An Update: Stephanie Trimberger and THE RUBY HEART

Earlier this fall, I asked my Seattle-area blog readers to go out to a signing for Stephanie Trimberger's The Ruby Heart -- a book Arthur and I worked on with her as part of the Make-a-Wish program, as chronicled in this video. I'm sorry to have to report that Stephanie passed away in November. But her memory lives on with her novel, and Make-a-Wish has now made The Ruby Heart available as a free PDF download for anyone who'd like to read it. You can check it out here.

(Thank you to reader Pamela for the heads-up.)

A Brief Ramble on Character and Self Consistency

Lord, I love Zadie Smith's essays, like this wonderful piece in last week's New Yorker on Joni Mitchell, changing artistic tastes, changing selves, and artistic continuity:

Who could have understood Abraham? He is discontinuous with himself. The girl who hated Joni and the woman who loves her seem to me similarly divorced from each other, two people who happen to have shared the same body. It's the feeling we get sometimes when we find a diary we wrote, as teenagers, or sit at dinner listening to an old friend tell some story about us of which we have no memory. It's an everyday sensation for most of us, yet it proves a tricky sort of problem for those people who hope to make art. For though we know and recognize discontinuity in our own lives, when it comes to art we are deeply committed to the idea of continuity. I find myself to be radically discontinuous with myself -- but how does one re-create this principle in fiction? What is a character if not a continuous, consistent personality? If you put Abraham in a novel, a lot of people who throw that novel across the room. What's his motivation? How can he love his son and yet be prepared to kill him? Abraham is offensive to us. It is by reading and watching consistent people on the page, stage, and screen that we are reassured of our own consistency.

This made me think of the fact that often the moments I love most in fiction or film are the moments where a character does something that is seemingly inconsistent with his or her outward character, but completely consistent with his or her inward self, which we've glimpsed throughout the proceedings . . . a sacrifice, an unexpectedly marvelous dance, a moment of honesty or tenderness they weren't capable of at the beginning. It is often the revelation of that character's strength through the demonstration of their vulnerability, and it shows us layers, dimensions, complexity, reality, all the things I like best.

That said, I disagree a little with the last few sentences of the paragraph I quote above because I don't find Abraham inconsistent at all; his obedience to his god simply outranks his love for his son, which could certainly be found offensive if you disagree with those rankings, but which is not a matter of discontinuity. And I think I like watching consistent fictional people not because I am like them, but because their dependability, the cleanliness of their consistency, anchors and comforts me in my own wild ups and downs. One of the great joys of fiction is that it can be neater than life; the best fiction either organizes the reader's emotions completely, I think, or just barely manages the messiness of reality. 

Agree? Disagree? In my inconstancy, I'm open to persuasion.

Finally, this essay also reminded me of this extraordinary version of "Both Sides Now" -- made famous in the Emma Thompson weeping scene in "Love, Actually" -- which almost makes me cry every time I hear it with its texture of pain and wisdom. It is worth stopping what you're doing to breathe and to listen:

Q&A: Trent Reedy, author of STEALING AIR

PSA for Writers:  Even if you usually skip the Q&As on this blog, you should read this one, particularly what Trent has to say about the Bechard Factor below.

Tell us the origin story and history of Stealing Air.

Stealing Air is a story I have been working with on and off for about twenty years.  It began as a very short and simple story that was my response to a sixth grade English class assignment.  Our challenge was to write any story we wished about "Freaky Frankie," this cartoonish Frankenstein's monster we were shown. I knew all the other kids would come up with scary or Halloween stories, so I wanted to write something different.  I wrote a piece called "Flyboys," in which Frankie was just a tough guy who picked on three boys whose passion was building a tiny skateboard-mounted airplane that two of the boys hoped to fly around on.  "Flyboys" was a big hit, and I was asked to read it at a sixth grade Halloween party.

I never let go of the core idea for that story, and sometime in my early twenties, I expanded "Flyboys" into a novel-length manuscript.  In the novel version, I developed the skateboard-based airplane, added a neat friendship dynamic, and gave the protagonist a romantic interest.  I had high hopes that this would be my first published novel.

