Why I Write YA Blogfest: Because Fin Made me Do It

The short answer is, I don't write YA.

If you asked me a year ago what I write, I'd have said, um, novels? I knew I wasn't writing memoir or non fiction but that's about it. The first book I wrote (currently mouldering gently in a digital drawer) is called Death Hires An Assistant. Hey, guess what happens in the book? Wow, you're psychic.

I had been writing Death Hires An Assistant in my head, on and off, for ten years. When we moved from NYC, to a place where deer walk down the street in the early morning mist and my neighbor keeps chickens, I had more brain space to let me get serious about writing. But the DHAA manuscript was a hot/cold/lukewarm-in-places mess. All my beta readers (except Tammy, I love you, babes!) said it was hit and miss. I didn't know what to do next.

I had a nugget of an idea that I wanted to play with, but I was afraid that starting a new project meant that I was abandoning DHAA, giving up. NaNoWriMo rolled around and I thought this would be a good way to 'waste' this new idea. You know, get it out of my system so I could get back to writing my opus.

I got the idea for BookEnd while driving up the Garden State Parkway. In my mind, I saw a boy, sixteen or so, standing by a ramshackle farm waiting for a man in period garb to walk through a gate. The man, looking like a lesser character in a Jane Austen movie, was pompous and confused. The boy laughed at him, taking him by the hand into the farm. That's it. That's all I saw. I was thinking about how funny it would be if minor characters from books found that, at the end of their story, they would be recycled.

I actually thought I'd write a light, funny story that I might be able to stretch to reach the 50K goal.
BookEnd has turned into a darker coming of age story that is over 75K and has a sequel, BookBegin already outlined. How the eff do these things happen? It's like I'm not even in control here.

So, why do I write YA? I think it's two things. It's because Fin, my main character, had a story to tell and his story is a YA story. And because YA is what I enjoy reading right now. I've been devouring Philip Pullman, Rowling and Garth Nix for years, not really making a distinction on A or YA reading, just loving the adventure.

For me, it's about the adventure, whether it's recycling book characters or having death for a boss.

Why do you write what you write?

X is for Xavier Roberts

And for (the great) X

My baby had "Xavier Roberts" tattooed on her left butt cheek. I didn't like it at all and seeing the strange signature on her ass almost made me cry, like the stork had saddled me with a damaged kid. I'd waited literally years for my parents to be able to afford a Cabbage Patch Doll, while my friends racked up the trendy dolls like extra pac man lives at the arcade. One friend had over fifteen of them, some still suffocating in their cardboard and plastic boxes, stored in the attic.

My Cabbage Patch doll had another deformity. She was French, or French-Canadian. All her birth documents were in french. I couldn't read the frigging thing and though it might have lent me some exotic credibility with my friends, it didn't. To say I was a disappointed pre-teen would be an understatement. I was desolate (or, as my dolly would say, Je suis desole) and that was one the moment, maybe the last moment, I ever bought into a trend.

I'm not saying I never bought something trendy again. For crissakes you can find a pair of (tasteful, mind) jeggings in my dresser as we speak. But I tried hard not to believe the hype again. If I was going to follow a trend I was going to do it knowing I was one of hundreds of lemmings getting ready to happily jump off the ledge.

Which is why it's such a surprise to me that I've ended up writing a YA book. Somehow, without meaning to, I wrote a in a genre that is hot right now. We have a friend who writes children's books, young kid stuff, picture books. They're great and fun, but what he really wants to do is direct, er, I mean write YA. It's not because he's got a YA story burning in his gut. It's because he's been told that's where the gold is.

Does that make him mercenary, smart or just normal? I don't know. I have the luxury of not being important at all. I don't have a publisher, editor, agent waiting for me to do the next thing. I can write whatever I want and simultaneously believe that I live in a vacuum where nothing I do will ever go anywhere and that one day someone will want to be my publisher, editor and agent.

This is a long-assed way of asking. Do you, in your heart of hearts, follow trends? Try to follow trends? Believe trends are real, important drivers in publishing? I know, I know, write what's important to you, the story that speaks to you, don't write what you think is trendy, yada yada. But what do you REALLY think?

E is for Everything OR Wednesday! 4.6.11

E is also for Echo & The Bunnymen

Starting off this week's links with Nathan Bransford's defense of the J. Howett debacle. There are some really thoughtful comments on his site about this, and I generally agree with him that there's just too much mean-spirited, mob-like bashing going on for what is, in essence a mistake anyone (any writer) can make. But it brings to mind the recent bashing of Rebecca Black's Friday song (Stephen Colbert made fun of it for charity)
and the (alleged) UCLA student's racist tirade against Asians. Despite the good/bad or unconsidered intentions of the poster (who is, in essence, the 'author' of what's put out there) the fact remains - the internet is the epitome of what it means to be public today. Even more public than going out your front door and stripping to your undies. Why? In front of your house maybe 10-15 people will see you, for a flash of time, then it's over. On the internet, it can be 10-10 million and it can go on forever. Until we learn that lesson, these examples of bad behavior, compounded by mob-mentality, anonymity-fueled tirades, will continue. And don't get me started on the 'anonymous' posters. Why isn't there a wiki-leaks for the effers who flame and humiliate on the internet, but are too cowardly to put their names to their deeds.

OK. Calmer now. Proceed.

Martin Amis is innocent?

Teen books should behave badly.

What is that thing?
It's a Book.
Can it Tweet?
No. It's a book.

Let's end on a sweet note. Cool  book trailer for Lane Smith's 'It's a Book' book

Is Genre a Dirty Word?

I've got something to say about the much maligned term 'genre'. Stephen King has talked about it. Michael Chabon has talked about it, and dollars to donuts they are both smarter than me. What I want to add is my personal story about how I stopped worrying and learned to love genre.

My parents are immigrants so the whole concept of Advanced Placement in High School was foreign (pun intended) to them. If they'd cottoned on to the fact that I could get college credit (as in $$ they didn't have to fork out) by attending harder classes in high school, they would have marched me in to those cauldrons of geek tout de suite.

But instead, I geeked myself out and, especially in English Literature and Art, put myself in AP. I loved it and it opened my mind to works of literature I wouldn't have found on my own. I still remember reading Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and my mouth dropping open because I felt just like Stephen Dedalus. But AP also set the bar too high for me, making me suddenly ashamed of reading anything that wasn't high art.

The summer of Junior year I sat in summer school after failing religion (at an all girl's catholic school - idiot!) and tried to read and understand The Stranger. My teacher commented on how advanced my reading choices were and I  was smugly pleased. I mean, come on! I was in summer school for failing religion. I was reading Camus. How cool was I?

Not that cool at all. If you'd gone into  my army supply store satchel (the one with the Joy Division pins all over it) and dug around the debris and the black nail polish, you would have found the forbidden library books. Mostly by Jude Deveraux, but maybe a Catherine Coulter or Laura Kinsale thrown in there. The Stranger I was reading because I had to prove to myself I could. The romance novels I was reading because I wanted too.

I learned all about the taboo of being a smart girl and reading genre books pretty damn early in life. I knew that being caught reading some things would make me a laughing stock but being caught reading other things would make me look intelligent, interesting. Ugh. Politicized reading sucks. I would tuck romance, horror, fantasy and comic books within the pages of some worthy tome as I rode the Path train to college at School of Visual Arts, like it was my version of a tatty Playboy. I wouldn't let friends into my car if an offending genre title was going to be visible. I had a  reading double life.

Eventually I stopped caring. I started reading what I wanted to read, which is what I've been doing in the last ten years or so since I've gravitated to Young Adult. Now, this trend started with the Harry Potter books (though I never outgrew Narnia, and never will) and kept going with His Dark Materials and the Garth Nix Abhorsen and Keys to the Kingdom books. I like fantasy, and I like adventure stories. For some reasons, it's always the Young Adults who are having adventures (and when I say adventure stories, I don't mean finding love. Different kind of adventure.)

I'd been reading YA for years and had already written an (adult) novel when, this past November, I started writing a book for NaNoWriMo. It was about a boy. A teenager. It never occurred to me that this was a YA book, until it was half way finished. So I started poking around the YA communities online, looking to educate myself. And there it was again. Shame and scandal if an adult reads a YA book. And some YA books are more loaded down with scorn and judgement than others - I'm looking at you, Team Edward.

There's an interesting piece on YA Book Shelf about the Devaluation of the YA Genre. I don't know why I was surprised to see that this existed. I hadn't experienced it in so long. There's a lovely benefit of getting past your 20's (and most of your 30's) -  shame over stupid things is harder to muster. Still, I guess I thought that with 'literary' writer's coming out on the side of genre that this kind of squabbly nonsense was mostly over. But no.

So, what do you think? Is there a genuine quality divide between genre and literary work? Is there such a thing as high and low art? Or is there just good and bad writing? I know what I think, but I'd love to hear what you think, especially a (non sneering) opposing view. Is YA (or any genre) somehow substandard by definition?