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

Hi, Random Girl! This post contains spoilers for The Fifth. This picture of this random girl who I have not been able to identify despite my best efforts, is as close to Suzanne as I have been able to find on the internet.  This girl is not quite as alternative in style as Suzanne is, but Suzanne is not as goth or alternative as the pictures that turn up when I google those key words, so this girl will have to do.  Imagine her wearing more black and more eyeliner and you'd have her about right. Contrary to the beliefs of some of my friends, Suzanne is not me.* She and I are similar in many ways, but Suzanne comes from a very different background and operates with a level of self-assurance I never would have had as a girl her age, because she comes from privilege and, as a result, has the belief that she should get what she wants when she wants it.  Sometimes, that makes Suzanne kind of a bitch in the bad way. In fact, one of the reviews from a stranger of The...

I've been doing a lot of YA reading lately, and I've come to the conclusion that the love triangle is a real problem for most writers. So here are Jay's Rules for an Effective Love Triangle: 1. Each love interest must be a viable choice for the protagonist. I know I don't usually talk about specific examples here, but I'm going to now, just for a minute-- Twilight .* Actually, it's not so much Twilight I want to talk about as New Moon , the sequel, because that was where the love triangle went off the rails, in my opinion, and when I stopped reading the series.** New Moon is where the love triangle between Edward and Bella and Jacob really takes off. Jacob's not much of a presence in the first book at all, and we don't find out about his feelings until New Moon . But once Edward leaves, Jacob jumps in and here's where the love triangle both starts and, in my opinion falls apart. Because Jacob is never really a viable alternative for Bella. Su...

At the moment, I'm a fan of two shows on television: Friday Night Lights , which is in its fourth season and is about a high school football team, and Glee , which is in its first season and is about a high school glee club.* But even though I'm a fan of both shows and watch them religiously, FNL is an infinitely superior show to Glee . Infinitely. Like the Sistine Chapel compared to a doodle I made on some meeting notes yesterday. Why? What makes one show so much better than the other? One word, one that I'm sure will be no surprise to anyone whose read anything on this blog before: Characters. FNL is a show so based on character that it actually interested me despite the fact that I don't actually care at all about football.** At all. Ever. The way FNL works is that it develops characters, then puts them in motion, and the stories and conflicts arise out of them. Take for example, Tim Riggins.*** Last year I wrote this about Tim's character: From a story...

Since I write YA literature, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what role the parents are going to have in the story. Because my main characters have to have parents*, of course, but parents aren't usually the most interesting parts of the YA story. If they were, that wouldn't be YA, it would just be...A. Recently, Liz B. over at Tea Cozy wrote a post about a New York Times article that dissed the role of parents in YA literature. In that article, author Julie Just says: Maybe you can think of more recent examples than “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1885) — the gallant, no-good father from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1943)? — but in the classic stories, from “Cinderella” to “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the hero’s parents are more likely to be absent or dead than cruel or incompetent. ... And then the young adult novel came along. I have a question for Ms. Just: are you high? Seriously? Because on what planet is Cinderella's father not cruel or i...

This week over at Editorial Ass , Moonrat asked an interesting question about self image of characters in YA stories. Here's the question in her words: Which kind of heroine do you think is better in YA fiction--one with a really positive self-image (to promote self-confidence in teen readers), or one with a flawed self-image (e.g. someone who has always felt like a misfit, who has never been labeled conventionally pretty, etc, to promote reader identification)? The comments are pretty interesting, but I find myself disagreeing with the premise. I don't write, and I don't know many other writers who write to promote an agenda. I'm sure they're out there--the "message" writers--but I don't have any personal experience with them. I, personally, don't write to promote self confidence in readers. That's not to say that I don't care about the effect of characters on readers, because I do. I'm all about characters and their effects o...

Gacked from a guest post by Rachel Simon over at Hey, Teenager of the Year! These are my top 5 YA literary crushes: 5. Quentin Compson. The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. Okay, so this is cheating a little bit because neither The Sound and the Fury nor Absalom, Absalom are really YA books, like, at all. Like not even in the way that you might say Catcher in the Rye is a YA book. But I can't help it. I love Quentin Compson. Is he screwed up? YES. Is he ultimately not a very heroic character? YES. Do I love him enough to put up with William Faulkner, who I actually can't stand as an author? God help me, yes. When I say I am character driven, this is what I mean -- I will read William Faulkner in order to be close to Quentin Compson. That, my friends, is dedication. 4. Matt Perino. Twenty Boy Summer , by Sarah Ockler . Matt Perino is not on this list because Sarah Ockler is a cool person (although she is), or because she, too, is...

Over at Mysterious Matters, mysterious wrote a post recently in which he says that, no matter what they say, more readers (at least of genre fiction) don't want their characters to develop. I can't speak to mystery fiction -- I don't read much of it, and I don't write mysteries -- but I wonder if that's a problem with series fiction moreso than genre fiction. If you're writing a trilogy or something, I think it would be a good idea for the characters to develop, but I can't imagine what you would have to say about one character over the course of ten or fifteen or twenty books. It seems...impossible. So if I were a writer of a series like that, I wouldn't work very hard on character development. I wouldn't want my characters to develop very much. Mysterious points out that in Agatha Christie the detectives didn't develop because they weren't supposed to--the focus of the reader was on the mystery and the puzzle, and the detective was jus...

