The Inner Truth of Teenagers

Why do teens love dystopia?  Well, according to Patrick Ness, best known for his extraordinary Chaos Walking trilogy, “Arbitrary authoritarian rulers. Nothing makes sense and there is no escape.  The grim social order is relieved by flashes of personal connection here and there...

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On Censorship and Happiness

As writers for children, we often navigate the line between too little and too much gritty realism. For one thing, we don't want to cut out a giant portion of our audience because of the censors.

I always sneered at censorious parents till this summer when my daughter got a part in "The Laramie Project,” at camp. It's about that poor kid in Wyoming who was beaten to death for being gay.  I didn't stop her, mind you, but I fretted about it to everyone who would listen.

 “It must be one of those ‘socially conscious’ camps,” my boss offered dubiously.

“Well, you wanted her to do something besides Guys and Dolls," my husband said.

My best friend texted me back:  she's happy about it you're happy about it 

But I wasn’t happy about it. I'm not a Bible-thumper. I support gay marriage. I just didn’t want my girl immersed in the most morose, miserable story possible at camp. I thought it was all wrong for her. Was I right?  You look at her face and tell me.

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Why Famous Writers Should Complain About Writing

Anne Lamott says ”Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”  Writers, if you don’t feel that way—if you happen to find writing effortless and easy—do the rest of us a favor and lie.

J.K. Rowling apparently wrote the complete story arc for the Harry Potter series on a long train ride, and then wrote most of Sorcerer’s Stone in cafes while her new baby was napping. Napping??? People, I was barely groomed the first year of my child’s life, let alone able to churn out a groundbreaking, genre-busting bestseller. It’s true that Rowling was on welfare at the time, her manuscript was rejected repeatedly before going on to revolutionize the industry, and from what I’ve read, all that success couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. But still. Jo, couldn’t you have worked up some writing block story to make the rest of us feel a little better?

By way of contrast, I give you Michael Chabon's story of writing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

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In Which I Discover My Character Has Purple Hair

Guess what, everybody? I'm using Pinterest and Google Images to help with my writing research!  I got the idea from wonderful   Stephanie Burgis, author of the wonderful  Kat, Incorrigible series of middle grade Regency romances with magic.

Here's an example of how it's working for me. One of my characters, Alastair, is a rocker kid with dyed hair and eyeliner. When I did a Google Images search  for BOY EYELINER I found him! 



Is he not adorable? Love the ironic eyeroll! Must incorporate the purple hair!  After some sleuthing, I discovered that in real life, his name is Adrian Heard and he lives in Australia. But to me he's clearly Alastair Templeton, a British-born rocker, New York resident and magic-loving sidekick to my heroines. Here's what else I learned:

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The Role of Character

I despise a story with weak characters. No matter how many car races or love-stories the author throws in, a novel is boring unless it centers around vivid, interesting characters who are changing and growing in unexpected ways to respond to their situations--or sometimes resisting change and growth, like Scarlett O'Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND. I loved Katniss Everdeen in HUNGER GAMES for defying the Capitol to protect her sister. Though mostly I hated Bella Swan in TWILIGHT for being so passive and whiny, at least she had the guts to love a vampire.

Young adult literature is so particularly compelling partly because kids by their very nature are always changing and growing and on cusp of such critically important changes. They are constantly being forced to make choices about their own characters. As GraceAnne diCandido, my literature instructor at Rutgers used to put it, the central question of a young adult novel is "Who am I and what am I going to do about it?"

How do you create your own unforgettable characters? Or is there a character in recent literature that you find especially compelling?

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Building a World

The best fiction is like a pyramid mostly submerged in water; only the very top pokes above the page but it must give us the sense that we will find a solid, three-dimensional creation no matter how far down we dive to explore it. This is true whether you're writing about aliens with three genders and lavender tentacles, twelfth-century Scots clansmen in kilts, or just a bunch of kids hanging out behind a 7-11 in Cranford, NJ.

