Jandy
Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun blew
me away. She writes in high-definition. It’s more than highly developed characters
you care about. When Jandy Nelson writes
it’s in color, and almost everyone else is in black and white. Reading Nelson is like walking into Wonka’s
chocolate factory and it’s not just a mirage –you can walk into it and touch
everything and taste it. I tried tearing
apart what Jandy Nelson had done to achieve this, but it wasn’t until I read another
nameless new novel that I fully understood some of what Nelson is doing when
she writes. I finished the fifth chapter
of Nameless Novel breathless, about to start telling people I wished I had
written this book. The premise was out
of this world. But it is way too easy to
post-it pages that let me down. Though
each of these four post-it points deals with a slightly different writing craft
principle, I suspect they are all negative examples of what Jandy Nelson does
so well.
Stage It
I had
the distinct feeling that Nameless Author was using her characters to move the
reader through her own thoughts. Too
often scenes weren’t about characters in conflict over their desires. Instead, the author uses her characters as
puppets to walk us through her own line of thought. The result is the characters do not sound
like young people, nor do they sound distinct from each other. The dialogue reads as hokey and fake. I am so much more present in the author’s head
than I am in the novel’s scenes, scenes which could have been dripping mood and
tense with conflict.
Her
ability to stage characters’ essential discoveries through action is perhaps
Nelson’s greatest strength as a writer.
The most memorable occasion in I’ll
Give You the Sun occurs on page 308:
It’s time for second chances. It’s time to remake the world.
Knowing I only have one shot to get it right with
this tool, I wrap the cord around my shoulder, position the circular saw
between Noah’s shoulder and my own, and turn on the power. The tool roars to life. My whole body vibrates with electricity as I
split the rock in two.
So that NoahandJude becomes Noah and Jude.
Jude splits her sculpture
down the middle epitomizing her need to be a whole person separate from her
twin brother. She could have just said
this in a line of dialogue, but as an action the moment is heightened,
beautiful, and memorable.
Emotional Core
Nameless
Author often dangled potential scenes in front of me only to snatch them away
and avoid them entirely. Two main
characters discuss a move on of them has to make. No sooner does one of them reflect, in her
head, how hard this will be, than we skip ahead to the next scene, a scene in
which the significant move has already been made. The reader never gets to see the scene
happen. I felt so cheated. I wanted to see this experience in a
scene. As a reader, I want to head
directly into the characters’ messiest, most emotionally challenging, horrific
moments. I want to head into the moments
that deal directly with the emotional core of the story.
In
contrast, Nelson’s Noah has just been caught masturbating with Brian, caught by
his mom. “She doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen,” Noah
says narrating the opening of the next scene, and neither does Nelson. She lays down sentence after sentence heading
directly into the messiest of moments, the one Noah would most like to avoid,
and –oddly enough –one right at the emotional core of the novel. As Dianna enters Noah’s room to talk about
what happened, I wriggle in my chair squeamishly. I want to get out of this scene as much as
Noah does. But Nelson steers us right
through it, and her courage results in fabulously real moments like Noah’s
exclamation:
How does she know what I’m feeling? How does she know anything about
anything? She doesn’t. She can’t.
She can’t just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me
around.
And the scene ends with
Dianna’s theme-cracking statement to Noah:
“Listen to
me. It takes a lot of courage to be true
to yourself, true to you heart. You
always have been very brave that way and I pray you always will be. It’s your responsibility, Noah. Remember that.”
And, yes, that cuts right to
the core of Noah’s conflict with his mom and, more importantly, himself.
Character Development & Stakes
Namelss
Novel’s protagonist loses her closest friend to a decision she, herself, will
soon have to face. Nameless Novel’s
protagonist witnesses the loss, she sees it happen, and it is final. This should be a climactic scene in the book. The protagonist, already dealing with
traumatic loss, stands to lose the first person she’s trusted to be a real
friend. But the scene leaves me
cold. Why? The lost friend is severely
underdeveloped. She doesn’t feel
distinct from the protagonist as a person.
She doesn’t even speak differently.
She is characterized differently in terms of interest, background, and
even race, but on the level of the soul, her approach to life has never been
given definition. So, I never come to
care about her. Beyond that, close
friends each contribute something to the relationship the other needs; if I’d
known what the protagonist lost with her friend, I would have felt the loss as
it happened.
Jandy
Nelson has me caring from page one:
This is how
it all begins.
With Zephyr
and Fry –reigning neighborhood sociopaths –torpedoing after me and the whole
forest floor shaking under my feet as I blast through air, tree, this white-hot
panic.
In these two sentences I
come to know about care about Noah.
Because he is running from bullies, I feel immediate sympathy for
him. I smile at his voice, at his
hyperbolic way of thinking, at his energetic, racing syntax. I also admire my first glimpse of Noah’s
vivid way of viewing the world. If
Nelson can do this in two sentences, imagine how much I, the reader, care about
Noah by page 145 when Jude describes Noah’s new, non-painting personality as
“death of the spirit”. I literally
gasped. I felt the loss, because I’d
been given a chance to feel what Jude was losing. I lost Noah with her.
The Readers’ Job
In
one of the final scene of Nameless Novel, one character basically explains the
meaning of the entire book, over the course of eight pages. No fair.
A book is supposed to be an interaction between the reader and the text. It’s the author’s job to put a story out
there. It’s the readers job to react to
it. No fair kicking the reader out and
taking over that role. A significant thematic
line or two placed appropriately? Okay.
But eight pages. It kicks me
right out of the story because I have no more thinking to do. And, frankly, it feels disingenuous because
in reality nobody shows up to explain the meaning of life.
To
be fair, even Nelson dallies with the temptation to moralize at the end of I’ll Give You the Sun, but at least her
thematic lines are tied to in-scene action.
It’s a little much when Jude rambles on about how maybe we are
accumulating new selves all the time, but this is so incredibly overshadowed by
action-action-action at all the climactic moments. Jude saws the NoahandJude statue in
half. Oscar tackles Noah. Guillermo realizes Dianna is Jude’s mother –not
because someone tells him – but because he sees
the studies for her statue. This is a
novel of secrets revealed, but they are never just disclosed from one character
to another, they are revealed through action every time.
I
hoped by exploring the contrast between these writers’ approaches I would be
able to arrive at some general principle of novel writing that embodies all
four of these writing musts:
•
Staging characters’ essential discoveries through action achieves the integrity
at the core of why we write in the first place.
•
Heading directly into the messiest moments at the emotional core of the
material results in radically true, reader-changing moments.
•
Slowing down and spending the time to develop characters who need each other
raises the stakes, heightening the moments when we lose them.
•
If you do these things, there won’t be any need for you to explain your book’s
meaning in the final chapters because your readers will have lived it.
I think all of this can be
summarize by some of the most powerful words a writing teacher ever shared with
me. Editor Patti Lee Gauch often says,
“Go far enough.” I’ll Give You the Sun is a prime example of a writer going far
enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment