Karen Sandler

Category: The Writing Life

  • RTW-Guess This Pitch

    Road Trip Wednesday this week for YA Highway is a “Blog Carnival,” where they’re asking bloggers to post an elevator pitch of one of their fave books. Your job, readers, is to guess which book I’m pitching and to post that guess in the comments. The challenge for me is to pitch a book that’s not too obscure so no one can guess it and not too obvious so the fun is over too quickly. Hmm…

    Here we go:

    After waking from a coma, a teenage girl knows something is awry in her life. Her parents are evasive, her grandmother hates her and she’s been sent to a different, special school. But as she puts together the pieces of what her parents are keeping from her, she realizes that not only is she no longer who or what she once was, if anyone else discovers her secret, it will mean a death sentence for her.

    Hopefully that’s just vague enough that the first poster won’t guess it. Very fun!

  • The Right to Choose What I Read

    I’m new to young adult literature. That is, I’m new as an author. Of course I read YA books as a kid, pretty much picking and choosing at will from the school library. That’s how I ended up reading decidedly non-YA books like Kafka’s Metamophosis and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when I was 14. Thank God for a mom who didn’t fear provocative literature.

    Since I’m such a newbie on the block (my first YA, the dystopian Tankborn, comes out in September 2011), I’ve sat back a bit regarding the “kerfluffle” over an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Meghan Cox Gurdon. In her editorial, Ms. Gurdon declares, among other things, that today’s young adult books are dark and depraved. I’ve been unsure how to respond since I’m still working hard to get up-to-speed in YA. I’m learning as fast as I can, reading almost exclusively YA at this point, looking for the best, but also picking and choosing the books that most appeal to me.

    And here is my first quibble with Ms. Gurdon. Not every book is going to appeal to every reader. I’m okay with dark as long as there’s a wonderful character arc and there’s a sense of hopefulness at the end of the book. That’s why, although I voraciously read Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and am half-way through Catching Fire, I’m thinking long and hard about whether I will read the third book or even finish the second. I can be an emotional wimp and based on what I’ve heard of book 3, I might not want to go there. It’s a fantastic series, and I’m sure I’ll miss a lot by not reading all three, but I might just exercise that freedom of choice I have and put the book aside. Does that mean the books should be banned from schools or that teens shouldn’t read them because I choose not to? Of course not. That would be silly.

    Should a young adult have that same freedom to choose as I do as an adult? For the most part, yes. A teen reading is a wonderful thing. Yes, some books might not be age appropriate, depending on the teen. When I was writing romance, my love scenes were fairly explicit. If a mom at a signing asked if my books were suitable for her daughter, I usually suggested they might be okay for a mature 15 or 16 year old, but I made it clear how “fleshed out” the love scenes were. The mom and the teen could make a choice based on that.

    That’s not to say the daughter might not find and decide to read my sexy books herself. Is that a problem? It might be if the son or daughter felt uncomfortable with what they read AND didn’t feel they could talk it over with their parent. But if a parent and child have an open and free flowing relationship, Mom or Dad can talk over the content of a book with their teen, both before he or she reads it and after.

    The thing is, so many of the YA books I’ve been reading in my effort to become more educated in the genre are tremendously thought-provoking. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series and the issues of beauty and obsession with fame that it raises. The Hunger Games‘s treatment of not only oppression and insurrection but our fascination with reality TV. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind‘s handling of the dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice and where it could lead. These books are the Faranheit 451 and 1984 of our day.

    Who wouldn’t want their teens reading these books, considering these issues, critically analyzing these metaphoric stories? Teens are already thinking about these and even weightier issues, considering the world they live in. A novel can be a safe place to explore the darker side because it is fiction.

    Just my humble opinion.

  • Character Interviews

    First of all, I want to make it clear that I do not talk out loud to my characters (nope, not me…that’s not my voice you hear drifting from my office). But since it’s important to get to know my characters before I start writing about them, I do ask them lots of questions. So you could say I interview them. Just like I would a real, actual person. Except, honestly, I don’t do it out loud. Really.

