Deleting the Obvious

I was reading a middle grade book last night, and what struck me about the author was the way she used very simple language to create surprise in her writing. Her style struck me because the last few middle grades I read used a lot of repetition to get ideas across.

I think repetition is a pitfall of any YA or MG writer, maybe especially for MG writers. We are never sure if kids are connecting with the ideas we are saying, so we, as adults, tend to hammer them in a little too strongly sometimes. We do it in life, so it's pretty natural that we do it in writing. Kids, of course, pick up on this instantly. Case in point:

The other day, Christopher, who is now nineteen, came with me to run a few errands. He works about 30 hours a week, maintains a good GPA, has a steady girlfriend, and just completed and passed two summer classes. So, really, I should know better. Dashing into the library, I looked over at the semi busy road and called to him, "Be careful crossing that street!"

He looked at his friend, grinned, and said, "Aw hell, Mom, I'm just going to shut my eyes, run into traffic and hope for the best."

I know. I pretty much deserved that.

So now that I am writing more full time, I am doing a lot more revision. (Writing to me really IS revision - I can't go forward until I've gone back and tinkered for a bit) My new editing eye is to delete anything that is not only obvious, but anything that is predictable.

This is harder than it sounds. I remember reading assigned novels in college and skipping over long passages of dialogue or description because I pretty much knew what it would say. That's the other piece: you want to make your characters consistent, but you also don't want to make them dull. And a lot of what I had to read in college were the kind of books where characters represented ideas or theories, so it may have been worse. In kid lit, the cliched characters are lethal.

All this being said, I will leave you with this bit of advice:

MG/YA Brains: The Divide

Whenever my house seems dusty and cluttered, which is a lot, I put on some real estate show and look at the adults only kind of living with porcelain objects on tables and alien things like crystal and wine decanters. It's an entirely different world from mine. There, basketballs would never roll across a living room floor (we have a small Juliette balcony which sounds so lovely, but it is at the perfect height for a basketball toss) and you wouldn't have to think of a way to hide cat scratch marks on the sofas.

I love watching those shows. It's an escape that helps me come back and hurl rogue basketballs into the garage, pick up the fossilized socks under the sofas and start the laundry with renewed apathy.

I do that with work, too. A few days ago, I was writing curriculum for a course I am less than excited about teaching. So in the middle of a thrilling lesson on apostrophe usage, I went online and looked at new jobs. These jobs wouldn't be in my classroom where the windows don't open, ever, and the air conditioning kicks in the week before Christmas. These would be in new and shiny classrooms where the students didn't text while I was talking about Herman Melville and all the apostrophes would arrive in meticulously rendered papers. I just needed to find that job.

One really interested me. It was about an hour from here and it was teaching MG and YA writing. You had to have written and published at least one book, have a current manuscript and a bunch of other requisites  that I already have. It sounded perfect.

Of course, it's impossible for me to do this job since I'm already overly committed for the spring, but thinking about teaching MG and YA was no different from my viewing of adult only houses staged for sale.


And it made me think, again, about those lines between MG and YA. They seem so definite in the bookstores and libraries. Yet books like The Hobbit confuse me - that was assigned in our seventh grade class, yet it is in the YA section in a lot of places. Number the Stars, also a book I taught in middle school, is in the YA section. Other than obvious subject matter, I'm not sure what divides them. I have an idea, though, now, after one of our pre-dinner conversations.

Christopher was saying something about sleep and the brain, and how dreaming is essential to survival. (Remember finishing your first semester of college psychology and all the stuff you found out?) The conversation went something like this:

Definitely a YA reader, with a semi mature attitude. I say semi mature because Christopher would also agree with this brain theory:

Emma, who was gluing feathers onto the cover of her report on cell function, (because cell function reports are dull) explained to Christopher that she knew, exactly, why we dream.

"When you go to sleep, your brain has nothing to look at and nothing to do. It's sooooo bored. So it makes up stories until you wake up. That's why you dream."

I think I had my answer to the difference.

MG Moments and Mirrors

I usually take on too much in my life. When I had two kids under the age of five, a husband who was away most of the time in corportate America, no help from family, and a part time job, I decided to do the only logical thing: I decided to have another baby.

It's sort of like an ADHD of the soul.

So now I am trying to leave a numbing teaching job that looms in the fall by becoming a freelance writer (the research is so interesting that I don't get any writing done), write a middle grade and a young adult novel simultaneously while my kids bicker and complain they are bored.

Then there are the dishes and wet towels and the cat hairballs that um..."reappear" on the carpet complete with feline stomach bile. (I just picked three random items that are completely and entirely invisible to the rest of my family).


I'm not complaining, just observing.

So when my friend came for a visit this weekend, she asked me, "How do you keep the tone of the middle grade novel and the young adult novel separate? Don't you mix them up?"

Here's how:

In our hallway, there is a mirror. Before my sons leave, they have to check that their hair is straighter than a ruler, that their pants are properly sagged, that their cell phones are properly aligned in their pockets so they won't mix a single text message.

This morning my daughter (a fourth grader) was ducking down in front of the mirror. After she did this about five times, I asked her what she was doing.

"Checking," she whispered, "but I'll tell you later, Mom."

She did: Emma believed the mirror had "captured" her face and was holding it there. All she had to do was pull away fast enough and she would be able to still see her face caught inside the mirror.

That's the difference.

The Line Where MG and YA Divide

Girls have begun coming over to our house. Now there are new rules about keeping doors open and keeping the conversation wholesome since there is a little sister playing around the house with innocent toys like fairies and mermaids.

Along with the new rules, I have developed new and not entirely wonderful habits. I eavesdrop. I casually snoop. I ask prying questions. When I don't hear talking or laughing, I holler things into rooms like "Yoo hoo, everything all right in there or do you need some company?" and sometimes I've been known to show up at doorways holding popcorn or other excuses. Of course, I'm spying. I freely admit this. I told the kids I have become a hall monitor in my own house. They immediately informed me that the hall monitor in their school is much more understanding (and her nickname is Troll).

So the other day, Emma, the nine year old little sister, gave some sage advice to her older brothers. She explained, very matter of factly, that a boy on the bus told her the facts of life. I froze. Emma went on: "If you hold hands with a girl, and kiss her at the same time...well," she said, blushing, "you could get a baby." The moment passed. Her brothers, who luckily pretty much adore her, thanked her for the advice - and bless their adolescent hearts, they both kept straight faces. "No problem," she told them, and went back to her American Girl magazine.

Two days later, I overheard (honestly, they were sitting right on the deck while I made dinner with Emma) a conversation between my eighth grader and a girl regarding the early signs of pregnancy. So did Emma. It drifted right in through the window.
Emma looked at me and said, "Mom, don't worry."
"I am worried," I said, racking my brain for any time this could have happened.
Emma laughed. "Mom," she said patiently, "Philip is only in the eighth grade. He can't be pregnant."

A Middle Grader Dishes on MG Lit

Emma, Age 9


Emma is a fourth grader who likes to read, but who likes to write her own stories even more.
"Mostly I used to read and write only about fairies. Fairies are still my favorite subject, and all the stories I write have at least one fairy in them. But in the last year, I have begun reading a lot of other types of books so I can talk about them."

Do you remember your favorite picture book?

I read all the Olivia books, then all the Madeline books, but I especially loved any story that had a cat or cats in it.

What types of books do you and your friends usually read now?

My friends read a lot of books that are from Disney movies or from Saturday morning shows. We also all read the American girl books. I don't really like the books from television or movies. I read books with enchantment and fantasy, books that take place in castles or have some mystery to them. I like when books don't match tv, and I don't know how the story ends already.

What makes you pick up a book?

Well, it used to be only the cover. Now I read the first few paragraphs before I decide whether or not I want to read it.

What kinds of covers do you like?

The cover can only have one main thing on it. I don't like covers with lots of little pictures and two or more things happening. I just put those down.

When you read those first few paragraphs, how do you decide if you like it or not?

The main thing is I don't want to know what the problem is right away. I love drama, when the writer makes something dramatic happen right on the first page and I get a picture of it happening in my head. Then I feel like I'm sort of going into the story, that I can see it. But when they say the problem, I feel like I don't know what's going on, that I missed a page before the first page. If I don't know where the story is happening or who the characters are, I'm not ready to know what's wrong.

What makes you keep reading that story after you've taken it home?

I like to feel a little bit scared while I'm reading. I don't like to be relaxed. It's exciting when the character has to do something like be quiet for a long time not to get caught or to escape from somewhere. I have to be just a drop worried and think about the book when I'm not reading it. That's a good book. It's like the story is happening to you. And I love details once I'm in the story. I like to know what the people are eating, what it looks like, where everything is on the table.

Is there anything you don't like about some books you read that you would like to tell writers?

Yes. This is something I have noticed and my friends have, too. In the last chapter, all the problems have to be solved very, very clearly. None of us like it when we have to try and figure out what the author meant. Like, did she escape? Or did she turn into a different type of fairy?
That's terrible. When authors do that, I don't read any of their other books. I just feel disappointed at the end.
One other thing is that you don't need to have the character like a boy. I feel like I can't wait until that part is over and the writer gets back to the story. It's like an interruption.

Thanks for doing this, Emma.

You're welcome, Mom. Only next time, I'd like to do a videoblog instead of watching you type.

Tomorrow's Blog

My nine year old daughter is not happy that I write YA when she reads MG. So, with Emma, I am going to start/attempt (they're different verbs for a reason), an MG with her as an advisor.
She also read "Ben's" interview and wants to discuss what makes a good MG novel according to her and her friends.
I must say, convincing a high school boy to agree to be interviewed is a task similar to the herding of cats. With this age group, her friends eagerly volunteered, and instead of being anonymous, they wanted their pictures posted alongside the interview...