Still on the Verge

A few weeks ago my good writing friend and mentor, children’s author Tracy Barrett invited me to write a post for her Goodbye, Day Job! blog. (I’ll give you a moment to read it here. Thanks.) So writing for Tracy got me thinking about a lot of things—some kind of depressing, like the fact that I quit my day job four years ago to write full-time and haven’t made much outward progress on the publication front since then. Unless you count one story in Cicada. But it was like two years ago and the next story I sent them was “passed on” as my former agent liked to say. I had a few nibbles here and there and a few encouraging comments from editors and agents. 

But mostly what I got were more passes, or worse, nothing. As in, no response at all from what I picture as extremely young, over-worked editors, demoralized in the face of this dismal economy and general state of malaise when it comes to the future of the book industry. That, or else they’re all out having a grand time strolling the streets of Manhattan and sipping coffee in outdoor cafes and traveling around giving speeches at conferences for audiences of eager/deluded beginning writers (I get this image from following these editors on Twitter. Lately my Twitter feed reminds me more and more of high school when I was sitting off at a side table eating soggy French fries while gazing longingly at the popular group, laughing it up and clearly living more exciting lives then I ever would. I know this is a weird digression, but it occurs to me that there’s a revealing clue in here about why I spend my days writing about angsty teenagers. Or maybe not.)

Anyhoo, enough of the depressing side of things. In the positive column I’ve come up with the following:

1. I’m counting that Cicada story, damn it. I should count it. They paid me, the only payment I’ve earned thus far in the past four years.

2. I said in the Goodbye, Day Job post that I had written over 500,000 words during this time “off.” That was a total guesstimate. But it got me thinking how many words I really have written. And guess what? It’s 1,564,910. (This includes eight novels for a total of 483,256. Plus 1,081,654 words of daily journal writing. In case you’re wondering, I did not include in this number several projects I started but didn’t finish, a handful of stories, three years of correspondence with my writing buddy, and this blog. For trivia purposes the blog stands at 45,398 words as of this moment.)

3. And speaking of my writing buddy, meeting the glorious Donna Koppelman of Edenton, North Carolina in line at a porto-potty at a writers’ conference, ranks right up there as one of my greatest accomplishments in the past four years. She is my accountability/critique partner extraordinaire. We still haven’t quite decided if we are mentoring or enabling each other on this seemingly never-ending quest of ours, but we do agree that we are thankful to be on the road together.

4. Did you catch it up there in number 2 that I wrote 8 freaking books? (Okay, one of these will likely remain in a drawer forever. And two were complete rewrites, but still. I’ve been busy.)

5. Made some cool breakthroughs in my process. (These include but are not limited to (1) figuring out that I must write something everyday to stay sane. Which also has the added bonus of making me less of a witch with a b around my family (2) realizing that to follow a story through to its proper end I must hold nothing back, no matter how strange or bizarre it seems as I am writing. Strangely, my best stuff comes from this murky, subcutaneous place (3) learning how to revise giant messes of rough drafts with help from tons of books on writing and numerous writing workshops and conferences (4) understanding that I really really do trust the process. When I start a book, I know without a shadow of a doubt, that I will finish it, one way or another, even if I don’t quite know how I will get there.)

Not too shabby. Even if I don’t have an actual book on a shelf to show for it. The road, as they say, is long. There are mountains in our way. But we climb a step every day. (oh geez, now I’m quoting bad 80’s songs.)

It’s freakily true, though. When I first met Donna and we were comparing journeys, she said something like, you’re way further ahead than I am. (She is very sweet. Did I mention this?) And she went on to say, it’s like you’re on the highway and you’ve got your blinker on and the exit’s coming up and you’re about to veer off.

In other words, she was saying I was on the verge. When I started this blog last year (Sept 30, 2010, to be exact), I believed that I was just about to get off the interstate. I had no idea that the exit ramp was so far away. I’ve had my blinker on for miles now. Sometimes I’m tempted to turn the stupid thing off. But that’s only on a really gray day. Mostly, I just keep driving along. I’ve got a decent gps system. Apparently, I’ve got an endless gas tank. My windshield is mostly bug free. I’m not stopping.

