Testing Cunningham’s Thesis

In my February 5th post I wrote about an idea M. Allen Cunningham shared in the recent Poets and Writers inspiration issue. In his essay he explores turning “creative limitation” into a “positive force” and argues that “imposed limitation” stimulates creativity.

My day job recently forced me to put Cunningham’s thesis to the test.

This season, I’ve been crazy busy with my not-writing work – I’m a freelance theatrical stagehand. Most recently, an old friend who runs the scene shop down at Texas State called me for a gig, filling the last beautifully empty week in my calendar until the end of the season. I kind of wanted to kill him even as I said yes. It makes me feel a bit like an ass to complain about getting paying work. But feeling like an ass has never stopped me from blundering on before, so here goes. I despaired when I lost that week of free time. I didn’t realize how much I had been fetishizing it and draping it in (probably unrealistic) expectations in regard to my neglected WIP.

Then it was just gone. Once more, my ‘writing time’ had been superseded by my annoying need for food and shelter.

I’m proud to report that I eventually stopped feeling sorry for myself. Even more surprisingly, I rose to the challenge and set my alarm for four a.m. More surprising still, I actually managed to drag myself out of bed when it went off the next morning.

I wrote for two solid hours before “starting” my day.

I know, I know. There’s nothing new in a writer getting up insanely early to work. But it is new to me. And, even though it puts a deep ache in my lazy bone to say it, I have seen the light. Okay, not exactly the light; it’s still dark in those quiet hours. But I am now officially a believer in the get-up-before-the-rest-of-the-world-and-write strategy.

When I have to be.

Luckily, that only turns out to be about half the time. My paying work usually starts in the afternoon or evening, leaving me plenty of time for both sleep and writing. So it’s a comfortable commitment, one that fits easily into my long standing dedication to not working too hard if I don’t have to. But it is a new commitment that I am (so far mostly) keeping.

And I wrote some strong words in those predawn sessions. I also kept up on all three of my blog commitments. I couldn’t help feeling a little proud at the end of the week: I had been tested and not found wanting.

True confession time:

Getting up that early sucked. And I only did it three out of the five days I worked my unusual eight-to-five schedule: on one morning I snoozed until 4:30, and on Thursday I didn’t get up and write before work at all. But I’m still calling it a good week, a personal victory on a small scale. A definite step in the right direction. And I can’t stress how happy I continue to be with the product of my early mornings.

If you’ve got a day job and you’re considering a predawn writing practice, I say go for it. You’ll be tired in the evenings at first, but it gets easier. If nothing else, when you tell people about it they’ll think you’re hardcore.

Next up for me is Ballet Austin’s New American Talent Contest at the Long Center. Their work calls start at 8:00 a.m. Mine will start at four.

YA Novelist Brian Yansky on Writing for Boys, Part 2

[Below is part two of my recent email interview with YA sci-fi novelist, Brian Yansky. Here’s a link to the interview’s first part. My conversation with Brian is part of a larger series on teen male aliteracy, all of which can be found on the Yellow Bird Blog.]

BPW: I recently read a great essay by author Matt de la Pena about how becoming an active reader can change a man’s life, young or old. In our emails leading up to this interview you mentioned how reading “saved you” when you were young. How so?

BY: I didn’t start reading a lot until I was seventeen. Before that I was, to put it mildly, unfocused. I was close to flunking out of school. I knew the local police much too well, and they knew me.  But when I started reading and writing (I started writing a diary because of the reading), I found a different kind of excitement from the kind that had been getting me into so much trouble. Reading and writing became healthy obsessions. They gave me focus. They gave me hope.

BPW: Andy Sherrod describes some basic differences between boy books and girl books. These have to do with the personality of the hero, the types of and settings for conflicts the hero must face, the narrative voice, and the use of factual information in the story. Your most recent novel,Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments, fits pretty neatly into all of Sherrod’s defining characteristics for a boy book. How did you come to specialize in writing for a young, male audience? Did you make a conscious choice?

BY: Well, like a lot of YA writers, I thought my first book was for adults. I found an agent who thought so too and tried to sell it. Several publishing houses liked it, but it didn’t sell. Then my wife and [YA novelist]Cynthia Leitich-Smith both encouraged me to think of it as a YA novel. I revised it a little but not much. It sold, almost immediately, as a YA.

I love writing YA characters. That age has so many possibilities. There’s a freshness to the world and experience and at the same time a naivety in some instances. It’s also a time of great change. There’s school and friends and first love and a lot of firsts. It’s just an interesting time, ripe with dramatic possibilities. It comes down to this: I’m excited and thrilled by writing characters this age. You should write what excites and thrills you.

BPW: Homicidal Aliens ends with a major victory for the protagonist but leaves one antagonist unaccounted for. Does this mean a third book is in the works? If so, can you give a little taste of what future annoyances readers can expect for Jesse? If not, what’s next on your writing horizon?

BY: My next novel is not a sequel. Alas, no more alien books.  My next novel is called UTOPIA, IOWA, and will come out in early 2015. I just finished the final edits with my editor. It’s about this character who sees ghosts, but this is not the big deal to him because everyone on his mother’s side of the family sees ghosts. However, it becomes a big deal when a girl in his school is murdered, and she starts insisting he find out who killed her. I hope my main character, a–surprise,surprise– seventeen-year-old male, has a strong and interesting voice.

[If Yansky’s past heroes are any indication, his newest protagonist will indeed have a unique and memorable voice. Many thanks to Brian Yansky for his great answers here and for all of his great books. Earlier in this series, I asked Andy Sherrod for his boy book top ten. So it only seemed fair to ask the same of Brian. Here are his boy book recommendations:]

Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness
Unwind by Neil Shusterman
Godless by Pete Hautman
Looking for Alaska by John Green
The Great Green Heist by Varian Johnson (due out 2014)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

YA Novelist Brian Yansky on Writing for Boys

Brian Yansky writes YA novels and teaches writing at Austin Community College. In his books he tells the stories of teenaged boys. I first met Brian at the 2012Austin SCBWI Annual Conference. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to get to know him a little better and read two of his sci-fi novels, Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences, and Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments. In addition to his full-time jobs writing novels and teaching at ACC, Brian sometimes teaches short format classes for The Writers’ League of Texas. Not to gush, but I can tell you from firsthand experience it’s worth the money to take one of these (usually half day) courses, because he teaches as well as he writes.

In many ways, Brian is the perfect example of a writer who is daring to buck some of the YA publishing trends I’ve been talking about in my ongoing series on the topic of teen, male aliteracy.

I posted a review of Homicidal Aliens on my personal blog late last week.

Here’s Part One of my recent email interview with him:

BPW: In Homicidal Aliens, just as in Alien Invasion before that, your first person narrator Jesse sounds exactly like who he is, a male teenager. Your language has a genuine plainness to it that’s highly effective. It’s also in keeping with what Andy Sherrod identifies as one of the defining characteristics of a boy book: the intense emotions the characters are feeling are undercut by your narrative voice. Is there a “real” Jesse whose voice you borrowed from? Either way, can you talk about developing your distinctly teen, male voice?

BY: First, thanks for saying that. I do want every character to have a distinct voice, and I struggle to make my characters sound the age they are. It may help that I suffer from arrested development, and a part of me still sometimes reacts like a teenage boy: “I have to do that? You mean I have to do that now?” So I do get in touch with my inner teenager when I write my young adult novels. I suppose the voice is some mix of my memories of myself and my friends at that age, my imagination, and my observation of teenagers – both in real life (one of the benefits of teaching at Austin Community College) and in the novels I read, movies and TV I see, songs I hear. The way a voice comes is a bit of a mystery, but as I’m building a character – adding specifics about how a character sees his world and what he does in it – the voice becomes clearer and clearer in my mind.

BPW: You successfully write for a teen audience. Do you have teen beta readers?

BY: I don’t.

BPW: Is it because you choose not to? Or is it more a matter of limited access?

BY: There are probably a few writers who do have teen readers, but none of my writer buddies do.  Every writer is different though. I just do my best to be true to the character. Then I have a critique group, who all write YA and Middle Grade, read my work. Then my agent, who sells mostly YA and MG. Then my editor at Candlewick. So if there are places where the voice seems inauthentic, I get feedback. But, honestly, I rely mostly on my ear and, as I said before, a combination of observation, imagination, and memory.

Look for the rest of my conversation with YA novelist Brian Yansky in two weeks, and find out how discovering reading as a teenager changed his life.

In Defense of the Passive Voice

Here’s how my current favorite style manual, The Little, Brown Handbook, defines passive voice:

“The passive voice of the verb indicates that the subject receives the action of the verb. Create the passive voice with be, am, is, are, was,were, being, or been followed by the main verb’s participle.”

It gives this example: “Her latest book was completed in four months.”

The main point to take from that definition is that “the subject receives the action of the verb,” as opposed to the subject performing the action. To make the above example active, you would write it like this: “She completed her latest book in four months.”

Seems pretty straight forward, right?

Apparently not. I regularly run into writers who work from the assumption that any use of a “to be” verb constitutes the passive voice. This is not true! (See? That last sentence was active even though I used “is.”)

I offer this post in defense of the passive voice. Not only is it frequently misunderstood, it’s not always the wrong choice to make as a writer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it should be your “go to” sentence structure. But sometimes it makes sense to use it.

For example, I once worked with a novelist who was revising a first person POV YA sci-fi thriller. He tended to overuse the passive voice, constantly describing things that happened to his hero until the manuscript read like a journal of events the narrator simply witnessed. We worked a long time on rooting out all that passive voice and making his hero into the prime mover of his novel. But he had a chapter where his protagonist fell into the clutches of an antagonist with mind control powers. So I encouraged the author to go crazy with the passive voice in that part. It made sense, because his hero had lost all agency. The passive voice captured his protagonist’s predicament perfectly because he had become, quite literally, the puppet of the antagonist.

So, don’t fear the passive voice. Just make sure you use it deliberately. Like any grammatical construct, it deserves its place in your writer’s toolbox. But, like any tool, it can be dangerous if you don’t understand what it is or how it works.

Sweeping Past Writer’s Block

Stuck? Can’t get past a prickly plot point? Or maybe your hero has gotten everything she wants and it’s only chapter four? Do you have writer’s block?

Sweep that Block Away

Pick up a broom. Dust some shelves. Good chance they’re your books, anyway. Such not-quite-mindless activity is perfect for letting your brain immerse itself in the problem. It gets your hands moving and your eyes watching without really seeing while that pesky plot point problem percolates away inside your head. And the next thing you know, the house is a little cleaner and you’ve come up with a brilliant solution to your dilemma.

Sweeping and dusting are good writer’s block fighting tasks for two non-writing reasons, as well. First, they’re never ending. They always need doing. Around my house we get about a five minute window of hairlessness when the place actually looks clean and shiny (two dogs and a long haired cat). So, no matter how many times you get stuck in a revision, chances are there’s some dusty corner somewhere in your house that you can go after. And, even if it doesn’t really need cleaning, you’re not hurting anything.

Which leads me to the second reason: sweeping and dusting are good because they promote domestic bliss. Instead of bouncing a ball (or your head) against a wall, or simply wandering through the house muttering angry nonsense at your feet – both of which activities can be a bit annoying to the people you live with – incorporating a broom or dust cloth into your writing struggle allows you to be a contributing member of the household, even as you solve your manuscript’s problem. That is satisfying both for you and for that person in your life who loves you and supports but probably entertains regular, secret doubts about having chosen to live with a writer. You know what I mean. I don’t care if you’ve got a roommate or a spouse or something in between, he or she will find you easier to live with as you wade through your seventh revision if he/she sees you carrying a little extra weight around the house. It lends you a noble air: as far as your significant other can tell you’re digging down deep and forcing yourself to help the team, even in the midst of your darkest writerly despair.

Doesn’t that sound good? Doesn’t it sound just like the person you want to be? I know it sounds like who I want to be. And any day now I’m confident that I actually will become that selfless, broom wielding writer. I know I will. Someday soon, instead of munching on candy and staring out the window, I’ll drag myself out of from in front of my computer and pick up that broom, and I’ll sweep all that pet hair right into the same trashcan as my writer’s block. It’ll be glorious and satisfying. And it’ll happen soon. I can feel it stirring inside of me.

But, if you happen to do it first, let me know how it goes.