What do you call a bunch of librarians?  A pack?  A mob?  I hope it’s not a murder (it is for crows, you see).  Next month I’m presenting at the UELMA (Utah Educational Library Media Association) Spring Conference, where I’ll begin the session by pointing out that Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and R.L. Stine’s Welcome to Dead House are essentially (in terms of archetype) the same story.  I’ve never known any books to generate such antipathy in elementary educators as the Goosebumps books, so I’m a little worried that the session will end prematurely in some violent episode. 

If it doesn’t, I’ll claim much more than a foundational sameness between Great Expectations and Welcome to Dead House; I’ll argue for the following texts being riffs on the same elemental story: Pride and Prejudice, The Harry Potter Series, The Graveyard Book, Holes, Much Ado about Nothing, Fablehaven, A Wrinkle in Time, The Tale of Despereaux, Last of the Mohicans, Dracula, Dune, Little Women, The Illiad, and the books of 1 and 2 Samuel from the Old Testament (the story of King David).  And just for the record, I am NOT making a comment on the veracity or lack of such of scripture.  Archetypal theory is about narrative, not fiction; it addresses the structure humans apply to everything, including facts and events, in order to construct meaning.

Sound implausible, all those books being the same story?  Well, if you’re not a librarian you may have to figure out how and why this is true on your own.  Then again, once I have a presentation in my toolbox I’m not one to let it rust in there.  If things go well I’ll see about doing the presentation other places.  Then the world can share in the wonderful knowledge that Mr. Darcy is Darth Vader, Japanese Kabuki is only technically and cosmetically different from classical Ballet, and not only do all the world’s great religions believe very similar things, but that these things are taught using the same story that undergirds life.

I’ll let you know how things go next month, as always.  But next on the docket is LTUE!

James is almost back from his publicity tour for The Maze Runner, which has me thinking about how he got where he is (and has been over the last few weeks).  The answer is pretty simple: he wrote a good book, and The Hunger Games created a bubble for dystopian YA that raised his good book to the top of Random House’s list.  The first half of that forumla was produced through earned skill and a boatload of hard work over the years; the second half was born of providence, good fortune, or, if you’re not cosmologically inclined, blind luck.

I often meet writers who are looking to be the next Stephanie Meyer.  They actually talk about how to do it, strategize battle plans and the like.  This is a complete waste of time, and trust me, if you’re serious about publishing you have plenty of other things that will more productively fill every single second of your waking life.  Why is it a waste of time, you ask?  Because becoming the bestselling author in the world is a butterfly affect thing.  It is the cumulative result of so many different variables, many of which we are all completely unaware of, that trying to manipulate factors to bring it about is just laughable. 

It’s the nature of all popular culture—and by the way, phenomena like Harry Potter and Twilight are essentially pop culture events.  The biggest bestsellers are always products of adoption by popular culture.  Take the entire body of any story form for mass consumption, whether it be novels or movies or whatever.  About eighty percent have no chance of becoming huge.  They are simply too low in quality, targeted to too small an audience, not distributed widely enough, or something similar.  Some will be every bit as rich and worthwhile as any other narrative put out that season, and they still won’t have a chance to really break out.  Earning bestsellerdom takes more than deserving it, sadly.  You need sufficient quality, a sufficiently large audience, sufficient production and distribution—and a good deal of providence.  And what we find is that between ten and twenty percent of truly professional level stuff fits the first three criteria.  About the top fifth of any genre published has a chance to break out and make it huge. 

Why do so few actually do it?  Largely, it’s a matter of chance, but in this case luck almost always exhibits itself as word of mouth.  Word of mouth can be generated by innumerable factors, some of them quite silly.  In James’s case, he happened to write a book that reminded people at Random House of The Hunger Games—and he wrote it years before The Hunger Games was even contracted.  His timing was, in most respects, plain luck.  He happened to come out with a good book at the perfect time.  That is, in almost every circumstance, the formula for break out success.

