People are going to turn around and look up

I was at the Happiest Place on Earth on Monday, and it occurred to me that Disneyland is sort of live-action fiction. You wander through all of these very detailed, distinctive fictive neighborhoods, waiting in line to get on rides that simulate space or fairytale lands or somewhere under the sea (cue Sebastian), etc. The whole park is actually built above ground level--you're walking over a series of tunnels that "cast members" use to travel to and from the different lands (in order to preserve the magic element of the park). I think the word for it is verisimilitude: everything has the appearance of truth but isn't really true. It can feel a little like walking through a book.
But even if you immerse yourself totally in the experience, it's easy to get to reminded that what's going on around you isn't real. All you have to do is turn around (or look up at the rafters) and you see carefully concealed emergency exits, strings of lights, security cameras, animatronic ghosts and pirates and animals repeating the same canned movements. Most rides depend on the rider keeping his or her butt in the seat (and hands safely inside the ride at all times!), facing forward, never turning to look back behind. Of course, people do turn around and look up.

Maybe there's a lesson for writers in this: you need to assume that your reader is going to turn around, look back, glance upwards. Disneyland does a remarkably good job of creating an alternate world (except for It's a Small World, which kind of looks like it was set up in an empty hotel ballroom, with track lighting on the ceiling and exposed staples and exit signs everywhere) but if you look closely, you can always see little signs to remind you that this is all Made Up. When you're writing, you need to try to make sure that you conceal those types of signals. Sometimes that's making sure you don't miss continuity errors ("Jean" becomes "Joan;" a 14-year-old neighbor celebrates her 12th birthday, etc.); sometimes it's making sure that your protagonist's actions and emotions make sense based on how you have established him/her so far and where his/her arc is going. Make sure your readers aren't asking (unintended) questions along the lines of, How come I can still see Captain Jack Sparrow inside the Pirate's cave while directly in front of me he's locked up in a jail cell? Such as, Why is Rachel suddenly attending the dance that she spent the last 30 pages trashing? And at all costs, avoid slowing down the pacing to a stall (the equivalent of the dreaded "The ride will be moving shortly" announcement); you don't want your readers shifting in their seats, waiting for something to happen.

I am clearly not "waiting for
 something to happen" here.

Not all works are striving for verisimilitude with the real world, but whatever environment you are creating should be as seamless as possible. You want your reader to believe in its authenticity. Whether you're building the world of a suburban high school or the kingdom of the Mer-people, remember that your readers will be looking in all directions.

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Commencement

I finished J. Courtney Sullivan's debut Commencement during my flight to LA last Friday, which is an endorsement: as you might recall, I hate (hate!) airplanes so if a book can hold my interest while I am at 39,000 feet, it's a pretty good book. An overview from Publisher's Weekly:

It isn't quite love at first sight when Celia, Sally, Bree and April meet as first-year hall mates at Smith College in the late 1990s. Sally, whose mother has just died, is too steeped in grief to think about making new friends, and April's radical politics rub against Celia and Bree's more conventional leanings. But as the girls try out their first days of independence together, the group forms an intense bond that grows stronger throughout their college years and is put to the test after graduation. Even as the young women try to support each other through the trials of their early twenties, various milestones—Sally's engagement, Bree's anomalous girlfriend, April's activist career—only seem to breed disagreement. Things come to a head the night before Sally's wedding, when an argument leaves the friends seething and silent; but before long, the women begin to suspect that life without one another might be harder than they thought. Sullivan's novel quickly endears the reader to her cast, though the book never achieves the heft Sullivan seems to be striving for.

This book reminded me so much of my female friendships in college and also of the ways in which they have changed post-graduation. I love how it depicted how confusing it can be to navigate the post-grad world and finding out which feminist/liberal/academic ideals you can carry into the rest of your life and which don't work for you outside of the quad.

I felt at times like some of the characters (particularly April and Sally) didn't seem real to me--more like amalgams of traits and, particularly for April, as a tool to explore feminist activism. Some of the dialogue seemed a little dated. I would have been in college at roughly the same time as the characters, and certain ways in which they interacted or talked seemed from another era. Then again, I didn't go to a private women's college, so perhaps the experience there is different. Something about the tone made me sense that it was a parody at times, which I don't think was intentional.

