Review: Dear Bully edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones

Dear Bully edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones

Review by Elle

Publication information: HarperTeen / 6 Sep 2011 / 352 pages

Where I heard about it: We were sent a review copy by HarperTeen.

Spoilers: Not applicable! Surely you can’t spoil non-fiction.

Review:

Discover how Lauren Kate transformed the feeling of that one mean girl getting under her skin into her first novel, how Lauren Oliver learned to celebrate ambiguity in her classmates and in herself, and how R.L. Stine turned being the “funny guy” into the best defense against the bullies in his class.

Read your favorite authors’ stories about bullying—as silent observers on the sidelines of high school, as victims, as perpetrators.

This has been one of those reviews that I’ve written and rewritten until my fingers fall off and I’ve memorised the words. It has been so difficult to express exactly how I feel about this anthology; indeed, Dear Bully has gained so many bloggers’ and readers’ highest recommendations that it almost feels like an act of self-sabotage to give it less than 10/10. Sadly, though, I think it that’s where I’m forced to go with this because as much as Dear Bully is a ceaselessly moving, gut-wrenching, fist-pumping look at bullying and its results that I wanted to give to every single broken child and say, “Here, you can fix it,” it also has its low moments, moments which made me wonder whether or not it could have been possible to have been a little less trite and whether it could have tried just a little harder to appeal to a slightly wider audience.

I was really excited when I first heard Dear Bully was in the works but I confess that I had largely forgotten about it between its initial press and its publication date because my plate was so saturated with awesome books, so you can imagine how chuffed I was when it hit my doorstep at the beginning of the month in amongst some dystopian titles from HarperTeen. It has been my opinion for some time that a non-fiction book about bullying and survival was drastically overdue for the YA scene and, as it happens, I genuinely think that the end product of Dear Bully will be as valuable for adults and parents (if not more so) as it will be for the young adults that it’s marketed to. Certainly, Dear Bully would be an asset to any educators or individuals who work with young people in a counselling or welfare capacity to refer back to and discuss within their groups, as ideally positioned as it is to be a tool to encourage young adults to change their perceptions of bullying.

Here’s the answer: learning to fit in, learning to get along, ignoring it, and being the better person don’t work.

Asking victims to save themselves doesn’t wwork. People need to intervene. They need to give up on disbelief, on stupid, gossamer lies – oh, it’s not that bad, you’ll survive, high school is only four years.

They need to start listening. They need to hear us say: It’s that bad. Four years is too long. It has to stop. Putting faith in the idea that it will make a difference – we’re all sharing our bullying stories. This one is mine.

- Saundra Mitchell

In fact, largely, I found that Dear Bully achieved exactly what it set out to do: it was a celebration of survival and a portrait of the sheer tenacity with which the human spirit responds to being slowly crushed. I love the concept even now (having long finished with the book and had time to mull it over) that the once-trampled geeks and the ridiculously-repressed nerds, those from the land of endless imagination as a form of escape, are passing over that wisdom to others in the same position. I loved that the majority of the book was made up of accounts from the quiet people, from the people who stood on the sidelines and who hid in corners and libraries and books and behind their hair in the hopes that they wouldn’t be noticed. I love that the book contained honest accounts of people who stood back and let bullying happen, who were the bullies, and who ultimately tried to understand their bullies. I am so glad that the book also contained realistic accounts of authors who had contacted their bullies after school to tell them what idiots they were and who, for the most part, received a very prompt response from them which turned out to be a big fat apology.

Sadly, however, the things that Dear Bully wears most proudly on its sleeve as strengths are also its unfortunate low points. I feel fairly strongly that the cover is going to be prohibitive for male readers within the young adult genre who might otherwise have picked up a book about bullying and who may need it just as badly. There are, of course, counter arguments to say that many of the authors contained within this volume might not have appealed to male readers in the first place (lots of covers with dresses on them!) or that if those males read (those covers with dresses on them!) those authors anyway, they won’t care, but I don’t think the cover is going to make it pride of place on any male shelves (there’s a reason the US and UK covers of John Green’s books don’t have people on them, guys – even if The Fault in Our Stars has taken that a little far). Secondly, I have to say that I was really disappointed with the introduction to the book. We love Ellen Hopkins (see!) but the introduction felt like an amalgamation of facts with very little feeling in it; the introduction comprises the first X pages of the book and it’s going to be the first introduction any kid who hasn’t heard of Dear Bully receives – it reads like a textbook and I can envision many hands sliding it back on the shelves.

Thinking about it, wondering what happened to being

                   safe, what happened

To being able to protect my sloppy tongue with friends.

                   And I wonder

What if mean was frozen in a game of tag and nobody

                  ever touched

Its fingers to let it go run free and it just had to stay there

                 alone forever.

- Carrie Jones

It’s more difficult to comment on people’s personal experiences. I thought that the majority of the anthology was very balanced in its treatment of the authors’ stories – I especially loved the fact that it was split into easily digestible sections and that those sections were named for individual themes. There were several sections that stood out to be as truly inspirational, stories that I feel are universal and that I want to rip out of the book and make random kids in the street read. There are other sections that are humorous and provide such a welcome relief (and made me cackle like a loon on the bus). But there were a few sections which I felt just didn’t fit and which, as they accumulated, started to add up to an uncomfortable feeling of wondering why they were included in the first place. I’m sure that all of the authors meant their accounts very genuinely and that there was a great deal of support for this anthology in the compiling of it but it as a reader, I have to say that it added a very dull note for me to read accounts of people saying, “Well, I wasn’t really bullied but…” alongside people who had some truly harrowing experiences and triumphed at the end.

On the whole, I’m very pleased that Dear Bully exists and I’m going to recommend to every teen librarian and educator that I know that it be included in some way in their collection or curriculum but I my initial enthusiasm is just a wee bitty bruised, as we would say in bonnie Scottish-land.

Now, as an adult, you wish you could go back and change it all. You see yourself strong, as strong as you are now. You see yourself standing up for Matt and Dina and Michelle and Stewart. And Bigfoot. Especially Bigfoot. You want to wipe away the tears and the confusion and the hurt of that sixteen-year-old boy. And you want to tell him you’re sorry. Sorry that you left him there, crying in the field.

But you can’t change anything and the memory of leaving tht man/child broken by the tractor will hurt you forever. But you survived. And all you can do is share your strength with others, with teens who have been bullied or who are afraid to do anything about those who bully. And you try and you try and you hope that you’re heling, but behind it all you can still see him.

Bigfoot crying in the field.

- Teri Brown

7 double-stuff oreos: A book that comes with high recommendations.

(For more rating information see here.)

Book Babble: Kate on Top Five Books NOT for High School

Over the past week, in addition to reading endless scholarly articles and writing nine possibly-horrible pages of my own, I also hosted a house guest in the form my sixteen-year-old cousin. In the midst of discussing politics and parents – we are those kinds of cousins – we spent a lot of time talking about our shared passion: books. Books that were good, books that were bad, and books that were ugly, books we were required to read and books we read for fun, books we were currently salivating over and books we’d read a thousand times. As she is starting her junior year at my old high school, though, the discussion inevitably turned to the curriculum (which is much the same as it was when I was sixteen), and it all led me to consider the required books we had in common – that maybe should never have been taught at all.

As you read this list, keep in mind: I’m not saying that these books are useless in curriculum as a whole, because I think several are well-suited for college. I’m also not saying that a high school student is incapable of reading any of these books. I think most high school students absolutely have the capacity to read these independently. No, what I’m saying is that these books shouldn’t be part of the high school curriculum and forced down the throats of the unwilling. Wait, no, don’t go. Let me explain!

The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

11th grade American literature

Let me tell you a little story about The Scarlet Letter: it got me grounded for six weeks.

The problem with The Scarlet Letter is a simple one. It’s boring. I understand completely the time period from whence it came and the moral concerns of Hawthorne and other American romantics – you can’t graduate with an English degree without getting to know the genre, and I’ve read “Young Goodman Brown” in both during high school and college and then again as a teacher – but words cannot describe to you the effort it took me, as a sixteen-year-old, to slog through the story. “Story” even seems like a bit of a gift, because I don’t remember the book being plot-driven as much as morality-driven. And something about Pearl, that weird little girl, in a forest with falling leaves and a babbling brook.

