A "Breakdown" on Breaking Down a Manuscript; Two Conferences; and a Personal Best

There's a new Narrative Breakdown up at the website -- this time on Revision Techniques (Part I), as James and I talk through a few of my favorite methods of figuring out what you want your book to do, what it IS doing, and how it can be made to do all of that better. If you've read Second Sight or taken any of my classes, these will not be news to you, but it might be fun to listen anyway. (Talking about outlining is everyone's idea of a good time, right? Right? Yay! So you'll enjoy this.)

Registration is now open at the Dakotas SCBWI website for a full Novel Writing Workshop with me, October 4-6 in Custer, South Dakota. This workshop will involve my Plot Master Class on Saturday and my intensive talks on Character and Voice on Sunday, and it's the only conference appearance I'm making the rest of this year, due to my upcoming wedding and honeymoon. Other than this, I do not plan to offer said Master Class again (online or in person) until next spring, so here's your chance if you want to catch it in 2013.

I will also be at LeakyCon in Portland June 27-30, participating in general shenanigans.

Finally, I will admit to using my blog as commonplace book and diary as much as means of transmitting information, and as such, I've made a habit of recording my running times here to track my progress through the years. Now I have a nice new personal best to note:  The Brooklyn Half-Marathon, May 18, 2013, 1:59:28 -- with a personal best 10K in there too, at 56:39. Woo! I never get over the pleasurable strangeness of me, a longtime Enemy of All Things Exercise and In Particular Running, being able to do multiple miles in a single bound. (Or many bounds, really. You get the idea.) 

Scholastic Fall 2013 Online Preview

Our twice-a-year roundup of selected titles deemed of especial interest to librarians is now live at Scholastic.com! You can see a wide number of Scholastic editors and authors present the books we've been working on for your delight. Check it out here.

On my end, I talk about If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth, mentioned below, and the awesome The Nazi Hunters by Neal Bascomb, the first-ever full-length narrative nonfiction book I've had the pleasure of working on. It's about the hunt for Adolf Eichmann -- the operations manager for the Holocaust, more or less -- after he escaped Nazi Germany post-World War II, so it combines elements of a mystery novel, a spy story, a Holocaust tale, and a revenge thriller . . . and the pictures we've found for it are just fantastic. Come this September, I'm excited to show you more!

What I'm Publishing: Summer 2013

If anyone ever accuses me of publishing only one kind of book, I will first laugh uproariously and then, stone-faced, point them to this blog post:

 ZOE'S ROOM (NO SISTERS ALLOWED)

by Bethanie Deeney Murguia

June 2013

The Queen of the Universe has a wonderful room --

and unfortunately, she has to share it.

(Unless you have a very special monitor, this image does not show 

the copious and delightful amount of glitter on the cover.)

 

THE PATH OF NAMES

by Ari Goelman

May 2013

The only Jewish summer-camp math-genius Kabbalistic fantasy novel you'll ever need.

(See more here.)

 

OPENLY STRAIGHT

by Bill Konigsberg

June 2013

A gay book for the Glee generation,

about being out, being proud . . . and being ready for something else.

"One of the best gay-themed YA novels of the past ten years."

 -- Michael Cart, Booklist, starred review

 

IF I EVER GET OUT OF HERE

by Eric Gansworth

August 2013

A beautifully written historical YA by an acclaimed adult novelist,

about the transformative powers of good friendship and good music. 

You can see the complete Arthur A. Levine Books summer 2013 lineup on our website here, and Like us on Facebook here. Thank you for keeping an eye out for all of these titles!

All About THE PATH OF NAMES: Behind the Book, Q&A, & Giveaway!

