The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": YA writing

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Just YA Writing Stuff

Recently, a friend of mine who is sort of related to me as well (in one of those inlawish kind of ways) read my novel, and asked why, since I seemed to be able to write, did I "waste" my ability on YA.
It's not the first time that's happened. I don't walk around meeting people, saying,
HI, I WRITE YA.In fact, I rarely tell people I write. But when I do, I see them look away into the distance, and say, "What is YA? Like the Hardy Boys?" This is said with thinly disguised contempt. Okay, maybe it's not so thinly disguised. Maybe it's painfully obvious.
So I can't wait to tell these same folks that I'm almost done with an MG...
But in today's New York Times today, there is an essay that lets me know I'm not alone:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/books/review/Rabb-t.html

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

A Few Commandments of MultiCultural Writing

Over the past weekend, I tried begging off from reading YA novel first drafts for a friend of mine, a garden variety English teacher, who decided to teach a YA writing class over the summer.
"But you don't write YA," I reminded her, "in fact, you don't write."

I think when you write for teens, people get the idea that it's somehow easier than writing for adults. She seemed really lost, so sap that I am, I agreed to make comments in a separate notebook so the students could see them only if they chose.

Now, somewhere along the line, some editor must have mentioned that multicultural YA is the next hot thing. Maybe it is, but I really think folks should write what they know about. There were 14 multicultural first chapters out of 19. I learned one thing for sure: I could never be an editor. Ever. I'm horrible at it, and bad writing makes me angry which is most likely an abnormal response. I never, ever felt this way when grading students' papers, but these are adults, and they should know better. Here is my small rant:

Do not have characters named Doug and Kyle and Heather use words like "...in the hood" or borrow any gangstaspeak. I grew up in NYC, and if they went into the barrio and started throwing these words around, they would last about 14 seconds. Maybe not that long. In fact, if Doug and Kyle and Heather went into certain neighborhoods at all, and didn't speak, they would only last 15 seconds tops.

Also, do not have Doug and Kyle and Heather suddenly call their grandma "abuela" -- it's jarring and just plain weird. And it doesn't make your story multicultural.

Hispanic people do not refer to their children as "mi quesadilla." Ever. Trust me. I teach Spanish and ESL, I know lots of Spanish people, and they do not refer to their children with endearments taken from the Taco Bell menu. It's the same as if Heather's mom crooned, "Ah, there she is, my little pot roast." Stop.

Speaking of Latin people, please, please, please, do not use the adjective fiery. It's like something out of a TV Guide listing, and it was bad then. Save it to describe the food. On second thought, don't. Just don't use that word. And don't disguise fiery as "spicy" or "caliente" or even hot.

For some reason, the word "piquant" kept showing up. Horrible word, and teens would feel like they were using an SAT vocabulary builder. Stop that, too.

Native American teens do not speak like Tonto. They speak like teens in California, or New Jersey, or Florida. They do not give directions to their friend's house by saying, "...west, over the creek where the wolves water." (cringe) And while I'm at it, I might add that I once spent a year researching Native American culture to write an MG book, and I concluded that without visiting and speaking to Native American people, the book wouldn't be convincing. I think that advice is still valid.

Now, this class is in a tony suburb of Philadelphia, with lots of ambitious writers. I know how crabby I sound, so I want to say that writing a novel is always a hopeful,
wonderful event, but you really have to write about what you know. You really do; it's not one of the many writing cliches: this one is spot on.

Doug and Kyle and Heather have their problems, too. They might leave their clarinet at the mall, or develop a crush on their mom's life coach, or they might cut themselves out of grief over the divorce. These could all be made into YA books. Not books I would want to read, but with talent and revision, they could work.

And I am thankful that I read these. A few times, I have thought of applying for editing jobs. It seemed so easy. Now I know.

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.

***