Category: writing

“It’s Complicated” at CBC Diversity

- Stacy 1 Comment

As we’ve discussed on here before, diversity in children’s and YA books can be pretty controversial. Just reading the comments sections at any of the latest posts about diversity can make your head spin, between the people denying that white privilege exists and those saying that even if it does exist, it doesn’t matter, because “people of color don’t read.”

Those things aren’t true, but how do we dispel them? How do we address the multi-pronged issue of getting more diverse books out there?

The CBC Diversity Committee is working to help address this. This week on the CBC Diversity blog, the theme is “It’s Complicated.” Check out Nancy Mercado’s opening post:

The internet can often be a rough-and-tumble kind of place when it comes to complex and layered discussions, but we think it’s possible and necessary to have a respectful and open forum where we are able to chat about some of the challenges that we face, as well as the opportunities that exist when we come together as a community.

This will be a safe space for us in publishing—writers, editors, marketing folks, sales people, artists, anyone involved in getting books to kids—to discuss the issues.

Today, Cynthia Leitich Smith is talking about the fear of saying something wrong. Hop on over and join in on the conversation.

 

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On a related note, here’s some recent coverage of this issue.

The Atlantic Wire: The Ongoing Problem of Race in YA

Huffington Post: Race On YA Covers: Survey Reports A Continued Lack Of Diversity

Jezebel: White Folks Star in 90% of 2011’s Young Adult Book Covers

John Scalzi: Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

John Scalzi: “Lowest Difficulty Setting” Follow-Up

Sarah Ockler: Race in YA Lit: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee-Colored Skin, YA Authors [at SFWA]

Sarah Ockler: Race in YA Lit: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee-Colored Skin, YA Authors [at her own blog]

BYU event before LTUE

- Stacy 4 Comments

Life, the Universe, and Everything is NEXT WEEK! That means I’ll be seeing many of you then. If you’re unable to attend LTUE, though, and are in the area, you should check out this event. It’s free for any who’d like to attend—you don’t have to be a student. And if you are going to LTUE, come anyway! Karen won’t be on any panels officially, so this is your chance to ask her questions and perhaps even get a book signed after the program.

So You Want to Work in Publishing For Young Readers?

Courtesy Howard Tayler, SchlockMercenary.com

If you are interested in working as an author, an illustrator, an editor, or in any other position in the publishing for young readers market, you are invited to come listen to, discuss with, and learn from Stacy Whitman, on February 8th, from 5:10-7:40 pm. in room 251 Tanner Bldg at BYU.

Stacy Whitman is the editorial director of Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books. In 2009 while living in Orem, Utah, she founded a small press named Tu Publishing, dedicated to publishing multicultural fantasy and science fiction for children and young adults, which was acquired by Lee & Low Books of New York City and became Tu Books. The imprint launched fall 2011 with Tankborn, Wolf Mark, and Galaxy Games: The Challengers, and will follow up with BYU graduate Bryce Moore’s book this spring, Vodnik. Whitman holds a master’s degree in children’s literature from Simmons College. Learn more about Tu, including submissions guidelines and links to buy books, at http://www.leeandlow.com/p/tu.mhtml. Stacy’s blog of writing and publishing advice can be found at www.stacylwhitman.com.

Stacy’s presentation will be a wide open discussion on the publishing business, including, but not limited to the following topics:

  • Preparing for a career in publishing
  • What does an editor do all day?
  • Working with authors and art directors
  • Advice for writers and illustrators on getting published
  • Diversity in publishing and books
  • Genre fiction and children’s fiction

Stacy will be accompanied by author Karen Sandler.

Karen Sandler is the author of seventeen novels for adults, as well as several short stories and screenplays. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a software engineer, including work on the space shuttle program and communications satellites. TANKBORN, published by Tu Books, is her first young adult science fiction novel. She lives in northern California with her husband, three cats, and an Andalusian/Morgan mare. For more information about Sandler, visit karensandler.net.

