Author: Lawrence Tabak

Ha! This topic reminds me of a response historian Barbara Tuchman gave a student when asked, “How do you know when your research is complete?” She said, “You know what they call a historian who waits for his or her research to be complete?” Pause. “Unpublished.”

At some point you have to  let go. I’m not at that point yet, but I’m getting close. Of course, when I say let go, I mean letting go for the first time. Letting go when the book is as good as I can make it — at least this month. But then I’m anticipating the famous agent “R&R” — not “rest and relaxation” but Rewrite and Resubmit. Then, if I am fortunate to find an agent who is willing, we go on submission. Perhaps the book piques an editor’s interest. The editor says, “Close, but [for instance] I found the antagonist one-dimensional, and perhaps you could change the MC (Main Character) from a 16-year-old-boy to a a 14-year-old girl with a multi-cultural background and ambiguous sexual identity.”

Hence my initial barked and sarcastic “ha!”

Nevertheless, I’m getting very close to subbing. Especially to this one unnamed agent who closes submissions on May 1 for the summer. Time is getting short on that one.

Part 2 – Exploring the Printz Finalists (plus a bonus)

In Part 1 I looked at three of the finalists which featured highly stressed main characters – a gangbanging Haitian buried in rubble, a girl with severe Aspergers, and a street boy in 19^th century London. Another common element, which I did not note in that post, is that none of these books depend upon a traditional central teen romance.

The two remaining books break from this pattern. In Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Saenz tells a love story with a conventional arc. Two teens become fast friends, one clearly smitten, one resistant. The story opens with the 15-year-old Americanized, but Hispanic male narrator awakening to a feeling of loneliness and inadequacy. He is close to his mother, distant from his father. His sisters are 12-years-older, his only brother, also older, is in prison. It’s pretty clear in the opening pages that this will be a more self-reflective, interior journey. As such the strength of the book isn’t so much the tale, but the telling.

In Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wien spins a fantastical historical adventure whose central element is the intense friendship between two teenage girls. It begins with a sort of diary being written by one of the two girls; a diary which reveals the setting of WWII, and the circumstances: she is being held a prisoner of a sadistic German SS officer who is torturing her by making her live in her underwear (this is, of all the books, the one most clearly a TEEN book). By making it a journal, Wien is allowed to spin the tale from first person without revealing the fate of the teller. This is just the first gambit in what is a cleverly convoluted plot. The journal entries begin to tell the story of this friendship and solve for the reader how the narrator has come to her dire straits.

The third book I’d like to examine is the recently published Eleanor & Park, another more traditional romance, in which Rainbow Rowell partners two misfits: a loner half-Korean boy named Park from a well-adjusted loving family, and an impoverished eccentric Eleanor whose family situation is dangerous and dysfunctional. The story of their falling in love is so delicately and beautifully wrought that the book is clearly an early contender for the 2014 Printz.

One lesson to take away from three books which rely on a romantic (well, Verity is virtually romantic) attachment between two teens, is the amount of stress the authors layer onto the relationships. In Aristotle and Dante it is sexual identity, in Eleanor & Park it is Eleanor’s crippling home life and peer pressure, in Verity the friends are both brought together by the war, and then torn apart by it. Nothing comes easily to these relationships and only one of three ends well.  All three are worth reading to find out which couple survives.

Weaving the Threads of Fiction

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading through the 2013 Printz finalists and winner. The Printz is the premiere award given to books written for teens.

I thought it might be interesting to look at one aspect of the writing and to compare techniques. Do the authors use a variety of story lines or character complications to increase narrative tension and drive, and if they do, how many of these threads do they introduce in the first ten pages or so? Because I’m only addressing plot points introduced in the early pages of the book, I’m confident that I won’t be revealing any spoilers. Let’s start with In Darkness by Nick Lake, this year’s winner.

In Darkness

The opening lines reveal the teenaged main character (MC) and first-person narrator to be buried alive in rubble, the result of the great 2010 Haitian earthquake. Alone and dying. This, it would seem, should be plenty of trouble. But listen to the additional woes laid on by Lake:

1. The MC is a killer, having committed his first shooting at age 12

2. He has witness horrors — babies abandoned, men coming back to life

3. He had been trapped for days and is suffering unbearably from thirst and hunger

4. He is in the company of decomposing bodies

5. He’s recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted before the earthquake

6. He has lost  his sister, taken away by gangsters

7. His father was chopped to death by machetes in front of him

In other words, Lake has put his character in mortal danger. But on top of this he weaves a life story which is fraught with complexity and deep wounds. He is not only a boy alone and dying, he a deeply damaged boy, and the particulars of this damage are the heart and soul of the book.

The White Bicycle

Beverley Brenna gives us another damaged MC and narrator, Taylor Simon, a teenager with debilitating Aspergers. Here are the complications that are detailed as the story opens:

1. Although Aspergers has made her highly dependent on others, particularly her mother, at 19, she is hungry for independence.

2. She and her mother have been dislocated to France.

3. Her mother may be on the verge of getting married

4. Her father abandoned her and her mother when she was eight

5. Her early school experiences, when she was undiagnosed, were horrendous

6. She is undergoing a philosophical search through the writings of Sartre

7. She has had a mysterious contact with a very old woman who ended up hospitalized

Once again, it is not enough to have a deeply damaged MC. Brenna layers on a history of woe and current complications, one on top of another, like a layer cake. It is the combination of all of these which produces the narrative drive that compels the reader onward.