However, when I was sent to Afghanistan with the Iowa Army National Guard in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, all of my plans changed.  I became fascinated by the country I had been sent to help reconstruct, and I made a vow in my heart to one particularly inspiring Afghan girl, promising I would do all I could to tell her story.  Thus, instead of Flyboys, the adventure story of three sixth-grade boys from Iowa who become friends while building a plane in a secret workshop, my first published novel was Words in the Dust, the story of a young Afghan girl who struggles to find peace and lasting meaning in post-Taliban, Afghanistan.

Writing Words in the Dust was a very serious, emotionally demanding process, and so when I set out to write my second novel, I needed something more light-hearted and adventurous.  Flyboys was just the right story.  However, reading that old novel-length story after all I had learned at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and after what I’d learned working with you, I realized Flyboys would need to be completely rewritten.   Most of the plot and characters remained the same, but the resulting novel Stealing Air is incredibly different, a lot better than its prototype stories. 

How was writing your second novel both different from and similar to writing your first?

The process of getting a novel published can be very difficult and usually requires a lot of work.  In my long journey to publication, I felt ready for the extensive revisions I would have to do to prepare my first novel Words in the Dust for submission to publishers.  There are many magazine articles and blog posts about this.

What the articles and blogs did not prepare me for was the awesome amount of work in revision that takes place after signing the book contract.  The course of revisions and copy edits was exhausting but exhilarating.  When it was over and Words in the Dust was a real book on the shelf, I was pleased with the result, knowing I had done my very best with that novel.

In life we often have the tendency to look at the past with a filter that can remove from our immediate memory a lot of the difficulties and hardships we faced in a given time.  This filter enables some people to long for the “good old days” of high school which can be remembered with fondness, as long as they don’t think about all the old social pressures and tedious homework assignments.

I think to a certain extent, I was looking back on my first novel experience with a similar filter.  I dove into writing and revising Stealing Air with the idea that I was a more experienced writer, thinking that the process should be smoother and easier.  What I learned is that, for me at least, every new novel presents its own unique complications.  It’s like starting over.  And how wonderful is that?  I loved the challenge of writing and revising Words in the Dust.  After the initial sense of surprise and frustration in dealing with Stealing Air’s issues, I eventually embraced my chance to relive the “good old days” of preparing another novel for publication.

Who were your best friends when you were in sixth grade? What was the worst trouble you ever got up to together?

I love that quote from the old film Stand By Me: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve...does anyone?”

I’ve been blessed in my life with many great friends, so I don’t want to say that the peak of my friendships was in the sixth grade, but it was a special kind of friendship in fifth and sixth grade.  Maybe it was because hanging out with the guys in those days was so new.  For the first time, we didn’t need our parents looking over our shoulders so much.  Everything felt very new and full of potential.

We’d head out of town on the old abandoned railroad tracks, and find our own world away from adult influence, at the Runaway Bridge, this limestone railroad bridge that crossed a little creek.  There we would mess around, trying with little success to avoid falling into the water and mud.  Unfortunately, this bridge has since been destroyed, but I keep a piece of its limestone on my bookshelf as a reminder of those times.

We never found ourselves in too much trouble, but I remember sometime around sixth grade, I was staying overnight at my friend Tim’s house.  We always thought it was fun to sneak out after his parents had gone to sleep.  I don’t know why this seemed like such an adventure.  In a little farm town with just over 1,300 people, there wasn’t much to do late at night.  I know that for some reason we were terrified of being caught by Dysart’s lone police officer.  On one night we had sneaked out with illegal fireworks, a few “black cats,” and planned to set them off at different places around town.  It was a breezy night, so we had trouble getting the fuse to light.  Our bright idea was to simply shorten the fuse.  As a result, the thing went off before we had our chance to make a getaway.  It was a tiny little pop, really, but we were sure everyone in town had heard it, and that the cop was on his way.  We sprinted away from the scene of our crime, running through the dark and crossing a street by the elementary school.

From behind me, I heard the sound of a traffic sign rattling as if Tim had slapped it while running past.  I turned and hissed at him to keep the noise down, but he was no longer following me.  I went back, and found him lying in a fetal position on the pavement.  As I whispered frantically, trying to get him to get up and run so that we could avoid capture, he just let out the pained, sickening groan that all boys come to understand at least once in their lives.  “I racked myself,” he said.  Tim had hit the sign pole at a dead sprint, the steel crushing him all the way down to where it filled his whole body with a guy’s cold dull paralyzing pain.  After a while, I managed to get him back on his feet so that we could go back to his house, but for the rest of the night he kind of just stared off into space, not the same guy.

