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).
And by the way, if you haven’t seen me talk about it on Twitter or Facebook, you should check out this post on Cynthia Leitich Smith’s blog in which I interview Tankborn author Karen Sandler—and at the end you’ll see ways to enter to win a critique from me. Deadline is Oct. 24!
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.
Reader reactions are so subjective. One person might think there’s not nearly enough worldbuilding in a book (“give me more! MORE!”) and another might say of the exact same book that what worldbuilding there is was way too confusing (“I couldn’t keep all those made-up words straight!”).
So how do you, as the author, balance the needs of such a wide range of readers when you’re working in a complex world that needs development? And how do you balance the need to establish your characters, setting, and plot with the need to spool out information to your reader to intrigue them rather than confuse them?
This is a question that pretty much every author and editor of speculative fiction struggles with, particularly because we, as veterans of the genre, are already more comfortable with a lot of worldbuilding jargon than your average teen reader, particularly teen readers whose preference for fantasy runs more toward the contemporary paranormal variety. There are a number of reasons why I think Twilight was so popular on such a broad scale, but one of the biggest ones was the relatability of the situation. So what if you’ve never had a vampire show up at your high school? It could happen!
Think about all the really big fantasy hits of the last few years in children’s and YA fiction: Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Twilight, Hunger Games. Of these books’ beginnings, only The Hunger Games is all far that outside the everyday experiences of your average young reader, and even The Hunger Games starts with a relatable situation—a coal mining family lives in a desperate situation and must hunt for food; while most kids who would have access to The Hunger Games don’t live under a despotic regime, it’s plausible that it could happen in the real world. Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are ordinary kids going to school, living somewhat normal lives (even if abusive ones, in the case of Harry) before their worlds change with the discovery of magic. Their starting point is relatable.
What this means is that readers of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Twilight figure out the world alongside the main character. Information is spooled out as the character needs it, so the reader doesn’t have to absorb everything at once. This is a low bar for entry, not requiring much synthesis of information.
What about Hunger Games? Now it gets a little tougher. Suzanne Collins starts out with a perfectly relatable (if a tiny bit cliche) situation, the main character waking up and seeing her family. We get some exposition on Katniss’s family and the cat who hates her. But it becomes non-cliche by page 2, when we learn about the Reaping. Ah! What’s the Reaping, you ask? We don’t know yet. Now the bar for entry is raised. There is a question, the answer for which you’re going to have to read further to find out. The infodumpage level is low, but there is still some exposition in the next few pages, letting us know that Katniss lives in a place called District 12, nicknamed the Seam, and that her town in enclosed by a fence that is sometimes electrified—and which is supposed to be electrified all the time.
Collins’s approach to spooling out a little information at a time is to explain each new term as she goes, but some readers think that feels unnatural in a first person voice because the narrator would already know these things, so why is she explaining them to the reader? It depends on the story, in my opinion—Collins makes it work because of how she crafted Katniss’s voice. It is a very fine line to walk—I can’t tell you how many submissions I’ve gotten that start out with, “My name is X. I am Y years old. I live in a world that does Z,” an obvious example of how this approach becomes downright clumsy when not handled with Collins-esque finesse.
Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum, in which the reader is given clues to work out rather than having any new terms explained to them. This approach needs just as much, if not more, finesse. It’s a process that some readers who are new to speculative fiction might stumble over the most, which is why I think there’s so little of it in middle grade and YA fantasy and science fiction. I’ve seen it called “incluing,” which is a silly word, but I don’t know of another name for it and the description of incluing in that Wikipedia link is exactly the kind of worldbuilding I prefer to see in the beginning of a book, particularly one set in a world that has no connection to our own, or if it’s in the future of our world it’s far enough into the future that the society is probably unrecognizable to us, such as the society in Tankborn.
The prominent example I like to give writers for this kind of worldbuilding is from The Golden Compass. Check out the first page of that book:
(I hope that embed worked right! It’s easier just to show you the first page from Google Books than to type up the first few paragraphs myself.)
Pullman jumps right into the scene, with Lyra sneaking down the hallway with her daemon. We don’t even know what the daemon physically looks like until paragraph 4, and even then we don’t know why he’s called a daemon or what makes a daemon special. In fact, this is one of the major conflicts of the book—we need to read more to find out about daemons, and further mysteries are revealed as we read that deepen our understanding of daemons. As we discover more clues that intrigue us, we want to know more, and keep reading.
But the line between intriguing the reader and confusing the reader is very thin, and I would argue that for some readers it’s in a different place than for others. Those of us who are familiar with fantasy might be more willing to patiently wait for more information about daemons because we trust that this author will let us know what we need to know when the time is right. We know that they’re teasing us with this information so as not to overburden us within the first few pages of the book (or, in the case of The Golden Compass, because the reader can’t know what the majority of people in that world don’t know, either).
In situations in which you need to establish a world that’s entirely different from our own, I find that putting a character in a situation that’s somewhat familiar to the reader can help with establishing the unfamiliar. In Karen Sandler’s Tankborn, for example, Kayla has to watch her little brother instead of going to a street fair with her friends. While Kayla might call him her “nurture brother” instead of just her “brother,” it’s still a situation to which a lot of readers can relate, even if it is set on another planet and her brother is catching nasty arachnid-based sewer toads instead of familiar Earth frogs and toads.
For me it’s also the difference between showing and telling. Philip Pullman shows us how his world works, rather than pausing to tell us how it works (“in this world, all people are born with an animal companion called a daemon”). Telling can work, though, especially in small doses—Katniss’s voice is so conversational that the brief moments of telling in the first few pages of The Hunger Games work, particularly because Collins is mostly showing what Katniss is up to. The brief pauses to “infodump” feel like the reader is being told a story by a storyteller, like a friend telling a story over the kitchen table after a nice big meal would pause and explain something you didn’t understand (a friend who’s a very good storyteller). It’s an awareness of audience, in a way, that most speculative fiction doesn’t have the luxury of.
Showing isn’t always better, and telling isn’t always bad, when done right and mixed in with showing. Whichever method you use, remember that sometimes readers will trip over new words so you need to give them as much context as possible without over-infodumping. And here is where the art comes in. I can’t tell you what that balance is, but if you look at examples like the ones above, you’ll get a better feel for how much to reveal and how much to hold back in your first few pages—revealing enough to orient your reader and give them a sense of the differences of this world (while grounding them in something familiar like Lyra’s hallway or Katniss’s humble home) while seeking to avoid overburdening them with too much all at once.
The line for each reader will still be different—heaven knows that I’ve seen reviews criticizing the first few pages of the same book that another reviewer found not-meaty-enough—but you’ll come to find the right balance for your story.
What about you? How have you found the right balance of worldbuilding without overburdening the reader? What books do you recommend as examples of good worldbuilding in the first few pages?
I’m going through a big stack of submissions that have been languishing for a while (and if you submitted a partial before Sept. 1 and don’t get a request for a full manuscript by the end of the week, you’ll know the answer is a no thanks). I’m on the lookout in particular for a book that will appeal to middle-grade girls, and I’m having a bit of a frustrating time of it. Mostly because humorous middle-grade voice seems to be a hard one to nail, and so many of the submissions in my pile seem to be going for a humorous bent.
Voice is the one thing that I don’t feel, as an editor, that I can fix. It’s too intrinsic to the art, too personal, something that has to be worked on before it comes across my desk. And a humorous voice? Even harder to shape as an editor. I completely appreciate how tough humor is just in general. It’s very subjective. So something that makes me giggle madly might not tickle someone else’s funny bone.
However, there is also a certain voice that I can only describe as “trying too hard.” The intended humor is super-goofy, overexplaining the jokes and losing the reader in the process. It feels too self-conscious, like the character is watching herself too closely instead of living her life. Humor should come, in my opinion, as a side effect of situations that happen to be a little goofy, rather than forced out of something the character finds funny, which is harder to translate into reader laughs. Thus, I personally think it’s really hilarious that Tyler Sato gets a killer asteroid named after him because, coincidentally, his cousins happened to name a star after him. But Tyler Sato himself doesn’t find it all that funny.
Part of the problem is that self-consciousness can sometimes work in YA, at least more than middle grade, because teens are more likely to notice things comment on them in a snarky way. Middle graders aren’t expected to be jaded just yet. But it’s not just that. Have you ever noticed that whenever, say, Stephen Colbert loses his deadpan, the joke loses a little something? Part of the hilarity is in the deadpan delivery. And we also have to acknowledge that not everyone is a humor writer—and that’s okay. Sometimes a book can be better when it’s not trying so hard for the laughs.
If you are writing humor, my only suggestion for improving your craft is to read writers who make it work, like Lisa Yee, Michael Buckley, and Tu’s own Greg Fishbone.
What I’d really like to see in my submission pile, though, as far as middle-grade books are concerned, is not necessarily humor—after all, we’ve got the hilarious Galaxy Games coming out this month already; go buy it! or read an excerpt!—but rather straight-on fantasy, science fiction, and mystery for middle-grade readers of both genders, but particularly girls because I don’t have much on my list for middle-grade girls right now. I’d love to see something more along the lines of Shannon Hale’s books for middle grade readers (one of my favorite books of all time is her Book of a Thousand Days, set in a Mongolia-like world): adventure and coming-into-her-own (not necessarily coming-of-age, which is more of a YA thing; would love such YAs, but I’m talking MG here right now). I also wouldn’t mind something along the lines of Michael Buckley’s The Sisters Grimm, while noting that even though the book is funny, the point-of-view character, Sabrina, is the straight (wo)man. It’s everyone else around her who’s all wacky-fairy-tale-ish.
…aaand another thing! Slang. Slang is the bane of every writer, and getting it wrong can definitely affect voice for the negative. It’s so hard to get slang right—current enough that today’s readers will not feel like the character sounds like their parents (even though it was probably written by someone from that generation or older), but also not trying so hard that it sounds corny or—worse—gets dated before it even comes out, just new enough to be thought up-to-date by the adult author but old enough to be completely out of style for the young reader. It’s particularly hard in middle school, an age where kids are sometimes just getting the hang of slang themselves. How do you write up-to-date slang without sounding completely wrong?
The general consensus among the writers of my acquaintance can be summed up in Kimberly Pauley‘s response:
Make it up. 🙂
If you’ve ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Firefly, I think one of the biggest strengths of those universes are their mostly undated slang, because they didn’t go for the easy late-90s slang everyone and their brother on Dawson’s Creek was using. Joss Whedon really is a master at made-up-yet-contemporary-sounding slang. (The hairstyles in Buffy, however, haven’t stood the test of time so well.) Find a way to fake-curse, for example, by playing with language and using something that would be unique to your character—it will make them stand out more in a good way anyway, and avoid trendy words that will be out of date before the book even gets accepted by a publisher. You might also run your slang by the tweens in your life, and if you get an eyeroll, you might reconsider.
Voice is tough to master for any writer. So perhaps take a look at your book and consider: am I trying too hard to make it funny? Can it be played straight and enjoyed for the adventure, mystery, magic, and fun of it all, whether it’s funny or not? Because perhaps its strengths lie elsewhere—and that’s a good thing!
Writers often ask me about query letters—how to write them, what to put in them, what will hook me.
The problem is that I hate query letters. I much prefer a simple cover letter with the first three chapters (NOT three chapters randomly sampled from the book). This is why my submission guidelines explicitly say, “Please include a synopsis and first three chapters of the novel. Do not send the complete manuscript.” The cover letter just needs to let me know the basics about your manuscript: genre, plot synopsis/hook, intended audience (middle grade or YA), and perhaps your writing credentials. Usually I don’t even bother reading the cover letter until I’ve read a page or two of the partial—until I’m hooked on the actual writing, it just doesn’t matter to me.
Occasionally I’ll get an emailed query from someone who has obviously been to our website, where they could have easily found the submission guidelines (which are prominently linked), because they’re using our Contact Us email address to query. When I email back with the link to our submission guidelines and telling them they’re welcome to send the first three chapters and a synopsis per the guidelines, often what happens is that a few days later I’ll get a package in the mail with “REQUESTED MATERIAL” written on it.
