Blue Website! New Talk!

Exclamation-point worthy news: At long last, my redesigned website is up and running!

(That sentence is your signal to click on over to www.cherylklein.com to see the new layout. I'll give you a second.)



Okay. Hooray! The beautiful, bright new design is by my friend John Noe of the Leaky Cauldron, and incorporates my favorite Tudor Rose emblem (sign of my membership in the sacred siblinghood of English majors) as well as an easy-to-use navigation bar. If you took that opening-page invitation to poke around, you'll know that most of the navbar links don't work yet, the book covers for the slideshow need to be resized, and neither the majority of the talks nor my submission guidelines are up at present. But I'll be adding these things over the next few weeks, so please check back occasionally to see what's new. And my blog, for the record, will continue to reside here at chavelaque.blogspot.com, so please don't change your bookmarks to that other address.

To celebrate the redesigned site, I put up a new talk as well: the "Springing Surprises" speech I wrote but did not deliver in full at the Vermont College Novel Writers' Retreat. That talk made me think a lot about effects in writing . . . the way a writer can use surprises, or spacing, or the pacing even in a particular paragraph, to focus or distract the reader's emotional attention and thereby achieve the writer's emotional aims, the same way a movie director can blow up a truck to make the audience go "Oooh!" I don't know that I have anything more to say about this now than what I say here, but I'm interested in tracking cool techniques/effects for use in a future talk, maybe. . . . Let me know if you see any worthy of note.

Theory: A Definition of YA Literature

So I've been thinking off and on about a practical definition of YA literature -- something I could look at to help me decide whether a manuscript is an adult novel or a middle-grade novel or, indeed, a YA. Such delineations don't matter to me as a reader -- a good book is a good book -- but they do matter to me as an editor and publisher, because I want every book I publish to find the audience that is right for it, and sometimes, despite a child or teenage protagonist, a manuscript is meant for an adult audience. Hence I have written the definition below to help me think through these situations as they come up. This is very much a WORKING theory; I hope you all will offer challenges, counterexamples, additions or arguments to help me improve what I'm saying here. But here's what I have right now -- the definition broken into five parts for easier parsing:

1. A YA novel is centrally interested in the experience and growth of
   
2. its teenage protagonist(s),
3. whose dramatized choices, actions, and concerns drive the
   
4. story,
   
5. and it is narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective.

Some further discussion of terms here:

1) "centrally interested": The book's central storyline focuses upon the emotional, intellectual, and all other forms of experience and growth of its main character. It may be interested in other things as well -- dragons, the definition of justice, life in 1908 Russia -- but all of those interests are secondary to the experience of the main character, and usually filtered only through him/her.

This is often where I find adult books separating themselves out here, because while they may have a younger protagonist, the adult books aren't interested in that protagonist's life per se -- they're interested in showing the world the protagonist will encounter in all its ugliness or glory, and a younger character often provides a useful "innocent" or "naive" viewpoint, or at the very least a figure of instant sympathy to adults. As an example, it's been years since I read Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, but I remember it as a wonderful book that avoided the "innocent/naive" pitfall by making Paddy a fully-rounded and rather foulmothed boy. Still, I felt it was rightly classified as an adult book because to me it read as much like a work of anthropology -- A Report on the Mindset and Behavior of a Representative Ten-Year-Old Male in 1968 Ireland -- as it did a work of fiction; that is, it felt as much like a study of a childhood in Ireland at a time of social unrest Paddy didn't fully understand, as the story of a child there. (See also note below on "story" in #4.)

"growth" -- the character is different at the beginning than he is at the end, and usually for the better. I always think of Richard Peck's wise dictum that a YA novel ends "ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived"; and that the events of the book have left the character better prepared for that.

2) "teenage protagonist(s)": Yeah, I'm going to posit that YA novels require a protagonist at an adolescent stage of life, between childhood and the full rights and privileges of adulthood. I do not think this is true of children's books, particularly picture books (that is, that they must have a child main character); but I think it's true of teen books, because life between the ages of 14-18 is such a unique time, full of so much intensity and so many firsts, that only a very sheltered adult or a very advanced child could have those same sorts of experiences and changes.

3) "dramatized" -- shown, not told; dialogue, not narration; the primary action happening before our eyes, not offpage.

"choices, actions, and concerns" -- the protagonist does things; s/he makes choices, takes action, and has interests in and/or connections to the world outside his/her head.

"drive" -- the protagonist is expected (by the reader at least) to make a difference in this fictional world, and by the end of the book is empowered to take some action to do so.

4) "story" -- a sequence of events linked by cause and effect, generally with a recognizable beginning and end. When people ask me why I went into children's books editing, I have often said just this, story: that things were required to happen in children's/YA books, that they had to have a forward action beyond the events of everyday life, as it often feels they don't in adult books. Maybe what I really mean here is that the events of the book have to have shape and meaning, while in adult books things can just happen because that's what happens in life: things happen.

5) "narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective": The book does not have to be in first person (though goodness knows a good eighty-five percent of YA fiction seems to be these days; I wonder what the actual statistics are on this), but it stays close to the viewpoint of that teenage protagonist, without the distance of, say, an adult looking back at his teenage years. The exception that proves the rule here might be The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, whose detached, almost academic third-person narrator is nonetheless sympathetic to Frankie and describes her emotions as well as her excellent plotting.

There is one more assumption running through everything I'm saying here that I'm hesitating to codify into part of the definition -- but perhaps I should. And that is that a YA novel should end with hope, that there must be some thread of a ghost of a promise of a happy ending or more growth, that there is indeed meaning to the events enclosed. Not necessarily a moral, certainly not an explicit one; but no existentialist despair, either, or random horrors that do not cohere other than aesthetically (I am thinking of Thomas Pynchon's V. here, but I may just be a bad reader of Pynchon). In terms of the Richard Peck quote above, if a YA novel leaves its reader with the sense of a lot of the protagonist's life left to be lived, perhaps it should also leave the reader with the sense that that life (and the reader's life) is worth living. But do we limit the art of the genre if we say it can't go fully into the darkness?

What do you all think of all this?

How to Be A Twitter Writer? Wittier and Rather Tighter.

Partly because I've been so bad at long-form blogging lately, I'm going to try Twittering for the summer: @chavelaque. And as fascinating as I find my sandwiches, I promise to try to keep my daily-life tweets vs. interesting or amusing thoughts on something like a 1:2 ratio.

Memorialize This

So this is the way my weekend went. First, there was the terrific LeakyCon with John Green, which John Green himself sums up nicely here:



The last song on the video is the Harry and the Potters anthem "Dumbledore," and what you see in the opening bars is most of the 500 or so people in the room, having spontaneously formed a large circle with arms around each other, equally spontaneously running to the center of the circle and rocking. It set a new standard for epic Potters shows, and I fully support John's closing gauntlet to the Twilighters.

Then I flew to central New York to see my cousin Hans receive his Master's in landscape architecture from Cornell University. When we arrived, we noticed a banner on a back wall that read "WE LOVE YOU DOWLBO! CONGRATULATIONS!" But that was later topped by this --

-- dragged behind a plane that circled the Cornell stadium. We couldn't find a "Dowlbo" in the list of graduates (though granted, there were 5,000 of them), so we speculated among ourselves who Dowlbo was and why someone might have splurged on him: a message from a relieved wife to a ninth-year graduate student who finally completed his Ph.D.? A love letter from an narcisstic Dowlbo himself? Simply a proud family? That's certainly the most likely option, but also the most boring, when there are so many other interesting narrative possibilities. Any other ideas?

And then, speaking of proud, crazy families:


We held one of our semiannual battles for the honor of hosting the Frog, which had dwelt for far too long with Hans and Megan in Ithaca. While family friend Josh Shields completed the course first, the game is called Killer Klein Croquet, so we hastily invented the Shields Clause to grant the Frog to the first Klein-family finisher. And thus my aunt Carol (brown shirt and glasses in the middle) will take the Frog back to Iowa until we meet again.

And finally, we saw Niagara Falls. Quite beautiful; quite cold; quite glad I don't have to go over them in a barrel.

The entire weekend was thoroughly, thoroughly awesome -- my love and thanks to all involved.

A Pub Plan and a Poll

I mentioned below that Betsy and I would be hosting a Kidlit Drink Night in conjunction with BEA, and those plans are now in place: Friday, May 29, starting at 8 p.m. at the Houndstooth Pub at 8th Ave. and 37th St. Come one, come all!

