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.

Little Gods

I got a text Sunday night while I worked in the middle of a quickly emptying stage at the Long Center; Ballet Austin‘s most recent production had closed that afternoon. We were halfway through the load-out. I was exhausted and a little depressed because I hadn’t managed to work on my WIP in weeks. This was one of those periods where the pull of my day job was testing my commitment to maintaining a writing practice. And I was failing.

The text came from my brother in Maine:

“Hey Brad just wanted to let you know that Marylou passed away today. Love you Brian.”

Mary Lou was his mother-in-law, and her death had been imminent for months. I still considered her a friend, even if her crippling dementia had wiped any memory of me from her mind. We had gotten close one winter in the mid-nineties when I lived and worked in her home trading my then meager carpentry skills for room and board. She and her husband, a master carpenter, had hired me to help them convert their 18th century farm house into a B&B.

That text from my brother, so simple, with barely any punctuation, destroyed me in a way that I would never have predicted. I made an excuse to my crew head and fled to the upstage bathroom before I lost it. Luckily it was empty. I locked the door behind me and leaned against the gray tiles to stare down at my phone, nose dripping onto its screen. The words blurred out of focus.

Eventually my vision cleared and my breath smoothed. But I couldn’t pull my eyes off of my phone. Each time its screen went black I woke it back up to read my brother’s text another time.

A half-familiar thought was trying to penetrate my grief. Eventually I let it.

We humans are communicators like no other creatures on the planet. Sure, non-humans use language in varying degrees. I get that. But not like people. Our communication skills border on the divine. Take my brother’s text. With a few dozen keystrokes he quite literally pushed me into a new world where my friend Mary Lou no longer existed.

That is power.

And he’s not even a writer. But his message (re)taught me a lesson I’ll probably never finish learning: written expression has the power to change the very fabric of the universe. That’s at least part of why I started writing poems and stories as a kid. When I write I become a little god.

All writers do.

I’m not speaking metaphorically here. Writers of all kinds put words together in ways that transform their readers’ worlds. Whether it’s a text telling of a loved one’s death or a thousand page novel or a treatise on quantum mechanics, when it’s done well writing has the strength to shift any paradigm. Just consider the hundreds (if not thousands) of holy scriptures that humans have created, or the U.S. Constitution, or the Odyssey. I could keep going, but you get the point.

This post is not one of those of seminal documents. I know that. I just wanted to publicly thank my brother for his unintentional reminder of why I write. And say goodbye to friend Mary Lou. Both of them showed me something I needed to see at exactly the moment I needed to see it. It hurt to learn of my friend’s death, and I know her passing leaves a hole in a lot of lives, including mine. But at least one good thing came from her passing.

I went home that night and I wrote for hours. Most of it was crap, over-emotional and meandering. Stuff that will most likely never see the light of day. I didn’t care; I was writing again. It didn’t matter how I felt the next morning when the alarm slammed me into another fourteen hour workday. I had remembered my power. I had reclaimed my tiny slice of divinity. Once more I was a little god, however sleep deprived.

“Creative Limitation as a Positive Force”

Five hundred words, that’s all I needed. But a million little disasters distracted me. Compared to what a lot of people deal with, they’re not really disasters, at all. I know that. But knowledge of relative scale had ceased to provide much relief or solace after what had now been several months of low level stress and petty catastrophes. And it certainly didn’t help me focus on coming up with those five hundred words I needed for the next day’s deadline.

I sat in the shadowy glow of a blue running light upstage during Act One of Tosca at the Long Center (I work as a stagehand).

I had just given up on writing.

Seconds before, my computer had sighed a tiny almost-beep and gone blank in my lap. Its fans had stilled for the final time. The battery status indicator kept flashing once green then twice red, once green then twice red, once green then twice red. I knew its brain had fled this mortal realm. The little flashing light was merely leftover electricity with nothing else to do. My faithful machine’s last heat drained into the tops of my thighs. I pulled the power cord out of its back. The little light flashed one final time and went dark.

Surrounded as I was by my fellow stagehands, I silently swallowed against my tears and slid my laptop’s corpse into my bag. All I could think about was my WIP. It had been at least a month since I backed it up. I knew I could never exactly recreate all of the small scale tuning of my narrator’s voice that I’d been doing in that time.

I prayed to whatever god has jurisdiction over irresponsible writers and resolved to put this latest setback out of my mind until tomorrow. I pulled out my copy ofPoets & Writers’ 2014 inspiration issue. It fell open to M. Allen Cunningham’s essay called “Rethinking Restriction: Creative Limitation as a Positive Force.”

I read the first paragraph and snorted. Ha! I thought. This ought to be good. But his thesis, that it’s more useful to view “imposed limitation – in ideas or images, as well as in actual time to create” as a positive tool for a writer, intrigued me. And it certainly had specific relevance to my situation.

Some context might help. Here’s a partial list of some of what’s been eating at me since the end of last year. The first minor disaster was the partial flood of my house that required me to pull half the floor out, dry it, and reinstall it. But there have been several ongoing stressors, too. Our hot water heater has been agonal for over a year. Several plumbers have warned me it’s in its final (though hopefully still pre-dramatic-explosion) death rattle. There’s also the older, even more feeble washing machine. Getting back to discreet catastrophic events, we had a break in the main water line into our house, two tile installers who haven’t actually installed any tile in our only shower, a furnace that broke down twice, and a bunch of other annoyances. The most recent of which was the death of my computer in the dark, surrounded by Puccini’s beautiful music.

And here’s this guy telling me I just need to turn my problems into my solutions. I won’t lie; I briefly entertained some uncharitable thoughts for Mr. Cunningham. But I kept reading. I couldn’t help it. His premise that “resistance to its production [is] what makes good art good” intrigued me.

#StagehandView

The argument has a compelling logic that I just couldn’t refute. So I stared into the silhouette of the Act Three ground row I sat upstage of, and I despaired.

I had lost my last excuse, my best justification for not writing. If lack of time (or computer), if the myriad distractions occupying my conscious mind, were not the reason I had stopped writing, then what was?

Only one answer seemed plausible: I had reached the first true test of my commitment to my writing life, and I had failed it.

I was pathetic.

I finished the article anyway. What the heck? I thought. It’s not like I had anything better to do.

In the second half of his piece Cunningham delves into the role of the conscious vs. the unconscious mind in the writing (or any creative) process. He defines that moment all writers face when we must simply stare at the blank screen or page and hope something comes as “a practice of faith.” And he’s right.

So I said another aimless prayer. I put down the magazine and picked up my notebook and pen. Whatever emotional cocktail I experienced at that moment sure didn’t feel like faith. But it wasn’t despair, either. So I kept staring down at the white paper in my lap. I kept my lucky pen poised. I noted how the blue backstage lighting had rendered the lines of the page nearly invisible. Then I pressed the tip of my pen to the paper.

Eventually it moved.

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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.