Dodger

Prolific and heralded novelist Terry Pratchett not only sets this book in Dickensonian London, Charles Dickens is a major player. The main character is a street boy. As the story opens, the boy, Dodger, finds himself going to the rescue of a girl beaten and thrown from a carriage. Both are subsequently placed under the care of a passing gentleman and his friend, the boy rather reluctantly. So we begin with a boy in abject poverty, who is living in the sewers of London. But then the plot thickens.

1. The identity of the damaged girl is a mystery

2. The poverty and deprivation of the boy is expanded in detail

3. The intentions of the gentlemen, as seen from the boy’s POV, are suspect

4. The girl has lost a baby from her injuries

5. The gentlemen enlist Dodger to help solve the mystery of the beaten girl

So Pratchett takes the wily, deprived Dodger and immediately complicates his life in multiple ways: by getting involved in saving the girl, by coming under the attention of two gentlemen of puzzling nature, and by being enlisted in solving a mystery.

Summary

If this sample were all you had to go on, the key to writing an award-winning book would be to start with a damaged MC: child gangster with a bullet wound, a murdered father and a kidnapped sister; deeply disabled Aspergers sufferer; street orphan. Then start piling up the complications, because one complication doesn’t seem to be enough.

Will this formula hold true for the other two finalists? Stay tuned.

I’ve been reading a steady flow of draft manuscripts from serious YA/MG writers, both through my critique group on in on-line critique sites. I’ve also been reading through the 2013 Printz Award finalists, which is the most prestigious award for books designated for teens.

One of my observations is that the acclaimed books have either an extraordinary main character in ordinary circumstances, a somewhat ordinary chactacter thrown into extraordinary circumstances, or the jackpot — an extraordinary character in extraordinary circumstances. Take this year’s Printz winner, In Darkness. Without providing any spoilers, the main charcacter (MC) is a cold-blooded teenage gang banger who specializes in assasinations who happens to be narrating while trapped under tons of rubble in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. He also has some sort of magical  realistic connection with Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the 1790s slave revolution. Double whammy for sure on this one. How about my favorite (so far) of the finalists: The White Bicycle. Narrated by a girl with severe Aspergers who can’t detect facial clues (or even recognize faces), and who is confused by the simplest non-literal expression such as “why don’t you sit on that for awhile.” But why not take the character far from her home in Canada? Say France. Giant whammy paired with a little whammy.

More commonly in the manuscripts I read in draft, the writer seems hesitant to take their character’s circumstances or personal attributes to the extreme. The character has a missing parent, but the pain is remote and obscure. Or the MC lives only in relative poverty (certainly not by Haitian standards). Or the circumstances are somewhat trying — Mom is dating a bad guy, a boyfriend is dabbling in drugs, kids at school are teasing.

Take a lesson from Hollywood. I recently was revisiting that beyond-reason story of thwarted genius, Good Will Hunting. The Matt Damon character is a good example of the kind of hurt the average YA writer seems to shy from. He not only gets in fights, he’s being arraigned for assault and looking at jail time. He not only comes from poverty, his father lays out a wrench, a stick and a belt and tells the little Matt to pick one for his beating. He’s  not only smart, he’s perhaps the brightest human being since Leonardo da Vinci. Probably smarter, actually, if you listen to the preposterous scene in the bar where he puts down a pompous Harvard student by citing chapter, verse and page of the obscure history book the Harvard boy is citing from as if it is an original thought. He solves overnight a problem that the MIT Fields Award winning prof has spend two years working on. You get the drift. Take an interesting idea (impoverished, thwarted smart kid) and exaggerate it to the point of unbelievability. You’ve got a hit!

So if you’re looking to break out from the crowd, it might be worth asking: is my MC extraordinary? Are the circumstances also extraordinary? Shoot for a least one big whammy and one smaller one.

 

When I first started writing fiction, it was in a workshop environment. In fact, it was really more about producing for that workshop than writing for its own sake. Oddly enough, when I started writing long fiction, I somehow came to the conclusion that good writing was a solitary effort. It was between me and publishing professionals. Bad idea. (But probably no worse than counting on non-writer friends and relatives for critiques.)

Over the past few years I’ve started finding critical assistance from other writers via a couple of the many web-based platforms. Not only has the input helped me, but in reading hundreds of submissions I’ve sharpened my eye towards my own work. From these contacts I’ve developed a few highly productive exchange partners, and hope to continue those relationships.

This past month I joined an online critique group, and although it’s too early to know how well they’ll tolerate me, their presence is already a comfort. Having a reliable, stable group of committed writers to provide suggestions and support is a great thing for a pursuit that is so fundamentally solipsistic.

Writers who might not know where to begin should take a look at www.critiquecircle.com. which has a terrific interface. Also consider joining appropriate forum groups, where writers of similar interests often exchange manuscripts. I look back at my earliest projects and find myself wincing at mistakes any experienced reader would have noted. And I think of the long list of acknowledgements in so many wonderful books. There’s a reason for them, and should ever I be so fortunate, I’ll be proud to offer up my own growing circle of kind, perceptive folks who have helped.

 

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