So, as I’ve said before, asking you to follow the directions does not mean I have requested your manuscript. It just means that I’ve asked you to follow the directions so I can receive your material in a way that will allow me to give it all due consideration. Once I have read the partial, I may request to read the full manuscript. But until then, writing “requested material” on the envelope for something I know I haven’t requested just makes me believe you aren’t listening, and that makes me think that working with you might not be an enjoyable experience.
Most agents, however, prefer query letters. As do some editors. Their work preferences are different than mine. This is why it’s SO important to read submission guidelines.
Just a few thoughts that combine from reading a couple recently published postapocalyptic trade books and some of the submissions I’ve been going through recently. This isn’t by any means a comprehensive list of things to think about—just a few things that struck me as a pattern in (some) recent reads (and something I notice when it’s done well).
I guess everything I want to say actually falls under the old (and very useful) “show, don’t tell.” And really, one doesn’t even have to apply to postapocalyptic writing, but it’s in a postapocalyptic book that I saw this problem, so here you go.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
If you include newspaper clippings/stories as metatext to support the main narrative, make sure that it actually sounds like a news clipping. Use inverted pyramid structure, starting with the most important details and filling in backstory and history only once important details have been included.
One of my first publishing-related jobs in college was as a newspaper reporter, and the end of my stories—even my feature stories—often got chopped off for space. This is a particular form of writing that means your lede has to be an actual lede, not an introductory sentence, and you don’t include common-knowledge information (stuff all the characters would know because they live in that world) as an infodump in the second paragraph.
Less is more in post-apocalyptic worldbuilding.
We usually don’t need to know every detail of the apocalypse in the first chapter, or even by the end of the book. In fact, it usually just slows down the reading and even occasionally turns off a reader to be reminded in every sentence just how bad the world is because of global warming’s effect a hundred years ago or because we ran out of fossil fuels or because a great plague hit the world three hundred years ago. These things are common knowledge to the characters—or perhaps they’re lost knowledge for the character, depending on how long ago the apocalypse happened and how much technology/media had broken down in the years since.
But generally letting the reader know exactly what happened within the first chapter or two turns into an infodump or an as-you-know-Bob. Actually, what you want to do is revealed in that last link—I didn’t know there was a name for it! Incluing, at least according to Wikipedia (which is of course so reliable, but let’s go with it for now unless someone knows of a more technical term), is what you really want to do:
Reel out worldbuilding details little by little, cluing the reader in to worldbuilding details as they need the information (or slightly before, so as not to be jarring).
The best incluing example, the one I always go back to, is the first page or so of The Golden Compass, in which Lyra is talking to her daemon as they spy on a conversation in another room. We have no idea what a daemon is, even the basic concept of what one looks like, within the first page—that’s something Philip Pullman spools out to us little by little, creating a mystery, through small, specific details, that hooks us enough to make us want to know more.
These ideas are pretty basic, but so important in a good postapocalyptic tale, in my opinion. The only exceptions I can think of to not letting the reader know the cause of the apocalypse: zombie post-apocalypses, such as Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (we know the cause of the apocalypse was zombies, because they’re everywhere; though we might not know the cause of zombies, we know the cause of the breakdown of society) and stories in which the apocalypse is currently happening, such as The Carbon Diaries (we see the breakdown of society through the main character’s eyes)—though in either case infodumps still won’t be appreciated.
But in general for most post-apocalyptic tales, I argue that less is more when it comes to revealing the cause of society’s death and allowing it to be a mystery that the reader discovers along the journey. Sometimes that journey will be figuring out why their current society is a dystopia, and hence figuring out the cause of the apocalypse that triggered this new society, but post-apocalyptic and dystopia aren’t synonymous, so sometimes it’ll simply be common knowledge that Earth that Was died in some way so we had to set out for the stars, or that in the characters’ great-grandparents’ generation a great plague swept the earth, or that global warming caused the world to become so flooded that people live on boats, fight over what little earth there is available on those boats, and evolve to grow gills and webbed feet.
Okay, Waterworld isn’t exactly the best example, but you could do worse for a short sweet example of how to worldbuild an apocalyptic backstory . . .
For those of you who submitted PARTIAL manuscripts, I am nearly up to date on everything that has come in up through June 1. I’ll post when I am, so that you’ll know that if you haven’t heard from me, the answer is no. But I’m still working my way through a few.