A long long time ago in land called 2007, I wrote a little bit about characters and likeability . Here's how I feel about it: Characters don't have to be likeable. They have to be relatable. There's a difference. The reason why this topic comes up again now is that I read a post on the Bookends blog in which Jessica talks about characters and likeability . She says, in part: I do believe that characters have to be likeable for a book to work. That doesn’t mean, however, that characters can’t have flaws or unlikeable characteristics. I tend to use Hannibal Lecter a lot as an example, but I think he’s such a fabulous example and tends to be a character most people are familiar with. Who could imagine creating a horrific serial killer who is actually likeable? On paper that doesn’t make any sense. On the book page you see how it works. Okay, maybe he’s not entirely “likeable,” but he’s certainly fascinating enough that you need to keep reading about him. Sure, he eats peopl...

Recently,* the Intern did a post about transformation in characters. Her point (and you should read the rest of her post, because it's awesome) is that too often, writers have their characters transform for no reason whatsoever. All of sudden they just look into the sky and decide that their lives are going to be different, and that's a crap way to handle transformation in a story.** She's right. It's not interesting, and, furthermore, it's cliched. It's every bad teenage movie/book in the world. Characters have to change over time, and even after they've changed they shouldn't be unrecognizable from their former selves. For example, in a project I'm thinking about now, a girl goes from being an ordinary good girl to being a more rebellious and outspoken girl.*** She doesn't do this by staring up at the stars and thinking to herself "as God is my witness, I'll never be shy again!" but at the result of several situations and ...

Earlier this month, Steph Bowe wrote a list of things that make her stop reading a YA book. If I'm being honest, I'll say that very little will stop me from reading a YA book, mostly because YA books are generally so short that by the time I realize that I should have stopped reading one, I'm done with it. But here are the things that would make me stop reading one, and will keep me from reading the next book in the series, should there be one: 1. "hip" teen slang. Do authors really think that they're being authentic when they do this? Because without fail, "hip" slang sounds corny and cheesy in, at most, a year. Also, if you are not actually a teenager, you have no idea what they think is hip. Adult writers for YA should focus on story and worry about slang later. 2. too many pop culture references. These references, like the slang, grow stale way too quickly and only serve to date the story. And, again, adult writers have no idea what po...

1. I've been watching old episodes of The West Wing on Bravo lately, and have come to the conclusion that I love the character of Sam Seaborn. He's smart, he's earnest, he's a good writer, and he's played by Rob Lowe. What's not to love?* 2. I just bought the cutest jacket at Ann Taylor Loft. I know you care, but it's not every day that one can find a white denim jacket with styling reminiscent of Michael Jackson and a tailored waist. I'm just saying. 3. NaNoWriMo proceeds apace. There is no way that I'm going to be able to keep writing at this pace after this month is over, but I'm on track to finish. It's an interesting project...in some ways the speed is freeing and in other ways it's extremely limited, as to make the word count I have no time to go back and revise. 4. Alien and Aliens are amazing movies. Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection ? Not so much. 5. This week's Glee characterization inconsistency watch: Rache...

Jay's Nanowrimo Word Count: I talked about my predeliction for boys with girl names here , but a little while back, Fangs, Fur & Fey had a discussion about how the members of the board name their characters, and the comments section is chock full of good ideas.* Also, I didn't talk about how I name my characters in that last post, just about how I want to name them.** It's a pretty short tale, actually: my characters come with names. In other words, when I start to get to know a main character, a name, or a set of possible names, just occurs to me. I don't go looking for alternatives until or unless there's a problem with the original name (see the aforementioned "girl name" controversy). Last names are harder, but also, in a perverse way, easier, because you can just flip open a phone book and find a billion of them.*** Secondary characters take a little more work because I don't often know them very well when they first show up.**** Some of th...

One of my new favorite shows this season is Glee , the Fox show about the misfit members of a down and out high school glee club and their teacher. It was created by Ryan Murphy, one of the creators of Nip/Tuck , and has a lot of musical numbers in it, and it's a pretty awesome show. But it's not totally awesome, and since it's been on my mind for a while, I wanted to talk about why Glee isn't living up to its potential. Short answer? Characters. The pilot episode set the characters up very well, giving us an idea of who each of the glee club members were in a nutshell, and most of the people I know who were excited about the pilot were excited to learn more about those characters. But the show has taken some odd twists and turns with regard to the characters that don't really make sense, and its making the characters hard to understand. An example: Finn Hudson is the football quarterback who is coerced into joining the glee club* and ends up staying because (a) ...

1. I was sick this weekend, so instead of having a nice relaxing weekend at home, I had a crappy phelgm-filled weekend. blech. 2. I also read a book this weekend that I was hoping would be good, but was not. Note to self: if your main character is going to do something reprehensible like cheat on his "perfect" significant other, it's important that he be either (a) interesting or (b) relatable.* Otherwise, the reader will end up thinking she wasted her time reading about a jerk who cheats on a nice girl for no real reason besides the other girl is hotter.** 3. I am lukewarm about the band Paramore*** and the song "Use Somebody" by the band Kings of Leon, but here is a perfect example of how two lukewarm things can become one steaming hot pile of amazing. It's Paramore's acoustic version of "Use Somebody," which shows that Paramore is more talented that a lot of people (including me) give them credit for, and that "Use Somebody"...

At some point, everyone who writes gets asked this question: Where do you get your ideas? Stephen King talks a lot about where his ideas come from, I think mostly because some of his ideas are so horrifying/strange that people really want to know. Nick Hornby, who writes books that are less strange than King*, probably doesn't get this question quite as much. But no matter what type of writer you are, I think this is a common question: people who don't make up stories always wonder how people who do make up stories do it. I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but what happens to me sounds pretty similar to what happens to King or anyone else, so I wanted to provide an example of how an idea came to me, recently.** I read a website called One Sentence , which is a place where people try to tell stories in one sentence. Pretty self-explanatory, right? Sometimes the stories are funny , sometimes they are sad , sometimes they are bitter , and sometimes the writers writ...

Let me confess a weakness--I like boys with girl names. This is a hard thing as a writer, because boy characters with girl names are not popular in YA. They are confusing at best, readers say, or imply things about the character that you don't want to imply.* So despite the fact that I know actual non-gay boys named Shannon and Kelly and Lesley and Yancy, it is going to be hard to include non-gay boys with those names in my stories. The thing that annoys me about this is that girls with boy names are NO PROBLEM, especially if the girl is supposed to be awesome and kickass. Think about it--how many "Sams" and "Alexs" have you seen in books lately? I even saw a "Mike" (short for Michaella) once. And this prejudice carries over into non-girl names as well. Recently, I had to change a main character's name from Julian (which is TOTALLY a boy's name, Twinsburg!) to Jeremy because the readers were getting confused by his gender.** The problem, fo...

A while ago (like, way back in May), Agent Kristin had writer Carolyn Jewel do a guest post on the intricacies of including backstory in the story . Backstory can go wrong primarily in two ways: 1. there isn't any. 2. there's way too much. Most writers err on the side of "way too much." These are the writers who insist on prologues and pages of stuff about the character's childhood, when the character isn't actually a child anymore. I can understand this. I mean, you spend all your time working out these characters and their world--leaving any of it out, especially when it does have an impact on your story, can be really hard. Worse, when it's well-written. Carolyn Jewel comes down hard on backstory. She writes that whenever you leave the "now" of the story, things get boring. I'm not entirely convinced of that, but I do agree with her that backstory has to be parsed out in dribs and drabs, a couple of sentences at a time, interspe...

This past weekend, I fell in love with a character.* Not one of my own, someone else's . And it got me thinking, why do certain characters work for me and others don't? What is it about a character--my own or someone else's --that makes me want to spend time, sometimes endless amounts of time, with those characters at the expense of my housekeeping and my dog and my job and even, sometimes, my relationships with other people? What does it? And after thinking about it for a little while, here's a (partial, incomplete) list of the things that can hook me into a character:**, *** 1. They have a troubled past. I'm a sucker for a character who has suffered in the past and has come out mostly okay on the other side. Not totally okay, as you'll see from the rest of this list, but mostly okay. Most of the time. 2. They have secrets. I'm a firm believer in the idea that everyone has secrets. Sometimes big secrets, sometimes little teeny ones, sometimes e...

Earlier this month, Lynn Viehl had a lovely post about antagonists called, hilariously, " Ten Things I Hate About Your Protagonist ." In that post, she talks about the number of ways that antagonists can be two-dimensional or just plain boring. My favorite of hers? In the middle of the final crisis in the story, when she has the upper hand over everyone, the antagonist proudly delivers a full confession of all the wrong she's done. Hmmmm. Maybe she's Catholic. In the world of The Incredibles , this flaw would be called "monologuing." :) Seriously, though, this should never happen anymore. Not even in James Bond.* My own personal problem in writing antagonists is that I don't spend enough time on them. My villains aren't two-dimensional, exactly, but I don't have a good idea what's going on with them in the early drafts. Like, they just show up for plot purposes and I don't know enough about their internal lives to know why they w...

Agent Nathan Bransford posted a blog entry recently about figuring out what your characters want , and I have to say that this is the thing that I find lacking in a lot of things I read, especially YA. Because there are so many conflicts inherent in a teenager's every day life -- school demands, and cliques, and parental demands, and Big Emotional Milestones -- sometimes what the characters actually want gets lost in the noise of the plot and doesn't come across clearly. But it's not enough for things to happen to a character--the character has to want certain things and try to make certain things happen, and then react when they do (or don't). Since I'm at the beginning of about seven SQUILLION projects right now, I'm figuring out what motivates my characters. This always happens for me in layers, like so*: 1. The superficial motivation. When I first find a character, I already know something of what motivates him or her. That's how they come to me. ...