How it’s going: I’m about 3 weeks behind in posts and have run out of the backlog to post. It’s fine. It’s fine! I have 4 chapters on a middle grade. It’s fine.
Count: 1,156/80,000
Check List:
Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
Edit prep – o
Revision – o
Query – o
Pitch – o
Agent list – o
One of my favorite comic book series was called Planetary. It’s still called Planetary, I’m just having issues with tenses.
Warren Ellis took a world that started with century babies, people born in 1900 with extraordinary abilities, and riffed on the Fantastic Four, martial arts movies, Godzilla, and a dozen other artifacts from my childhood. How could I not love it?
Illustrated by the incredible John Cassaday (just pick up a copy and you will understand), one sequence changed the way I looked at space availability.
In this sequence, a character has to convey a chunk of information via monologue. Usually, as in a Shakespearean (or any kind of) play, the actor will talk a bit and maybe move around onstage. In a movie, maybe they are waving a gun. In real life, you get told “sit down!” as you try to move around while your parental unit monologues about that thing you totally swore you were going to do. And didn’t. Anyway, in this scene, the character finds a camera on the table, takes a selfie, sticks the photo to his forehead and turns around to face the audience and his in-panel listeners.
Boom.
Every time someone had attempted to tell little-me about art, they went on about background and mid-ground and foreground. Every time it went in one ear and out the other. Here, finally, I got it. In comic books, there were three spaces available to tell parts of the story. Background for small characters or something the characters were reacting to, mid-ground for main characters to be speaking, and foreground for small, immediate actions.
These spaces were not interchangeable, but shifting the focus of the space or rotating the camera, would change the meanings of what was happening. The background side story becomes foreshadowing becomes main focus. The foreground small throwaway action is a character trait illustration, or perhaps a hidden action for the audience of the comic but not the other participants on the page.
In terms of dialogue, there were three spaces as well. The character monologues to us in the midground. He performs a small movement in the foreground that illustrates his character. And his audience stares gobsmacked outside of the panel until the very last cell where the view changes and we see them having watched him the entire time. The third space is off the page – what we call breaking the fourth wall – but without the character slyly acknowledging us the audience, that third space is simply the space left for the reader.
Most of the drafts of my first novel type project had all things happening on the foreground. Background information, secret histories, side conversations; everybody knew everything. There was no sense of mystery or in-jokes, or the sense that anyone existed outside of a capital letter at one end and a period at the other.
When I applied forcible separation via spacing, I got something different entirely. I didn’t have the visual space of a comic book. I couldn’t show someone meeting with a suspicious looking character while another oblivious character went about their day. I needed to allude to a shared past, foreshadow danger, and stop making characters so darn helpful. I needed most dialog to be understood in different ways by all characters present in the conversation. Finally, my villains got creepier, my protagonist faced great consternation, and my allies took time and effort to win over. You know, conflict.
As previously surmised on this very site, there are probably tens of thousands of alphabet-type books in existence. There are probably a double dozen published each year in the USA. Some past favorites of mine include a Where’s Waldo type hunt in the illustrations, a jazz rhythm primer, and teaching about the natural history of Hawaii.
When a market is saturated with what has been said, eventually you can say something about what has been said before and add to the conversation of what exactly the market has tolerated, what it means, what it says about us as a culture, a society, and the human experience as it is understood in this moment.
Cabin In the Woods put both of these concepts together and gave audiences a commentary on killing teenagers in a movie, stereotype roles, rituals both arcane and corporate, and the most hilarious exchange (”Am I on speakerphone?”) that illuminated the humanity behind the people who typically hold NPC signifier positions. It was not the final word.
Time marches on, seasons change, tastes change, social mores change, more derivative works are added to the total library of human creation; there is always more to be said.
Cabin In the Woods is a horror movie, first and last. Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom (referenced elsewhere on this blog) is an alphabet book. Both take the structure of expectation of their genre, tick the required boxes, and then hang something new on the skeleton of what is needed to succeed.