And then, there’s the context problem. The Scarlet Letter is almost always taught during the early part of the year, during discussions of Puritanism. Our reading of it was wedged firmly between “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and Anne Bradstreet poems, which suggests that it’s actually, you know, literature from that period. It’s not. It’s Hawthorne retroactively claiming that period to discuss morality, sin, and Christian guilt, and actually says more about the mid-1800s than actual Puritans. It’s my same problem with using The Crucible (which is an allegory about McCarthyism, by the by) to represent the Salem Witch Trial-era: maybe that era is featured, but that’s not actually what the play is about! That’s like saying Fingersmith is Victorian England at its finest, or that Water for Elephants best represents Prohibition-era America. The time periods are settings for new ideas, but they are just settings.

But I digress from my actual point: The Scarlet Letter is a difficult book to read, and I think a difficult book to teach unless you are willing to really delve into the moral issues inherent in it, which is hard to do in high school at all, let alone in a public high school. I struggled to follow or connect with the book in any way, and eventually ended up giving up on it. Which meant I didn’t do well on the quizzes and assignments, leading me to a temporary C- in the class – and being grounded until the end of the quarter. Thanks, Hawthorne!

Suggestions to replace The Scarlet Letter: Try some of Hawthorne’s short stories (properly contextualized!); “Young Goodman Brown”, “Dr. Heidigger’s Experiment”, and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” are all drastically more engaging!

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

10th grade literature

I don’t have a story about how Julius Caesar ruined my life – I never had to memorize anything from it, I didn’t fail the tests on it, it never got me grounded. No, instead, my issue with Julius Caesar is a simple one: I think it’s a horrible introduction to Shakespeare.

Oh, I’d read a Shakespearean play prior to Julius Caesar, because we’d done Romeo & Juliet the year before, but let’s face facts. Everyone knows the story of Romeo & Juliet, and given that I was in high school not long after the Leonardo DiCaprio movie came out? I think my entire class could’ve burned their books and still at least passed the class. For a lot of us, Julius Caesar was our first substantive interaction with Shakespeare, and it’s the wrong choice. I think it has some of the greatest speeches Shakespeare’s ever written, but it lacks his magic. I don’t feel when I read Julius Caesar the way I do when I read Othello, Macbeth or Much Ado About Nothing. And I think if you want to capture the attention of younger readers (especially those as emotionally immature as 10th graders), Julius Caesar isn’t going to do the trick. (Neither is Merchant of Venice, the other 10th grade Shakespeare selection at my old high school, but it slightly edges out Julius Caesar. Just barely.)

Suggestions to replace Julius Caesar: Why not one of the comedies? They require a little more from the teacher in terms of giving context, but they’re also so much more engaging. And since a lot of schools don’t offer anything but the usual staple of tragedies (Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet), it might be nice to pepper in Much Ado About Nothing or Twelfth Night.

To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

10th grade literature

To Kill a Mockingbird and I have a special relationship because I never read it in high school. Oh, it was required, but I never even cracked the spine on that book. I blamed it mostly on the fact that we read it during a busy month during my high school career, but there really wasn’t an excuse. I just – didn’t read it. Until I was 25 and preparing to teach it myself, it was that one book everyone but me had read.

For a while, I don’t actually know why I’d skipped out on reading it. As an adult, I found it engaging, thoughtful, and powerful. Atticus Finch is one of my favorite attorneys of all time, fictional or otherwise. I tore through it and enjoyed it. Why, then, did I just ignore it when I was fifteen?

But then, I tried to teach the book.

I think To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books you need to come to in your own time. Being forced to read it sucks everything powerful about the book right out and leaves you with skeletal remains. There’s a scene I remember where Jem destroys these flower bushes with his sister’s prized baton because the woman who lives in the house shouts horrible things from her porch. His father punishes him by making him go over and read to the woman, who is elderly and very ill. It’s not a major scene, all told, but for some reason it really affected me when I read it alone. When I read it to my students, I expected some kind of emotional impact – and got none. Oh, a few told me afterward how much they loved the book and planned on reading it again, on their own, but for most, it was just another book I was forcing them to read. I’d like to think maybe I avoided reading To Kill a Mockingbird when I was fifteen because I knew I wasn’t ready, and wanted to wait until I was. I know that’s not the real reason, but I’m glad I did.

Suggestions to replace To Kill a Mockingbird: I’ll be the first to point out there is woefully little contemporary literature taught in schools. As To Kill a Mockingbird is often lauded as a more “contemporary” part of the curricular canon, why not replace it with something more modern? I don’t have concrete suggestions here, but something in the last 30 years might be fun for students who sometimes get the impression that schools don’t believe in books written after 1965.

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

9th grade literature

Oh, Great Expectations, what can I say about you without this becoming a massive rant?

When I started reading Great Expectations, I felt incredibly sophisticated. It was Charles Dickens, who is kind of a Big Deal if you like books, and here I was, just starting out in high school, armed with one of his novels. I brought it to every class with me, I read it during all my downtime, and I was convinced if I was to be worth anything as a reader and a literature-lover, I had to devour Dickens. But I lost this steam very early on and now, I couldn’t tell you how Great Expectations ended – or really, how it started – if you had me at gunpoint.

Dickens is a hard read, which I think is pretty much universally acknowledged at this point. His descriptions are endless, stretching over full pages, but why not! He got paid by installment. But more than that, I think it’s he’s a difficult “sell” unless there’s an engaging plot driving the story. And for that reason, Great Expectations is my Dickensian The Scarlet Letter: the plot isn’t enough to make the nearly-inaccessible prose worth it. When I read A Tale of Two Cities, I struggled just as much as I did with Great Expectations (and, unlike with Great Expectations, skipped chapters here and there) but I could probably recite the plot well enough to at least convince someone I read it 11 years ago. I can’t do that with Great Expectations. I only really remember the mouldering wedding cake.

I’m not sure how many high schools actually make Great Expectations a 9th grade novel, but pseudo-sophistication aside, I’m not sure what the book actually did for me in the long run. I feel like my inability to recall much about it is a testament to how poor a curricular choice it was, except maybe for the part where my teacher felt bad that we were all miserable and let us work outside.

Suggestions to replace Great Expectations: Anything else ever written by anyone? Though seriously, if Dickens is a must, why not A Christmas Carol? I know most people know the story, but it’s a lighter read and I think it’s significantly more lasting.

Walden

by Henry David Thoreau

11th grade American literature

Confession: I loved Walden. Of everything we read in the 11th grade, including A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby, Walden might actually be my very favorite. I was heavily into philosophy and trying to sort out all my beliefs, and Walden helped me with that.

But school almost ruined it for me.

I think this harkens back to my point with To Kill a Mockingbird in that some books are best being read on their own. I didn’t want to pick apart and analyze how Thoreau spoke to the greater transcendentalist movement or the possible symbolism in the birds he heard chirping every morning. I wanted to enjoy his perspective and the way it affected me, as a person, without the ugly complication of filling out a study guide. Writing essays comparing and contrasting him to Emerson just turned something that I was enjoying into meaningless rote, and I’m pretty sure if I hadn’t felt so strongly about Walden, I probably would’ve ended up hating it.

This may, admittedly, be more a statement of how we teach high school than what books we use to do it, but I really think Walden is best suited saved for the people who are ready for it – or at least, for a class when you can talk about how you relate to it, rather than solely how it ties into the time period and genre and.

Suggestions to replace Walden: We read a lot of Emerson, too, at my school, so I’d say “just stick with the Emerson.” Or read a single chapter of Walden rather than the whole thing. Frankly, I’d like to see more essays included in high school curriculum, and maybe have a wide range. I think it’d be a nice addition to the traditional canon.

This isn’t an all-inclusive list. I actually had several more that didn’t make the cut for one reason or another.

But I’m curious: are there books any of you read in school you thought were really ill-suited for school? Any you look at now and don’t know what your teachers were thinking? I’d love to know!

Review: A Blue So Dark by Holly Schindler

A Blue So Dark by Holly Schindler

Review by Elle

Publication information: Flux / 1 May 2010 / 227 pages

Where I heard about it: It’s a loooong story.

Spoilers: Very mild spoilers (which are clearly marked)!

Review:

Fifteen-year-old Aura Ambrose has been hiding a secret. Her mother, a talented artist and art teacher, is slowly being consumed by schizophrenia, and Aura has been her sole caretaker ever since Aura’s dad left them. Convinced that “creative” equals crazy, Aura shuns her own artistic talent. But as her mother sinks deeper into the darkness of mental illness, the hunger for a creative outlet draws Aura toward the depths of her imagination. Just as desperation threatens to swallow her whole, Aura discovers that art, love, and family are profoundly linked—and together may offer an escape from her fears.

It’s been so difficult for me to write this review.

I first heard about Holly Schindler when her second novel Playing Hurt popped up on several of my most trusted book friends’ wish-lists but a quick investigation revealed that there was nothing particularly appealing to me about its synopsis (basketball players, ex-hockey stars, yadda yadda) so I didn’t pick it up. During the same sojourn on her Goodreads page, however, I discovered that her debut novel A Blue So Dark has one of the most arresting covers I’ve seen this year and so, edging forward with a significant amount of It Could Be About Mermaids trepidation, I placed an Amazon order and gingerly hid the product of my impulse buy on the bottom of my reading pile.

The spirit moved me to pick up A Blue So Dark a couple of weeks ago, literally right after finishing Rebecca; I was looking for a change of pace, something short and contemporary, but most of all I had hoped that a novel about parental schizophrenia would be a story which packed enough of an emotional punch to drag me out of my post-amazing-book malaise. I think perhaps my experience of A Blue So Dark suffered more from what I was looking for from it than it did as a novel but nevertheless, I find myself looking back on it as a maze of contradictions, a story which I enjoyed enough to gush about whilst reading but one that makes me scratch my head looking back at the end.

I’d rattle her shoulders to get her attention, except the way she slumps in the chair, it’d break my heart to touch her. Her whole body’s so limp, she doesn’t seem lie she has any bones at all. She seems more like a jean jacket that’s been left behind, draped over a chair.

I want to grab this jacket – no, this empty shell – and go running outside, screaming, “Wait! You forgot this!” And I want my real mom, the artist who teaches drawing classes and smells like sun – to turn on her heel. “Goodness,” she’d say. “How silly of me to forget this old thing.” And she’d step into that empty shell I’m holding like it’s a bodysuit. She’d zip up the front and smile at me. “That’s better,” she’d say. And life would go on as normal.

Sure. Normal. Whatever that is.

The most important thing that comes to mind for me is that Aura was a wonderful narrator. We join her story just before everything officially goes to hell in a handbasket, whilst she is immediately in the midst of hiding her mother’s mental illness, trying to negotiate the battle ground that is high school, fighting to define her feelings for her estranged father and struggling to come to terms with her best friend Janny’s new baby and her subsequent new priorities. It is clear right from the beginning of the novel how hard Aura tries. If there’s one thing that stuck with me from the experience of reading A Blue So Dark, it is the sheer tenacity with which Aura fights to hold her family together – and though her family as she sees them are an undoubtedly unconventional bunch, I found it to be a wonderfully real glance at the priorities of a teenager who feels like she has been abandoned by her father. I think I perhaps enjoy stories about broken families more than I enjoy tight-knit a-little-too-perfect-families (in contemporary YA specifically) because I find them to be far more relatable. To whit, I loved the fractured relationship between Aura and her father and the fact that it is clear that she has had all of the innocence that we carry about our parents utterly eroded and she can see her father for what he is (a not very pleasant individual who is reprehensible for a hundred reasons and yet still frustratingly sympathetic) whether she likes it or not.

I also loved the portrait of Grace (Aura’s mother) and her decline into mental illness that we are able to glimpse through Aura’s almost-flashback memories. I think that Ana says it best when she says that the atmosphere in the novel is utterly suffocating – so many things happen in such a short span of time – and as someone who has suffered from mental illness, I can say that this Schindler’s description of this experience hit very close to home for me. While Grace is suspended in a bubble of immediate wants and needs, Aura’s world is spinning so erratically out of control and in every direction that it’s impossible to pin down exactly what can be done to fix anything or to help, even as a temporary measure, and feelings of helplessness abound. As a reader, I was desperate to reach into the novel, alternatively in a state of wanting to shake Aura and wanting to hug her and tell her that she’ll have the chance to grow and develop outside of this madness if she can just hold on long enough. These things collectively are triumphs of Schilder’s and are expressed poignantly and ironically through Aura’s epigraphs to the beginning of every chapter and through her sharp and frighteningly accurate summations of the world around her.

I try to go back to the portfolio, which has always amazed me. To think, my own mother was responsible for these strange, fearless images that refuse to be caged by any -ism. These works aren’t just abstract, or expressionist, or impressionist. They are somehow a blend of all, with odd angles, incongrous details – broad, bfanciful strokes of colour breaking up blurry, out-of-focus faces that peer out from windows or cafés or cars or moon craters, each setting so ornately detailed that it seems far more like a photograph than something created entirely by hand.

The more I leaf through it, the more her portfolio taunts me. These pictures are telling me Look, Aura, right now you’re okay, just like she was. But soon, you won’t be. Soon, you will start to fall to pieces, see? Because even these pieces – this artwork – it doesn’t make any sense. That’s the schizo mind at work, Aura. Tiny pieces, shards, fragments – that’s all you’ll be. Enjoy being whole while you can. It won’t last forever.

There are things about the novel, however, which are wanting enough to make my overall experience not nearly the complete catharsis that I’d hoped for at the end of such an incredibly hard journey. (I would skip this paragraph if you are adverse to mild spoilers.) On the subject of family relationships, I found Aura’s relationship with her grandmother, Nell, to be an extremely tenuous link. We are introduced to this plotline of the estranged grandmother very early on in what is already a very short novel and (I presume in an effort to condense the act of expounding back-story) we’re informed as readers that Aura has already done the legwork, found her grandmother and has gone to work for her in her photography shop in order to get closer to her. Aura knows who she is, Nell supposedly has no idea who Aura is, and it’s all terribly convenient. What is more convenient is that when Aura is most in need of help – when she desperately needs to confide in someone about her mother but finds herself completely unable to tell a teacher, her father, a doctor, a neighbour – she somehow manages to confess all to Nell and the ending is wrapped up in a neat little bow of It’s All Better Now.

Furthermore, there was the frustrating presence of Jeremy, a pretty skater boy whom Aura had a crush on. Jeremy’s physical description never seemed to gel with his emotional presence for me and there were times when far more important matters should have been addressed but were delayed or glossed over for more Jeremy interactions. Despite this, I actually loved Jeremy’s cheeky side and his surprisingly (and slightly contrived) depth of empathy and I would have loved to see more character development for him. Overall, in fact, I think that character development was what was really lacking in the novel; though I didn’t have the same problems that some people had with Aura, I did feel that everyone who wasn’t Aura or Grace got the short end of the stick.

I am confident, however, that the too long, didn’t read portion of this post could be simply summed up in the following: it was enjoyable, there were gut-punching moments and moments of disturbing accuracy, but overall the novel suffered from being so incredibly short. I felt like someone had ripped about 100 pages of it out at random just to spite me. I would definitely recommend this novel (the length and the happy ending may make it especially to reluctant readers) but I would caution that it doesn’t have that rounded feeling of completeness that you might have come to expect.

7 double-stuff oreos: A book that comes with high recommendations.

(For more rating information see here.)

And some more linkies, just to make the score even on this one, because I think it perhaps deserves more than I’m giving it:

The Book Smugglers’ review

ReadingWatchingLiving’s review

ChickLovesLit’s review

Paperback Treasures’ review

The Book Scout’s review

In My Mailbox: The Edition That’s Not My Fault

In My Mailbox (IMM) is a weekly feature organised by The Story Siren. IMM is a post where you can show which books entered your house and it also gives you a chance to say thank you to the people that kindly sent them. To find out more about how you can join in click here.

Graceling by Kristin Cashore | Goodreads | Angie @ Angieville’s review | US cover
Fire by Kristin Cashore | Goodreads | Angie @ Angieville’s review | US cover
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater | Goodreads | Angie @ Angieville’s review | Maggie Stiefvater’s blog
The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan | Goodreads | Rosy @ The Review Diaries site | Angie @ Angieville’s review | US cover

Writer Workshop Week: Michelle Harrison

Day 5 – Michelle Harrison

Writer Workshop Week is a week of guest interviews with well-known authors who Elle and Kate have asked to share a little bit of their writing process for aspiring novelists and readers alike!

Hello, Memoirites! Today’s author is Michelle Harrison, author of the award-winning The 13 Treasures. Not only has her writing won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book prize, but the sequels The 13 Curses,  The 13 Secrets, are now available and Michelle is working on her first novel for young adults entitled Unrest! Welcome, Michelle!

Elle: Hi Michelle, thanks for stopping by! Loving The 13 Treasures as I do, I’d be really interested in how difficult it is for you to weave secrets and red-herrings into your plotlines. Do you pre-plan right from the beginning or do secrets appear as you write?

Michelle: Hi – thank you for having me! Well, the process of writing each of my books was very different and so the occurrence of secrets and red herrings varies from being planned right from the start, or something that just pops into my head at the time. With The 13 Treasures I jumped straight in with only the premise of a girl who had the rare ability to see fairies, and a rough idea of the ending. The result of that was that the plot meandered all over the place and I ended up cutting and rewriting extensively – I essentially wrote two or three different books. As it turned out, this was a good thing because it was a learning process. (I found a few of my very first chapters squirreled away a couple of weeks ago, and they’re SO cringe-worthy!) About halfway through the novel I discovered that planning ahead really helped, and began to make a few bullet point notes of what I wanted to appear in a certain chapter.

When I wrote The 13 Curses I was struck through with fear that I wouldn’t be able to complete a second book. I wrote a synopsis with almost every little detail planned, which was helpful in many respects but took some of the enjoyment out of the writing. I think it was another learning curve and just gave me the confidence I needed to make it to the end. Being immersed in the first book for so long (around seven years) made me too comfortable in that story and also made it harder for me to leave – starting something new was a scary prospect.

Since then, I’ve learned that a balance works best for me when it comes to planning. My third book, The 13 Secrets, was written to an outline which was basically an extended blurb. This was exciting enough for me to want to write the book but it left room for change. The further I am into a story the more ideas I get; it’s like they feed off each other and if the story is already structured too rigidly then it doesn’t allow better ideas to surface. I’m using this ‘extended blurb’ approach for my current novel, Unrest, and it suits me well so far.

Kate: Similarly, I’m curious as to if you always knew The 13 Treasures was going to be part of a series. Is this something that made itself clear to you as you wrote, or did the characters always make it clear to you that they had more complicated plans ahead?

Michelle: When I first began The 13 TreasuresI was set on the idea of a trilogy with each book being self-contained. I had vague ideas for books two and three. Towards the end of the first book when I’d started to research getting published, much of the advice warned against trilogies for a first time writer because it was a bigger chance for a publisher to take than a stand-alone. With that in mind (and also the desire to work on something new) I began to think of the book as a single story, but with the option of continuing if there was a demand for it from a publisher. Most people are surprised to

find out that the character of Red only made it into the book in the very last draft, and obviously her story led the way for a sequel. When I eventually got an agent I mentioned the idea of a second book from Red’s point of view. She loved it, and so we decided to go for this approach when it came to meeting publishers.

When I was about halfway through The 13 Curses I started getting ideas for a potential third book in the series and luckily, that’s what my publisher asked for. So I started out wanting to write a trilogy, changed my mind, then ended up writing one anyway!

Elle: I see a theme evolving in our questions because I’d like to know how much of your characters that you discover in the process of writing versus how much you know at the outset. I feel like Tanya (The 13 Treasures) comes to know herself in the course of the books – was it planned that way?

Michelle: I usually know very little about my characters at the start. More often than not it’s just one or two things about them, and sometimes a feeling that develops into more. For instance, Warwick, the groundskeeper of Elvesden Manor, came into my head as a sullen, unfriendly

The treasure map! Click to enlarge

man but I knew there were reasons for his ways, and his back story was one of my favourites to invent. As the stories develop, characters become real to me and I end up knowing things about them that never even make it into the books.

Leading on from the previous question, it’s probably because I work in this way that the books evolved into a series. As the characters became more complex and rounded, and their motivations clearer, they drove the continuation of the story.

Kate: To break the chain: I’ve heard a lot about writer’s retreats, or authors getting together and spending a day just writing. Have you ever tried writing with a group like that? If you have, was it helpful, or distracting?

Michelle: I’ve never been on one. I’m not sure it would work for me – I can imagine getting terribly distracted by a) the other writers; there’s nothing more off-putting than hearing about the thousands of words someone is reeling off when you’re still staring at your chapter heading; and b) the location. If it was a lovely place, such as a country cottage I’d be likely to go off exploring and kid myself it was research. I tend to be a hermit, and a snappish one at that, when I write so I’m probably best left alone to get on with it!

Elle: How much research do you put into your books? Every writer gleans inspiration from somewhere different; you’ve lived in a haunted flat and you were surrounded by children’s books every day for a while, do you find that you look back and see bits and pieces of your experiences popping up in your novels?

Michelle: Definitely. I always research whatever I write about, whether it’s fairies or ghosts, but my books are riddled with other incidental things that have happened to me or people I know. My current book is about a boy who experiences sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences, and it’s through these conditions that he connects with the spirit world. I got the idea from a family member who experiences both these things on a regular basis.

Smaller aspects include place names: I once drove through a town called Lickey End when I was lost, which I adapted into ‘Tickey End’ in the ’13 Treasures’ books. The name ‘Elvesden’ came from a postcard a friend sent me from a holiday camp, and I found the legend of the thirteen treasures in a book given to me by someone else.

Kate: How do you deal with writer’s block (or, if you don’t get true writer’s block, getting stuck)?

Michelle: Thankfully I’ve never experienced true writer’s block. I get stuck occasionally, usually when I want to move my story on and I’m trying to visualise the best way to do that, but sometimes I grind to a halt because I haven’t done enough research. If that’s the case then I’ll find out whatever it is I need to know before continuing – I’m not the sort of person who can leave part of the story and fill in the blanks later.

If I’m having trouble moving forward I’ll read through the previous few chapters to see if there’s anything that needs correcting, but most of the time an idea presents itself. If it doesn’t then I sometimes take a break and have a bit of a daydream about possibilities until I get somewhere.

Elle: Do you use a writer’s program such as Scrivener when you write or do you have some other method? Hundreds of disorganised Word documents or hundreds of notebooks and scraps of paper?

Michelle: Um, OK. I just had to Google Scrivener! It seems pretty sensible, and actually there are some similarities in how I work. I write in Word, creating one main folder for the novel. Each chapter is a separate numbered file. I’m not really sure why I started writing like this rather than one long document but I just find it easier. I can always find my place quickly and I like the feeling of completing a chapter and seeing the files build in the folder. After the final chapter is complete I’ll create one document piecing everything together.

Alongside the chapters I’ll do separate documents with my dedication, acknowledgements, research documents and if relevant, a list of quotes.

I keep notebooks, too. They tend to be less organised, containing partially written chapters (I only write long hand if I’m travelling somewhere and can’t be bothered to take my laptop), notes, drawings, dates, timelines, place names, chapter titles, and To Do lists. It all goes in higgledy piggledy – I might write half a chapter, stop mid-sentence and write a list of questions I need answers to. It probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone else but weirdly I know where everything is – sort of like a messy room!

I’ll also use my notebook to record chapter lengths and add up my word count every time I complete a chapter.

Kate: Sort of along the same lines, do you have any writing “must haves”, be it a favorite playlist on your iPod, a comfy chair, a tasty snack, or something else entirely?

Michelle: Not really. I tend to drink a lot of tea when I’m writing and if I’m approaching my deadline there’s usually chocolate to be found nearby, but that’s about it. I wish I could listen to music when I write but I just can’t concentrate. Increasingly during breaks I listen to the odd song which I’ll link to a certain character, so maybe play lists will develop over time.

Elle: I’m determined to ask everyone this question! Most writers are asked who their favourite writer is and which writer has influenced the most but I’d like to know which book, or books, has had the most influence on you as a person and your work?

Michelle: I suppose the books that have influenced me most are the ones that encouraged my love of reading and kept me reading. If I hadn’t had a love of books instilled into me I wouldn’t be a writer. I’ll start with the ‘Famous Five’ series by Enid Blyton. These were the first books I read by myself, and re-read many times – I loved the mystery and adventure, and of course how the children did their own thing without the adults interfering.

In my teens I became addicted to Christopher Pike’s books – I’m glad to see they’re making a comeback at the moment! In particular I loved the ‘Final Friends’ trilogy. The characters seemed so glamorous that I yearned to go to an American high school and live that kind of life. I was also a fan of Pike’s twist endings, which is probably apparent from my own work. My first attempts at fiction writing were heavily Pike inspired.

Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee was a huge influence on my ’13 Treasures’ trilogy. It contains all sorts of gems of fairy mythology and the most beautiful art work, and was the main reason I became interested in the darker side of fairies.

At the risk of sounding a bit dippy, a book which affected me personally was The Cosmic Ordering Guide by Stephen Richards. I started it feeling sceptical, and while I don’t agree with everything in it, I’m a big believer in positive thinking which is really what this amounts to.

