the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin.” How did it feel to create a wholly original world and storyline here? (I wonder if you even felt more free, not having to get those historical details right . . . ?)Going about creating a new world was not so different—but working without a plot net (without the framework of a fairytale to guide my storyline) was definitely a little intimidating. This is the first novel I’ve completed that is not a retelling of some sort. On the one hand, that was nerve-wracking, but at the same time it was also very freeing. Since I wasn’t constrained to a predetermined set of plot points and conclusion, I never felt like I was “forcing” my characters into position, and they were able to go about their business quite naturally. As long as I could keep up with them, we did fine!
Even though this is a made-up world, I still did my homework, familiarizing myself with everything from lunar science, to castle life, to the tools of historical espionage, to our own world’s history of religious persecution, to period firearms and the technology of warfare! There was a little more freedom here, however, for a couple of reasons. First, Llyvraneth is not so firmly grounded in real-life Earth history as was the world of
Curse, so I could focus on the details that served the story best, without concern about anachronisms or inaccuracies. But more than that, Digger herself was a much more impatient character than Charlotte, and tended to pull me away from the research to tell my story, already! a lot sooner than Charlotte ever did.
What sorts of reference materials did you make up to help keep track of the world?Since I’ve been working with Llyvraneth for more than twenty years, I didn’t need much for my own reference (aside from a map), but a critique partne
On Tuesday, Arthur A. Levine Books published I Now Pronounce You Someone Else, the debut novel from writer Erin McCahan, edited by moi. I'll let this week's terrific Publishers Weekly review speak to the story:
Offering sharp wit and plenty of romantic interludes, first-time author McCahan captures the excitement and panic of a teenage girl on the fast track to becoming Mrs. Somebody. Seventeen-year-old Bronwen Oliver doesn't feel like she belongs in her family (she entertains escapist fantasies in which she discovers she was switched at birth and is really "Phoebe Lilywhite"). . . . When an old acquaintance, Jared, re-enters Bronwen's life and sweeps her off her feet, Bronwen thinks she's finally found someone to whom she can relate. And she's soon confident that she fits into Jared's world better than she fits into her own. On her 18th birthday, Jared presents her with an engagement ring. After readily accepting his proposal, Bronwen is on cloud nine until realities about potential married life bring her crashing back down. Told in lively first-person narrative, this intelligent romance teaches a hard but relevant lesson about living dreams and letting them go.
And that's exactly right -- it's an excellently Austenian romance full of moral development and funny observations, particularly about Bronwen's deeply, um, "eccentric" family. It's also a wonderfully Midwestern book, being set in suburban Michigan and focusing on marriage, which is not a subject that comes up much in coastal-set fiction for YA. (Which is one reason why I was so delighted by it -- my suburban Midwestern roots showing.) Erin answered some questions this week over e-mail:
Tell me about the first book you ever wrote. In elementary school, I wrote a novel – in pencil, in spiral notebooks – about my stuffed animals coming to life at night. I, of course, was the heroine of the novel, and, in it, I followed my stuffed animals one night down the clothes chute, which wasn’t a clothes chute but a portal to a different land consisting of a number of kingdoms inhabited mostly by fairies and wee folk who were forever on the verge of being overthrown by evil fairies. Naturally, I stayed to help these kingdoms defeat the evil fairies by uniting all the good people into one empire, and in the end they thanked me by making me a princess and giving me my own waterfall.
I think I read a paranormal romance with that same plot last year. What is your writing process like? For me, it’s like framing the canvas before painting the picture. I know where to start and where to end. I have a general idea of what the thing will look like, but it always changes along the way.
Are you a planner, or a seat-of-your-pantser? Do you revise as you go along, or only after you've done a huge chunk? Some of the best writing advice I ever got came from my creative writing professor at Hope College who said, “Never write with the intention that you will go back and revise later. Understand there will always be revisions, but they will be easier if you make every effort your best effort.” This very often results in my working on one particular scene for days and days and, occasionally, days.
6 Comments on Q&A: Erin McCahan, author of I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU SOMEONE ELSE, last added: 6/8/2010
.jpeg?picon=1639)
sharing original art from BIRD
Thanks for this interesting post! I have Words in the Dust in a stack of books on my night table, and now I'm going to move it to the top.
Awesome! I love the idea of stepping outside the novel and digging deeper to make the story stronger. Very inspirational and helpful post! Thank you both.
Hmm. I have one of those first novels that I've lived with for over a decade, too. It's a great plot with great characters. But it desperately needs a rewrite and it's so hard for me to wrap my mind around what needs to go and what needs to stay.
Both these novels sound great and I loved your memories of messing around with your friends when you were 12-ish. Friendships are important at that age. I think kids are missing out on some of that stuff today. When you die playing video games you don't lose as much as you do when you run into a stop sign. There's something to be said for sneaking out after your parents are in bed.
I enjoyed this interview, especially the "Bechard Factor's" big why question. Not only is this important for novels, but other works as well from picture books to rebuses.
Thanks for posting.
Great post. I love the term Berchard Factor. It's something that's new to me (picked it up in Ms. Klein's plot masterclass in Utah), and while it's cost me WAY more time than I anticipated, I'm forever grateful.
Thanks for posting this and thanks to Mr. Reedy as well. Looking forward to reading STEALING AIR - it's right up my alley.
Great post. Can't wait to see what you're working on next, Trent.
From the comments above, I see I'm not the only one that connected with "The Bechard Factor." I still fight with the idea that just wanting something to be a certain way in my writing isn't necessarily the Best Way. Thanks for the post, Trent.
Really great interview. I'm so interested in how you worked your experience in Afghanistan into your writing. I love books that have a real sense of time and place.
One of my most memorable writer's retreat experiences was listening to Margaret Bechard talk about revising. She was amazingly enthusiastic about chaos - the messier the better. Sent me home ready to face my mess!