Nikki Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest Sings

Nikki Loftin is a gifted storyteller. Her sophomore middle-grade fantasy, Nightingale’s Nest, (2014, Razor Bill) proves that.

At last month’s Austin SCBWI Working Conference I was fortunate enough to attend Sarah Ketchersid’s (Executive Editor, Candlewick Press) seminar on the importance of raising the stakes for your novel’s hero. Not surprisingly, Nikki was there too.

It got me thinking that I’d love it if she led her own class, maybe “Techniques for Torturing Your Hero in Entertaining and Compelling Ways?” Whatever she called it, I would definitely attend.

That’s because Loftin intertwines her plots so masterfully with her hero’s desires. No matter how hard Little John tries to do the right thing, his choices just keep making things worse. Nightingale’s Nest is at times heartbreaking and disturbing, but it kept me turning the page to learn if the preteen protagonist would ever catch a break.

In addition to her gripping plot, Loftin’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale” deftly creates a setting and backstory that firmly establish Little John as sympathetic and oh so damaged – again all of the hero’s problems are tangled up in choices he did and didn’t make before the time period of the book. Then she unwinds a chain of events which genuinely and believably threaten to crush him, along with pretty much everyone he loves.

Nikki Loftin

Which brings me to the story’s other main character Gayle, the strange little orphan who escapes her abusive foster home by living in a tree and singing. Gayle has magic in the same way Loftin’s entire book has magic. It’s just part of her, it’s not explained or justified. Magic is simply something the world ofNightingale’s Nest possesses in casual abundance.

I strive to create that kind of … I don’t know, magicality in my own fiction. Sorry to make up a word, but ‘magical realism’ and ‘fantasy’ don’t really fit what Loftin creates. Her book’s world is very recognizable; the people are just regular folks with familiar, if dire, problems. The setting of Nest has everything a typical suburban/urban preteen would find familiar. Except Gayle. It’s obvious from the first sentence of the book that she’s special, a catalyst. Loftin even goes so far as to call the little girl’s music “magic” in the opening paragraph. And that’s how the author treats the supernatural throughout the rest of the book: it’s matter of fact, no big deal. Just another branch for the reader to hold onto to as he climbs.

Nikki Loftin’s skill with plot and world building are enviable and make for a tightly paced and compelling read. And her characters intrigued me and demanded my sympathy in all the right ways. In short, Nightingale’s Nest lived up to the expectation created by her debut, The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy. I can’t wait to see what kind of world she crafts next.

Inevitable and Predictable, So Close Yet …

I just finished Matt de la Peña’s We Were Here (Delacorte Press, 2009). Not surprisingly, it kind of rocks. Don’t worry; this isn’t a review of a not so new book that you’ve probably already read. I only mention it because it’s a great example of inevitability. In case you haven’t gotten to it yet I won’t go into specifics, but the big reveal is far from surprising … in a very good way. Same with the novel’s ending.

The reason I didn’t mind figuring out the ending pretty early on is that de la Peña’s plot has inevitability. The hero’s choices drive him into increasingly difficult situations until he has to eventually confront the source of his self-inflicted torture. So always being aware of the story’s inevitable conclusion in the distance fits We Were Here‘s rough, urban journey. I found myself experiencing a growing satisfaction as I trudged alongside the book’s hero knowing where he was headed even when he didn’t. Paradoxically, and this is what I love about de la Peña’s writing, this dramatic irony also turned out to be the source of most of the story’s tension for me. I knew what the hero needed. It was painfully obvious. So I wanted to grab him by the scruff of his neck every time he took a step in the wrong direction. But in the end, the hero figured out the right course all on his own. He achieved redemption because he chose to. Like a worried parent, I could breathe again, my child had made it across the tightrope without my help.

And then there’s predictable. I’m talking bad TV sitcoms here. Unlike a story with a strong, inevitable ending, what the reader/viewer sees coming in a predictable plot isn’t really connected to the hero. It’s an outside force instead of a consequence of the hero’s actions. Therefore it feels like a cheat and leaves readers or viewers wanting more. Or worse, it leaves them wishing they’d never gotten suckered into the experience in the first place.

Okay, so we’ve established that we like inevitable endings and that tying our plot twists and crises to our protagonist’s choices helps us achieve them. Well, I’m hoping you’re with me on this; maybe my previous sentence should have been in the singular. Either way I shall plunge ahead.

Achieving inevitability instead of predictability also hinges on how delicately an author deploys the little signposts that get the reader wanting the ending everybody’s moving toward. A delicate balance must be struck. If de la Peña had peppered as few as one or two more bits of foreshadowing into We Were Here, the book could have ended up as just another formulaic and moralistic walk along an all too familiar adolescent beach.

I can’t help but imagine some early draft of the novel that looks precisely like that. Okay, I’ll admit it; Ihope that cliché early draft exists with all its flaws. I like to imagine it lying bloated at the bottom of some file drawer in Matt de la Peña’s office: an unremarkable stack of dusty pages held together by a single, overtaxed rubber band around its middle like a hobo’s belt. It’s petty, I know. But it’s an image that makes me feel better about my own writing process.

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.

Defining the Boy Book via Andy Sherrod

I volunteered for the Writers’ League of Texas last Saturday at the Texas Book Festival. I had a great time and met lots of interesting writers at all stages of personal development. One of the many WLT board members who also manned the booth that day was romance writer Evelyn Palfrey. She asked me what I was working on, and I told her a YA adventure novel. It was a conversational opening I had participated in dozens of times by that point in the afternoon. But then she surprised me by asking if I was writing my book for boys or girls.

I am writing a boy book. What’s a boy book? How is it different from a girl book? These are great questions that usually generate interesting discussions among YA and middle grade (MG) writers. Ms. Palfrey’s question last Saturday certainly did just that, even if I was the only one present who wrote for a teen audience. We ended up talking a little about Andy Sherrod, mostly because I dropped his name into the mix.

If you’re not familiar with Mr. Sherrod, he’s one of theVermont College of Fine Arts mafia, and he’s been studying and writing and talking about the issue of young, male aliteracy since graduate school.(Aliteracy is the state of being able to read but being uninterested in doing so.) I met him a couple of years back when he gave a highly informative presentation defining the term boy book. I had to drive an hour and half to Bryan (the seminar was sponsored by the Brazos Valley SCBWI), but I’m glad I did.

The FAQ section of Andy’s site opens with the four major factors he uses to define the “gender” of a YA or MG story. I pulled the following from there. It has been edited for layout purposes:

1. In a novel the gender of the protagonist makes a difference…to a degree.  Boys like to read about boys but there ARE good boy books with engaging female protagonists.

2. Boy readers want a protagonist that acts more or less alone in a secondary territory (away from familiar places like home and school) engaged in a physical pursuit, a journey on foot, so to speak, rather than a journey of the heart.

3. This involves the proper handling of emotions, particularly sadness or grief.  Some authors handle this in a way that keeps boys’ attention and some don’t.

4. Boys love facts but there is a difference between fact books and factual books.  Fact books don’t necessarily lead to active literacy, factual books do and can encompass all genres from non-fiction to fiction to science fiction.

In his presentation, Andy also touches on some of the positive male archetypes successful boy book authors deploy. Some examples include The Pilgrim, who is a wanderer/searcher filled with hope, whileThe Patriarch is a masculine form of caring responsibility/emblem of nobility and self-sacrifice. Sherrod defines ten of these archetypes in his lecture.

He also shares his belief that writers have a responsibility to engage with young male readers. He stands against the prevailing school of thought which says young American male aliteracy is inevitable. To quote Andy Sherrod,

“Boys will be interested in books … when books interest the boys.”

I read as a boy. I know boys who read. When they’re related to me by blood or close friendship, I often impose on their parents to let me use them as beta readers. There are and always have been boys who read. Lots of boys read plenty of things. Just not fiction.

Andy Sherrod’s right: if we want to get teen males to read fiction, we have to make fiction appeal to teen males.

I’m out of space here, but look for more on boy books in future posts.