The book you sell to yourself

This weekend, as Twilight opens in thousands of theaters, I have great plans to go to my local movie theater, relax with a box of popcorn, and see a movie full of adventure and romance, starring a very hot male lead.

Quantum of Solace is going to be FANTASTIC.

My preference for Daniel Craig over Robert Pattinson aside, I just had to link to this interview with Stephenie Meyer in today's Chicago Sun-Times: 'Hooked' by 'Twilight' film. For the most part, it's an average interview, but this part made me squint:

Ask her why these books are such a hit and she smiles warmly and says, "For me, it's an absolute mystery. I wrote these books for me and I don't know why people have responded. But no one was supposed to read these but me."

Either I'm misinterpreting, or that is the most mind-boggling statement I've read this month today. Who does Stephenie Meyer think she's kidding?

Look, I understand wanting to write for yourself. Faulkner said it best: If the story is in you, it has got to come out. I understand having a cool dream and wanting to write about it. And once it's out of you, you can decide that these books are for you and no one else is supposed to see them. Then you can put them in a drawer and forget about them for a while, maybe forever. These are all quite acceptable things to do with your story. It's also quite acceptable to come up with an idea, put together a manuscript, shop it around, and maybe sell a bestselling novel.

But if you're going to say the philosophy behind the former but actually do the latter, either stop saying or doing. If no one was supposed to read the book but you, then it wasn't a good idea to shop it to major publishing houses. If you always meant to shop it around, then you shouldn't say it was written for you and no one else should have seen it because publishing is anything but a solitary process.

Either one is fine, really. Just tell me which it is.

I can so relate! Can you?

In reading this article at Boston.com on urban teens who read street lit, I was particularly intrigued by this quote:

Millner's 14-year-old niece had read the "Gossip Girl" and "A-List" series but yearned for books with characters with whom she could identify.

In addition to this article on street lit, the "Thrilling YAs" program I went to at the YALSA YA Lit Symposium addressed this same question. "Kids enjoy books because they can relate to the characters," was Patrick Jones's statement in a very small nutshell. My problem is that statements like this always make me wonder what a "relatable" character is. The only answer I have is "It's something different to everyone."

I guess if you held a gun to my head I would tell you that teens can relate the best to characters whose lives are sort of like theirs. That, however, is a flawed statement. Probably the most relatable character of the past 10 years of YA is Harry Potter, and the number of HP readers who live in a magical castle and were born to fight one of the greatest evil wizards who ever lived is, as far as I know, zero. What made Harry relatable was the relationships he had with Ron, Hermione, and his other friends, and how he always tried to do the right thing. His life had some high wizarding drama but he also worried about getting a date to the school dance. Despite his reputation as the wizarding world's savior, he had the worries about first love and identity that we all do. He fought with his friends but made up with them, just like we do.

It's this "just like we do" mantra that always made me wonder why so many readers of the Twilight series saw Bella as relatable. She has friends, just like we do! She participates in extracurricular activities, just like we do! Oh, wait, she doesn't do either of those things. She has no hobbies or interests, like any human being does, outside of her boyfriend. She's supposed to be "different" and "weird" but there's no proof of her being either of these things other than the author telling us it is so. Instead, she gets the perfect boyfriend because she smells good. Since none of us can smell blood or know what our own blood smells like, this is a gap between Bella and the reader. A huge one. The very reason for the romance around which the plot is centered is something that we cannot relate to because it's physically impossible for us to do so.

Going a little younger in children's literature, my favorite Newbery winner of all time (and my husband's, coincidentally) is From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. I did not grow up anywhere even remotely near New York. I never saw the Metropolitan Museum of Art until I was 17. I don't have brothers. But I related to Claudia because I knew what it was like to want to see the world outside of suburbia while still being comfortable and wearing clean clothes. I understood what Claudia meant by wanting to go back to Connecticut "different." Claudia's adventure was about seeing the world outside of home and school and holding a secret that would set her apart from everyone else. Those are amazing things to have, and Mixed-Up Files is an amazing story of wanting. Claudia endures because we all want something special all to ourselves, and I'm not talking material possessions.