And a poll: On Friday, a friend and I fell into a conversation about song lyrics. My friend remarked that while she might fall in love with a tune, she never really pays attention to song lyrics. But for me the two are inextricably linked: I hardly ever remember melodies without words; I have to really pay attention to instrumental-only music in order to have some reaction to it; my favorite songs ("They Can't Take That Away from Me," "North Dakota," "I Love Every Little Thing About You," "The Babysitter's Here," "You Must Meet My Wife") all have genius lyrics as well; and I carry a stupid number of words set to music in my head -- especially pop songs of the 1990s, when I still listened to commercial radio regularly. (Also Baptist hymns.) I suspect the difference is that my friend, who is an enthusiastic amateur bassoonist, is much smarter about music than I am, but I don't know for sure. So I'm asking simply: Do you pay attention to/remember/care about lyrics in the music you love, or not? I look forward to seeing the response.

New Yorkers: Take Action for Marriage Equality

Hey, fellow New Yorkers! As you may have heard, our state Senate passed a bill for marriage equality yesterday, but it's facing a tough battle in the House. We all need to call and write our representatives and tell them we will not stand for being less cool, less loving, and less equal than Iowa. (And Connecticut. And New Hampshire. And Vermont. And Massachusetts. . . . Seriously, this is embarrassing.) FiveThirtyEight has the breakdown of representatives for and against; Andrew Sullivan has a helpful list of contact information. Let's do this.

I have been half in love with easeful Death

I was looking at a New York Times bestseller list from a couple weeks ago today, and I noticed:

• #2: Twilight: Directors' Notebook. A book about the making of a movie based on a novel about a girl in love with a member of the undead. (Twilight itself was on the series list, of course, along with House of Night, which is also about vampires.)
  
• #4: Thirteen Reasons Why. A novel about a teenage girl who kills herself and thirteen people who influenced her to do it.
  
• #6: If I Stay. A novel about a teenage girl in a coma, making the choice between living and dying.
  
• #7: Wintergirls. A novel about a teenage girl whose best friend has died of an eating disorder, pushing herself to that same point.

And I thought: What is it with teenage girls and death? Why all these teenage girls at risk, on edge, and no boys? How would these books have been different if they showed the boy version of those stories* -- a boy who killed himself because he was harassed/teased/neglected, a boy in a coma, a boy whose competitive pathology puts him on the brink of collapse? How might the books have been differently received by editors and readers? And what does it say that these stories of girls in extreme situations are so popular now?

* I should add that I absolutely don't mean this to criticize any of the authors or editors involved for publishing these books just as they are, as they're all interesting and important books just as they are, and authors have to tell the stories that come to them as they come. I'm just interested in the what-if of switching the genders, and the why of books about this particular gender and death being so popular.

I thought all this just sort of as a thought experiment, and then I thought, Well, did I read any books like that when I was a teenage girl? And one title leapt to mind immediately: Love Story. I don't remember how I found that 1970s classic weepie during my freshman year of high school, but I know I adored the weepiness; I saw the movie once but read the book multiple times. I'm not sure that falls under the same rubric as the books above, though, except maybe Twilight. . . . What I loved about it was the romance, and the way the romance was sharpened by death, how much more sweet and sad the story became when Jenny died. (I read a couple of Lurlene McDaniels, too, until I figured out the formula and got bored with them.) But Wintergirls, Thirteen Reasons Why, and If I Stay aren't so much about a romance with a living, breathing boy as they are about a romance with death itself (as I understand them; I haven't read If I Stay), and in Twilight, of course, death and the boy are one and the same.

So this made me think of a brilliant passage late in Jaci Moriarty's The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie. Jaci puts these words in the mouth of a decidedly ambiguous character, so I'm not sure their wisdom gets recognized and appreciated, but the passage reads:

It is my belief that the teenager is a person with three main characteristics. . . . First, teenagers get caught up in their own heads. . . . teenagers think about themselves a lot. They obsess about what they look like, what people think of them, what the point of life is. So number one, too much introspection.

. . . Now, number two, the teenager needs excitement--it's a reaction, I guess, to the realization that life is ordinary. In childhood, it's fresh and exciting, but then you start to see that the grown-up world is boring. So you look for hysteria and drama. You scream at concerts, you shriek when you see each other, you ride on rollercoasters, you get into alcohol and drugs. All year I've been hearing you guys use words like conspiracy, compulsion, pathology -- you get post-traumatic stress from exams; you're always running from the cops. I mean, you guys are just desperate for excitement. You're looking for extremes. You're looking for a climax.

