Arrow, by RJ Anderson

I've been reading RJ Anderson's faery series (the first book is called Knife in the UK and Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter in the US). The first two books are out in the US but the series continues on past them in the UK. We just finished this one, which sort of closes the first subseries, and my girls are already pestering me to order the next one, Swift, which apparently was just released in Britain.

What liked most about this book: 1) the feeling of being in a different culture, and 2) Timothy. We've seen Timothy's anxious side in the last book (Wayfarer), but now that he's worked through those issues and come out the other side, we're getting a whole new view of him. I love seeing the cheerful, slightly hyper, active side of him--just a very likable character! As to the cultural issue, Rebecca's put her finger on exactly that exhausting feeling of trying to navigate a culture that is similar but different from your own, of misinterpreting people, and of trying to fit into a new set of expectations while all the while holding very much to your integrity. (I guess that's actually two culture clashes, then--the clash between different faery cultures and the clash between the world of integrity and...the World in a religious sense.)

I'd recommend this series to your daughter/niece who likes some seriousness to her faeries.

Books for the precocious child reader

Every so often I get a request from someone for book recommendations. They have a first grader who's done with short chapter books and whose skill is on a 4th-5th grade level. Or their fourth grader has exhausted their classroom library, has the ability to read anything, but is too young to be interested in YA books that are big on romance or Teen Problems. They're still kids--but they are dying for a good story they can spend a long time in. So I've made this list for those kids. No, it doesn't include some of my favorite books, because they have themes more of interest to older readers. But hopefully it's a starting place. (And feel free to add suggestions in the comments--I'll try to remember to add to this as I run across books that fit this in the future.)

Books with magic:

The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Stewart
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and also James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, JK Rowling (this one is clearly middle grade, but be aware that they age up quite a bit, and later books may be too much for young kids)
Tuesdays at the Castle, and others by Jessica Day George
Princess Academy and others by Shannon Hale
Whales on Stilts! and others in the Pals in Peril series by MT Anderson (helpful to have read other kids’ series, as it’s sort of a parody)
Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians (series), Brandon Sanderson
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter (series), RJ Anderson
Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer (for girls who like Austen and magic)
The Magic Thief, Sarah Prineas
Half Magic and others by Edward Eager
The Enchanted Castle and others by E. Nesbit (old, but the inspiration for the Edward Eager books)
Fortune’s Folly and also Circus Galacticus, Deva Fagan
Princess for Hire (series), Lindsey Leavitt
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
Small Persons with Wings, Ellen Booraem
Entwined, Heather Dixon
The Ghosts, Antonia Barber
Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
Beauty, Robin McKinley
Secrets of the Cheese Syndicate, Donna St. Cyr
The Diamond in the Window, Jane Langton
Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities, Mike Jung
Princess for Hire, Lindsey Leavitt

Books without magic:

The Penderwicks series, Jeanne Birdsall. Four sisters, a dog, and a very interesting boy next door.
Flipped, Wendelin van Draanen
Millicent Min, Girl Genius, Lisa Yee
Journey to the River Sea and also The Star of Kazan, or The Dragonfly Pool, Eva Ibbotson
Rules, Cynthia Lord
Daddy Long-Legs, Jean Webster
Schooled, Gordon Korman
The London Eye Mystery, Siobhan Dowd
Winnie’s War, Jenny Moss
Palace Beautiful, Sarah DeFord Williams
The Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Suzanna Snow: The Midnight Tunnel, Angie Frazier
Al Capone Does My Shirts and sequel, Gennifer Choldenko
As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth, Lynne Rae Perkins
The Lion’s Paw, Robb White
Saffy’s Angel, Hilary McKay
Hoot, Carl Hiassen
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

The Star of Kazan and also Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson

Books with very slight magic (magical realism/mostly real except for one small thing—generally appeal to both the magic and non magic readers):

Savvy and also Scumble, Ingrid Law
Things Not Seen, Andrew Clements
The Magician’s Elephant, Kate DiCamillo
The Secret of Zoom, Lynne Jonell
Mudville or The Tanglewood Terror, Kurtis Scaletta
The Healing Spell, Kimberly Griffiths Little
Babe, the Gallant Pig, Dick King-Smith
Lionboy (series), Zizou Corder
Holes, Louis Sacher

SF (aliens, scientific time travel):

The True Meaning of Smekday, Adam Rex
The Doom Machine, Mark Teague
Dark Life, Kat Falls
Cosmic, Frank Cottrell Boyce
Circus Galacticus, Deva Fagan

Graphic novels:

The Arrival, and other books by Shaun Tan
Rapunzel’s Revenge and Calamity Jack, Shannon and Dean Hale and Nathan Hale
Ellie McDoodle, Have Pen, Will Travel, Ruth McNally Barshaw
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
The Storm in the Barn, Matt Phelan
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch

Piltdown Man and the Revision

Even though I keep writing new books, there’s one manuscript that I pull out every so often and stare at again. There’s something I really love about it, and something that’s wrong that I just can’t put my finger on. People used to tell me that my character doesn’t have enough feeeeeeeelings, but now I think I’m making progress, because now people say she has feeeeeeelings, she just doesn’t have a personality. Eep. Anyway. I’ve recently started going to a local in person writers’ group, and was looking around for something good to bring this time. We do all the reading on the spot, which is time consuming, and which means that really, everyone can only bring a snippet. It’s not the sort of setting for feedback on your complete novel, whether all at once or broken up—it would take years to read the whole thing that way. So I thought that maybe I could bring a bit of this problem novel and see if they have any new insights on the character.

What I noticed while reading over my opening was that after so many revisions and critiques, it now resembles Piltdown Man. If you remember anything about anthropology, you’ll know this was a famous hoax in which someone stuck together a bunch of different bones from different species and tried to pass the lot of them off as Man’s Early Ancestor, when in fact, it wasn’t anything but a mess. Alas, my novel (especially the opening) looks like that.

What was she like before the story starts? A bone the shape of school activities.
What is her Big, Personal Problem? Another bone with guilt over something she neglected to do.
This book is supposed to have magic in it. WHERE IS THE MAGIC? Show it to me on page 1! I’ve crammed a bone of magic in there.
I don’t understand why she’s here. It’s too confusing. So now I’ve got stuff about her mother and her brother and her aunt and her uncle and even her broken-hipped grandmother glomming up the place.

Stop!!!

I’m not saying they’re wrong in feeling there’s a problem. But I think that you have to be careful when you listen to critiques. Critiquers are usually right when they put their finger on a problem. But they’re not always right about the solution. And you can make yourself crazy (and make your own little Piltdown Man) if you try to incorporate every single change anyone suggests.

Take a deep breath. What is the story YOU want to tell? Maybe that critique gave you a good idea. But maybe you know that what you need to say is more than that. Listen to that little voice inside you. Don’t let your internal editor—or anyone else’s—crowd out the core of your story.

I still don’t know exactly how to fix the book. But I might just start by weeding.

On characters

The next segment I'm focusing on this year is character. There's mood and feeeeeling, which have to do with interiority, private interpretation, and voice, all of which are part of character portrayal. But then there's the bit about creating a character who exists apart from the plot events. I will freely confess that while I've read a lot of books where I like the story and feeeeel for the characters, six months later, I can't remember their names (and in really extreme cases, I can't keep two characters in one book straight). So--I would say that while excellent characters are probably a key point in making a book someone's best beloved--it might not be the sole criteria for selling a book. However, I want to write excellent books, not just moderately pleasing ones! So, two thoughts on characters that are not my own, but which I think are worth writing down and using when creating memorable characters:

1. Giving them some distinguishing "thing" that's all their own (from Christy Lenzi), something that exists quite apart from the plot at hand, and
2. Making sure that your principal characters contrast each other and complement each other (from Maggie Stiefvater). Not in a cliche or cardboard way--but some small way to signal to the reader who it is when they come up.

Some examples of these principles:

Anne of Green Gables--who could ever forget Anne? She has carrot-colored hair about which she's very sensitive, and she has a fantastic imagination that gets her into trouble.

Draco Malfoy, with his pale hair, pointed chin, and drawling voice. Actually, just about every character of Rowling's has something. Snape's greasy hair and silky, dangerous voice, Umbridge's horrible pink hair bow. Sometimes it's something visible and sometimes it's a way of speaking (hem hem!). But we know it's them!

DJ Schwenk--she doesn't ever say what's on her mind, even though a lot is.

Julianna from Flipped--the girl with the tree and the chickens

Crossley-Holland's Gatty--bad grammar but sees things true

Wizard Howl--vain!

Lord Teddie, from Entwined, for his posh and genial way of speaking, as well as Lord Bradford's kind brown eyes.

Mr. Malvern from The Scorpio Races, with his horrible tea mixture (tea, butter, milk, and salt--ick!!)

I realize these are examples for point 1 above, and I'm going to have to think some more on contrasting characters. Hopefully I can come up with some good examples and do a follow up post to this.

More on feeeeeeling

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about these two posts, one by Mary Kole and one by Maggie Stiefvater. I’m told that my plotting and prose skills are up to snuff, but something I still struggle with is getting the reader to feeeeeel. (You may have guessed that by the number of posts on that subject lately.) I know Maggie is exceptionally good at this, and I know she does it deliberately, and after getting my library to buy a copy of her latest book (The Scorpio Races) and keeping it out overdue to study it, I’ve sent off for my own copy. Because this is something I need to learn, and seeing good examples of it while hearing people talk about it are all ways to get this idea into my brain. And I’m having some small insights about this that I wanted to record here.

1. Part of it is getting into your MC’s brain, and bringing the reader along with you. No secrets from the reader.*

2. Part of it is using words and phrases that fall naturally within the range of your focal character’s thoughts/world, but also (to paraphrase Markus Zusak), observations beyond the surface descriptions anyone could grab out of the top of their brain. An example from The Scorpio Races:

...But it’s not a bill collector. It’s a long, elegant car the size of our kitchen, with a tall, elegant grille the size of a dustbin. It has round, friendly-looking eyeballs with chrome eyebrows; its tailpipe breathes white puffs that creep around the tires. And it is red—not the red of the horse I saw on the beach yesterday, but red like only humans can imagine. Red like candy. Red like you’d like to taste or possibly paint your lips with.

Red, Father Mooneyham often remarks sadly, like sin.

3. Part of it is relating those turns of phrase to actual things in the setting/story where the reader is present. Example:

a) I was tired, and my eyes ached under my dry contacts.
b) I was tired, and my contacts felt like shriveled sausage slices on my eyes.
c) It felt like my contacts had become John’s overdone sausage slices from breakfast—shriveled and dead.

Not the greatest example, and somewhat overwritten, but—let’s assume that earlier in the story, John tried to make breakfast and it was a disaster. This reference back to something from the character’s actual world adds a layer of grounding to your story. It’s almost like a private joke between the reader and the character.


*Although I will add a caveat to that—sometimes you may pull off a narrator who keeps secrets from the reader, major ones—like in Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief. There are some…key facts, you could say, that Gen “forgets” to tell us for a good part of the book. But. It works. I think it works because even if he declines to reveal some major facts about himself, he isn’t keeping emotional secrets from the reader. We may learn new things about him at the end—but he doesn’t turn into a different person. We know his feelings and personality and outlook on life as much as we would have with that extra knowledge.

Character outside of plot

I think plot is something that springs from character, and that the two are pretty much inseparable. So perhaps this isn't the most accurate title. But there's something I see occasionally (probably because I'm guilty of the same thing), and that is when a main character is not a complete, breathing person but an empty set of eyes to see the plot by. And this ties into how to make your reader identify with the character and feeeeel.

We want to make the main character sympathetic, right? One way to do that is to show them being nice to someone weaker than themselves. Another way is to show how other characters are worse than the MC. But it's not enough to feel sorry for your MC. Pity isn't the same thing as love, you know. Nor is an empty set of eyes. It's hard to love a character who just records events without being personally involved. The big question you have to settle for the reader first of all is, why would they want to hang around this character for 200+ pages? And to help answer that, you need to show who this character is. So imagine your character outside of the plot of this particular story. Who are they? What are they like when the bullies AREN'T around? What do they dream of, what do they want, what are their aspirations for when things go right? What makes them the most happy, the most relaxed, the most themselves? How are they good? You need to know (and show) those things so that when the plot happens, we have someone to love and cheer for. Of course you aren't going to want to explain all this before the plot starts--you need action and choices right up front, too. But it's important to weave in this sense of character early on so that you give your reader someone--a real someone--to cheer for.

More on character

Just a couple of small writing ideas/observations before starting the craziness of Thanksgiving. Maybe someday I'll come back and develop them some more. For the moment, I just don't want to forget them.

1. Finding your way into a character's head/voice: set up a scenario (a waiting room, a park, a train station, etc.) and have two different characters write how they would see the place. The details they notice and the mood they feel and what the setting makes them want to do should be distinct from character to character.

I think, to make this a more meaningful activity, it would be best to do this with two characters who are more or less foils to each other. This might be your hero and your antagonist--or it might be two characters who have to work together but who are very--perhaps abrasively--different. (So--not just Harry vs. Voldemort, but maybe Hermione vs. Luna.) Doing this will help you figure out what is the same (ie how they connect) and what is different (ie where the tension comes from) between these two characters.

2. Making your reader feeeel. This is just one of my weaknesses, so I'm always trying to notice why a scene works in a book for me. Or in this case, a movie. One of the best scenes I've seen in a while is the one of Neville's speech in the last Harry Potter film. Just excellently done. In that scene, the audience knows something the characters do not, and yet, when you watch it, you feel extremely sad right along with them. Why? Because the camera doesn't just show you a tragic scene; it shows the characters' reactions to what they are confronting. Ginny's scream, for example. What Neville says and does, even though he doesn't have all the facts, sets the emotion for the audience as well. And, the best moment of all--the surprise (to the characters). The camera gives you both emotions--those of the good guys and those of the bad. They could have stopped with Voldemort's reaction, but they didn't--what carries the scene and makes it even stronger is the fact that they show Hermione's reaction as well. Just stating the facts of the case isn't enough if you want your reader to feel. When you know what your character is feeling, you cease to be an outside observer, and that character's reaction can pull you along so that you are inside the story. Then you as the reader will feel--which is what an author wants, right?