New Year, New Mountain Range

         Well, the new year finds me at the precipice of a whole new phase in my writing.  In 2011, I published my first story and completed the second draft of “the YA novel I think is going to make it.”  But as I wrapped my holiday gifts, visited with family, and indulged in gingerbread, my sense of accomplishment morphed into a an unsettling realization.

From the top of the mountain on which I now stand, I can see the undulating topography of an entire mountain range before me.  I’ve never gotten so far with my writing before, but it is dawning on me there is a whole other level of climbing and journeying.  My manuscript is good, but is it Sara Zarr-good, Laurie Halse Anderson-good?  John Green-good?  How to get there?

         At an SCBWI conference, I once heard Sheldon Fogelman, leveling the side of his hand against his other open palm, say “In order to proceed, you have to have a plan!”  It’s always worked for me before, kept me from wandering aimlessly, and kept me growing as a writer.

         So here is my, albeit flexible, plan so far:

January & February

         Finalize pitch.   

              How does revised pitch inform revision goals?

         Draft Query Letter

         Crystalize business card design

         Study amazing Sara Zarr novel, How to Save a Life for

                  evolution of characters’ thought arcs across story

                  pacing

                  not overwriting

                  beginnings

         Write two short stories

         Continue compiling a list of fifty agents 

              & research to hone list

         Look for the right workshop for manuscript

        

March – BIG MEETING with writing group: feedback on manuscript

         Organize feedback into Draft 3 & 4 goals

         Write 1, 2, and 5 page synopses

         Write Chapter Outline

April & May

         Draft 3

June & July

         Draft 4

September

         Start sending queries to agents!

         What do you think?  Any advice for the writer who doesn’t just want to be published, but wants to be GOOD?  Have you ever gotten to a new phase in your writing where you think, What am I going to do now?  It seems like an easy place to give up.  How did you go forward?  What are your writing goals for 2012?

Writing Cross-Culturally

            In my last post I mentioned my material always circles back around to themes of adoption.  They say having kids will teach you a lot about yourself.  Adopting our daughter from China, definitely brought my interest in adoption into focus.  As a result, many adoptees show up in my writing. 

As an adoptive mother, I am eternally thankful to the scores of talented authors and illustrators who have explored adoption issues in pictures books.  These treasures have been a meaningful way for my daughter and I to open discussion and make sense of her own story.  Naturally curious, I have explored ahead and found not nearly as many middle grade or young adult novels deal with adoption at the forefront of the story.  There are a number of excellent titles which feature an adoptee as a minor character, but far fewer which host a protagonist struggling with the identity and cultural issues I foresee in my daughter’s future.  Perhaps this is why my own short stories and novels feature protagonists whose central conflicts involve grappling with missing pasts, blending cultural identities, and facing issues of race.

That brings me to the writing question of this post.  Here I am, a thirty-something adoptive mom writing, often in the first person, from the perspective of Asian American teenagers who at some point in their pasts were adopted from China.  These girls’ lives are a far cry from my own past –a white girl who grew up on Long Island and spent the better part of her life in the well-off suburbs of the Midwest.  This is writing cross-culturally. 

Do I even have the right to attempt to tell these girls’ stories?  Perhaps these stories are better told by Asian American authors.  We certainly have many gifted young adult authors who are also Asian American.  I have even had colleagues warn –your writing may not be publishable, and editor may not find you credible to write these stories.  Maybe we should we wait for this generation of Asian American adoptees to write their own stories? 

But, I wonder, what will they read in the meantime?  Does ethnicity alone qualify an Asian American author, born in the US and raised by Asian parents, to understand the special issues associated with adoption and multi-cultural families?  Perhaps, being an adoptive mother, literally functioning as the bridge between my daughter’s two worlds, do I have a special insight into an international adoptee’s struggles?  Does that earn me a pass to write contemporary Asian American protagonists?

What do you think about writing cross-culturally?  I’d love to hear you weigh in on this issue!

Additionally, if you’ve read any young adult literature featuring protagonists dealing with adoption issues as the central conflict, please, by all means, pass on the titles!

What is Your Material?

In her book, Making a Literary Life, Carolyn See dedicates an entire chapter to the question What is Your Material?  She asks us to “Notice the stuff that interests you!”  I think the concept of our writing material has a worthy place in a blog on writing craft.  It’s important that we become familiar with our personal material, that we explore why it’s important to us, and that we learn how to compost it.   This concept of composting is Natalie Goldberg’s:

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil.  Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.  But this does not come all at once.  It takes time.  Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall though the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

Once when I was just taking up writing seriously, my architect brother asked me, “What are you going to contribute to the field?”  The question stymied me, but years later, after becoming more familiar with my material, the question seems much more appealing. 

            I’ve found my material returns again and again to the theme of adoption.  Without a doubt, I’ve been forever altered by the experience of being an adoptive mother.  But beyond that, raising my daughter has awoken me to the ways in which adoption themes run through my own life, despite the fact that my husband and I are the first to ever adopt in our family.  This quotation from Karin Evans’ The Lost Daughters of China embodies how my material is so precious to me:

“As a writer I have immersed myself in other subjects, but have always returned to the adoption theme.  Whether in fantasy or reality, it haunts us all, adopted and non-adopted alike.  It is a metaphor for the human condition, sending us forth on that mythic quest that will prove we are bonded to each other and to all creatures of this world –and in the process, reveal to us who we are.”