 

 

Notes from SCBWI Winter Conference

- Stacy 5 Comments

I had such a great time talking to everyone at SCBWI Winter Conference this weekend and teaching the multicultural books breakout. In one of my sessions, we didn’t get to this part of my notes, and for the others, we had to go through the list quickly because it was so long.

One thing we talked about is how the industry itself is working on awareness and furthering diversity among the books themselves and future publishing personnel. Last night, we launched the CBC Diversity Committee, which is working on these goals with other publishing partners. We have a brand-new website (which will gain content as time goes on) and plan a variety of events such as panels discussing diversity, visiting school career days and job fairs, and just continuing the conversation about diversity in all platforms, such as social media. See also some press coverage, where Robin Adelsen, the CBC’s executive director, shares our goals:

To make a difference, we will focus on recruitment by visiting high schools and colleges, providing resources on the CBC Diversity blog and promoting discourse by hosting panel and roundtable discussions.

I also promised attendees of my session that I would share with them the list of questions we discussed that might help us to know what questions to ask when thinking about deep cultural differences, whether we’re talking about writing cross-culturally in the sense of writing from a perspective not our own, or whether we’re thinking about reaching a readership that isn’t entirely our own culture, and if perhaps there might be some ways to express/acknowledge those differences in our writing. In the case of writing from our own cultural perspective, these questions may be less useful, but nonetheless I think they might get us all thinking about how culture affects decisions we make—not as a form of conditioning, at least no more than any other culture, but as a framework by which we interpret the world. Thinking about these questions may help us in our writing as we apply them to characterization, worldbuilding, plot (how a character reacts to certain problems may certainly be affected by cultural attitudes, whether he or she goes with mainstream culture or not, as does how other characters interact with that person, which eventually over the course of a book turns into a sequence of actions that turn into plot), setting, and so forth.

These questions are from chapter 9 of the excellent book A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience: Beneath the Surface by Joseph Shaules. The author was writing to an audience of potential U.S. expats living abroad, with the idea of helping them to think about cultural differences and ways to adapt to their new countries and enjoy the journey, but as I read it, I found so much that is applicable to ways we might think of culture in terms of writing about it, not to mention the adaptation experiences I had living with college roommates from other countries The intercultural experience goes both ways—though I didn’t live in another country, and so my experience wasn’t quite as deep, I still found I had to adapt and learn from my roommates if I wanted to get along with them.

I highly recommend reading the whole book, or at least chapter 9, where he expands on these questions and discusses how the answers are not either-or, good/bad—just choices that don’t have a value attached to them that show how different people choose to handle universal human questions in different ways.

  1. Whom are people loyal to?
  2. Who gets respect?
  3. How do we ensure fairness and efficiency?
  4. How do we manage our emotions?
  5. Who is in control?
  6. What time is it?
  7. How can we judge goodness and truth?
  8. How different are men and women?
  9. Am I in your space?
  10. Shall we look forward or back?

Also: I loved that there were several Koreans in my seminar over the course of the day, two in one session alone! After that session, we got to talking about why and how I’m learning Korean, so I wanted to give a shout-out to the excellent Talk to Me in Korean and their sister site, HaruKorean. I think for those with middle-school aged kids and older, and for us adults looking to learn, it’s a great place to learn Korean both by ear (with the short podcasts that feel like you’re just listening to your Korean friends bantering, yet you’re learning at the same time) and in writing (at HaruKorean you can practice Korean sentences and get corrections from native Korean speakers).

And lastly (but not least), one thing I didn’t get to include in my presentation for lack of time was bookseller Elizabeth Bluemle’s anecdote about how she talks up diversity to her customers, which illustrates well the bookseller-reader part of the diversity in publishing equation. She noted,

“Thinking about our own approach to race in children’s books requires ongoing self-assessment for all of us booksellers, me included. For instance: when I handsell books to customers, I usually gather three to five possible titles and booktalk each one.”