So stop planning on being that next person who shakes the world on its foundation and makes Earth settle at a slightly different slant afterward.  For most who deserve such, it doesn’t happen.  And you can’t make it happen.  What you, and I, and any one of us can do is strive to be in that top twenty percent.  We can strive to be in the top fifth in quality, and write things that people really do want to read,  lots of them, and work until people in the industry realize that as well.  At that point, we qualify for bestsellerdom.  Then we just wait and see if the Fates pick our names out of the hat (hopefully, not to cut our threads).  If not, well, I intend to toss my name into that hat again, and I’ll keep on doing it as often as I can for as long as I can manage.

There was been a J.D. Salinger sighting!  At least if you count the documentation of a federal suit.  I read about it on CNN here, if you’re interested.

This is the gist of it: Some person calling himself/herself/itself J.D. California wrote a book about a sixty-year-old Holden Caulfield tottering about New York making an ass of himself, and the North American rights were just purchased.  Apparently, the book was first published by some Swedish publisher with somewhat suspect credentials—and no, the fact that the business is Swedish is not what makes it suspect.  In response, Salinger compromised his forswearing of the entire world enough to marshal a legal team to file suit.

It’s really quite an interesting situation.  Salinger has been holed up in New Hampshire for the last four decades or so, three of which he’s spent refusing to talk to just about anyone.  He makes Thomas Pynchon look positively chatty.  So you know this new book really has irritated him if he instigated a legal complaint.  I kind of feel sorry for him because he’s certain to lose.  I’m no specialist on the matter, but I do know it doesn’t take all that much of a variation on a creative work to escape copyright.  Just ask J.K. Rowling, among others.  The rip-off doesn’t have to be good, just sufficiently different from the original.  This work sounds like it will be sufficiently distinctive in its mediocrity, if nothing more.  Anyway, Salinger doesn’t strike me as the type to take his crowning creation Caulfield having manic and  moronic adventures around New York with much equanimity. 

If it were me?  I’d remind myself  that The Catcher in the Rye truly is one of the great English language novels, that it keeps selling hundreds of thousands of copies a year, and that a poor derivative will have the impact that a poor derivative deserves—something like a kitten’s sneeze rating on a hurricane severity scale.  Mockery and satire can affect the legacy of a great work, but only if the satire is as ingenious as the subject work in question ever was.  Salinger should relax, enjoy his Hew Hampshire freedom from the banished world, and enjoy his tenth decade of life—just not too much to cost him an eleventh.

Oh, one last thing: anyone who is interested in the true potency of voice delivered through strong point of view craftsmanship should read Catcher, as you won’t find much better.  Pay particular attention to the repetition of derogative terms Caulfield uses.  They’re so prevalent they’d be unreadable if that wasn’t exactly the way a furious, bitter teen boy would describe his world.  Caulfield is so dissatisfied with everything and yet doesn’t even possess the vocabulary to articulate his exasperation, even to himself.  It’s wonderfully awkward expression, readable only because of its truth.  A lesson any writer can learn from.

Wrote this yesterday.  Posted today.  Don’t look for a why.  With me, you mostly won’t find one.  

James and Scott had a very successful signing, if what I saw was any indication.  Due to another obligation, I had to attend the event early (6:00 rather than 7:00) but there was already a line about half the length of the store.  Waited in line for about twenty-five minutes, got impatient, then cut (with the permission of the store CRM) to say hi.  Met Scott for the first time (which was nice); met his wife Jennifer (nicer); chatted with James for a moment (not unpleasant, really).  Then I hurried to Salt Lake Community College for the 2009 Phi Theta Kappa Induction Ceremony, where a few friends serve in positions of leadership and as faculty advisors.  For those who may be interested, I dressed presentably (and that certainly wasn’t for you, James), with the exception of my shoes.  I repeat: presentable shoes make little sense to me, as who would want to present them or have them presented to one?  Here’s my blog post that’s kind of on this.