    The way I do it is I fill out a questionnaire of some kind. Lengthier for main characters, more brief for minor characters.  The questionnaire will include some basic stuff such as the character’s name, height, weight, hair and eye color. Who their mom & dad are, their siblings, where they live. Small details that, believe it or not, I will sometimes forget. For instance, I don’t want my main character’s eyes to change in the course of the book from blue to brown to blue (assuming she’s not changing them with contacts).

    Once I have the physical details nailed down, I get into the internal issues–family dynamics, moments in the character’s life that had an impact on them. What are her strengths and weaknesses? What is his world view? What justifications does she have for doing what she does? What is at least one quirk that this character has (terrified of spiders, maybe, or extremely clumsy)? I also make sure to give them flaws. Perfect people are boring.

    Before I start writing and as I’m working, I also tend to keep a “notes” document where I keep tabs on certain story and character details. There might be an uncle who died years ago and I’ll make note of his name in case he comes up more than once. There might be some crucial backstory of a monumental turning point for the character that I have to remember to keep track of.

    And if my characters are non-communicative? My antenna immediately go up.  So, why don’t you want to talk, I ask (silently, of course)?  What about your background keeps you mum?  Problems with your mother, your father?  Your ex-girlfriend cheated on you?  Your younger brother died as a baby and you somehow feel responsible?

    No one in this world is a blank slate and my characters shouldn’t be either.  Something made them what they are at the moment my story starts.  I have to create that past life for them. That way I make them real.

  • What do you mean, I need conflict?

    I’ve been trolling through my storehouse of articles I wrote in the past, looking for likely material for my blog. This is partly out of sheer laziness (easier to rewrite something already written than write new), but also because there are some pretty decent musings on various writerly topics.

    The most recent one I’ve pulled out has to do with conflict. Creating genuine, difficult to resolve conflict between my characters used to be the bane of my existence. Okay, sometimes it still is. But it’s also something I enjoy doing because it’s part of characterization, which is my favorite part of writing.

    This particular article came about when a writer related to me how editors would tell her they “couldn’t engage” with her characters, that her characters weren’t sympathetic or dynamic enough. When I first started writing novels, I received similar feedback from editors and it was always a bit maddening because it seemed so vague.  As a consequence, it was difficult to put a finger on what it was about my characters that didn’t pass muster.

    What I learned after years of writing, rewriting, getting feedback, rewriting, etc., is that what was likely missing in my characterization, where it was lacking the “zing” that the editor was looking for, was lack of development of my characters’ backstories and conflicts.  While judging writing contests, I’ve read so many promising, well-written manuscripts that fizzled because the main characters lacked powerful internal conflicts. These internal conflicts, paired with complex external conflicts (e.g., they have to save the world from blowing up) are what invest your reader in your characters and therefore in your book.

    What is an internal conflict?  It’s a problem within a character that only he or she can solve.  Something so deep-seated, it informs every choice the character makes.  Something so enormous, it should seem to your reader that nothing will ever heal that wound. The issue may not completely resolve at the end of the story, but there should be enough of an arc such that the character at a minimum has new insight into this difficulty. Otherwise, your reader may feel dissatisfied with the story’s resolution.

    I like to use as an example my hero Lucas Taylor in the first book I wrote for Harlequin, THE BOSS’S BABY BARGAIN (yes, a bit of a goofy title, but the thing sold like hotcakes).  Lucas’s mother was an alcoholic and he spent his childhood in and out of foster care.  His mother let him down countless times, getting sober long enough to regain custody of her son, then falling off the wagon and losing him again.  Then, when his mother finally seemed to have her act together, was staying clean and sober, she was killed when their apartment caught fire.  Lucas was badly burned while trying, and failing, to save her life.

    Think about the load Lucas was carrying.  He fears caring for anyone–they might disappear from his life at any time.  He doubts the power of love–it neither kept his mother from drinking nor saved her life.  And his guilt over his inability to save his mother is a thousand pound weight on his heart.

    These are big, big issues that will require a novel-length story to resolve.  The trick is to make a sympathetic character out of this harsh and hard-edged man.  I had to make sure there were moments of generosity and kindness that demonstrated his true nature, showed the reader the man Lucas might have been if his life had not been so tragic.

    I always think hard about my characters’ backstories, what in their past has built the walls around their hearts.  I try to make those conflicts seemingly insurmountable, but as the story proceeds, to show glimmers of the characters’ true selves through the chinks in their armor.  Hopefully, my reader will care enough about my characters and my story to read all the way “THE END.”

  • My #ArmchairBEA Interview

    The lovely Melissa Montovani of YA Book Shelf sent me five questions to answer for my very own #ArmchairBEA interview. You can follow Melissa on Twitter at @YABookShelf.

    1. You sold your first novel in the romance genre back in 1997. What made you decide to switch to writing young adult fiction?

    Two things pushed me to switch to YA. First, I had had the opportunity to judge a couple of YA novels in the Romance Writers of America RITA competition. RWA awards RITAs to the best romances of the year in several categories, including young adult. I found I really enjoyed those YA books and that got me thinking about writing one myself.

    The second “inciting incident” (heh, incorporated a writer term there) was the difficulty I was having in writing a romance proposal that my editor liked enough to buy. I’d written 10 books for Harlequin’s Special Edition line. I was looking to enter into a new contract with them. But my editor passed on every proposal I sent him.

    During that time, I started toying with the idea of taking a screenplay I’d written years ago and re-casting it as a YA novel. Since there was a lag between when I’d send my editor a given proposal (I ended up sending a total of 5) and when I’d hear back from him, I started working on my YA idea during the gaps. I’d finished a rough draft by the time I got the fifth turn down from my editor and decided that I’d focus all my energies on YA.

    2. What type of research did you need to do for your new Dystopian YA novel, Tankborn?

    I had to research genetics, the Indian caste system and other aspects of Indian society, Hindu and Sanskrit names and words, and little odds and ends having to do with the geography of Loka, the planet that Tankborn takes place on.

    3. How does blogging figure into your self-promotion system?

    At this point, I’m just trying to get my name out there in the YA world. My goal is to blog twice a week, although sometimes that just doesn’t happen. I’m actually much more active on Twitter than on my blog, simply because a Tweet is so much shorter. But my blog does appear on my website as well, so that helps keep my website fresh.

    I think when I get closer to Tankborn’s release date I’ll probably get more active on the blog, maybe do some contests and announce appearances and signings.

    4. As someone who has never been to BEA, I’m always interested to know more about the good and bad points about attending. Can you tell my readers and me what were the three best and less-than-great experiences you had at BEA in L.A. years ago?

    Best: 1) I did an autograph session in the RWA booth and got to meet many readers. 2) I got to score many books. 3) I got to meet editors, including the one who was considering a book of mine at the time.

    Less-than-great: 1) The place is huge, so there’s too much to see 2) I only went the one day, so I missed many of the authors I would have liked to have met/heard speak. 3) Can’t think of a 3rd!

    5. Adult readers often worry that a lot of contemporary and dystopian YA is a little too dark and cynical for teen readers. What would you say to those who critiqued Tankborn (or other novels in these genres) on this basis?

    Of those who have read Tankborn, no one has described it as dark and cynical. I don’t think it’s nearly as dark as some, although with the issues it raises, I wouldn’t call it a light read either.

    What I think is key to most dystopian novels, despite their dark cynicism, is that they make the reader think. Their stories are often metaphors for aspects of our current society. Scott Westerfeld’s Extras is an excellent example of that. In Extras, the economy is based on fame, an element of our current society that sometimes gets way out of hand. By the same token, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games takes on our morbid fascination with reality television. It’s not too hard to imagine a show like the Hunger Games on TV in the not too distant future.

    Just as earlier, classic dystopian/SF books (e.g., 1984, Fahrenheit 451) held up a mirror to current society, these newer dystopian YAs are doing the same. If it causes us to stop and think, to maybe do things differently (better) in the future, I think that’s a good thing.