Because I have the last name "Klein" and I live in New York City, a lot of people I meet here assume I'm Jewish -- an assumption that I'm fine with, even as I called myself the "imprint shiksa" for my first few years at Arthur A. Levine Books. So while it's entirely possible that Ari Goelman's agent sent me the manuscript for The Path of Names because she thought I might have a religious connection to the material, I fell in love with it for my own reasons:

• Some of the realest kid characters I've ever read in a novel, with dialogue that exactly captures the way kids can switch from snarkiness to sensitivity in a turn.
• With that, a terrific sense of humor and jokes that made me laugh out loud more than once.
• A 12-year-old heroine -- Dahlia Sherman -- who loves performance magic and math more than popularity and fashion, and who holds herself a little apart from her peers in part because of that lack of shared interests, and in part because she fears their rejection. (This was probably my real point of identification with the book, I do confess it.)
• A totally original combination of elements:  A contemporary Jewish summer camp story set in Pennsylvania and starring Dahlia, crossed with a story about a yeshiva student named David in the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1930s, both shot through with fantasy and mystery.
• This completely lives up to the definition of "new" I offered a couple weeks ago. 
• A terrific title. 
• A kind of magic I had never seen before in a fantasy novel -- and when you've read as many fantasy novels as I have, that's saying something. 

The challenge such books face in the publishing industry is that they'll often be regarded as "only for Jewish readers" -- just as books about girls are only for girls, or books about gay kids as only for gay kids, or books about Latinos are only for Latinos. If you aren't yourself Jewish, then you should read it and help us explode those stereotypes; and if you are Jewish -- and especially if you went to a Jewish camp as Ari Goelman did -- then you'll find even more to recognize and enjoy in the book. It is certainly the only book I've edited ever to be written up in The Times of Israel, as "A Jewish Harriet Potter." And it's also received a starred review from Booklist.

I'm delighted to welcome Ari Goelman to my blog for a Q&A.

What novels were the biggest influence on you when you were a young reader (ages 8-18)? As a middle-grade reader I loved the Susan Cooper ‘The Dark is Rising’ series, especially the novel The Dark Os Rising. I also loved the book The Silver Crown, and (as I got older) pretty much any high fantasy I could get my hands on, starting with The Lord of the Rings trilogy and ending with ... whatever the latest high fantasy was. As a slightly older teen reader I discovered Steven Brust and Roger Zelazny – especially loving Brust’s To Reign In Hell and Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Which, now that I think about it, were both pretty centrally concerned with magic and religion, albeit in a totally different way than The Path of Names.

There are so many interesting ideas packed into this book -- summer camp, Kabbala, magic (real-world and fantasy), mazes, Lower East Side history. . . . Where did it start for you? How did these other elements develop in it? I think it started with a summer camp story, and evolved from there. Once I decided to set the story in a Jewish summer camp, I thought, “Hmm. Jewish summer camp – Jewish magic. That seems to make sense.”

Then, once I started thinking about Jewish magic, that naturally led to Kabbala and the rest. I’ve always been interested in the somewhat forgotten elements of Jewish folklore. I was raised as a conservative Jew where the party line was, ‘We don’t believe in magic. Or the afterlife. Or demons. Or witches...’ I was a young adult before I started to come across references to all the Jewish superstitions that saturated the Jewish world for centuries before the Enlightenment.

Described in that way, it might make me seem a little smarter than I am. Here is the way it actually worked: I’d be in synagogue for a cousin’s bar mitzvah or such, and there’d be a mention of an anecdote in the Talmud about a rabbi hurling lightning at another rabbi. The lesson would supposedly be something about tolerance or arrogance. But I would sit there thinking, ‘A rabbi hurling lightning? That is so cool! I would love to read a fantasy story about that.’

As far as the parts set in the Lower East Side, my grandfather grew up in the 1930s Lower East Side, and I always loved the stories that he and my great uncles would tell about their boyhoods in the tenements. When I was older I discovered that he had visited the spot in rural Pennsylvania which ultimately became my summer camp some fifty years before I was a camper there. I loved the thought of somehow combining those two milieus.