She said that in that stack, she tries to include at least one book featuring a character of color, and if she sees resistance on a customer’s face about the book about the character of color,

“…and they say those coded things like, ‘I don’t think that’s really for him,’ or ‘Oh, she wouldn’t like that,’ you can say, ‘Kids in town LOVE this book!’ (Of course, that has to actually be true. You never compromise your integrity or reputation by pretending a book is good or popular when it isn’t.) And you can make one more gentle try, by saying why you chose that book for that customer’s grandchild…”

…focusing on what’s great about the story—the adventure, the specifics of the plot.

“If they still say no, at least they will be more aware of why they’re saying no.”

Read Elizabeth’s whole post here at the Shelftalker blog.

 

My LTUE schedule 2012

- Stacy 8 Comments

I’ll be in Utah this February again this year for the excellent science fiction/fantasy convention Life, the Universe, and Everything. It’s the convention’s 30th anniversary this year. Normally it’s hosted at Brigham Young University, but due to scheduling difficulties it’ll be held this year at neighboring Utah Valley University only a few miles away—and a few miles closer to my greatest restaurant love, a restaurant I have yet to find matched in New York City (seriously), Sakura. Seriously, best deep-fried sushi (sometimes called tempura—not just for shrimp!) that I’ve found anywhere. Particularly the Geisha, Spider, Firecracker, Ninja, and Hawaiian rolls. If you’re in Utah and you haven’t discovered this place yet (and you’re not Jessica Day George) GO. It’s SO GOOD.

But I digress. (Good sushi can do that to me.)

Anyway, my point is that you need to attend LTUE, especially if you live in the Intermountain West. Sure, they’ve started charging a nominal fee (it used to be free), but that fee makes sure this great convention can continue to happen every year, giving them a modest budget for facilities, guests of honor, and so forth. The committee that runs the con are all volunteers.

Speaking of guests of honor, I’m looking forward to meeting a longtime internet but not (yet) real-life friend, James A. Owen. He’ll be talking about both writing and illustration, including a whole seminar on how to draw dragons, so if you’re an illustrator, you want to come to this LTUE.

Also attending will be the Writing Excuses team—not just locals Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler, but also SFWA vice president, puppeteer, and author Mary Robinette Kowal, not to mention a number of locally-based pros, writers and editors like Mette Ivie Harrison, Larry Correia, James Dashner, Bree Despain, J. Scott Savage, Tyler Whitesides, Chris Schoebinger, Robert J. Defendi, Lisa Mangum, and many more.

Check out the full schedule here (where there may be some tweaks to the schedule, so you might want to check back before the con), but here’s my schedule:

 

Thursday, February 8, 2012

10:00 AM—What Exactly Does an Editor Do, Anyway? (Rick Walton (M), Stacy Whitman, Suzanne Vincent, Lisa Mangum, Kirk Shaw)

11:00 AM—Middle-grade books for boys (Tyler Whitesides, E. J. Patten, Michael Young, Stacy Whitman(M))

2:00 PM—Feeling Fake: What to do about that pervasive feeling that everyone belongs in the publishing world except you. (Sandra Tayler, Jason Alexander, Ami Chopine (M), Stacy Whitman)

7:00 PM—A Vampire is NOT your Boyfriend!: Real Vampires (Mette Ivie Harrison, Michael R. Collings, Dan Lind, Stacy Whitman(M))

 

Friday, Febrary 10, 2011

No panels for me, though I will be around the convention, so I’m open to individual meet-ups for lunch (particularly at Sakura…). I’m also looking forward to James Owen’s main address this day, and the Writing Excuses live podcast. .

EDIT: I have been added to the below panel to give the editorial side:

6:00 PM—Book Bombs: How to make an Amazon.com bestseller (Randy Tayler (M), Robison Wells, Larry Correia, Stacy L. Whitman, Michaelbrent Collings)

 

Saturday, February 11, 2012

1:00 PM—Writing Cross-Culturally: Mistakes to Avoid, or, How to Avoid Cultural Misappropriation (Stacy Whitman)

This will be a workshop in which we talk about all the mistakes that even well-meaning authors can make in diversifying our writing, and how to use strong worldbuilding and characterization to prevent that. Also: how making mistakes doesn’t mean we’re racist—it just means we’re willing to learn.

2:00 PM—Plots, Subplots, and Foreshadowing (Bree Despain (M), J. Scott Savage, Brandon Sanderson, James A. Owen, Stacy Whitman)

 

I’m not on the following workshop, but want to highlight it because both Sandra and Mary are people to learn from, and given that the workshop will be two hours long, you’ll get an opportunity to really go in depth.

3:00-5:00 PM

– The Published (and aspiring) Author’s Toolbox: Learning skills for networking, blogging, social media, and self-promotion.  This workshop will teach principles and give you a chance to practice skills to integrate networking, blogging, social media, and self-promotion into your professional life without being the person who annoys and without pulling you out of balance with yourself.

(Sandra Tayler, Mary Robinette Kowal)

 

NY SCBWI schedule

- Stacy 6 Comments

If you didn’t already know, I’m going to be speaking at the end of the month at the New York SCBWI National Conference at the end of January. I’m excited to be talking about multicultural books, particularly writing them—pitfalls to avoid, things to consider when you write cross-culturally, maybe highlight some of my favorites from the last few years for writers to look to as examples. If you’re going to be there—and even if you’re not—feel free to mention in the comments your favorites from the last two or so years, or to give me an example of a mistake that authors or movies make in the name of “diversity” that you wish they would do better.

Before I give you my schedule, though, let me remind you that tonight on Twitter is #yalitchat, where I and Tankborn author Karen Sandler  will be talking about writing cross-culturally. Especially if you can’t make it to SCBWI nationals, drop by tonight at 9 pm EST. Even if you’re not on Twitter, you can follow the conversation at search.twitter.com (search for “#yalitchat”) or one of those sites that let you search hashtag conversations (sorry, I can’t think of a good one right now, but maybe someone in the comments might know what I’m talking about and give us a link?).

Here’s my SCBWI schedule:

  • VIP party and Art Show on Friday night (Jan. 27)
  • Presentation on Saturday, January 28th:  11:45 am-12:45 pm, 3:15-4:15 pm and 4:30 pm-5:30 pm
  • Gala Reception for attendees on Saturday from 5:30 pm-7:30 pm

If you’re attending, I hope to see you at one of those events, and if they end up doing a KidLit Drinks Night again this year, perhaps I’ll pop in there too. We’ll see how exhausted I am by the end of the day Saturday!

 

Writing diversity: avoiding the Magical Negro

- Stacy 15 Comments

I don’t know that we’ve ever discussed the concept of the Magical Negro here before, or its equivalent in American storytelling with Asian and Native American characters, and I think we need to. With Tu’s emphasis on protagonists being characters of color, I don’t get as many submissions nowadays using this old stereotype/trope, but it’s one that I’ve seen a lot of in past years because it’s so common, an easy way to add diversity that has a subtle racism in it because of the way it privileges the white main character over the person of color who is helping him (and it’s usually a him).

I just ran into this great post by Nnedi Okorafor from 2004—that you should go read in its entirety—that sums up the trope quite nicely:

  1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.
  2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.
  3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.
  4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.
  5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

Think about even some recent movies and you’ll see this trope at work. (Movies are easy comparisons for me as shortcuts, because they tend to be easier touchstones for a larger audience.)  Cowboys and Aliens, anyone? I was enjoying the complicated character interactions of C&A right up until the end when (SPOILER ALERT) a certain important character dies, which ruined the entire movie for me. Not quite a Magical Negro in that situation, but related to it. American martial arts movies from the 80s and 90s had plenty of Magical Asians teaching young white kids karate or kung fu (yes, Karate Kid,  awesome as it is, falls into this).

