by Riley Redgate
I am studying for a degree in Economics. I am the type of person that economists call, kindly, "risk-averse." This is a much more forgiving term than "a large wimp," but in my mind, they're synonyms. I admit it! I am a large wimp. This is objectively true. I hate roller-coasters because of the panic centers in my brain that helpfully supply scenarios in which I fly, screaming, off roller-coasters and to my doom. I hate walking home alone at night because of an overactive imagination, which plants serial killers behind every ominous-looking dumpster, and also because I am a human female. And I hate deep water because Jesus, have you guys seen The Perfect Storm?
I'm getting published next year, and it's surreal and wonderful, and part of me is still expecting to wake up from what is clearly a fever dream. People understand those emotions, those of disbelief and excitement, which I've been experiencing ever since the sale. I haven't spoken nearly as much about the fear.
It's kind of a mood-killer. What If, the fear helpfully supplies, every review for the book is filled with the most vitriolic hatred imaginable? What If the general reader response doesn't even merit hatred, and is a resounding 'meh'? What If you sell exactly two copies, and they are to your parents and your sister? What If your words are lost within this wash of human noise in a virtual instant, and ground down to nothingness by the inevitable progression of time? (That last one will certainly happen, which is rough.)
Most of my fears terrify me because they are unanswerable. What if I fall overboard in deep water? I don't know. I could get eaten by a shark (which would be sad, because I love sharks). I could do the boring thing and drown. The difference between that sort of fear and writing fears are twofold: 1) I'm not going to die from bad reviews. I'm just not. And more importantly, 2) with writing, I have an answer to all the horrible hypotheticals in my head.
So, What If every terrible thing I'm imagining does in fact come to fruition after I'm published? What if it's all exactly as horrible as my pessimist side imagines?
Well, too bad. I guess I'll keep writing, because it's a compulsion.
Whether you're just starting to draft that first novel or on the road to your eighth publication, if you're afraid, that's all right. The only question that matters is this one: do you need to write? If the answer's yes, then the fears don't matter. Which isn't to say they're not valid. Just that they can be beaten by sheer stubbornness.
I need to write. This is the only thing that calms my nerves, because nobody can stop me from continuing, no matter what happens. Unless, of course, we become subjected to an Orwellian dystopia, and an overreaching governmental hand snatches all writing materials from my grasp. In which case I will move to Canada.
Cheers!
Riley
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a senior at Kenyon College represented by Caryn Wiseman. Her debut novel, Seven Ways We Lie, will be released by Abrams/Amulet in Spring 2016. Her site is here, and she Tweets here.
Showing posts with label Riley Redgate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Riley Redgate. Show all posts
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
A Basic Guide to Tumblr
by Riley Redgate
These days, social media is the fastest way to engage with readers, if that's your sort of thing. Some people, of course, choose to create a veneer of mystery instead, not Tweeting, not Facebooking, nada. But the great thing about social media is that it's so simple! You can do it all while sitting at home, not wearing any pants! I don't know why you're not wearing pants. Better not to ask.
Pants aside: when it comes to various social media platforms, people don't seem to think Tumblr is as simple as Twitter or Facebook. Every time I mention Tumblr to people who don't Tumbl, they react with alarm, bafflement, or a mixture of the two. This makes sense to a degree, since Tumblr culture is, erm, sort of weird. But never fear! I know the place a little too well, since over the last few years, my blog has stumbled its way into 10,000+ followers, and I also spend about 10,000% of my free time on the site. I've made this cheat sheet to explain a few things about Tumblr if you're looking to get started.
But first: why should you, gentle author, care about starting a Tumblr? Well, if you write Young Adult, Middle Grade, or New Adult, here's why: in a recent article, TechTimes says that more than 70 percent of Tumblr's users are age 16 to 34. Moreover, "Tumblr, now the fastest growing social site, has seen an increase in its active users by up to 120 percent within the last six months." Tl;dr -- it's where your target audience is hanging out.
Without further ado, here are the five things you need to know about Tumblr Culture:
5) Keep Up
One thing that can seem intimidating about Tumblr is the pace, which is breakneck. The Dashboard -- home to posts from all the blogs you follow -- is active 24/7 and constantly updating, so things get easily lost in the mix. Tumblr even has a specific function to encourage constant activity: the Queue. You can set your queue to post automatically for you, up to 24 times a day. Compared to hosts like Blogspot, that can seem like an extreme number, but on Tumblr, a steady stream of activity is good.
"Wait!" you might say. "What about the quantity of stuff I will need to generate, if I want to post that often? Am I supposed to sell my soul? Quit my job to make Tumblr posts all day?" No, friend. Although I'm sure Tumblr staff would love for you to do that, you don't have to, because ...
4) To Blog is to Reblog
On most other social media outlets, people focus primarily on their own content -- displaying it, advertising it, etc. But the climate on Tumblr is one of sharing. The site prides itself on being full of not only creators, but creative communities. For instance, you might find fanartists who draw pieces based on a fanfiction writer's work, or people who write 3,000-word essays about a TV character's psychology just to share with others and discuss.
Tumblr is hugely about interplay, which is why -- even on many popular blogs -- you'll find that the percentage of original content is relatively low. Each blog feels something like a miniature aggregate site, a collection of art, writing, opinions, etc. that the blogrunner enjoys. Like a little internet gallery! (For those unfamiliar, reblogging works quite simply: by clicking the "reblog" button, you rehost an original post from somebody else's blog to yours, and thereby share it with all of your followers.)
All this is to say that you don't have to stress about making your own stuff 24/7. The general mood of Tumblr is to stay active by reblogging others' work to support them, and you'll find your kin through common interests. This is best if you ...
3) Learn the Tag System
Some people migrate from Twitter to Tumblr and assume that tags function in essentially the same manner, but this is not the case. On Tumblr, people use tags in several primary ways. Firstly, you can organize your blog through tags. On many blogs, you'll find tag-based Navigation pages -- here's a screenshot of what mine looks like:
... so, whenever I make a post with a horrible pun, I tag it with "GET THEE TO A PUNNERY!" Then, on my Navigation page, when you click the "Get Thee to a Punnery!" link, it can take you to a page that displays every post I've ever made (or reblogged!) that has a horrible pun in it.
The second primary use of tags is to add commentary. On Tumblr--unless you have something vital to contribute to a conversation--it's seen as weird to reblog and add a comment to the post, because the original poster will see it as a response. This might feel counterintuitive, because on most other sites, commenting is seen as the best way to connect. But on Tumblr, people often get concerned that too much text messes with the ~aesthetic~ of the post.
If you do have an opinion but don't want to address it to the author of the original post, what many people do is reblog the post and write it in the tags, like this:
Tags are also gathering spaces. This function is more like the way Twitter uses tags. If you go to the Doctor Who tag, for instance -- http://tumblr.com/tagged/doctor-who -- you can see every post that Who fans have tagged with "doctor who". For smaller fanbases, the tag becomes like a little home base.
Phew! Okay. Tagging is a lot. Moving on ...
2) Do Not Engage with Call-Out Culture.
I waffled on whether to include this. For people just looking to make an author Tumblr and connect with their readers, one would hope it wouldn't be an issue, but you never know.
Tumblr users tend to be impulsive, passionate, opinionated -- and overwhelmingly socially liberal. It's a haven for LGBTQ+ people and intersectional feminist discourse; it has huge communities for the marginalized. And in people's desire to make Tumblr a safe space for social discussion, they often turn to "Call-Out Culture." This is where people present problematic behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and eviscerate it publicly. And for those who are actually famous, public opinion can turn on a dime and give the site a feeling of mob mentality. (See: that recent John Green debacle.)
Mostly, call-out culture is nothing to be afraid of, assuming you're not actually sexist/racist/etc. But it's the internet. Misunderstandings abound. A few months back, one of my joke posts got popular, but -- alas! -- it had a snarkier tone than I usually employ, and a comment arose claiming that I was jeering at young, female writers. (Which would be weird of me, as a young, female writer.) I tried to clarify, but people were already coming to my askbox yelling cursewords at me. So I didn't engage. After making a separate post to clarify the situation, I deleted the original post and turned off my askbox, and things simmered down.
There are far worse things than the overly enthusiastic social justice community. Like, say, the pro-anorexia side of Tumblr, or the shoplifter community. Also, a few years ago, I was mobbed by Men's Rights Activist users, who gave 18-year-old me appalling threats of sexual violence. Same solution: turn off the askbox; don't engage. This too shall pass.
Moving on now to the most important thing:
1) The Golden SocMed Rule: It's Not Really About You
I think this holds true for any social media platform: engaging with an audience should be about the audience first and foremost. A Twitter that consists mostly of a bot posting promos every five seconds is about the most self-defeating thing in the world. People are inherently self-serving, and if what you're posting isn't funny, useful, or in some way pleasing, there's no reason they'll want to connect with you.
Of course, the more famous you are, the less the Golden Rule applies. If you have a giant, rabid fanbase, you can probably talk about yourself all day and night and people will still love you. But for people trying to build buzz through social media, incessant self-promotion doesn't make sense.
Anyway, if you're already famous, all of the above is totally irrelevant. You could probably post just the word "butts" on Tumblr once a day and get a hilariously huge following.
I hope this is helpful! Questions about Tumblr, or about any of the above? Leave them in the comments. Until then, signing off.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a senior at Kenyon College represented by Caryn Wiseman. Her debut novel, Seven Ways We Lie, will be released by Abrams/Amulet in Spring 2016. Her site (hosted by Tumblr, no less) is here, and she Tweets here.
These days, social media is the fastest way to engage with readers, if that's your sort of thing. Some people, of course, choose to create a veneer of mystery instead, not Tweeting, not Facebooking, nada. But the great thing about social media is that it's so simple! You can do it all while sitting at home, not wearing any pants! I don't know why you're not wearing pants. Better not to ask.
Pants aside: when it comes to various social media platforms, people don't seem to think Tumblr is as simple as Twitter or Facebook. Every time I mention Tumblr to people who don't Tumbl, they react with alarm, bafflement, or a mixture of the two. This makes sense to a degree, since Tumblr culture is, erm, sort of weird. But never fear! I know the place a little too well, since over the last few years, my blog has stumbled its way into 10,000+ followers, and I also spend about 10,000% of my free time on the site. I've made this cheat sheet to explain a few things about Tumblr if you're looking to get started.
Without further ado, here are the five things you need to know about Tumblr Culture:
5) Keep Up
One thing that can seem intimidating about Tumblr is the pace, which is breakneck. The Dashboard -- home to posts from all the blogs you follow -- is active 24/7 and constantly updating, so things get easily lost in the mix. Tumblr even has a specific function to encourage constant activity: the Queue. You can set your queue to post automatically for you, up to 24 times a day. Compared to hosts like Blogspot, that can seem like an extreme number, but on Tumblr, a steady stream of activity is good.
"Wait!" you might say. "What about the quantity of stuff I will need to generate, if I want to post that often? Am I supposed to sell my soul? Quit my job to make Tumblr posts all day?" No, friend. Although I'm sure Tumblr staff would love for you to do that, you don't have to, because ...
4) To Blog is to Reblog
On most other social media outlets, people focus primarily on their own content -- displaying it, advertising it, etc. But the climate on Tumblr is one of sharing. The site prides itself on being full of not only creators, but creative communities. For instance, you might find fanartists who draw pieces based on a fanfiction writer's work, or people who write 3,000-word essays about a TV character's psychology just to share with others and discuss.
Tumblr is hugely about interplay, which is why -- even on many popular blogs -- you'll find that the percentage of original content is relatively low. Each blog feels something like a miniature aggregate site, a collection of art, writing, opinions, etc. that the blogrunner enjoys. Like a little internet gallery! (For those unfamiliar, reblogging works quite simply: by clicking the "reblog" button, you rehost an original post from somebody else's blog to yours, and thereby share it with all of your followers.)
All this is to say that you don't have to stress about making your own stuff 24/7. The general mood of Tumblr is to stay active by reblogging others' work to support them, and you'll find your kin through common interests. This is best if you ...
3) Learn the Tag System
Some people migrate from Twitter to Tumblr and assume that tags function in essentially the same manner, but this is not the case. On Tumblr, people use tags in several primary ways. Firstly, you can organize your blog through tags. On many blogs, you'll find tag-based Navigation pages -- here's a screenshot of what mine looks like:
... so, whenever I make a post with a horrible pun, I tag it with "GET THEE TO A PUNNERY!" Then, on my Navigation page, when you click the "Get Thee to a Punnery!" link, it can take you to a page that displays every post I've ever made (or reblogged!) that has a horrible pun in it.
The second primary use of tags is to add commentary. On Tumblr--unless you have something vital to contribute to a conversation--it's seen as weird to reblog and add a comment to the post, because the original poster will see it as a response. This might feel counterintuitive, because on most other sites, commenting is seen as the best way to connect. But on Tumblr, people often get concerned that too much text messes with the ~aesthetic~ of the post.
If you do have an opinion but don't want to address it to the author of the original post, what many people do is reblog the post and write it in the tags, like this:
Tags are also gathering spaces. This function is more like the way Twitter uses tags. If you go to the Doctor Who tag, for instance -- http://tumblr.com/tagged/doctor-who -- you can see every post that Who fans have tagged with "doctor who". For smaller fanbases, the tag becomes like a little home base.
Phew! Okay. Tagging is a lot. Moving on ...
2) Do Not Engage with Call-Out Culture.
I waffled on whether to include this. For people just looking to make an author Tumblr and connect with their readers, one would hope it wouldn't be an issue, but you never know.
Tumblr users tend to be impulsive, passionate, opinionated -- and overwhelmingly socially liberal. It's a haven for LGBTQ+ people and intersectional feminist discourse; it has huge communities for the marginalized. And in people's desire to make Tumblr a safe space for social discussion, they often turn to "Call-Out Culture." This is where people present problematic behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and eviscerate it publicly. And for those who are actually famous, public opinion can turn on a dime and give the site a feeling of mob mentality. (See: that recent John Green debacle.)
Mostly, call-out culture is nothing to be afraid of, assuming you're not actually sexist/racist/etc. But it's the internet. Misunderstandings abound. A few months back, one of my joke posts got popular, but -- alas! -- it had a snarkier tone than I usually employ, and a comment arose claiming that I was jeering at young, female writers. (Which would be weird of me, as a young, female writer.) I tried to clarify, but people were already coming to my askbox yelling cursewords at me. So I didn't engage. After making a separate post to clarify the situation, I deleted the original post and turned off my askbox, and things simmered down.
There are far worse things than the overly enthusiastic social justice community. Like, say, the pro-anorexia side of Tumblr, or the shoplifter community. Also, a few years ago, I was mobbed by Men's Rights Activist users, who gave 18-year-old me appalling threats of sexual violence. Same solution: turn off the askbox; don't engage. This too shall pass.
Moving on now to the most important thing:
1) The Golden SocMed Rule: It's Not Really About You
I think this holds true for any social media platform: engaging with an audience should be about the audience first and foremost. A Twitter that consists mostly of a bot posting promos every five seconds is about the most self-defeating thing in the world. People are inherently self-serving, and if what you're posting isn't funny, useful, or in some way pleasing, there's no reason they'll want to connect with you.
Of course, the more famous you are, the less the Golden Rule applies. If you have a giant, rabid fanbase, you can probably talk about yourself all day and night and people will still love you. But for people trying to build buzz through social media, incessant self-promotion doesn't make sense.
Anyway, if you're already famous, all of the above is totally irrelevant. You could probably post just the word "butts" on Tumblr once a day and get a hilariously huge following.
I hope this is helpful! Questions about Tumblr, or about any of the above? Leave them in the comments. Until then, signing off.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a senior at Kenyon College represented by Caryn Wiseman. Her debut novel, Seven Ways We Lie, will be released by Abrams/Amulet in Spring 2016. Her site (hosted by Tumblr, no less) is here, and she Tweets here.