Top YA Picks for Fall

A few months ago I was on a bad book reading roll. Not sure how this happened exactly. Just that the YA books that came across my desk—advanced review copies as well as stuff that I’d bought or checked out of the library or had handed down to me through the teen grapevine (which consists of my fourteen year old daughter and her friends)—weren’t doing it for me. The plots were too familiar. The romances were too sappy. (I’m really really really tired of the love triangle/two hot guys going for the same girl shtick. It’s boring. Never mind unrealistic.) The writing style veered from over-written and smugly literary to worse, hackneyed crap. Is that a literary term? It should be. The point is, all these bad books were getting me down, making me question the publishing industry. WHY! I wanted to shout to the barely out of their teens editors in their high rise buildings gazing out their windows at the NYC skyline. WHY are you putting this gunk out there?

Maybe they read my mind. Because lately I’ve been on a very good book reading roll. I’ve blogged about some of these novels already (see my review of Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff), but I’ve got a whole slew of others almost equally worthy of my high praise. (A word here, about what my high praise actually means. Nothing. I’m just a person who’s read hundreds, maybe thousands of books over my lifetime and who happens to be on a YA kick at the moment. Because I aspire to write YA fiction. And because I am secretly still sixteen years old.) What follows is merely my humble opinion about a handful of books that are on sale now (or just about to go on sale). Here they are in no particular order:

Juliet Immortal by Stacey Jay. Did you ever see the TV show Quantum Leap? This may date me, but it was about a guy whose soul jumped from body to body. Each episode he found himself stuck inside some stranger who had a problem that needed to be solved before he could leap again. Juliet Immortal takes that general idea and gives it a Shakespearean twist. The soul jumping around is Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. Each time she lands in a new body, she’s got a mission to find and helpfully nudge together two clueless lovers. Complicating matters is that Romeo is leaping into bodies too, except he’s working for the dark side, the side that tries to make couples turn on each other. Violently. Also he hates Juliet and wants to kill her. Very clever book that any teen girl who has to read Romeo and Juliet (meaning, all of them) will love. This one’s easy to find in a bookstore. Cool-looking cover. Has its own floor display.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin has a cool cover too. An ethereal-looking girl is floating, her face half under water. Some guy’s floating behind her, holding her, keeping her afloat. Or maybe he’s trying to tug her back down. This book was a page-turner and I—who usually guess where a plot is going fairly quickly—did NOT guess this one until I was nearly finished. Main character wakes up from a coma. She’s been in an accident that killed three of her friends. She remembers nothing. But now she’s having strange hallucinations and weird, possibly psychotic episodes. There’s a cute boy, of course. But only one. He’s got a secret too. Kind of annoyed at the end to know I’m going to have to wait for the sequel.

Aside: Sequels are big these days. There are pros and cons to them. The pro, from a reader standpoint, is that you get to revisit characters you love and fall back into a world you enjoyed visiting. Also, when there are breathless, cliff-hanging endings, of course, you want to see what will happen next. From the publishing standpoint, sequels are good investments. They’ve got a built-in fan base and conceivably the author can just keep churning out the next installment. The con is that readers have to WAIT for them to come out. And many sequels fail to live up to the originals. You just know the authors are pressured to keep stuff going they’d probably be happy to retire. I’ve also heard that some authors are instructed to split what was originally written as a stand-alone book into two books or three. This offends me as an artist. But I can’t imagine anyone will lose sleep over my opinion. For the foreseeable future, sequels are here to stay.

All These Things I’ve Done by Gabrielle Zevin will likely have a sequel, and I am eagerly awaiting it. This book is the hardest to characterize. Maybe because it has such an original voice and plot, kind of a take off on a David Copperfield-style novel with chapter titles like, “I Defend My Own Honor” and “We Mourn Again; I Learn the Definition of Internecine.” It’s set in a not so distant future where chocolate is illegal. The main character’s father was a mafia type crime boss (he’s dead now; the victim of a hit) who peddled chocolate on the black market. Complications ensue when the girl’s ex-boyfriend eats poisoned chocolate and she’s accused of the crime. Oh, and she falls in love with the son of the new get-tough-on-crime D.A. I need to read some reviews of this book to see how others describe it, because I can see I’m failing miserably here. Please, just read it.