The fantasy magic in the book is based in what I understand to be a very esoteric Jewish religious practice – the Kabbala – but the book isn’t religious at all. Dahlia and the other kids spend very little time contemplating God. You also have a provocative epigraph where you quote Bernie Cloud:  “Religion is just magic, but with more words.” How do your own relationships with religion and magic emerge in The Path of Names? I think I very much share the ambivalence towards Judaism (and organized religion in general) that is evidenced in The Path of Names. It was fun to write a story where all the Jewish magic works. The world would be so much simpler if you could verify religious belief systems with some sort of physical manifestation ... say, calling down lightning on your enemies. Religion aside, I find magic and the supernatural creeps into most everything I write. I’m not totally sure why this is. Like I mentioned before, I’ve always been an avid reader of fantasy literature. Maybe it comes from my general interest in ideas of power and resistance, especially when they’re operating in ways that are secret, or at least hard to see. I have this sense (which I think is pretty broadly shared in contemporary society) that power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few in ways that are hard for the rest of us to see, let alone to resist. Also -- let’s face it -- magic is fun. It would be fun to be a thirteen-year-old with the power to change things, even if the odds seemed stacked against you.  

What is your favorite part of the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, etc.) and why? Oh geez. That’s a hard one. On the one hand, writing the first draft is definitely the most difficult part for me. You’re staring at the blank page, and you have so far to go before it’s done, and it probably won’t be any good anyway, and shouldn’t you work on a new blog post, or maybe go start on dinner or something? Contrast that to revising, where you have a manuscript and you’re reading it and making it better. On some level, I’m scared of the blank page in a way that I’m not scared of revising. Now here’s the complicated part – difficult as it is for me, the mingled feeling of fear and distaste ... and excitement when I write that first draft is the reason I write. That feeling of creating something new is the best part. If I go a few days without writing something new, I start worrying that I’m never going to write anything again. I don’t like that feeling. 

A couple of reviews have praised the book for having the main character, Dahlia, be a smart girl who loves math. Did you envision the protagonist of the book as a girl from the beginning, or was that a deliberate choice later in the process? What challenges did you face, if any, in writing across gender, and how did you overcome them? I always saw the protagonist as a girl. When I wrote the short story that eventually grew into The Path of Names, I had this very clear memory of a girl at my summer camp complaining about how another girl wasn’t friends with her any more. I ended up making Dahlia far more independent than that girl, but there was never any question that the main character would be female. The challenges that I faced had to do with uniquely female things – for instance, how much would a thirteen-year-old girl notice the curviness or the lack of curviness of her peers? Being married to a former thirteen-year-old girl who is happy to answer these kinds of questions was invaluable in overcoming this obstacle.
 

You have a five-year-old and a set of very young twins at home. Plus you teach. How do you work in any writing time? Do you have a set schedule or process? The short answer is: it’s hard. Not just to work in writing time, but to make the most of the writing time I have, given the exhaustion of being a working parent with three small children. More often than not, one or more of our beautiful little people is sick or getting a tooth or just generally dissatisfied with their sleeping arrangements and would like to express their displeasure repeatedly at 1:00 a.m. 1:30 a.m., 2:30 a.m. and so on. I’ve discovered that I can do a pretty good job at some tasks when I’m tired, but writing a novel is not one of them. There’s too much to hold in your head, and too much concentration required. Having said all that, I do try to write to a set schedule, as I think the alternative is a ‘no writing’ schedule. I am still making progress in my ongoing writing projects, just not nearly as fast as I would like. 

What are you reading now?  I just finished reading Steven King’s The Wind at the Keyhole which I thought was great, especially the two stories-within-a-story. I have just started Seer of Shadows by Avi, but I’m still too early into it to have formed an opinion. I’m also reading Harry Potter to my five-year-old (who would probably like me to point out that she’s almost six), and I’m enjoying it through her eyes all over again. 

Please visit Ari's website.

+++

GIVEAWAY! Though The Path of Names is in stores now (hint hint hint & hint), you can win one of my three remaining copies of an ARC of the book by leaving a comment below with any of the following:  one thing that you've never seen in a fantasy before and you'd like to; your own provocative epigraph (or epitaph, if you prefer); or the identity that people mistake you for based on your name, if applicable.

