How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Over on The Swivet, guest blogger Courtney Summers talks a little bit about how to stop worrying about offending people* by just being true to the story you're trying to tell. I think that's something that all YA writers are concerned about to some extent: because our books are read by kids, sometimes fairly young kids, and because our books deal with things that teenagers are dealing with (like sex and drugs and rock'n'roll) that are "adult" things, we occupy this sort of grey area where we can get called on the carpet by actual adults for the things we appear to be advocating when we include them in stories for young adults. This concern isn't a huge one of mine,** I think because of the way that I was brought up. My mother was (is) a single working mom and didn't have a lot of time for hands on supervision. The good news is that I didn't need a lot of hands on supervision. I was (am) a very independent person, even as a child. Put me a room wit...

This is another one of those recommendations that you may look at and think "Jesus, Jay, when do you think I'm going to have time to read 800 pages? I have a job ," but what can I say? This feature is called "Jay Loves A Book" not "Jay Says You Can Finish This In An Afternoon If You Don't Have Anything Else To Do." I used to study Victorian Lit and I like long books, what can I say? Both of those facts means that Strange is a double win for me, because what Clarke has done (in this, her first book) is essentially write a Victorian novel. The book tells the story of the emergence of two magicians in 19 th century England. And by magicians, I don't mean guys who do magic tricks in top hats, I mean real magicians, who use magic, like wizards, only more...English. The plot, like the plot of all good Victorian novels, is way too complicated to go into, but the basics are these: in England, most magicians only study magic, they don't perf...

One of the things I always need to do after I've got a first draft is raise the stakes for my characters. I think it's because my stories almost always start from characters instead of events. I will get an idea for a scene and my first thought is always "what is the character doing here?" I spend a lot of time thinking about the character, until I understand what type of person the character is and what she (or he) would do next, and then I'm off to the races. But what ends up happening in the resulting first draft, then, is that I have a lot of scenes where I'm just working things out about the characters, and not much is actually happening. In the earlier editions of The Book, for example, there were a bunch of scenes where my character was sitting on the porch thinking. And those scenes were necessary to my own understanding of the main character, they were...they were boring . Nothing happened in those scenes. Combine that with a plot that had ver...

1. I saw a personalized license plate the other day on the way home, which was funny for 2 reasons:* (1) it said PNCREAS , which is just a plain funny word, and (2) who gets PNCREAS as a personalized license plate? You have to pay extra for that, and someone thought, "I know, I will get a personalized license plate trumpeting my undying love for an organ that is both an endocrine gland and an exocrine gland."** I mean, what ? 2. I saw a mouse in the kitchen today and literally screamed, and then laughed because (a) I've seen mice before--my mother's house is an old farm house and we would usually get one or two mice a year when the weather changed, and (b) could I be more of a cliche? But it's scary to be standing in your kitchen waiting for your coffee to be done and see something scurrying out of the corner of your eye, even if you know right away that it's just a mouse. Now, unfortunately, I'm going to have to buy a trap. I don't mind mice,...

Happy Food Coma Day! (God, I love Thanksgiving. I'm going to have leftovers for brunch right after this...) Next year, I have a high school reunion--no, I'm not going to discuss which one it is, because it will make me seem incredibly old, even though I'm really not. (really!) Just thinking about it makes me feel like I've lived for a hundred years. (But I haven't!) Anyway, I've been thinking about the reunion and what music will be played there, and what music reminds me of my high school experience, and this song--"Forever Young" by Alphaville*--just sounds like that experience to me. There are songs that, for some reason, just ARE graduation songs. When they come out, every high school in the country chooses them, or should choose them, as the song played at graduation. "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day, for example. Or "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye to Yesterday" by Boyz II Men. Or "These Are The Day...

One of the things that I always need to work on once I get a first draft done is pacing. I don't worry about it in a first draft--I don't worry about much of anything in a first draft--but once I start revision, I can always always condense two or three or half a dozen scenes into one. For example, this is what the scene outline would look like for the current draft of the TNP: scene 1 scene 2, which takes place 1 hour after scene 1 scene 3, which takes place 1 hour after scene 2 and in which the character tells a new character what happened in scene 2 and/or scene 1 scene 4, which takes place a week after scenes 1-3 because I've skipped all the "boring" parts like the subplot and any relevant descriptions, and also back story and plot. So you can see I always spend a lot of effort working on the pacing. In a very early draft of The Book (which now takes place over the course of about a month), the action took SIX MONTHS, which doesn't sound like that much...

1. "Let It Rock" by Kevin Rudolf and Lil Wayne is a fantastic song. Every time I hear it, I start speeding (assuming I'm driving) or dancing (assuming I'm not driving). I'm going to put it on my "Songs to Speed To" playlist (yes, I have one. Incidentally, what do you think the chances are that, when I get busted for speeding, I can get out of the ticket by playing the judge this song and saying "but Your Honor, this was on the radio!" Yeah, I didn't think so, either. Judges aren't really down with the latest Lil Wayne, as a rule.) 2. Why are all the women on Heroes blond except for Angela Petrelli and Nathan's wife (who's not even really in the show anymore and hasn't been since season one)? And when I say "all" I mean ALL: Claire (played by Hayden Panettiere), Claire's adopted mother, Claire's biological mother, Elle (played by Kristen Bell); Niki/Jessica/Brooke (played by Ali Larter); Daphne --...