Character diversity

I’m not sure if it’s just the online “circles” I hang out in or if it’s a wider thing, but lately I’ve seen a bunch of commentary and criticism on character diversity (or the lack thereof) in YA novels.

I think as authors we have a tendency for our characters to reflect the people we’re surrounded by in real life, and for most people the folks we hang out with tend to be racially similar to ourselves. The majority of our friends and acquaintances are also physically- and mentally-average, simply because people with physical and mental differences tend to be the minority. Most authors (at least most of the YA authors I know) are white, and so the books we read tend to be populated by able-bodied, mentally-average white people.

Part of this bias is probably subconscious; we don’t really realize that we’re modeling our characters after our circle of friends, the people we’re most comfortable with. But I think part of it, too, for many writers, is a fear of writing about someone who is not them, a worry about offending people by getting it wrong somehow. (This is perhaps somewhat ironic since writers have no issue with writing a character of the opposite sex.)

(Another worry I personally have is that the skin colour or other minority attributes I give a character will be linked up to the personality/background/etc of said character and interpreted as some sort of subtextual commentary by me the author, even though it’s nothing of the sort. But that’s a slightly different kettle of worms.)

I know I was guilty of a lack of diversity in my first few novels, for all these reasons. I finally started trying to create a more diverse cast of characters in my fourth and fifth novels, with Stars being my most diverse so far (fortunately aided by the nature of the setting and cast). It definitely requires a bit of conscious effort and mental retraining.

DiversifYA is a new blog started up by Marieke Nijkamp (also of the YA Misfits) and Alex Brown, dedicated to discussing diversity in YA fiction. They’ve started out by presenting interviews with a number of writers who identify themselves as a minority in some way – in race, physical ability, mental health, sexual orientation, etc. The interviews are honest and open and, I think, a great way for writers (and everyone else) to get to know a little bit of what it’s like from their point of view. Definitely worth checking out!

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The last few weeks I’ve been wrapped up with moving and getting settled into a new house, unpacking and addressing problems and all that stuff that comes with a change of address. I haven’t really had much chance to do a lot of writing, much less blog posts, but I’ve got a few links and things stored up that I hope to catch up on over the next little bit. :)

More good news for a friend!

When I first started following writing blogs I noticed that there were often circles of agented/published writers who all seemed to be friends or CPs: Kiersten White, Natalie Whipple, Stephanie Perkins; Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Maureen Johnson. Although I knew they would all have started from scratch just like me and my friends, it seemed like something foreign and perhaps outside what I expected would happen for myself, being a part of a successful group of writers like that. Like, in theory you could become the president, if you worked at it, but that’s something that happens for other people.

So it’s a little surreal to find it happening for me and my CPs now. I signed with an agent a couple weeks ago. My friend Maggie sold her book just before Christmas. My friend Charlee had the excitement of seeing a play she wrote performed. And now, the latest addition, which I’m super excited about:

My friend Heather Smith just signed a deal with Entranced Publishing for her YA novel Balancing Act! I read and critiqued this a little while ago for her, and it’s a great story, a contemporary romance about a girl who was training to be a competitive gymnast before breaking her ankle, who re-discovers her passion for the sport in the form of coaching. Heather was one of my earliest CPs, along with Charlee and Maggie, and – like Charlee and Maggie – writes wonderful stories. I’m so delighted she’ll get to share this one with the world! Congrats, Heather! :D

Emotional Tone

Something I think about a lot as I’m starting a new project is the emotional tone of the story. What do I want the reader to be feeling as they’re reading? (Besides a desire to keep turning the page, of course.) It can be a subtle thing, and is not always dictated by the subject matter. For instance, even though John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars is about two kids with cancer, it’s a relatively light, upbeat (if occasionally sad) book. Or the Harry Potter series, despite the lightness of some of the characters and concepts and language, gets somewhat dark toward the end.

Some day I’m going to challenge myself to write a cheery, upbeat book, maybe something like Ally Carter’s Heist Society stories. But I’m not there yet. My books all skew toward the darker, with some more so than others. I feel an emotional pull to these stories, much more than to lighter ones, like the anguish of the main character(s) has me hooked by the chest and is pulling me along the plot.

Despite this, it’s hard to get just right. I know (I feel) the feeling I want to achieve, but I have to really think about the sort of scenes that will create it, at the book’s two climaxes. These become my guideposts for navigating my pantser writing ship: the big, emotional scenes that set the tone for the whole story and drive my progress. If I don’t nail them, then the whole story feels off the mark.

After some time flirting with a new idea, I’ve switched back to working on WIP#1, working-titled Drago Mafioso, and that’s why: I’ve figured out the emotional tone of the story and the big climax scenes, even though there’s still quite a lot else I don’t know about the story. With WIP#2 (which I’ve tentatively titled Downstream of the Sun), I got the opening chapter down but don’t yet know the climax scenes or the emotional tone driving the story, which left me feeling a bit lost about where to go next.

The two books I read most recently were Ally Carter’s Uncommon Criminals and Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Princess – which had very different emotional tones. I find it interesting, and useful, to think about what the tones were and how the authors achieved it; it’s not always the big highs or lows, sometimes it’s the subtle things.

Friendship in YA

The other day I had a flash of realization about why my first WIP wasn’t feeling quite right. I wanted a kickass heroine in the novel, but the way I had the two main characters set up, a guy and a girl, the girl wasn’t very kickass. It was the guy who had the kickass abilities, and even though the girl had her own unique thing she didn’t feel very kickass. So I thought, well, what if I make that one a girl? But I didn’t really feel like the first character would work very well as a guy, the way I had the motivations and romance thread between them planned.

It took me a while to consider a third option: what if neither character was male? What if, instead of being romantic interests, they became friends? The sort of friends you’d go to the ends of the earth with, like Sam and Frodo; or you’d do the hard things for, like in Code Name Verity; or it would break your heart to lose, like BBC’s Sherlock and Watson. Love-at-first-sight I-would-do-anything-for-you friends. There’d be romantic subplots, but not between each other, and the friendship would be the focal relationship of the novel.

Would that fly in YA, I wonder? It seems like in YA, the main relationship development is always a romantic one. Aside from Code Name Verity, I’m having trouble thinking of another YA where the main characters are simply friends, with no romantic undertones. Harry Potter kinda has that with Hermione and Ron, though the series started out as MG where relationships are friendships, not romances. Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork trilogy has a really strong friendship between two of the main characters, but the focal relationship of the plot is really the romantic one(s). And… I’ve gone through my whole Goodreads list and can’t come up with another where it’s a friendship that’s front-and-center.

Thoughts? Do you think readers would root as passionately for a friendship as a romance? Can you think of any other examples of strong central friendships in YA?

Worldbuilding more

I’ve talked a bit about worldbuilding before. This has always been a weak area for me, especially during first drafts. I’ve always been able to get away with just forging ahead with the story because it’s set in some version of our own world where I know how things all work, even if some of the details of it are a little changed. The worldbuilding side of things didn’t interest me that much, getting all the nitpicky bits figured out. I wanted to tell the story, focus on the plot and characters, and the world was background noise. Sure, it was necessary, the narrative would be really quiet and flat without it, but it wasn’t the focus, it wasn’t vital to telling the story.

The WIP I’m currently focused on is a hard sci-fi, which is a bit of a departure for me. It’s set in a future post-space-colonization era, and opens on Jupiter’s moon Callisto. It couldn’t get a whole lot farther from my usual genre. It also couldn’t require much more worldbuilding, short of writing a high fantasy, which I also avoid because of all the worldbuilding involved.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t’ve even considered it… but lately I’ve been on a bit of a space kick, and it was the perfect setting for the character I wanted to write. This is often where my books start: I know the type of character I want as my protagonist, and I build the story – and the world – around her. Stars at Midnight ended up in a future post-plague world because it didn’t work to have an assassin’s guild in a modern city. This new one is in a future space setting because that’s how I think the new character will be most believable.

The downside is… I’ve spent just as much, and possibly more, time thinking about the world than I have actually writing anything. There is SO much to consider, and so much to research. On the one hand, it’s fascinating. I’ve learned a lot about the solar system, thought lots about the challenges facing a colony on a non-life-supporting planet, or how to power a ship through space. On the other hand… it’s a lot of work, and not where I want to be spending my time. I want to tell the story!

But I also try to minimize the amount of time I spend in revisions, because that’s not my favourite, either. So, knowing this is a weakness of mine, better to spend the time figuring it all out now than trying to go back and insert it or fix my errors later. Once the world’s in place, it can be full steam ahead.

And the winner is….

Oh my gosh, I have been ITCHING to share this news – and now I can! I have officially signed with an agent! I am so excited to announce I am now represented by the wonderful Rachael Dugas of Talcott Notch Literary Services! (And if all those exclamation points aren’t an indication of my level of enthusiasm, I don’t know what would be.)

Rachael actually found me by way of Cupid Literary Connection’s Blind Speed Dating Contest (remember my entry there for Stars at Midnight, back in February?) I got three requests on my entry, one of which was from Gina Panettieri of Talcott Notch. Gina really enjoyed my manuscript and passed it on to Rachael, who also loved it, and offered representation. After talking with Rachael on the phone I knew she was just what I was hoping to find in an agent. I think she’ll be a great partner for me and my stories!

The funny thing is: I would never have queried either Gina or Rachael just on my own. I wouldn’t’ve thought they’d be likely to be interested, just based on their bios on their website. Which just goes to show… well, two things. First, reading is so subjective, and it’s REALLY hard to sum up what appeals to you in a few sentences (and even then, you’ll still like stuff outside of it). It’s worth querying even people who seem to have only a loose interest in your genre. And two, contests work! I’m such a believer in query/pitch contests now. Unsurprisingly. :)

I’m going to close with some stats, because I always liked reading those when I was querying and reading announcements from newly-agented writers.

Manuscripts written, including Stars: 6
Manuscripts queried, including Stars: 3
Total queries sent for all MSs: 89
Total requests/queries: Magestone- 3/65; Secrets- 3/18; Stars- 4/6
Total contests entered: Secrets- 3; Stars- 2
Total requests from contests: Secrets- 3; Stars- 7

Scripts and opening night

Back in December one of my CPs, Charlee Vale, asked me to read a project she was working on. It was a script for a play, her graduate thesis. I’d never read a script before, and I’ve seen a few plays but not in quite a number of years now, but I’ve read plenty of stories and I’d loved Charlee’s novels that I’d read, so I agreed.

Let me tell you: reading a script is very different from reading a novel. For one thing, there isn’t any show. There’s barely any tell, even. There’s just the dialogue. All the showing, the movement and emotion, that’s all produced by the actors’ interpretations as they deliver the dialogue. It makes for an… interesting read. You have to change the way you think about the story, picture in your head the actors on the stage as you read their lines.

It was a beautiful story, as Charlee’s always are. She twines together two separate but related, mirroring narratives, about a couple in the distant (Greek) past whose souls have found each other again in the present, faced with a similar choice in both lives. I’m not sure I provided the strongest critique for it, given how unfamiliar the style was for me, but I hope it helped at least.

This past weekend Charlee’s play opened as a real live stage production. She posted it over at her blog, complete with photos. I would imagine this is the stage equivalent of your book’s release day, with all the excitement that accompanies it. So I just want to say, congrats, Charlee! It’s fantastic, and deserved. Hope you have many more!