Alma Alexander

While it is absolutely true that a writer, any writer, is the worst possible judge of his or her own work – especially after the third rewrite, when you’re no longer sure about anything at all and you start doubting every word on that page to the extent that you cannot conceive why on EARTH anybody else who didn’t have to read this stuff might possibly actually WANT to – there is a sort of instinct that you develop about things, especially if you’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while and you have some experience under your belt.

A while ago I wrote a couple of pages of New Novel, and even before I printed them out to get a second opinion from my first editor (who is married to me, but who doesn’t let that fact interfere with the sometimes brutal honesty of his reactions to my work) I knew that they were not good enough. What I had written down was so dense, so condensed, it was four scenes of story stuffed into six paragraphs – it was a synopsis of what I needed to write. I had written this particular piece of work as a narrative which was supposed to take its place in the book itself – but it wasn’t going to happen. It needed unpacking first, heavily.

My instinct was spot-on. My first editor told me the exact thing I had been thinking, without my having said a word about it.

I don’t do this kind of thing all that often – I usually have the opposite problem, writing too much, giving too much detail, because I’ve got it all in my mind’s eye and it’s a rich vision and in trying to put it across I fall into the trap of describing a Victorian attic, with every doily and tchochke in the picture. I have to rein myself back, study the vision, figure out which tchotchkes need to stay in and which doilies I need to whip away out of sight. But that’s what first drafts are for, exploring attics.

But the opposite of knowing that something is inadequate is knowing that it is good. And every now and then something is good enough to be nothing less than a gift from the Gods.

Often it’s my characters who will come up with these things, stuff I SWEAR I have never thought, or said, or intended to put into a book, until I see myself typing it and it appears on the computer screen as though by magic and then I can only sit back and stare at it and wonder where it had come from… because not a syllable of it came, at least not consciously, from me.

I’ll give you two examples.

The first is something of a small spoiler, so if you haven’t read “The Secrets of Jin Shei” and want to do so without knowing this particular tale, please do skip ahead to the asterisks…

When I wrote “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, there was a scene that I wrote early on which served a couple of purposes in the narrative – one was to establish the character of Xaforn, my warrior girl, and her absolute devotion to the concept of honour, and to living her life with that as her guiding star; the other was to begin a relationship between two people who would make unlikely friends, even unlikely allies, because of how very different, on the face of it, they were from one another.

Xaforn led a life of honour and austerity, was a foundling who had adopted the Imperial Guard as her family and would be willing to die to protect that family and uphold its traditions. Qiaan was a child of a Guard Captain and so knew those traditions from the inside – but she was (from Xaforn’s point of view, at least) soft, and weak; Qiaan lived protected while Xaforn did the protecting, Qiaan had the hearth and the family and Xaforn would be standing guard on the ramparts in the storm in order to keep that hearth and family safe.

These two girls bonded over the fate of a tiny feral kitten which Xaforn found a handful of bully-boys torturing – and could not allow them to continue, because some of them were of the Guard, her chosen family, the family which held honour sacred, which would never condone wanton cruelty like this.

Xaforn, still a slight child and a female to boot, took on three boys older and bigger than herself on the kitten’s behalf. But if it had ended there, the boys might as well have killed the little animal – because Xaforn had not the necessary skills or instincts to ensure the kitten’s survival. It was Qiaan who stepped in and provided that.

Xaforn won the kitten’s freedom. Qiaan won its life.

She gets into trouble over the incident, but also gains a reputation – and the justifications she gives for her actions finally settle on two simple reasons: one, the torturing was being done by Guards and Guards have more honour than that, and two, there was at least one outsider involved in the matter and it was “our cat”.

Later in the book, much later, Qiaan finds herself being used as a puppet figurehead “leading” a revolution against the crown – something that Xaforn, as one of the Imperial Guard, is sworn to prevent. The revolution goes badly awry and Qiann is deemed expendable – and is almost murdered.

And then, suddenly, Xaforn is there, out of nowhere, dealing with Qiaan’s assailants, and realising that Qiaan herself is badly wounded. When they hear reinforcements come, Qiaan begs Xaforn to go and leave her there – but Xaforn will not. When Qiaan realises that the reinforcements are Imperial Guard, that Xaforn will be fighting her own (probably to the death) in order to protect her friend, Qiaan demands to know why she should be worth such a sacrifice.

“Because,” Xaforn says, simply and quietly, “you are my cat.”

I SWEAR those words did not come from me. I swear I did not know that Xaforn would say them, was even thinking this.

But it is perfect. Utterly perfect. It is completely in character. This phrase encapsulates and explains everything, and this is one of the emotional high-points of the entire book.

I have a character to thank for that piece of dialogue – gift from the Gods, from their spirit into my hand and my keyboard, I was a channel, nothing else. And all I could do was sit back and stare at the screen and shake my head in astonishment.

* * * * *

END OF SPOILER

That is how you know that you have written something good, possibly something great. When you sit there looking at it, having just written it, and you cannot believe that the words on that screen, freshly minted, have come, could POSSIBLY have come, from you.

I was given another such gift only the other day, writing my new novel.

Once again, I have a character who has taken a step away from being dead letters on a page and into being flesh-and-blood three-dimensionally real, with a personality larger than life, a sense of humour, an ability to articulate her own thoughts and responses over and above and beyond what I am capable of imparting to her.

She meets another character, in a scene of 3000 words or so which I wrote at a sitting and which needs practically no editing at all.

And I sat back and looked at a particular dialogue exchange, and it was the Gods speaking again – because I had certainly not planned to write anything of the sort. These were two real people, having a real conversation.

I love it when things come together like this. When occasionally there’s a blaze of… something… when the muse walks into the room and smiles.

The little miracle, right there on your computer screen.

In the back of my mind there is a tiny grotto of a temple where I retire every night to say my literary prayers. On nights like these, when the little miracles are spilled like diamond dust across the rest of the prose, the bits I know I have crafted from my own knowledge and experience and ability and my own conscious thinking, I light an extra little candle of gratitude in that temple – because I know I do not do this writing thing alone, and when the Gods come to visit, I am always humbled and thankful that I am still sometimes their favoured child.

Why do people treat books as mirrors?

I recently came across a post by Elizabeth Bluemle at the Publisher’s Weekly site entitled “The New Literal Mind” (link to the full post, and comments that follow, given at the foot of this essay). Elizabeth writes, amongst other things:

“I’ve noticed a strange trend among grandparents these days, and sometimes among parents: the tendency to reject a book for not being specifically, literally, representative of their child’s world.”

Parents or grandparents apparently look at a book – its cover, to be more precise – and come up with reasons why their child or grandchild won’t want to read it. The kid’s a country kid, and the book is set in the city – or vice versa. The kid has a brother, and not a sister (like the character in the book) – or vice versa. Most damningly at all, the “Oh, I don’t think he’ll really be interested in THAT” comment when the skin colour of the child depicted on the book cover doesn’t happen to match the precise hue of the potential reader of said book.

That neatly connects with another trend that has seen a lot of Internet exposure recently – the blog posts of a whole bunch of people, particularly people of colour, about how they could never “find themselves” in the books that they were given to read as children..

And that brings me to the brink of something that I do comprehend as a concept but which I completely fail to understand on a visceral level.

Why are all these people so bent on treating books as mirrors? Why is the value of a book measured by how much of oneself – in an absolutely literal sense – one can “find” in it? I have never picked up a single book with the purpose of looking for multiple incarnations of me – but, instead, I’ve sought new things, new experiences, new ideas, landscapes I might never see in real life, people I might never meet, and people I might be fascinated with but would not remotely want to actually BE. I have never picked up a fantasy book with a dragon on the cover and expected to find a clone of me riding the dragon by page five.

When I read a book, I’m not looking for me.

Look at (a random selection of) books which have touched my life.

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott: at the time I first read that, I was still a young kid living in Europe. American history was not remotely familiar as such, not in detail, and the context of the March family’s lives might as well have been on a different planet. But with the one possible exception of going “Oh! She writes too!” when I met Jo March, I have never identified with any of the sisters. Meg is entirely too holier-than-thou (which I never was), Amy annoyed the snot out of me, Beth made me cry but I am not sure that she would not have been too precious to live with if I ever had to do it in real life, and even fellow-writer Jo often went off the rails and did things I did not approve of. I did not wade into the book desperately seeking a reflection of myself, and I was not put out when I did not find one. Did that stop me from enjoying the book and from loving my early copy of it literally to pieces? No, it did not. And if the cover on it had been anything to do with choosing it I would never have had it at all – because oh, these were AMERICAN characters who ran around wearing long dresses and white gloves none of which was remotely familiar to me so in other words these were the equivalent of “city” characters being thrown at a “country” child.

Any book of China, by Pearl Buck: my mother had a set of these and I read them, in translation, when I was pretty young. The books were old-fashioned hardcovers with slipcovers on them – the slipcovers are long since gone but as I recall a lot of collected-edition type books of that era basically had the title and the author’s name on the cover and very little else so relying on the cover art to determine whether I would “find myself” in these books never arose – but even if there was a Chinese girl on every cover that would not have prevented me from picking up such a book because, well, it had a Chinese character on the cover and I was not Chinese. I was not seeking myself in those books – I was getting thoroughly and enchantingly lost in a world not my own, where characters did not think or behave as I would have thought or behaved, where the rules were different and everything was rich and strange.

“Through Desert and Jungle”, by Henryk Sienkiewicz: Yes, I am a European child and I read European authors. Sienkiewicz was a Polish writer – of adult historical novels – who happens to be a Nobel Prize winner; he wrote a book for what would these days be considered a YA audience, which was a cornerstone of my mother’s growing up, and then mine, and then I gave the book as a present to my young nieces when THAT generation came up to the point of demanding things to read. I loved that book. I love it today, still. It concerns the adventures of a young English girl and a young Polish boy, children of Suez engineers in Egypt, who are snatched as hostages to be exchanged for persons being held by the colonial government during the Mahdi rising. The kids ride on camels across the desert in the moonlight; they are thrown into the chaos of conquered Khartoum; they are tossed out again in search of someone who would know what to do with them; they escape, and in their travels they cross from the Sahara into the near-equatorial jungles and savannahs, meeting lions, and elephants, and warring black tribespeople into whose path they blunder, and dying explorers, and malaria, and they live in hollowed out baobab trees, and oh GOD it is wonderful stuff. I first read this book years before I, too, stepped onto African soil – and even after I had done this my own experience of Africa was far, far different than those of the two protags of this book (thank Heaven…) To this day I have never been in Northern Africa, the Arabian part of Africa, Egypt or Algeria or Libya or Morocco; I have never seen the pyramids, the dunes of the Sahara, the Nile, or the Suez canal. I may or may not get to do this in the future. There was NOTHING of me in that book when I read it – I was not English, I was not Polish, I had never been to Cairo or seen the desert or experienced the humidity of equatorial jungle or set eyes on a living elephant. But I plunged into the story which has now held three generations of my family’s girls, and I had one hell of a ride.

But all of those are more or less “real” contexts, in the sense that although they were unfamiliar at least they were possible, they existed somewhere out there on this planet which turned with me upon it. What of true fantasy? If it is true that you need to find yourself in a book of fiction in order to enjoy it or even accept it, how did true fantasy ever even get a toe in the water?

The Hobbit, by J R R Tolkien: There are no such things as dragons. Or trolls. Or dwarven kings under the mountain. Or hobbits, for that matter. And there are no characters in that list which I could identify with, even remotely. Oh, I have always aspired to be an Elf, but I can no more be Tolkien’s Luthien than I can be Cinderella – both are creatures of the imagination.

Yes, before people point out the obvious, I am aware of archetypes, and people possibly identifying with an ARCHETYPE of a character rather than the character themselves. But I ask, again – where does Imagination come into this? Curiosity? An itch to discover things that are outside one’s own purview, things that one might never see or smell or touch in reality but which become all the more real because they take such firm and potent root inside the potent imaginary scenery of our own minds and hearts? Isn’t this what books are FOR – the chance to imagine something that had been unimaginable, to look out onto the world through a pair of eyes which might perceive it differently from our own?

Do people seeking to find themselves and only themselves in a story – people who dismiss the story as inadequate, for whatever reason, if they cannot – really believe that a child is incapable of imagining the things that are not spelled out for it? If that is the case I despair for the human race because it is wonder and imagination, the kind nurtured in very young children, which has taken us this far – and which may still be the only thing that will carry us forward.

Elizabeth Bluemle writes:

“As a child growing up in the sand-colored deserts of Arizona, I loved reading about kids in New York City, or the swamps of the south. I did enjoy the odd book about my own landscape, in part because there were so few of them, but if I’d limited myself to books about kids like me in a setting like mine, I’d have likely been bored, for one thing, and grown up with a very narrow world view, for another. I was living my life; the magic of books lay in getting to live someone else’s.”

A commenter by the name of Gail Gauthier then comes in from a completely different direction:

“I think one of our reasons for reading is to connect with someone–the author or characters we believe to be like ourselves. Even when we’re reading to try out different lives, I think there’s usually something about the book that we connect to. We think a character is like ourselves or like someone we’d like to be. Or something is happening in the book that has some significance for us.”
As a reader – then (as a child) and now (as an adult) – I am not sure that Gail Gauthier’s comment speaks for me. I did NOT enter a book seeking a character I believed to be like myself, or even particularly want one. The “something about the book that [we] connect to” that Gail speaks of has always, for me, been the STORY. A story lived by characters whom I could believe were living it. It did not matter in the least whether or not the character was “like me” or not – and preferably it would be someone not like me at all, someone whose own take on life and their own particular worldview would be sufficiently UNLIKE me to teach me something which I had until that moment not known or been capable of knowing.

Elizabeth Bluemle continues:

“We have many missions as booksellers, but it’s a strange world when one of them is the need to defend children’s curiosity and imagination against the instincts of some of their most loving and well-intentioned guardians. “

To which I can only give a resounding AMEN. Let’s keep the books as portals, as gateways into the unknown, as a magic carpet which can take us to lands unknown and perils unnumbered, where we can go wearing someone else’s skin – learning what it means to be HUMAN, as opposed to just being ourselves. There are enough mirrors surrounding us all our lives in which we can peer short-sightedly and see only our own faces – there are more and more every day, and often life does seem, in an eerie and tragic way, to be lived inside a carnival fun-house where there’s nothing BUT mirrors to surround us. A book, a good story, is a doorway out into the green meadows of summer, into the dunes of a yellow desert, out into the stars. Leave the mirrors behind. Let’s stop trying to find ourselves in other people. Let us, instead, try to find other people in ourselves.

Full text of the Bluemle blog post, complete with commentary:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/660000266/post/770045677.html

It’s the books – adult or YA – with that little kick of scandal, power to stir, the gift to get tongues wagging, that you remember the longest.

The power of controversy was illustrated not that long ago by the book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey (yeah, you reemmber that one, don’t you?) The author, Frey, scored the highest possible publicity coup that an author in America can get today – he landed on Oprah’s show to discuss the book. She lauded it, gave it her stamp of approval… and then the scandal broke when the “memoir” was revealed to be, well, um, not, um, quite, you know, what actually happened. Oprah pointed a trembling finger and breathed, “You LIED!”

Did the book sales drop? No, they jumped. I walked into my local indie bookstore not too long after the Oprah denouncement only to find Frey’s book prominently displayed on the shelves as a big seller.

Oh, but then the furor died down.

So they rekindled it.

Oprah apologised.

Gues what’s going to happen next? Can you hear the cash registers ringing?

Kids’s books aren’t so much banned for lying about things as for telling the kind of truth that some people find acutely uncomfortable.

The winner of the 2007 Newberry Award (that’s like the Nobel Prize for kidlit) was a book called “The Higher Power of Lucky”, by Susan Pantry – a public librarian. The book featured a word which made a slew of public-minded school librarians fly into a tizzy and ban the books from school library shelves. No, the word wasn’t a four-letter word, or swearing, or anything remotely inapporpriate as such. No. The controversy arose about the fact that Pantry’s protagonist happens to note the existence of a dog’s scrotum, and called it by name. Not even because of any salacious intent whatsoever – it happens to be the part of the dog’s anatomy that is relevant to the subject currently under discussion at the time in the book. But oh, the storm in that teacup – an actual word which applied to a part of the human body that we’d like to keep under wraps crept into the text of an award-winning book, and suddenly it did not matter in the least that the award was one given for young readers’ literature – there was the issue of “appropriateness”, and what it was or was not appropriate for our children to know.

The years have passed and so, apparently, has the storm. But I do remember wondering, at the time, whether I should introduce the word “scrotum” into my own YA novel… just to see if I could get a similar rise out there.

Books are banned or challenged in schools and libraries all the time – there is now a Banned Books Week to celebrate these volumes, and you can purchase merchandise that proudly proclaims, “I read banned books!” And why not? Titles banned or challenged in recent years include household names and true classics. Here’s a sampling:

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

Colfer, Eoin. The Supernaturalist.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.

Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass.

Meyer, Stephenie H. Twilight Series.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye.

Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens]. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Baron, T. A. Child of the Dark Prophecy.

Judy Blume, Forever

The reasons given range from “sexual content” – even if teens have seen more sex on TV than could possibly be packed between the covers of a YA book – to “race/gender issues”, to “deals with the occult”. In other words, mostly things that make the PARENTS uncomfortable – it took an adult mind to call Noddy “gay”, and therefore objectionable. And it only takes one parent with a mission for the books to start their journey on the Banned Book path.

But take heart – look at some of those titles, some of those authors. They’re classics, old and new; some of them have been selling for generations, others, newer ones, are going to be doing the same thing as the kids of the kids who were banned from reading them re-discover the “forbidden” literature of their elders.

Some of the most banned and challenged of all YA books, ever, have been the seven books of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. All of them. All of the time. Constantly. Why?

Elizabeth Kennedy, in “Harry Potter – The Censorship Battles”, writes:

“Depending on who you talk to, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are either wonderful fantasy novels with powerful messages for kids, or they are evil books designed to promoted an interest in the occult since Harry is a wizard…. The latest challenge began in Gwinnett County, Georgia, where a parent challenged the Harry Potter books on the grounds that they promoted wichcraft. When school officials ruled against her, she went to the state Board of Education. When the BOE confirmed the right of local school officials to make such decision, she took her battle against the books to court. Although the judge ruled against her in the spring of 2007, she has indicated she might continue her fight against the series.”

Last I looked, Georgia has not been inundated by a gaggle of young witches waving tiny wands and chanting “Wingardium Leviosa!” Very few spells have been cast. Really. But boy, is the torch-burning mob of outraged villagers kindling not the books themselves but the sheer enthusiasm for them! For most young readers of average to superior intelligence and curiosity, a blanket “Thou Shalt Not Read This”, particularly when accompanied by nothing stronger than “Because I said so!”, is tantamount to making the reading of that banned material essential. Nothing attracts like forbidden fruit. I wonder if therre WERE any kid readers of Potter who were actually disappointed that they didn’t turn into a tiny wizard or witch themselves after dutifully reading Rowlings’ increasingly weighty tomes.

But even the witchcraft controversy gets old after a while – there are only so many times you can point to something not happening and try and claim it was because you “pre-emptively” banned the book in question. Something new was needed. And Rowling seems to have an excellent sense of timing for controversy. Just as the Pottermania was beginning to wind down, with no more new Potter books on the horizon, she turned to a packed audience at Carnegie Hall and revealed that DUMBLEDORE WAS GAY. She added, after the revelation, “You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! …Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?”

All new ammunition for the controversy-chasers. Now we had not only witches on the loose, but gay wizards, too, and surely, SURELY that had to be bad for the children’s morals?

Can you hear those cash registers ringing…?

