YA Fantasy Writer

In the ages of movies, books can no longer take languid pages upon pages to catch a reader's interest. Pull them into the story now, and keep them hooked until the very last page, or your ship will start sinking.

I can tell you that early in my rough draft, I had a sinking ship, and there's other writers out there that have experienced this "must make the protagonist more likable" epidemic as well. I would like to then impart the wisdom I discovered while mending this.

Timothy Hodge Says It's Admiration, Identifiability, and Pity
Timothy Hodge believes that the key to capturing likability lies in three universal qualities; the more that you inject into your protagonist, the more likable they'll inevitably be.

These qualities are:

1. Admiration: The hero has an unusual quality that we admire. (Harry Potter is the all-star magician; Superman is, well, Superman.)
2. Identifiability: The hero is the everyman and we relate to him/her. (Tom Hanks roles.)
3. Pity: The hero is the underdog.

Hodge says we can set up pity right from the start by making the hero an orphan. Problem with that is your protagonist is--at least, if you're writing fantasy YA--a teenage of some sorts, and cutting off the identifiability of your protagonist by removing parents from the picture could be a throat-slicer. If your protagonist is an orphan, consider someone else to fill the parental role, however minor it happens to be.

Identifiability is easy in young adult fiction; make the protagonist like the reader. You have age going for you, and if you're writing well, you should have critical emotions going as well. Young adult focuses on the passage to adulthood and is inheritly identifiable to its audience that way.

Admiration is harder. You don't want to make the young adult protagonist larger-than-life to the point that the reader no longer feels like they're grabbing an element of themselves from the protagonist. At the same time, you need to make this character stand out right from the start or they may fade into the background.

Jaye Wells Says It's Empathy
She talks about characters doing bad things specifically, saying it's all about humor and motivation:

Motivation is the lynchpin here. If you have a character who's doing shit randomly then you're going to lose readers. Your character can't be like a five-year-old.
"Why did you break your toy, Timmy?"
"I don't know."

If your character is a Timmy, you're going to have problems. But if you give that same character a reason to do those things, well, that's different, isn't it?
"Timmy, why did you break your toy?"
"Because the bad voices told me to."

See the difference? As humans we're very good at rationalizing bad decisions. Make sure you character has a damned good reason to do bad things and the readers will follow.

If the reader can empathesize with your protagonist--that's to say, can see the reasoning behind even the bad things--then you're on the right track. If your character is just flailing about helplessly though, that doesn't work.

This doesn't just include things that character intentionally does, but the bad qualities the character may have no control over as well. Why is the character clumsy? Bratty? (And is that brat funny?)

Then there are authors who don't make likable characters at all.
Patricia Cohen wrote about how author Zoe Heller says, "Creating likable characters isn't my job," instead comparing characters to a frying sausage: she lets it see how the public takes it, how it pans out. And in her book THE BELIEVERS, the public "wasn't inspired with her characters;" "didn't want to spend time with them."

I admire Heller for her bravery in saying that that's not the goal in her stories, but I disagree with her statement that "fiction is not to offer up moral avatars, but to engage with people whose politics or points of view are unpleasant or contradictory."

I think these empathesizable, admirable, identifiable, pitiful creatures are the bread-and-butter of fiction. Making a protagonist likable--preferably in the first couple of paragraphs--is quintessential to capture the reader's interest, right at the very first page.

Bloggers Unite is celebrating Banned Books Week. I thought this would be a wonderful time to return to AND TANGO MAKES THREE and the controversial story behind this wonderful children's book.

I try to focus mostly on YA books in this blog, but the picture book AND TANGO MAKES THREE made an impression on me ever since my introduction to it in my Children's Literature college class, and I'd like to share this beautiful book--and it's sad background--with others.

Let's start with a quick synopsis of AND TANGO MAKES THREE: Two male penguins mate at the San Francisco Zoo. The zookeepers gave them an egg and named the newborn penguin Tango, because it "takes two to tango." They live happily ever after.

So what's wrong? Our homophobic society has skewed this into a picture book that clearly supports homosexuality. The book has banned due to the claim that homosexuality was an idea that was too sensitive for young minds to wrap their heads around.

Mind you, as I wrote about last time I brought up AND TANGO MAKES THREE, the penguins involved in this "gay mating" parted ways and selected new, female mates. In other words, this picture book captured the story about two male penguins saving an egg--not gay penguins, just a couple of ol' buds--and yet the fears laced deep within our society have prevented this miraculous event from being shared with our children.

Many banned books come about because of something as inexplicable as this. Foul language and racism are a couple others that have ripped books from school libraries, but this is definitely a case of ludicrious and illogical banning based purely on societal hysteria. And even if it is about homosexual penguins, who's to keep this from your child? Is it really going to promote homosexuality in our children? Is there something wrong with the homosexual that is going to your grocery store and buying your same brand of cereal?

Support Bloggers Unite's Banned Book Week and discuss your favorite banned book--and why it shouldn't be removed from the libraries of our youth!

Do we live in an age that will not produce classic literature?

I like to think not. Though there's lots of people that illogically despise HARRY POTTER, it will live in legend. Hell, Cal State Fullerton already has classes on it (ask me about it if you're interested; I was in the first semester it was offered!)

Thanks to Nathan Bransford's blog, I came across this 17 Book Deal and choked on my rooibos tea. Seventeen books in three years!? I guess that eliminates any necessity for a day job! (That was meant to be funny, but my brain is weary as the week closes.) How's this relate to YA? Well, James Patterson happens to have 11 "adult" books and 6 young adult books all wrapped up in the contract! Crazy!

And to close, THE INTERN has hilarity about people promising orphanages and aquariums for endangered species for their book advances. Where do people get the idea that books make this much money? I thought the "starving writer" stereotype was well known... is it like a J.K. Rowling complex falling over society?

My boyfriend and I have a long-standing joke (that is mostly mine) about whether I'll pay off the car I bought new in 2004 (with bills that never end) or the private student loan from that one semester I was going a wee crazy with the imaginary FORGOTTEN WINGS book advance. I think all potential authors think/talk about these things, kind of like how high school students discuss their dream colleges, but let's remember to keep it realistic! And, for the love of whatever you believe in, don't put it in your proposal/query! (I'm still wary of drinking the tea and reacting again over these things.)

Speaking of pitches, a sneak peek into my Hawaii Writer Conference post that is being delayed yet another day: how Kristin Nelson humorously compares pitch-rambling writers to glazed donuts. I love it.

Will do a post on the Hawaii Writer Conference in the near future, but in the meantime, I thought it best to divulge the seven experiences you have when querying.

This is not the first time I have queried a manuscript. I wrote another book--premature birth, we'll call it--and queried for it about a dozen times before I attended the San Diego Writer Conference and was told by the editor of Baen that he thought I was a young adult fantasy writer and not a shit's-exploding-and-worlds-are-shaking fantasy writer. Oh, and stop writing about dreams, it turns readers off.

So the book got shoved under the bed and I wrote Forgotten Wings, which I have not yet queried for. I keep nitpicking and nitpicking and telling myself "It's done!" and then "It's not done!" like a schizophrenic without medication, and then I sit down with rum and contemplate first my book, and then the meaning of life, while also counting the calories of coke I am consuming hour-by-hour.

I've learned from blog reading that some writers query the "not my fav" agent first and work up the list. I don't know why. I like preparing until my eyes are rimmed and covered in red ravines, and then researching each. and. every. agent. before sending out that query, and going down the "this person rocks!" list (which is actually kind of large when you research and get to know these people, their blogs are awesome and hilarious), because that just seems like the respectable thing to do. I even do my best to purchase books each of these agent represents to make sure our tastes are sort of parallel (and to build up good karma supporting other authors!--hunt for the hardcover!)

And so, thanks to further research, I spoke with one of my "this person rocks!" agents at the Hawaii Writer Conference after convincing myself (with more rum the day before) that it really was "It's done!" this time. She represented three books that were just fantastic, and to have her represent my book would be a true compliment. I just sent in a query with the first 30 pages, to which I planned to do yesterday if it weren't for the fact my hands started shaking and I needed to beat the crap out of my keyboard in a video game for awhile to get the shakes out (while suffering tremendous jet lag and wondering why my boyfriend was not willing to stay up until one in the morning.)

The jitters are now back again. So here's how querying works, based on my "veteran" experience with my premature manuscript and now my release of Forgotten Wings into the hands of a clearly very friendly, very amazing woman that does not fit the "agents are out to eat our brains!" stereotype at all (although I've never been prone to that stereotype honestly, I try to picture someone instead with a giant stack of papers about four times the size of them going "Dear Lord, I'm only getting paid for one of these papers," and if their stack is electronic, they're double cool because they're green):

1. You get hungry. You start to look for things to eat and consume (which isn't good when you're counting coke calories). Alcohol is a common one, but so is cheese and crackers, mangos, and red tea. In my case, anyway. This is as close as I can get to understanding pregnancy.
   
2. You have the desire to scream at someone. You want to instantly call the person closest to you (or maybe second or third up that ladder) and scream incessantly about nothing, with lots of "my book is horrible, I'm so screwed [or other, fouler replacements]!" that you hopefully think is not true but is just what happens when that evil bile that lurks in varying degrees in all humans seeps out of your pores. Interlaced in your ramble that clearly supports the case for animal tranquilizer usage on humans is the person's reassurances that echo the voice of reason in your mind and calm you into a reading state.
3. You read Bird by Bird. You've trained yourself to do this whenever you have any kind of meltdown that is writing-related. You have favorite chapters for feelings that, much to your hair-ripping disapproval, you can't explain in words.
4. You beat the crap out of the keyboard playing video games. Or blogging, or Facebooking, or whatever have you. Personally, I have found the keyboard gets punished the most when trying to kill people in a different state that you think are political zealots dressed in the avatars of elves with daggers.
5. You read more. Now your hands are tired. You read your manuscript, and then your favorite passage(s) from your favorite book(s)--or books represented by the agent to which looms over your manuscript now with a giant scythe that is dripping with ice cubes--and you find yourself with a highlighter, scraping at both your manuscript and the book. Sometimes Self-Editing for Fiction Writers appears out of nowhere like a ninja.
   
6. You mark your calendar. You realize you're slipping into dysfunctionality (especially when you combine words like dysfunctional and functionality together into words that spell check thinks are inappropriate) and you get up and put a giant red circle around the "two month" mark for when you'll get a reply, because you're probably not going to be coherent enough in an hour to do that math ever again. (Until you get your reply, anyway.)
7. "Rejection!?" You start preparing yourself for the reject at this point. It's instinct, a part (maybe big, maybe small) is just bred into us to do it. You tell yourself instead of getting accepted that maybe, just maybe, you'll be good enough to not get a form rejection, but some personalized thing that says you were good enough to "place" rather than get the gold trophy. If you're good at bouncing back on your feet, you realize you don't care about trophies at all, and this is when you get back to reality:
   

You smile. Because life is good, and you love to write. And you've been doing that all along.

Let's say you're not good at bouncing back. Here's some advice:

• Personally, I tend to spend more time going "where is it!?!?" than freaking about what happens to the submission afterward. Channel all your anxiety into this. Write something else. Walk the line of "hope for the best, prepare for the worst" if you were not born with that beautiful thing called optimism, and do your best to tell yourself that someone will--they will--eventually fall in love with your manuscript, just like you have.
• Get some supportive readers. My readers keep me afloat if I ever twitch-twitch out of my "life is good" mentality.
• Remind yourself that people can and will check you out online. This logical approach not only forces you to keep a positive mentality (you can't lie in blogs and Facebooks and etcetera, your mood will inevitably show), but it often gives you the opportunity to exchange a positive mentality with others and realize just how cool the written word is. Because, you know, you didn't know that already.

Stumbled on my entry? Share your thoughts on querying!