On Sunday I bought a bag of something called “freeze-dried coconut water.” Let that logic sink in for a minute.

I haven’t actually tried it yet, but I have read the package, and it seems to be the result of taking actual, watery coconut water and sucking away the water part until all that’s left is the essence of coconuttiness. A stupid, Whole Foodsy product—the kind of thing that my dad will be really mad that I used his credit card to pay for—but surely not the first time the siren song of convenience has melted the earwax of a spendthrift. People make complicated decisions, I contain multitudes, etc., etc.

But enough about me and my luxury food purchases. Let’s talk about characters.

I am, as of approximately Monday, a reformed reticent about character-creation exercises. I hatehatehate those character charts that demand you spit out everything from name to height and weight to favorite food and dream vacation spot. Filling those out elicits a creative joy somewhere between medical paperwork and a coloring book. It’s busywork! Unless she’s playing MASH on the school bus, no character is ever going to be called upon to recite a litany of her quirks and preferences. And if she does, you, the author, should really re-examine your strategy for crafting dialogue.

What I DID used to believe in is a mystical, unknowable mental alchemy of holistic character formation, a theory that now sounds even more ridiculous with a name like “holistic character creation.” Fortunately, my fledgling publishing career has not only taught me volumes of practical skills, but has also done some good descaling of my bright little eyes. That is to say: books—and all the multitudes they contain—are made, not begotten. Characters are devised, or built, or hewn with rough and angry chops, not granted fully-formed from on high. (I don’t think authors who talk about “discovering” their characters are wrong, per se, but I suspect it’s just their subconscious blushing and waving off admirers with an “oh my, you’re too kind.”)

This should be a relief! It was to me. Lately I feel like I’ve done enough bashing my head on a desk in frustration to make my skull crack open like an eggshell, and yet: no Athena. So now I’ve got a patchwork, slapdash, stopgap, bric-a-brac way of building my characters into real, imaginary people…with some prefab ingredients. It’s the literary equivalent of “cheater” recipes that rely heavily on canned biscuit dough and premixed taco spices, only a little more nutritious. Look:

Myers-Briggs types. Look them up—the theory is complicated and based on Jung but apparently sufficiently rigorous to get the stamp of approval from my old therapist, and I think she went to school for Understanding People. You answer some questions and get assigned a type (I am, personally, an INFP: Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving).

The method: figure out your character’s type, either by taking the test for/as them, or by looking at the profiles and guessing which one fits. Boom: instant list of virtues and flaws that work together as a sensical, cohesive whole.Work them into your external conflict and your story is just humming along, isn’t it? As it happens, the character I’ve been struggling to understand is my polar opposite: Extroverted Sensing Thinking Judging. It all makes sense! The more you know™!

The Sims. I’m sorry, shut up, whatever. We all play it, and we all know that after you go through the makeover-montage blitz of dressing up your Sims, the only interesting part of this game is what goes on in your head. You invent personalities! You get emotionally invested! You tell stories, admit it! Ain’t nothing in the rules that says a writer can’t make digital versions of their characters and watch them scurry around a virtual ant farm for a while.

Other people’s friends. Oh God, this method made me laugh so hard I’m not sure it even counts as a writing exercise. And it could happen to you!

Pick a friend of yours that didn’t go to the same high school as you and ask them to describe as many of their classmates as possible—not their friends, or anyone they knew that well, but what amounts to the secondary characters in their personal narrative. They’ll give you fun-sized mini-stories, one or two sentences that amounted to these strangers’ epithets during their formative young adulthood. What about the kid with the unfortunate nickname? What about the kid who interrogated everyone IN SONG about his missing pudding cup in 7th grade? What about the girl who let guys service her in the parking lot of Panera? What about the kid who was not only caught masturbating in class but was also—and I am not making this up—named JAMES EARL JONES?!

You’re bound to get a grab bag of high drama and utter mundanity, but that’s exactly what real high school is. And once you’ve stopped hiccuping with giggles, steal. Line up your cast of characters and dole out these ripped-from-the-yearbook quirks as you see fit.

Questionnaire. If you’re going to do an actual Q&A for your character, I think it should be the one from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

What is your name?
What is your quest?
What is your favorite color?
What’s the land-speed velocity of an unladen African swallow?

 

These four questions actually cover most of what a person is about.

What they’re called (duh)
What they’re all about
Something about their taste or personal aesthetic
How they react when thrown into situations they don’t immediately understand—someone asking them an absurd question, say.

So…these are my character-mettle-testing supplies. They might not be the most efficient or sensical or “normal” ways of understanding the fake people you’re trying to make real people care about, but It Worked For Me! Delicious, piecemeal, semi-homemade characters, or my name isn’t Sandra Lee.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some coconut water to rehydrate.