Plot, character, stakes, voice, theme, setting . . . What aspect of the novel did you struggle most with, and how was that resolved? Which one came most easily on this book?

One big advantage I had with Stealing Air is that after so many years, I was very familiar with the characters and the settings, having lived in Riverside, Iowa for nine years, and small Iowa towns like it for my whole life.

The biggest challenge was in determining what was at stake for the characters.  My initial draft simply accepted that Brian and Alex would want to get their airplane flying simply because flying is so cool.  That may be true, and it may be the way Brian, Alex, and Max would all really feel, but story reality is a bit different from real reality, and you helped me understand that for the reader to care about whether or not the boys could make their plane fly, there had to be serious consequences or rewards for success or failure.

We tried several different options before centering the stakes on the Plastisteel plane being the key to saving Brian’s and Max’s parents’ company.  This worked out great, because it required that I keep bringing back Mrs. Douglas, a surprise character who hadn’t appeared in earlier versions of the book.  I love that character, and my only regret with Mrs. Douglas is that I couldn’t figure out how to bring her into the book even more.

You and I talked a lot about what you call “the Bechard Factor” on this book. Could you describe that for me and how it played out here?

I had the honor of working under the guidance of author Margaret Bechard in my final semester at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, while I revised Words in the Dust.  In that novel, a character named Meena befriends the protagonist Zulaikha, teaching the girl to read and write, introducing her to classic Persian poetry. 

In early drafts, Meena had no name, was blind, and lived in a cave.  Margaret asked me why she had to live in a cave.  Why was she blind?  Why did she not even have pencil and paper for Zulaikha to use in her lessons?  I explained that the woman was old and her sight had just gone, that she lived in a cave because her house had been destroyed in the war.

Margaret Bechard patiently explained that she wasn’t asking me what fictional circumstances within the story made the nameless blind woman live in a cave, but that she wanted to know why I had chosen to make this character be this way?  What did the story gain by my making the character that way?  She was asking me to consider how the story would be affected if the woman was very different.

I eventually named the woman after the Afghan feminist martyr Meena, letting Meena live in the back of her own sewing shop.  This improved believability and made it much easier for me to get Zulaikha away from her house for her lessons.  It was, however, difficult to make those changes, to look at the plot and characters from outside the story, to break away from the way the story was first written and revise for the best effect.  The difficulty of the act of looking at the story from the outside to consider radical changes from early drafts is what I have dubbed the “Bechard Factor.”

Stealing Air had been with me a lot longer than Words in the Dust.  By the time I began revising it, I had been kicking around the original draft of the novel in my head for a decade.  So when Cheryl asked me why Brian wants to fly this experimental plane, why Brian wanted to make friends so much, and why Brian’s family had even moved to Riverside, Iowa, I struggled to find answers.  The answers had been so self evident in the story as it had been for so long that it was a challenge, once again, to step outside of the story and consider new possibilities.

Stealing Air is far richer after overcoming the Bechard Factor.  In the original version, Brian moves to Riverside with his mother after his father has abandoned his family.  Reasoning that such abandonment would be too emotionally heavy, I changed it so that the family moved to Riverside after Brian’s father lost his job.  But then the father was too depressed.  Finally, when I needed another reason for Brian needing to fly the experimental plane, it was decided that Brian’s father moved to Riverside to start a company with Max’s mother.  That was a breakthrough change that really brought a lot of elements together very nicely.

If you could own any plane, what would it be? And what’s your favorite skateboard trick?

There are a lot of planes I would love to try out, but if I could own one, I think I would absolutely love the world’s smallest twin-engine airplane, the low-winged Colomban Cri-Cri:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knb3qNq-Uho

I really admire people like Brian who can pull off amazing skateboard tricks.  When I was younger, I had a cheap skateboard that I bought secondhand.  I would mostly challenge myself to downhill runs where the skateboard would be zipping down a steep hill very fast.  Fortunately, I lived in Iowa where the hills aren’t too extreme.  There are hills and mountains where I live now in Spokane, Washington that are tricky in a car.  I would never attempt them on a skateboard.  There are a lot of skateboard tricks I would never attempt, but I think the people who do are kind of like superheroes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_1Y8UoLIu4 

Check out Trent's website for more on Stealing Air, Words in the Dust, and his videos and media!

A Brief Rant Against My Own Interests, but for My Own Beliefs

Katha Pollitt, a critic, feminist, activist, and liberal who I greatly respect and admire, posted this on Twitter this morning:

Half of laity members who voted against women bishops in Anglican church were women. http://tinyurl.com/btqdsuk  #slavementality

And I wanted to say, "Sister, please." Because that "#slavementality" hashtag reflects a fundamental misunderstanding -- or perhaps better put, a fundamental willful blindness -- on the part of my fellow liberals about the way that my fellow people of religion or faith sometimes think or behave . . . and in particular, a willful blindness by my co-feminists toward women who make choices that don't advance the cause.

Those women who voted against women bishops were quite likely ladies who read 1 Timothy 2:12* literally and who find that more important or compelling than their own rights. This is a perfectly valid way to think and behave in the private sphere. It may not be the way we feminists personally would interpret Scripture or vote -- but other people's religious beliefs aren't any of our business, and liberals have fought long and hard to make sure everyone's religious beliefs stay their private business and don't come into the public sphere.

All of this goes ditto for women who vote, based on religious grounds, for a candidate who opposes abortion rights**. That does come into the public sphere, as those women's choice of a candidate can influence all women's choices about life and death, literally. But that's still a valid belief and choice, and the work of those who support abortion rights then is to argue better and either change their minds or convince other people to outvote them. Same goes for the Anglican vote:  The work lies not in insults, but in a more wide-ranging theological discussion that might open up these women's minds, if they're willing to go there (which they may not be). It's complex and hard, but not cheap, as Ms. Pollitt's comment felt to me.

[A side note if you're interested in issues of Biblical literalism and religious mind-changing:  The New Yorker from November 26 has a terrific, thoughtful, even-handed profile of Rob Bell, the founder of Mars Hill church, and his journey from strict evangelical to someone still faithful but rather more nebulous in religious definition.]

Feminism is, or should be, nothing more and nothing less than the fight for the rights of women to maximize their personal choices and opportunities within a culture that often represses them -- including those choices and opportunities some feminists might disagree with, such as those that reinforce the repressive culture. Calling those women who make different choices idiots does not advance the cause here, and I wished we did it less and argued for complexity more.

_____________________________
* "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet," as quoted in the New Yorker article. 
** I should note that my own feelings about abortion are extremely squooshy, so I will not argue it one way or another, nor do I welcome arguments about it in the comments (goodness, no).

Southeast Asia in the Autumn: Editors' Boot Camp

For the first two weeks of November, I was on the other side of the Earth, first for five days in Singapore, then for seven in Thailand. This will be the first of, I think, five posts about my experiences.


I went to Singapore to teach at an Editors' Boot Camp, which the National Arts Council sponsored as part of the Singapore Writers' Festival. My co-instructor was the excellent Francesca Main of Picador Books UK -- an adult-books editor who was just as passionate about the art and craft of editing as I am, resulting in three good days of sharing our knowledge with the Malay and Singaporean editors in attendance, and learning from them in turn. Case in point: The Singaporean publishing industry does not have two things that completely change the publishing equation when compared to the US & UK:

• Agents. This makes sense when you consider that Singapore has four official languages (English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil) for a population of just over five million, which greatly fragments the publishing market, which in turn makes it difficult for an agent to build a living out of 15% commissions. Thus most manuscripts in Singapore are submitted directly to the publishers.
• Amazon.com and the Kindle. They do have e-books, which can be purchased through the website www.ilovebooks.com, among others. But the 900-pound gorilla that has so transformed the US and UK publishing industries hasn't yet established a Singaporean outpost. 

What they DO have:

• Diversity. This is a "duh" statement given the country's languages and population, but coming from U.S. publishing, it was a pleasure to see so many editors from such diverse backgrounds gathered in one place:  Muslims, Malays, native-Chinese speakers, expatriates . . .
• Energy. Not only were the editors eager to learn, but the government was eager to support the country's publishing efforts, as evidenced by the existence of the course itself. 
• Creativity. I was really impressed by the wide-ranging and beautifully designed lists of small publishers like Epigram Books, Monsoon Books, and Marshall Cavendish (which is very different from the MC we have here).

Four observations I offered in class, which I rarely have occasion to offer in my courses for writers:

• Authors and manuscripts are published most successfully when they are a good fit with the editor's values, the house's values, and the market's values. That is:  The editor values what the book accomplishes artistically, and knows how to help the author maximize its intellectual intentions and emotional effects; the house can successfully connect the book with its audience, because it's an audience the house already values and knows how to reach; and the market recognizes the worth of the book and embraces it. The market's values are endlessly created and recreated, because it doesn't know what it wants until that desire has been offered to it. But an editor's and house's values can usually be seen in what they've published in the past.
• Having recently seen, and really liked, the film of Cloud Atlas, I finally read the New Yorker article about its making, and I was greatly struck by this quote from Lana Wachowski:  "The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies. So as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modeled." (Those of us who must deal with comp titles would also observe that originality has a highly mixed sales record.) 
• Much of being an editor is dealing with negative space:  what is not there at present and should be. 
• Editors have a close-to-inexhaustible faith in the perfectability of manuscripts:  that they can and will get better, with the application of the right combination of insight, imagination, time, and elbow grease. We acquire this faith through seeing the process happen over and over again, for a wide array of writers and projects. It is a much harder faith for writers to keep, given that they usually don't have the opportunity to see any process but their own, and they're so deeply personally invested in that and the outcome (whereas we editors get to have a little more distance from both).

Thanks very much to Francesca (pictured to my right above), to the writers and editors in our class, and to the National Arts Council for making the trip possible!

To Anyone Who Has Ever Blogged About YA Cover Design

... and complained about how there aren't enough people of color,
... or too many girls in fancy dresses,
... or not enough people in everyday street clothes,
... or how you hate seeing girls in pieces,
... or overly sexualized,
... or from behind,
... or on a black background,
... and why can't we just get a real girl on the cover for once:

HERE IS A COVER FOR YOU. 

BUY THIS BOOK. 

IF ENOUGH OF YOU DO IT, 

IT WILL MAKE EVEN MORE OF 

A DIFFERENCE THAN YOUR BLOG POSTS. 

Need more cover awesomeness? Here is the back, for anyone who's ever wanted to see a person with a disability on a book jacket:

And you can read the starred review from PW here.

Links to Put Your Money 
Where Your Mouth Is: 

Indiebound | B&N | Amazon

(This is not a book I edited, by the way. But I swear to God:  Support the covers you want to see, and change happens.)

A Revised Plot Checklist

Recently I sat down to analyze a couple of the novel manuscripts I'm working on, and as is my wont, I ran them through my Plot Checklist, which helps me ensure that I know (and more importantly, the reader knows) what the story is, what is at stake, what emotional ends we're working toward, that things actually happen, and all those other good things. However, the version of the Checklist I featured on my website (which is also the version included in Second Sight) hadn't kept pace with some of my thinking about plot -- particularly what I'm currently teaching in my Plot Master Class,

So I revised the Checklist for my own use, and put the revised version up on my website here, again with a Word template for downloading. (The old checklist is still up here, at the address given in the book.) If you've read Second Sight, the four biggest changes you'll notice are:

1. The addition of "Desire" to this page. I discuss it in the character talk, but a Desire is such a useful structuring element for a plot -- giving your protagonist a defined goal -- that I wanted to include it here too.
2. The addition of "Obstacles" -- the things that get in the way of the Desire or of the task your character must accomplish in the novel. Generally there are both Overarching Obstacles -- the major things your protagonist must overcome, like the distance to Mount Doom -- and Periodic Obstacles -- problems in each individual period of the journey. They can be both internal and external (and there probably should be both internal and external obstacles).
3. "Periods": Rather than thinking about individual Escalating & Complicating Events, I now try dividing a manuscript into periods. A period is a set of Escalating & Complicating Events that occur within a limited period of time, often with one other particular person or in one particular place, during which time your protagonist changes in one particular way. They are often joined by Turning Points (but there are usually more of them than just three or four, so they aren't quite Acts, in the screenplay-structure sense).
4. "The Experiential Point" -- I wrote about this here.

If you use the checklist, I hope you find it useful! I'll next be teaching my Plot Master Class in Utah on November 17 -- registration here -- and I believe spaces are still open in Hawaii in February as well. The online version will start up in December, and if it goes well, we may run it again next spring. This blog will have details. 

Postscript: Stephanie Trimberger's Book Signing

A few weeks ago, I posted a request for the good people of the Pacific Northwest to come out and support Stephanie Trimberger at her book signing for The Ruby Heart. Said people responded in force, and you can see Stephanie, her father, Arthur, and footage from the event in this wonderful MSN.com video here. Have Kleenex at the ready:

"Harry Potter" editors make dream come true

A Chain of News Links

Two terrific books pubbed officially yesterday:  The Savage Fortress, by Sarwat Chadda, and Stealing Air, by Trent Reedy. I wrote about The Savage Fortress for the CBC Diversity blog here, cheerfully (and with Sarwat's full approval) calling it a book of "no socially redeeming value" -- which is one of the many things that actually makes it awesome. But you should also read Sarwat's own wonderful blog post on the reasons why he wanted to write this book, to satisfy his ten-year-old self "who always wanted another hero like him." And when you're done with that, please hop on over to the Scholastic Savage Fortress site and play the "Master the Monsters" game. I am terrible -- TERRIBLE -- at video games, so my high score on this game is 600; my compliments to anyone who can do better than I did (e.g. the average five-year-old). There's good stuff to come on Stealing Air as well. 

Speaking of diversity:  In this week's Narrative Breakdown, James and I and our return guest Matt Bird discuss creating ensemble casts, including Matt's excellent theory on Heads, Hearts, and Guts, and why there are so few characters of color in ensembles like Girls or Sex and the City. Subscribe on iTunes, and do please comment, review, or tell us what you'd like to see more of!

Speaking of developing your writing muscles: If you'd like to see me give my Plot Master Class in person, registration for the November 17 edition in Salt Lake City is now open! To get a sense of the topics covered, check out the description for the online edition of the class (which is sold out, I'm sorry to say. If I'm able to balance work and my responsibilities in teaching it, we'll run it again sometime next year). I believe there are also still spaces available at both the Master Class and the SCBWI general conference in Hawaii on February 22 & 23, 2013 -- e-mail Lynne Wikoff at lwikoff at lava dot net if you're interested.

Speaking of appearances in connection with educational opportunities, did you know J. K. Rowling is doing a virtual author visit with schools, in support of the new Harry Potter Reading Clubs? You can register a class for the webcast here.

And there the chain comes to an end. Or wait -- a little delight to send you on your way:

All About THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ME: Behind the Book, Q&A, and Giveaway!

Two and a half years ago, I received a few sample chapters of an unsolicited manuscript that made me laugh out loud from the very first page, so I immediately wrote to the author and asked her to send me the whole thing. It was called The Encyclopedia of Me, and it was the brilliant story of twelve-year-old Tink Aaron-Martin. When Tink gets grounded, she decides to use the time to write an encyclopedia of her life, encompassing her family, with two loving parents and two older brothers, Lex and Seb (the latter of whom is autistic); her hairless cat, Hortense; her fickle best friend, Freddie Blue Anderson; and, as the summer unfolds, a new interest in skateboarding and an equal interest in the blue-haired skateboarding boy next door, Kai (whom the much more assertive Freddie Blue just might like as well). The manuscript at that time alternated portions of the encyclopedia with straight-narrative sections. I loved the format, but what I loved even more was the voice, which was capable of hilarious observations like this one: 

Seb frequently smells as bad as Lex, but different. This is mostly because he staunchly refuses to shower more than three times in a week. If you are ever not sure which twin you are dealing with, breathe deeply. If your senses are kickboxed into an eye-watering stupor by the stinging stench of cheap cologne, it’s Lex. If they curl up and die due to the overwhelmingly hideous moldy pong of sweat, combined with the antiseptic, lemony zing of hand sanitizer, it’s Seb. Easy, see?

But Tink's voice was also capable of great sensitivity and thoughtfulness, in contemplating Freddie Blue's behavior or her favorite tree. All the characters felt as rich and flawed and warm and complicated as many real people I know. Tink is biracial, but it's simply a fact of who she is, not the source of any angst (beyond an inability to get her hair to behave). And Karen fully dramatized some great set-piece scenes, like the one where Freddie Blue, Tink, and Kai try to spend the night in a department store. A terrific voice, wonderful characters, the ability to execute some great scenes, genuine emotion, and that aforementioned laugh-out-loud humor all made me fall in love with the book, and I signed it up as soon as I could.