Horror movies need horror, and they need to say something horrible or reveal a horribleness about us or at least say something in a horrifying way. Alphabet books need to be about the alphabet or at least include the letters in the currently accepted order or acknowledge that there is an order they will proceed to ignore for the good reasons they go on to state in the work itself.
Alphabet book? Needs alphabet.
Horror movie? Needs horror.
When I was in tenth grade, my English teacher kept us in line by saying she previously worked for the FBI*. She came from another time, which I did not appreciate until decades later when I read Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.
Tenth grade was a strange year. It was the year I found my voice** and started a writing club. It was the year I was less angry at things and people. It was the year I began to realize that other people were not set out of time, but that I had not lived enough to understand the conversations going on around me.
Mrs. O had a thing about Henrik Ibsen’s “The Dollhouse”. She would talk about how important it was – a piece of fiction where a woman chose – chose! – a life outside of her husband and children. That the protagonist had gone from her father to her husband’s household, and molded her personality to fit. We sophomores stared and waited, not wondering, just waiting for the punchline. In the modern age, we were children of divorce and working parents, mothers with multiple degrees who kept household and career alike.
But Mrs. O waxed on about a woman choosing herself, even if she didn’t know that self yet. As a child, I empathized more with the children who would be left with the stern personality of the father, and as an adult, my heart still aches for them. They would not see a pathway before them to strive for their own freedom, only that a fellow prisoner escaped and did not choose to take them, too.
Decades later, reading about a playwright and critic who fell in love with the then contemporary play, “The Dollhouse”, I finally understood what it was trying to say. In a time before the necessity of two parent working households, in the time before choice, this play mattered. To say there was a choice before that choice was even a thing to be imagined!
The worst part about listening to marketing your work is when people talk about trends vs. Evergreens. When they say trend, they mean you are saying something about the conversation or state of the world today. Evergreens say something about the human experience as it has been and will be. Everyone wants to write an evergreen. For one thing, they sell beyond the pop of the moment. Ibsen wrote an evergreen that was also a trend. While what he had to say was new in his time, in our lifetimes there are still people to which the thought of choosing your own path is a new concept. Maybe not when they are tenth graders in desks in high school, perhaps later in life when they have found themselves at ends. Just as I hope to write something that can be reread as new in different stages of life, I wonder what treasured stories, that I have always accepted, will tell me something new now that I am somebody else.
*One of my classmates nagged Mrs. O until she confessed that she had been a secretary for the FBI. My classmate uttered the immortal words, “Oh, that’s boring.” And we all listened to the sound of one grade falling.
**I’m pretty sure I had a voice before tenth grade, but as my brother put it, “We didn’t think you could talk.” Thanks.
Mem Fox (we love Mem Fox) is a children’s book author of some repute. She’s a titan of children’s writing, for one thing. For another, she’s the reason I know that Australia is a real place*.
On her website she has videos about how to read picture books and if you ever attend a talk she gives, she’ll tell you how to write picture books. I don’t mean the normal bit about having a writing place and writing every day. Fox pays special attention to the cadence of words, and structures both word choice and story communication for a particularly lyrical experience. Each book is like a song.
One of the stories she told, that has stuck with me, is that she argued for a long word in a picture book. Toe to toe, nose to nose, fighting for her right as an artist.
She explained it a little softer than that, making the argument that children fall in love with the sound of words. They can figure out the meaning later. Her story required a three-syllable word in exactly the right spot, and the finished book was perfect when read aloud.
When I am writing within a character’s voice, their diction is my word choice, and I can’t betray their voice by choosing a word I think is easier to understand. Or a reference that is more accessible. It must make sense for that character.
The caveat is that I am aware that the diction will say things about the character. If the reference is too old, I need a reason for that character to be older than the target audience, or if the word is obscure, that character had better have a good reason to know it.
*At a conference, I eagerly picked up Possum Magic. It’s one of those childhood books that I know so well I can read the words off the page and my heart. As I turned the pages, I noticed the word lamingtons. Now, as an adult, I know that word. It’s important to note that I grew up in the Mojave Desert and for much of my developmental years, possums were considered mythical creatures. I mean, so were cows.
I had always read Possum Magic as a fanciful story about a magical possum in a made-up land and at the ripe old age of thirty, I brutally discovered that it had taken place in Australia. I called my mother.
I asked if she remembered Possum Magic and how much I loved that story. And she said yes, how I loved that story. I asked if she remembered how I thought it took place in a magical far-off land. She said yes.
I asked at what point in my development did she plan to tell me that Australia was real? And she laughed and laughed.
There is no betrayal like parental betrayal.
Good practice is practice that moves you forward. Obviously.
Wait, come back.
When I was young, I played the flute. Mostly I played the flute because my dad had played the flute and playing an instrument was a thing you did in my hometown. I was technically terrible. I felt no music in my heart. My favorite part of practice was standing with legs spread on either side of my Labrador who insisted on laying down in front of my music stand. When I played notes that were too high for her, she stood up. It was terribly exciting.
I could play all the scales, and when looking at the music on the stand, I could make a solid effort at the marches and church music. I could listen to the metronome or play while it was also on, but neither were particularly connected. A funny thing started to happen.
Eventually, I got better.
At the same time I was struggling through basic musical expression, I was taking math courses harder than anyone thought possible for me*. When the math added concepts like variables and matrices and proofs, the lower level addition-subtraction-multiplication-division got to be quick as a thought. Which was how fast I needed to perform it when I played.
My first writing mentor** told me to listen to dialogue around me in order to develop the sense for natural speech in my writing. During this time, I kept reading books (which I still do) and someone at a seminar talked about removing all the unnecessary parts of conversation. We don’t need the uhm, the mhm, the mmm, the uh, the hi how are you. We need the important part of the conversation. Somewhere in all those books that had gone through agents and editors galore were the important parts of conversations.
In my good practice sessions, I figured out how to combine the “listening to conversation around” me, and the “necessary parts of conversation” for concise, character demonstrating, clear dialogue. I even figured out where to add the well-placed mmm and uh and the difference between hi how are you and hi you alright***.
Good practice moves me forward but it needs more techniques than the single thing that I think I’m practicing.
*When I was ten, I had a math homework worth 25 points. There were 24 questions, and you got an extra point for putting your name in the right place and spelling it correctly. I got 4%.
**In the grand tradition of small towns, Mrs. Betty L Speckles was a friend of my mom’s from quilt guild. When she found out that Betty had published some poems, my mom asked if Betty would give me some pointers. I am forever grateful that she said yes.
***Hi you alright is the British greeting and the answer is Yeah. Or Yes. Or the American ignore and move on because you honestly have no idea how to answer it. I entered the country in September and did not figure out how to answer that question until February.
Black lives matter.
Police brutality cannot be tolerated in a functional society.
Representation matters, in media that is created, media that is consumed, and in all facets of life. I’m writing this a few miles from a city that I love, but one that has a troubled history with racial inequality. Not troubled. Appalling.
This is a city that once admitted to maintaining a black site on American soil for American citizens to be held without due process where they were interrogated with techniques used at Guantanamo. More information is available in this article at The Atlantic.
We are being crushed under the weight of racial inequality even if you think it does not impact your life. It does. And even if you believe you have not felt that weight, it is our duty to stand together.
Below are some resources I have turned to or discovered from posters on Twitter, Instagram, and through online searches as I struggle to find a way to help.
You can find a bond fund near you by searching for bail bond fund or bail bond and your nearest metro or state name. The Community Justice Exchange site has a good list.
This article on Rolling Stone has a list of resources.
This article on Fast Company has links to donate to BLM, get involved with a chapter near you, and petitions to sign to demand justice for George Floyd.
This is the link for the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter.