The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Interview with A Middle Grade Reader

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Interview with A Middle Grade Reader

Today I had the double pleasure of picking up the laundry from Emma's room and helping her edit a rough draft of her life story. Just in case I was developing any kind of ego, I discovered that she loves me slightly more than her Aeropostale clothes and slightly less than her kittens. But she did agree to two offers.

One, she read the first chapter of my new middle grade (of which there is only a first chapter) and she agreed to honestly answer some questions about her own reading habits.

"You have reading habits?" I asked her.

"They force us to read at school," she reminded me.

She liked my new middle grade, mostly, but she thought the first paragraph was really boring. She's a fairly reluctant reader as she spends most of her time listening to and reading song lyrics. But her answers might shed some light on any middle grade you might be writing.

1. What types of stories do you like to read?

I only read realistic fiction or fantasy.

2. What makes those books good?

With realistic fiction, you can relate to what's going on with the characters or the plot. I love when not everything is perfect, like the character fails a subject or has nerdy friends. The perfect stuff is just not interesting.

With fantasy, I love the feeling that anything can happen. I can't stand when I can predict what will happen next.

3. How do you pick a book to read?

By the cover. Like the cover of Dear, Dumb Diary there's a girl petting a brain. That's the best cover because it makes you want to read the book. Or at least the summary.

4. How long do you read a book before you decide whether or not to finish it?

First of all, I am not mad weird like you, Mom. I don't read a book to the end even if it's bad. I give it maybe two or three pages. Then I just go on to the next one.

5. What is your all time favorite book?

The Midnight Library series. The best.

6. If twelve year olds could control what students read, what would the choice be?

Music on youtube, lyrics. After that, just nothing from a teacher. Let them go pick out what they like to read and don't force books on kids because you just ask your friends what they're about and what happens if you don't want to read them.

7. What type of setting do you like the best?

For fantasy, it has to be a different place, and creepy. An old house or a creepy lake. For realistic fiction, I like home and school only.

8. What do most of your friends read?

Boy and girl stories, romance and Twilight. I can't stand those. I like fantasy and most twelve year olds don't really like fantasy.

9. Do you have any advice for your mom's new middle grade?

Ummm, honestly?

Yes.

Your first paragraph is dull. No one cares about description. But the creepiness is good. I like that. I like not knowing what will happen.

10. If I finish this one, will you read it?

Not if there's a lot of description, but probably if there's action and scary stuff.

13 comments:

Jemi Fraser said...: One of the best interviews I've read in ages!!! Honest and refreshing. #6 cracked me up - that's exactly why I let the kids pick out their own books to read in my classroom :); Sunday, 13 March, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: Jemi, one of the qualities I loved about the kids when I taught middle school was the complete lack of social "filter" -- "wow, my mom got the same bad haircut you have. Did you go to that place by IHOP? Cuz that's where she went." They would say stuff like that.

It is pretty refreshing if you have the stamina ; ); Sunday, 13 March, 2011
Bish Denham said...: Well now, that is a marvelous interview. Getting inside the mind of a middle grader is a tad bit scary. Raising one must be...you are brave mother Anne.; Monday, 14 March, 2011
Stephanie J. Blake said...: So funny. Love how kids don't have any problems letting us know how it is.; Monday, 14 March, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: Lol, Bish, I have no choice. I like babies, but I forgot they would grow up to become kids who enjoyed pix of pet brains.

Hey, Stephanie, famous debut author! Nice to hear from you --
no they have no problems in that direction. I'm just wondering, with a 19 year old, when the social grace kicks in...; Monday, 14 March, 2011
K.C. Shaw said...: Excellent interview, very honest! And really useful, too. It makes me want to go back to work on my own MG WIP and see how much of that boring description I've accidentally added. :); Monday, 14 March, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: I love description in writing, K.C. - it adds flavor, pulls me in, but then, I'm 107. They really do hate it. In fact, I learned to only ask questions about plot when I taught middle school b/c no one remembered the descriptive passages. Most likely, that's b/c no one read them. So yeah, minimal adjectives.; Monday, 14 March, 2011
Tatum Flynn said...: Thanks for this, funny and true! *runs off to amp up action and scary stuff*; Monday, 14 March, 2011
Anonymous said...: This is such a wonderful interview.

And she gives a book a few pages to get good? She's very discerning. I wish I had done that when I was young. I'd wait 50 pages for a book to get good. So much time wasted on things that didn't please me right away.; Saturday, 19 March, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: Hi, Girl Friday! That's right, take it from the source. Middle graders tend to be your best advertisers, too, so you want to keep them hooked.

I know, Medeia. I highly doubt that Emma will be a writer, though. Kids who stick with books, sort of waiting for them to get good (as I used to do -- sort of try to develop a "taste" for a story) tend to be bookish.

Emma views my passion for reading as a kind of lovable disorder. "Poor Mom, and her books..." But I think she's more typical of her age group than kids who will become writers.; Monday, 21 March, 2011
Mary Witzl said...: That was a great interview. I agree with Emma about books about people who are imperfect. Nothing irritates me more than reading about some happy paragon with straight teeth, beautiful clothes, and wonderful friends.; Wednesday, 23 March, 2011
Glynis Peters said...: Good to read the views of the younger readers. Thanks for sharing your interview. Lovely.; Sunday, 27 March, 2011
Unknown said...: A big thank-you to your daughter for agreeing to be interviewed! Her answers were enlightening.; Monday, 11 April, 2011

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***