I despise a story with weak characters. No matter how many car races or love-stories the author throws in, a novel is boring unless it centers around vivid, interesting characters who are changing and growing in unexpected ways to respond to their situations--or sometimes resisting change and growth, like Scarlett O'Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND. I loved Katniss Everdeen in HUNGER GAMES for defying the Capitol to protect her sister. Though mostly I hated Bella Swan in TWILIGHT for being so passive and whiny, at least she had the guts to love a vampire.
Young adult literature is so particularly compelling partly because kids by their very nature are always changing and growing and on cusp of such critically important changes. They are constantly being forced to make choices about their own characters. As GraceAnne diCandido, my literature instructor at Rutgers used to put it, the central question of a young adult novel is "Who am I and what am I going to do about it?"
How do you create your own unforgettable characters? Or is there a character in recent literature that you find especially compelling?
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 3 of 3
Blog: The Paper Wait (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: character, The Craft of Writing, Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, Add a tag
Blog: The Paper Wait (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: inspiration, fantasy, The Craft of Writing, Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, Add a tag
The best fiction is like a pyramid mostly submerged in water; only the very top pokes above the page but it must give us the sense that we will find a solid, three-dimensional creation no matter how far down we dive to explore it. This is true whether you're writing about aliens with three genders and lavender tentacles, twelfth-century Scots clansmen in kilts, or just a bunch of kids hanging out behind a 7-11 in Cranford, NJ.
The question is, how far do you have to go to create that sense of reality, of faithfulness?
When it comes to research, no one could say I'm a shirker. My WIP is a fantasy novel based on Jewish folklore, so for years now I've been reading everything from the Biblical books of the Prophets, medieval wonder tales, the novels of Isaac Baashevitz Singer, Hasidic tales of the Holocaust, collected Jewish folk tales and Apochrypha, scholarly treatments of ancient Jewish magic and the like.
But now that I've gotten my characters to my fantasy world, I'm having trouble imagining myself there and I couldn't figure out why...until I read Jane Yolen's wonderful essay, Turtles All the Way Down (first published in Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov and published by St. Martins Press in 1991). The prolific Yolen, no slouch at building worlds herself, suggests that we base our fantasy worlds on landscapes we know intimately. "In fantasy, outer landscape reflects inner landscape…. If the place is real enough, then the fantasy creatures and characters--dragon or elf lord or one-eyed god or the devil himself--will stride across that landscape leaving footprints that sink down into the mud. And if those creatures are also compelling, having taken root in the old lore and been brought forward in literary time by the carefully observing author, those footprints in the mud can be taken out, dried, and mounted on the wall."
How do YOU make your writing come to life? How do you build a world?
Blog: The Paper Wait (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Reviews, fantasy, Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, Add a tag
My WIP is fantasy so I must, simply MUST, read everything new and noteworthy in the children’s fantasy genre. (Or at least that’s my excuse!) Here’s my latest favorite.
THE CABINET OF EARTHS by Anne Nesbet
In the time-honored tradition of children’s books, our heroine Maya’s mother is very ill. To fulfill the mother’s fantasy, the family moves to Paris for a year. There, all roads seem to lead to a mysterious Society of “beautiful people” who sniff a heady substance called anbar, live in houses with brass salamander doorhandles, and, as it turns out, are all connected to a shimmering Cabinet of Earths. In the midst of Maya’s ordinary problems of adjusting to a French middle school without speaking French, her little brother James goes missing. When the Cabinet chooses her as its next keeper, she must decide whether to sacrifice her brother’s essential personality or her mother’s shot at immortality.
I love fantasies and I read so many of them that it's exciting to find an original vision like this one. For one thing the magic is French and it's set in Paris--a refreshing change from the English magic trope. For another, the "earths" themselves represent such a interesting reworking of the classic theme of magically preserving a life. And the book is beautifully, whimsically, even deliciously written. I read this in a waiting room while my husband was having surgery and it was like having a friend there to entertain me and keep me company.
Have you read any kid’s books recently that you would recommend to the rest of us? If so, why?
Ariel,
I don't write fiction/fantasy, but in picture books, one of the things that's always fascinated me is the mechanics of how a writer slips into fantasy and then back to reality. Neat trick and difficult to do successfully.
I'm not sure how to do it successfully, but I think you have to really believe in your world. And just like real life, it has to conform to it's rules and constraints. As to the outer landscape reflecting the inner, that should be true in most novels -- the conflict must be one that readers can relate to; the setting provides a framework through which characters move, stumble and grow.
I think a lot of it is being willing to create the part that doesn't immediately go on the page, not to get too crazed about filling page counts. That's probably a lot harder to do when you're under contract.
To date, I've never dabbled in fantasy. But that doesn't mean I never will. I think there are common elements in world building with contemporary fiction. You still must paint a setting picture. You still must engage the senses. And yes, you still need to know what to leave out!
Really interesting question, Ariel! Jane Yolen's suggestion about basing our worlds on landscapes we know intimately makes a lot of sense to me. (Perhaps because my favorite fantasies often have a clear real world base...)