End-of-the-World Love

            To teens, love feels real, complex, and unbelievably urgent.  I think Lev Grossman puts it best in a March 2012 Time Magazine article entitled Love Among the Ruins:

There’s an unshakeable conviction within every adolescent –including the adolescent who lurks inside every adult – that love, your particular love, is more important than anything else.  Grown-ups, tired and jaded and mind-controlled beings that they are, will try to tell you otherwise, that it’s not the end of the world, but don’t trust them.  They’re just jealous.  They only wish they could still remember what the end of the world felt like.

Hormones, though often referred to by adults in a patronizing way, put teenagers in touch with a heightened physical experience many adults covet.

So how are these YA authors doing it?  In The Fire in Fiction, Donald Maass suggests some approaches to writing sex, which certainly apply to YA, but I think his suggestions can be applied as easily to unconsummated love and attraction.  Maass says authors should avoid the obvious emotions of longing, desire, and lust.  Instead, he suggests looking for oblique details and secondary emotions that can make attraction, and even sex, refreshing and new on the page.  And doesn’t it make sense that this is how such scenes should read for young adults experiencing these feelings for the first time?

By these standards, Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, at bare minimum, crosses into the realm of YA.  For Oscar, love becomes an issue of life and death on many levels.  (Spoiler ahead!)  Diaz gives us a quintessential example of focus on oblique details and secondary emotions:

…but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of sex –it was the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck.

But I think Maass’ advice works just as well for hand-holding, as in L’Engle’s Camilla:

Now I was terribly conscious in each finger, in my palm, in every bit of the skin of my hand, of the contact between us.  I could feel it somehow not just in my hand but all over me.  It was such a big feeling, such a strange one, that we walked for quite a while and I hardly heard anything that Frank was saying because the feel of his hand seemed to fill my ears too.

So end-of-the-world love ranks high on my list of YA descriptors.  Some of my favorite young adult love stories include:

If I Stay and Where She Went by Gayle Forman

Camilla by Madeleine L’Engle

The Last Summer (of You and Me) by Ann Brashares

Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor

What are some of your favorite YA love stories?  How do the authors create the intensity of first love on the page?

Causality & Chapters

             So that was nice, using the mobile metaphor to take one thing at a time in my first chapter.  It really worked, but sometimes all my over-analysis of how a story’s working can rein things in so tightly the story doesn’t get a chance to run.  So I have to swing back and forth from one metaphor to another depending on what my story needs.  Mapping mobiles and covering my dining room table with color-coded indexes cards helped me get a handle on things.

            However, I’m feeling uncomfortable about the way I ended up dividing my story into chapters.  I ended up with ten, long chapters that group elements of my story thematically –Emergency, Boundaries, Mothers, etc.  For a while that was working for me; it helped me see how theme was holding the story together.  But readers confirmed my nagging fear that these hulking chapters are not agile enough.  They are beautiful and they make an aesthetic mobile, and for a while they really helped me, but when it comes down to it I need to loosen the reins and let the forward motion of the story carry it forward. 

What I’m getting at is what makes a story a story is that is moves forward.  Each thing that happens causes the next thing, or it should.  Even if I build a beautiful mobile, at some point, I have to hang it up and let the wind blow through it.

            I remember one of my best writing teachers saying, a poem is not an essay.  And as prettily as I can structure a story, it is not a poem.  A story has to move forward.  As E. M. Forster memorably put it: if we write, “The king died, and the queen died,” we have a narrative, but if we write instead, “The king died and the queen died of grief,” then we have a plot.

            Right now, I’m reading Laini Taylor’s new book, Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  I am literally propelled through the story.  Her chapters are fairly short, they’re lean and nimble, each chapter causes the next one.  And though Laini titles each with a meaningful phrase from that chapter, she merely numbers the chapters and lets the story go as it must.  She has 60 chapters.  Sixty!  How freeing!  (She also groups her chapters into three or four large sections, the way you would group scenes in a play into the major acts.  She does this by slipping in a page with a changing refrain to introduce each act.)  But by and large, she lets each scene emerge from the one before, and I turn the pages like I’m slapping the story-horse I’m riding to go, go, go as fast as it can!

            So I am inspired to loosen my reins on this next draft.  Now that I understand the structure of my story (thanks to mobiles), I’m going to try something different.  Instead of guiding my horse through a tightly designed equestrian jumping course, I’m going to loosen the reins and just let the story run, run, run.  One short chapter causing the next.  Yee-hah!

            Are you still struggling with chapter division and its effect on the story?  I’d love to here what you’re trying!