MISSION TO TEACH: In Honor of Jhumki Basu

Soon after James and I began dating, lo these many years ago, I met his friend Jhumki Basu -- one of the most energetic, accomplished, and inspiring people I've ever known. She helped found a charter school in Bed-Stuy devoted to democratic learning, and especially to the goal of encouraging urban youth to pursue science. She got her doctorate at New York University and became a professor there in science education. She ran triathalons, wrote poetry, traveled widely, agitated politically, took care of her friends. And then in 2009 -- "tragedy" does not begin to cover this -- she passed away from metastatic breast cancer at the age of 31.

Now her father, Dipak Basu -- who is also James's and my friend -- has written a book about her life, entitled Mission to Teach. It is not only a full biography of Jhumki, it is also a father's memoir of his daughter; a brave and heart-wringing cancer narrative; and very much the story of a coming-of-age of a teacher, of how Jhumki's pedagogy evolved through her years of teaching and research, and how her work continues through the educational foundation her parents set up in her name. The foreword by Jane Goodall (yes, THAT Jane Goodall) states, "This is a powerful, beautifully written book," and in capturing the spark that Jhumki was to so many people, I couldn't agree more.

The book is available at all major online retailers, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You can read more about it here, and about the ongoing science-education work of the Jhumki Basu Foundation here. Thank you for checking it out, and for keeping the spark alive.

Warming Up

Long silence, sorry. Life happening. Life is work (some really fascinating books coming up this summer); cooking (I have a great new kitchen and the Mark Bittman How to Cook Everything cookbooks and apps, and I'm loving using both); teaching (in the last two weeks of my Writer's Digest Plot Master Class); and running (the Brooklyn Half-Marathon is in three weeks, and I have to run ten miles later today). Also Mad Men, because I trust Matt Weiner to take us somewhere good.

The Narrative Breakdown podcast is back! James has posted two episodes in the last two weeks, including one on "First Person POV in Film," with our friend Jack Tomas, and "Crafting Subjectivity within Objective Point of View" -- or, more accurately, how to convey a character's thoughts when you're writing third-person -- with me.

Some tidbits I've written in the Master Class discussions, to make up for the lack of content here:

In terms of manuscript reading, when I'm hearing a pitch or something, I think of something "new" as:
1) an unfamiliar/unusual setting or character -- often meaning an international or historical setting, as with WORDS IN THE DUST in the lesson, or a delightful YA historical I published this last spring, THE FIRE HORSE GIRL.  Most parts of the United States do not get to count as new.
2) an unusual combination of elements -- like ninja chick lit, or a dystopian verse novel (not that I have actually seen one of these, but it would certainly be new) (and kind of awesome if done right, now that I'm thinking about it).
3) An inversion of the usual:  An eight-year-old boy who hates dogs, for instance (rather than wanting one as does most of his fictional ilk), or a teenage girl who becomes a superheroine by staying at home (like Sansa Stark made awesome). 

I think the key things that make a book "quiet" are the stakes, the pace, and the tone of the voice. When the stakes are low -- when what might happen obviously isn't going to be life-changing in any direction; for instance, will a certain character make it home in time for dinner -- then it's easy for a reader not to feel invested in the action, since who cares? When the novel dwells more on tiny moments than big gestures -- when the camera is set on an ultra-zoom on the action, let's say, so every glance or twitch seems to have importance to the author -- that can be lovely if we're invested in the characters and the stakes (a la Jane Austen novels)  . . . or it can be deadly slow and quiet, because everything takes forever to narrate, and none of the action is very dramatic, or out of the ordinary way.

 

And the tone . . . well, there's a difference between a narrator who says "And then it went SPLAT! all over the dirt!" and the one who says "It fell to the ground,"  or the one who takes the time to craft a lovely simile about the moon and include it in the story vs. the one who says "The blood looked black in the moonlight." Which is not to say one is better than the other, because one isn't, and I really like some quieter books -- Sara Zarr and Cath Crowley's novels come to mind. But I do think that if you're writing a quieter novel in today's marketplace, you have to have a really strong voice and really great characters to whom the reader deeply connects to make up for that lack of action.

I think quiet stories achieve success when the world and characters they portray are SO REAL and SO RICH and textured and believable that readers can't help but become involved in them, because they tell the truth about the world we live in -- even if the world in the book is not our particular world. These stories do the small particulars so well they become large and universal. 

Dream sequences can serve a useful function in a novel if the dramatized dream helps the protagonist realize something that is buried deep in his/her unconscious, and that realization plays a role in the plot. BUT, far too often, they are excuses for writers to have lots of beautiful symbols and foreshadowing floating around for a bit that then takes forever to pay off in the actual action, AND they stop that action dead in its tracks for however many pages while the writer gets his or her symbolic ya-yas out. AND some writers use them as the primary way for the main character to receive information, which just feels cheap, as the main character isn't earning that information in any way -- it's a gift to the character from the writer, which really means a gift to the writer from his/herself. I like symbolism (or more accurately, image systems) a lot, and I think it can really enrich a book, but very often dream sequences just feel self-indulgent to me. If you have a lot of them, be sure every one is truly essential to the story, and keep them short. 

The Quote File: George Santayana

George Santayana is perhaps most famous today for the aphorism "Those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it" `` a quote I disagree with, actually, as even those who study the past often find themselves sliding into the same human mistakes. But I very much like a lot of the rest of what he says -- and I think of the "fashion" quote especially at Fashion Week and in H&M:

The wisest mind has something yet to learn. 

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. 

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. 

Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than the logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.

Religion and Fear

During Lent, the minister of the church I attend sends out daily reflections over e-mail. This is today's, and I think it's wonderful. From The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life, by James Martin:

When I was a novice, one of my spiritual directors quoted the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, who contrasted "real religion" and "illusory religion." The maxim of "illusory religion" is as follows: "Fear not; trust in God and God will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you." "Real religion," said Macmurray, has a different maxim: "Fear not; the things you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of."

"Act III, Scene iii" by Madeleine L'Engle

Someone has altered the script.
My lines have been changed.
The other actors are shifting roles.
They don't come on when they're expected to,
and they don't say the lines I've written
and I'm being upstaged.
I thought I was writing this play
with a rather nice role for myself,
small, but juicy
and some excellent lines.
But nobody gives me my cues
and the scenery has been replaced
and I don't recognize the new sets.
This isn't the script I was writing.
I don't understand this play at all.

To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
in this extraordinary drama
written by
somebody else.




From Lines Scribbled on an Envelope and Other Poems (FSG, 1969)

BOOK SALE!

It is time for one of my favorite events of every year -- the awesome BOOK SALE at my church, Park Slope United Methodist. There are two essential things every book-loving New Yorker can do with the sale:

1. DONATE YOUR OLD BOOKS

Now is the perfect time to clear space on your book shelves for all the treasures you're going to find at the sale.  And aren't you ready to get rid of all those CDs you don't listen to anymore? We'll take 'em!

We welcome donations of books, CDs, DVDs, records & children's books. All items must be in good condition. We do not accept videos or tape cassettes, magazines, outdated textbooks or computer manuals, or any book that is moldy or falling apart. All donations are tax-deductible.


The church is located at 410 6th Avenue (at 8th Street) in Brooklyn, one block down and over from the 7th Avenue F stop.  Donations will be accepted at the church on

• Monday, February 18, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. 
• Thursday, February 21,  6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
• Friday, February 22, noon to 3 p.m.

To arrange a car pickup (Park Slope & vicinity), call 347.538.7604 ASAP, before all the slots fill up. All items must be boxed or bagged and ready to go.

2. COME BUY MORE BOOKS!

The Book Sale is open:

• Friday, Feb. 22,  7 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Evening Preview Sale!  $20 Admission
• Saturday, Feb. 23, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (free)
• Sunday, Feb. 24, 12:30 - 5 p.m. (free)

I won't be around the sale this year, but about six boxes of books from my apartment will be, so please buy 'em up and enjoy!