Sometimes the trope is fairly benign. So let’s look at Karate Kid. After quite a bit of focus on Daniel, eventually there’s a bridging of the cultural gap between Mr. Miyagi and Daniel—eventually Daniel learns about Mr. Miyagi’s past and we come to understand Mr. Miyagi as a person, which deepens the character development and I think changes the dynamic from one in which his existence in the plot is only to help the main character. Daniel has at least a tiny bit to offer Mr. Miyagi as well, in the form of friendship to a lonely old man. The balance is still in Daniel’s favor, but not as severely as in other stories that use this trope.

In Okorafor’s post, she examines Stephen King’s use of this trope, and she also notes that

King is not a racist. The Talisman, The Stand, The Shining, and The Green Mile are superb novels and I do think that there was good intent behind the making of the characters I’ve mentioned. Nevertheless, these characters are what they are and King does benefit from that fact. Magical Negroes are always interesting, being magical and mysterious, and they make things happen. When a Magical Negro pops up, the story crackles and pops.

The trope is a trope because it can make a story work. Yet just because it’s something that works doesn’t mean it’s something we shouldn’t try to avoid when we can, especially because the trope can be pretty caustic, too—think about, especially, storytelling about Native Americans. Last of the Mohicans and Dances with Wolves are pretty good examples of When Tropes Go Bad: the Native Americans almost always die to leave the land to their white inheritors, and the power dynamic is always tipped in favor of the white protagonist as inheritor of the virtues of the Native Americans. “Native Americans don’t live here anymore” seems to an underlying message from stories like this. The controversial book Touching Spirit Bear comes closer to home for those of us in the YA community.

(Okorafor’s post over on Strange Horizons covers a lot of interesting and important territory on this subject, so go read the whole post.)

How to avoid the Magical Negro trope, or at least the worst version of it? As I think about it, the Magical Negro is kind of a subtype of the Guru character who comes to help the protagonist on his journey. In fantasy, Gandalf is the perfect example of the Guru character. Especially in The Hobbit, Gandalf exists to help, teach, and guide. We don’t know much about him—he’s just this mysterious magical being who helps Bilbo set off on his quest. Gandalf’s role in The Lord of the Rings is expanded a little, and his relationship with Sauron and their backstory more important, but Gandalf is still very much in the role of helper to the main characters, the one who dies so that others can live (getting away from the Balrog)—he just happens to be powerful enough to come back as Gandalf the White, and then AGAIN help the main characters win by bringing reinforcements to Helm’s Deep, among other feats.

But when the Wizard becomes the Magical Negro, we add a racial dynamic to a relatively tired old trope (after all, even if it works for Gandalf, it’s been done so many times) that, especially when the older POC is teaching a young white kid, implies a symbolic inheritance/transference of wisdom and power—especially, as we already talked about, when it comes to stories involving Native Americans in the 1800s.

Occasionally I hear white writers, especially, say things like, “How can I add diversity to my stories, then? It seems like you can’t win. When I do add diversity, I get accused of playing to stereotypes”—the Magical Negro being one, the Black Guy Dies First being another.

I think part of of the solution is seeing past the main character as the most important character to the exclusion of other characters. “Helper” characters need to be fleshed out as independent beings in their own right, with their own concerns that don’t always match up to the priorities of the main character, even if the fate of the world is at stake.

I’m currently catching up on Supernatural Season 6, and there was a really great episode about Bobby, the down-to-earth friend of the family who is always getting Sam and Dean out of scrapes both big and small. (SPOILERS AHEAD) At the end of Season 5, Bobby sold his soul to a demon to accomplish some goal that I’ve now forgotten, the end result of which was to ensure that Satan went back in his cage and didn’t destroy the world. Now in the 5th season, Bobby has to deal with the consequences of that deal. Meantime, Dean has some suspicions about Sam being not quite right and wants to air his worries/grievances to his normal confidant, Bobby. But Bobby now has bigger fish to fry. He has to worry about his OWN soul, literally. Yet Dean’s worries are justified and he really does need help, so Dean has to help Bobby so Bobby has the space to help Sam and Dean.