Monday, January 12, 2015
When I Was Eight
by Riley Redgate
Like most strange adults, I was once a strange kid. Back in my elementary school days, I had a knack for sleepwalking: I'd end up downstairs a lot, managing our staircase with ease, and sometimes I'd have conversations with people while asleep. One night, my father found me in the hall outside my bedroom, staring at nothing. When he asked me what I was doing, I helpfully replied that I was "looking." Looking at what? I don't know. I didn't elaborate. We chatted for a minute or two about why I was still awake -- it was about 1 AM -- and then I went back into my room. I remember zero percent of this.
Nighttime is when I do my best work. Unfortunately, it is also when I am weirdest. This has always been true. Once, when I was eight, I walked downstairs in the middle of the night, sobbing. My parents asked me what was wrong. My response was, "I just don't want to die!" If I were my parents, I would've been terrified of me. (Note: I have not yet died.)
People wonder why old fairy tales were so bloodthirsty, what with all the violence, cannibalism, etc. I feel like the answer is pretty simple: children are obsessed with darknesses and terrors. I have spoken with innumerable people who tell me they went through a Holocaust fascination phase as a kid (so did I). When I was in elementary school, my fellow students loved this Jingle Bells parody, which is a blood-soaked piece of rewriting if I've ever seen one. And kids, Neil Gaiman says, read his notoriously horrifying book Coraline as an adventure, while adults get nightmares. Let's be honest, though: all you need to do is crack open one of those Scary Stories anthologies to find something traumatizing. Those were always popular at my school libraries.
When I was eight, the ideas of death and pain were everywhere in the media I consumed. Kids' books and movies have a high body count -- dead parents, dead kids, people getting injured all the time. Harry Potter is the poster child for fictional orphaned kids, who have been trendy in literature since Dickens. Kids get devoured by the handful in Roald Dahl's The BFG, and tortured by Ms. Trunchbull in his book Matilda. Part of this is the dichotomy kids' books often draw between good and evil: evil people hurt others, and good people stop that from happening. But there's more there.
I'm still scared of dying, like most people. But when I was eight, the fear of it crippled me. I had huge fears that swallowed me up every night as I lay there, staring at the ceiling. I have a body of experiences now that help me cope with fears based on how my life has gone this far. But when I was eight, fiction was the only way I could understand most fears. Stories make awful things comprehensible to kids. It's an incredibly important part of growing up, understanding what bad things are, why they happen, and how they operate.
Books taught me the best way to beat the monsters, too: keep going. Keep reading to the end of the story. Keep moving forward until something changes, or until you understand. That's why my favorite kids' books, from chapter books to YA, have heavy or dark elements -- these books help readers deal with hard truths, and persistence is always the way to tackle them.
It's understandable, wanting to shield kids from the worst parts of the world. Still, in my opinion, kids shouldn't be sheltered from scary topics. There's a time and a place for everything, obviously, and kids' literature has boundaries that adult categories don't. All the same, loss, pain, and death are part of being alive, from the youngest age, and in my life, books have been the weapons I've used to fight back the fear of them.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Like most strange adults, I was once a strange kid. Back in my elementary school days, I had a knack for sleepwalking: I'd end up downstairs a lot, managing our staircase with ease, and sometimes I'd have conversations with people while asleep. One night, my father found me in the hall outside my bedroom, staring at nothing. When he asked me what I was doing, I helpfully replied that I was "looking." Looking at what? I don't know. I didn't elaborate. We chatted for a minute or two about why I was still awake -- it was about 1 AM -- and then I went back into my room. I remember zero percent of this.
Nighttime is when I do my best work. Unfortunately, it is also when I am weirdest. This has always been true. Once, when I was eight, I walked downstairs in the middle of the night, sobbing. My parents asked me what was wrong. My response was, "I just don't want to die!" If I were my parents, I would've been terrified of me. (Note: I have not yet died.)
People wonder why old fairy tales were so bloodthirsty, what with all the violence, cannibalism, etc. I feel like the answer is pretty simple: children are obsessed with darknesses and terrors. I have spoken with innumerable people who tell me they went through a Holocaust fascination phase as a kid (so did I). When I was in elementary school, my fellow students loved this Jingle Bells parody, which is a blood-soaked piece of rewriting if I've ever seen one. And kids, Neil Gaiman says, read his notoriously horrifying book Coraline as an adventure, while adults get nightmares. Let's be honest, though: all you need to do is crack open one of those Scary Stories anthologies to find something traumatizing. Those were always popular at my school libraries.
When I was eight, the ideas of death and pain were everywhere in the media I consumed. Kids' books and movies have a high body count -- dead parents, dead kids, people getting injured all the time. Harry Potter is the poster child for fictional orphaned kids, who have been trendy in literature since Dickens. Kids get devoured by the handful in Roald Dahl's The BFG, and tortured by Ms. Trunchbull in his book Matilda. Part of this is the dichotomy kids' books often draw between good and evil: evil people hurt others, and good people stop that from happening. But there's more there.
I'm still scared of dying, like most people. But when I was eight, the fear of it crippled me. I had huge fears that swallowed me up every night as I lay there, staring at the ceiling. I have a body of experiences now that help me cope with fears based on how my life has gone this far. But when I was eight, fiction was the only way I could understand most fears. Stories make awful things comprehensible to kids. It's an incredibly important part of growing up, understanding what bad things are, why they happen, and how they operate.
Books taught me the best way to beat the monsters, too: keep going. Keep reading to the end of the story. Keep moving forward until something changes, or until you understand. That's why my favorite kids' books, from chapter books to YA, have heavy or dark elements -- these books help readers deal with hard truths, and persistence is always the way to tackle them.
It's understandable, wanting to shield kids from the worst parts of the world. Still, in my opinion, kids shouldn't be sheltered from scary topics. There's a time and a place for everything, obviously, and kids' literature has boundaries that adult categories don't. All the same, loss, pain, and death are part of being alive, from the youngest age, and in my life, books have been the weapons I've used to fight back the fear of them.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
6 Reasons You Will Never Escape the Listicle
by Riley Redgate
The listicle: it's an article, but also a list. No, that's not a portmanteau of "list" and "testicle," though that also sort of works, in a way.
Thanks to BuzzFeed taking over the world, you probably see a listicle or two popping up in your Facebook feed or on Twitter daily. This very blog post is a listicle! Help, I've been converted to the Dark Side, ha ha. No, seriously. Help.
I've seen plenty of people complaining about listicles being the downfall of civilized society or the end of Real Readership. I don't particularly agree, but that's fine. One can think listicles are the end-all-be-all of perfect journalism or that they are some terrible plague on society; everyone's opinion is pretty much valid. But I'm more interested in why and how they became such a phenomenon so quickly, because that is an undeniable truth. This is a type of writing that's catchier than chicken pox, and wherever writing trends pop up, it's always good to examine them closely.
As I see it, here's why these articles have proven themselves to have the sticking power of particularly determined leeches:
1) The ever-clickable titles.
The portal into the listicle inevitably has a cutesy but wait, there's more! tone to it. I just know there's some person out there behind a keyboard whose actual job is titling listicles. They're probably cackling gleefully, cracking their knuckles, and making unfathomable amounts of money off it all. These titles have a great and terrible power. 12 Quirky and Adorable Times Jennifer Lawrence Enraptured the General Viewing Public? I like being enraptured! Show me more! 9 Facts You Won't Believe Are True? Is that a challenge? That sounds like a challenge. I'd better click it, just to show them I can believe those facts are true. That'll show them.
More page views equals more success. Clickable titles are the first step, then, to taking over the world. These titles sell a product with efficiency and clarity -- you know exactly what you're getting. Brevity is the soul of wit. It is also apparently the soul of capitalism.
2) The convenient organization.
Listicles are essentially pre-chewed food. Everything is easily digestible, lined up in order so that the quickly scanning eye can hop from point to point with maximum efficiency. It's also convenient for the author, because it's essentially just an article taken to the chopping block: you take the topic sentence of the paragraph, turn it into a sentence fragment, put a number before it, and voila. There's an emphasis here on comprehensibility, rather than style. It's hyper-commercial, and organized to be so.
3) Their unthreatening nature.
Honestly, listicles seem to betray how scared the internet has become when it comes to reading anything long. This format is a great way to make articles look low-calorie. It's not some tremendous block of text, the listicle cries. You're still on the internet, the land of the miniature attention span! This is a quick article!
This is funny to me, because (as mentioned in point #2) I feel that many plain ol' articles could be easily converted into list-form, and conversely, many listicles could be transformed into plain ol' articles without too much hard work. Not that writing lists and writing articles aren't different arts, but wow, the magic effect of white space. How much more likely is someone to read an article titled 30 Things You Loved About the 90s, which is simply 30 numbered evenly spaced paragraphs about the 90s, versus an article titled What You Loved About the 90s, a 30-paragraph-long essay?
4) The ranking system.
Something that's uniquely wonderful about the list format is that it presents the opportunity for you to rank the importance of your points without having to state explicitly, This is the important part, for these reasons. Especially if the list is reverse-numbered (5, 4, 3, 2, 1), the reader can expect that #1 on the list will be something special. This also helps retain readers who otherwise may have stopped reading before the end. They will feel some terrible tug in their chest that urges them to finish the listicle, to see it through to the bitter end, no matter their current feelings toward it, no matter how much they might want to quit. They will want to be impressed. They will be stubborn. I am not at all speaking from experience.
What I'm saying here is that the setup creates unresolved tension. If you see #5 at the top, you'll naturally want to read down to #1.
5) Humor.
Cracked.com has been doing these for ages. (Though there's a world of difference between BuzzFeed listicles and Cracked listicles.) The list format lends itself to joke format. Each number gets a setup and a punchline, and then you move on. In a lot of cases, the last number on the list is also a punchline. The audience expects this, in a way, which means it's all the more satisfying when their expectations are met.
6) The internet has a long memory.
The internet is the place that still can't let go of videos like They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard and the trololo song. I doubt it'll let go of this oddly specific, highly successful writing format that's created a million viral articles. The internet has dug its little hands into the listicle, and the internet loves the listicle, so the listicle, BasedGod decrees, is here to stay.
So little time and effort involved, and so many laughs. Here's a gif of a cat. Moving pictures. We're basically in Harry Potter now. This is the final stage of human evolution. This is it. We've reached the top.
Am I against listicles? Not really. I think they're hilarious, and expeditious. And frankly, at least people are still reading articles at all. It's 2014. Weren't we supposed to be uploading information to our brains by now?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
The listicle: it's an article, but also a list. No, that's not a portmanteau of "list" and "testicle," though that also sort of works, in a way.
Thanks to BuzzFeed taking over the world, you probably see a listicle or two popping up in your Facebook feed or on Twitter daily. This very blog post is a listicle! Help, I've been converted to the Dark Side, ha ha. No, seriously. Help.
I've seen plenty of people complaining about listicles being the downfall of civilized society or the end of Real Readership. I don't particularly agree, but that's fine. One can think listicles are the end-all-be-all of perfect journalism or that they are some terrible plague on society; everyone's opinion is pretty much valid. But I'm more interested in why and how they became such a phenomenon so quickly, because that is an undeniable truth. This is a type of writing that's catchier than chicken pox, and wherever writing trends pop up, it's always good to examine them closely.
As I see it, here's why these articles have proven themselves to have the sticking power of particularly determined leeches:
1) The ever-clickable titles.
The portal into the listicle inevitably has a cutesy but wait, there's more! tone to it. I just know there's some person out there behind a keyboard whose actual job is titling listicles. They're probably cackling gleefully, cracking their knuckles, and making unfathomable amounts of money off it all. These titles have a great and terrible power. 12 Quirky and Adorable Times Jennifer Lawrence Enraptured the General Viewing Public? I like being enraptured! Show me more! 9 Facts You Won't Believe Are True? Is that a challenge? That sounds like a challenge. I'd better click it, just to show them I can believe those facts are true. That'll show them.
More page views equals more success. Clickable titles are the first step, then, to taking over the world. These titles sell a product with efficiency and clarity -- you know exactly what you're getting. Brevity is the soul of wit. It is also apparently the soul of capitalism.
2) The convenient organization.
Listicles are essentially pre-chewed food. Everything is easily digestible, lined up in order so that the quickly scanning eye can hop from point to point with maximum efficiency. It's also convenient for the author, because it's essentially just an article taken to the chopping block: you take the topic sentence of the paragraph, turn it into a sentence fragment, put a number before it, and voila. There's an emphasis here on comprehensibility, rather than style. It's hyper-commercial, and organized to be so.
3) Their unthreatening nature.
Honestly, listicles seem to betray how scared the internet has become when it comes to reading anything long. This format is a great way to make articles look low-calorie. It's not some tremendous block of text, the listicle cries. You're still on the internet, the land of the miniature attention span! This is a quick article!
This is funny to me, because (as mentioned in point #2) I feel that many plain ol' articles could be easily converted into list-form, and conversely, many listicles could be transformed into plain ol' articles without too much hard work. Not that writing lists and writing articles aren't different arts, but wow, the magic effect of white space. How much more likely is someone to read an article titled 30 Things You Loved About the 90s, which is simply 30 numbered evenly spaced paragraphs about the 90s, versus an article titled What You Loved About the 90s, a 30-paragraph-long essay?
4) The ranking system.
Something that's uniquely wonderful about the list format is that it presents the opportunity for you to rank the importance of your points without having to state explicitly, This is the important part, for these reasons. Especially if the list is reverse-numbered (5, 4, 3, 2, 1), the reader can expect that #1 on the list will be something special. This also helps retain readers who otherwise may have stopped reading before the end. They will feel some terrible tug in their chest that urges them to finish the listicle, to see it through to the bitter end, no matter their current feelings toward it, no matter how much they might want to quit. They will want to be impressed. They will be stubborn. I am not at all speaking from experience.
What I'm saying here is that the setup creates unresolved tension. If you see #5 at the top, you'll naturally want to read down to #1.
5) Humor.
Cracked.com has been doing these for ages. (Though there's a world of difference between BuzzFeed listicles and Cracked listicles.) The list format lends itself to joke format. Each number gets a setup and a punchline, and then you move on. In a lot of cases, the last number on the list is also a punchline. The audience expects this, in a way, which means it's all the more satisfying when their expectations are met.
6) The internet has a long memory.
The internet is the place that still can't let go of videos like They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard and the trololo song. I doubt it'll let go of this oddly specific, highly successful writing format that's created a million viral articles. The internet has dug its little hands into the listicle, and the internet loves the listicle, so the listicle, BasedGod decrees, is here to stay.
So little time and effort involved, and so many laughs. Here's a gif of a cat. Moving pictures. We're basically in Harry Potter now. This is the final stage of human evolution. This is it. We've reached the top.
Am I against listicles? Not really. I think they're hilarious, and expeditious. And frankly, at least people are still reading articles at all. It's 2014. Weren't we supposed to be uploading information to our brains by now?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Graffiti
You can look through the pages of any of my favorite books. No matter how much I love a book -- no matter how dog-eared the pages are, how creased the spine is, how ripply the pages are from me sobbing over some character's totally unfair death -- you won't find writing in the margins.
One of my friends compulsively writes reactions in the books he reads. Another underlines a couple sentences per page, but without notes. Another friend thinks it's a less active sort of reading, "lazy reading," not to write anything in the margins. On the other hand, one of my friends thinks that writing in a book is a special type of sacrilege that reserves a spot in some minor circle of hell for the offender, so, you know, there's that.
Personally, I find it kind of hard to have any opinion on other people's reading habits. If we're talking a collector's item or antique, that's one thing, but I feel like the idea of 'defacing' a book places so much unnecessary emphasis on the material itself, rather than the experience of reading it. Personally, taking time to jot notes jolts me right out of the narrative, which is why those high school projects requiring annotations felt like me trying to extract my fingernails. But hey, if someone else feels a deeper connection to that story by writing thoughts or underlining, who am I to claim that their experience is invalid?
I feel like this is the same sort of issue that some people have with making art out of books - for instance, sculptures! I've seen book sculptures like that one floating around the internet with incredibly angry comments attached. "How could anyone do that to perfectly good books?" says the rage-filled internet browser. "That makes me sick!" Which, er, I don't know if they're actually looking at the sculpture, but that's a beautiful piece of art right there, worthwhile in its own right as I'm sure the books were. The actual physical form of a book is important, sure -- especially with all the symbolism surrounding the banning, burning, or destroying of books -- but is it the most important thing? If the books weren't going to be used, or if there are other copies in the world that can still perpetuate the idea, then why not sculpt something out of these books?
(I personally made a sculpture out of pages I took from Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick, so admittedly, I'm a little biased here. And let's be honest, it was more than a little fun to tear out that Whiteness of the Whale chapter, good Lord. But whatever, my gripes with Melville are beside the point.)
Sometimes, as a fellow non-note-taker, I want to have a good long debate with my friend who wants to condemn all the Book Graffiti-ers to Inferno-type justice. After all, in one of my favorite books, Fahrenheit 451, a band of book-loving exiles [spoiler!] memorizes books in order to preserve them for the future. The idea, not the form, is what's important; the idea is what's saved. There's also the fact that in this increasingly digital publishing climate, eBooks -- books made entirely out of computer code, oh gosh -- are comprising a growing proportion of what modern readers buy. Does that make these books less important, because they're not printed and glued together and kept on a shelf in pristine condition?
I would argue not at all. A book is a deeply personal experience, and to be honest, assuming someone is disrespecting books because they write in the margins is borderline hilarious to me. It's the story we crave, and hell, if someone needs to lick every page of a book in order to appreciate that story to its fullest extent, then I say lick away. I'll argue that books are important not because of packaging, but because of the meanings we attach to them. I'll argue that complaining about in-page writing is the silliest sort of traditionalism. At least a page-licking, margin-writing reader is a reader at all.
Meanwhile, I fully intend to memorize Fahrenheit 451, because dude, how badass would that be.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
One of my friends compulsively writes reactions in the books he reads. Another underlines a couple sentences per page, but without notes. Another friend thinks it's a less active sort of reading, "lazy reading," not to write anything in the margins. On the other hand, one of my friends thinks that writing in a book is a special type of sacrilege that reserves a spot in some minor circle of hell for the offender, so, you know, there's that.
Personally, I find it kind of hard to have any opinion on other people's reading habits. If we're talking a collector's item or antique, that's one thing, but I feel like the idea of 'defacing' a book places so much unnecessary emphasis on the material itself, rather than the experience of reading it. Personally, taking time to jot notes jolts me right out of the narrative, which is why those high school projects requiring annotations felt like me trying to extract my fingernails. But hey, if someone else feels a deeper connection to that story by writing thoughts or underlining, who am I to claim that their experience is invalid?
I feel like this is the same sort of issue that some people have with making art out of books - for instance, sculptures! I've seen book sculptures like that one floating around the internet with incredibly angry comments attached. "How could anyone do that to perfectly good books?" says the rage-filled internet browser. "That makes me sick!" Which, er, I don't know if they're actually looking at the sculpture, but that's a beautiful piece of art right there, worthwhile in its own right as I'm sure the books were. The actual physical form of a book is important, sure -- especially with all the symbolism surrounding the banning, burning, or destroying of books -- but is it the most important thing? If the books weren't going to be used, or if there are other copies in the world that can still perpetuate the idea, then why not sculpt something out of these books?
(I personally made a sculpture out of pages I took from Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick, so admittedly, I'm a little biased here. And let's be honest, it was more than a little fun to tear out that Whiteness of the Whale chapter, good Lord. But whatever, my gripes with Melville are beside the point.)
Sometimes, as a fellow non-note-taker, I want to have a good long debate with my friend who wants to condemn all the Book Graffiti-ers to Inferno-type justice. After all, in one of my favorite books, Fahrenheit 451, a band of book-loving exiles [spoiler!] memorizes books in order to preserve them for the future. The idea, not the form, is what's important; the idea is what's saved. There's also the fact that in this increasingly digital publishing climate, eBooks -- books made entirely out of computer code, oh gosh -- are comprising a growing proportion of what modern readers buy. Does that make these books less important, because they're not printed and glued together and kept on a shelf in pristine condition?
I would argue not at all. A book is a deeply personal experience, and to be honest, assuming someone is disrespecting books because they write in the margins is borderline hilarious to me. It's the story we crave, and hell, if someone needs to lick every page of a book in order to appreciate that story to its fullest extent, then I say lick away. I'll argue that books are important not because of packaging, but because of the meanings we attach to them. I'll argue that complaining about in-page writing is the silliest sort of traditionalism. At least a page-licking, margin-writing reader is a reader at all.
Meanwhile, I fully intend to memorize Fahrenheit 451, because dude, how badass would that be.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Unplugging
by Riley Redgate
Recently, I took a break from the internet. For forty-five days, I did not venture into the realms of Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter. Not even Google. The only things I used were sites like Moodle, SaplingLearning, and Gmail, which were necessary for me to not fail classes.
It had an interesting effect on my writing. Initially, I thought that since I'd have so much new free time, time that I used to spend on the internet, I'd spend that much more time on writing. Instead, though, I found myself avoiding the computer altogether. It helped that school started back up and provided a multitude of distractions, of course, but still. Once I was unplugged, I wanted to stay unplugged.
Still, though, unplugging provided some vital help to my writing, even if that wasn't exemplified by my pathetically flagging word count. Here's a list of benefits:
1) I spent that much more time reading. In the month and a half I was gone, I read six excellent books, from Neil Gaiman's slight and fantastical The Ocean at the End of the Lane to Haruki Murakami's fantastical but not-at-all-slight 1Q84. Imagine if, every time you read a post on Facebook, you were reading a novel instead. How many books would that give you?
2) I spent that much more time around humans, as opposed to staring into the depths of my computer. Unplugging from a constant source of interpersonal information means seeing less of the minutiae of my friends' lives; instead, I saw more of a big picture, because I spent more real time with them. I also made more connections. It's so easy to lurk on social media and feel like you're "getting to know someone" just by reading information they post on the internet. But if you're a chronic lurker, like me, they likely have no idea you're there and reading it, which means the connection is one-sided. Writing-wise -- as much as I love internet connections and talking to people online -- sharing experiences in real-time is helpful in a whole different way.
3) I spent that much more time with my own style of writing. The internet is a fascinating place -- it has developed a whole new type of communication. Everything is abbreviated. Everything is designed to be as eye-catching as possible in the shortest amount of time, which includes news pieces and other articles (Buzzfeed, for instance). Some speech patterns of the internet are downright incomprehensible (Tumblr, I'm looking at you). Getting away from the frenetic, everything-at-once, short-attention-span mode of communication that exists online ... it feels like everything slows down. Not to mention that there are these catchphrases you see online over and over, a collective internet slang. As with any slang and verbal shorthand, it infiltrates your writing, affecting it in whatever small way. Disconnecting from it helped me write more purely, write a higher proportion of words that came out of my brain, rather than words that happened to be buzzing around my skull because I saw the phrase a million times online that day.
4) I broke my dependence on the internet. With the prevalence of social media, people sometimes seem to forget that the internet is, at its heart, a tool. It is not the place to have one's entire life. Some days, over the summer, I would spend ten or eleven hours on the internet, jumping from site to site. Totally unhealthy. And sure, some of it was writing research, or getting to know someone, but most of it was not. Unplugging helped me get some perspective on what portion of my internet usage was actually necessary, and what was just a distraction from things that matter more to me.
Have you tried quitting the internet? Taking a break for an extended period of time? If so, what did you discover?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Recently, I took a break from the internet. For forty-five days, I did not venture into the realms of Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter. Not even Google. The only things I used were sites like Moodle, SaplingLearning, and Gmail, which were necessary for me to not fail classes.
It had an interesting effect on my writing. Initially, I thought that since I'd have so much new free time, time that I used to spend on the internet, I'd spend that much more time on writing. Instead, though, I found myself avoiding the computer altogether. It helped that school started back up and provided a multitude of distractions, of course, but still. Once I was unplugged, I wanted to stay unplugged.
Still, though, unplugging provided some vital help to my writing, even if that wasn't exemplified by my pathetically flagging word count. Here's a list of benefits:
1) I spent that much more time reading. In the month and a half I was gone, I read six excellent books, from Neil Gaiman's slight and fantastical The Ocean at the End of the Lane to Haruki Murakami's fantastical but not-at-all-slight 1Q84. Imagine if, every time you read a post on Facebook, you were reading a novel instead. How many books would that give you?
2) I spent that much more time around humans, as opposed to staring into the depths of my computer. Unplugging from a constant source of interpersonal information means seeing less of the minutiae of my friends' lives; instead, I saw more of a big picture, because I spent more real time with them. I also made more connections. It's so easy to lurk on social media and feel like you're "getting to know someone" just by reading information they post on the internet. But if you're a chronic lurker, like me, they likely have no idea you're there and reading it, which means the connection is one-sided. Writing-wise -- as much as I love internet connections and talking to people online -- sharing experiences in real-time is helpful in a whole different way.
3) I spent that much more time with my own style of writing. The internet is a fascinating place -- it has developed a whole new type of communication. Everything is abbreviated. Everything is designed to be as eye-catching as possible in the shortest amount of time, which includes news pieces and other articles (Buzzfeed, for instance). Some speech patterns of the internet are downright incomprehensible (Tumblr, I'm looking at you). Getting away from the frenetic, everything-at-once, short-attention-span mode of communication that exists online ... it feels like everything slows down. Not to mention that there are these catchphrases you see online over and over, a collective internet slang. As with any slang and verbal shorthand, it infiltrates your writing, affecting it in whatever small way. Disconnecting from it helped me write more purely, write a higher proportion of words that came out of my brain, rather than words that happened to be buzzing around my skull because I saw the phrase a million times online that day.
4) I broke my dependence on the internet. With the prevalence of social media, people sometimes seem to forget that the internet is, at its heart, a tool. It is not the place to have one's entire life. Some days, over the summer, I would spend ten or eleven hours on the internet, jumping from site to site. Totally unhealthy. And sure, some of it was writing research, or getting to know someone, but most of it was not. Unplugging helped me get some perspective on what portion of my internet usage was actually necessary, and what was just a distraction from things that matter more to me.
Have you tried quitting the internet? Taking a break for an extended period of time? If so, what did you discover?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
People Who Aren't Us
by Riley Redgate
Almost two years ago, I was lucky enough to catch the show Seminar on Broadway. The show is brilliant as a whole and deals with a creative writing seminar taught by the crotchet-iest of professors. It is about many things, but one subplot that particularly stuck with me went something like this:
A girl writes a book. The crotchety professor takes one look at the first page and not only criticizes every facet of the main character, but implies that the girl herself is exactly like that main character. The girl protests, and she hypothesizes that the professor is only uninterested because of what she is like as a human being. So she writes pages and pretends they are autobiographical pages from a nonexistent friend, a gay illegal immigrant amputee from South America, rather than from her own head. Crotchety Professor Man gushes over them. She takes this as a victory at first, but comes to realize that the professor has won: he has forced her to stretch her comfort zone and write from the perspective of someone who is nothing like her, someone whose story is far more high-stakes and creative than her own hyper-personal story.
That's not to say that a narrative can't be utterly brilliant despite how "normal" or "underwhelming" it may seem on its surface: look at the simple, down-to-earth concept of Mrs. Dalloway. Also, the prospect of misrepresenting, and thus offending, an entire demographic of people—a different race; a different gender; a different sexuality—is horrifying and daunting in equal parts. But I think that as citizens of a larger world, we have a responsibility to write also about people who are utterly unlike us in race, gender, sexuality, background. This responsibility is not only to those demographic groups as people who deserve representation, but also to ourselves as human beings, in order to aim for a larger worldview and heightened empathy. The important thing is how to go about portraying those perspectives. I believe there are two vital points to keep in mind:
1) Research. Research trends and statistics and understand their implications—but dig deeper, too. If you're writing a character who lives in extreme urban poverty, for instance, look up as many stories as possible from people who have lived in urban poverty, and people who are still living that life. Individual stories can tell you so much more than percentages and overall trends and general impressions, than graduation rates and unemployment rates. Reading individual stories will help humanize the people you're writing.
Otherwise ... well, for instance, if you the author have always been well-off, patchy or solely-trends-based research means you may run the risk of your characters just having a thin veneer of Ideas About Poverty over a personality that is driven by deeply-ingrained patterns of behavior that you, the author, have had your whole life. Research conscientiously so you can write conscientiously about people who aren't you, who don't think like you, who have never thought like you and will never be anything like you. (I'd argue that playing at those opposite perspectives is half the fun.)
2) Implications. One of the issues with minorities in fiction is that minority depictions can easily be misinterpreted as being the author's concept of the minority as a whole. It's the same messed-up principle that drives society to demand that women answer for their gender as a whole—as in, if a man is bad at driving, he's a bad driver; if a woman is bad at driving, it's because women are bad at driving. When a person of a marginalized demographic appears in fiction, he, she, or they may be held up as an Example for that demographic, even if the author never intended that to be the case. Subsequently, it's often hard for the character to shrug off that stigma and be seen as a multifaceted human being rather than "the black character!" or "the gay character!" or "the fat character!" Which is, of course, all the more reason to include more of those marginalized characters, to be sure they're not being pigeonholed.
It would be lovely if this weren't an issue, and luckily the world seems to be veering toward a world where it's less of an issue, but as it is, we still have to be hyper-conscious of the implications of these depictions. And by "as it is", I mean, "as we are currently dealing with shameless whitewashing of major Hollywood films," or "as the number of LGBTQ characters in well-publicized lead roles is hovering around zero, except in films that are explicitly About Gayness And Being Gay," or "as the number of incidentally fat teenage girls in lead roles is also hovering around zero."
Both of these points are seemingly focused on inhibition. Research excessively. Fact-check constantly. Police yourself. That sounds unappealing, I know ... but when it comes to writing the unfamiliar, I truly believe this is the right approach. We live in a time where people, bizarrely, hilariously, have started talking about being politically correct like it's a bad thing. If me policing my portrayals is going to make a trans* person more comfortable with reading my writing, or is going to make it easier for people of color to read a piece I've written without feeling excluded, then yes, I'm willing to put in extra time and effort to be "politically correct." Frankly, I don't view it as "political correctness"—I view it as obsessive honesty, because writing any group of people into a tiny box of conceptions is dishonest, a slap in the face of realism. The real world is diverse, and huge, and to get a taste of that in fiction should be utterly normal, really, rather than a special feature.
Sure, there may be readers who couldn't care less about the so-called "P.C."—but I feel like if I'm writing for public consumption, that means I'm writing for the entire public. And that includes those who are easily offended. No, I don't believe authors can please everyone, but I definitely believe we can write fearlessly and push the envelope while still being careful enough not to hurt people. In my opinion, Chuck Wendig's blog, terribleminds.com, is a great example of this. He's "offensive" in the sense that he curses constantly and has a crude sense of humor, but I don't know anyone who has read his pieces and come away from them feeling like they've been targeted. I think the same is true of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. It offends sensibilities, but it doesn't offend people, not on a deep personal level.
I don't know how popular this opinion is; it's simply my own approach. I'd love to hear what your approach is, or your opinion!
