Napoleon’s Goal

After taking a writing workshop from Martine Leavitt, I feel immoral if I write a first chapter—let alone a first page—without letting my readers know what my main character’s goal is. How can readers root for the character if what the character wants isn’t clear? I like Martine’s head-on approach. But I’ve also noticed subtler plots that seem to work well.

Who likes Napoleon Dynamite?

What’s his goal?

How do you know if he succeeds?

On first viewing, I’m not sure I could have answered these questions, but I still liked him and wanted him to win. Later, I caught what it was I’d been rooting for all along. Here’s the inciting incident that propels Napoleon and his brother Kip on their journeys toward self-respect:

Poor Napoleon. He tries so hard.

He adopts the buddy system. Pedro has his back.

He disciplines his image. What do you think of these bad boys?

But he does not succeed at learning self-respect until he goes from dancing behind closed doors at home to dancing in front of the whole school:

He learns to be himself. And everyone loves him for it, including me.

Tell me what characters you love, how clear or subtle their goals are from the beginning, and why the author’s choice works. Or the opposite—what characters you hate and why the author’s choices don’t work for you.

And also, tell me your favorite Napoleon Dynamite scene or quote! For today, this is mine:

“Do the chickens have large talons?”

“What?”

“Large talons.”

“I don’t understand a word you just said.”

*Update* – Since it’s writing-tip-Wednesday, just thought I’d plug my agent for a second. She’s teaching a webinar on publishing in the children’s/YA market on September 23. If you register, come back on the evening of September 23 and let me know in the comments how it went, and I’ll enter you in a drawing for a book. Mary is awesome—her writing background and her immersion in the publishing business have made her blog one of the most followed in the YA world.

Twins in My Past

Welcome to the first Flashback Friday this blog has ever seen.

Lately I’ve been missing that box of books I sold for five bucks at a yard sale—at least twenty Baby-Sitters Club books, some Saddle Club, and even a few Sweet Valley Twins. Give a shout if you remember Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield.

Those girls were my inspiration. That’s why I’m thinking about revisiting a series I set aside a while ago, The Twins of Green Hills. Never heard of Elizabeth and Samentha Smit? You will, as soon as I talk to my agent about this project.

In the meantime, here’s a little preview from book five:

One Tuesday morning, Mrs. Heldon said, “Since today is the last week of school, the princeple wanted to give the good citizens a gift. The principle is sending all of the good citizens on a trip.”

The classroom cheered.

“I will announce the people who are going now,” said Mrs. Heldon. She began reading names.

Samentha slowly raised her hand. “Isn’t Jodie Miller on that list?” asked Samentha.

“No,” said Mrs. Heldon. “She isn’t a very good citizen, and if she wants to go, she has to earn it.”

When Jodie heard that, she began to work and work and work. She cleaned off her desk and helped pass out social study books. At the end of the day, Mrs. Heldon said, “I can see you really want to go on that trip.”

Will Jodie get to go on the campout with Samentha and Elizabeth Smit? You’ll have to wait until The Campout hits shelves at a bookstore near you.

One more preview to tide you over:

Samentha slowly walked up the log steps that led to her cabin. “I probably have to share a cabin with some dorky kid like Gretchen,” Samentha mumbled. Samentha opened the door. Their on the beds sat the entire Beauty Club. “Oh, good!” thought Samentha happily.

The next morning the trumpet woke everyone up. Elizabeth and Alice ran out to the breakfast table. They quickly ate a pancake and had a carton of orange juice and then ran out into the forest. Just then a man in a red tank top and a mustache with brown hair walked up. He had already gathered up the rest of the kids. “Come on, guys. It’s time to hike,” he said. “Ok, you can climb for one hour and come back to the lake when you’re finished,” he said.

Samentha and the Beauty Club raced up the mountain. They hid behind a huge rock. “I can’t wait to play that trick on Gretchen,” giggled Shannon.

“Yeah! It will shure chase her out of the United States.”

I don’t want to give too much away, but let me just say that this “trick” involves war paint, some old animal skins Jodie found, Native-American-like dances, and stoning. Will Gretchen be run out of the United States? And also, is the man in the red tank top a pedophile?

I’m telling you, this series has it all—intrigue, abuse, racism. I can’t remember now why I never finished it back in fourth grade, but thankfully it’s not too late.

Writing for Charity

Okay, I didn’t mean to post on Monday again. I’m sort of looking forward to making fun of myself by posting some seriously bad writing from the 80s on Flashback Friday.

However, this is an extra post because it’s NEWS! I remembered that this weekend is the awesome Writing for Charity conference at Waterford, the same venue many of you came to know and love during the For Young Readers workshop in June. Look at who will be there this Saturday:

Anne Bowen
Laura Card
Kristen Chandler
Kristyn Crow
James Dashner
Bree Despain
Sharlee Glenn
Christine Graham
Mette Ivie Harrison
Sydney Salter
Matthew J Kirby
Mike Knudson
Kristen Landon
Sheila A. Nielson
J Scott Savage
Emily Wing Smith
Wendy Toliver
Rick Walton
Dan Wells
Jessica Day George
Ann Dee Ellis

And if you want to go to the Evening Extravaganza (only $10 if you can’t go during the day) you will also see:

Ally Condie
Brandon Mull
Brandon Sanderson
Sara Zarr

And . . .

me.

Bring a permanent marker and your arm for me to sign because I’m so famous I don’t have any books available for you to buy yet.

Hope to see you all there. It’s a fantastic opportunity to mingle with Utah authors as well as donate to a great cause—Utah literacy.

To you who have been before, are you going again this year? What was your favorite part about the conference last year?

Fear and Fascination

Today I share a quote from one of my favorite books, Printz winner The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean. I like this quote because in it the main character, Sym, tries to resist the lure of the Antarctic, something mesmerizing but dangerous. McCaughrean almost makes me want to travel to the Antarctic, even after everything she puts her characters through. Sym says:

I shut my eyes, like closing the blinds in a house, and vow not to open them again.

But the sky is radiant with buttery yellow iceblink, and beneath it heaves a sea that’s a gaudy swill of cobalt blue, inky navy, sage, emerald, and holly green cluttered with snowy bergy bits. Pancake ice, delicate as pierced stone tracery, rises and falls on the swell. Mountains and sculpted icebergs leap up on all sides: killer whales frozen in the very act of breaching. It is fabulously lovely. It demands to be seen.

And curiosity, like warmth, is creeping back into my bloodstream.

This fear-fascination reaction strikes a chord with me. Sym’s enchantment with the unforgiving landscape reminds me of how I feel about intense lightning storms, tornadoes—even regular ocean waves creeping onto the beach at night. SPOOKY! I want to hide just thinking about them. But I can’t resist the pull of their beauty, either.

I *think* I probably would have been scrambling for safety had I worked in downtown Salt Lake City on the day of its only deadly tornado, but part of me wonders if I would’ve been standing alongside the people who became my co-workers a few years later—the ones who told me they couldn’t leave their twenty-fourth-story windows as the funnel cloud touched down a block away.

What are the things that scare and captivate you at the same time?

To the Shapers of Culture

For today’s writing tip, I want to send a shout out to BYU professor Susan Howe, who was the first mentor I ever had say to me, “You ARE a writer.” This came at a time when I wasn’t so sure.

At the 2009 BYU English Department Awards Banquet she gave a speech, reprinted in the Fall 2009 issue of Humanities at BYU. I hope you’ll read it, but the short version is this:

“Don’t be shallow.”

Awesome tip, eh? Put that one to work and come back next week and let me know how it went for you.

We all know that “literary art has always reflected the age in which it was written,” but Howe’s speech made me question myself: What aspect of the modern age am I reflecting in what I write? Does it matter what I reflect as long as I’m having a good time and writing as honestly as I can?

Dr. Howe thinks it matters—that the values we incorporate into our writing should be chosen intentionally.

Howe shares two true stories, one about an American soldier in Iraq who nearly shoots a child who is approaching, not with an explosive, as the soldier suspects, but with a gift. The second story is about how the economic downturn has caused Americans to cut back, resulting in a particular spa going out of business because so many women had to “sacrifice” having their eyebrows waxed.

Howe says of these two stories:

“To consider them together is to reveal something about the culture of these United States in the twenty-first century: on the one hand there are very serious concerns being enacted in our culture, but on the other hand the excesses of American consumerism have made many aspects of our lives incredibly trivial.”

The shallow side of our culture is certainly reflected in publishing:

“There has been, for the last several years, a movement towards literature that is witty, intelligent, and playful, but dissociated, fragmented, and random; literature that refuses to assert value or even discernable meaning.”

What’s wrong with that? I enjoy me some random literature. Random movies. Random humor of all kinds. But I believe Howe gives every serious writer something important to consider:

“To trivialize people I think is the greatest danger of this type of literature.”

How can a young adult writer who happens to like randomness and getting her eyebrows waxed  “resist trivialization” in her writing?

I think Howe’s advice to college students still applies to me, no matter how often I happen to visit the spa or watch random commercials on YouTube:

“I hope you students, poised to take over the production and consumption of culture, will say, ‘ . . . In my art, I will do the difficult work of indicating what I value. I refuse to represent life as so bereft of meaning that readers will experience themselves as superficial, inconsequential, and shallow.”

One way we can do this, Howe says, is in learning from art “we perceive to be significant.”

Put more simply in the words of author Alane Ferguson: “You are what you read.”

I have a bunch of questions about this whole idea.

1. As a writer, do you ever think about yourself as a potential shaper and reflector of culture? Do you feel a sense of responsibility wielding words?

2. What works of art do you “perceive to be significant” that have inspired your writing?

3. Do you filter what you read and watch in an effort to better your craft?

My answers: No, I’ll get back to you, and no. But Susan Howe has definitely invited me to rethink my strategy.

Today’s Read: THE MILES BETWEEN

I recently finished reading The Miles Between (see sidebar) by the lovely and talented Mary E. Pearson, who was kind enough to make an appearance in Emily Wing Smith’s workshop class at Waterford last month. She mentioned the trickiness of writing a book that is all about coincidence when coincidence isn’t “supposed” to happen in fiction.

Mary, the book rang true for me! Especially the following scene, when the main characters are sitting around the breakfast table at their boarding school.

Read the scene and then tell me: who are your favorite foils in fiction—the calculating characters and the easygoing ones? The connecting characters and the distant ones?

The room dims. I think I am the only one to notice. And then it lightens again, like a cloud has passed the sun. For a brief moment everyone is frozen in time, like the sculptures that decorate the garden, and I look at each one, wondering at how easily their lives are intersected by simple things beyond their control, like wind and clouds and people.

“Aren’t you going to ask where Seth is, Des?” Mira asks.

Seth is new this year, and just because I happened to notice him when he first arrived and made a comment about his scruffy blond hair, Mira seems to think I have an interest in him. Which I don’t, of course, because that would break my number-one rule: Don’t get attached. But I can’t stop observing. It is my habit, always on the outside, looking at the armor others clothe themselves with, comparing their natures with my own, trying to imagine how they got that way and understand why circumstances crowd into one life and not another. Seth is connection to my distance, smiles and easiness to my everyday calculations, and I wonder at the divergent paths that have created us. But I don’t wonder overly much. I find his smoothness impossibly annoying, and I don’t really care where he is, but Mira still watches me, waiting for a response.

“All right, Mira,” I sigh. “Where’s Seth?”

I’m Ba-ack!!

I promised you, didn’t I?

Fireworks!

Refreshments!

And . . . REGULAR POSTS!

Please notice the blog schedule in the right sidebar.

Since it’s Wednesday, I’ll start off with a classic writing tip, one of my favorites that I’ve shared before:

“The drop of water hollows the stone.”

One word, one paragraph, one page a day is better than twenty-pages cranked out in once-a-year spurts. Why? I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet.

Another somewhat related idea is by E. L. Doctorow:

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Does anyone else see poorly at night? Tell me if writing a book works this way for you.

Thanks for coming back, ya’ll. See you next week!

Goodbye, dear readers.

Hey, all 10 of you, I’m taking the site down for a couple of months due to my crazy life and no time to make this blog worth reading. When I come back it will be better than ever. With fireworks and refreshments and regular posts and everything. Keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll let you know when I make my grand re-entrance to the blogosphere. (Do people still say blogosphere? It sounds a little early-2000s.) Happy summer to all of you!

Truth or Fiction?

How much autobiography do you knowingly put in your fiction?

I recently let my old pal Mak read my WIP because I thought she might be amused by the scenes I lifted straight from our high school experience.

When I’m reading, sometimes a scene hits me as so true—or so weird—I have to wonder if it really happened. Here is one from HOW TO SAY GOODBYE IN ROBOT by Natalie Standiford:

I turned a corner and came to a small church. There was a headstone near the path leading to the church’s wooden doors. I stepped closer to read the headstone. It said FOR THE UNICORN CHILD.

That is so cool, I thought. What a funky town this was. I imagined a neighborhood Legend of the Unicorn Child, about a one-horned little boy who’d died tragically, hit by a car or shot by a mugger or maybe poisoned by lawn pesticides. The story of the Unicorn Child was so real to these people they’d erected a stone in his memory.

Then I read it again. The stone didn’t say FOR THE UNICORN CHILD. It said FOR THE UNBORN CHILD.

I swear Ms. Standiford or someone she knows really thought there was a unicorn child buried in Baltimore. If not, I’m impressed by writers who make this stuff up.

I want to hear quotes from your favorite books that stand out as so starkly true you think it *had* to have happened to the author in real life. Either that or confess and tell me which parts in your novels are real. I want to know.

Revision part 100—Help??

I don’t remember how many revision blogs I’ve written, but it feels like part 100 because I lost track long ago on how many drafts of my WIP I’ve been through now.

Revision dilemma for the day:

I never thought I’d be writing about “killing babies.” I knew *other* writers sometimes had to delete their favorite, carefully crafted sentences or scenes. But not me. My problem was fleshing out the bones in hopes of coming up with over 50,000 words when it was all said and done.

So how did I get to 69,000 words?? Yes, that’s right. After adding all the details and scenes my wonderful editor-mentors suggested, I now have to delete 30 pages.

This is the part where I have to question: What is this scene accomplishing? Is it necessary? What will the book lose if this scene were gone?

I’m also reading the whole book out loud and deleting repetitive descriptive words.

And so far these ideas have cut one whole page.

Any other ideas on slimming this monster down?

Revision Triumph of the Day:

I have a new first chapter the writers group likes. I’m hoping editors agree.

I’ve learned a lot the last three months, but this one is big: Write the first chapter last. I’ve been given this advice before but never followed it because I’d worked so hard on my first chapters in hopes of grabbing an editor’s interest; it seemed dumb to push the chapter I’d agonized over to chapter two or three.

I’m converted now.

Why write the first chapter last? Because by then you know what your character really wants and can start the book off by showing your readers what the conflict is going to be all about. And often the best books start out with a rifle over the mantle—the one that goes off in the climax. How can you know where to place the gun in the first chapter—how can you know what the “gun” of your story really is—if you haven’t written the climax yet?

Thanks again to all the smart people who are writing my book for me.

Question of the Day:

How do you go about killing your literary babies? How do you decide?