This week's novel is This Savage Song, young adult urban/dystopian fantasy by Victoria Schwab. I read this one because I liked A Darker Shade of Magic so much that I figured I would delve into Schwab's other series.
In the mega-city of Verity, acts of violence create monsters and the city is divided between Harker, the mob-boss like ruler who keeps the monsters from attacking people who have paid for his protection, and Flynn, with his armed militia to fight back the monsters and his trio of Sunai, especially scary monsters who take the souls of sinners with their music. Kate, Harker's daughter, wants to be ruthless as her father to earn his respect. August, one of the Sunai, wants to be human.
The world building here happens in an oddly slow way. The book starts with Kate burning down the chapel at her boarding school in the country because she wants to get thrown out and sent home. It pulled me in without knowing that her father's a mob boss or that her home is crawling with monsters. Those things you find out a little bit at a time. You get to know August for a chapter or two without learning he's Sunai, just that he's confined to his apartment building and his dad and older brother are fighting monsters. But the world building grows and grows: there is geography that's important, and there's the history of the fall of the United States and of the civil war inside Verity, and there are three different kinds of monsters who work and are created in different ways. With every piece of world building we're fed, the situation changes a bit and there's a moment of readjustment. Every so often it fells like the story drags as you wait for information, but on the whole it works to keep the focus on the characters.
I like both Kate and August, who react in reasonable ways and are fairly rational people. They each have clear motivations and drives, but beneath that have layers of fears and vulnerabilities.
I also like the lack of a love story. Kate and August grow to care for each other, but they don't acknowledge or act upon any romantic feelings. They're friends. They help each other because they like each other, not out of the expected obligation to bend over backwards for the person you make out with, and not because lust drove them to act.
It was fun and I look forward to the sequel.
***
Next week: Spontaneous, contemporary YA with spontaneous combustion, by Aaron Starmer.
December 13, 2016
December 10, 2016
Thinking About Short Stories
With my current project writing short stories, I'm piecing together ideas about plot and learning a fair bit about myself.
The first thing I learned is that my natural medium is definitely novels. I come up with back story and character quirks that would add dimension to the characters or enrich themes or affect the plot eventually, but in a short story there is no "eventually." There's only the now, and those quirks are just hanging there, extra and unneeded.
A friend of mine once told me that short stories are like a spiral. He didn't elaborate on this metaphor, and it didn't make any sense to me without an explanation. (A short story is also like a chicken. It's also like the color yellow. See, those mean nothing.) So this week I looked it up, hoping someone on the internet would have a better explanation--or any explanation.
So think of an atrium with a spiral staircase around it. The ancient, magical tree in the middle of the atrium is the point of your story. As you climb the stairs, you spiral around it, seeing the magical tree from different angles, but still focusing on the tree. So in a short story, everything you say, everything that happens, is an investigation of your theme, but from different angles. Therefore, all the details, the quirks and the back ground and the world building, have to relate to the point of your story.
Another friend of mine has a podcast, where in last week's episode he shared some advice and helpful questions that he'd heard. The advice was this: everything under the sun has already been written, so don't worry about making the plot too complicated. Stick with a simple plot and let the strength and originality of your characters carry the story and make it original.
I like that. I need a simple plot that I can tell in a sentence or two, and then the rest I can fill with characters and details and world building, as long as those details stay on target, focusing on my magical tree in the atrium and not wandering off the spiral staircase and down a hallway.
So I started thinking about simple plots, and the examples that help me are all pretty silly.
1. Picture books. I have a toddler, so we read a lot of picture books. We read a lot of the same picture books over and over and over, and my toddler is starting to get annoyed with me when in the fourth repeat of "Pierre" I start analyzing the plot instead of doing the funny Pierre voice. (the first two read throughs are for reading, the third is for "where's the dog? There's the dog!" and the fourth is apparently for me to talk to myself.)
2. Fables and fairy tales. I've been thinking about the structure and tone of fairy tales off and on for the past year, and thinking about how that structure and tone relates to the tall-tale oral tradition, so putting this into practice has been fun. I have a friend (the same friend with the podcast) that wrote a writing workbook for children using fables as a model. Bad friend admission: I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think I'm going to bust it out this week.
3. Shaun the Sheep. This is a claymation TV show with seven minute long episodes that revolve around a herd of sheep, the dog that looks after them, and the farmer who has no idea the sheep have any adventures at all. Actually, "adventures" is kind of a strong word. In one episode the sheep refuse to take baths because there's no hot water, so they sneak into the farmhouse and siphon the hot water from the farmer's bath. That's the plot. The fun and the charm of the show is in the sheep's attempts to run and hide from the dog so they don't have to take a bath, and in their attempts (that both succeed and fail) to sneak into the farmhouse and distract the farmer, and in the way they have a pool party in their hot bath at the end.
I've been keeping these in mind this week as I've worked, and I've been keeping in mind that I'll need to go back during the editing process and either ax large portions of my stories or twist them until they can do more to help the story along, until they can be part of the spiral staircase looking at the atrium, and until they can pull their weight.
The first thing I learned is that my natural medium is definitely novels. I come up with back story and character quirks that would add dimension to the characters or enrich themes or affect the plot eventually, but in a short story there is no "eventually." There's only the now, and those quirks are just hanging there, extra and unneeded.
A friend of mine once told me that short stories are like a spiral. He didn't elaborate on this metaphor, and it didn't make any sense to me without an explanation. (A short story is also like a chicken. It's also like the color yellow. See, those mean nothing.) So this week I looked it up, hoping someone on the internet would have a better explanation--or any explanation.
So think of an atrium with a spiral staircase around it. The ancient, magical tree in the middle of the atrium is the point of your story. As you climb the stairs, you spiral around it, seeing the magical tree from different angles, but still focusing on the tree. So in a short story, everything you say, everything that happens, is an investigation of your theme, but from different angles. Therefore, all the details, the quirks and the back ground and the world building, have to relate to the point of your story.
Another friend of mine has a podcast, where in last week's episode he shared some advice and helpful questions that he'd heard. The advice was this: everything under the sun has already been written, so don't worry about making the plot too complicated. Stick with a simple plot and let the strength and originality of your characters carry the story and make it original.
I like that. I need a simple plot that I can tell in a sentence or two, and then the rest I can fill with characters and details and world building, as long as those details stay on target, focusing on my magical tree in the atrium and not wandering off the spiral staircase and down a hallway.
So I started thinking about simple plots, and the examples that help me are all pretty silly.
1. Picture books. I have a toddler, so we read a lot of picture books. We read a lot of the same picture books over and over and over, and my toddler is starting to get annoyed with me when in the fourth repeat of "Pierre" I start analyzing the plot instead of doing the funny Pierre voice. (the first two read throughs are for reading, the third is for "where's the dog? There's the dog!" and the fourth is apparently for me to talk to myself.)
2. Fables and fairy tales. I've been thinking about the structure and tone of fairy tales off and on for the past year, and thinking about how that structure and tone relates to the tall-tale oral tradition, so putting this into practice has been fun. I have a friend (the same friend with the podcast) that wrote a writing workbook for children using fables as a model. Bad friend admission: I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think I'm going to bust it out this week.
3. Shaun the Sheep. This is a claymation TV show with seven minute long episodes that revolve around a herd of sheep, the dog that looks after them, and the farmer who has no idea the sheep have any adventures at all. Actually, "adventures" is kind of a strong word. In one episode the sheep refuse to take baths because there's no hot water, so they sneak into the farmhouse and siphon the hot water from the farmer's bath. That's the plot. The fun and the charm of the show is in the sheep's attempts to run and hide from the dog so they don't have to take a bath, and in their attempts (that both succeed and fail) to sneak into the farmhouse and distract the farmer, and in the way they have a pool party in their hot bath at the end.
I've been keeping these in mind this week as I've worked, and I've been keeping in mind that I'll need to go back during the editing process and either ax large portions of my stories or twist them until they can do more to help the story along, until they can be part of the spiral staircase looking at the atrium, and until they can pull their weight.
December 6, 2016
Pivot Point Review
This week's book is Pivot Point, a young adult novel by Kasie West.
Addie lives in a compound for people with special abilities, where she lives a surprisingly normal life doing normal high schooler things, except that some of the football players are telekinetic and her dad can tell when she's lying and her best friend is always offering to erase her bad memories for her. Addie's gift is that, when faced with a decision, she can look into the future, living out the two two options. When her parents announce they are getting a divorce and her dad is moving out of the compound to live with the norms, they leave Addie the decision about where she'll live. She then lives out both possibilities, both of which have love interests and adjustments and high school shenanigans.
Even though this has a high concept sci-fi set up and even though half of the characters have powers, the novel has its roots firmly in contemporary YA. The people in the compound have abilities, but since they all have abilities and they all know everyone has abilities and they've all grown up in a culture of people with abilities, it's almost a non issue. It's just side notes that the cheerleaders are using their emotion powers to make the crowd excited at football games. It's so normal to Addie that it's not a big deal on which the narrative focused. Instead, the focus is on the characters' interactions as they do normal teenager things.
In fact, it's kind of like two contemporary YA stories as she lives through both time-lines, with the chapters switching back and forth. In one she's a new girl, trying to make new friends, discovering that the football players from her old school are purposefully injuring good players from other schools, and hearing through ever more infrequent phone calls about how her best friend's life is imploding. In the other story, she's wooed by the popular quarterback, has great times with her best friend, and deals with her newly terse relationship with her mother.
This is a story about Addie and how she wants to live her life, and her life is a mostly fluffy romp where most of the conflict is relateable teen drama. She doesn't have world shattering problems, and uses her power in an analogously low-stakes way.
It would be a completely different book, but I do wish she would use her powers to solve murders. Having lived through both time-lines, she (and the reader) get enough of the information to piece together what happened in a murder case happening in the background. Any one time-line only gets half the story, but together she gets the full picture. It seems obvious to me that she should report what she knows and stop it from happening. She argues that failing to live out the future exactly as she's seen it will cause the whole thing to fall apart, therefore all she can do is decide which of her two choices she'll make. But I would argue that she could report a crime and then do the search again to see that she hasn't messed up anything too badly.
My other hesitancy about this book is the emphasis put on football. I'm from Texas. Football was a big thing. My school was not this into football. The players were not in a clique that all the ladies pined for and could get away with anything because football. Maybe it was because our football team sucked, or maybe it was because everyone was a nerd (including the players), but for me the trope of the popular football players who rule the school rings false and feels like a cliche.
That's probably just me, but there was an awful lot of football for not being a novel about football.
***
Next week: This Savage Song, urban fantasy by Victoria Schwab.
Addie lives in a compound for people with special abilities, where she lives a surprisingly normal life doing normal high schooler things, except that some of the football players are telekinetic and her dad can tell when she's lying and her best friend is always offering to erase her bad memories for her. Addie's gift is that, when faced with a decision, she can look into the future, living out the two two options. When her parents announce they are getting a divorce and her dad is moving out of the compound to live with the norms, they leave Addie the decision about where she'll live. She then lives out both possibilities, both of which have love interests and adjustments and high school shenanigans.
Even though this has a high concept sci-fi set up and even though half of the characters have powers, the novel has its roots firmly in contemporary YA. The people in the compound have abilities, but since they all have abilities and they all know everyone has abilities and they've all grown up in a culture of people with abilities, it's almost a non issue. It's just side notes that the cheerleaders are using their emotion powers to make the crowd excited at football games. It's so normal to Addie that it's not a big deal on which the narrative focused. Instead, the focus is on the characters' interactions as they do normal teenager things.
In fact, it's kind of like two contemporary YA stories as she lives through both time-lines, with the chapters switching back and forth. In one she's a new girl, trying to make new friends, discovering that the football players from her old school are purposefully injuring good players from other schools, and hearing through ever more infrequent phone calls about how her best friend's life is imploding. In the other story, she's wooed by the popular quarterback, has great times with her best friend, and deals with her newly terse relationship with her mother.
This is a story about Addie and how she wants to live her life, and her life is a mostly fluffy romp where most of the conflict is relateable teen drama. She doesn't have world shattering problems, and uses her power in an analogously low-stakes way.
It would be a completely different book, but I do wish she would use her powers to solve murders. Having lived through both time-lines, she (and the reader) get enough of the information to piece together what happened in a murder case happening in the background. Any one time-line only gets half the story, but together she gets the full picture. It seems obvious to me that she should report what she knows and stop it from happening. She argues that failing to live out the future exactly as she's seen it will cause the whole thing to fall apart, therefore all she can do is decide which of her two choices she'll make. But I would argue that she could report a crime and then do the search again to see that she hasn't messed up anything too badly.
My other hesitancy about this book is the emphasis put on football. I'm from Texas. Football was a big thing. My school was not this into football. The players were not in a clique that all the ladies pined for and could get away with anything because football. Maybe it was because our football team sucked, or maybe it was because everyone was a nerd (including the players), but for me the trope of the popular football players who rule the school rings false and feels like a cliche.
That's probably just me, but there was an awful lot of football for not being a novel about football.
***
Next week: This Savage Song, urban fantasy by Victoria Schwab.
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