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Almost two years ago, I was lucky enough to catch the show Seminar on Broadway. The show is brilliant as a whole and deals with a creative writing seminar taught by the crotchet-iest of professors. It is about many things, but one subplot that particularly stuck with me went something like this:
A girl writes a book. The crotchety professor takes one look at the first page and not only criticizes every facet of the main character, but implies that the girl herself is exactly like that main character. The girl protests, and she hypothesizes that the professor is only uninterested because of what she is like as a human being. So she writes pages and pretends they are autobiographical pages from a nonexistent friend, a gay illegal immigrant amputee from South America, rather than from her own head. Crotchety Professor Man gushes over them. She takes this as a victory at first, but comes to realize that the professor has won: he has forced her to stretch her comfort zone and write from the perspective of someone who is nothing like her, someone whose story is far more high-stakes and creative than her own hyper-personal story.
That's not to say that a narrative can't be utterly brilliant despite how "normal" or "underwhelming" it may seem on its surface: look at the simple, down-to-earth concept of Mrs. Dalloway. Also, the prospect of misrepresenting, and thus offending, an entire demographic of people—a different race; a different gender; a different sexuality—is horrifying and daunting in equal parts. But I think that as citizens of a larger world, we have a responsibility to write also about people who are utterly unlike us in race, gender, sexuality, background. This responsibility is not only to those demographic groups as people who deserve representation, but also to ourselves as human beings, in order to aim for a larger worldview and heightened empathy. The important thing is how to go about portraying those perspectives. I believe there are two vital points to keep in mind:
1) Research. Research trends and statistics and understand their implications—but dig deeper, too. If you're writing a character who lives in extreme urban poverty, for instance, look up as many stories as possible from people who have lived in urban poverty, and people who are still living that life. Individual stories can tell you so much more than percentages and overall trends and general impressions, than graduation rates and unemployment rates. Reading individual stories will help humanize the people you're writing.
Otherwise ... well, for instance, if you the author have always been well-off, patchy or solely-trends-based research means you may run the risk of your characters just having a thin veneer of Ideas About Poverty over a personality that is driven by deeply-ingrained patterns of behavior that you, the author, have had your whole life. Research conscientiously so you can write conscientiously about people who aren't you, who don't think like you, who have never thought like you and will never be anything like you. (I'd argue that playing at those opposite perspectives is half the fun.)
2) Implications. One of the issues with minorities in fiction is that minority depictions can easily be misinterpreted as being the author's concept of the minority as a whole. It's the same messed-up principle that drives society to demand that women answer for their gender as a whole—as in, if a man is bad at driving, he's a bad driver; if a woman is bad at driving, it's because women are bad at driving. When a person of a marginalized demographic appears in fiction, he, she, or they may be held up as an Example for that demographic, even if the author never intended that to be the case. Subsequently, it's often hard for the character to shrug off that stigma and be seen as a multifaceted human being rather than "the black character!" or "the gay character!" or "the fat character!" Which is, of course, all the more reason to include more of those marginalized characters, to be sure they're not being pigeonholed.
It would be lovely if this weren't an issue, and luckily the world seems to be veering toward a world where it's less of an issue, but as it is, we still have to be hyper-conscious of the implications of these depictions. And by "as it is", I mean, "as we are currently dealing with shameless whitewashing of major Hollywood films," or "as the number of LGBTQ characters in well-publicized lead roles is hovering around zero, except in films that are explicitly About Gayness And Being Gay," or "as the number of incidentally fat teenage girls in lead roles is also hovering around zero."
Both of these points are seemingly focused on inhibition. Research excessively. Fact-check constantly. Police yourself. That sounds unappealing, I know ... but when it comes to writing the unfamiliar, I truly believe this is the right approach. We live in a time where people, bizarrely, hilariously, have started talking about being politically correct like it's a bad thing. If me policing my portrayals is going to make a trans* person more comfortable with reading my writing, or is going to make it easier for people of color to read a piece I've written without feeling excluded, then yes, I'm willing to put in extra time and effort to be "politically correct." Frankly, I don't view it as "political correctness"—I view it as obsessive honesty, because writing any group of people into a tiny box of conceptions is dishonest, a slap in the face of realism. The real world is diverse, and huge, and to get a taste of that in fiction should be utterly normal, really, rather than a special feature.
Sure, there may be readers who couldn't care less about the so-called "P.C."—but I feel like if I'm writing for public consumption, that means I'm writing for the entire public. And that includes those who are easily offended. No, I don't believe authors can please everyone, but I definitely believe we can write fearlessly and push the envelope while still being careful enough not to hurt people. In my opinion, Chuck Wendig's blog, terribleminds.com, is a great example of this. He's "offensive" in the sense that he curses constantly and has a crude sense of humor, but I don't know anyone who has read his pieces and come away from them feeling like they've been targeted. I think the same is true of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. It offends sensibilities, but it doesn't offend people, not on a deep personal level.
I don't know how popular this opinion is; it's simply my own approach. I'd love to hear what your approach is, or your opinion!
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Friday, August 9, 2013
Tic Toc
by Riley Redgate
The other day, I was strolling through Goodreads when I encountered a review that stopped me in my virtual tracks. I don't remember what book it was for, so I can't find it again and thus the specifics here are invented, but in essence, it said this:
"This book used the phrase "blue eyes" seventy-eight times. Seventy-eight. Yes, we get it, the love interest's eyes are frickin' blue!"
Nervous laughter. This is a new era, everyone. With the advent of the search feature on eBooks, readers can now see exactly how much of a crutch your crutch words are.
One of the most disheartening (yet strangely hilarious!) writing things I've ever done is a control-F search for the word "and," which led me to realize that numerically, "and" comprises 2 percent of my entire manuscript. Amusing. Less so when it's a reviewer realizing that your work has a reliance on certain phrases.
I've always wondered why writer's tics exist. One hypothesis I've come up with is that it's something in our minds trying to fix the disparity between our character's voice and our own voice. Like, in reality, I actually do just use some words so very often: "like," "actually," "just," "so," and "very." ... Hang on.
Another guess of mine is that we have lingering initial concepts of people, places, or things in our manuscripts that haven't been fully fleshed out. I've often found that, sadly, an author's fixation on a character's particular physical characteristic can become a (poor) substitute for that character having an actual personality. For example, instead of deepening and fleshing out a character's humanity, she gets a "blue-eyes" tag and that makes her familiar to a reader in an easy, superficial way. A character's voice is repeatedly described as "husky" because that's how he first came to the author, in a snatch of a husky-sounding voice. A flag is repeatedly described as tattered and worn because that's how the author first saw it in their mind's eye. It betrays something never having left the conceptual stage.
Another guess: casual padding. My tics, especially the ones listed above, are irritatingly common words like "just" and "so," and I share these tics with a lot of folks out there. The sheer quantity of them is staggering and often hard to notice -- you have to use the ctrl-F laser-pointer to see, "Welp, okay, I've used "just" 834 times in this manuscript. Great." I'd hazard a guess that the reason they're harder to notice is the reason they're there in the first place -- they're placeholders. Empty calories. They delay the point of the sentence, and they do it sneakily. Eyes brush over them.
Of course, reviewers' eyes tend to be more discerning than an author's. And now, if someone starts noticing your egregious excess of "blue-eyes" descriptions, there's nothing stopping them from telling the whole world how repetitive your writing got, quantitatively.
This is terrifying to me. Terrifying. Of course, it's also Capital-A Awesome. Honestly, in my eyes, anything that holds authors accountable for the quality of their prose is an Awesome development, given our hyper-commercial day and age, where The Quality Threshold seems to be transforming -- more and more -- into The Purchasing Threshold. That is to say, the question starts changing from "how perfect can this be?" to "how perfect does this have to be for people to buy it?"
As with any issue of Awesomeness, though, I'm torn. On the one hand, yes, I absolutely believe it's great that authors have more cause than ever to worry about their writing getting lazy. Keeps you on your toes; keeps you striving for excellence! On the other hand, there's a point at which pulling out numbers gets arbitrary. Another review I saw that listed crutch phrases said that one of these 'crutches' showed up four times. Honestly, in a novel-length work, four of a phrase doesn't seem like a great deal to me (unless the phrase is something like "alarming proclivity to waterski spontaneously!", which ... um, it wasn't).
In any case, I'm sure if I'd been reading the book, I wouldn't have noticed those three repeat phrases, and I feel like the practice of breaking books down by numbers -- if it indeed becomes a 'practice' -- creates a risk of veering into semantics. I mean, come on: if you ctrl-F your way through the classics, I bet you'll find repetitions, some unintentional. Authors pre-1950, after all, didn't have the luxury of finding every instance of their crutches electronically in a fraction of a second. And while it's now simple to find the flaws of a book by the numbers, I certainly hope that doesn't become our default mode as readers. I hope that collectively, readers still hunt first for the beautiful and the unexpected within a book rather than the failed and the recycled.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
The other day, I was strolling through Goodreads when I encountered a review that stopped me in my virtual tracks. I don't remember what book it was for, so I can't find it again and thus the specifics here are invented, but in essence, it said this:
"This book used the phrase "blue eyes" seventy-eight times. Seventy-eight. Yes, we get it, the love interest's eyes are frickin' blue!"
Nervous laughter. This is a new era, everyone. With the advent of the search feature on eBooks, readers can now see exactly how much of a crutch your crutch words are.
One of the most disheartening (yet strangely hilarious!) writing things I've ever done is a control-F search for the word "and," which led me to realize that numerically, "and" comprises 2 percent of my entire manuscript. Amusing. Less so when it's a reviewer realizing that your work has a reliance on certain phrases.
I've always wondered why writer's tics exist. One hypothesis I've come up with is that it's something in our minds trying to fix the disparity between our character's voice and our own voice. Like, in reality, I actually do just use some words so very often: "like," "actually," "just," "so," and "very." ... Hang on.
Another guess of mine is that we have lingering initial concepts of people, places, or things in our manuscripts that haven't been fully fleshed out. I've often found that, sadly, an author's fixation on a character's particular physical characteristic can become a (poor) substitute for that character having an actual personality. For example, instead of deepening and fleshing out a character's humanity, she gets a "blue-eyes" tag and that makes her familiar to a reader in an easy, superficial way. A character's voice is repeatedly described as "husky" because that's how he first came to the author, in a snatch of a husky-sounding voice. A flag is repeatedly described as tattered and worn because that's how the author first saw it in their mind's eye. It betrays something never having left the conceptual stage.
Another guess: casual padding. My tics, especially the ones listed above, are irritatingly common words like "just" and "so," and I share these tics with a lot of folks out there. The sheer quantity of them is staggering and often hard to notice -- you have to use the ctrl-F laser-pointer to see, "Welp, okay, I've used "just" 834 times in this manuscript. Great." I'd hazard a guess that the reason they're harder to notice is the reason they're there in the first place -- they're placeholders. Empty calories. They delay the point of the sentence, and they do it sneakily. Eyes brush over them.
Of course, reviewers' eyes tend to be more discerning than an author's. And now, if someone starts noticing your egregious excess of "blue-eyes" descriptions, there's nothing stopping them from telling the whole world how repetitive your writing got, quantitatively.
This is terrifying to me. Terrifying. Of course, it's also Capital-A Awesome. Honestly, in my eyes, anything that holds authors accountable for the quality of their prose is an Awesome development, given our hyper-commercial day and age, where The Quality Threshold seems to be transforming -- more and more -- into The Purchasing Threshold. That is to say, the question starts changing from "how perfect can this be?" to "how perfect does this have to be for people to buy it?"
As with any issue of Awesomeness, though, I'm torn. On the one hand, yes, I absolutely believe it's great that authors have more cause than ever to worry about their writing getting lazy. Keeps you on your toes; keeps you striving for excellence! On the other hand, there's a point at which pulling out numbers gets arbitrary. Another review I saw that listed crutch phrases said that one of these 'crutches' showed up four times. Honestly, in a novel-length work, four of a phrase doesn't seem like a great deal to me (unless the phrase is something like "alarming proclivity to waterski spontaneously!", which ... um, it wasn't).
In any case, I'm sure if I'd been reading the book, I wouldn't have noticed those three repeat phrases, and I feel like the practice of breaking books down by numbers -- if it indeed becomes a 'practice' -- creates a risk of veering into semantics. I mean, come on: if you ctrl-F your way through the classics, I bet you'll find repetitions, some unintentional. Authors pre-1950, after all, didn't have the luxury of finding every instance of their crutches electronically in a fraction of a second. And while it's now simple to find the flaws of a book by the numbers, I certainly hope that doesn't become our default mode as readers. I hope that collectively, readers still hunt first for the beautiful and the unexpected within a book rather than the failed and the recycled.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Female Friendships in Fiction
by Riley Redgate
I've come to notice, recently, a curious deficit of solid friendships between women in fiction. In fact, I think I've started searching for them subconsciously, and only realized how rare they actually are when I saw the recent comedy The Heat—which, by the way, is a hilarious buddy-cop comedy. Distressingly enough, friendships of the between-X-chromosomes-only variety seem to be overwhelmingly riddled with drama involving Y chromosomes, the rule to which The Heat was a refreshing exception. In fact, I'm having difficulty coming up with a literary friendship off the top of my head that fit these two simple criteria: 1) two non-related women are friends, and 2) they do not at some point in the book fight over or about a male. I find this rather disconcerting.
One caveat: I don't read a lot of women's fiction. But should I really have to delve specifically into a genre that's so heavily gendered that it's named "women's" in order to find strong female friendships? I don't think so. I certainly don't have to read male-gendered genres to find male friendships, although it could be argued that there really isn't a specifically male-gendered genre, just genres that seem more stereotypically masculocentric—crime, action, etc. There is certainly no "men's fiction" section at Barnes & Noble.
Anyway, a lack of girlfriends falls under a larger umbrella of problems. For anyone who hasn't heard of the Bechdel test, it's a misleadingly simple test to run on any work of fiction: do two female characters, at any point during the work in question, have a conversation about something other than a man? An alarmingly high volume of books and films don't pass the test. It's not necessarily an indication of a feminist work—Iron Man 3 passes the test, for instance—but it sure is interesting that this is even a question, in our modern age.
I got to thinking about female friendships, honestly, because I found the friendship in The Heat alarmingly noteworthy. I say 'alarmingly' because a story where two women are friends really shouldn't have to be noteworthy. I also realized that while our culture has a specific word for close-knit male friendships—bromance—it has no female equivalent, which upset me until I realized that given the lack of fictional friendships that would fall under that umbrella anyway, we don't particularly need a female equivalent yet. This upset me further. (I was thinking the popular term "girl-crush," but it doesn't really work as an equivalent; it implies idolization rather than an actual deep human link.) Look at the broad array of fascinating, nuanced friendships between men in fiction: Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway; Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee; Kirk and Spock; Harry Potter and Ron Weasley; Sherlock Holmes and John Watson; Seth and Evan from Superbad (yes, er, that one in particular is fascinating and nuanced). That was right off the top of my head, and yet I'd be hard-pressed to name one female friendship that has the level of widespread adoration that these bromances have collected.
Inevitably, when girls are portrayed as friends, it hops right back to the Bechdel Problem: they bond over men, rather than inherent traits in themselves. Male characters rarely have this problem. For instance, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers from the Avengers team start out as having issues with each other in the recent film because of Tony's sass and comedic immaturity and Steve's overdeveloped sense of duty/loyalty. They clash initially, but through fighting the villain's troops, each comes to appreciate the other's strength and courage, and they become friends. Not even a whisper of a romance being slightly relevant to their bonding.
By contrast, many fictional female characters seem isolated, turned into islands who have an inability to relate to other women except via the relationships they have with men, and an inability to relate to men except in the eventual context of romance. Even Hermione Granger in Harry Potter, one of my favorite characters of all time, has a sad deficit of onscreen interaction with other ladies. This is partially because of the close-3rd narration from Harry's perspective, of course, but it's still disheartening to see her most noteworthy interaction with another girl her age being the typical jealousy (over Lavender Brown getting together with her crush). And to address a recent YA trend: personally, I find it crippling and largely unnecessary for great characters like Katniss Everdeen, who are strong in and of themselves, to be yanked into a love triangle situation, in Hunger Games' case with a (male) best friend and a (male) survival mate. I really never stopped wondering why she needed to have a romantic interest in her best friend at all—and while her friendship with Rue was fantastic, Certain Plot Events promptly removed that as a factor.