I recently read Beautiful by Katie Piper, a model who had acid thrown in her face by an ex-boyfriend. If ever a book made me grateful for my own life and health, this is it. It’s a story that puts things into perspective, and I have nothing but admiration for the author’s courage and determination.

Kate: Finally, your website says that you knew by the time you left school that you wanted to be a writer. Was this a bolt-from-the-blue realization or did it build up over time? Did any one isolated incident make you think, Yes, absolutely, this is what I am going to do?

Michelle: It was a slow build up. I’d started writing short stories when I was about fourteen and began thinking that writing a book was something I’d like to do one day. So the ambition was there early on, but not really in a considered way.

At that time it seemed a huge thing, which it was, but not in the way I expected. Before I’d written a novel, the writing was the most daunting prospect. Only after I’d completed my first draft did I realise that there were bigger challenges ahead. The desire to become a published writer grew and evolved from there on – the more rejections I got, the more I wanted it and the harder I worked. There were a few hissy fits along the way but, looking back, I’m glad I had to earn it!

Writer Workshop Week – The Giveaway

In the spirit of the 13 Treasures series, we’re sending you on a treasure hunt through the WWW posts from this week in order to win any two books of your choice from the writers features in Writer’s Workshop Week! Fill in the form below.

Winner announced: 28/10/11

Writer Workshop Week: Gayle Lemmon

Writer Workshop Week

Day 4 – Gayle Lemmon

Writer Workshop Week is a week of guest interviews with well-known authors who Elle and Kate have asked to share a little bit of their writing process for aspiring novelists and readers alike!

Hello, my bookish friends! Today’s foray into our Writers Workshop Week is Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of the New York Times Best Seller The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. A woman of many hats, Ms. Lemmon also serves as the deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy program. Prior to her work on the council, she was a journalist whose work has appeared in countless publications – and who herself has appeared on many news shows! And just in case you’re not impressed yet, she holds an MBA from Harvard Business School! We are deeply honoured to have her participating today. Welcome, Gayle!

Elle: Just to start, because you’re unique among all our other authors for this week: you’re originally and foremost a journalist, and discovered the basis for this book while you were on assignment.  What made you decide to become a journalist?  What other adventures did your career take you on before this one?

Gayle: I became a journalist because I believed in the power of stories to help connect people to the world around them. I had covered politics for most of my 20s, including reporting on the impeachment of President Clinton and the 2000 and 2004 campaigns for ABC News. But I wanted to write about stories that touched people’s lives in a different way – stories about economic development and business that showed the power of jobs to change people’s lives. And that is how I ended up leaving ABC to go to busines school, so that I would have the background to be able to write about and talk about these topics with some fluency. Business school was a very foreign world for me, but I learned a great deal about business and jobs and markets. And I brought that background to the stories I told.

Kate: Everyone I’ve heard talks about how your book reads like fiction, not biography. Given your background, I’m curious: did you find it hard to translate writing in the “journalistic” style into a full book? Was there translation required at all?

Gayle: Yes, writing a book requires different muscles than writing a news story. As a journalist you are trained to spill out the full story in 1500 words – or less. That is very different from writing a chapter of 5,000, 6,000 words which is only one small part of the story. It is a lot of fun to let the story breathe and take its time, but it took some time for me to learn how to do that.

Elle: I’m interested in how your method might be different from some of our other authors. How did you prepare to write this book (or any other writing assignment you do)?  Do you use tape recorders for interviews?  Pocket notebooks? Photographs of the places you’re writing about?

Gayle: Afghanistan is not an easy place to report from given language barriers and security challenges. I used a FlipCam to take video of people and places I might never meet or see again. I took a lot of pictures. And I did a lot of on-the-ground research at Kabul University with primary documents from the Taliban years.

Kate: How hard was it to make the unique struggles of someone living under the Taliban – a situation most of us in the first world can’t even fathom – accessible to your reader?

Gayle: You know, it was easier than I initially expected, because at heart this was a story of survival, of resilience, of young women overcoming impossible odds for the sake of the family they loved. The themes are absolutely universal, though the backdrop is, obviously, incredibly dramatic and different from that which most American readers know. I wanted to show readers that yes, the Taliban years stopped many women’s lives as they knew them, but that they still managed to find hope and community despite everything they were up against.

Elle: A lot of fiction authors feel that they write better when they’re reading in their genre.  What genres do you read in, and do you think this effects your writing?

Gayle: I read a lot of non-fiction. I also read a lot of great fiction and some philosophy. I think it always has an impact on your writing, because writing that matters changes the way you think and see the world. And that in turn shapes the way you write for yourself and others.

Kate: You spent quite a while in Afghanistan on assignment, which is where you met Kamila Sidiqi and were exposed to this remarkable story. At what point did you know this was going to become a book? Was it a choice you made after a certain amount of time, or was it a more organic process?

Gayle: When I first met Kamila, as I mention in The Dressmaker’s prologue, I was immediately fascinated by her story. But actually bringing it to readers took much longer, in part because some agents and editors thought no one cared about Afghanistan stories and women stories anymore, and in part because the security and logistics obstacles were daunting. All the setbacks made me more determined to bring this book to life. But it took time and perseverance.

Elle: Any delicious hints about your future projects?

Gayle: Well, I am looking at a story about war, family, women – and cooking. Let’s see how the first round of research goes. I would love to share the idea with your readers when it’s ready.

Kate: I’m constantly interested on how authors deal with writer’s block and “getting stuck.” Do you have any particular coping methods? Any “tricks of the trade,” if you will? I’m especially interested in your perspective as you are probably more used to writing under a deadline than other authors.

Gayle: Write. Write. Write. Even if what you write stinks, you will have something to gut the next day. Writing is a discipline and a craft and it requires work. Never look for a way around the work, but instead work through the tough parts.

Elle: I’ve asked everyone this question but think you might have one of the most unique answers. Most writers are asked who their greatest influences are amongst the writers they’ve encountered – I’d rather know which book was the most influential in shaping your life and work?

Gayle: What an excellent question. A few I would have to cite: “The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.” Also “The Plague” by Albert Camus and “Self Reliance” and most anything else from Ralph Waldo Emerson. “We Regret to Inform You” from Philip Gourevitch. And the story I loved most as a girl was “Little Women.”

Kate: How much, do you say, did your work change between drafts? Is the book as it is now pretty much what you first submitted for publication, or has it evolved quite a bit?

Gayle: The work changed a lot between drafts, because I was learning how to write a book – from your first question. I had to learn to trust myself and to loosen up and to let myself be part of the story, as I am in just the Introduction and the Epilogue. I learned a great deal in this process, and I am still learning. I hope that never stops.

Keep an eye out for out Writer Workshop Week giveaway 22/23 October!

Tomorrow on the blog: Michelle Harrison!

Writer Workshop Week: EC Sheedy

Writer Workshop Week

Day 3 – EC Sheedy

Writer Workshop Week is a week of guest interviews with well-known authors who Elle and Kate have asked to share a little bit of their writing process for aspiring novelists and readers alike!

Hi, all! Today, E.C. Sheedy joins The Book Memoirs to take on Writer Workshop Week. She is the author of a number of romantic thrillers, including Without a Word, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Overnight. She has also contributed to several Bad Boys anthologies. Most recently, Overkill was published by Carina Press, and is now available in digital format!

Kate: I’ve been curious about this since I realized you write both novels and short stories: does your creative process for writing a shorter piece differ from writing a full-length novel? Do you plan differently, keep your ideas and notes differently, or think about writing differently?

E.C.: My first real effort at a short story was OVERKILL; I wrote it for THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SPECIAL OPS ROMANCE, and was one of twenty authors who participated in the anthology. Writing short was a challenge! I don’t know how others approach it, but I learned very quickly to limit who I invited to the short-story cast party. Too many characters and they can become testaments to stereotyping, mainly because there is so little page time to develop their uniqueness. And I absolutely refuse to answer about my note-taking skills on the grounds that RAP (the Real Author Police) will show up on my doorstep and demand return of my writer’s badge. Let’s just say my notes are abysmal whether I write short or long.

Elle: How much research do you generally put into the planning stages of your novels? For example, in Overnight one of your protagonists is an artist, and in Room 33 your main setting is a hotel – how much research would you have put into art dealerships and the hotel business beforehand?

E.C.: The artist part was easy, because I have a sister who once owned a successful art gallery. (So call me a cheater As to the hotel setting in ROOM 33, it sprang from my fascination with old hotels. The mystery of “if these walls could talk” is so compelling. I also talked to a person who’d worked in the hotel industry about the problems and challenges in refurbishing a derelict hotel. He was so-o helpful. But, truly, the internet rules for most of my research.

Odd story about that, though. When I started writing ROOM 33, I Googled “old hotels” looking for pictures to paste in my imagination more than anything. But what I also got was a bunch of porn sites—insistent porn sites that wouldn’t stop popping up until I restarted my computer. The connection between old hotels and porn remains a mystery to me.

Kate: In an essay on teaching writing, Diane Christian Boehm talks about her particular writing ritual: when she’s stuck, she starts cleaning her house, and usually her vacuum cleaner snaps her right back into creative mode! Do you have any writing rituals for when you’re stuck?

E.C.: Vacuuming. Anything. Snaps me into going to the bar for a dozen martinis. Obviously it propels Ms. Boehm into a more positive direction. I envy her that.

But back to your question. I’m pretty much always stuck in one way or another. But when it really gets bad, I basically peck and snarl at myself until I get the writing in gear. I have no rituals except one; I’ve taken to lighting a scented candle when I start writing. It does nothing to increase my output, but beautiful scents are such a luxurious background for thinking. No music for me. I love it, but it doesn’t work for me while I’m writing.

And, when I’m writing intelligently, I make sure to leave myself a cliff hanger from the last writing session. I never stop at the end of a chapter, though, always within a chapter. Always at a point of forward movement in the story—preferably during a crisis. (Please note that I said when I’m writing intelligently. Such is not always the case.)

Elle: Do you think it’s important to read in your genre? I have read several author interviews (although the one that sticks in mind is fantasy author David Eddings) wherein the author often says they don’t like to read in their own genre in case it “taints” their own individual ideas? Which other genres do you read?

E.C.: I write contemporary novels, mostly romantic suspense, but I honestly don’t read a lot in that genre. I’m not sure fear of tainting my own work is why I don’t read it. I should think on that. But when I read it’s for the love of it, and it’s relaxing to read books and stories outside your chosen genre because the internal editor takes a holiday and your brain’s not set on critique. You just enjoy. I read quite a bit of historical romance—enjoy the pure elegant fantasy of it. I adore Gail Whitiker’s Regencies, and I’m currently exploring the work of Julie Anne Long, Julie James—and of course, Lisa Kleypas. Wonderful storytellers. And I love thrillers. Right now I’m reading THE INFORMATIONIST by Taylor Stevens which was a recommendation from one very smart and well read woman I met on Twitter. And one of the best books I’ve read in a long time is what you might call a historical mystery with a touch of magical realism—THE THIRTEENTH TALE by Diane Setterfield.

Kate: Thrillers are, inherently, books which are heavily reliant on all the twists and turns of plot. Do you have a particular way you track the progress of your plot (be it through a computer program, a storyboard, or a giant wall-sized plot map)?

E.C.: Oh-oh. Here’s one of those questions that puts my writer’s badge at risk again. I love the twists, turns, black holes, and dangerous curves inherent in a thriller or suspense novel, but I can’t seem to think of them all ahead of time. It’s more like they show themselves as plot possibilities through the characters wants and needs. I don’t particularly like the way this works for me, because I’m always moaning about it (ask my writer friends), but so far it’s the way I get things done. Have I tried some other methods? Am I always on the lookout for a *better* way? Definitely. I’ve been mired in the plot bog way too many times, and I can tell you, it’s a cold, dark place. Still, at some moment along the writer’s path you have to accept your own process with all its warts and wanders. Apparently leaping into unknown fast-flowing rivers is mine.

Elle: Along the same vein, do you sometimes find it difficult to keep thrillers fresh? I’ve heard several writers of crime fiction say that after a certain point, it becomes really difficult to find ideas that are both unique and exciting.

E.C.: I think it’s difficult to come up with something all fresh and shiny new—in any genre. Too few plots and too many writers. (I really do wish all the others would go away. LOL)

How many plots are there? This librarian site says from 1 to 36 and that looks to be about right. How many novels are published every year? From what I’ve heard, somewhere around 50,000. That said, you can easily see the “freshness” challenge.

Kate: Writer’s wisdom says it’s better to write a few words a day you throw out than not write at all. How much do you write in a given day? Do you write every day?

E.C.: I try to write every day. I usually fail. I had to stop writing for a long while, because real life made some heavy demands on my time. And it’s been tough to, uh, get back in that x-number-of-words-per-day saddle. I’m still working on that.

Elle: Here comes the mandatory adult content question: how much is too much? As a general piece of advice for our readers who are perhaps budding romance novelists, how would you advise them to go about handling the adult content portions of their novels? Do steamy scenes ever get old to write (even if they never do to read, ahem)?

E.C.: Ah, the good old sex scene. First piece of serious advice? Don’t write a sex scene unless you want to. It’s not some kind of author graduation requirement. Write sex because you enjoy writing it, or don’t do it. If you toss a sex scene into the book because you think you should, it will ring false. When I wrote my first scene involving sex in JUST ONE KISS, a short category romance and my first book, it felt truly weird—like I was writing on a public washroom wall: “Call me at 768-6453 if you want a XXX good time.” I got over it because I wanted to, and I came to believe my characters deserved a more rational approach to their love life on the page.

How much sex is too much sex? Wow. I don’t know. Sexual excess is like beauty, methinks, it’s in the eye of the beholder. I know I have my limits. I don’t like a sex scene for the sake of having a sex scene, and I don’t like pages of them at the expense of the story. When that happens I skim. But do I love a beautifully written sex scene that grows out of the characters, rings true to the emotional storyline of the book, and makes me tingly all over? Absolutely. It’s an amazing skill to write a great sex scene—not every author has it, and not every author wants to have it.

Kate: What advice would you give budding authors who want to write in a genre similar to yours? What are the unique challenges or features you’ve found your type of thriller offer?

E.C.: When someone asks me what I write, I always say I write sex and mayhem. Oddly, people seem interested in both. But it’s kind of a lie really, because the truthful answer is I write the books I want to write. That those books happen to include sizzle and suspense is a bonus for me, because it allows them to fit into a recognized genre. I didn’t start out writing suspense, but it’s what I gravitated to, because I love the complexities and challenges of plot. In the end, I think, it’s all about looking inside yourself as a writer and poking at that simmering stew of story ideas and inspiration, then choosing a direction.

Those of us who write suspense, mystery, or thrillers generally have a bit of the mechanic in us. (I’d say engineer, but I can’t aim that high.) We like a lot of moving parts and love fitting them all together. I think that mechanic trait is a prerequisite in the suspense game. If you’ve got that, you’re good to go.

Elle: I’m determined to ask everyone this question. Every interview I see asks writers who their main influence is on their life and their writing but I’m more interested to know which novel(s) do you feel have had the biggest impact on you as an individual and on your writing?

E.C.: For straight—brilliant and warm-hearted—romance the author that led me to writing it was LaVyrle Spencer, specifically her book MORNING GLORY. I loved the emotional impact of all her books, and so-o wish she was still writing. Back then, I badly wanted to write like LaVyrle Spencer. I never did. Seems I was stuck with EC Sheedy. Another author I admire for a completely different reason is Lee Child. His prose is spare, his series character, Jack Reacher, both sympathetic and enigmatic. I don’t write like him either. Sad for me, actually. On a more personal note, a book I read as a teen did exert a powerful influence on me. That book was Ayn Rand’s THE FOUNTAINHEAD, a book length treatise on individualism, and the worth and spirit of the creative human. I maintain a strong affinity to her philosophy.

Truly, I’m influenced by every book I’ve read, both the ones I loved and the ones I didn’t. A writer is, after all, the sum of her pages.

Thank you so much for having me on your blog. This has been fun—and I’m always up for that!

Keep an eye out for out Writer Workshop Week giveaway 22/23 October!

Tomorrow on the blog: Gayle Lemmon!

Writer Workshop Week: Zoë Marriott

Writer Workshop Week

Day 2 – Zoë Marriott

Writer Workshop Week is a week of guest interviews with well-known authors who Elle and Kate have asked to share a little bit of their writing process for aspiring novelists and readers alike!

Hej, Memoirites! Hvordan har du det? It feels appropriate to say hello and ask you how you are in Danish because today’s author is young-adult novelist Zoë Marriott! No, Zoë herself is not Danish but her wildly popular first book, The Swan Kingdom, is an ingenious retelling of the fairytale ‘The Wild Swans’ by Hans Christian Andersen… (See what I did there?) Zoë is also the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel Daughter of the Flames and the highly acclaimed Shadows on the Moon, currently available in a bookstore near you. We love Zo and we’re always delighted to have her on the site.

Elle: Hi, Zoë! Thanks so much for agreeing to be here. In prepping for the interview, I spent some time working through your treasure trove of a website and all of your tips for aspiring writers. If you had to pick one single piece of all-important advice to give to budding novelists, what do you think it would be?

Zoë: Thanks so much for inviting me, girls! Now, this first question… Oh, heck – where’s Yoda when you need him? The thing is, the One All-Important Piece of Advice probably changes from writer to writer, from day to day, even from minute to minute. It all depends where you are in your book, your life and your career. If I’m going for a one-size-fits-all type of thing I’ll probably plump for a reminder that the only difference between a published writer and an unpublished one is that the published one never gave up. So don’t ever give up. Persistence is three times as valuable as luck.

Kate: As a big fan of fairy tales and folk stories, I’m curious: what made you decide to use an Andersen story as the backbone for your novel? Was this a conscious decision at the get-go, or an evolution as you worked through ideas?

Zoë: I’ve always been fascinated by fairytales, and The Wild Swans was my favourite fairytale growing up. Looking back, I can see that what really captured my attention about the story – and all folkloric works – is the wide gaps left for the imagination within the narrative. Fairytales always tell you who did what and where, but somehow that essential WHY is never provided. Just why is the wicked stepmother so wicked? Why is the father or King always so willing to banish and forget his own children? How do the children themselves feel about it? What kind of courage does it take to go on when your fairytale world has fallen apart like this? I promised myself that I would explore these questions when I got older. And then I forgot about it. But when – several years later! – I realised that I wanted to write young adult novels, The Wild Swans immediately presented itself as a story that I needed to re-tell. It was as if it had been waiting patiently at the back of my mind all that time for me to grow up and notice it.

Elle: I’ve noticed that in my search for information, I haven’t seen anything which speaks to your writing process. Do you story-board? Are there lots of pieces of paper stuck haphazardly on your walls or do you have nice, neat index cards full of plans?

Zoë: Here’s where I bust out my camera! As you can see here, I’m a devotee of notebooks. Generally when I get a little spark of an idea I’ll pick out a notebook that seems right – I have nearly a hundred neatly stored in my Writing Cave – and I’ll start shoving Post-It notes into it with all my random thoughts. Later on, when the idea has matured or collided with another idea to make something that seems juicy enough for a book, I’ll get the notebook out again, pop a working title and a date in the front and start scribbling like mad – everything from fully formed scenes to one-line snatches of dialogue, to character sketches.

I do almost all of my rough drafting with a pencil in a notebook, which means that about 75% of my notebook is full of messy stuff which bears no resemblance to anything in the finished book at all. I’ve tried typing directly into a computer but I find it adds a lot of hard work to the revising later on – things look so official once you’ve got them in a Word Doc., it’s much harder to be flexible, play with ideas, change your mind. When I feel like I’ve rooted the story firmly in my brain I start trying to write a synopsis to contain all the craziness. Oy vey, synopses! I’m terrible at them! Plotting is definitely my week spot. I’ve developed all kinds of elaborate graphs and diagrams to try and keep control of my plots (as you can see!).
I’m not sure any of them really work – they’re more like a comfort blanket that I need in order to keep going when really I have no idea how things are going to fall out. For instance, after finishing the first draft of my current book I was forced to go back and change the gender OF EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER except two, and completely re-write it to make that work. I feel as if I’m a 50/50 mix between a planner and a pantser, and I hope one day to find a combination that works for me a bit more smoothly.

Kate: As someone who’s fairly private with her own writing, I always wonder this about published authors: when do you share your writing with other people? Do you have a sounding board you bounce ideas off of from inception or do you wait until you have some or all of a first draft done?

Zoë: Oh, you’re not alone, Kate! Lately I’ve been feeling like a bit of an anomaly in this regard, because Twitter and other writers blogs show me that everyone – but everyone! – seems to have teams of alpha readers, beta readers and critique partners. But I don’t. I never have. The only people who even get to glimpse what I’m working on before I’ve completed the first draft are my agent and editor – and when I say ‘first draft’ I actually mean ‘third or fourth draft that I call a first draft because I don’t want to admit how awful the actual first draft was’.

When I was first writing this was because I couldn’t find any person in my real life who was a) interested enough to comb through a first draft on my behalf and b) capable of doing so in a meaningful or helpful way. Seriously, you can’t exactly ask your mother, can you? By the time I became aware of the huge online YA community and the critiquing boards on places like AW I found that I didn’t really want feedback from anyone who wasn’t going to be directly involved in getting the book published, because so often the comments I saw online were contradictory and unhelpful.

But even though I don’t have any beta readers, I do belong to an informal writing group which was founded by an online friend of mine several years ago. We call ourselves The Furtive Scribblers and you’ll find them mentioned in the acknowledgments of everything I write. We have enormous, no-pressure fun, brain-storming, bouncing ideas, testing plots for holes, and pushing each other through writer’s block. I adore them, and without them my books would be HALF as good, if that.

Elle: I’m really interested in your experience of planning a fantasy novel and the alternative rules of that world. For high-fantasy, everyone’s advice is to start with a map, urban-fantasy seems to carry the recommendation of working out the mythology first. What did you do first whilst plotting your brand of fantasy novel?

Zoë: Panic, normally. As soon as I start to get an idea of what my fantasy world is going to be, I freak out and become convinced I JUST DON’T KNOW ENOUGH OMG. I wear out my library card, spend all my cash on reference works, documentaries and world music CDs and Google until my fingers bleed. Because my fantasy worlds so far have all had a historical basis (Daughter of the Flames was a mixture of India, Africa and Tibet, Shadows on the Moon is Japan and a sprinkling of China) it would have been all too easy to get things wrong.

Which may sound crazy when I’m making up my own world – but if you’re creating a pre-industrial country with no mass production and you have your characters pull out a ‘tarp’ or carry water in a metal bucket, you’ve already messed up. If you’re going to create fairytale Japan you need to know about real Japan or instead of an homage you’ll create a stereotypical parody, and not only insult the real culture you’re using but embarrass yourself. I do not like to embarrass myself!

Only when I’ve stuffed my brain to bursting point with every real life fact I can find do I feel as if I have the right to start messing around and actually making stuff up. This is the fun part. I used to draw incredibly detailed maps, but my publisher doesn’t like them and won’t actually put them in the book, so now I mostly sketch out relative areas so that I don’t get mixed up later on. I have a mental check list of vital facts I must know before I start work in earnest, like – what is the primary religion or religion of this country or countries? How strongly does this affect the day-to-day lives of the people? What does the general populace look like? What is the climate like, what are the major geographical features and natural hazards? What are is the wildlife like? The list goes on for quite a long while. But once I’ve filled those boxes I’ll give myself freedom to make other things up as I go along and as the plot or characters require. Some of my favourite bits of world building have come from impulse invention – like the facial tattoos in DotF.

Kate: Do you have any writing “rituals”? Do you have to cut yourself off from the outside world? Do you start rereading what you last wrote? Is there anything that has to be done for the juices to get flowing?

Zoë: I try not to let myself get into too many rituals, because I have an addictive personality and I feel as if I would just end up strangling myself. So, generally, I try to be in my Writing Cave by 9:00, I usually have a large mug of tea or coffee with me, and I generally try to re-read and revise what I wrote the day before, and then go onto new material. But if I blocked the doorway of the Writing Cave with three baskets of un-ironed laundry and I have to write downstairs instead? I try to be OK with that. If the dog rolled in something awful and needs a bath and I can’t start until 10:00? Golly, I really, really try to be OK with that. I think the only things I absolutely must have are my notebook/pencil and my iPod. Music is one thing I can’t do without. I mean, I can write without it, but I find it so hard to get started, it’s just easier to give in.

Elle: You’ve mentioned in one of your Q&A answers on your website that the ending to The Swan Kingdom changed drastically halfway through as you got to know your characters. Do you tend to find you start a novel with a fully-formed character in mind, or do you often begin with a handful of details and surprise yourself as you go?

Zoë: Actually, the ending itself stayed exactly the same. What changed was where the ending took place, how it took place, and all the characters involved!

I always start with a character. Stories come to me through the filter of a character’s eyes. I get that little whispering voice in the back of my head, and their life begins to unreel itself before my eyes. And because of this I fool myself that I know who they are and what’s going to happen. But of course, I’m not actually receiving messages from an alternate reality – it’s all coming from the little Writer Plugin in my hindbrain. And so what seems to come to me as incontrovertible ‘fact’, like this character’s actions, or that character’s traits, are all negotiable.

It’s only when I actually put the characters in the world, set them against each other and and let them get to work, that I truly start to understand them, and see how their histories, personalities, and conflicting desires, work together to create what I hope are fully realised people. And as soon as this starts, the story – what it means to them and what it means to me, and hence what actually happens – begins to warp and change.

Zoë's plot diagram - click to enlarge!

This is a good thing. Even if it does cause the occasional panic attack…

Kate: At what point do you abandon an idea – be it for a plot twist, a character, or part of your fantasy world – as unworkable? Is there some threshold that lets you know “this won’t work”?

Zoë: Nope. I’ve not yet figured out how to be well adjusted about this stuff. There’s things that I love, and things I don’t. The things I love stay no matter what, and the things I don’t go out the window in a constant stream. Then I send it to my editor and she cuts half the things I love, brings half the things I don’t love back from the flowerbed under the window, and tells me to make it work. And I groan and clutch my head, and try to sneak as many of the ‘love’ bits back in as I can, but it’s never as many as I wanted. If anyone else has any tips on how to handle this? I’d be extremely grateful!

Elle: I’ve taken great pleasure in putting this question to everyone else but I especially can’t wait to see what you say! Writers are often asked who their biggest influences are but I would instead like to know which novels most influenced you as an individual and as writer, barring the most obvious answer (cough, cough)!

Zoë: The Holy Trinity for me as a young person was – The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley, Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce, and Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith. If you’ve read these, you’ll sense a common theme – resourceful, brave, compassionate heroines, with bag-ass swords. These books taught me who I wanted to be and I like to think I’ve lived up to that, at least in a small way. Even though my sword is only a wooden one.

When it comes to writers who influence me and my work as an adult, though – writers that I’m still striving to emulate, writers whose books have expanded my horizons and continue to make me a better writer myself – the picture changes a little. Suddenly I’m looking at a new top three:

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold and The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin.
These books have a lot less in common on the surface, but each of them has a core of… something, some indefinable thing, that I’m constantly trying to breach and understand. I’ve re-read each of these so many times you’d think I’d know them by heart. Instead, I find myself reading a new book each time. THAT is greatness. I bow down before them.

Thanks again for having me Elle and Kate, and for coming up with such different, intriguing questions!

Keep an eye out for out Writer Workshop Week giveaway 22/23 October!

Tomorrow on the blog: EC Sheedy!

Writer Workshop Week: Ellen Hopkins

Writer Workshop Week

Day 1 – Ellen Hopkins

Writer Workshop Week is a week of guest interviews with well-known authors who Elle and Kate have asked to share a little bit of their writing process for aspiring novelists and readers alike!

 

Hello, everybody! Today, we’d like to welcome author Ellen Hopkins to Writers’ Workshop Week here on The Book Memoirs. Ellen is the author of eight young adult books, including the Crank trilogy (consisting of Crank, Glass, and Fallout) and the soon-to-be-released Perfect. All of her novels are New York Times best sellers. Formerly a non-fiction author, Ellen was inspired to write her first novel, Crank, after real-life events surrounding one of her daughters.

 

Kate: Hi Ellen, it’s lovely to have you here! As most people have heard, your début novel, Crank, was inspired in part by your daughter’s drug addiction. What was that experience like, in terms of taking painful reality and transposing it to fiction? It seems too obvious to ask if it was a difficult experience.

Ellen: It was cathartic. Something I had to do, really. For me, if not for an audience. I truly didn’t start the book expecting, or even considering, publication. But through the writing process, it became clear that the story was important, not only to me, but to anyone who has been touched by addiction. The book, in fact, sold with only 75 pages complete because the editor who first saw it realized how powerful the story would be.

Elle: Speaking of real life and real situations making it into your fiction, on your website under the section for budding writers you mention always keeping a writer’s notebook for “when the muse strikes” – just how much of your day-to-day observations of people and places do you think makes it into your novels?

Ellen: Quite a lot, really. Writers must be observers. I can’t stress that enough. Creating realistic, multi-layered characters requires voyeurism, something I practice with zeal.

Kate: When I taught, your books were easily the most stolen from the English department’s classroom libraries, a massive compliment to any author! What most helps you keep writing authentic situations that teenagers are drawn to?

Ellen: Respect for the generation. It was never easy to be a teen, despite what some adults might think. Just because your years don’t number many doesn’t mean your problems don’t. Navigating school, relating to others, falling in and out of love, dealing with the adults in your life… these are the easy things. Toss in major choices like whether or not to have sex, drink, use, etc., the waters become choppy. Add things you cannot control—abuse, desertion, rape, etc., you have a tsunami. Survival is everything. I want to help them survive.

Elle: You mention critique groups on your website. Many writers advocate a group of fellow writers, others show friends and family, and others seem to keep their manuscript solely for their editor. Who is your first audience and how important would you say that their opinion is to you in terms of revisions?

Ellen: I used to have an amazing critique group, but over the years it dissolved. People moved. People got frustrated and quit writing. Toward the end, I had published a couple of books and my group became a bit too deferential. Now, I have a select group of writing friends, all published, whose opinions I totally respect. We do retreats together, and this is where they might serve as beta readers. Truthfully, though, at this point in my career, I don’t have time for rounds of revision. Rather, I self-edit heavily as I write, so my first draft is largely my last draft.

Kate: You used to write nonfiction books for children. I think the number was somewhere in the 50s! How was your writing process when you were writing nonfiction books different from your process now that you’re writing fiction?

Ellen: I wrote the nonfiction much faster. But it still had voice, which is why the editors loved it. I could also write more than one nonfiction book at a time. Can’t do that with fiction. I need to stay vested in the characters I’m writing. And, even though fiction pays better, it feels less like a job. This is fun!

Elle: I’m interested in the locations that you write in. Do you only take notes in your notebook or do you ever flesh out full scenes? Do you prefer quiet or activity? Coffee shop or office? All of your notes and/or storyboard with you or writing-free, so to speak?

Ellen: I am now writing two books a year—one young adult and one adult. I don’t have time to write scenes in a notebook, then transpose. And my note taking is, too often, on scratch paper. I have stacks to sort through. Also, because the verse-novel formatting is so specific, I actually write to trim size, so that the word placement is exactly how I want it. I write at home in my office, or on the road on my laptop (sometimes on airplanes, often in hotel rooms). I need quiet and focus.

Kate: What do you find distracts you the most from writing? Do you find you suffer from writer’s block? Writing yourself into corners? “Delete everything I wrote yesterday” syndrome?

Ellen: My family. I do travel a lot for promotion, so I understand they want my attention when I’m home, and I do my best to spend quality time with them. But that is also my best writing time, so it can become an issue. I don’t block on story, but do sometimes on scenes. When that happens, I work my body somehow—walk or garden or play with my dogs. Physical movement lets my subconscious kick into gear and gets me where I need to go. I don’t write myself into corners and if I have ever deleted everything I wrote the day before it was totally by accident, and completely maddening.

Elle: Linear or scene-by-scene? Do you think that it detracts from your writing if you don’t write in order or do you think it packs more of an emotional punch to craft the scene you’re most in the mood for?

Ellen: Straight ahead. I have to, because each page flows very specifically into the next, and every single word counts. I might, in fact, stress for a half-hour over the exact word or sentence or stanza and get that right before I move forward.

Kate: Your books are written in a very poetic, free-flowing style. Was this a conscious decision you made when starting to write Crank, or just something that came more naturally to you?

Ellen: I started Crank in prose, but the voice was all wrong. Put the book away and went to a writer’s conference, where I saw Sonya Sones (another verse novelist) speak. I’ve written poetry most of my life and decided to try combining verse and story. It worked.

Elle: Most authors seemed to be asked which fellow author is their biggest influence. Instead, I’d like to ask you if you have any particular books which have influenced the way in which you write or have changed the way you view the writing process.

Ellen: Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey. Four very different voices, and unique writing styles for each. Complicated viewpoints. It’s a hard book to read, but brilliant, and totally character driven. That one spoke loudly to me.

Keep an eye out for out Writer Workshop Week giveaway 22/23 October!

Tomorrow on the blog: Zoë Marriott!

Book Babble: IMM the Highly Anticipated Edition!

Chasing Brooklyn by Lisa Schroeder | Goodreads | Elle’s review of The Day Before
If I Tell by Janet Gutler | Goodreads
Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins | Goodreads
Working Stiff by Rachel Caine | Goodreads | US cover