Last but not least, Bluefish by Pat Schmatz. So happy I came upon this precious book. It’s nothing like the others I’ve read lately. Not commercial in the least. No flashy cover (just a picture of little blue fish). I highly doubt there will be a sequel. This is one of those throwbacks, “quiet books,” I think they call them, that I didn’t know were published anymore, and I must give three cheers to Candlewick Publishing for putting it out there. Beautifully written and character driven. Alternates points of view between Travis, the new kid in town, living with his flawed grandfather, grieving over his missing dog, and hiding a secret. He can't read. And Velveeta, who is as dramatic and outspoken as Travis is quiet. Her secret is she lives in a trailer park and often spends nights away from her neglectful mother who doesn't seem to notice. Enter: a teacher who tries to help. This description makes the book sound more sentimental and cliched than it is. (I think that's the only problem with the book--that it DOES have kind of a stereotypical plot idea.) But it works. You really care about these kids, and while there are no neat solutions to their problems, there is hope in the ending.

And before I sign off, here's one more plug for several books I reviewed before, now officially on the market:

Ashfall by Mike Mullin. About the volcano at Yellowstone that explodes and leads to a stranded teen taking a dystopian-nightmare of an adventure across the country to find his parents. (This book has the Teen-staying-up-all-night-to-finish-reading-it Seal of Approval. That was what my daughter told me, bleary-eyed, the next morning, anyway.)

Lola and the Boy Next Door. Sweet, fresh, and true-to-life-ish love story by Stephanie Perkins.

The Beginning of After by Jennifer Castle. Realistic and heartbreaking story of a girl and the year after her family dies in a car accident.

So there you have it. September is a darned good month for new releases. Take it from me,

Your humble avid YA reader

Review of Steve Brezenoff's Brooklyn, Burning

An editor at a writing conference told a story about a librarian from Florida who decided not to purchase a new picture book about snow. When questioned about her decision, she laughed and said something like, “These kids live in Florida. They don’t need to know anything about snow.” The editor paused for effect then asked the audience, “Isn’t that the reason those kids should have a book like that?” Well, yes, of course, everyone agreed, and we all smugly mocked the misguided cheap librarian in our heads. (Okay, maybe I was the only one who did that. Sorry.)

The point is that it's a good thing for kids to be exposed to the unfamiliar. The strange. The uncomfortable. The different. Different kinds of weather. Different kinds of people. Different kinds of worlds. I know a lot of people would disagree with me. Maybe kids in Florida don’t really need to read books about snow. And maybe sweet, sheltered, upper middle class teens don’t need to read books about homeless, thrown-away, gender-confused kids in New York City. Maybe we should all just stick to reading books that mirror our own realities.

If that’s true, there won’t be many readers of Steve Brezenoff’s new novel, Brooklyn, Burning. I read this book five days ago and I still can’t wrap my mind around it; so much of it—from how it’s written to the subject matter—stands out and has stuck with me.

Let’s start with the point of view. It’s practically in second person, something I’ve rarely seen before except in some weirdo experimental fiction I read in grad school. A reminder: first person POV uses I. Third person uses he or she. Second uses you. That point of view just isn't used that often in fiction. I said practically second person though, which is probably not an official term. The main character, Kid, starts the narrative the way one might begin a letter. (And in a way, this novel is a love letter.) “You probably don’t remember it like I do,” Kid says, and goes on to remind You, whom the reader learns is a person named Scout. This POV could seem like a gimmick, a quirky way to tell a story, but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s a necessity because the genders of Kid and Scout are never revealed. They could easily be two boys or two girls. Or one of each. This isn’t a clever gimmick either. It’s one of the major themes of the book. That maybe gender doesn’t matter all that much in the ultimate scheme of life.

A lot of people would probably disagree with me about that too. But whatever. Let’s move on and talk about setting. I have never been to Brooklyn, but after reading this book, I feel like I’ve lived there. The few blocks where this story takes place come alive in all their smelly, noisy glory. There’s a bar. There’s music. There’s homeless people. Everything seems real. Nothing is stereotypical.

The structure of the book is cool. The narrative shifts back and forth in time between two summers in the life of Kid. The first summer there was a fire in a warehouse where a lot of homeless teens lived. Kid’s best friend may or may not have died in the fire. Kid may or may not have started it. The second summer Kid meets Scout, but is clearly still tormented by the past. There’s a mystery at the heart of this story. What really happened last summer? How was Kid involved? Why is Kid living on the street in the first place?

Now I need to give a shout out to the writing style. There are a lot of books out there that are plot-oriented and fast-paced. The language is used only to keep the story moving. Then there are the stories where you know the author is showing off her writing skills. In these purposefully literary-styled novels, the language tends to interfere, keeping the reader from falling into the story. Instead you’re stopping periodically to dissect a particularly long sentence or puzzling out a beautiful but unnecessary metaphor. Steve Brezenoff has pulled off the rare feat of creating a literary novel with a compelling plot.

Okay, I know I'm gushing and still not doing this novel justice, writing about it in this very floundery, scattered way. So I’ll shut up and end with a passage from the book itself.

Kid and Scout are eating pizza. They’ve just decided to team up and form a band but they’re not sure what to call themselves. Kid asks:

“What are your songs about? I mean in general.”

You shrugged and dropped a folded crust into the box, then leaned back on your hands. They were probably greasy with pizza and for a second my heart skipped a beat as I thought about licking the sauce from your fingers.

“Just the world in general, I think. You know, people.”

“People it is.”

“As a name?”

I smiled. “Why not?”

So we were People. Finally.

Brooklyn, Burning comes out in September. Look for it.

Perfect Pitch

I’ve always hated writing pitches. For the uninitiated, a pitch is a brief description of a manuscript written to grab the attention of an editor or agent. Hook someone with the perfect pitch and you’ve elevated yourself out of the bottomless slush pile and into the glorious realm of the solicited. If you can write a snappy pitch, the first door on the long road to publication opens. Someone wants to read what you’ve written.

For most of my writing career (and I use the word career here in the loosest sense) I took what I like to call the Field of Dreams approach to submitting my work. Do you remember in that movie how the Kevin Costner character constructed a baseball field in his cornfield and there was that God-like voice intoning IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WILL COME? In other words, carve out a cool baseball field in the boonies of Iowa or Nebraska or wherever the heck Kevin lived, and people will just intuitively sense that it’s there, drop everything they’re doing, pile their families into their cars, and drive out to watch a ball game. (Hey. It could happen.) Whenever I had what I believed was a cool finished novel, I’d do the Field of Dreams thing, and send it out into the publishing world attached to something along the lines of this:

Dear Editor,
Enclosed please find my book. Thank you for reading it.

Wow. I know. Talk about attention grabbers. I was so adorably hopeful back then. I honestly thought that editors, like nostalgic baseball fans, could somehow feel the cosmic shift in the Creative Universe when they opened my submission. Oddly, sometimes the strategy worked and I did get a few kind editors to read and even occasionally send me encouraging feedback.

But I don’t recommend going this route. If you’re serious about traditional publishing, you’re eventually going to have to buckle down and write a pitch. I wish I could give you some helpful advice. Sadly, there’s a very big part of me that is still standing in the cornfield turned baseball diamond hoping the editors will magically appear. I have a block when it comes to writing pitches. It’s weird. I’m a writer, so theoretically I should have the skills. I write reviews of other people’s books. You’d think I’d be able to write about my own.

Maybe part of my problem is that I’ve heard so much conflicting advice over the years about what editors/agents want in a pitch.

1. Write it like it’s the inside flap of a book, I heard an editor say once.
2. Whatever you do, don’t write it like the inside flap of a book, said someone else.
3. Write in the same voice of the book to give the editor a sense of your writing style
4. Keep a professional tone. Don’t be clever and try to write it like one of the characters
5. Make it a mash up. Charlotte’s Web meets Twilight set at a school like Hogwarts, for example
6. Stay away from comparisons. Your book is not like a classic. So just get over yourself

You get the point. Apparently, editors and agents expect different things from a pitch. So you’re going to have to do your homework and check out their guidelines and follow them to the letter. There are a few hard and fast rules that I will share with you. If you send your pitch the old fashioned way (in the mail), for God’s sake, don’t include cutesy stuff like rainbow stickers or scented paper or glitter. My friend Deb would disagree with me heartily, but there is NOTHING more annoying than an explosion of glitter on your desktop. If you’re on Twitter, don’t do what this poor deluded sap did recently—he mass tweeted a bunch of editors and agents with what basically amounted to a link to his book and a demand that they read it. Yikes. I can’t imagine that obnoxious tactic led to many takers. One editor even tweet-berated him for all to see.

Not to lapse into a previous blog, but one of the great perks of having an agent was I could merrily avoid writing a pitch. SHE wrote it for me and when editors passed on looking at my book, I had the nice smug feeling that what they were rejecting was actually my agent’s take on the book and not anything related to me. But enough self-pity. The reality is that I’m back to square one (or to keep my lame baseball metaphor going, first base) and I need to buck up and do the work myself. Not only to snag an editor's attention, but to keep it.

Here’s something I learned from reviewing ARCs (advanced review copies of books). Every so often, they’re so far in advance that they don’t have an inside flap or a blurb written on the back. A reader picks the book up and has no idea what it is. Is this meant for middle schoolers or young adults? Is it a romance or a mystery or a heart-wrenching drama? She's opening the book blindly with no idea what’s inside, and the truth is, that makes it difficult to start reading. It would be helpful if there were some kind of hook--a smidgen of a description of what’s inside to whet her interest--a pitch.

Otherwise she might stay on the sidelines of that cornfield forever, with no idea that there’s this really awesome baseball diamond right on the other side of the cornstalks.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Okay. Let’s say you’ve been writing seriously for six years (and half-seriously for ten more). You set a word count every day, and you hit it. You read books in your spare time (because you love to and not just because it’s market research). You joined your professional organization and attend regional and sometimes national conferences. You’ve studied the business. You send your work out to editors and take their feedback seriously. You snagged an agent, which didn't pan out, and you’re geared up to find new representation. In the meantime you’re keeping a brave face and writing every day. You love writing and you want to continue to write. But some days, you’re discouraged. Beaten down. Weary.

Well, my weary friend, if this is YOU, I think I may have an answer to your troubles.

It’s starts with the zen-like acceptance that writing is what you DO. It’s not about money or fame or published books lined up on the shelves. Even if you have all of that, even if you’re Stephen King or JK Rowling—in the end, it’s just YOU, ALONE, every day, facing the blank blaring page on your computer screen, plugging away as the words alternately roll out or bleed from your fingertips. Accept that fact, and you’re halfway there.

There’s an interesting character in Camus’ existential novel The Plague. If you haven’t read this book, it’s about a town that is quarantined because of a plague. The townspeople are stuck inside the guarded walls, dealing with people dying around them and trying to figure out what to do as they wait to succumb to the plague too. They come to terms with this reality in their own ways. The doctor decides that it is his duty to care for the sick. The priest offers spiritual help. Teachers continue to teach and shopkeepers continue to sell. See, it’s all a big metaphor about life in general. We’re the townspeople, living our lives inside the metaphorical walls of the earth. We’re all eventually going to die so what do we do while we wait? Do we go nuts? Do we hurt others in our fear? Do we kill ourselves under the strain? Or do we simply go about our business, doctoring and preaching and teaching? Or in the case of my favorite character, a guy named Grand, do we write?

Grand seems like he’s been plopped into the narrative to provide comic relief. He enters the scene every once in a while, consumed with a novel he is writing. The other characters treat him with amusement, asking him politely how his book is progressing. The funny part is that Grand doesn’t seem to be able to get past the first sentence. “One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.” Each time we meet him he’s changed a word. Should it be the month of May or June? Should the horsewoman be elegant? Should the flowers bestrewn? He keeps working on the sentence. His dream is to finish the entire novel. He imagines that when he finally does, all the gentlemen will praise him and cry “Hats off!”

But at the end of The Plague he is still fiddling around with the sentence. He’s probably never going to finish the novel. No gentlemen are ever going to cheer “Hats off!” and yet Grand is strangely content. He’s decided to cut out all of the adjectives and he’s eager to rush home and get to work. It’s what he does. It’s how he spends his life. I don’t know what Camus meant exactly with his construction of Grand. I suppose you could see the guy as deluded and silly. A perfectionist who will never move onto Sentence Two. A person who could do so many more important things with his time on this earth. But Camus was a writer, in addition to being an existentialist philosopher, and so I would like to believe that he sympathizes with Grand. Not everyone is a doctor or teacher. Some of us happen to enjoy fiddling around with words. And if we can amuse other people in the process, all the better.

Other writers have made their peace with writing for the sake of writing. Emily Dickinson wrote the majority of her poems alone in her attic room. Only a handful were ever published when she was alive and those were edited heavily and published anonymously. “This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me—” is the beginning of one of her one thousand seven hundred seventy five poems. Herman Melville toiled alone too. He had achieved success with several of his earlier books, but his masterpiece Moby Dick was ignored. He said he didn’t care. He wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne (to whom he dedicated the novel) “For not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re NOT Emily Dickinson or Herman Melville. They were brilliant writers, who tragically were not recognized as such while they were alive, but their words and ideas will live on as long as there are people to read them.