Over the next year and a half, Karen and I worked together to absorb the narrative sections into the encyclopedia entries and turn the entire book into an encyclopedia, with the plot unfolding alphabetically from A-Z. This involved (nobody who knows me will be shocked to hear) a lot of outlines at first, as Karen cataloged all her plot events and encyclopedia entries and mapped them onto each other; and then a lot of cutting and adding, tweaking and refining right up through the proofreading stages, as we juggled entries, photos, and footnotes in within our allotted 256 pages. But the book remained both intensely emotional and very funny -- a perfect tween-girl smart read, and equally great for fans of YA writers like E. Lockhart or Jaclyn Moriarty. Recently I asked Karen some questions about herself and the book.

 

First things first:  What would your own encyclopedia entry look like?

Rivers, Karen (June 12, 1970 - forever). (Karen prefers not to die.) Author of many wonderful novels for children, teenagers, and adults. Born in British Columbia, Canada, she went to college for ages and ages and studied a little bit of almost anything, having contemplated at various different times careers in theatre, journalism, law, and medicine. Then she worked at the phone company and some equally scary places before becoming a writer full-time. She has always loved giant sets of encyclopedias because they contain all knowledge! (As well as for their beautiful gold-edged pages, of course.) She has two splendid children who never fight or spill things, and a dog who -- if properly inspired by a squirrel -- can actually climb trees.  (Only one of those statements is not 100% true.) She can usually be found walking slowly up or down the mountain behind her house, thinking things or taking photographs, or -- on a good day -- both. 

Which came first with The Encyclopedia of Me, the story or the format? How did the other one follow?

I think the story came first, or rather, the character. At the time that I started to write this book, I think my kids were just babies. My older son, my stepson, is autistic. And at the time, his autism was really consuming our lives. Most of our waking hours were spent dealing with certain situations, supporting him, or talking about his autism and how we were going to deal in the longer term. One of the things we talked about was what it would be like for siblings to have an older brother for whom different rules applied. That was basically the germ of the idea of the story, simply that it would be the sibling's story and the autism would merely be on the periphery and normalized because that would be all the sibling would ever have known. It was so much in my consciousness, in a way I think it was my way of trying-on-for-size what that might be like.

When I began to write, Tink originally was going to read the entire set of encyclopedias, inspired by A.J. Jacobs's The Know-It-All. As I wrote, it seemed implausible that she would get past the first As (I started reading them again myself and was struggling by the third entry), so she started to make up her own. It evolved from there. I know people roll their eyes when author's say "It wrote itself!"  But in this case, the format decided itself and it was something of an accident. Originally, it was straight narrative with the entries scattered throughout, but then we decided to take a stab at making the whole book fit the format. In addition to working well with the story (I think!), it was also fun and challenging to write. Sometimes it even felt impossible.  

This is going to sound as crazy as the "It wrote itself!" comment, but I will say that it's much more satisfying to write a book that's really really hard to write, from a technical standpoint. It makes me understand, on a completely different level, why people climb Everest for fun. Having successfully done it once, I have all kinds of ideas for other novels structured like specifically formatted books, such as cook books and etiquette books and ... the possibilities are limitless!

What attracts you to encyclopedias?

The idea that a book holds all the answers. Of course, now I'm grown up, I understand that knowledge changes and evolves, and looking at old encyclopedias, you realize they are full of things that we subsequently now know more/differently/better.  But as a child, they were flat-out the answer to everything. I think Wikipedia is similarly attractive now, but it isn't quite the same.  You don't randomly flip through Wikipedia while lying on the hall carpet on an endlessly long summer day, discovering things about Sri Lanka or the endocrine system that you never knew. The magic of random discovery has pretty much been lost with the loss of print encyclopedias, which makes me sad. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't currently HAVE a set of encyclopedias, but I wish that I did.   I'm slightly hoarder-like and collector-inclined, I think I would like to have sets from various different decades, just to play compare-and-contrast with them (I have dictionaries and etiquette books and medical books across decades, which are lots of fun). But I live in the world's smallest house! So that might not work.

What sort of challenges did you face in working the story into an alphabetical, encyclopedic form?

There was a very real risk that the plot was going to be compromised by trying to force it into a mold. Making the story flow was incredibly tricky (as you know!). The last thing we wanted was for anyone to read the book and be conscious of the manipulation of the plot to fit the alphabet, so we made a real effort to simply tell the story as a straight narrative that incidentally was displayed in alphabetical order. 