While waiting in line, I met a very nice elementary teacher and her son. He told me about all the books by local authors that he’s read as he passed by them on a display table. Then he did the same for a table of national bestsellers. (The discussion I had with this boy and his mother gave me an idea that I rather like, but I’m not ready to share it yet and commit myself. I’ll let you know if I make up my mind.) One of these bestsellers was The 39 Clues: The Maze of Bones, written by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) and released by Scholastic.  This is to what I referred in the title of the post.  I do not like this book at all.  I haven’t read it (and don’t intend to), and don’t refer to the content.  I mean I don’t like what it stands for, either as an artistic endeavor or as a trend in publishing.

For those who didn’t read it last year (I did and would have posted on it if I’d been blogging), Time did an article on The 39 Clues and its potential to be THE NEXT HARRY POTTER!!!  (You must address this non-book(s) and never-will-be book(s) in all caps to retain the privilege of writing in the English language, and any fewer than three exclamation points is just considered rude.  Or so I’ve been told.)  It’s a distressing article that any avid writer or reader should read.  Do so here.  Basically, beneath comparisons to Rowling’s impact on publishing and examination of a uniquely diverse media saturation campaign, it talks about how The 39 Clues is an attempt to move publishing to a television model of story production: narrative by committee.  Only in this case, it isn’t a committee of writers (which is bad enough) but of editors and others from the publishing house.  In essence, Scholastic is pioneering a method of getting books with as little dependence on writers as possible. 

But, you say, The Maze of Bones is written by Rick Riordan, and you don’t get bigger names in kids and YA than that.  True, but The Maze of Bones is not a Rick Riordan story; it is a committee-concocted story given to Riordan to write.  Apparently, being a perpetual NYT bestseller isn’t qualification enough to convince Scholastic that Rick could come up with his own story and sell it.  Instead, it’s preferable to give the top-of-your-line slot to a franchise produced by a think tank (with some feedback from the actual authors you hire to, you know, write the book). 

I won’t go into detail about the mechanics of this, as the article does a fine job of that, as well as expressing most of my concerns about this approach.  But here’s the heart of my displeasure: From the foundation of Hollywood, the movie business has done everything in its power to marginalize writers.  After all, without them there is no product, and there’s no way directors and producers are going to share that indispensable billing.  (Editors really deserve it as well.)  Television has transitioned securely into committee composition for the express function of producing formulaic material that is just new enough to be mistaken for possessing original facets.  Great story, in any artistic medium, is by its nature idiosyncratic.  When you get rid of that the brilliance is lost.  You may have a logically constructed, entertaining read; what you won’t have is a true connection between the reader and anything.  The assembly line can’t hide the fact that its foundational motivation is to sell books as quickly as possible.  There may be other surface motives, but you can’t hide the heart.  When someone (stress the one) writes a story, no matter how much they may strive for material success, there is a singularity of vision and purpose that will show through if they do the job right.  They just can’t be totally blind to the fact that something drove them to write this story in this way in the first place, and that something is what can really connect with a reader.  

Committees have no something.  They have lots of somethings, all balanced and shaved of sharp edges, that total a great big calculation of empty substance.  Even Rick Riordan can’t save that, not when compared with what Rick Riordan could have done on his own with a really good idea and some time.  It’s been said that committees are where ideas go to die.  Now, apparently, those dead ideas are to become stories that sell millions of copies.

So, where was I?  Of yes, balling my eyes out.  Naturally.

So, once I had the contract for GDC something hit me: I now had to write the book.  A kids book.  I wasn’t certain I could do that.  I’d never done it before, and as I’d written quite a bit in the previous few years, I assumed there was a reason I’d never written one before–I just hoped that reason wasn’t an utter lack of capability. 

It was a difficult process for many reasons.  First and foremost, trying writing a book 1/3rd the length of the shortest novel you’ve written previously, for an audience you’ve never tried to address, using shared-world restrictions, tropes, and compositional limitations (a two POV limit, for example, both pretty much prescribed).  All of this was new and, I confess, I didn’t much like any of it.  (The moral of our story is don’t sign a contract to write a children’s book when you don’t write children’s books, and haven’t read children’s books since you were, yourself, a children.  Unless you have to, of course.  Then by all means.) 

The length aspect had me petrified from the beginning, but it turned out to be the least disconcerting challenge.  I found that trying to fit my story into the larger narrative arc of the line (and the world) changed my conceptual approach to the story (as did the fact that I’d already condensed a trilogy to a single book with much diminished scope).  I suppose I took an episodic view of my narrative; I started to conceptualize it as an entry in a larger entity, and thus was more easily able to accept a relatively modest scope.  That didn’t make me happy, certainly, as my storytelling instinct is to go Dostoyevsky or Dante or Robert Jordan (that is to say, epic and massive).  But it didn’t move my nose too out of joint, as it were.

Writing for a middle grade audience and dealing with composition restrictions, however, had my nose upside down and bleeding.  GDC (like most fantasies, regardless of audience age) is about good and evil, but I wanted to make recognizing each difficult without calling into question the clear, distinct, and oppositional existence of both.  This involved every character in the book operating, quite frequently, with less knowledge of what is going on than the reader.  While some of the story is of the “What is going to happen?” structure, some employed the mystery paradigm of “How and why is this so?” and “When will the characters realize what I, the reader, know?”  To built this type of narrative where the reader witnesses a story that is substantially more complete than any individual character’s perspective allows requires seeing plot events from multiple points of view.  Only having two points of view to work with, and having them prescribed, made this much more difficult.  Also, because the book was to be part of a larger line (all written from the same ethos of R.D. Henham), I was constrained stylistically, which no author enjoys.  At least, so I assume from my frothing rages whenever I felt I had to discipline myself from doing anything too unorthodox.

As for writing for ten year olds, I wasn’t sure how to do it and am not sure I can do it now.  I hope that when I have a story that ten year olds will like, I naturally write it in such a way to make it appealing to them.  But my stories dictate the manner in which they are written.  I could no more take a story conceptualized for adults and “write it differently” for kids than I could the reverse; the “same story” for a different audience is a different story.  GDC is a children’s story, so I hope and believe I constructed it in terms of content, context and subtext, diction, and syntax fitting for that audience.  I suppose I’ll only know after the release, and I get to hear from the readers what they think and feel about the story.  In short, I’m not certain it’s possible to know the audience for any book, really.  I just did my best and followed C.S. Lewis’s advice (which is rarely a bad idea): write a story you would have liked to read as a child.

That being said, I tried to at least catch up on the basics of what was going on in children’s fantasy fiction.  The last middle grade book I’d read was probably The Cay by Theodore Taylor back in fifth grade.  I wasn’t in touch with anything in YA or children’s literature beyond the first three Harry Potter books, which I’d read to see if they justified the hype (they don’t, but no popular revolution is entirely justified by the catalyst, and I think Rowling’s work is as deserving of unreal providence as nearly any other writer’s might have been, so good on her).  My understanding of children’s literature was decidedly classical (meaning ancient and surprisingly British in flavor), as it consisted of vintage Lloyd Alexander, Madeline L’Engle, Roald Dahl, Peter S. Beagle, Lewis and Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevensen and the like.  So I started sampling the best and most successful (and yes, they are sometimes the same) of more recent children’s fantasy.  Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (my favorite children’s book of all time), Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (masterful story and writing, though not a children’s series), Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven series, etc. 

It was very much like studying for a test while taking it–in a class you’ve never before attended.  Yet somehow, that initial draft turned out quite well.  Mirrorstone gave me nearly a year before the rough draft was due.  I had it to Stacy in three months.  (See March 3rd’s post for hint about patience if you want to know the content of the following nine months.)

Next time: A Tale of Two Editors, or Vivisection Isn’t That Bad (Even for Whiners)