Here’s the sticking point of the zen-like acceptance theory: It works only partly. It may keep you writing every day, but you're not going to feel very good about it when you suspect that people won't read that writing. Writers and readers, we need each other. Don’t let Emily Dickinson’s hermit-like status in her garret bedroom fool you. She wrote tons of letters and many of her letters were poems. There were a few people out there in the world, people she cared about, who read her work and supported what she was doing. Melville, too. In that same letter to Hawthorne where he said he didn’t care if people liked his book or not, he said he hopedHawthorne would like it.

I understand, weary writer. I truly do. You don’t want money or fame. You only want to be published so you can have readers, others out there who’ll get what you’re writing, who’ll getyou. Every one of us has a story to tell. And every one of us wants to be listened to and understood. Some of us just happen to be little more obsessive about getting that story onto the page.

This seems like a digression, but bear with me. I read a great book yesterday by Sara Zarr, How To Save a Life. (pub Little Brown, Jan. 2012) The narrative goes back and forth between two girls, who on the surface couldn’t be more different. Jill, still reeling from the loss of her father the year before, is lashing out at everyone, particularly her mother, who has made some questionable decisions lately. And Mandy, who is pregnant and has come to live with Jill after Jill’s mother promises to adopt Mandy’s baby. The book seems like it might tread into predictable territory—two girls realize they have more common, etc. But it doesn’t. There’s a real tension here. It doesn’t come from outside, where the reader wonders what’s going to happen to the characters. It comes from the characters themselves. What are they going to do to mess things up? I stayed up late reading, worrying over these girls as if they were my friends.

I loved this book. I’ve read all of Sara Zarr’s books and loved them too. They’re filled with flawed, vulnerable, yet still somehow hopeful/doing-the-best-they-can people. I imagine Zarr writing them somewhere alone—in a nicely appointed office or maybe at a local coffee shop—just her and her lap top. All the while she’s doubting. She’s wondering if what’s she doing is silly and pointless and stupid. When she reaches the final page of her manuscript, she’s fighting off tears and grinning like a fool. Okay, maybe she did win the National Book Award for one of her previous books, but this new one, How to Save A Life, which isn’t even out yet officially, is still untested.

I’d like to put her mind at ease. Hats off, Sara. It’s good. Thank you for writing it. You’re right. Sometimes we save our own lives by saving others.

Weary writer, THIS is why you write. You only need to connect with one other person to make it all worthwhile.

PS. Yesterday you came across a witty tweet: THE ONLY WRITING ADVICE YOU REALLY NEED. And when you clicked on the link it said:
Keep Writing.

Haha. But you knew that already. Now go do it.

Page Turners: What's the Driving Question?

The past few weeks I’ve read several practically impossible to put down books, and it got me wondering what it is exactly about a book that makes it so compelling. Especially because the books I’m talking about are very different on the surface (and underneath the surface too). A memoir. The third book in a teen romance series. A man vs nature YA adventure. And an angsty soap-opera-y teen fantasy with a mythological twist. The obvious common denominators are good, solid writing, interesting and complex characters who seem real (with the memoir, of course, they ARE real), and a strong plot.

Plot is one of those elements that I used to struggle with in my own writing. Boiled down to the basics, plot is simply the sequence of events in a story. This happens then this happens then this happens. The trouble is, how do you decide what happens next when you’re the writer? I imagine with many formulaic action/adventure type stories (especially movies) you’ve got a group of guys in a smoky room just throwing scenes out there to see what sticks. First, we’ll have a car chase and then we’ll have an explosion and then we’ll throw in another car chase followed by a sex scene. But those stories, once you strip away the special effects, are really about nothing. Often, they’re even boring. To truly be compelling you’ve got to place a character into the action that people care about. If they don’t like the main character, if they don’t at least sympathize with him on some level, then really, what difference does it make if he’s in a car chase or running from an explosion or tangled up in the sheets with some random beautiful girl?

I’ll leave the creating a complex, sympathetic character issue for another day, and instead focus on plot. I’ve learned over the years that what it all comes down to—what makes a reader continue to turn pages (and, strangely, what makes a writer keep writing them)—is one question. Patti Gauch, former editor at Philomel and now a writing teacher and speaker, put it this way: “The character is basically being shot through the book like a pinball. He will hit obstacles and exterior stuff, which will play off of the interior stuff. What will he do? How will he deal with it? A question overlays the entire book. The writer must say it, explicitly or implicitly, from the very beginning.” She gave the example of The Wizard of Oz. Will Dorothy get home? But you can probably think of a ton of other examples. Will the guy who's afraid of the water in Jaws kill the shark? Will Luke and his friends beat the evil Empire in the Star Wars trilogy? Will Harry Potter triumph over Voldemort? These all seem like battles, and in a way, they are. A battle between the main character and someone or something else. It's English 101--Conflict.

