Place

Dorothy Allison wrote an essay called "Place" for The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.  In it, she describes place not as a description of the setting, but as an experience for the character.

"Place requires context.  Is it responsive?  Does it notice me?  Or is it porcelain, pristine, and just ignoring my passage through?  Are there people on the street who flinch when I smile at them?  Is there a reason they do that?"

 "What I'm trying to say is that place is not just landscape--a list of flora and fauna and street names.  That's not place, that's not even decent research."

"I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who's telling me the story.  Place is emotion."

 She compares the place of a hotel room, which is exactly like all other hotel rooms and has no emotional resonance with the character or the reader with the place the character was when her boyfriend said he didn't want her and the place where the character's mother slipped a cookie into her luggage for her to find when she got to that hotel room far away and unpacked.

This relates to something my friend, Eric, has been talking about for quite a while.  He hates description and makes the point that great description tells us about the character, about their emotional state, their habits, or their background.  For example, if a character who just lost her mother describes her kitchen, everything will relate back to her mom and the description will slip into memories, and Eric likes memories.

If you have a non-omnipotent narrator, the things they mark as worth mentioning in a description, where they choose to point the camera, are the things they think are notable--things that remind them of memories or the things that are out of place or strange or wondrous.  They note things they haven't yet taken for granted.  So in a way, any description will tell you about character, about their experiences and their understanding of their environment.  But I think Dorothy Allison and Eric want it pushed further, they want you to lean into those emotional moments and make the connections more explicit.  "I remember my mother standing at our electric stove-top, cursing over inedible spaghetti."

Allison's advice is also related to Jay Asher's advice.  He says that there's no point in describing a 7-eleven or a grocery store, because everyone has experienced those places and knows what you're talking about.  You don't usually have emotional memories of 7-eleven, so going on about how the character feels about a fridge full of Dasani would be a stretch.  I'm not sure if Allison would argue not to set a scene in one of these settings, or if she would argue that they just aren't a place, that the character brings "place" with them.

Allison also mentions that a writer has no idea who their audience is, where they are, or what they've experienced.  So is it presumptive to assume that your reader knows what a 7-eleven looks like and considers them non-places?

Then there's something to be said about non-places.  Just as you can learn about a character through what they choose to describe*, you can learn from how they feel about being in a non-place.  Do they like it?  Are they used to it?  Is it uncomfortable?  Are they in a non-place physically because they're in a non-place emotionally?

"If you're lucky, Oprah is on at eleven-thirty at night.  And you can check out what she's done lately.  Try, try, try not to start channel-hopping and watching the ads.  You can't afford any of that stuff anyway.  It's the middle of the night, three o'clock in the morning, and you're in a room in which the art on the wall is a stylized painting of a flower or an unknown landscape.  And I do mean an unknown landscape.  Someone is doing these paintings and making money, but it's not an actual artist and that landscape is nowhere you recognize.  Also, the mattress is kind of soggy, and you've got one of those covers that you are too hot if you have it on and too cold if you pull it off.  You're awake at three o'clock in the morning and you are nowhere; this is not a place."

This section is her own most damning counter argument.  It is so much more engaging than the scene after a breakup that she describes.  Why is the "you" in this passage awake at 3 AM?  You're clearly having a miserable time.  Is it the fact that emotion slips into what she intends to be a boring setting, a non-place, that shows you bring place with you?  And the details she uses are so relatable.  Oprah on at a weird time!  The comforter that doesn't work!  Yes!  I've been in that hotel room!  That's exactly what it was like!  But Allison reads to learn new things, and I read for escapism and for those moments of resonance, those moments of things I've experienced put on paper where I know I'm not alone.

So maybe there's some middle ground in all this.  You don't need to describe the 7-eleven, but if you describe the lighting as "Mountain Dew colored" hitting a resonance point and a witty detail, and saying it aggravates your hangover (pulling the character's situation and emotional state into the setting, then that works for me.



*This is short hand.  I know a characters are fictional and have no agency to choose anything and it's all the writer making decisions.  [loud raspberry noise]

Modern Monsters, Episode 5: The Reaper

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 1: Modern Monsters

Episode 5: The Reaper

Content Warning: This episode deals with suicidal ideation.  Stay safe.