Don't get me started on removal, either. The erasure of a healthy, strong, or even competent mother figure is almost hilariously prevalent in YA (although admittedly this extends somewhat to healthy father figures, too). Dead, missing, or neglectful mothers, or mothers who fall into easy stock character territory, comprise a vast majority of the moms I've read, but that is actually another issue entirely. The romanticizing of dead or missing—and, therefore, totally inactive/helpless—women is even obvious from YA cover art. Check out this brilliant, thought-provoking article on the issue, complete with a plethora of dead-girls-in-pretty-dresses examples.
I think part of the reason girl friendships are so rare is that society is only just starting to adjust to the notion of women with agency, who can be strong and important and psychologically fascinating on their own. It's still depressingly easy and accepted for writers to fall back on the notion that femininity equals passivity, and if an author does happen to do that, it makes it tough for female friendship to be as engaging as two more active characters' friendship would be. As such, since society at large is still trying to catch up with the concept of active women, we as writers have a responsibility to help them along. I'd argue that the most important questions we ask about our characters is how accurately they represent real humanity, which means we need to remember the importance of including ALL realistic situations, like, say, supportive lady friendships that can stand alone. Otherwise we face the glum potentiality that all literature will have the same types of characters and relationships in the spotlight until kingdom come, when there's no reason for other characters not to have the spotlight too.
Meanwhile, I'm going to make it my new side project to come up with a catchy girl equivalent for "bromance." If you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it in the comments!
Also, if you can think of an awesome girl-bromance, please do leave that in the comments too, to restore some of my faith in humanity. (Bonus points if one of the ladies involved is a person of color or not heterosexual.)
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
I've come to notice, recently, a curious deficit of solid friendships between women in fiction. In fact, I think I've started searching for them subconsciously, and only realized how rare they actually are when I saw the recent comedy The Heat—which, by the way, is a hilarious buddy-cop comedy. Distressingly enough, friendships of the between-X-chromosomes-only variety seem to be overwhelmingly riddled with drama involving Y chromosomes, the rule to which The Heat was a refreshing exception. In fact, I'm having difficulty coming up with a literary friendship off the top of my head that fit these two simple criteria: 1) two non-related women are friends, and 2) they do not at some point in the book fight over or about a male. I find this rather disconcerting.
One caveat: I don't read a lot of women's fiction. But should I really have to delve specifically into a genre that's so heavily gendered that it's named "women's" in order to find strong female friendships? I don't think so. I certainly don't have to read male-gendered genres to find male friendships, although it could be argued that there really isn't a specifically male-gendered genre, just genres that seem more stereotypically masculocentric—crime, action, etc. There is certainly no "men's fiction" section at Barnes & Noble.
Anyway, a lack of girlfriends falls under a larger umbrella of problems. For anyone who hasn't heard of the Bechdel test, it's a misleadingly simple test to run on any work of fiction: do two female characters, at any point during the work in question, have a conversation about something other than a man? An alarmingly high volume of books and films don't pass the test. It's not necessarily an indication of a feminist work—Iron Man 3 passes the test, for instance—but it sure is interesting that this is even a question, in our modern age.
I got to thinking about female friendships, honestly, because I found the friendship in The Heat alarmingly noteworthy. I say 'alarmingly' because a story where two women are friends really shouldn't have to be noteworthy. I also realized that while our culture has a specific word for close-knit male friendships—bromance—it has no female equivalent, which upset me until I realized that given the lack of fictional friendships that would fall under that umbrella anyway, we don't particularly need a female equivalent yet. This upset me further. (I was thinking the popular term "girl-crush," but it doesn't really work as an equivalent; it implies idolization rather than an actual deep human link.) Look at the broad array of fascinating, nuanced friendships between men in fiction: Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway; Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee; Kirk and Spock; Harry Potter and Ron Weasley; Sherlock Holmes and John Watson; Seth and Evan from Superbad (yes, er, that one in particular is fascinating and nuanced). That was right off the top of my head, and yet I'd be hard-pressed to name one female friendship that has the level of widespread adoration that these bromances have collected.
Inevitably, when girls are portrayed as friends, it hops right back to the Bechdel Problem: they bond over men, rather than inherent traits in themselves. Male characters rarely have this problem. For instance, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers from the Avengers team start out as having issues with each other in the recent film because of Tony's sass and comedic immaturity and Steve's overdeveloped sense of duty/loyalty. They clash initially, but through fighting the villain's troops, each comes to appreciate the other's strength and courage, and they become friends. Not even a whisper of a romance being slightly relevant to their bonding.
By contrast, many fictional female characters seem isolated, turned into islands who have an inability to relate to other women except via the relationships they have with men, and an inability to relate to men except in the eventual context of romance. Even Hermione Granger in Harry Potter, one of my favorite characters of all time, has a sad deficit of onscreen interaction with other ladies. This is partially because of the close-3rd narration from Harry's perspective, of course, but it's still disheartening to see her most noteworthy interaction with another girl her age being the typical jealousy (over Lavender Brown getting together with her crush). And to address a recent YA trend: personally, I find it crippling and largely unnecessary for great characters like Katniss Everdeen, who are strong in and of themselves, to be yanked into a love triangle situation, in Hunger Games' case with a (male) best friend and a (male) survival mate. I really never stopped wondering why she needed to have a romantic interest in her best friend at all—and while her friendship with Rue was fantastic, Certain Plot Events promptly removed that as a factor.
Don't get me started on removal, either. The erasure of a healthy, strong, or even competent mother figure is almost hilariously prevalent in YA (although admittedly this extends somewhat to healthy father figures, too). Dead, missing, or neglectful mothers, or mothers who fall into easy stock character territory, comprise a vast majority of the moms I've read, but that is actually another issue entirely. The romanticizing of dead or missing—and, therefore, totally inactive/helpless—women is even obvious from YA cover art. Check out this brilliant, thought-provoking article on the issue, complete with a plethora of dead-girls-in-pretty-dresses examples.
I think part of the reason girl friendships are so rare is that society is only just starting to adjust to the notion of women with agency, who can be strong and important and psychologically fascinating on their own. It's still depressingly easy and accepted for writers to fall back on the notion that femininity equals passivity, and if an author does happen to do that, it makes it tough for female friendship to be as engaging as two more active characters' friendship would be. As such, since society at large is still trying to catch up with the concept of active women, we as writers have a responsibility to help them along. I'd argue that the most important questions we ask about our characters is how accurately they represent real humanity, which means we need to remember the importance of including ALL realistic situations, like, say, supportive lady friendships that can stand alone. Otherwise we face the glum potentiality that all literature will have the same types of characters and relationships in the spotlight until kingdom come, when there's no reason for other characters not to have the spotlight too.
Meanwhile, I'm going to make it my new side project to come up with a catchy girl equivalent for "bromance." If you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it in the comments!
Also, if you can think of an awesome girl-bromance, please do leave that in the comments too, to restore some of my faith in humanity. (Bonus points if one of the ladies involved is a person of color or not heterosexual.)
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Edit Like a Bully
by Riley Redgate
I've always thought that for writers, finding a strong circle of support is more than helpful—it's a necessity. There's so much negativity floating around the publishing world, from doubts about the industry as a whole to the odd rude critiquer one might encounter. Not to mention the inevitable self-doubt. We need people to remind us that dreams are possibilities, and that our goals are achievable.
Sometimes, though, we go too far. We find wonderful people; we find supportive and understanding writers and build a friend circle with them; we find beta readers who are tough and honest but never cruel or anything but constructive. And in the finding, we forget that there are cruel people out there.
Yep. It's obnoxious, but there are indeed those folks who roam the bookshelves looking for their next target of derision. People who are waiting to snort at your metaphors and scoff at your turn of phrase. People for whom the "benefit of the doubt" doesn't exist. (For some select books that have drawn the hatred of alarmingly large segments of the population, even normal friendly readers can turn into vitriolic book bullies. Example: the comments section of this video.)
Of course, this isn't meant to freak you out. It's just a friendly reminder that some people suck, and because writers who write for publication create work to be perused by all people—including those who suck—it's something we have to keep in mind. Turns out, too, that their lack of empathy can be helpful. At least, it's helped me,cynic realist that I am. Here are the rules I play by:
When you're editing, put yourself in the shoes of an absolute jerk. Read through slowly, line by line, and ask yourself, "If I were taking this not at all seriously, and reading it in an overly dramatic voice, could I laugh at this line? This phrase? This description?" Yep—pretend you're an absolute jerk who found a manuscript on the ground and has nothing better to do than joke about its contents with a few absolute jerk friends. It's a necessary step, because—while we all feel deeply about the stories we have to tell—when we're editing, we have to pretend there's no emotional context. We have to pretend we are those people who don't read respectfully, who don't even care enough to actually read rather than skimming. And then we have to tear our work to shreds so they don't do it for us later.
After all, if there's an opening, something in a sentence that could serve as a chink in the armor, someone out there could jump on it. Case in point: the video referenced above, and the entire series of videos that follows. (For those who don't want to click through, it's basically a YouTube celebrity reading through Twilight, picking out lines he finds particularly insipid, and mocking them.) Watching that footage reminds me of the terrifying possibility that—were my stuff ever to get published—that could happen to my work, too. Yeesh.
People always talk about "killing darlings" as if it's a horrifying prospect, but to me, what's far more horrifying is the absolute willingness of the reading public to go all-out psycho-killer-screech-screech on a book once it becomes "cool" to dislike that book. Once we distance ourselves, remember who we're writing for, and take everything we write with a healthy grain of salt, "killing darlings" stops being painful and becomes just another stepping stone to that seamless suit of literary armor.
And once you've done that, you'll have done all you can. Which means if someone does decide to take a jab at your writing, you can chalk it up to preference and not worry a bit.
Of course, this ferocious inner editor has to be shut down when you're drafting, otherwise it'll be an impediment to getting words down on the paper. In short, my tactic is this: Draft like your best friend is cheering you on. Edit like a bully.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
I've always thought that for writers, finding a strong circle of support is more than helpful—it's a necessity. There's so much negativity floating around the publishing world, from doubts about the industry as a whole to the odd rude critiquer one might encounter. Not to mention the inevitable self-doubt. We need people to remind us that dreams are possibilities, and that our goals are achievable.
Sometimes, though, we go too far. We find wonderful people; we find supportive and understanding writers and build a friend circle with them; we find beta readers who are tough and honest but never cruel or anything but constructive. And in the finding, we forget that there are cruel people out there.
Yep. It's obnoxious, but there are indeed those folks who roam the bookshelves looking for their next target of derision. People who are waiting to snort at your metaphors and scoff at your turn of phrase. People for whom the "benefit of the doubt" doesn't exist. (For some select books that have drawn the hatred of alarmingly large segments of the population, even normal friendly readers can turn into vitriolic book bullies. Example: the comments section of this video.)
Of course, this isn't meant to freak you out. It's just a friendly reminder that some people suck, and because writers who write for publication create work to be perused by all people—including those who suck—it's something we have to keep in mind. Turns out, too, that their lack of empathy can be helpful. At least, it's helped me,
When you're editing, put yourself in the shoes of an absolute jerk. Read through slowly, line by line, and ask yourself, "If I were taking this not at all seriously, and reading it in an overly dramatic voice, could I laugh at this line? This phrase? This description?" Yep—pretend you're an absolute jerk who found a manuscript on the ground and has nothing better to do than joke about its contents with a few absolute jerk friends. It's a necessary step, because—while we all feel deeply about the stories we have to tell—when we're editing, we have to pretend there's no emotional context. We have to pretend we are those people who don't read respectfully, who don't even care enough to actually read rather than skimming. And then we have to tear our work to shreds so they don't do it for us later.
After all, if there's an opening, something in a sentence that could serve as a chink in the armor, someone out there could jump on it. Case in point: the video referenced above, and the entire series of videos that follows. (For those who don't want to click through, it's basically a YouTube celebrity reading through Twilight, picking out lines he finds particularly insipid, and mocking them.) Watching that footage reminds me of the terrifying possibility that—were my stuff ever to get published—that could happen to my work, too. Yeesh.
People always talk about "killing darlings" as if it's a horrifying prospect, but to me, what's far more horrifying is the absolute willingness of the reading public to go all-out psycho-killer-screech-screech on a book once it becomes "cool" to dislike that book. Once we distance ourselves, remember who we're writing for, and take everything we write with a healthy grain of salt, "killing darlings" stops being painful and becomes just another stepping stone to that seamless suit of literary armor.
And once you've done that, you'll have done all you can. Which means if someone does decide to take a jab at your writing, you can chalk it up to preference and not worry a bit.
Of course, this ferocious inner editor has to be shut down when you're drafting, otherwise it'll be an impediment to getting words down on the paper. In short, my tactic is this: Draft like your best friend is cheering you on. Edit like a bully.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Hey, Y'all: Dialects and Slang
by Riley Redgate
Haff you ever read dialogue vere the vords look a beet strange?
'ave you read dialog where words sound right funny in yer 'ead 'cause of 'ow they show up?
Or maybe them quotations get to seemin' real Southern alluva sudden. (Billy, fetch me mah shotgun!)
I haven't seen many stylistic choices that polarize readers as much as written dialects do. Some people despise them with every fiber of their being, and words like "gimmick" inevitably get thrown out with regard to them in conversation.
Personally, I think it adds a nice bit of variety to the mix. Some writers use it to great effect—one of my favorite series has dialect not only in dialogue, but in the actual first-person narration. But sometimes it feels awkward, or worse, unnecessary.
It's certainly an interesting choice, because it takes "Show, don't tell" to an extreme. I mean, if you simply wanted to get a description of a voice in there, you could write, "She spoke with a thick Slavic accent." Or, of course, you could describe a voice more figuratively—"Each of his words was crisp and well-measured, a bite of something acidic." But when you encounter an author who writes the words as they actually sound under the influence of that accent, it's a constant reminder. If it's well-done, it turns into a pleasant auditory effect rather than a weird garbled distraction. A bit of atmosphere.
It is a fine line to walk, though. If "dialected" words aren't there enough, they'll jar when they crop up again. On the other hand, if they're too present, you risk complete incomprehensibility. Yeow.
It's an important issue, because it brings to the forefront the issue of sound in writing. I was a musician long before I was a writer, so rhythm and sound are paramount to me, especially when I'm doing line edits. Most people even read their manuscripts aloud at some point to get that auditory perspective. Either way, whether you internalize the flow of a line or hear it with your earholes, you can tell when it clicks into place—and you can sure as hell tell when it's clunky. Sound helps bring shape to the form of sentences, paragraphs, pages. It speeds the pace or drags it behind; it casts a line for the reader or yanks them in. And hoo boy, does it make or break humorous writing.
Most people know sound is an important step, but rarely do writers have to confront sound so directly in the drafting stage as in the case of dialects. I mean, you've got onomatopoeia, etc., but for so many people, the real 'music' of the writing often comes through in later drafts.
Slang, too—another sound-related tool—seems to polarize readers. Maybe not to the extent of dialects, but I've noticed that weird curses or terminology can quickly end up seeming like a crutch. Unfamiliar terms pop out of the text, naturally, and since the readers are extra-conscious of them, they sometimes seem like they're there twice as much as they actually are. There's a recent trend toward futuristic slang in speculative manuscripts—and it's a fine line to walk. If it doesn't sound cool, it'll feel awkward. And just like dialect, it can't fade into the background altogether, or suddenly it'll pop up again like a friend you forgot you had. And the interaction will be uncomfortable. And y'all don't want that happenin', now, do ya?
Are you a fan or a foe of dialects? How about slang?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Haff you ever read dialogue vere the vords look a beet strange?
'ave you read dialog where words sound right funny in yer 'ead 'cause of 'ow they show up?