I realized that the books I read recently all had an over-riding question. And since they contained characters that I worried over, I was eager to turn the pages and see how the question would be answered.

The memoir, This Is Not the Story You Think It Is by Laura Munson, might seem like an odd choice as a page turner, (see the previous blog entry for the complete review) but on the first page Munson relays the news that her husband may no longer love her. The book had more going on it than that, of course, but I was turning pages to find out what was going to happen to Munson. Did the guy love her or not? Was he going to stay? Was she going to keep him after his midlife crisis pretty much put their family through hell? (I won’t tell you the answer.)

The third book in a teen romance, We’ll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han, was a perfect, light summer read that I carried around the house until I finished. I'd already read the other books in the series, The Summer I Turned Pretty and It’s Not Summer Without You, so I already knew and loved the characters. Belly, who spends summers at a beach cottage with Conrad and Jeremiah, two brothers she looks up to and tags along after. They merely tolerate her existence, until the one summer she turns pretty….The books deal with her attraction to the two boys and their growing attraction to her, which threatens to tear all of them apart. Big question: Which boy will Belly choose?

I read the man vs nature YA adventure, Ashfall by Mike Mullin (release date: fall, 2011, Tanglewood Publishing) in one afternoon. The main character is Alex, a fifteen year old computer geek and taekwondo expert. At the beginning of the novel Alex fights with his parents after refusing to go on a weekend family trip to visit relatives. They reluctantly leave him home alone, and unfortunately, for Alex, that weekend the super volcano underneath Yellowstone (which really exists. Yikes) erupts and destroys half of the country. This novel was all action—one horrifying challenge after another as Alex makes his way 140 miles, by ski, over ash, through scenes of death and destruction, to find his parents. You won’t be able to put the story down until you know if he makes it.

The angsty, soap opera-y teen fantasy with a mythological twist is Fury by Elizabeth Miles. (Simon Pulse pub. August, 2011) This book has a great hook. The furies from Greek mythology, those crazy vengeful sisters who choose deserving humans to punish, are back, and for some reason, focusing their attention on two clueless teens in a small town in Maine. The narrative goes back and forth between the two kids, detailing their numerous faults and sins, with the furies in the background plotting their relentless, manipulative revenge. I’ve read reviews of this book online and some readers, apparently, thought the kids deserved their fate. But I didn’t. I was biting my nails in growing horror, worrying over Emily and Chase, who, okay, are a tad shallow and sometimes downright cruel, but aren’t we all? At times? I mean, who hasn’t had a secret crush on a best friend’s boyfriend? Ultimate, page turning question: will the furies pursue these kids to the bitter end—(gulp)—death?

So, there you have it. Four compelling, wildly different page turners that reminded me what makes a page turner. And here’s the cool takeaway lesson for writers: Figuring out the over-riding question of your book might be the key to the whole plot thing. At least it is for me. Start out with your sweet, sympathetic, very-real-in-your-own-mind character and plunk him down in your made up but also very real created world. Then let him go, asking, What if this? What if that? What will my sweet made up little guy do next?

The only way to know for sure is to write the book. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a page turner of your own. If not, well, at least you answered the question for yourself.

Free Agent (This is not the story you think it is)

So a few weeks ago my darling agent of nearly two years decided to retire, and upon hearing the news I found myself sobbing in a hotel bathroom (see my blog about college road trips, zombie apocalypses, the highly over-rated Amish, and tour guides at Princeton who stretch the truth). But this story is not about that.

Sure, I could bore you with the gory details of my freak-out, which involved blubbering into my cellphone to my dearest writing friend, saying over and over, I can’t DO this again (meaning, cold-querying agents while simultaneously submitting stuff myself and collecting inevitable rejections), but whispering it, so my son who was watching Star Wars with his best buddy in the other room wouldn’t overhear and think his mother had lost her mind when we still had miles to go and many more colleges to visit and hear chirpy barely out of their teens tour guides relay fun hyperbolic facts about eccentric scientists and their allegedly visitable labs.)