For those of you from whom I asked for FULL manuscripts, I’m working my way through that reading, getting back to people with editorial letters, feedback, or (sadly, yes) declines as necessary. I respond to full manuscripts; it just takes me a while. If it’s been more than four months since I got your manuscript, a reply to you might have slipped through the cracks. Feel free to follow up to see where your manuscript is in such a case. If it’s been less than four months, I should be getting back to you sometime this month.
Also, if you are a member of a writing community, listserv, message board, or other group for which this might be interesting—to which I haven’t already posted a call for submissions—you are welcome to share this around:
Call for submissions
TU BOOKS, an imprint of LEE & LOW BOOKS, publishes speculative fiction for children and young adults featuring diverse characters and settings. Our focus is on well-told, exciting, adventurous fantasy, science fiction, and mystery novels featuring people of color set in worlds inspired by non-Western folklore or culture. We welcome Western settings if the main character is a person of color.
We are looking specifically for stories for both middle grade (ages 8-12) and young adult (ages 12-18) readers. (We are not looking for picture books, chapter books, or short stories. Please do not send submissions in these formats.)
For more information on how to submit, please see our submission guidelines at http://www.leeandlow.com/p/tu_submissions.mhtml. We are not accepting unagented email submissions at this time.
What I’m particularly interested in seeing lately: Asian steampunk, any African culture, Latino/a stories, First Nations/Native American/Aboriginal fantasy or science fiction written by tribal members, original postapocalyptic worlds, historical fantasy or mystery set in a non-Western setting.
Many authors have broken that mold & followed Ursula K. Le Guin’s admonition to write more of the “other.” But there’s still a strong British tradition—among the biggest touchstones for kids from the 70s and 80s era are arguably Susan Cooper, Roald Dahl, Diana Wynne Jones, etc.
All touchstones for a reason—they’re REALLY GOOD books. But told from a particular cultural perspective, and there is a danger to just one single story—and if you haven’t seen that TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie, I highly recommend you googling “the danger of a single story” and watching all twenty minutes of the talk, because she has a lot of really great things to say about how important it is for ALL children to see themselves mirrored in the books they read.
Yet despite our gains in diversity in fantasy and all of children’s books, we still have a long way to go. Just in the last few years, I’m sure you’ve heard of the problems with intentional or unintentional whitewashing that goes back as far as Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. You probably know that the main character of Earthsea, Ged, has copper skin, and that all the characters in the book except for the invaders are people of color. The myth was that “black books” don’t sell, so many versions of Earthsea didn’t feature people on the cover to avoid that “problem”—even to the point of featuring dragons. There are no dragons in Earthsea. EDIT: Wait, there were dragons in Earthsea? I honestly don’t remember them! But my point is that whether dragons are important or not, Ged is not white. Whoops!
And when people were featured on the cover, what does Ged look like?
It’s easy to say that’s all in the past, but as we all know, we’re still dealing with the problem now.
There’s the question of whether “black books” sell to a “mainstream” audience (I hate this term, because “mainstream” here implies “white,” without the nuance of all the other people in the audience—74% isn’t 100%!), not to mention it assumes that white people wouldn’t be interested in reading a story that features a black (or Asian, or Native American, etc etc) character.
In a world in which Will Smith and Denzel Washington are doing just fine, why is this a problem in our books??
Several months ago I attended a panel that featured several NY publishing house editors, a School Library Journal blogger, and an NYPL librarian (sorry, it’s been so long I can’t remember who was on the panel, but someone who was there might pipe up). One thing that was brought up by someone (sorry! can’t remember who!) on the panel is that part of the problem is that we’re defining books by “black book”/“white book,” rather than “awesome mystery,” “exciting historical adventure,” “thriller,” “space adventure.” That’s what we’re working on at Tu—exciting books for young readers that are all about the story first and foremost and just happen to feature a person of color as the main character. How silly is it to assume that the hero always has to be white?
A lot of my colleagues in editorial are looking for books featuring a wide variety of characters. It’s a change that we all need to implement as writers, readers, parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, marketing, and anyone else involved in bringing books to young readers.
Let’s look at the readers themselves for a minute.