So maybe I have something more than "It's different to everyone." Maybe I also have, "It all depends on matters of the heart." Blair, Serena, and Massie don't have much in common with urban teens superficially. But let's be fair here: They don't have much in common with middle-class suburban teens, either. One could say that the Gossip Girl and Clique series are pure escapism, a fantasy set in the real world, but I think there's more to it than that. I think it's that readers of books about other teens, whether those teens are urban or suburban, rich or not, want to know that there are some experiences that are universal, or that there are experiences to look forward to. Really, how many teens see themselves in Tally Youngblood? Doesn't seem to matter; those books are crazy popular. If it's all about teens seeing themselves in books, then why are the majority of the Teens' Top Ten picks speculative fiction?

Obviously there's more to being relatable than a familiar environment or the "just like me" factor. It's about "just like me" and "just like I want to be" and "just like I could be." Perhaps even "just like I was."

YA is extraordinary if you ever get to know it

Earlier today, Liz B and I did a presentation for the New Jersey Youth Services Forum on YA for older readers, officially titled "YA for Older Readers: More than just sex and four-letter words." We spent a little over half the presentation talking about themes and trends in YA for older readers, and one of the things we really worked hard on was talking about YA for older readers that was literary, or fun, or both. We wanted to show our audience the huge range of possibilities for YA fiction, especially realistic fiction that didn't necessarily have sex, drugs, or rock and roll but required life and reading experience to understand. I also had a 5-minute section prepared on how Gossip Girl has changed YA publishing for the better, but alas, I didn't have the time to give it.

It seems like an act of the cosmos, then, that I would run across this blog entry today: Is my novel too weird? at Revising Leah. This blogger, who appears to be at work on (or has just finished) a novel he believes is probably YA, says (with many parts snipped out because I know y'all can follow links):

But the other day, when it occurred to me that my novel might be a little too weird, I wasn’t thinking about one specific element of the story that I could correct; rather, I was thinking about the story as a whole. What I thought was weird about my story isn’t that it is odd or idiosyncratic in places (the best works of literature are often those that are a little strange);instead, it’s the fact that the story really isn’t weird at all which makes it too weird...

...the “second act” of my novel revolves around a history report on the ancient Egyptians. Of course, that report is a plot device... Leah goes to the library, she takes notes, she writes her essay, she’s nervous about reading it in front of her class. These are some of the most mundane events imaginable, and what worries me is that the story itself is too focused on these mundane events.

But what I like about the mundane is that it is real. Sadly, it’s true that a lot of the horrible things that happen to main characters in other young adult novels do happen to some real teenagers in real life, but most teenagers live relatively mundane lives... If I write a story about these things, then I may be writing a “real” story, but the price I have to pay for that realism is, I guess, a weird and boring novel.

No.

That's not how it works.

Revising Leah believes, or at least I glean this from reading his entries, that in order to appeal to a wide YA audience you need to have some kind of Big Traumatic Event. He doesn't want to write the BTEs because that's not what interested him as a teen and he's not into "melodrama." And you know? That's perfectly fine. What's not fine is believing that these books represent all contemporary YA and all YA sales, or that a writer has to write BTEs and melodrama in order to sell books. Plenty of books sell that contain none of these things. Plenty of books sell that aren't science fiction or fantasy. YA is a cool genre because anything can happen, including realism that appears to be boring on the surface but is saved by great writing (see the list at the end of this entry). It's also not fine to believe that popular books are bad and less popular, more literary books are good. Gossip Girl is not inherently worse than Looking for Alaska. There's room in YA for everything. YA is a place where The Clique can happen as easily as Madapple and everything Ellen Hopkins ever wrote.

I don't think there's a "price to pay for realism" at all. The only price around is the one the reader pays when the writer doesn't see that YA can be literary, that it can have many layers, and that a story about everyday life doesn't have to be, well, everyday. As Stephen King said in On Writing, our lives have no plots, so a plot where some kind of big trauma happens is not necessarily the key to a successful YA novel. "Relatable" characters are not necessarily ordinary. We all related to Harry Potter not because he was magical, but because he got into fights with his friends and completely screwed things up with Cho Chang and always strived to do the right thing. Harry Potter is as ordinary as you and I, and that heart, that brand of realism, is what makes for a successful YA novel.