. . . And finally, teenagers lose their sense of perspective. They're stuck between childhood and adulthood so they don't know whether they're up or down. One day, they're dressing up to look old and get into a bar; next day, they're putting on their cute voice to get the child's fare on the bus. It's like they're in an elevator all the time, so they can't judge where they are." (p. 404-405)

Death's finality and hugeness feeds introspection. It is extreme and exciting -- the approach to it, anyway, and the dodging of it, or the struggle or choice to embrace it. And it provides an end, a certainty that has its own comfort (though also terror) in the up and down.

But that wouldn't explain why there are so few books about boys and death. So one other theory here (which I'm pretty sure isn't original to me): More than anything else, teenage girls want to be seen. Twilight is a story about how special Bella is, how she is an exception to Edward's rules about humans, how he sees her once and falls helplessly in love with her then. (Love Story = same thing.) Thirteen Reasons Why is about a girl claiming the attention she was denied in life; If I Stay about the people who gather around a girl's bedside, paying attention to her, asking her to stay in life; Wintergirls about a girl who wants to be the skinniest -- to have the least seen of her, actually, and having that be her victory -- until that desire consumes her. Death, in its extremity, promises and focuses attention in just the same way a love story does. And when the two are combined: teenage-girl bliss.

Your comments? Theories? Thoughts?

One last thing that has nothing to do with death but a lot to do with teenage girls and love: The video for Taylor Swift's "Love Story." I freely confess I'm fascinated by this video, partly because it seems to have been concepted after someone watched "Pride and Prejudice," the What the Hell??? version (but with eighteenth-century dress for the ladies), partly because it (and the song) pushes all my romantic buttons, partly because it pushes all my feminist ones at the exact same time, and then finally because the song is such a well-constructed piece of narrative craft, moving from first glimpse (being seen!) to forbidden love to marriage proposal with Daddy's permission in less than four minutes. As a friend of mine said, "It's total high-school English class crack," and the part of me that is still in Mrs. Markley's Honors English II class third period adores it. Well worth watching, for any of those partial reactions.

Squee!

My sweet Marcelo gets a fantastic review in the New York Times:  The Summer of Living Dangerously

And More Appearances!

Another one this month and one in November: On the 28th, I'll be on the bloggers' panel for SLJ's "Day of Dialog 2009" in conjunction with BEA. My brilliant fellow panelists are Liz Burns (A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy), Laura Lutz (Pinot and Prose), and Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty), all moderated by my friend and yours Betsy Bird; and rumor has it there will be quite the shoe-off (which means I desperately need to go shopping, because, besides the magic shoes, everything I own is as practical and boring as a DVR manual). 9:15 a.m. at the Brooklyn Public Library. Free, and there will be muffins -- can you really ask for anything more?

Oh, and Betsy and I will be hosting a special BEA Kidlit Drink Night on Friday night, at a place to be decided . . . um, once I e-mail Betsy back. But it will definitely be Friday, May 29.

Then, from November 6-8, I'm going to be one of the featured speakers at the SCBWI Western Washington Professional Retreat. I hear marvelous things about this chapter and the location of the retreat looks a-maz-ing, so it ought to be a good time. (I'll also be at the Midsouth Fall Conference in Nashville from September 25-27 -- a scant three days after my 31st birthday, so maybe I'll have to work something special into my presentation for that.)

Me at LeakyCon and Harry Potter in Paris

Leaky readers will already know this, but for others who might be interested, I'm delighted to announce I'll be half of a keynote conversation at the upcoming LeakyCon 2009 near Boston, on Friday, May 21, discussing the writing, editing, pleasures, pains, and nature of YA literature with John Green. Yes, that John Green, the brilliant author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns, and the head wrangler of the awesome troupe of Nerdfighters. So assuming I am not utterly silenced by fangirldom, this should be a lot of fun. Tickets are $20 with a LeakyCon registration (I don't think they're available without), and can be purchased at the second link above.

And here are two Harry Potter-related pictures from my time in Paris -- first, me at number 51, rue Montmorency*, former site of the "maison de Nicolas Flamel":


* Ten points to the first reader who can guess what other work of children's literature I thought of when I saw this name -- and no, it's not the series published by Scholastic.

And then I noticed this interesting juxtaposition of elements on the front of the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur:


Coincidence? Or the mark of a French seeker of the Hallows (perhaps even Monsieur Flamel himself)? Who can say?