I think that kind of complication of character motivations makes all the difference. Bobby is sort of Sam and Dean’s Gandalf. He’s always sending them off on quests, or in Supernatural parlance, “jobs.” There isn’t a racial dynamic, but Bobby is a “helper” character most of the time. Yet Bobby is a fully-fleshed-out real person, too, who is just as important as anyone else. He’s not lower in social stature, he’s not obliged to help Sam and Dean out of any other motivation other than friendship/a sense of family. He doesn’t simply exist to serve Sam and Dean and then disappear.

ETA: I know this is already long, but Okorafor has a great point in that same post that sums up what I’m getting at quite nicely:

Part of my point was that Magical Negroes have power that, if harnessed for personal intent, would change the story greatly. What would The Green Mile be if Coffey had been more concerned with escaping than helping? What would The Talisman have been if Speedy hadn’t been there for Jack because he was trying to save the talisman himself, because he thought he himself was capable, too? What would have happened in The Stand if Mother Abigail had been more concerned with helping her own folks make it to a better place than the ragtag group that came along? What would all these stories have been if these characters’ destinies weren’t so tied to someone outside of themselves? If they hadn’t been written that way? The answer: the stories would have been more complex, the characters more human, less lapdog.

Making secondary characters more fleshed-out, real people with their own priorities and individual worth, and less a cardboard cutout, won’t automatically prevent them from still being representative of a trope, but I think it can help mitigate the dynamic. And, of course, more stories starring POC as heroes of their own tales is another solution to this problem. Let’s talk about it some more. What do you think?

**By the way, this post was inspired because I followed a link from Nnedi Okorafor’s post on her bust of Lovecraft, the symbol of her World Fantasy Award, which explores Lovecraft’s racism and the legacy of racism we must confront in fantasy. Go read that as well.

 

On sequels

- Stacy 4 Comments

I’ve been reading a number of highly anticipated sequels lately, as well as editing a sequel or two myself. It has me thinking about the best ways to reintroduce your reader to your characters and plot that they may have just read last week—or maybe it’s been more than a year. How do you avoid over-dumping on the re-reader without leaving the non-re-reader in the dusts of confusion?

One strategy I’ve seen in sequels for young readers, especially, is to just stop the action entirely at some point in the first chapter and explain what happened in the last book. It’s a trick I saw used a lot in series books for kids when I was a young reader obsessed with Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew books.

This doesn’t really work for me. Any stopping of the action for an infodump breaks the spell for me as a reader, taking me time to rebuild my suspension of disbelief. It worked to a point in those old series books because my library didn’t always have every single copy in order when I wanted them (not to mention they were missing several volumes), but especially if you’re not writing series books (as in, shared-world), it’s not the best strategy, in my opinion.

Then there’s the school of thought that just dumps you into the action of the new book. This can work, but it’s tricky. One book I read recently is a good example (no, I’m not going to tell you the name of it): I’m right there with the story until the character thinks of another character who she’s lost touch with. He’s not in any scene for the first quarter of the book, and I was racking my brain that whole time trying to remember which of two or three possibilities he could be, and that confusion wasn’t cleared up when he showed up in-scene.  And it’s a confusion that I’m not sure the author could have anticipated. Maybe I should have glanced back at the previous book to remind myself. Was he a love interest? Was he a brother? Was he a potential love interest who turned out to be a brother? (Perhaps too much Star Wars in my diet?) I couldn’t remember until at least halfway through the book, and mostly because I picked up the last book and skimmed. This has happened to me a few times lately.

I think there are ways to help jog the reader’s memory without losing momentum or forcing the reader to go back to the previous book (some readers might not even have the previous book on hand—they might have borrowed it from the library or a friend). In my opinion, the best way to remind readers, whether they’ve just read a book and are launching into the sequel immediately or it’s been a year since they read the last book, is the same principle as getting your reader into a completely new world: through well-placed details planted with a deft touch.

Let’s look at the opening pages of Catching Fire, the second book in The Hunger Games trilogy, for an example. The first two paragraphs are right in the moment, Katniss thinking about what’s going on right now and what’s about to happen. We don’t get a direct reference to the Hunger Games until paragraph 3, but all along she’s talking about their outcome because that’s what life is for her now: reporters and camera crews, preparation for the Victory Tour, the dread she feels so much that it’s physically affecting her.

Then in paragraph 3 we get a quick review of book 1 with an in-scene rumination on how much she wants to forget the Hunger Games but isn’t allowed to because it suits the political purposes of the Capital. One paragraph, and it all matters to the current plot. She doesn’t stop the plot to explain what the Hunger Games were, just reminds the reader with a deft touch of the repercussions of all the events of book 1.

Then we’re on to the scene again, and the purpose of Katniss being in the woods: hunting for her best friend, Gale, who can’t be out in the woods as much anymore (and in the meantime, glancing off the subject of her mother and her sister, in context, discussing how life has changed for them since Katniss won the Games, how she doesn’t have to hunt for them to survive), and how Gale’s family is still living hand to mouth, why she’s the one hunting (Gale has gone to work in the coal mines), etc. The next couple of pages is kind of a “what’s happened since last time” catch-up combined with a few key details reminding us of events of book 1 or backstory while Katniss clears her snares, but woven in so that we know that she’s thinking about these things while she’s hunting. She’s got a lot of time for her mind to ruminate while she roams the woods, and these things matter to her now, right now while she’s going about her daily tasks, rather than the “stop and review” I was referring to above. It’s a subtle difference—and probably the conversational tone of the present tense of Catching Fire helps with that. It feels like Katniss is personally telling her story, so a few thoughts of the past that she’s currently thinking about work in a way that might feel odd in past tense.

I had another sequel in mind to use as an example, but it’s at home and I’m at the office and I’ve been drafting this post over the course of several days now. So I’ll go ahead and post this now, but maybe I’ll come back with that other book when I get home from the office, as a counterpoint. Catching Fire actually doesn’t do a whole lot of active reminding of what happened in the last book—as I said, it’s more of a “here’s what’s happened since last time” approach, using a hunting scene as a framework, that simultaneously reminds readers of characters and relationships, with a sentence or two here or there where necessary to remind readers of past events (like the sentence that notes that Gale’s mother lost her husband in the same mining accident in which Katniss lost her father). But not every book has as memorable a plot as The Hunger Games—not everything can be about kids being forced to kill other kids on reality TV—so there are some sequels in which a more active reminder is necessary. But these sequels still require a deft touch so as to avoid stopping the action. I believe the book I have at home does that, but I’ll have to go look at it to be sure. So, more later!

Villain POVs

- Stacy 12 Comments

I have to admit, I really hate villain POVs. There are so few villains that have any redeemable qualities, and especially starting a book out with the villain’s point of view when they’re murdering and/or plundering just makes me go, “Why do I want to read this book, again?”

This is actually one of the things I hated most about the Wheel of Time series, though I loved the series in general: I hated the amount of time spent on this Forsaken’s love of naked mindless servants, and that Forsaken’s love of skinning people, or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I get it, they’re irredeemably evil. Get back to someone I’m actually ROOTING FOR, which is why I’m reading the book!

Sometimes it’s important to briefly show the villain’s point of view to convey to the reader some information that our hero doesn’t have, but I find more and more that my tolerance for even these kinds of scenes is thinning fast. Too often it’s a substitute for more subtle forms of suspense, laying clues that the reader could pick up if they were astute, the kind of clues that the main character should be putting together one by one to the point where when he or she finally figures it out, the reader slaps their own forehead and says, “I should have seen that coming!”

It’s a completely different matter, of course, when the whole point is for the “villain” to simply be someone on another side of an ideological or political divide where there are no true “bad guys.” Usually this happens in a book in which your narrators are unreliable, which can be very interesting.

