This week’s YA Highway Road Trip Wednesday asks bloggers to share their favorite posts from their own blogs.  For some this might be like trying to choose their favorite children.  But not me.  I’ve written some truly embarrassing blog posts and would be more than happy for BPS (Blogging Protective Services) to come and take them away.  Nevertheless, I have written a few I don’t mind having my name attached to.  So here are a few of my favorites.  I hope you enjoy them too.

Most Popular:

• Princess Bride’s Count Rugen on Why Daylight Savings Time Sucks.

Most Commented:

• Judging a Book by Its Cover – Boys and YA Literature

Most FUN!:

• Ending Your Book Like a Party
• Being Fashionably Late Within Your Story

Most Thoughtful:

• A life lesson for the New Year from a squirrel
• Some things need never change

YA Specific:

• Judging a Book by Its Cover – Boys and YA Literature
• One Guy’s Perspective on “Guys” in Fiction

Road Trip Wednesdays:

• Various posts where I play along!

Poetic (aka actual poems):

• Random poems I’ve written

And of course since this is for YA Highway I have to pimp my very own YA Highway post from back in the wee early days of the “Highway” when the uber-thoughtful Kirsten Hubbard invited me to share a guest post because I’d played so nicely with the other bloggers. :)

• Finding Your Voice (on YA Highway)

Most writers’ initial forays into fleshing out characters in their shiny new WIPs involve pages,  sometimes entire chapters, of disposable drafting.  While it’s true some of these words might find their way in as backstory (provided it’s handled appropriately) this early writing is mostly a tool for the writer in getting to know his or her characters.  Here’s a writing exercise which might be helpful with early character development and even make your initial WIP drafting more efficient.

Invite your characters over for dinner.

Out here in the real world a simple and fun way get to know someone better is to share a meal with them.  So why not do the same with your new characters?  While your at it why not invite all the characters from your current WIP over at the same time?  Instead of just dinner, hold a banquet!

Once you’ve made the decision to play host and the imaginary invitations have been sent out, the real work of character observation begins.

Here is a list of some things you’ll want to pay attention to as your fictional evening unfolds:

• Which of your characters was late and which ones were on time?
• Who took the time to RSVP and who simply showed up at your door?
• Did anyone come empty handed?  If not, what did they bring?
• Did anyone arrive unexpected or uninvited?  Who decided to bring a date along?
• How did each of them come dressed for the occasion?
• Who seemed happy to be there and who seemed annoyed?
• How did they each arrange themselves at the table?  Did anyone presume to sit at the head of the table?
• Assuming you’re a stupendous host with a boundless spread of delicacies, what kinds of foods did each of them eat?  Are any of them vegetarians?  Vegans?
• Who knew which fork was for what?  Who talked with their mouth full?
• Who put their napkin in their lap?  Or tucked it into their collar?  Who didn’t bother using a napkin at all?
• Did anyone pick at or push their food around on their plate?  Who cleaned their plates or asked for seconds?  Or thirds?!?
• Did anyone try to make off with any of your stuff when no one was looking?
• Which of your characters dominated the conversation?  Who sat quietly trying not to be noticed?
• Who was ready to, or needed to, go home as soon as the meal was over?  Did anyone stay too late and wear out their welcome to they had to be asked to leave?
• Did anyone find the liquor cabinet then need a cab to get home or even pass out on your couch?
• . . .

The purpose of the exercise is simply to notice how each of your individual characters behaves in a commonplace, imaginary setting.  This can help you better distinguish your characters from each other as well as point out where some of your characters are more alike than you had thought.  The most most thing here is to give each of your characters plenty of room to act freely then expect to be surprised!

It can be difficult, even painful at times, to throw away some those early, hard fought words or scenes from your early drafts.  Spending a little time up front really getting to know your characters first can help you hit the ground running when you do sit down to draft.   And if you feel you may be one of those writers who keeps too much early drafting around, simply plan in advance to use disposable tableware.

Just in case.

In a recent blog post, Dawn Metcalf posed a question about what makes good guys in fiction into “great” guys who do more than serve as a mirror for the heroine of the story, but are strong in their own right.

I thought I’d give it a shot.

A strong “guy” character in fiction is one who is confident in who he is (which doesn’t mean he’s not vulnerable), he has a distinct personality of his own making him interesting in his own right, and he doesn’t become someone else with the introduction of a love interest.  That’s not to say that falling in love (like having children) doesn’t push people to be better versions of themselves for the sake of those new relationships.  It certainly does!  (Or at least it should.)  What it DOES mean is that a strong character (male or female for that matter) is one who doesn’t stop being the person they are – the person the other character fell in love in the first place.

I’ve always believed a healthy relationship is built around two people looking together in the same direction, not two people (or even one for that matter) looking only at the other.

For the story to carry on after the romance ensues, strong characters are those who expand the scope of their own interests, even their lives, to include the other without completely trading in their independence for dependence (or even worse, co-dependence).  It’s a delicate balance.  However, each of the characters had a life before they met and each needs to continue to have a life after they meet, albeit an expanded one.

After all, where’s the excitement, or the conflict (fictionally speaking), in a relationship where one partner is merely hanging on the heels of the other doing nothing but waiting to be needed?  Without that underlying, ongoing tension which keeps them independent yet together, the romance is over.  Even if the characters themselves don’t appear bored with each other, the reader almost certainly will be.

Thoughts?

There’s been lot of discussion lately in the blog and twitter spheres on the subject of boys and YA (young adult) literature. More specifically writers and others are asking why more boys aren’t reading YA. I’ve followed a number of these discussions with interest, but for the most part I’ve been fairly quiet on the subject. However, a recent discussion (Where Have All The Young Men Gone? : Guys In YA) on YA author Dawn Metcalf’s blog has finally motivated me to join the conversation.

Most of us are familiar with the expression, “Never judge a book by its cover”. In other words, don’t assume what something is like based only how it looks. This expression is usually offered as an admonition about people and prejudice, but here I want to consider its literal meaning with regards to actual books.

YA is a growing genre with many talented writers crafting and contributing new stories which in turn expand the genre’s scope and readership.  (You can read more about it an article in this month’s Los Angeles Times.)  Nevertheless, I’m always struck when I stroll through my local Borders bookstore by what I see on the book covers in the YA fiction section.

First, a quick word about marketing.

Authors know that publishers make the final decision about cover art for the books they publish, not the authors themselves.  (There are exceptions of course, but not many.)  Authors also understand book covers are as much about marketing as they are about distilling the essence of the story with a picture.  Covers sell books.  This may mean a publisher might choose to emphasize a more marketable aspect of a book for its cover, while the author may feel a different aspect is really at the core of the story.  For the most part the authors I follow have been very happy with the final covers their books receive.  That’s a good thing!  But sometimes publishers miss the mark.

So what does this have to do with boys and YA?

I mentioned before I’m struck by what I see whenever I visit the YA section of the bookstore.  What strikes me is how little I see most of these images appealing to teenage boys.  As an adult I am happy to stop and pick up a few titles for a closer look.  Partly this is out of simple curiosity and partly this is because I’ve connected with some of these authors writing in the YA genre through social networks.  They’ve shared their views about their books and about their own writing process, in turn I feel more connected to them and so I’m interested in seeing their titles first first-hand.  However, a teenage boy walking through a bookstore won’t have my agenda.

He’ll see a book on the shelf and that book will have a precious few seconds to try to grab his attention long enough for him to hopefully pick it up and find out more.  If the cover art suggest the story is mostly a romance, he’s not likely to be interested.  If the cover features a lone, racy, weapon-clad heroine, with little else to depict the “story”, the image will scream “girl book” and he’ll leave it on the shelf.  Worse yet, if those covers make him feel at all embarrassed, like he’s wandered somewhere in the bookstore he shouldn’t be, he wouldn’t dare to pick one up, especially if he thought anyone was looking.  And more than likely, he’d likely simply steer clear of the YA section altogether.

So what’s the answer?

If we want more boys to read within the YA genre then publishers need to reconsider boys when making cover art decisions and stop making so many YA titles look like something they wouldn’t be interested in.

I couldn’t help but wonder while writing this post if J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was to be published for the first time in 2010 what the book covers would look like.  I suspect they would end up looking more like the covers for the DVDs rather than the lovely artwork of Mary GrandPre which depicts more of the story without the racy intensity of the main characters.

So that’s my take.  The opinion of one (to quote Kate Hart of YA Highway) “brave male soul in a world of women YA bloggers”.  (This still makes me laugh every time I read it!  Thanks Kate!)

Okay, it’s your turn.  Please feel free to let me have it in the comments.

This week’s YA Highway Wednesday Road Trip is celebrating the limerick in honor or St. Patrick’s Day.  Followers were asked to write limericks for their favorite book and/or WIP (work-in-progress).  Several months ago the folks a YA Highway issued a similar invitation to write haiku.  I had fun writing for that one so I thought I’d join in this week too.

As with my haiku, I’ve written one limerick for my current WIP and another limerick for the entire series for which it’s a part.

Raven Academy (Book 1)

Connor thinks it’s a school just the same
as all others with different names,
but it’s part of a plan
in which he’ll have a hand
in revealing what pow’r has it claimed.

The Citadel of Kidrodell (the series)

Kidrodell is a land out of time
and the home for a new kind of crime
when the good at first sought
by its exiles is fraught
will the threads of Earth’s history unwind?

Finally, I’ve taken the easy way out of deciding what other books to “limericize” by simply choosing one I most recently finished and which I thoroughly enjoyed.

BONESHAKER (by Cherie Priest)

Briar Wilkes and her son are estranged
by Leviticus’ deed, unexplained.
Now Seattle’s walled tight,
full of zombies and Blight,
and Steampunk will forever be changed!

This week’s YA Highway Wednesday Road Trip is about Favorite Helpful Sites for writers.  I’ve decided to play along this week and share a tip I picked up from my day job where part of my time is spent supporting and configuring information search tools.  Three simple words . . .

USE. GOOGLE. READER.

I know many writers already use Google Reader as the portal for their many blog subscriptions.  It’s a great way for the information you want to come to you (Yay RSS!) so you don’t have to go looking for it.  (Of course this works for anyone, not just writers.)

But did you know you can use Google Reader as your own personalized search engine?

I won’t attempt in this post to explain the ins and outs of Google Reader.  YA Highway blogger Kate Hart has been working through this herself recently and might we willing to share her first-hand experience getting started.  :)

There is a bit of a learning curve, but it is SO worth it.

Once you’re up and running with Google Reader you can subscribe to as many blogs as you’d like then organize them according to “folders” (tags used for search indexing).  You can create as many of these folders as you wish.  You can even assign a blog to multiple folders if it fits into more than one category you’ve created.

*** WARNING!!! IT GEEK ALERT! ***

*** WARNING!!! IT GEEK ALERT! ***

*** WARNING!!! IT GEEK ALERT! ***

Here’s in a nutshell how it works.

Any RSS-enabled website writes published content to a feed.  That feed is basically a running record of all content published on that site.  When you subscribe to a feed using Google Reader, you have access to everything published on that site.  For your convenience unread content stands out while previously read content disappears.  But the content is all still there.

An example:

To illustrate how this works I’ve done a search within my Google Reader for the term ‘writing sites’.  In this example I selected my YA Highway folder, as this where I’ve organized all the YA Highway blogs I subscribe to.  (Using the dropdown menu you can search specific sites, shared items, you name it.)

Then I searched.

Looky . . . looky . . . customized search results!  And I DON’T have to cull through pages and pages of Google’s world-wide search results because the search is already limited to just the content I specified – namely my YA Highway “tagged” content.

That’s it!

The RSS feed contains ALL published information on that site so you never have to worry about losing a bookmark or deleting a subscription email again.  Looking for that post you read last month about synopsis writing?  Want to share a link with someone to the post with tips for writing a great query letter?  If you’ve subscribed to those blogs using Google Reader all you have to do is point, search and scroll!

Please take a minute to leave a comment and let me know if you found this post helpful.

Thanks!

In my previous post I suggested ending your book in the same way you would consider ending a party.  Today, I decided to continue the party analogy by looking at how to best begin your book – by being fashionably late.

The expression ‘fashionably late’ is likely familiar to most of us.  It’s is used to refer to someone who shows up at an event, such as a party, after the time the event was scheduled to begin.  This doesn’t, however, apply to those who simply got mixed up and arrived late by accident.  Being fashionably late is something done on purpose.

Okay, so why would anybody want do that?

One possibility is to create the impression you’re too busy and important with other social engagements to be anywhere on time.  However, I’d like to believe most people aren’t so self-important as all that.  The reason I’m sticking with for people to show up late is that it’s more fun.

Anyone who’s ever attended a party knows it takes a little while for the guests to loosen up.  It starts with people clustering into small groups, eyeing the refreshments, and wondering who’s going to be the first to break the ice.  While this might be a nice setting for an intimate chat with a few close friends, it doesn’t sound much like  a party.  Experienced partygoers at this stage might not even stay for the h’orderves.

Being fashionably late then means waiting to show up for the party until after the ice has broken, the music is hot, and the people aren’t just staring at the snack bar – they’re eating and drinking freely out on the dance floor.  Everybody’s already having fun!

So how does this apply to my book?  I’m glad you asked!

You’ve likely heard the advice “Don’t start your story at the beginning.”  Why?  Beginnings are boring.  Beginnings are slow.  Beginnings are all about setting up what’s going to happen since nothing has happened yet.  If you want to grab your reader’s attention and keep it, you need to bring them into your story in the middle of things.  If your story doesn’t open with tension, action, or a drama (no melodrama, please), the chances are that experienced readers won’t stick around for chapter two if they even get that far.

And don’t worry about what to do with all that necessary backstory your reader needs to understand your story.  In the same way our fashionably late partygoer will find out who else is there and catch up on the latest gossip by mingling and chit-chatting with the other guests during the party, so your readers will mix and mingle with later chapters and scenes in your book where you can introduce that important information.

*  *  *

Now it’s your turn!  What are some other ways you can consider your book like a party?  Share your ideas or a drop link in the Comments section if you’re inspired to post about your own!

(This post was inspired by a recent post on Magical Words about book endings.)

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard when throwing a party is to end it while the guests are still having fun.  This may seem counter-intuitive, but in truth it makes a lot of sense.  If people leave the party feeling good they’ll want to come back again next time. If you milk the party until its all fun is gone, concerned your guests will miss out on something if you don’t, their last experience won’t be of fun at all.  It will be of that awkwardness that comes from trying to figure out how to politely get their coats and slip away when no one’s looking because they’ve had enough. Probably not quite the lasting impression you were hoping for when you planned the party to begin with.

The same can be said with your book.

Once you’ve written the climax and the drama has peaked, the plot is essentially over even while the characters, though perhaps maybe not all of them, live on.  Assuming you’ve completed telling the story you set out to tell, all that remains in the writing is the important task of deftly, but seamlessly, shutting down the story (without dragging it out) and tying up any loose ends.  Once that final “peak” has passed, the reader is ready for closure, not more story.  It’s a delicate balance.  The right amount of closure gives readers the freedom to carry on the story in their imagination if they’d like, yet it also satisfies those readers who’ve enjoyed the ride but are ready to move on to something else.

Like maybe your next book!

Anna Staniszewski posted a link to a very funny commercial on her blog today.  I’ve copied her and done the same here.  Watch it first so the rest of this post will make sense.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

Imagine for a moment if we could pull back the camera and see the entire set. If we did, we’d see the cut-off ends of the bathroom walls and the boat.  And we’d have seen the horse just off to the side waiting from him to mount as he picked up the clam shell.  Our imaginations filled in the parts we couldn’t see but assumed were there from the few details we could see.

Speaking of direction, Mary Robinette Kowal does an excellent job describing direction and suggestion applying the principles of puppetry in the process of writing fiction.  You can listen the interview in the Writing Excuses podcast.  I HIGHLY recommend listening to it.

Our goal as storytellers is to create an impression of the reality we are creating in the minds of our audience.  Done well, it doesn’t have to take pages and pages of description or narration to do it, only takes enough to suggest it.  Imagination will do the rest.

For writers of fiction, that’s a great lesson to keep in mind.

Until today, I had never heard of a manuscript style sheet.  I was introduced to this term in a post by Mary Robinette Kowal about her upcoming book: Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor, 2010).  While you’re there, why not visit the rest of Mary’s site to learn more about her and her work.

In the world of information technology a style sheet is a master file used to easily manipulate the look-and-feel of an entire graphical user interface system (e.g. a blog, website, certain software applications), but in the world of publishing the style sheet (a.k.a. “style guide”) serves as a set of standards or conventions for a particular manuscript.  (See this Wikipedia article for more on this.) You can also read an excellent post about them on Deanna Houk’s blog!

I appreciate Mary sharing this and even posting a .pdf of the “Shades” style sheet to her blog.  It offers a fascinating glimpse into the publishing process for those of us still working towards it.  As I read over it, the character, place and term indexes are what really stood out for me.

Like many writers, I maintain my own private list of “things to keep in mind” when I’m revising a manuscript.  Thanks to Mary, now I’ve got a few more.

(edited to correct link URL for Mary’s post)