Ghost Talkers Review

This week's novel is Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Ginger is a medium working for the British Spirit Corps during WWI.  Ostensibly, the Spirit Corps is a group of women who entertain the troops and keep their moral up.  But actually, the British servicemen are conditioned to report to the Spirit Corps as ghosts after they die to describe the events of their deaths, like the locations of snipers and machine guns.  The women of the Spirit Corps speak to the ghosts and take their reports before releasing their spirits.  But now the Germans have figured out that the British are using ghosts and are trying to find details of the project's operation, and there's a spy in the British ranks giving the Germans information about the ghosts--a spy that killed Ginger's intelligence officer fiancé, Ben, when he got too close to discovering the leak.  Now Ginger and Ben's ghost have to go to the front, find the leak, find Ben's murderer, and save the Spirit Corps.

My favorite thing about this book was how Ben's ghost deteriorated over time.  His memory would slip, so he couldn't remember the specifics of what he had learned in his investigation.  This worked well for the story's plot in that he couldn't just tell Ginger who the spies were, so she had to go on an adventure to retrieve his notebook and then figure out how to decode it, because he couldn't remember the cipher he used.  But it also worked to raise tension, because it wasn't simply that he had amnesia, but that he also misremembered things.  He talked about memorizing poems in school that didn't come out until years later.  He confused the cipher he used on his notes about the spies with the cipher he used to talk to Ginger.  So in all this, Ginger not only has to find the truth herself, but she has to sort what he says as true or false.  This was on top of suspicions from early in the book that the war has changed Ben and that he might be the spy and might be misdirecting everyone even after death.

He becomes more and more driven by his base emotions, like protecting Ginger and taking revenge on his murderer.  He went into rages and poltergeisted at people who hurt Ginger on accident because she startled them.  Eventually there wasn't much left of him and what was left wasn't recognizable as Ben, or even as human.  My favorite image of the book is that ghost Ben would be both standing at attention and crumpled in a ball, holding his own head.

This is all putting the emphasis on Ben a bit more than I would like, so let me clarify: my favorite part was that Ben deteriorated and Ginger handled it.  She was professional as a trained medium who constantly experienced death.  She was afraid of Ben's rages and of his personality being lost.  She was broken up that he had died, yet glad he was still around, and ashamed that she wanted him to stay and worried that he would stay too long, and then pained again that he would leave eventually.  There was so much love in her, and she was so strong in the face of supernatural yet relatable hardship.

I did get confused sometimes as to why Ginger wasn't talking to certain people, when they would probably have valuable information. Sometimes it seemed a bit because the plot needed her to not know things and to be in certain places.  For instance, at one point Ginger and Ben's former assistant get separated on a train because the doctor in charge drags the injured assistant off to a car with people with similar injuries and sends Ginger to go nurse the not-so-wounded guys in the car for the not-so-wounded.  When she gets off the train, she can't find the assistant.  Instead of asking the doctor where the assistant went, she hides so she's not spotted.  I almost get that.  But not completely.  It would have saved a lot of time if she'd kept up her nurse-supervising-one-wounded-guy disguise to have one conversation with the doctor who was supposed to have taken responsibility for her charge. Oh well.

***

Next week: On the Edge of Gone, apocalyptic YA, by Corinne Duyvis.

Modern Monsters, Episode 4: Shenanigans

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 1: Modern Monsters

Episode 4: Shenanigans



Edit: Sorry for the wrong link.  Everything should be in working order now.

Sunshine Review

This week's novel is Sunshine by Robin McKinley.  Vampires!  Cinnamon rolls!

Sunshine, a baker at her family's coffee house known for her cinnamon rolls, drives out to the lake one day, where she is attacked by vampires.  They chain her to the wall of a ballroom in an abandoned mansion as tempting food for the prisoner chained to the opposite wall: a rival vampire.  After two nights and a day imprisoned together, Sunshine uses the magic her grandmother taught her, magic she hasn't though about in years, to escape and help her cell-mate escape too.  She escaped, but now her friends and family are all concerned that she disappeared for two days and came back traumatized, the police in charge of controlling supernatural activity don't believe her when she says she can't remember what happened, and the vampire gang that kidnapped her wants revenge.

The voice makes this book.  Sunshine is so engaging and describes her world and the people in her life with such humorous honesty that it makes even long sections of bakery drama and descriptions of her traumatized wooziness entertaining.  Her voice is colloquial, interrupting herself to hum and wonder how she should phrase things, especially delicate things.

This is a secondary world fantasy with modern(ish) technology, which I am all about.  Everyone knows about the Others, who are various kinds of supernatural monsters, from vampires to demons to were-beasts.  They've recently come out of a war against the Others that has left them in a semi-post-apocolyptic state, where a large part of the population was lost and large sections of land are unusable.  But at the same time, Sunshine's family runs a little bohemian coffee house in a quirky neighborhood that's working to hold off gentrification.  There's a branch of the police that deals with supernatural activity and a thriving business in charms and wards.

I also appreciated that Sunshine's vampire ally is never described as boyfriend material.  She always describes him as her partner when they start working together to combat the rival vampire gang that's after them.  She makes it clear that just being in the same room as a vampire puts you so on edge that it's like being stalked by an apex predator.  She makes it clear that people are only drawn to vampires because they have mind control powers if you look them in the eye, and those instances of coercion are jarringly strange.  With a bit of clarity, Sunshine recognizes that her vampire ally is unattractive in the extreme.  He looks dead with pasty skin and the way he unnaturally moves and unnaturally breathes make her uncomfortable.  It's a nice twist on the vampire story I've always heard, that they're unnaturally attractive.

I enjoyed the side characters and Sunshine's relationships with them were complex and respectful and mature.  Sunshine and her mom bicker constantly, often exploding into screaming matches, but at the same time they love one another unconditionally.  At one point it comes out that Sunshine's best friend has been working for the supernatural police, recruited in part to keep tabs on Sunshine.  But instead of that ruining their relationship, Sunshine hears her out and they start working together to track down the vampire gang.  Sunshine's boyfriend, Mel, gives her space when she doesn't want to talk about her trauma and wakes up in the night screaming, and Sunshine realizes that he's not sharing everything with her either.  She questions if it's a good thing that they give each other so much privacy, but instead of ditching him for her vampire partner, they agree that no matter who they are or what they're hiding, they're always friends and will always support one another.


***

Next week: Ghost Talkers, World War I with ghost soldiers, by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Agency in Young Adult Fiction

There's a natural tension in young adult fiction: the main characters are the same age as the readers (teenagers), and yet in order to have a story, the characters need enough agency, enough freedom from adult supervision to have an adventure.  This creates a handful of tropes that can work really well, or can trigger my eye rolling.

1. The parents are dead.  This worked well in The Reader, which was a recent review here on the site, because her father's murder deeply affected her and sent her on a vengeance spree.  Also she was trying to rescue her guardian and therefore working towards regaining some supervision.  But often enough, killing the parents is a way to shuffle them off so we never have to think about them again.  Sometimes the loss of parents happens well before the story starts and doesn't even seem to affect the kid at all.  I've learned that orphans in the English countryside have whacky, lighthearted fun! 

2. The parents are criminally negligent.  This crops up a lot in contemporary YA, where the parents are too wound up in their own things to remember they have wild teenagers or to notice that those teenagers talk to demons.  You also see parents who travel for long periods of time for work and leave their kids home unsupervised in an empty house.  I've learned that this is a recipe for your kid getting their group of friends together in your living room to have a séance and do battle with a poltergeist.

3. Related to 2: when the adults know that the kids are about to face grave danger and instead of stepping in, say, "No!  It has to be you!"  I will forever hold up the sixth and seventh Harry Potter books as an example of this.  Even though Harry did not graduate magic high school and has no idea what he's doing or how to do any of the magic involved, even though he has the whole Order of the Phoenix (which is full of some of the best, most experienced witches and wizards, all of whom will drop what they're doing to help him in any way possible) at his disposal, no, no, he's the chosen one and it has to be him.  Let that child go muck around and be in danger, and drag his friends into it to boot.  Not only is it child endangerment, but it's a bit of a logical stretch that a kid will be able to defeat the dark lord for you.

I make fun of these, but I completely understand why they happen.  Another recent review here on the blog was The Rhithmatist, and in it the adults did a good job sheltering the kids and keeping them away from the danger.  This resulted in the stakes being really low as the main character's conflicts revolved around failing to make friends and bickering with the friends he had and not liking one of the new professors, instead of the conflicts revolving around kids being kidnapped and possibly murdered by terrifying chalk monsters.  The big danger was not front and center for the main character so it wasn't front and center for the reader.  Before I put my finger on what was happening, I thought the book was skewing younger, leaning towards being a middle grade book.  The adults behaved appropriately in that one and so the main character had less agency.

It wouldn't be much of a story if the parents do all the adventuring and the kid is their sidekick.  Although, that's sort of what happens in The Girl from Everywhere and not only did it work great, but that was an awesome book.

So now I want a book where the kid is the chosen one, but the kid's mom says "Nope," and does everything they can to keep their baby safe.  It'd be from the mom's point of view, making it not a young adult book, and then...I don't know who would read this but me.

Modern Monsters, Episode 3: The Spider Woman

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 1: Modern Monsters

Episode 3:The Spider Woman