Or maybe them quotations get to seemin' real Southern alluva sudden. (Billy, fetch me mah shotgun!)
I haven't seen many stylistic choices that polarize readers as much as written dialects do. Some people despise them with every fiber of their being, and words like "gimmick" inevitably get thrown out with regard to them in conversation.
Personally, I think it adds a nice bit of variety to the mix. Some writers use it to great effect—one of my favorite series has dialect not only in dialogue, but in the actual first-person narration. But sometimes it feels awkward, or worse, unnecessary.
It's certainly an interesting choice, because it takes "Show, don't tell" to an extreme. I mean, if you simply wanted to get a description of a voice in there, you could write, "She spoke with a thick Slavic accent." Or, of course, you could describe a voice more figuratively—"Each of his words was crisp and well-measured, a bite of something acidic." But when you encounter an author who writes the words as they actually sound under the influence of that accent, it's a constant reminder. If it's well-done, it turns into a pleasant auditory effect rather than a weird garbled distraction. A bit of atmosphere.
It is a fine line to walk, though. If "dialected" words aren't there enough, they'll jar when they crop up again. On the other hand, if they're too present, you risk complete incomprehensibility. Yeow.
It's an important issue, because it brings to the forefront the issue of sound in writing. I was a musician long before I was a writer, so rhythm and sound are paramount to me, especially when I'm doing line edits. Most people even read their manuscripts aloud at some point to get that auditory perspective. Either way, whether you internalize the flow of a line or hear it with your earholes, you can tell when it clicks into place—and you can sure as hell tell when it's clunky. Sound helps bring shape to the form of sentences, paragraphs, pages. It speeds the pace or drags it behind; it casts a line for the reader or yanks them in. And hoo boy, does it make or break humorous writing.
Most people know sound is an important step, but rarely do writers have to confront sound so directly in the drafting stage as in the case of dialects. I mean, you've got onomatopoeia, etc., but for so many people, the real 'music' of the writing often comes through in later drafts.
Slang, too—another sound-related tool—seems to polarize readers. Maybe not to the extent of dialects, but I've noticed that weird curses or terminology can quickly end up seeming like a crutch. Unfamiliar terms pop out of the text, naturally, and since the readers are extra-conscious of them, they sometimes seem like they're there twice as much as they actually are. There's a recent trend toward futuristic slang in speculative manuscripts—and it's a fine line to walk. If it doesn't sound cool, it'll feel awkward. And just like dialect, it can't fade into the background altogether, or suddenly it'll pop up again like a friend you forgot you had. And the interaction will be uncomfortable. And y'all don't want that happenin', now, do ya?
Are you a fan or a foe of dialects? How about slang?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
On Procrastination
by Riley Redgate
Hello there, FTWA readers!
It's Wednesday. I have two final exams on Thursday. I have another one on Friday. This is a blog post.
Let's talk about procrastination!
Do you know why procrastination is easy? I do.
It's not scary.
The actual writing part of life almost always involves some element of I'm Not Good Enough. Editing, drafting while knowing you'll have to go back and edit 90% of what's coming out of your fingers, querying, synopsizing - the whole deal involves self-criticism. And procrastination, happy activity that it is, does not. It allows you to think of your work in the positive terms of the abstract, even whilst you cheerfully shirk it. Malformed sentences go away. Characterization issues disappear into the ether. And plot holes? What plot holes?
Procrastination happens because we're scared of what could happen in its stead. We could spend hours on a single scene and emotionally exhaust ourselves. Worse, we could spend hours on a single scene and then realize that scene needs deletion. We could rewrite our query four times and still realize it's not good enough.
For example, let's take my current mode of procrastination. I have not looked back over the book that I should have looked over several times by now for Friday's exam. Why? Because I'm scared I'll get to it and realize I need to memorize a million things I don't already know. I'm trusting in what I've already done rather than rediscovering what I've done and what I need to fix. Procrastinating, I can say, hey! You know what? I know a lot of things. Here's what I've learned. A lot of things, right? I'll be fine, eh?
After I finish writing this blog post, I will read the book in question. And, odds are, I shall rapidly discover I have yet some things to brush up on.
So the cure to procrastination? Make it as scary as going back to your unfinished draft.
Here's why you should be scared of procrastination:
1) You'll regret it later. Nothing's less satisfying than going to bed thinking about what you could have done with your day, and what you did instead of what you could have done.
2) You don't have all the time in the world. You have time. But not infinite time. You have people you love and places to go; you have books to read and other activities in which to participate. You do not have a million hours to spend faffing about on Twitter etc. while your WIP languishes in that other window.
3) It makes the writing harder. What if you get out of practice? What if you forget quite how your MC's particular voice sounds? These are problems not-unheard of. Coming back to an unfinished draft after an overlong break is laborious, and disrupts rhythm, and could be disadvantageous for quality itself.
4) It makes writing feel like work. I mean, come on. What other types of things do you put off? Studying for exams. (Ahem. -averts eyes-) And like, emailing your least favorite relative, and filing taxes, probably. But writing? Writing is a joy to you. That's why you do it. Whether you get an adrenaline rush, a deep satisfaction, a further knowledge about the human condition - whatever. You have a reason to be doing what you're doing. What you don't have is a reason to delay it.
Thus concludes another blog post that sounds more like a lecture/chastisement than it probably should. -sigh- Sorry about that. I'll blame it on finals week stress ... and now I'm off to review Aristotle's Poetics!
Bonne chance! Your WIP loves and awaits you!
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Hello there, FTWA readers!
It's Wednesday. I have two final exams on Thursday. I have another one on Friday. This is a blog post.
Let's talk about procrastination!
Do you know why procrastination is easy? I do.
It's not scary.
The actual writing part of life almost always involves some element of I'm Not Good Enough. Editing, drafting while knowing you'll have to go back and edit 90% of what's coming out of your fingers, querying, synopsizing - the whole deal involves self-criticism. And procrastination, happy activity that it is, does not. It allows you to think of your work in the positive terms of the abstract, even whilst you cheerfully shirk it. Malformed sentences go away. Characterization issues disappear into the ether. And plot holes? What plot holes?
Procrastination happens because we're scared of what could happen in its stead. We could spend hours on a single scene and emotionally exhaust ourselves. Worse, we could spend hours on a single scene and then realize that scene needs deletion. We could rewrite our query four times and still realize it's not good enough.
For example, let's take my current mode of procrastination. I have not looked back over the book that I should have looked over several times by now for Friday's exam. Why? Because I'm scared I'll get to it and realize I need to memorize a million things I don't already know. I'm trusting in what I've already done rather than rediscovering what I've done and what I need to fix. Procrastinating, I can say, hey! You know what? I know a lot of things. Here's what I've learned. A lot of things, right? I'll be fine, eh?
After I finish writing this blog post, I will read the book in question. And, odds are, I shall rapidly discover I have yet some things to brush up on.
So the cure to procrastination? Make it as scary as going back to your unfinished draft.
Here's why you should be scared of procrastination:
1) You'll regret it later. Nothing's less satisfying than going to bed thinking about what you could have done with your day, and what you did instead of what you could have done.
2) You don't have all the time in the world. You have time. But not infinite time. You have people you love and places to go; you have books to read and other activities in which to participate. You do not have a million hours to spend faffing about on Twitter etc. while your WIP languishes in that other window.
3) It makes the writing harder. What if you get out of practice? What if you forget quite how your MC's particular voice sounds? These are problems not-unheard of. Coming back to an unfinished draft after an overlong break is laborious, and disrupts rhythm, and could be disadvantageous for quality itself.
4) It makes writing feel like work. I mean, come on. What other types of things do you put off? Studying for exams. (Ahem. -averts eyes-) And like, emailing your least favorite relative, and filing taxes, probably. But writing? Writing is a joy to you. That's why you do it. Whether you get an adrenaline rush, a deep satisfaction, a further knowledge about the human condition - whatever. You have a reason to be doing what you're doing. What you don't have is a reason to delay it.
Thus concludes another blog post that sounds more like a lecture/chastisement than it probably should. -sigh- Sorry about that. I'll blame it on finals week stress ... and now I'm off to review Aristotle's Poetics!
Bonne chance! Your WIP loves and awaits you!
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Twenty-Five Brief Excuses for Not Working on Your WIP Right Freaking Now
1) You're reading this list.
2) You're reading another list about writing. Possibly something meant to be motivational. Possibly something involving the publishing industry, something that relies largely on comforting words like "personal craft" and "unique voice."
3) You're stalking literary agents on Twitter.
4) You're stalking literary agents on their blogs.
5) You're stalking literary agents at their home addresses. (No. Bad. Stop.)
6) You're daydreaming about another idea which sprang into your mind as a fever dream at two in the morning and seemed brilliant, but which you promptly forgot. You think it was about something involving a duck. Maybe.
7) You're re-reading the bits of the WIP that you've already written. (It's initial analysis, okay?)
8) You're writing extensive backstory for your characters because look, it's important, it's part of the psyche.
9) You're on AgentQuery, QueryTracker, Preditors and Editors, or some other website involving other people who also should be working on their WIPs.
10) You're on Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, or some other website involving people who would have no idea what "WIP" meant were you to drop the abbrev in convo. (Their ignorance is comforting. Well, you think to yourself, I am farther along than all these people!)
11) You're debating character quirks with yourself. This character really likes cursing - should you rein him back? Will people judge you as an author or as a human being for his vulgar behavior? Moreover, will they judge you if your main character's second nephew has a penchant for speaking using only words that have the letter X? Or how about that girl you stuck into chapter seventeen who eats condiments without food? Is your book turning into an indie movie? What's even going on? Where are you? Who are you?
12) Okay. You've taken a break to eat. Things seem normal again.
13) You're still eating. You're feeling guilty about eating.
14) You're staring at the last sentence you wrote yesterday, rereading its final words over and over and over, attempting to find an adequate segue to the next scene you have planned, which shall be a Scene of Great Emotional Gravitas.
15) Someone from the Real World texts you and jolts you from your Mindset.
16) Someone from the Real World is talking to you. In person. You can't seem to converse, because all you can think about is how inadequate your dialogue is.
17) You're at work.
18) Just kidding. That's not an excuse. You're at work and the power's out.
19) Scrivener is still installing on your laptop. (It's been seventeen hours. You're considering buying a MacBook. Is this PC really worth the pain?)
20) You're drawing arcs. Character arcs. Plot arcs. Psychological and spiritual arcs. Vaguely parabolic arcs. You always knew Algebra 2 would come in handy at some point.
21) You're making a Writing Playlist on Spotify or iTunes. (You're getting desperate.)
22) You're moving to a location where your "emotional interiority can be the most focused". You're not even entirely sure you know what this means. (Oh, God, this is bad.)
23) You're considering becoming a poet instead. (You write commercial fiction, buddy.)
24) You're still reading a list some girl wrote on a writers' website. But you're about to finish that list. You feel mild panic descending upon you. You have no excuse, now.
25) Go. Write. Do it.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
---------------------
GET YOUR QUESTIONS READY
In an upcoming post From The Write Angle contributors will answer your questions. What's it like to "get the call" either from an agent or a publisher? How do I get my MS in to Hollywood? How do historical writers do all of that research?
What are your questions for our contributors? Keep an eye out for our upcoming call for questions.
2) You're reading another list about writing. Possibly something meant to be motivational. Possibly something involving the publishing industry, something that relies largely on comforting words like "personal craft" and "unique voice."
3) You're stalking literary agents on Twitter.
4) You're stalking literary agents on their blogs.
5) You're stalking literary agents at their home addresses. (No. Bad. Stop.)
6) You're daydreaming about another idea which sprang into your mind as a fever dream at two in the morning and seemed brilliant, but which you promptly forgot. You think it was about something involving a duck. Maybe.
7) You're re-reading the bits of the WIP that you've already written. (It's initial analysis, okay?)
8) You're writing extensive backstory for your characters because look, it's important, it's part of the psyche.
9) You're on AgentQuery, QueryTracker, Preditors and Editors, or some other website involving other people who also should be working on their WIPs.
10) You're on Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, or some other website involving people who would have no idea what "WIP" meant were you to drop the abbrev in convo. (Their ignorance is comforting. Well, you think to yourself, I am farther along than all these people!)
11) You're debating character quirks with yourself. This character really likes cursing - should you rein him back? Will people judge you as an author or as a human being for his vulgar behavior? Moreover, will they judge you if your main character's second nephew has a penchant for speaking using only words that have the letter X? Or how about that girl you stuck into chapter seventeen who eats condiments without food? Is your book turning into an indie movie? What's even going on? Where are you? Who are you?
12) Okay. You've taken a break to eat. Things seem normal again.
13) You're still eating. You're feeling guilty about eating.
14) You're staring at the last sentence you wrote yesterday, rereading its final words over and over and over, attempting to find an adequate segue to the next scene you have planned, which shall be a Scene of Great Emotional Gravitas.
15) Someone from the Real World texts you and jolts you from your Mindset.
16) Someone from the Real World is talking to you. In person. You can't seem to converse, because all you can think about is how inadequate your dialogue is.
17) You're at work.
18) Just kidding. That's not an excuse. You're at work and the power's out.
19) Scrivener is still installing on your laptop. (It's been seventeen hours. You're considering buying a MacBook. Is this PC really worth the pain?)
20) You're drawing arcs. Character arcs. Plot arcs. Psychological and spiritual arcs. Vaguely parabolic arcs. You always knew Algebra 2 would come in handy at some point.
21) You're making a Writing Playlist on Spotify or iTunes. (You're getting desperate.)
22) You're moving to a location where your "emotional interiority can be the most focused". You're not even entirely sure you know what this means. (Oh, God, this is bad.)
23) You're considering becoming a poet instead. (You write commercial fiction, buddy.)
24) You're still reading a list some girl wrote on a writers' website. But you're about to finish that list. You feel mild panic descending upon you. You have no excuse, now.
25) Go. Write. Do it.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
---------------------
GET YOUR QUESTIONS READY
In an upcoming post From The Write Angle contributors will answer your questions. What's it like to "get the call" either from an agent or a publisher? How do I get my MS in to Hollywood? How do historical writers do all of that research?
What are your questions for our contributors? Keep an eye out for our upcoming call for questions.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Being Good Enough
by Riley Redgate
I used to run Cross Country in high school. As such, I can say with authority that it is a painful sport. If you don't feel terrible at some point during your run, odds are you're not running hard enough, or so the coach will tell you. "Pain is weakness leaving the body! Hrrrgh!"
And the fun thing about it is that it never gets easier. Soreness is part of the territory, no matter how fast or slow you are. If you run three straight 8-minute miles and you feel like you're going to drop dead afterward, great. Keep running hard, and maybe soon you'll be able to run three straight 7-minute miles. And then you'll have the privilege of ... still feeling like you're going to drop dead afterward.
Now, although writing rarely involves physical agony (erm, or so one would hope), the process is virtually the same. An eternal uphill battle. How so, you ask? Writers themselves are works in progress. We are never a finished product. We, and our writing styles, are always learning, evolving, transforming. We will always be able to improve, which is one of the reasons the process is so exciting. It's never the same thing twice.
The similarities don't end there. Most writers are constantly barraged with the pressure to measure their success by other people's reactions. Will agents like my book? they wonder. (Heck, will they even like my query letter?) How about publishers? How about reviewers? How about (gulp) the reading public at large?
But the most important question should always be, Do I like my own book? Just as a new PR (personal record) is the thing cross-country runners aim for, as writers, we should first aim for our best possible personal effort. I mean, let's be real: If every runner held him or herself to the standards of an Olympian, 1) there would be a hell of a lot more injuries out there, and 2) they would only ever feel bad about themselves.
I am not Tirunesh Dibaba, the 5k gold medalist. She is shorter than me, lighter than me, and built differently. I will never be her. I will never run three miles in fifteen minutes. Aspiring to be her is pointless. And similarly, writers can't poison their own mindsets by wanting nothing but to be the next Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Bill Shakespeare. That road leads nowhere—and it is a depressing one to run.
