Remember my post on Sunday about staying up after bedtime reading books - and not just when I was a kid? Well, last night it was entirely Lisa Schroeder's fault, since I was spending time with Isabel, the main character of It's Raining Cupcakes. I had every intention of marking my place and going to bed at a decent hour - really and truly I did - but it just didn't pan out that way for me. Instead I found myself up until after 1 a.m. so I could finish the book. (It's my own copy, which I bought when the book was first released, and just now got around to. Eep.)
N.B.: Staying up until very late at night/early in the morning to read this particular book is an especially egregious mistake because there are CUPCAKE RECIPES at the conclusion of the book, and willpower is weak, but energy levels are low at that time of night and so I went to bed wishing I had a cupcake. And I don't even have a particular affinity for cupcakes. Speaking of which, could Lisa's timing on this book have been any better? Cupcakes are the new black, or so it seems, with special cupcake stores opening all around the country, places like Starbucks and chain bookstores now carrying them (both Borders and Barnes & Noble have them), and a variety of popular cupcake cookbooks being available? Some sort of cupcake Zeitgeist is sweeping the nation. Too bad the Zeitgeist doesn't deliver cupcakes at 1 a.m.
In case you haven't yet heard about this book, it's the story of only child and soon-to-be 7th-grader Isabel. Isabel has spent her whole life in Willow, Oregon, and she desperately wants to travel elsewhere. Everyone except her parents have been places - her aunt is a flight attendant, her best friend goes to camp, Disney and the Grand Canyon, her neighbors go to various places in Europe, even her teacher has been out of the country. But travel isn't something that Isabel's parents do, so she's stuck waiting until she's a grown-up. Or is she?
When Isabel's friend Sophie tells Isabel about a baking contest for kids with a prize involving travel to New York City, Isabel sets out to create the perfect recipe for jam-filled tarts. Isabel's mother, who is in the process of opening a cupcakery called "It's Raining Cupcakes", leans on her hard to create and submit a cupcake recipe instead, in order to help promote her new business. Isabel has to decide what to do - a decision made that much harder by her mother's precarious mental state: she appears to suffer from depression (at the very least), and everyone walks on eggshells around her for most of the book, putting that much more pressure on Isabel.
Isabel is a resourceful, clever kid with an advanced knowledge of baking (certainly more advanced than me!) and a lot of heart, and I enjoyed reading her story to find out how things turned out for her. With so many hurdles in her way - some of her own making and some created by others - it proved to be unputdownable.
In the end, I think one of Isabel's little notes sums up how this book made me feel:
People travel to see beautiful things,
But really, beauty is everywhere,
isn't it?
On the difference between motivation and inspiration.
Lisa Schroeder's post about motivation and inspiration, and whether they are the same thing or not, was interesting to me. Here's some of what said:
To me, motivation is what keeps you going - it's the force that keeps you moving forward.
When I'm writing a book, most of the time, there is motivation enough from inside of me to finish it. I love that feeling of accomplishment. I WANT to finish it. When we start out writing a novel, we have to be motivated enough to sit down and put words to the page consistently almost every day. And I think it is important to understand where your motivation comes from.
Now that I'm published, I'm motivated by having editors who want to see other things from me. And I'm motivated by wanting my career to grow.
Inspiration is more about the act of creating. When I talked about praying and hoping for inspiration, what I'm looking for are nuggets of experiences that speak to my heart and soul. That move me in such a way that I, in turn, want to work hard to move others with my words.
. . .
So, I look for things that touch me. That MOVE me. You know what I'm talking about here. It's that sunrise that takes your breath away. It's a music video like this one ["How to Save a Life" by The Fray.] It's holding a precious baby and watching as he reaches up and touches your face. It's watching a movie that moves you to tears. And then I take those feelings of joy/sorrow/regret/pain and try my best to drop them into my story.
On finding satisfaction in the writing alone
The ginormously talented Justine Larbalestier wrote a post the other day entitled "Make it the best book you can", in which she picked up on some of what Elizabeth Gilbert said in her TED speech, which I quoteskimmed in February. I commend Justine's entire post to you. (Hell, I commend her entire blog to you, but that's not the point.) Here, however, is the bit I quoteskimmed:
You can only control the book you write.
You can’t control whether you sell it. You can’t control how big the advance is if you sell it. You can’t control how much is spent promoting it. You can’t control how many copies Barnes & Noble takes or whether they take it at all. You can’t control whether punters buy it when it finally appears on the shelves. You can’t control the reviews. You can’t control the award committees.
Spending time and energy angsting about any of that stuff will only do your head in.
All you can do is write the very best book you can.
It will get published or it won’t. It will find its market or it won’t. It will sell or it won’t. It will win awards or it won’t. None of that matters if you’ve written the best book you can.
Books with huge advances and the biggest marketing and publicity budget in the world sink like a stone. Books with nary a sheckle spent on them take off out of nowhere. Books you think are terrible do great; books you worship sell fewer than a thousand copies. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. Do not let it do your head in.
On understanding your characters
First up, a post from , who found writing advice in an inspirational email:
I receive daily inspirational emails from tut.com. This morning, one of the comments in the email was "Sometimes, understanding their fears, Julia, helps you to understand their actions, as well as their pain."
I know what that means on a personal level, as far as people with whom I interact - but, it hit me (since I'm in the middle of revisions) that understanding my characters' fears (from protagonist to antagonist) will help me to make sure that the actions I assign to them are in accord with the fear and pain (or desire to avoid pain.)
As a writer, I know the reason for the character's action. But, in writing down those actions, it's not enough to just write 1) a cool scene, 2) move the plot along, 3) get to 70K, etc. - there has to be a valid basis in the psyche of my character for anything they do. And, I have to give my reader enough information that they will understand why that particular character acts in that way.