When I saw a video entitled “Phonetic description of annoying sounds teenagers make,” I was like YES! And then I was like, NO! And then I was like, “breathy voice long low back unrounded vowel with advanced tongue root.”

Because while I love a rigorous breakdown of adolescent speech patterns as much as the next linguistics-obsessed young adult writer, this video kind of encapsulates a writing problem I’ve been having lately: I’ve forgotten how to sound like a teenager.

MUSICBAND totally sold out after their first album, dude.

Well, not totally. At the wizened age of 23, I’ve just just passed the pivot point of language shift from “hip young thing of today” to “old,” and so I can still trade fluently in the slang and speech patterns that define millenials or Gen-Y or whoever. I know enough not to say things like “I wrote a blog” or to put a definite article before the names of websites. The expressions are easy, but they’re not the problem. It’s the expressed.

One of the reasons I love reading (and writing) YA fiction is because teenage feelings are, to borrow an appropriate phrasing, some intense shit. Besides the inner turmoil engendered by ungodly amounts of hormones coursing through your body, you’ve got a new external experience practically every day, whether it’s driving or taking the SATs or making out with someone you really really want to (or don’t want to, for that matter). And while fiction is, by definition, fictive, that doesn’t preclude it from telling the truth, and I think YA fiction operates with a singular understanding between the reader and the writer to translate the specific details of one character’s ups and downs to the larger, universal curves of the teenage human experience.

Getting the feelings right is crucial, in other words. And when your point of origin is no longer the chemical cocktail of adolescence but a conscious recipe of one part imagination and one part memory, inspiring that same buzz of immediacy and intensity is tricky business. But besides the rusty archives of your own recollection, where can you find teenage truth?

Du-uh. The internet.

I’m not saying you need to go out and #followateen-stalk actual, individual teenagers. That would be weird. But you also shouldn’t go out and read think-piece essays about Those Kids Today, because that is looking at teenagers with all the subtlety and understanding of that song from Bye Bye Birdie. Don’t have a cow, man!

Here’s my curated list of true teenage stories. These kids aren’t always going to be neat, or dynamic, or well-edited or -rounded or -spelled, or even interesting, at times. But then again, none of us was. The stories are still valid.

• Rookie, the only teenage magazine that speaks to actual teenagers instead of the glossed-up automatons Seventeen seems to think exist out there
  
• Teenage Diaries Revisited, for the NPR treatment of adolescence with the benefit of hindsight
  
• Hanging Rock Comics, because Taylor-Ruth draws and collages a lot of things I wish I had been cool enough to understand as a teenager
  
• Only the Young, a documentary about kids in California I saw in Montreal and found so charming I bought and watched again twice
  
• This American Life episodes, forever: Prom, Harper High School Part 1 & Part 2, High Speed Chase, Crush (Prologue), I Enjoy Being A Girl (Prologue)
• Or, if you’re of my generation and you’re brave, trawl through the archives of your own personal LiveJournal or Xanga.

Are you wincing? Are you feeling it? Are you optimistic and cynical all at the same time? Good—or as the kids would say, “voiceless velar affricate”—that’s the place you want to write from. And if I missed anything good, hook a girl up and let me know.

This post is about plot. But also grammar. The grammar of plots.

Stay with me!

Here is a lovely picture of Grammatica personified from the Hortus Deliciarum, a 12th century manuscript by the Abbess Herrad of Alsace, to endear the concept to you

So, I’m teaching my mother Latin. It’s an ambitious undertaking, sure, but she’s an eager student. And I’ve always believed that nothing deepens your own understanding of something like trying to explain it to someone else who has no idea what you’re talking about. Also, she gave me life, so the least I can impart in return is the best thing I’ve ever learned in that life.

Learning Latin requires swallowing a lot of abstract concepts. Like, for example, predicates. From the Latin praedico, meaning “I proclaim.” I know what a predicate is, but I cannot sum it up simply and succinctly for love or money (though my mother only pays me in the former). Regardless, here goes: In broadest terms, predication is all about relationship between the subject of a sentence and…the rest of the sentence (I’m sorry, I’m sorry; think Mad Libs-y thoughts.) And thinking about predication made me realize that it’s a beautiful way to think about the plots of stories.

Look, I get it: you do not like grammar. It is not only unsexy but also inflexible, and you need to bend things. You think sentence structure is boring and technical and you think that narrative structure, that glorious tapestry of self-expression, is the seat of the soul of writing. Rules are the opposite of creativity. Right?

To use a technical term: ish. Comprehension of grammar is not about learning to diagram sentences. It’s not about whinging when someone misuses an apostrophe. It’s about cultivating the purest, most efficient fluency of thought. So if you want to call yourself a writer, you’d damn well better get grammar. Got it?

So. A sentence is a microcosm of the narrative it builds. Understand the sentence and there is nothing more to know. Heaven may not dwell in wildflowers, William, but when a grain of sand is grammatical there is indeed a world within. It’s a beautiful specimen, and I want to slice it up on slides and peer down for a second at these predicate things.

The way a sentence’s string of words generates a gravitational pull towards sense is a perfect analogy for the way sentences eventually coalesce into a sensical, emotionally authentic story. A sentence makes grammatical sense when and only when it expresses a logical relationship between its subject and verb (plus whatever prepositional phrases or adverbs help set the scene). Once you’ve got your subject, the rest is predicate—the action! the drama! the good part! A subject tells you what is, a predicate tells you what happens.

A story’s the same way. The climax of your story will only compute well if it plays upon what was set up in the very beginning. If your plot hinges on a betrayal, the effectiveness of that betrayal is predicated on an establishment of trust in the beginning of the story. A story about redemption is predicated on an appreciation for the depth of the mistake. To be effective, the end of your story must take its singular significance and resonance from the circumstances of its beginning.

Maybe this is obvious. But I like that there’s a common back-and-forth between the place of story and the place of grammar. Bringing across, trans latio. And this is why I’m bothering to teach my mom. Translation is not about how different two languages are, like Latin and English; it’s about how similar two concepts can be, like predication and storytelling. And while I’m generally agnostic about theories of everything, I do think this: humans are nothing without stories, stories are nothing without language, and language is nothing without grammar.

Or, in other words, know grammar and know your soul. Sic transit gloria fabulae. Translate everything, because everything will translate.

Verbs, like people, have moods. You know this intuitively even if you didn’t know it had a name: the difference between I write, I might write, and to write lies in the mood.

This somewhat non-sequitur of an image relates writing to building, because Christine de Pizan GETS IT

And when you write, you exist in the indicative mood. Creative doings are untempered action, after all: you draft and you plan and you put words on paper and you revise and you proofread. And then, you submit. And everything goes subjunctive.

For those of you whose hobbies are gerunds like “bicycling” and not abstract nouns like “grammar,” a quick refresher. Wikipedia, that Official Transcription of the Collective Unconscious, says that “subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred.”

Various states of unreality. Also known as the stretch of days between when you abandon your wonky little bundle of words on a doorstep and when you hear that someone’s adopted it. Or the time it takes for your void-shouting to echo. Or the haze of wishes and hopes that clogs up your ability to make declarative sentences. You say things like this:

Someone might like this.
If only my book were less weird!
Please let other people think this is readable.
I wish/hope/pray that this doesn’t suck.
This shouldn’t be so hard.

All subjunctive. All moody.

“It might have been” may be the saddest words of tongue or pen, but trim the phrase to its present tense and you have the most flirtatious: “It might.”

The subjunctive is wonderfully seductive like that. It’s the most human aspect of the most human form of word. What separates us from the animals if not “wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred”? What else is story if not a manifestation of those things? And where else do writers like to while away time if not in “various states of unreality”?

I think there’s a reason this aspect of action words shares its name with a synonym for emotion: verbal mood is mercurial, hard to grasp and harder to explain. (Even now, you are probably still scratching your head and wondering if this will be useful for Mad-Libs. It won’t, and I’m sorry for being stupidly obtuse.) Writers, being the agent nouns that they are, gotta write. It’s the only cure for what ails us—getting back to the indicative I write I tell I create—but how are we to make the transition? Thinking of ourselves in the future-tense-indicative might seem like the just the thing to rekindle the blaze in our bellies—I will write, I will succeed—but there’s a hollow, New Year’s resolution sound to those phrases. No, the necessary, block-breaking paradigm shift is of a much more imperative mood.

Literally. Get out your exclamation marks, get rid of your moodiness, and get ready.

Sit down! Type letters! Make words! String sentences! Print pages, scribble on scraps, keep creating! Do not stop! Do not despair! Do not dwell in possibility! Do not gentle go into that good night! Make your mark! Plumb depths! Exhaust everything! Revise! Wrestle! Struggle! Go, go, go!

SURGITE: the motto of Brock University, a school I have never heard of before now, means PUSH ON in Latin. Do it.

The last book I wrote took shape behind a very un-peek-behindable curtain, for reasons of personal sanity and also laziness. But the more I’ve begun to hang out with writers, the more I want to talk about writing (and also write, duh). And even though many, many others have written longer and better about how to write, my dear friend (and totally accomplished writer) Simi asked me the other day for tips on, you know, actually starting a novel. In response, I wrote her a novel’s worth of information, and now I’ve adapted it to share with you.

And! I’m starting my next book, so I’ll have lots of bare-laying to do in the coming weeks. We’ll see this thing through together, you and I. Sharing is good for you!

So: write a novel. What’s the worst that could happen?

No, I’m serious. I need to know—you need to know—in the universe of your fiction, what is the worst thing that could happen.

Got an answer? You’ve got a story.

Continue reading →

(Optional soundtrack for this post may be found here or here).

I’ve been 23 years old for almost half a year now, and I think Blink-182 was on to something.

On one side of it, 23 is a lot of years: I have a college degree, a job with a paycheck, and more than one nice pair of pants. I pay taxes*, I make budgets, and I can drive three and a half hours to a writers’ retreat all by my lonesome. I have come far enough in life that there exists a place where I used to be, and find myself giving advice to people (plural!) whose present situation is my past.

Most critically, though, I write books. Have written, am writing, whatever—I have picked a career and God-damned if I’m not in it for the long haul.

But on the other side, 23 is so little. I sleep in my childhood bedroom. I don’t pay the heating bill. I can’t rent a car. I get called “young lady” by my so-called peers in the business of book-writing as they dispense advice in a patronizingly royal we: “We can’t give up! We all have to keep writing!”

Lady, I know. I’ve kept writing since I was 16. You want trunked manuscripts? I’ve got six. I might have been born yesterday but that doesn’t make me stupid. It doesn’t make me some kind of wunderkind, either; I’m not trying to posit myself as an under-appreciated prodigy here. I don’t want to whine. I just want to work.

Back in the days (daze?) of employment-hunting, my mantra was this: if the worst thing they can say about you is that you’re too young for the job, then the best is yet to come. Time heals all ills, and no more so than when you’re afflicted with youth.

My point (or my hope, or my belief) is this: age should be neutral. Your work and the quality thereof is the only thing that counts and the only thing you should count on.

Last night, my mother and I were commiserating over our respective places in time. “You’re closer to the beginning of your life, and I’m closer to the end,” she said, one of those double-edged statement that cut at each of us in opposite ways. I said what I thought without thinking about it and spit out one of those dumb-but-true truths:

“We’ve both got tomorrow. That’s all you need.”

*or, okay, I will have paid taxes as of tonight. This is why god invented e-filing.

Think back to any “E! True Hollywood Story” you’ve ever seen (because I know you’ve seen them). You know how there’s always that grainy, talent-show clip of a six-year-old Christina Aguilera belting out a song onstage at her elementary school, and then a quick cut to a talking head of a parent or friend who’s all, “we knew from the very beginning she would be a singer”? I think these moments happen for those of us less glamorously gifted, too.

Mine would be when, at age seven-ish, I was flicking through the manuscript for a book my mom was working on illustrating about princesses having a slumber party. After hearing a story of fantastic beasts evidently too scary for sheltered royal progeny, one of the princesses was said to gasp thusly: “What DRAGON?”

Cue me: “Shouldn’t it be ‘WHAT dragon?'”

An editor is born!

This humble-bragging anecdote is just a lengthy, lede-burying lead-in to the fact that I’ve just (well, a month ago) completed editing My Novel. Since that first incidence of precocious pedantry, I’ve gone on to edit plenty of things–the high school lit mag, endless cover letters, a handful of news articles, and even manuscripts–but never anything so long and so very my own.

If you’ll recall from this fall’s FAQ, I absconded to Canada with the a project of writing a book, which I did. I had a schedule, which was to write 2,800 words a day, and I mostly succeeded, because I had nothing else to do and I was determined to see this thing through. It hit 78,000 words, I hit the end, and then I started another one, because I still had a month and a half left in my new lease on life and also on sublet apartment. I left the book alone, like you’re supposed to, and waited.

I don’t (or don’t here, anyway) talk about my fiction writing much, because…it’s scary! I don’t know. For some reason I’m the proverbial open book about my Real World, whether I’m sobbing in nice restaurants or weathering a long-distance relationship or thinking about the future where my parents are dead and I don’t know how to get my car repaired. But when it comes to letting people in on my Fake World, the one that I built in my head out of gumpaste and papier-mâché and dreams in Old French, I seal off.

For the creative process, the generative part, I think this is a good thing–no matter how crazymaking the lonely days of French-Canadian composition were at the time. But for editing, and especially after editing, you’ve got to start letting other people in.

So I emailed copies to trusted friends, printed the damn thing out, and slapped it in a plastic binder, ready for the evisceratory rage of the red pen. And you know what? Weren’t so bad. Were, actually, kind of fun. Kind of a relief to see that hey, the book is Not Terrible. Kind of reassuring to see that, with the benefit of a break, my future-self could pick up and refine the threads and themes and know what and when to slash. Kind of thrilling, too, to think that “WHAT dragon?” was a question more rhetorical than I realized at the time–a calling to my calling.

The book is 81,000 words long. It is funny and it is sad and it is Pretty Good, if I do say so myself. It is being looked at by experts, really, and it is in God’s hands, figuratively. It is finished in the sense of done and finished in the sense of slicked over with metaphorical polish, but either way, I’m the one who finished it.

Edited to add: My sainted mother managed to track down the page in question. Behold: