Wearing a Banana Skin While you Write

Meg Cabot on her wonderful blog wrote a few posts about writing for non-white characters if you are white, and her own experiences with racism, given that her adopted brother is black and she dated an Arab American while working at a dorm. Meg also said that one should not be lazy if you're writing out of your comfort zone: if you are white and you want to write about non-whites, you can't just dress an average American in a brown identity and call it black, or it will taste like buttered edamame (stirfried soybean pods) at The Cheesecake Factory.

If you are going to write about bananas, for example, read books about bananas, talk to people who've been in Bananaland, even buy tickets if you can afford it, zip on a huge banana skin before you write a fantasy novel with Arnold the Banana flaying the forces of Hungry Darkness, or at least before you revise it. Because if you take a white character and dress them in banana skin, then someone named Denise the Banana will call you out for it.

Which is all right if you're a white author trying to overcome your prejudice, but how about if you're non-white? Because I'm Indian, but I know little to nothing about Indian culture. As a kid I created an alter-ego Jenny Andrews who was Indian, but completely Americanized and a secret agent to boot. The most I know is Hindu mythology because we have a lot of books, and I do plan to write a book combining Hindu mythology and superheroes, but I know nothing about transportation or politics there.

And if you're Americanized, you're most likely going to write about white people because you mainly see them in the media and in school, and in your circle of friends. Even if you join the Banana Students Association, you may not feel comfortable writing about bananas because you know little beyond their sweet taste, especially when fried in butter. You might write about being an Americanized Indian, but you might also want to tackle with righteous fury the bananas who have been trampled on when everyone preferred apples.

The best way to do research on unfamiliar cultures is to read literature on that culture. The textbooks provide guidelines, but go with fiction, with essays, maybe even with artwork. One book I read for my manuscript was about Chinese restaurants, filled with surprising information I could integrate into the book. Use your libraries, both school and public, and read read READ. And it you want to tackle modern racism, go with this book:

This book provides a snapshot of 1960s racism from a white man who tinted his skin, shaved his head, and dyed his hair to appear black. Then he traveled in the Deep South to find the truth of racism. A disturbing fascinating, and heartbreaking study that will definitely put you into someone else's shoes. Along with a whopping dose of common sense.

Banana skins indeed. What will they think of next?

A lot of Yackum

You learn a lot from rereading first drafts. And second drafts and third drafts too, for that matter. Rereading "Murder in Panel Five," a satire on the typical Agatha Christie mystery, I've discovered a lot of what we call yackum.

"Yackum," aka "rambling," aka "unnecessary nonsense," becomes the vice of all writers when slogging through draft 1 of an unpublished short story. Novelists can get away with yackum, especially if they are literary elephants like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, but short story writers do not have that luxury. Unlike novelists, who experiment with their medium to the point of exasperating us readers, the short story writer has to tell a story. Period.

Types of yackum to look out for:

1) Dialogue- Usually worse in novels, but unnecessary or flat dialogue must go. If it sounds false? Cut it. If it has one word off and the word can't be removed? Cut it. Characters put the "yak" in "yackum".

2) Inner Dialogue- Even worse than outer dialogue because it occurs in the character's head. Aka Rambling for God Knows How Long, especially in a mystery. Show your character's reaction, don't have them say it. Yak in yackum, folks!

3) Description- Hairier than dialogue, but rely on your ear for this one. If you read at an open mic, you'll trim on the fly to avoid being cut off in the middle. You want concise and lyrical sentences. And if you have even one paragraph (four sentences) waxing on, the editor will probably slap your manuscript. Here you can break the dialogue rule and have other characters judge your protagonist, or each other, as long as you keep it concise and clear.

Have fun!

Great Literary MacGuffins: Titles to Examine

Since in an earlier blog post I talked about Literary MacGuffins that should be the title of your story, why don't we take a look at some classic Literary MacGuffins:

We read this novel in gifted 4th grade, listening to audio tape, as mentioned before; I finished it ahead of everyone else and mispronounced "sadist" for several days until our teacher put it on our vocabulary list. In a nutshell: Meg, the protagonist, goes on a journey with her precocious brother Charles Wallace and  schoolmate Calvin to rescue her father from another planet with the help of Ms. Whatsit, Ms. Who and Ms. Which, three strange ethereal beings.  

First, the title "A Wrinkle in Time" refers to a new term called a tesseract, which is indeed such a wrinkle. The tesseract links the book together because the three "witches" in the story use the tesseract to travel through time and space, and a mishap with a tesseract starts the book by taking away Meg's father. Makes sense, no?

And since we're talking about Madeline L'Engle, may I say rest in peace, since she died in 2007, and thank you for writing such a wonderful book.

The Importance of Reading Your Work Aloud

We hear this tip all the time if we write. It may be the most crucial tip . . .

And I didn't listen for about five years. I read other people's work aloud, especially poems that rhymed, and I read out my own stuff when I got the chance, but in terms of performing I tend to get in over my head. Reading out loud to others? Definitely. Reading out loud to myself? NEVER.

Why this negativity? It stemmed from when I entered a gifted program where we followed books on audiotape. With respect to my Language Arts teacher, since in his class I learned to love reading and developed my love for horror, audio works didn't work for me. For one thing, I could read faster than I could listen to the stuff; I finished A Wrinkle in Time five days ahead of schedule. For another, I believed in characters having different voices; now I know that the speaker's quality is much more important. If you have two voices doing about ten characters, you were dead to me as a fourth and fifth grader.

But now, having received about a hundred rejections total for all the work I have, and writing poetry for class, a habit I haven't kept unfortunately, I've realized how important word flow needs to sound. We may see the letters on paper, but we also have to hear them. And if your readers even in the classroom don't laugh when you want them to, then something is wrong with the words, not with their hearing.

Even better, reading aloud will give each of our characters a voice. Neil Gaiman at Mouse Circus gives the Man Jack a terrifying growl, while the Sleer truly comes off as a smoky creature. When I read aloud a piece with a supervillain, I gave the villain a maudlin British accent, which helped him appear even goofier.

In the case of a novel, individual voices are necessary for a novel where every character gets a say. Not just the villains and the heroes, but the anti-heroes, the helpers, the thugs, and minor people who steal the show. Democracy has a price, but it gives our novel strength.

Serial Titling: The Real Condensation Begins

Let the record stand that titling stories and naming characters are one of the most unpredictable events in terms of difficulty; sometimes it's easy as pie, as any author can tell you. Sometimes a character will come fully formed to your head, as what happened to J.K. Rowling on a train, but sometimes they just remain in the story like square gears that you can't really fit in. Or they're wood and the rest of the story is metal. Weird stuff like that happens.

With titles, though, you encompass all of your story's elements into a few words. Not all writers try to do this; for younger audiences, the titles might be more concrete (The Berenstein Bears And Too Much Vacation), but as you go into the scholarly set, people want clever titles with meaning. 

Most often, the title centers on the object mentioned in the title, whether it's a person, or a significant object. We call this the literary MacGuffin, because we, the reader, want to find out who or what the thing mentioned in the title is. (Macguffin: object that protagonists in a story want. The literary MacGuffin is something that the readers want.) In fact, Wendelin Van Draanen wrote two Sammy Keyes books when these MacGuffins popped up as titles, and she wrote to find out what the Sisters of Mercy and a Runaway Elf were respectively. Another great example is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, since Sirius Black, the title prisoner, is an integral character that the whole world is searching for. 

This strategy doesn't always work, however, because your literary MacGuffin might be cliched. If your book has a lot of MacGuffins, then you have to pick the one that encompasses the story the most. My whole story is about Magic Turning into Memories, but that title doesn't have the zing I'm looking for since magic is a necessary staple of fantasy novels and memories is a huge mouthful. So what is an author to do?

The solution is to make the theme sound less cliched. So I need to find apt synonyms for magic and memories respectively. Either that or use the theme of Midsummer and Snow, or something off about the woods, since all of these appear in the book. Hey, it might happen.

The Night Owl is Really a Cuckoo

As a writer trying to balance schoolwork with cartooning and possibly revisions, I have come across a rather exotic species, one that is worth keeping if one has the money and time. But as I have neither, I warn everyone else who is reading this blog: the night owl is not your friend.

See, the night owl is looking for only thing: your time. And if that time happens to be at night and you are a morning person and you're not used to taking naps, you a

re going to be very grumpy. You don't even hear him coming in because he uses the back door, with all his specialized gadgets. But if you do see him, he wears this cunning disguise:

Do not be fooled by this gentle exterior, diurnal writers. Anyone will tell you in the wake of the Harry Potter craze that owls are not the gentle messengers that will nibble your fingers fondly. They are expensive, noisy, and fussy And the night owl's true face looks like this:

And to be honest, you can't trust a guy who dresses up like an owl unless you know he has a teenage sidekick and that he's mean because he really cares about everyone except the psychopaths that killed his other sidekicks- oh wait, I'm thinking of BATS! Silly me!

If you DO have the money, you DO have the time, then you can make the night owl a rat sandwich. But tonight I'm closing my window and hope that he doesn't have lockpicks . . .

Balancing Cartooning with Writing

Things I have learned over the past two weeks:

1)Don't let the night owl routine dominate you; find the time to write, NO MATTER WHAT.

2) Don't get stressed, or everyone will hate you.

3) Biology is never easy, so always study.

4) Do a little bit every day, just to salvage your sanity.