For example, it's necessary to be aware that I can't suddenly having someone run screaming from a clown, if I haven't set up their fear. Perhaps at a first grade party a clown trick went bad and scared them half to death. The motivational reveal doesn't need to be more than perhaps a sentence or a comment from another character - like, "Yeah, remember when that bozo dumped the whole ant farm on her? She itched for a week."
Fears and Actions and Pain... intimately intertwined.
On crafting villains
I've been listening to U2's new album, "No Line on the Horizon" in extremely heavy rotation whilst in my minivan. Great album, solid start-to-finish, plus it comes with excellent liner notes (I'm sick of opening those CD booklets to find nothing but photos, sometimes not even good photos - U2 provides lyrics and information about who did what on each track. Happy day!) My favorite tracks are 1 ("No Line on the Horizon"), 2 ("Magnificent" - as you probably guessed if you've read my "Music" line in posts this week), 3 ("Moment of Surrender"), 6 ("Get on Your Boots") & 9 ("White as Snow", the tune of which is based on O Come O Come Emanuel), if you care. That said, this bit at the end of the final track, "Cedars of Lebanon", caught my ear as potential writing advice:
Choose your enemies carefully 'cos they will define you
Make them interesting 'cos in some ways they will mind you
They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friend
On balancing craft and mass appeal, and on "boy books"
My friend put up a post earlier this week in which he quoted an answer he gave to a newspaper interviewer (whether the full answer ran in the publication is beside the point, as I believe you'll agree). Here's what David's post said:
I got a chance to really think about the art of balancing craft and mass appeal recently, when I was doing a newspaper interview and encountered this as the first question:
"The recent publishing trend in boys' books has incorporated toilet humor, blood and gore in an effort to gain boys' reading attention. Your Weenies series incorporates this type of humor. Despite what critics say, do you believe that these kinds of books have a place in reading today? If so, why?"
Yikers. That seemed to be a bit loaded, but here's my response:
My first story collection appeared in 1996, so I think I'm safely ahead of the bandwagon. I guess I'm ahead of the meat wagon, too, since there's actually very little blood and gore in my work. The stories have been called "Twilight Zone for kids," by more than one reviewer. While I do have some shocking endings, I tend to pull the camera away before things get graphic. I use some bathroom humor. I also use a bathroom. To deny this part of our existence seems a bit Puritanical. It's definitely not an either/or situation. I might have a story where a kid drops his pants and sits on a photocopier, but I have another that pays homage to Kafka's "Metamorphosis," and one that explores Zeno's paradox. I sneak a lot of philosophy into my work, in an attempt to justify the four years I spent getting a degree in it. The bottom line is that I've had countless teachers and parents tell me that one of my books turned a nonreader into a reader. As for the issue of quality, one of my stories was voted the best young-adult magazine story of 2005 by the Association of Educational Publishers . Others have been reprinted in textbooks. Teachers all over the country are using my story, "Predators," from The Curse of the Campfire Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales, to teach Internet safety. I suspect that many of the critics haven't done anything more than glance at the covers. Admittedly, the Weenie theme suggests a certain level of frivolity. But while the cover gets a kid to pick up the book, it's the stories that hold the reader. And they do this not by virtue of the occasional splash of body fluid or whiff of gas, but by a richness of plot and wealth of ideas.
Last night, I read Lisa's new YA novel, I Heart You, You Haunt Me.
Because it is a verse novel, it goes extremely quickly, which is bound to make this book a success with today's busy teens. (S, who grabbed it from me as soon as I was done, is taking honors classes in history and English, which means a whole crapload of reading all the time, so her recreational reading is way down. As in, she hasn't started Libba Bray's new book, even though she love-love-loves the first two, owing to time constraints. But a verse novel with all of its welcoming white space is something she feels "up to" right now.)
Before I say anything review-wise, I should point out that I've met Lisa in real life, not just on the interweb, and that I really, truly like her and consider her a friend. So, really, I was predisposed to want to like this book. But I can honestly say that I'd have liked it anyhow, even if I'd never heard of Lisa Schroeder, because the voice was great and the story was good. My knowing and liking Lisa already probably makes me like this book even more, but I'd have liked it anyway, if you see what I mean.
The main character, Ava, begins the book at the funeral of her boyfriend, Jackson. It takes a while until we figure out how Jackson died, but it's clear from the beginning that Ava blames herself for his death. Anything to do with what Jackson was like or how their relationship was is well-handled through flashbacks. And just as we sort out a bit about who he was and who they were together, we meet Jackson's spirit, who is keeping Ava company. Whether his company remains welcome is a separate issue, as is Jackson's reason for being there.
This book will make you think about first love and first loss and interconnectedness and grief and redemption without ever telling you what to think about any of it. And Ava's parents are the lovely, helpful sort of parents that all of us hope our children will see, although sometimes our kids don't see it the same way. As an adult reader, I really enjoyed that about it. As a teen reader, I can imagine being swoonily in love with this book and it's romantic story. For serious.
My favorite part? I'm not saying what it is, 'cause that would be all spoiler-ish and I'm not going there. And if you have the book but haven't yet read it, do not skip ahead. Seriously. But if you've read the book already, or after you read the book, tell me whether page 203 gave you goosebumps and made you cry, all at the same time. Because I sure did. Which isn't to say that the rest of the chapter-poems aren't good; just that page 203 is killer.
Brava, Lisa! I heart you and your book. Folks who don't yet own it may want to order a signed copy from Powell's. It's only $7.99 (plus shipping). And if you've got a teen girl around, this book will make a spectacular Valentine's Day present.