--Betty Jean Lifton Lost & Found: The Adoption Experience (NY: Harper & Row, 1988)

Indeed, I have found that whether or not actual adoption finds its way into my characters live, they often end up, in some sense, adopting each other.

            And sometimes our writing material, by virtue of its nature, makes special demands of us.  In my post next Monday, I want to look into the special challenges my material has raised for me –in particular, writing cross-culturally.  In the meantime, I’d love to know what you’ve discovered about your material.  How do you stay in touch with it?  How do you fuel your compost pile?

Chapterness Conclusion

            Studying chapterness in Wintergirls, freed me to see how each of my chapters could grow organically.  To assume there is a formula for chapter structure would be a misinterpretation of this little study.  There are all kinds of chapters: short one-scene chapters, chapters that start with some exposition and build into a scene and then another scene, chapters that frame a flashback in a present scene to forward the character’s journey.  The possibilities are endless.   

            At least now, I have some tools with which to prod my chapters to see if they’re actually functioning as chapters: 

       1) Is my character moving forward inside and out?  

       2) Does my character face choices, and do I take him far enough?  

       3) Does a complication cause a rise in tension that lands the character in a new place?   

       4) Do the smaller arcs clump to form a larger one?   

These questions helped me shift around the note cards on which I'd outlined my novel, as well as, add some cards that were missing.  I’m sure I’ll re-see my chapters as I write through my second draft.  I just feel glad to not be falling back on mere intuition about where the chapters should begin and end.  It helps to have a thoughtful understanding of some actual mechanics of chapters.
            Special thanks to one of my personal YA goddesses, Laurie Halse Anderson, for writing such an artful book.

            What are your thoughts on chapterness?  How do you structure your chapters?  What kind of chapters do you like to read the most?  When you read, do you hold onto each chapter conceptually in your memory or do you sort of get lost in them?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on chapters too.  Thoughtful artistry means exchanging ideas and refining the way we see our art.

Chapters: Arcs Clumping Together

            In the case of Wintergirls Chapter 11, one arc made a complete chapter, but arcs more often than not clump together to form chapters.  In Chapter 35 of Wintergirls, after attending Cassie’s funeral, Lia arrives at her mother, Chloe’s, house to spend the night.   

            Arc 1: Lia pulls into the driveway observing the cars for the wake parked across the street, and she observes her mother pull up next to her seemingly upset.  Lia searches the house for her mother who’s gone in first and finds her crying in the shower.  This arc establishes a rich ambiguity for the chapter: Chloe could be crying over Cassie’s death, over the danger Lia is in, or over a patient who’s died.   

            Arc 2: Lia cooks a meal for Chloe, asks about Cassie’s autopsy, and when Chloe takes a call from the hospital zones out remembering how the negative voices of this house got in her head.   

            Arc 3: Lia takes her mother’s deal –Lia will eat, and Chloe will tell Lia about Cassie’s autopsy.  

            Each arc has its own rise and landing in a new place.  But they also function together to depict how this daughter and mother get what they need out of each other.  The chapter also continues the through-line of the novel –Lia’s battle with Cassie; she has to know what happened to Cassie and whether she will follow her down the same road or defeat her.

Chapters: Arcs and Complications

            So I get that a chapter has to move the character forward, and I get that choices and going far enough are ways to do that.  But when are my chapters supposed to end?  I mean, how far forward do you let the character move before making a break between one chapter and the next?  The answer seems to be explained by arcs.

            I feel like I get arcs.  I drew a bunch of little arcs to help me understand the chapters I studied, but explaining the specific arcs of each chapter in words was harder. These concepts helped:

• An arc is a small beginning-middle-end in a story.

• Tension rises in the middle.

• The character lands in a new place.

• That rise in the middle is caused by a complication. 

Chapter 11 of Wintergirls, a short, two-page chapter demonstrates how an arc can work.   

Beginning: Lia is in bed, unable to sleep, sure Cassie’s ghost is right outside her door; she even spins herself an imaginary cocoon for protection.   

Then middle: the fragrance of ginger, cloves, and burnt sugar which Lia’s come to identify with Cassie infiltrates the room, and Cassie appears addressing Lia in ghost form for the first time.  “Come with me,” she says to Lia.   

Finally end: Lia spends the rest of the night locked in Cassie’s gaze.   

The complication:  Cassie not only appears, but makes her demand propelling things forward.

Chapters: Choices and Going Far Enough

            Wintergirls Chapter 9 is an excellent example of how Anderson gives Lia choices and takes things far enough emotionally.  Lia arrives home having made it through the day in which she learned her friend, Cassie, died alone in a motel room after leaving Lia thirty-three unanswered messages.   
            Anderson gives Lia choices: she eats a rice cake instead of Thanksgiving leftovers; she turns down sister Emma’s invite to kick the soccer ball around in favor of retreating to her room and digging out a pill to help her cope; and when her dad comes in at the end of the night to suggest they talk, Lia pretends she’s asleep.  With each choice we see her retreat further from her family.  
           Perhaps more importantly, Lia would also like to avoid the thought of Cassie and any responsibility for Cassie’s death, but the idea dogs her until her father finally gets up and leaves her for the night.  At this point, Lia is not just sad she’s lost her friend, or frightened she may be on the same path.  Lia is, in fact, plagued by the idea that Cassie’s death is her fault.  This is Anderson going all the way emotionally.