But any book that focuses on the subtleties of female friendships, choices, and the experience of being a young feminist today--as well as issues like equality and gay rights, marriage, balancing a career, mother-daughter relationships, loss, and sexual abuse/the sex trade--is welcome. This is beachy read with some heft--you'll burn through it and enjoy yourself but afterward you'll still find yourself thinking about the issues it touches on.

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Dear Diary

Diaries kind of fascinate me lately because I've been writing a fake one for my WIP. The last time I was at my childhood home, I dug out (from under my old twin mattress--really unique hiding place) my diary from middle-high school. It was equal parts hilarious and mortifying; even at 14 I was still illustrating some of my feelings with crude cartoons. I was also dabbling in really bad, really angsty poetry that tended to always relate back to both my mean friend and the weather, or try to personify the weather as her. Oh, and I would throw in some Latin or Spanish vocab here and there to sound "intellectual." I eagerly described the emotional roller coaster of some painfully awkward crushes; the apex was lending a pencil to one guy, which led to our first (and only) conversation:
Him: "I need that pencil."
Me: "Um, okay." Hands him pencil
Him: "Thanks."
In my diary, I noted that this clearly meant that he was interested in me. Particularly because I did not get the pencil back, which allowed me to project all sorts of feelings onto the dude (ever the optimist, they were mostly positive).
In my elementary-school journal, I apparently wrote a long diatribe against crooked teeth--I was late to lose my baby teeth and was the only kid in my swim class to not have a mouth full of gangly, growing-in adult ones. So I wrote repeatedly about how "disgusting" their teeth were and how happy I was that I still had tiny, perfect, straight baby teeth. (I was a really weird, embarrassingly judge-y kid.) My mom had read that entry at the time and still laughs about it today.

Anyway, I love this NPR "Hidden World of Girls" feature on diaries:
Dear Diary: A Peek Inside the Pages of Our Lives
I saw so much of my own diaries in the pages submitted but also marvelled at the different experiences documented on pink, lined pages. I didn't name my diary "Sue" like one woman did, although I did sign all entries with the name "Stella," for some reason. Maybe the next time I get back home, I'll take some pics and submit my own pages for the project. It's so cool.

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In defense of break-taking

Last night, I was all set to park my butt in my desk chair and crank out my 1,000 words. I had my notes in a neat pile. I had good writing music queued up on iTunes. Word was open and the cursor was blinking where I left off the night before. And then I closed the document and proceeded to the kitchen, where I played with my food for an hour. Followed by watching TV on Netflix. Word stayed closed the rest of the night.

I am a big fan of the notion that how you write a book is by parking your butt in a chair and writing. I need to be strict with myself and actually hold myself to the 1,000 words/day rule. If I miss a day, it's 2,000 the next, and so forth. If I didn't do* this I am pretty sure I would never get anything done. I'm not good with distractions and (like everyone) I have a lot of them. *And honestly, half the time I don't keep up with my wordcount goal, but at least I consistently work toward it.

But there are times when, schedules be damned, you just need a break. I'm starting to realize that when that happens, it's best to take the break, recharge, and get back on track the next day. It's one thing to slack off when you're feeling lazy and another to recognize when you're in danger of burnout. Sometimes giving yourself space and time to recharge makes you more productive afterward. And sometimes it's just being nice to yourself. Taking breaks is okay--probably not a breakthrough to many people, but to this Type-A, super rule-following overachiever it felt like a little epiphany.

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One-star sacrilege

Lone Star Statements is an awesome, thought-provoking collection of Amazon 1-star reviews of some of the works that made TIME's 100 best novels. The excerpted 1-star reviews are pretty outrageous, such as:

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Author: J.D. Salinger
“So many other good books…don’t waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed.”

The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Author: John Steinbeck
“While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”

So hopefully I didn't sound like some of these reviewers when I lightly panned Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Hyperbole aside, some of these reviews are a reminder that what is the epitome of great literature to one person is terminally boring to someone else. Reading is subjective. Maybe when something is dripping in accolades, we also have a tendency to be a lot more critical.
 
Thanks to Elizabeth Craig's Twitter for the link!

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Memories of My Melancholy . . .

Who doesn't love Gabriel García Márquez? In my (humble) opinion, he won the Nobel Prize for a reason. Memories of my Melancholy Whores was on my TBR list since it was published in 2005. Sometimes I like reading about stuff like melancholy whores. There, I said it.