What I really want to talk about is this great book I read, This Is Not the Story You Think It Is, the heartbreaking and surprisingly funny-at-times memoir by my new hero Laura Munson. My rational, logical son would likely disagree with me, but I believe that books (and people) have a way of popping into your life just when you most need them. Example: I met the dearest writing friend when we were standing in a Port-a-potty line at a writing conference. And I discovered Munson’s memoir at a used bookstore while I was gliding by the memoir/biography section on my way to pick up every book in the Ender’s Game series for said logical, rational son. (He wants to reread them all. But he doesn’t want to buy them new and put money into the pockets of an author he disagrees with. See HIS blog on the subject, immediately preceding this entry.)

Munson is cool. I knew this from the very first page of her book. “You might think all this would find me in a place of intense panic,” she states (upon hearing her husband say that he no longer loves her) “but I’m choosing something else. I am choosing not to suffer.” Turns out that Munson had an epiphany the week before this potentially earth shattering news. She’s a writer. At that point in her life she had written FOURTEEN unpublished books, and she was getting tired of that fact. Tired of having to tell people she was a writer then having to add that, no, they couldn’t buy her books at a bookstore. Tired of writing and writing, and never seeming to get anywhere with it. She comes to the conclusion that pinning her success and happiness on something out of her control is a ridiculous waste of time, and she decides that she will embrace this bit of wisdom: the end of suffering happens with the end of wanting. She says this twice. The end of wanting. Which was helpful to me. I had to read the statement twice more. And it hit me that I’m tired of wanting too.

But how do I stop wanting to be published? Happily for me, Munson had the same thought. She asked a famous author friend of hers. How do you spend your life writing without wanting to published? And he answered: “The only difference between being published and not being published”—(wait for it…)—“is being published.”

Yeah. So it annoyed Munson too. But then she gets the horrifying news from her husband about not loving her anymore and the real bottom drops out of her world. Head still spinning and heart breaking, she wonders if she can put her new found epiphany about choosing not to suffer into practice. The man is clearly having a mid-life crisis. Maybe she can just step aside and let him have it. In the meantime she won’t freak out about it. She’ll take her pleasures where she can get them. And when he’s done, he’ll either come back to her.

Or he won’t. Not something she can control either way. The book is the four and a half month true story of how she coped. The irony is not lost on Munson that it becomes her first published book. Strange thing, fate.

Self-pitying digression: I liked having an agent. I’ll admit it was for mostly lazy and vain reasons. Lazy, because I really really really hate the work involved in writing pitches and query letters and synopses. And I hate studying the market and keeping up with submissions and (ugh) rejections. Having an agent meant I could devote all my time to writing. She took care of the irritating details. She absorbed the blows of the rejections, which she was kind enough to call, “passes.” I can see that I was probably a fool to put all this stuff on her. Especially because now I’m a little hazy about where my manuscripts are and what kind of editorial feedback I really got. (I do have a nice agent at the same firm who’s taking care of this during my transition into free agentdom. Last night she forwarded me a ton of correspondence so I got to see bam bam bam all of the dreaded passes in one big soul searing dump. Serves me right.)

The vain aspect comes into it because I liked saying, “I have an agent” to people after they asked me what I do. ("I'm a writer and I don't have any books published yet, but I have an agent" was my standard line.) An agent is an outward symbol to the mostly disinterested world that there’s SOMEONE out there besides relatives and dear friends who recognizes that what you write is worthy (ie, publishable). I had a professional, book-loving person in my corner. An advocate. A cheerleader. Rah Rah Me.

Vain. Like I said. And now as I find myself slipping into boo hoo self-wallowment (I know. Not a word) I say a giant Thank You to Laura Munson.

Thank you for baring your soul and writing your book, Laura. (Can I call you that? I feel like you’re my long lost twin except you’re way prettier and you went to boarding school and you ride horses and live in Montana and you’re now a best-selling author.) Thank you for giving me the nice psychic smack that I needed when I needed it. It is silly to expect my happiness to come from outside myself—from something I can’t control. I have a good life. I have two beautiful brilliant healthy happy children. I have a loving husband of twenty years who has never had a mid-life crisis. (I asked him last night and he confided that he felt like having one but then decided to buy a new car. Whew. Hardly a crisis at all.) So who cares if I have an agent or not? Who cares, really, if I ever get a book published? I'm still a writer. And the truth is, I live out my dreams every day.