We've all heard Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Shakespeare are "great." But since we won't ever become them—since we can't measure how good we are by other people—how do we know when we're good enough? For each of us, what is "good enough"?
Well, achievement is not a spectrum or a sliding scale for all of humanity. Good enough is and always will be your personal best. Your life. Your PR.
Here's hoping you break your record!
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
(P.S. Sorry that this post is oddly late in the day, regular FTWA readers! I posted it in the wee hours of the morning and the Blogger gods promptly decided to consume it.)
I used to run Cross Country in high school. As such, I can say with authority that it is a painful sport. If you don't feel terrible at some point during your run, odds are you're not running hard enough, or so the coach will tell you. "Pain is weakness leaving the body! Hrrrgh!"
And the fun thing about it is that it never gets easier. Soreness is part of the territory, no matter how fast or slow you are. If you run three straight 8-minute miles and you feel like you're going to drop dead afterward, great. Keep running hard, and maybe soon you'll be able to run three straight 7-minute miles. And then you'll have the privilege of ... still feeling like you're going to drop dead afterward.
Now, although writing rarely involves physical agony (erm, or so one would hope), the process is virtually the same. An eternal uphill battle. How so, you ask? Writers themselves are works in progress. We are never a finished product. We, and our writing styles, are always learning, evolving, transforming. We will always be able to improve, which is one of the reasons the process is so exciting. It's never the same thing twice.
The similarities don't end there. Most writers are constantly barraged with the pressure to measure their success by other people's reactions. Will agents like my book? they wonder. (Heck, will they even like my query letter?) How about publishers? How about reviewers? How about (gulp) the reading public at large?
But the most important question should always be, Do I like my own book? Just as a new PR (personal record) is the thing cross-country runners aim for, as writers, we should first aim for our best possible personal effort. I mean, let's be real: If every runner held him or herself to the standards of an Olympian, 1) there would be a hell of a lot more injuries out there, and 2) they would only ever feel bad about themselves.
I am not Tirunesh Dibaba, the 5k gold medalist. She is shorter than me, lighter than me, and built differently. I will never be her. I will never run three miles in fifteen minutes. Aspiring to be her is pointless. And similarly, writers can't poison their own mindsets by wanting nothing but to be the next Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Bill Shakespeare. That road leads nowhere—and it is a depressing one to run.
We've all heard Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Shakespeare are "great." But since we won't ever become them—since we can't measure how good we are by other people—how do we know when we're good enough? For each of us, what is "good enough"?
Well, achievement is not a spectrum or a sliding scale for all of humanity. Good enough is and always will be your personal best. Your life. Your PR.
Here's hoping you break your record!
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
(P.S. Sorry that this post is oddly late in the day, regular FTWA readers! I posted it in the wee hours of the morning and the Blogger gods promptly decided to consume it.)
Monday, September 17, 2012
My Book Has Issues
by Riley Redgate
Once upon a time, there was an author who cared immensely about the world around her. She spent massive amounts of time studying societal problems and potential solutions for those problems.
One day, she thought to herself, Ah-ha! I've got it! I will write a book based on the damaging nature of the patriarchy! It will be set in high school, and every high schooler who finishes it will be five times more knowledgeable about feminism than they were when they started. It will be perfect.
The book was terrible.
The end.
Sorry, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Really, though - I feel like everyone I've spoken to has read That One Book that feels like this, has read That One Novel that seems crafted only to Teach The Reader a Lesson about Life and Educate Them about Problems of Which They May Previously Have Been Unaware. (Dear God, that capitalization went on far longer than intended. Oops.)
There's a good reason for this, obviously. Issues Books, in my opinion, are infinitely harder to pull off than books that don't involve anything large and societal. After all, unless the readers are completely buried in the character's head, their natural inclination will be to attribute facts set forth in a novel to the author's knowledge, not to the character. If there is a character who's a clear Voice of Wisdom in the book, for example, the reader will see through that character as if they were transparent; the reader will assume the author's using that Voice as a mouthpiece - unless the character is well-crafted enough to be completely opaque.
In other words, Issues Books have to be even more ingrained in their own worlds than regular books. The characters have to be even more set in stone and clearly defined, so that a transgendered or gay character doesn't turn into The Transgendered Character or The Gay Character. The dialogue, above all else, must remain natural and delve only rarely into the realm of sheer explanation. Otherwise it will feel like two people parroting facts at each other. It might even feel like non-fiction, or simply a flimsy attempt at fiction.
Don't get me wrong: I love reading about social issues, and I love that authors are trying to combat ignorance through fiction. I'll be the first to advocate an increase in published works that tackle problems like racism in the modern world, sexism, rape culture, oppression of the underprivileged, etc. - the idea of raising awareness of these problems via a novel is admirable.
But building a novel around an issue rather than plots and characters has only one way to go: downhill. When it comes to fiction, I'm always looking for someone to attach to, rather than something. When we as readers lose the perspective of the individual, with his/her individual motives and problems and objectives, we lose any reason to keep reading the novel as opposed to, say, an article about the issue in question.
Also, I don't know why someone would want to reduce a character to a mouthpiece. Because one of the most powerful abilities of a novel is to personalize large-scale matters. It draws the reader into a state of empathy. Reading about the life of one specific drug addict helps explain drug addiction in general because it provides a vivid example of the lifestyle; reading about one bullied gay teenager shows in one story the cruelty happening in a million instances. Character-based as it is, fiction humanizes what we've never witnessed, or what we don't understand, and to ignore that capability is to disregard the strength and power of fiction itself.
In the end, I don't want to read an Issues Book. I want to read a book, and if it happens to involve Issues, so be it. But first make me care for the characters that populate the world, and for what happens to them. That's where the real strength in the story will lie.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Once upon a time, there was an author who cared immensely about the world around her. She spent massive amounts of time studying societal problems and potential solutions for those problems.
One day, she thought to herself, Ah-ha! I've got it! I will write a book based on the damaging nature of the patriarchy! It will be set in high school, and every high schooler who finishes it will be five times more knowledgeable about feminism than they were when they started. It will be perfect.
The book was terrible.
The end.
Sorry, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Really, though - I feel like everyone I've spoken to has read That One Book that feels like this, has read That One Novel that seems crafted only to Teach The Reader a Lesson about Life and Educate Them about Problems of Which They May Previously Have Been Unaware. (Dear God, that capitalization went on far longer than intended. Oops.)
There's a good reason for this, obviously. Issues Books, in my opinion, are infinitely harder to pull off than books that don't involve anything large and societal. After all, unless the readers are completely buried in the character's head, their natural inclination will be to attribute facts set forth in a novel to the author's knowledge, not to the character. If there is a character who's a clear Voice of Wisdom in the book, for example, the reader will see through that character as if they were transparent; the reader will assume the author's using that Voice as a mouthpiece - unless the character is well-crafted enough to be completely opaque.
In other words, Issues Books have to be even more ingrained in their own worlds than regular books. The characters have to be even more set in stone and clearly defined, so that a transgendered or gay character doesn't turn into The Transgendered Character or The Gay Character. The dialogue, above all else, must remain natural and delve only rarely into the realm of sheer explanation. Otherwise it will feel like two people parroting facts at each other. It might even feel like non-fiction, or simply a flimsy attempt at fiction.
Don't get me wrong: I love reading about social issues, and I love that authors are trying to combat ignorance through fiction. I'll be the first to advocate an increase in published works that tackle problems like racism in the modern world, sexism, rape culture, oppression of the underprivileged, etc. - the idea of raising awareness of these problems via a novel is admirable.
But building a novel around an issue rather than plots and characters has only one way to go: downhill. When it comes to fiction, I'm always looking for someone to attach to, rather than something. When we as readers lose the perspective of the individual, with his/her individual motives and problems and objectives, we lose any reason to keep reading the novel as opposed to, say, an article about the issue in question.
Also, I don't know why someone would want to reduce a character to a mouthpiece. Because one of the most powerful abilities of a novel is to personalize large-scale matters. It draws the reader into a state of empathy. Reading about the life of one specific drug addict helps explain drug addiction in general because it provides a vivid example of the lifestyle; reading about one bullied gay teenager shows in one story the cruelty happening in a million instances. Character-based as it is, fiction humanizes what we've never witnessed, or what we don't understand, and to ignore that capability is to disregard the strength and power of fiction itself.
In the end, I don't want to read an Issues Book. I want to read a book, and if it happens to involve Issues, so be it. But first make me care for the characters that populate the world, and for what happens to them. That's where the real strength in the story will lie.
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Clearing Out the Clutter
by Riley Redgate
Why hello there!
I am writing this from my one hundred percent certified Dorm Room™. As of yesterday, you see, I am a fancy-schmancy College Student™.
Classes started yesterday. Last week, I was lucky enough to go on a hiking/camping/backpacking trip in the wild outdoors with some folks from the College. Said trip involved a general deficit of personal hygiene, enough blisters to rival those of an entire cross country season, and campfires galore. And it was wonderful for a number of reasons:
1) I did not look at any screen of any sort for six days straight. This gave me a disproportionately heightened sense of personal accomplishment.
2) I made some excellent friends before I even got to orientation.
3) Here's a secret: Before the trip, I felt myself slipping down the slope toward Writer's Block. I was getting words out, but they were strained. The bottom of the proverbial barrel was getting severely damaged by my scraping fingernails. I was worried that when I got to college, I'd hit Real Actual Writer's Block just when I needed to be able to write for papers, etc. ... BUT, when I returned from the camping trip, my writerly brain felt refreshed. In fact, my mind had built up and saved several ideas over the six-day period, and the lack of ability to write them down made me all the more eager to take advantage of that ability when I got back.
Maybe it's nature. Maybe it's good company. Maybe it's depriving oneself of the actual physical ability to write for a while. Whatever it is, my new official advice for those afflicted by the dreaded writer's block is to take nature days. As in multiple nature days. Let fresh air clear your head; physically distance yourself from the word processor; don't think about writing unless it happens to drift across your mind in passing. Let the world flow before your eyes, easing the pressure on your writer-brain.
It's easy to get buried in the writerly world these days. We have blogs, twitter, social networking sites, email - with all of these awesome options to meet people with the same interests, it's easy to lose track of life outside all that, and the world outside our lives in general. I've often heard that the writer's best friend is a full and well-rounded life, every day/week/month filled with as many diverse experiences as possible. Maybe the fix for writer's block is to let your vat of life experiences fill back up so you can draw on it again with fresh perspective.
From this different physical place, and from a slightly different mental place, everything looks new to me. And this newness has proved wonderful for jolting my mind back to that place I needed to be. Three cheers for nature and the world around us!
Do you have any rituals to clear out the clutter?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Why hello there!
I am writing this from my one hundred percent certified Dorm Room™. As of yesterday, you see, I am a fancy-schmancy College Student™.
Classes started yesterday. Last week, I was lucky enough to go on a hiking/camping/backpacking trip in the wild outdoors with some folks from the College. Said trip involved a general deficit of personal hygiene, enough blisters to rival those of an entire cross country season, and campfires galore. And it was wonderful for a number of reasons:
1) I did not look at any screen of any sort for six days straight. This gave me a disproportionately heightened sense of personal accomplishment.
2) I made some excellent friends before I even got to orientation.
3) Here's a secret: Before the trip, I felt myself slipping down the slope toward Writer's Block. I was getting words out, but they were strained. The bottom of the proverbial barrel was getting severely damaged by my scraping fingernails. I was worried that when I got to college, I'd hit Real Actual Writer's Block just when I needed to be able to write for papers, etc. ... BUT, when I returned from the camping trip, my writerly brain felt refreshed. In fact, my mind had built up and saved several ideas over the six-day period, and the lack of ability to write them down made me all the more eager to take advantage of that ability when I got back.
Maybe it's nature. Maybe it's good company. Maybe it's depriving oneself of the actual physical ability to write for a while. Whatever it is, my new official advice for those afflicted by the dreaded writer's block is to take nature days. As in multiple nature days. Let fresh air clear your head; physically distance yourself from the word processor; don't think about writing unless it happens to drift across your mind in passing. Let the world flow before your eyes, easing the pressure on your writer-brain.
It's easy to get buried in the writerly world these days. We have blogs, twitter, social networking sites, email - with all of these awesome options to meet people with the same interests, it's easy to lose track of life outside all that, and the world outside our lives in general. I've often heard that the writer's best friend is a full and well-rounded life, every day/week/month filled with as many diverse experiences as possible. Maybe the fix for writer's block is to let your vat of life experiences fill back up so you can draw on it again with fresh perspective.
From this different physical place, and from a slightly different mental place, everything looks new to me. And this newness has proved wonderful for jolting my mind back to that place I needed to be. Three cheers for nature and the world around us!
Do you have any rituals to clear out the clutter?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Monday, July 30, 2012
On Budget: Page vs. Screen
by Riley Redgate
Last weekend, The Dark Knight Rises made $160.9 million.
Last weekend—as in, within roughly seventy-two hours—this film made a little more than fifty cents off every human living in the United States. Let's just let that sink in for a hot second.
Has it sunk in? Excellent. Moving on:
I saw The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX. (In fact, I saw it in IMAX from the front row, which was both terrifying and extraordinarily painful, but that's beside the point.) And it hit me while I was watching how much impact the phrase "high-budget" or "low-budget" has on the movie industry. All the spectacle of Nolan's film—I can imagine the creators burning through money, mowing it down, eating it up. Money for every explosion, every costume, every special effect. Would it have been remotely the same film if they hadn't spent $280 million on the thing? One can only imagine.
It's interesting on the other end, too—the output end. Only the rarest of authors make obscene amounts of cash, as opposed to the realm of wide-release films, a realm where $13 million in three days can be described as "paltry".
When it comes to cash, no one can deny that films have a higher throughput. Massive amounts in, and (hopefully) massive amounts out. Of course, artistic vision and creativity also have tremendous influence on the film industry—but budget has a huge impact on the final product, and of course, on the existence of the product in the first place. A film that costs zero dollars to put together would be quite an interesting film indeed.
In book-land, on the other hand, the place of origin—the author's brain—isn't necessarily influenced by money. (I say "necessarily" because I'm speaking as someone who has made exactly zero dollars from writing. There's probably someone out there who makes better first drafts when they're having money thrown at them, but whatever.)
The question: Is there a "budget" of sorts when it comes to writerly ways? I believe there is, and I've drawn up a list enumerating the sources that feed into this creative budget:
1) Time. Because there are never enough hours in the day. Time is a crucial resource, and authors who are lucky enough to have an abundance of it will probably see more productivity.
2) Command of language. Because a strong vocabulary, a good sense of orthography, and sentence-to-sentence flow are gifts that keep giving.
3) Familiarity with genre. Because knowing what's become a trope, what's fresh and original, what's familiar and loved, and what's expected from the genre is a well of knowledge you can draw on with every step down the noveling path.
4) Support. Because one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. (Two can be as bad as one; it's the loneliest number since the number one.) A network of friends, beta readers, critique partners, and cheerleaders is on the "priceless" end of the value scale.
5) Inner peace. Because seriously, have you tried to write when you're having one of those no-confidence days? Don't know about you guys, but for me, that tends to degenerate into me typing one letter repeatedly and staring at my word processor. Confidence: vital contributing factor, in my opinion.
6) Emotional investment. Because it'd be mighty tough to make yourself write about your characters if you don't care about them.
Oh, and 7) Divine inspiration. Because life isn't fair.
People may rant and rave about how different books and films are, and how one shouldn't compare them. But when it comes to budget, the two mediums run on the same principle: When you make a high-budget film (hey there, James Cameron's Avatar) you're hoping to get at least as much as you spent back, right? The more you put in, the more you'll expect out. And similarly, when you put more time into writing, or when you read books in your genre and take mental notes, or when you edit until you're personally satisfied with it, you'll get output. Maybe not monetary output, necessarily, but hey, raise your hand if you think authors are in it for the money.