Describe your favorite writing space and time.

I love to write during the day because it's a novelty. For the last seven years, most of my writing has been done at night on a laptop in bed (for warmth), after the kids are asleep. I've seen more of 3 a.m. than I'd like to have seen! Now my kids are in school full time and I can sit (!) at the dining room table and write while actually properly awake. It remains to be seen if this improves the quality of my work.   

What novels were the biggest influence on you when you were a young reader? And what encyclopedia did you grow up using?

I read so voraciously as a child and a young adult that isolating books now to say they were more or less influential than any others feels like I'd be contriving an answer to fit what I feel an author should say, as opposed to the truth. The truth was I read everything, absolutely everything that I had access to, in massive volumes. We did not watch TV (or at least the TV we had had a blown picture tube, so we could only watch about 30 minutes a day before the tube gave up, and it involved using pliers and getting electrical shocks to turn it on). We read. I read between seven and ten books per week for most of my childhood/teen years.    

When I say we read everything, I really mean it. My mum was briefly in a Danielle Steele phase, and I read those as eagerly as I read Little Women or A Wrinkle in Time or Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. Or Flowers in the Attic, for that matter.  My dad read mostly books about war and tall ships, so I have this absurdly detailed understanding of tall ships based on reading the Horatio Hornblower series repeatedly. There was never really a distinction made between "adult" books and "kid" books in my family; nor was there any fuss made about genre fiction vs. literary fiction. They belonged to Book Of The Month club, which I don't think exists anymore, but involved getting condensed versions of popular books in a bound volume every month. We loved those. It's impossible not to be influenced by everything you read; whether it's good or bad, there is something you can take away from it. I suppose it's only a matter of time before I write a tear-jerking romance that is set on a brigantine.  

As an adult looking back, I'd say if I wanted to be inspired by anyone's career, I'd pick Judy Blume.  She really perfected the whole "You are going to be OK" genre of realist YA.  Madeleine L'Engle I think redefined the parameters of middle-grade fiction, blurring lines of fantasy and reality, and I love her for that. I love everyone who tried something new or different and just really went for it, both back then and now. 

You’ve written a number of novels about this preteen/early teen stage of life, and especially the family/friends/young romance conflicts that I think are the bread-and-butter of older middle-grade. What attracts you to writing about this time period? Was it a significant time in your own life?

I learned a while ago (after I was already writing YA) that a person's frontal lobe doesn't fully develop until they are in their early twenties. I'm paraphrasing (and possibly mis-remembering), so don't quote me on this, but I believe the gist of it was that until the frontal lobe finishes developing, people are actually biologically unable to view the world in a not-entirely-egocentric way. The idea that people (and characters) are limited by this brain development to seeing the world in this utterly up-close way at all times is fascinating to me. It explains why I can remember with 100% clarity, things that happened to me, who I had a crush on, what I wore, and how I felt when I was young, but I have only vague recall of what I said or did or wore in the intervening decades. The intensity of that stage of life is what draws me to it again and again. The first time you feel something, it's so powerful. Kids are figuring out who they are, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, except more like a Choose-Your-Own-Character. The possibilities are endless, which makes teen and pre-teen characters so much fun (and so endlessly interesting) to write.

As a teen/pre-teen, I never felt quite comfortable in my own skin.  Now, when I talk to the kids who I perceived as problem-free and popular and perfect, I find out that they struggled with similar feelings. Who knew? It seems as though everyone always feels like they are slightly on the outside, looking in. In a way, I want to send a missive to my younger self that effectively says, "Look!  Everyone else feels the same way! You are going to be OK!" Except maybe now I can send the bulletin to my readers:  You ARE going to be OK. I promise.

Links:

• Karen's always lovely and thoughtful blog
• A terrific review from Little Willow: "Middle school librarians would be wise to add The Encyclopedia of Me by Karen Rivers to their shelves this fall."
• The Quill and Quire starred review:  "E is for excellent."

Giveaway! Even though the hardcover is now in stores, I have a few ARCs of this still lurking around my office, and I'd be delighted to see them go to good homes. Your challenge:  Write a brief encyclopedia entry either for yourself or for the main character of your work-in-progress, and post it either in the comments below or on your own blog/journal/Facebook. (If you do it on your own website, please leave a link here.) I'll decide a winner by the 15th. Thanks!