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!

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)