... yeah, heh, that's what I thought. But what you might get as payback from a big creative budget: personal satisfaction. Satisfied readers. And hopefully—most importantly—a damn good read. Here's hoping yours is a blockbuster!
Can you think of any other contributing factors to your personal Writer's Budget (tm)?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Last weekend, The Dark Knight Rises made $160.9 million.
Last weekend—as in, within roughly seventy-two hours—this film made a little more than fifty cents off every human living in the United States. Let's just let that sink in for a hot second.
Has it sunk in? Excellent. Moving on:
I saw The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX. (In fact, I saw it in IMAX from the front row, which was both terrifying and extraordinarily painful, but that's beside the point.) And it hit me while I was watching how much impact the phrase "high-budget" or "low-budget" has on the movie industry. All the spectacle of Nolan's film—I can imagine the creators burning through money, mowing it down, eating it up. Money for every explosion, every costume, every special effect. Would it have been remotely the same film if they hadn't spent $280 million on the thing? One can only imagine.
It's interesting on the other end, too—the output end. Only the rarest of authors make obscene amounts of cash, as opposed to the realm of wide-release films, a realm where $13 million in three days can be described as "paltry".
When it comes to cash, no one can deny that films have a higher throughput. Massive amounts in, and (hopefully) massive amounts out. Of course, artistic vision and creativity also have tremendous influence on the film industry—but budget has a huge impact on the final product, and of course, on the existence of the product in the first place. A film that costs zero dollars to put together would be quite an interesting film indeed.
In book-land, on the other hand, the place of origin—the author's brain—isn't necessarily influenced by money. (I say "necessarily" because I'm speaking as someone who has made exactly zero dollars from writing. There's probably someone out there who makes better first drafts when they're having money thrown at them, but whatever.)
The question: Is there a "budget" of sorts when it comes to writerly ways? I believe there is, and I've drawn up a list enumerating the sources that feed into this creative budget:
1) Time. Because there are never enough hours in the day. Time is a crucial resource, and authors who are lucky enough to have an abundance of it will probably see more productivity.
2) Command of language. Because a strong vocabulary, a good sense of orthography, and sentence-to-sentence flow are gifts that keep giving.
3) Familiarity with genre. Because knowing what's become a trope, what's fresh and original, what's familiar and loved, and what's expected from the genre is a well of knowledge you can draw on with every step down the noveling path.
4) Support. Because one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do. (Two can be as bad as one; it's the loneliest number since the number one.) A network of friends, beta readers, critique partners, and cheerleaders is on the "priceless" end of the value scale.
5) Inner peace. Because seriously, have you tried to write when you're having one of those no-confidence days? Don't know about you guys, but for me, that tends to degenerate into me typing one letter repeatedly and staring at my word processor. Confidence: vital contributing factor, in my opinion.
6) Emotional investment. Because it'd be mighty tough to make yourself write about your characters if you don't care about them.
Oh, and 7) Divine inspiration. Because life isn't fair.
People may rant and rave about how different books and films are, and how one shouldn't compare them. But when it comes to budget, the two mediums run on the same principle: When you make a high-budget film (hey there, James Cameron's Avatar) you're hoping to get at least as much as you spent back, right? The more you put in, the more you'll expect out. And similarly, when you put more time into writing, or when you read books in your genre and take mental notes, or when you edit until you're personally satisfied with it, you'll get output. Maybe not monetary output, necessarily, but hey, raise your hand if you think authors are in it for the money.
... yeah, heh, that's what I thought. But what you might get as payback from a big creative budget: personal satisfaction. Satisfied readers. And hopefully—most importantly—a damn good read. Here's hoping yours is a blockbuster!
Can you think of any other contributing factors to your personal Writer's Budget (tm)?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Do You Want to Know a Secret? Do You Promise Not to Tell?
by Riley Redgate
Back when I took acting classes, one character-building activity in particular stuck with me: the Secret. The goal of the Secret was simple and self-explanatory: Come up with a secret for your character, something the character never says onstage or even references subtly. Tell no one what the secret is. Harbor the secret. Supposedly, this helps breathe inner life into your performance.
But I always felt like the point of the Secret wasn't to give the character inner life, but to create a semantic attachment between actor and character. Similarly, what I love about creating characters' backgrounds in writing is that it makes me feel like the character and I are getting to know each other. Yeah, a significant portion of what I craft for my characters never makes it "onscreen"—but since such a vital portion of writing consists of nailing a character's voice, every little bit I can do to connect to them seems to help. It's not that I'm furthering the character so much as furthering my ability to communicate who he/she is.
Which brings me to the larger issue: What happens when your character's Secret is actually your Secret? And how much of an author's life seeps into the creation of a novel? I know some writers who base entire characters off people they know in real life. (I have been known to borrow a characteristic here and there, but I've never had a specific friend/family-member/enemy/what-have-you from my personal life in mind when I've come up with characters.) Of course, there are "easter eggs" lying around here and there—something in a line of dialogue will be a reference to a thought I had while driving to school, or there'll be some loosely adapted translation from a foreign language for a character's name. Nothing too major, though.
Interestingly enough, a fellow writer once told me about one of her easter eggs before I read her novel—and that knowledge ended up ruining the character for me, because every time I read one of his lines, I was like, "THIS DUDE IS BASED ON SOMEONE I KNOW." It was sort of uncomfortable. And invasive-feeling.
However, when another friend told me one of his character's secrets—a secret relevant only to the character, nothing drawn from my friend's real life—it didn't bother me at all. I felt like it maintained the illusion, and actually assisted it, instead of destroying it. It seemed like he'd applied the acting activity, and it'd worked.
I started to wonder, though—if my first friend hadn't told me a thing, would I even have noticed? Would I have enjoyed reading that character just as much as the character in Novel #2? Many writers look down on blatant authorial self-insertion, but as long as there's that barrier between author and reader, does it really matter? Technically, doesn't all writing (and acting, for that matter) involve a degree of self-insertion, assuming we're writing (or acting) from a place of sympathy? Dark and scary questions indeed.
Of course, the question would eventually become this: if the author relies on self-insertion, will he/she ever be able to write an entirely different main character, a character who isn't him/herself? And heck, I've got to admit, when an author has an obscenely long series of books, I sort of start to wonder if they've forgotten how to write in any other character's voice.
Do you think that self-insertion, if unknown to the reader, is acceptable? Do you draw directly from real-life experiences (or people) when you write? Are your characters' secrets their own, or yours?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Back when I took acting classes, one character-building activity in particular stuck with me: the Secret. The goal of the Secret was simple and self-explanatory: Come up with a secret for your character, something the character never says onstage or even references subtly. Tell no one what the secret is. Harbor the secret. Supposedly, this helps breathe inner life into your performance.
But I always felt like the point of the Secret wasn't to give the character inner life, but to create a semantic attachment between actor and character. Similarly, what I love about creating characters' backgrounds in writing is that it makes me feel like the character and I are getting to know each other. Yeah, a significant portion of what I craft for my characters never makes it "onscreen"—but since such a vital portion of writing consists of nailing a character's voice, every little bit I can do to connect to them seems to help. It's not that I'm furthering the character so much as furthering my ability to communicate who he/she is.
Which brings me to the larger issue: What happens when your character's Secret is actually your Secret? And how much of an author's life seeps into the creation of a novel? I know some writers who base entire characters off people they know in real life. (I have been known to borrow a characteristic here and there, but I've never had a specific friend/family-member/enemy/what-have-you from my personal life in mind when I've come up with characters.) Of course, there are "easter eggs" lying around here and there—something in a line of dialogue will be a reference to a thought I had while driving to school, or there'll be some loosely adapted translation from a foreign language for a character's name. Nothing too major, though.
Interestingly enough, a fellow writer once told me about one of her easter eggs before I read her novel—and that knowledge ended up ruining the character for me, because every time I read one of his lines, I was like, "THIS DUDE IS BASED ON SOMEONE I KNOW." It was sort of uncomfortable. And invasive-feeling.
However, when another friend told me one of his character's secrets—a secret relevant only to the character, nothing drawn from my friend's real life—it didn't bother me at all. I felt like it maintained the illusion, and actually assisted it, instead of destroying it. It seemed like he'd applied the acting activity, and it'd worked.
I started to wonder, though—if my first friend hadn't told me a thing, would I even have noticed? Would I have enjoyed reading that character just as much as the character in Novel #2? Many writers look down on blatant authorial self-insertion, but as long as there's that barrier between author and reader, does it really matter? Technically, doesn't all writing (and acting, for that matter) involve a degree of self-insertion, assuming we're writing (or acting) from a place of sympathy? Dark and scary questions indeed.
Of course, the question would eventually become this: if the author relies on self-insertion, will he/she ever be able to write an entirely different main character, a character who isn't him/herself? And heck, I've got to admit, when an author has an obscenely long series of books, I sort of start to wonder if they've forgotten how to write in any other character's voice.
Do you think that self-insertion, if unknown to the reader, is acceptable? Do you draw directly from real-life experiences (or people) when you write? Are your characters' secrets their own, or yours?
Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Welcome New FTWA Bloggers!
I know! It's the weekend and we're posting on From the Write Angle! Quick! Grab your emergency kits because this is an emergency broadcast.
No, not really. You can relax. This is a good, unexpected call in the middle of the night—kind of like those announcing the birth of a baby. And on this fine Mother's Day, we are announcing the arrival of our bouncing baby ... triplets! Three lovely, baby-faced writers who are joining our FTWA family don't look, act, or behave much like triplets, which is odd don't you think? However, you may just find that these new FTWA family members have enough things in common to give my claim a touch of validity.
No, not really. You can relax. This is a good, unexpected call in the middle of the night—kind of like those announcing the birth of a baby. And on this fine Mother's Day, we are announcing the arrival of our bouncing baby ... triplets! Three lovely, baby-faced writers who are joining our FTWA family don't look, act, or behave much like triplets, which is odd don't you think? However, you may just find that these new FTWA family members have enough things in common to give my claim a touch of validity.
Without further ado, I proudly introduce MarcyKate Connolly, Stephen L. Duncan, and Riley Regate!
MarcyKate Connolly writes young adult fiction and has a passion for fantasy and sci-fi. She recently made it into The Writer's Voice contest. (If you haven't heard about the contest, don't worry, I hadn't heard about it until just the other day. Making a team in the contest is a pretty big deal from what I can tell—so a huge congrats to MarcyKate.) She also had a smashing story about fleeting moments and how meeting one person can impact your life in the Spring Fevers short story anthology. She composes music and has some surprising marketing and HTML skills.
Her first post will be on the topic of writing conferences and will air here on May 16th.
She also blogs at MarcyKate.com, and she can also be found on Twitter.
Stephen L. Duncan adds a little more testosterone to the FTWA mix and is also a young adult specialist. His first book in The Revelation Saga is due out in 2014. His stories are inspired by his travels around the world and the characters he’s met. His first book was pitched as "a sweeping adventure with elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Harry Potter." Yeah, that gets a person interested! Stephen is a new papa and enjoys playing guitar. (Real guitar—not that Rock Band stuff. Although that's fun too.)
His first post will be on following your dreams, meeting your goals, and reaching that finish line and will air on May 14th. (That's tomorrow!)
When he's not on FTWA you can find him blogging at INKROCK.com and also tweeting.
Riley Redgate, the third born of the triplets, also writes young adult science fiction. While she doesn't have a special in with strange worlds (as far as we know), she does have a special in with the YA audience as she recently turned eighteen. While Riley is young, she already knows more about writing than many aspiring writers and is ready to take on the world and prove that if you have what it takes, age is irrelevant. She likes to play piano and is an optimistic kind of gal.
If you missed Riley's first FTWA post about coming of age last week, be sure to pop over and read it.
Riley can also be found blogging in her mighty little jungle, or tweeting.
With thanks to these lovely new members, the From the Write Angle team is back up to a lovely fifteen. (For those less into math it means that you should see each of us roughly once every five weeks or so.) As well, we'd like to mention at this time that the lovely and talented Robert K. Lewis and Darke Conteur are taking a sabbatical of sorts from FTWA, but you can still find them hanging out on their own blogs. Check the About the Team page under "About the Alumni" for more information on how to contact them.
If you are curious about any of our FTWA members, we encourage you to check out our About the Team page where you will learn interesting things about who lives in money pits, the pitfalls of wooing pretty girls, and other surprising facts. Also be sure to RSS our posts using the nice "Posts" button on the right under "Subscribe to" so you won't miss a thing!
As well, we take turns tweeting under the @writeangleblog handle on Twitter and occasionally can be found stumbling around on our Facebook page. Join us! We don't bite—much. (And those of us that do have had their rabies vaccination updated. I checked.)
Only a few short months ago, I (Jean Oram) joined the From the Write Angle blog and it already feels like home. In no time at all, I am sure these folks will feel as at home here as they do thanks to our wonderful and loyal readers.
So, without further ado, welcome to our new members!
 |
| MarcyKate Connolly |
MarcyKate Connolly writes young adult fiction and has a passion for fantasy and sci-fi. She recently made it into The Writer's Voice contest. (If you haven't heard about the contest, don't worry, I hadn't heard about it until just the other day. Making a team in the contest is a pretty big deal from what I can tell—so a huge congrats to MarcyKate.) She also had a smashing story about fleeting moments and how meeting one person can impact your life in the Spring Fevers short story anthology. She composes music and has some surprising marketing and HTML skills.
Her first post will be on the topic of writing conferences and will air here on May 16th.
She also blogs at MarcyKate.com, and she can also be found on Twitter.
 |
| Stephen L. Duncan |
Stephen L. Duncan adds a little more testosterone to the FTWA mix and is also a young adult specialist. His first book in The Revelation Saga is due out in 2014. His stories are inspired by his travels around the world and the characters he’s met. His first book was pitched as "a sweeping adventure with elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Harry Potter." Yeah, that gets a person interested! Stephen is a new papa and enjoys playing guitar. (Real guitar—not that Rock Band stuff. Although that's fun too.)
His first post will be on following your dreams, meeting your goals, and reaching that finish line and will air on May 14th. (That's tomorrow!)
When he's not on FTWA you can find him blogging at INKROCK.com and also tweeting.
 |
| Riley Redgate |
Riley Redgate, the third born of the triplets, also writes young adult science fiction. While she doesn't have a special in with strange worlds (as far as we know), she does have a special in with the YA audience as she recently turned eighteen. While Riley is young, she already knows more about writing than many aspiring writers and is ready to take on the world and prove that if you have what it takes, age is irrelevant. She likes to play piano and is an optimistic kind of gal.
If you missed Riley's first FTWA post about coming of age last week, be sure to pop over and read it.
Riley can also be found blogging in her mighty little jungle, or tweeting.
______________
With thanks to these lovely new members, the From the Write Angle team is back up to a lovely fifteen. (For those less into math it means that you should see each of us roughly once every five weeks or so.) As well, we'd like to mention at this time that the lovely and talented Robert K. Lewis and Darke Conteur are taking a sabbatical of sorts from FTWA, but you can still find them hanging out on their own blogs. Check the About the Team page under "About the Alumni" for more information on how to contact them.
If you are curious about any of our FTWA members, we encourage you to check out our About the Team page where you will learn interesting things about who lives in money pits, the pitfalls of wooing pretty girls, and other surprising facts. Also be sure to RSS our posts using the nice "Posts" button on the right under "Subscribe to" so you won't miss a thing!
As well, we take turns tweeting under the @writeangleblog handle on Twitter and occasionally can be found stumbling around on our Facebook page. Join us! We don't bite—much. (And those of us that do have had their rabies vaccination updated. I checked.)
Only a few short months ago, I (Jean Oram) joined the From the Write Angle blog and it already feels like home. In no time at all, I am sure these folks will feel as at home here as they do thanks to our wonderful and loyal readers.
So, without further ado, welcome to our new members!
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