There are other controversies out there, some of them focused on matters potentially far more “real” than a fantasy wizarding world. One of the latest kerfuffles to blow up in the blogosphere is the so-called “mammothfail” discussion concerned with Patricia Wrede’s new book, “The Thirteenth Child”. Pat Wrede wrote a novel which she described at one point as “Frontier Fantasy with Mammoths” – it was a fantasy “Little House on the Prairie” but instead of Native Americans Wrede populated her North American continent with woolly mammoths and other extinct beasties. The Native American tribes who would usually have made that place their home were noticeable by their absence.

The blogosphere exploded with outrage. Wrede had written a book that “denied the existence of an entire race”, and was therefore a Bad Evil writer who had a Hidden Agenda and had written the book in order to apparently erase a subset of the human race from the face of the earth. But the book to which her novel initially alluded, the “Little House of the Prairie” of beloved memory to many, had its own very serious issues – I read a review of it by someone who was descended from one of the Native American tribes from whom, essentially, the Ingalls family stole their homesteading land. In that reality-based story, the Indians were just as “vanished” as in Wrede’s book – because they did not MATTER in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s world. But her book was given to kids to read – and generations of them loved it to bits.

Wrede chose not to take the all-too-real issues of the Native American population – as we know them today – into her what-if fantasy world, and her avoiding the issues seems to be treated as far worse than Ingalls’s whitewashing of them.

I suspect that Wrede didn’t go that route not because she wanted to hurt anybody at all but because the issues that would otherwise have had to be addressed would have probably been beyond the scope of a YA novel of the ilk that she was writing – and if she had tried to address them in an appropriate manner there would have been somebody who would have objected on the grounds that she was being too graphic, or that she was stereotyping her Native American characters, or that she was making every Native American character a “magic Negro” shaman who could come along and wave a hand and make everything all better. Wrede’s “pioneer” family came from a magic-wielding world, where everybody wielded magic. Her choices, had she included the Native American population, would have been one worse than the next – she could have had that segment of the population have no magic at all compared to the settlers (raising the question, why not them if everyone else?), or she could have had them possess different magic to the settlers (which, if the settlers’s magic defeated it in a game of magical rock-paper-scissors context, would have begged the question as to why the Native magic was inherently weaker than the settlers’ magic – and if it was not weaker, then how come the settlers won…?) The issues are many, and complex, and there probably isn’t a right answer other than not to write anything at all – but also, here, there is a shot of story with a chaser of controversy. A lot more people have now heard of “The Thirteenth Child” than might have done had Wrede courted no controversy at all, whether consciously or accidentally. One wonders if the Potter Effect will step in and take the matter to an obvious conclusion.

So – some books are controversial because of manufactured drama, some because of any number of genuine issues that arise from them (to paraphrase a statement about greatness which seems to apply, some books are born controversial, and some have controversy thrust upon them…)

How do YOU feel about controversy in books, particularly in books for yournger readers? What really matters to you in books like these? What would be the thing that would make YOU draw the line if you were choosing a book for a young reader of your own?

What sins are unforgivable? And what kind of storm in a teacup is simply a stir-up to gather interest and reader passion, and let the wind blow where it will…?

Selected Bibliography:

James Frey, “A Million Little Pieces”

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1897924,00.html

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Pantry

http://www.readersread.com/cgi-bin/bookblog.pl?bblog=220071

http://ecochildsplay.blogspot.com/2007/02/newberry-controversy.html

Banned Books, Children’s Literature

http://childrensbooks.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=childrensbooks&cdn=parenting&tm=29&f=10&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.1.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.ila.org/pub/banned.htm

http://childrensbooks.about.com/od/censorship/tp/bannedbooks.htm

Harry Potter

http://childrensbooks.about.com/cs/censorship/a/banharry.htm

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/10/20/j-k-rowling-at-carnegie-hall-reveals-dumbledore-is-gay-neville-marries-hannah-abbott-and-scores-more

The Thirteenth Child

http://ilya1.livejournal.com/143228.html

http://elynross.livejournal.com/435519.html

http://www.reasoninmadness.com/?p=661