But there’s a line for me, generally the pillaging/raping/murdering/all manner of human rights abuses line, at which I’m sorry, I just don’t care about this guy’s point of view. The equivalent of this in middle grade books—where pillages/murders/rapes are (hopefully) fewer—is the pure evil villain who’s just out to get the main character because the villain is black-hearted, mean, vile, whathaveyou. Evil through and through, with no threads of humanity. (Though honestly if he’s killing people “for their own good” to protect a certain more nuanced human viewpoint, I generally still don’t want to see that from his POV.)

So, what’s the line for you? Do you like villain points of view? Do you feel they add depth to a story? At what point do you think a villain POV goes from adding nuance or advancing the plot to annoying?

ETA: Coincidentally, my author Bryce Moore recently reviewed the Captain America movie and had this to say about how a character becomes evil, which I think is apropos to this discussion:

Honestly, if writers spent as much time developing the origin and conflicted ethos of the villains of these movies, I think they’d all be doing us a favor. As it is, it’s like they have a bunch of slips of paper with different elements on them, then they draw them at random from a hat and run with it. Ambitious scientist. Misunderstood childhood. Picked on in school.

That’s not how evil works, folks. You don’t become evil because you get hit in the head and go crazy. You become evil by making decisions that seemed good at the time. Justified. Just like you become a hero by doing the same thing. A hero or a villain aren’t born. They’re made. That’s one of the things I really liked about Captain America. He’s heroic, no matter how buff or weak he is.

This is, perhaps, the best description of why villain POVs bug me so much: because they’re oversimplified, villainized. And for some stories, I think villainization works, but I don’t want to see that point of view, because it’s oversimplified and uninteresting. When it’s actually complicated and interesting, then it becomes less “the villain” and more nuanced—sometimes resulting in real evil (after all, I doubt Hitler was an evil baby; he made choices to become the monster he became) and sometimes resulting in a Democrat instead of a Republican or vice versa—ideological, political differences between (usually) relatively good people (though our current political discourse would probably make little distinction between *insert the opposite of your own party here* and Hitler, I do believe there is truly a difference).

FAQ: Muslim protagonists

- Stacy

A writer asks:

I recently submitted the first three chapters of my manuscript to Tu Books as per your guidelines, and I am a ball of anxiety. My MC is a Muslim girl, and while the story itself is pure historical fantasy, I am worried that you will feel a Muslim protagonist is not relatable enough. Can you share your thoughts? I’ve been told that publishers might not want to take a chance on a Muslim protagonist.

 

No need to worry! Muslim protagonists (as well as non-Muslim Arab and Arab American protagonists) are welcome here, both historical and contemporary. I’ve been on the lookout for a story set in the Middle East and hadn’t found the right one yet. So please, yes! Send them along.

The biggest concern I’d have about any character being relatable would be on an individual basis, not because they were Muslim. If the main character were unsympathetic, that kind of thing—that’s what makes it hard for me to relate to a character. For me, relatability is based more on emotional connection rather than situational relatability. I can’t directly relate with the situation of being a genetically engineered untouchable/slave, but I completely related to Kayla in Tankborn on an emotional level. Who hasn’t felt as lost and disoriented at some point as she did, needing to discover what was most important to us and where we fit in the world, whether we shared her situation (being Assigned to her first job as a GEN caretaker) or not?

What I look for in something I might like to publish: strong, relatable characters; settings that interest me (whether familiar or unfamiliar); plot lines in which interesting and important things happen, action abounds, and connect closely with character development; worldbuilding that brings a reader into the world (in fantasy, no one knows this world, even if it is closely related to one in the real world; skillful worldbuilding is very important on a number of levels); well crafted voice. This can be done with characters of any background (well, I might not sympathize with a story told completely from Sauron’s point of view; completely evil characters are generally not sympathetic!).

I hope that helps allay some fears. When we say “about everyone, for everyone,” we mean everyone. Except maybe Sauron.