Note that this is from 2008 or 2009 estimates from the US Census Bureau & that we’ll have a more accurate view once the 2010 data is available. I’ve heard that soon, if not now, about 50% of kids in schools across the nation are people of color, including Latinos. Right now, if you add up those sides of the pie, even in 2008 people of color were 32% of the population overall.
You might want to run by those again. I think just seeing how the green part of the pie just grows… and grows… and grows…
Why is that?
Okay, then I just wanted to show you this last thing. NOW REMEMBER—not all people of color live in poverty, and not all people in poverty are people of color. But when thinking about how kids access books—who buys them, where kids find books to read, etc.—it’s important to remember that a large percentage of those in poverty are kids of color, and that affects how they’re able to access print materials.
Note that because of the demographic breakdown, a lot of the kids who only have 1 book to share with 354 other kids will be kids of color.
And you get a pretty good picture that the majority of the book-buying public being white has a lot to do with who’s in poverty as much as any other reason. Of course, correlation isn’t causation—I’m just saying there’s a link here for us to consider, and that there’s a lot of work to do in making sure that kids in poverty also see themselves mirrored in books. There’s a privilege situation that means that most of the demographic writing books aren’t necessarily the same demographic as the kids looking for books in our schools and libraries. (I first heard of this data when Andrea Davis Pinkney shared it at the A is for Anansi conference; later I found a study that confirmed the numbers, but I don’t have the link here on my home computer.)
We often talk in multicultural book circles about the idea of mirrors and windows—mirrors to see your own experience reflected back, windows to see into another world. Author Zetta Elliott recently added a dimension to that which I like, the idea of “sliding glass doors” to walk in and experience someone else’s world. That’s what reading is, isn’t it? That’s where true interculturalism begins.
In 2009 when I was starting Tu Publishing as a small press in Utah—before we were acquired by Lee & Low—I talked to a few neighborhood kids about their reading habits. This is by no means a scientific study, and I want to warn you that often, kids at this age don’t have the vocabulary to express their feelings about reading, so it might seem like I’m leading them, but the questions I’m asking in the video are questions that use information their parents supplied to me. Let’s watch them first, then I’ll discuss.
(Ignore the links to the Kickstarter campaign—that’s from way back when we were starting up.)
The last four kids were all siblings in a multiracial family. Note how the older sister had a lot more vocabulary to explain why she likes the books she likes! I’m sure that the boys and the youngest girl will eventually find the words to explain what they mean. But I want to talk about Austin in particular. He’s actually younger than his brother by two years—he was 8 and his brother was 10 at the time of filming. So his answers do reflect his developmental place in life—he just doesn’t have the vocabulary to express his frustration. In a family of readers, he hates to read, his mom says, not only because of his ADD but also because he can’t ever find any books that he feels he relates to. He would love to read a mystery, but when he picks up the mysteries his older brother is into, he flips through them and says in disgust, “Why can’t there be any black people who solve mysteries? Aren’t there any black people in this book at all??”
Anecdotally, that is one of the many factors that might affect why some kids of color don’t read as much genre fiction: not as many mirrors in as windows, which means it’s a bigger stretch for them to go out of their comfort zone every day. And they often do that so often, that in reading for pleasure, why would they want to yet again read about someone other than themselves?
Not every kid will have a need for mirrors. But shouldn’t we be providing them for the ones that do, and windows into their world for other kids?
Business-wise, it’s easier to sell windows than mirrors. Hence, when you look at the numbers of who buys books, of course the largest number of books currently sold will be to white people picking up books in which they see themselves mirrored, right? They’re the people who buy books by a large margin, both because whites are just a larger percentage of the population but also because a greater percentage of them are in a higher socioeconomic bracket. But then, we discount that low-income neighborhoods need public libraries and school libraries and all those other places where kids should have access to books and other reading materials, too. And we definitely discount the minorities who have money and are looking for great mirror books for their kids or themselves.
But hey, we’re publishing people. We can’t change the world, but we can do something. We can get involved in our communities and do what we can in our own spheres of influence. We can hope and work toward making sure that those opportunities are available through a lot of ways, like helping local libraries retain their funding, getting involved in mentoring, donating books, or donating money to book programs like RIF (which, if you noticed recently, lost all its federal funding due to severe budget cuts). There are so many opportunities to get involved like that.