I've added some of my favorite YA about ordinary teens here:


Dramarama: Broadway shows bring their own drama.

An Abundance of Katherines: Boy goes on a road trip at the end of his senior year and falls in love.

Crooked: A normal boy and girl form an unlikely friendship and try to navigate bullies and parental troubles.

Prom: Her boyfriend is kind of an ass but she still wants to go to prom.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist: Two souls meet and bond over exes and music.

Criss Cross: She wished something would happen.

A Little Friendly Advice: Dad wants to make reparations. Also, there's a camera.

Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie: Freshman year is an extreme sport.

(and feel free to add your own favorite great "nothing happens here" titles!)

Yes, I know these are all realistic fiction, because strange and brilliant things happening to teens is sort of the point of YA science fiction and fantasy.

O mother, where art thou?

Quick, tell me what Harry Potter, Cinderella (we'll go with the Disney version here, just for clarification's sake), Blair Waldorf, Steve York, Darren Shan, Gemma Doyle, Snow White, and Bobby Pendragon all have in common.

If you said, "Dead, otherwise absent, or antagonistic parents," you get a cookie. Baked by someone other than me, of course.

It seems to me that for years, the role of the parent in a YA novel was to get the heck out of the way. Many parents were, and still are, killed offstage before the opening of the novel, be it by car accident or disease or whatever the author's other favorite method is. I think my favorite parent offing is from Lauren Baratz-Logsted's Secrets of My Suburban Life, in which the main character's mother is killed by a falling pallet of Harry Potter books. Still larger numbers of teens live with single parents and never knew their mother or father, or their parents are divorced. The way a parent disappears in a YA novel isn't really the point here. The point is, they're gone. If the parents are still married, often one or both of them would have an antagonistic relationship with the main character. This could range from a simple existing on two very different planes to one or more abusive parents. In the end, that point remains as well: The parents are somehow emotionally and/or physically separated from the main character. This is a common and even important plot device in YA lit; getting the parents out of the way means that teens are more free to develop as people and have adventures of their own, adventures that they guide, and must face the consequences of their actions without a parent to protect them.

What I'm noticing more and more is a shift from the dead/missing/antagonist parents to teens who maintain a much closer relationship to their parents, and parents who play a major role in the story. Even if one of the parents is dead or missing, the teen will maintain close ties to the remaining parent and have a positive relationship with him/her, or whose improving relationship is a focus of the book. Some examples:

Impossible by Nancy Werlin
My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger
Life as we Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick

There also seem to be many more books of late where it is the actions of a parent rather than the main character or a peer that set the book in motion. Some examples:

Madapple by Christina Meldrum
Me, the Missing, and the Dead by Jenny Valentine
The Last Exit to Normal by Michael Harmon
Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb
How it Happened in Peach Hill by Marthe Jocelyn

Some books focus on a child's/teen's relationship with another significant adult and adults in the story outnumber the main character's peers, like in The Canning Season by Polly Horvath, What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell, Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer, or The Day My Mother Left by James Prosek.

The other place I'm seeing this parent-focus phenomenon? Television. Gossip Girl and 90210 both give the parents of the teen main characters their own romances and storylines. I'm not saying that parents don't have lives, of course, because that would be ridiculous, but I find it a little unusual in shows that the network is marketing so heavily to teens. In the previous 90210 incarnation, we almost never saw Jim and Cindy Walsh. When I read YA as a teen I always wondered where the parents were, because my parents would never have let me get away with half the adventures those characters had. In all of this I have to wonder: Where is this trend coming from. Maybe it's a reflection of Gen Y's better relationships with their parents? I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but my Gen X self had exactly one friend in high school who considered her mom her friend, and we all thought she was weird. My Gen Y patrons, however, seem to be much closer to their parents and their parents exercise much tighter control over their lives. It would make sense, then, to reflect this in their literature, but does this mark the beginning of a fundamental change in how teens come of age in YA lit?

Even though Gen Y has better relationships with their parents than previous generations, I don't see the dead/missing/antagonist parent plot device disappearing any time soon. It's still the quickest, easiest way for teens to establish and maintain independence. What I do see is a change in how a teen's story develops, because parents are such a strong influence, for good or bad, in teens' lives. It'll be interesting to see where this trend goes.

A nice idea, but you're late for the funeral

An article in today's SF Gate does quick reviews of three YA novels involving dead main characters, or those who can speak to them: Zombie Blondes, ghostgirl, and Dead Connection. It cites Twilight, of course, as a big factor in the popularity of dead characters in YA lit.

It's not a bad article, but I have to wonder: Where has this writer been for the past three years of YA lit? Dead characters have, erm, risen in popularity over the span of a few years and even if Twilight had never been written they'd still be around. One of the discussions the "Dead, Dying, and the Undead" Popular Paperbacks subcommittee had at Annual was the shaping of the list. Did vampires and zombies belong on the same list as books like Dead Connection and Looking for Alaska? Did we want books that explored how people died, or just what they did after they came back to life? How could books about vampires compare to those about losing a friend? Do we want them all on the same list? I think it's really easy to look at the genre superficially and say, "Books about the dead/undead are popular because of Twilight," but that's way oversimplified. There were, are, and will always be popular vampire books in YA. They're probably an easier sell now because of Twilight, but that's not the only factor.

In YA, teens have been dying for decades for one reason or another. Despite this article's narrow view, there's a huge range of books about dead, death, and the dying in YA fiction these days. (In fact, that will be the featured October BCCLS Book Bonanza list.) Watch for a review of one coming shortly.

YA lit trend watch: Boys with eating disorders

It seems to me that every year there are two, maybe three books, written independently of each other and published by two separate companies, that touch on the same topic. In 2007, for example, there were two books about boys molested by their female teachers, and there were also two retellings of Hamlet. Today, I seem to have come up with two books about boys with eating disorders, which is a subject I find somewhat fascinating. So, a joint review of both.

Nothing by Robin Friedman is half verse, and half prose, in a dual first-person point of view. Parker is the older of two children. He's a super athlete, super achiever, and super pressured by his father to get into the elitest of elite colleges: HarvardYalePrinceton. Parker feels like anything short of perfection, in love, in academics, in extracurriculars, in religion, is a sign of complete and utter failure. The only thing Parker feels that he can control is his eating, or rather, his binging and purging. He knows it hurts him and he's slowly losing energy and the will to keep up with his own life, but vomiting is the only thing that makes him feel good anymore. His younger sister Danielle narrates her part in free verse. She's more the forgotten child; she has her own interests and she's smart, but it seems like she can never get out of Parker's shadow. Eventually, Parker's eating disorder catches up to him, and here Friedman effectively uses verse to show not only Parker's inability to work his brain the way he used to, but his drop in status from his family's golden child to the disappointment. Friedman manages to make both characters well-rounded and distinct, and the book doesn't read like an encyclopedia entry on eating disorders. It plays a little fast and loose with New Jersey geography, but I'm willing to forgive that in favor of the book's merits. I know teens who read about eating disorders will often read every eating disorder book they can get their hands on, and this is definitely one to give them.


Purge by Sarah Darer Littman is a semi-autobiographical novel told from the point of view of Janie, hospitalized for bulimia. In her journal, Janie chronicles her daily life and the rigor of life in a treatment center. In the center, she meets Tom, who suffers from both anorexia and bulimia. As Jenny writes about her three weeks in therapy, the reader sees the complications in her family and social life that drive her to binge and purge. Her road to recovery requires that she dredge up painful memories, but unlike Tom, Janie is lucky enough to have a family that supports her and wants to see her get better. It's readable in the same way that Lockup is watchable for me. There's something highly compelling about a book that reveals so much about a life with so few freedoms, where everything you do is controlled by someone else and all you have are your own thoughts and feelings. Readers will like Janie. She's honest in her journal the way she wouldn't be in a standard narrative. This is another one that should be popular when it comes out in spring '09.

I'm not sure if this trend of YA books involving boys with eating disorders is a trend, per se. It's not like fantasy or vampire books where you can play with the legends and genre conventions. Eating disorder books have been popular with teens for decades, anyway. What I do think is that boys with eating disorders will get more recognition, and perhaps teens with eating-disordered boy friends will help them get the help they need. Either way, it's a nice diversification of the subgenre. And of course, YA lit is doing it first.