I'm really interested in opening lines lately, and Memories' was a doozy:

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin. 

It's alienating (a story about a "whore" is one thing; an adolescent one is another and hard to get past), but also intriguing. 

My expectations weren't met with Memories of My Melancholy Whores. This was no Love in the Time of Cholera. I was distracted throughout by thinking about the tragedy of the young girl's situation*, and I was frustrated that she remained such a cipher, even if that was intentional and necessary to the story being told. Wouldn't the narrator's love for her have been more powerful if she had a personality? Insights made by the narrator (and there were many, and they were affecting) were tempered by that fact that I had labeled him as, well, a dirty old man. The writing, as always, was beautiful, skilled, and lyrical. Credit has to be given to Edith Grossman, the translator, too. Her translations (such as the 2003 Don Quijote) are all incredible and I will basically read anything with her name attached. Memories was a brief but monotonous novella brimming with beautiful passages and meditations on aging, love, and death. You can't say it's bad, it's just underwhelming. 

From Publisher's Weekly: 

García Márquez's slim, reflective contribution to the romance of the brothel, his first book-length fiction in a decade, is narrated by perhaps the greatest connoisseur ever of girls for hire. After a lifetime spent in the arms of prostitutes (514 when he loses count at age 50), the unnamed journalist protagonist decides that his gift to himself on his 90th birthday will be a night with an adolescent virgin. But age, followed by the unexpected blossoming of love, disrupts his plans, and he finds himself wooing the allotted 14-year-old in silence for a year, sitting beside her as she sleeps and contemplating a life idly spent. Flashes of García Márquez's brilliant imagery—the sleeping girl is "drenched in phosphorescent perspiration"—illuminate the novella, and there are striking insights into the euphoria that is the flip side of the fear of death. The narrator's wit and charm, however, are not enough to counterbalance the monotony of his aimlessness. Though enough grace notes are struck to produce echoes of eloquence, this flatness keeps the memories as melancholy as the women themselves.

*I guess I'm not alone--a film based on the novella has created a lot of controversy in Mexico because of concerns that it glorifies child prostitution. 

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The Hunger Games

Yeah, FINALLY I read The Hunger Games. Now I'm a bona fide fangirl.

What I loved:
--Katniss. She was so tough and scrappy and guardedly compassionate. She doesn't wilt in  the face of brutal violence, pus-filled wounds, or desperate hunger. And despite her chops, she's still a realistic teenage girl grappling with how she feels about her mom, her appearance, and the boys in her life.

--The fact that this dystopian YA doesn't shy away from brutality. I didn't like thinking about ritualized games in which children are forced to fight each other to the death, or a future North America in which so many people are starving. But I did like the sense of urgency in Panem and that the stakes were really, really high.

--The love triangle with Peeta and Gale. Katniss's inevitable choice between the two is introduced less on the basis of superficial factors (looks, social status, etc.) and more on personality and character. Peeta has shown his compassion and protective nature. He's a very moral person with a strong sense of self, as we saw when he said that he wanted to show the Games that they couldn't change who he was. Yet Gale is a wily hunter, resourceful, and devoted to Katniss and her family. He has a history with her. What don't I remember reading? Katniss debating blonde hair versus brown, or the like. Awesome.

--How one can read a subtle critique of reality TV in the story, thanks to the uber-disturbing games being broadcast on national television.

--All of the characters, from Cinna and Effie to Haymitch and Prim, were rich and interesting. I'd want to read a spinoff book about most of them.

What I'm not completely sold on:
--I can't quite figure out what the Capitol's ideology is, what motivates them to pamper those in the Capitol and punish the rest. I have to stretch to believe that the Games were created to intimidate and control the people of Panem. Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, but I'm skeptical that a government would subject young people to such torture in the name of entertainment/control. Maybe I just needed more background on Panem.

--This is picky, but more than a few times when some new creature or concept was introduced during the Games (such as the Tracker Jackers, Muttations, or the medicines/potions), it seemed too convenient to the plot. For example, I would have been more receptive to the Muttations shaking up the final battle between Katniss and Cato if we'd read more about them earlier in the story. It seemed a little deus ex machina to me on this first reading.

Now I can't wait to pick up Catching Fire.

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I write like . . .

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Distracting me from the 1,000 things I should be doing today is the "I Write Like" game. (It's overtaken the bookish/writerly corners of Twitter, too.)

According to the game, this very blog is pretty consistently Dan Brown. (Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure I've never mentioned Knights Templar, Masons, Symbologists, or Mickey Mouse watches with great sentimental value.)

Sections of my YA novel are the following: Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, more Dan Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, and Oscar Wilde. Hmm. Three contiguous paragraphs went to: Wilde, then Vonnegut, then King. Ummm, okay?

Then I wondered, How accurate is this thing? I tested it on an excerpt of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it very correctly said Kurt Vonnegut. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet, however, went to James Fenimore Cooper. Strangely enough, the Knight's Tale from Canterbury Tales got William Shakespeare. A passage from The Bell Jar? Written like Stephen King. Grain of salt, taken.

Anyway, it's really fun to play around with. Warning: don't start using it unless you have some time on your hands--it's kind of addictive.

*Update* I've been working on my new WIP tonight, and I tested it during a break. It's like Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, and Stephanie Meyer. How's that for jacket copy?
(Clearly, I'm not taking this seriously.)

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Writing Soundtracks

Writing soundtracks--love, hate, or meh?
(As in, soundtracks for writing--not composing music.)

I have writer-friends who need total silence. Some who can only listen to classical or purely instrumental music. Some who need hand-picked playlists, and some who just need NOISE. Personally, I need a little music to write and I tend to go the playlist route.

For my last project, I had a few massive playlists that I always listened to while I was working. Some of the songs were ones I felt my MC would like (e.g. "Here (In Your Arms)" by Hellogoodbye; Coldplay; "No One Sleeps When I'm Awake" by The Sounds; Leona Lewis; Springsteen. She has eclectic taste). Some were ones that evoked in me the emotions I needed to write her/the story (hello, Ani DiFranco and Morrissey). Some were just ones that I just liked and would give me a little boost if I was frustrated or tired (such as The Clash and, um, "Everyday I Write the Book." Seriously, I am that dorky.)

Naturally, I am a little sick of the stuff I was listening to while writing and revising over the last year. I also associate some songs with that project--which is cool, but I don't want to be distracted by that while writing something new. For my current WIP, I'm totally obsessed with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (read Pitchfork's review of the album here). It's so, so good--flawless, nostalgic-but-modern pop that can nicely blend into the background when you get into writing, but is layered with enough meaning that if you stop and catch yourself taking a music-listening break, there's a lot to explore. As my WIP grows, I'll probably make a new playlist, but for now I'm just listening to this album over and over again (and still not sick of it).

Do you listen to music while writing? While reading? (I have been known to make reading playlists, too) What are your favorite writing songs?

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Vacation Reading Report: Satisfactory

I'm back! I had a great week off and a happy Fourth (and I hope you all did, too). Oh, and my flights were pretty good and I was even able to read during both of them. Score!

Last time I went on vacation I really sucked at making any progress with my TBR bookshelf. I did a little better this time around, but not great. I read The Girl Who Played With Fire and started The Hunger Games. (Speaking of The Hunger Games: Are you doing the Readalong? A chapter a day until Mockingjay!)

The Girl Who Played With Fire was as addictively readable as Dragon Tattoo, but I didn't enjoy it quite as much. The story arc wasn't as neat the first book--understandably, I guess, for the middle book in a trilogy. Knowing that Lisbeth Salander is back for a third book lowered the stakes a little, although I was still desperate to find out how she got herself out of her messes in Played With Fire. I loved learning more about Lisbeth's backstory and never grew tired of her character. I liked the book's feminist slant, despite the disturbing descriptions of violence against women (like Dragon Tattoo, although the book is very violent, the violence doesn't seem gratuitous). The cliffhanger-y ending made me want crack open The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest immediately--which I couldn't do because 1) that book is currently making its way through the US postal system to me 2) it will be the last Lisbeth Salander book, and I don't want to gobble it up quite yet.

One random observation: does everyone in Stockholm subsist on 7-11 pan pizzas and McDonald's? Nine times out of ten, if a character is eating something he or she picked it up from 7-11 or went to McDonald's. Does Sweden lack produce? Heck, I've eaten passable green salads at IKEA, so I am curious about the limited dietary choices made by all of the people in Lisbeth's and Michael's circles.

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