But as that side of things improve, we also have to make sure that the actual books continue to grow toward reflecting the world that kids see in their daily lives, inasmuch as that is possible in a fantasy world, right?
As Andrea Davis Pinkney said at that same conference I mentioned above, “We’re doing okay, but we have a lot of work to do.”
Next time: Writing cross-culturally. What should writers take into consideration when thinking about writing from a perspective not their own? Should they even attempt writing cross-culturally/cross-racially?
I see this so often—most recently earlier today: A “writer”* tells his or her friends, “I have this great idea for a novel! What do you think? If I wrote it, would you read it?”
There’s no way to answer this one honestly as a friend if you’re also an editor. Because my honest answer would be no way, thanks. Unless you were Brandon Sanderson or Dan Wells or another published friend who I’ve talked with about a few ideas in the past—published authors with a track record of turning ideas into readable prose. And even then, those ideas were often only half-formed in those conversations, ideas that grew into something so much more complex and interesting once the friend actually wrote his schizophrenia novel or his chalk-drawing novel or whatever. (I had nothing to do with the germination or the development of those ideas—I just happened to be in the room, physically or metaphorically, when a conversation about what they were working on next happened at some point.)
Why?
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
It’s not the concept that matters so much as the execution. Well, I take that back partly. Worldbuilding matters in fantasy and science fiction, that’s for sure. Obviously, or I wouldn’t be giving a whole 2-hour workshop on it this weekend, and we wouldn’t have endless fan conversations about what magic system is better or which would win in a fight, pirates or ninjas.
But even a story with something as awesome as pirates or ninjas needs good execution to make it worth reading (or watching—just look at Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Though that would be an awesome Rifftrax. But I digress). And interesting characters. And a plot that holds up under pressure.
Ideas don’t matter if you can’t write the book (period) and write it well (which will require revisions—too many novice writers think they’ll be the exception because they got away with writing term papers at 3 am on the day they were due and getting an A on the first draft; novels are not term papers). Worrying about whether readers would like the idea before actually writing the book is putting the cart before the horse. If you don’t write it, talking about the idea to all your friends/the internet/that editor you just met randomly on the train is just all talk and no action—especially when the idea usually involves vagaries like a generic romance and “the characters learn that love conquers all, and they learn that bigotry is wrong.” Or “and all the kids learn that friendship is better than bullying.” Or “and they learn that they really do need their mother after all.”
Even Max learned that home was the best place to be. But that’s not why most people have loved Where the Wild Things Are for almost five decades (yes, that’s right–it’s almost 50 years old). We love it because Max makes mischief, because he runs around the house in a wolf costume telling his mother, “I’ll eat you up!”, because he goes on this fantastic journey to the land of the Wild Things where they have a wild rumpus, and because when he comes back home his supper was still hot. It’s the details that make the story a classic—the way it’s written, and in this case, the way it’s illustrated. Sure, Max learns a lesson, if you want to call it that. But the idea isn’t as important as the execution when it comes to making the book linger in the minds of five decades of children and their parents.
If you’ve gotten an idea that grabs you and you think it would make a great book, then write it. And write some more. And join a writing group, and share your actual writing with your family. Tell them about the idea after you’ve let the seed germinate.
You might say, “But what if they say it didn’t sound interesting? Why bother to write it?”
Well, then you’ve got some revising to do if their feedback makes sense to you, don’t you? But it’s your book. Don’t wait until your spouse or your coworker or your running partner with completely different literary tastes says they find your idea interesting. If you find it interesting, that should be enough for a first draft, at least. Because if it’s not, how are you going to get through multiple revisions, the submissions process, and the editing process? Is this an idea that you want to live with for the next several years of your life? Who cares what they think?
Go write it. Let the “theme” take care of itself in the telling of a great story with interesting characters and a compelling plot and worldbuilding. If you executed it well, it’ll find its audience, even if your spouse/coworker/dog walker don’t appreciate a good ninja-pirate love story.
*Usually, said writer hasn’t ever actually written anything, because they’re waiting for the “right idea” to come along before they start.