The question is, how far do you have to go to create that sense of reality, of faithfulness?

When it comes to research, no one could say I'm a shirker. My WIP is a fantasy novel based on Jewish folklore, so for years now I've been reading everything from the Biblical books of the Prophets, medieval wonder tales, the novels of Isaac Baashevitz Singer, Hasidic tales of the Holocaust, collected Jewish folk tales and Apochrypha, scholarly treatments of ancient Jewish magic and the like.

But now that I've gotten my characters to my fantasy world, I'm having trouble imagining myself there and I couldn't figure out why...until I read Jane Yolen's wonderful essay, Turtles All the Way Down (first published in Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov and published by St. Martins Press in 1991). The prolific Yolen, no slouch at building worlds herself, suggests that we base our fantasy worlds on landscapes we know intimately. "In fantasy, outer landscape reflects inner landscape…. If the place is real enough, then the fantasy creatures and characters--dragon or elf lord or one-eyed god or the devil himself--will stride across that landscape leaving footprints that sink down into the mud. And if those creatures are also compelling, having taken root in the old lore and been brought forward in literary time by the carefully observing author, those footprints in the mud can be taken out, dried, and mounted on the wall."

How do YOU make your writing come to life? How do you build a world?

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Fighting Writer's Block

Lately I have writer's block. Every time I sit down at the keyboard, I feel paralyzed. It doesn't immobilize me, but it does restrict my range of motion, dooming me to write the same stupid sentence over and over again. With modifiers. Without modifiers. Eventually the sentence just becomes a heap of words that I wouldn't waste wood pulp on. Oh, this feeling is bad. But I've been here before and I know what to do.

I have started to re-read Brenda Ueland's IF YOU WANT TO WRITE: A BOOK ABOUT ART, INDEPENDENCE AND SPIRIT. Brenda first published this book, which I consider to be the best one of its kind, in 1938. She based it on her experiences teaching writing classes in Minneapolis, after returning home from some wild Bohemian years as a freelance writer in New York City.

I discovered IF YOU WANT TO WRITE in the late 1980s by accident, as a staff pick in the now-defunct Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore on the Upper West Side, and it was the single thing that helped me through my first and worst writer's block, the one that lasted for years after college.

Here's just one of my favorite quotes from Brenda: "Inspiration doesn't come like a bolt, nor is it a kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time...I learned that when writing you should not feel like Lord Byron on a mountaintop but like a child stringing beads in a kindergarten--happy, absorbed and putting one bead on after another."
What are your weapons agains writer's block? And do you have a favorite writer on writing?

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Read any good books lately?

My WIP is fantasy so I must, simply MUST, read everything new and noteworthy in the children’s fantasy genre. (Or at least that’s my excuse!) Here’s my latest favorite.

THE CABINET OF EARTHS by Anne Nesbet

In the time-honored tradition of children’s books, our heroine Maya’s mother is very ill. To fulfill the mother’s fantasy, the family moves to Paris for a year. There, all roads seem to lead to a mysterious Society of “beautiful people” who sniff a heady substance called anbar, live in houses with brass salamander doorhandles, and, as it turns out, are all connected to a shimmering Cabinet of Earths. In the midst of Maya’s ordinary problems of adjusting to a French middle school without speaking French, her little brother James goes missing. When the Cabinet chooses her as its next keeper, she must decide whether to sacrifice her brother’s essential personality or her mother’s shot at immortality.

I love fantasies and I read so many of them that it's exciting to find an original vision like this one. For one thing the magic is French and it's set in Paris--a refreshing change from the English magic trope. For another, the "earths" themselves represent such a interesting reworking of the classic theme of magically preserving a life. And the book is beautifully, whimsically, even deliciously written. I read this in a waiting room while my husband was having surgery and it was like having a friend there to entertain me and keep me company.

Have you read any kid’s books recently that you would recommend to the rest of us? If so, why?

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