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  Despite their decidedly anti-Yale bent, Sailor Boy and I have long been fans of The Simpsons. So when Heather (via Celeste) revealed that you can now Simpsonize yourself, we jumped at the chance.
Here’s me on the left. Golly, my hair’s gotten long. And since I know you all want to know what Sailor Boy looks like, here’s him. As you can see, he has apparently lost the lower half of his body in a freak run in with Itchy and Scratchy. Real shame.
Also, it’s SB’s Birthday this weekend. Happy birthday SB!
Still in deadline mode, but some things to note:
My friend, talented debut author C.L. Wilson has an excellent blog in which she discusses the intricacies of World Building. And since her first book is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read, I’d say she knows what she’s talking about. (Read more about her amazing new series here, or on the discussion page at Amazon.) Anyway, she says, in part:
“World building is not just for fantasy writers. Honest. All writers world build. It’s just that contemporary and historical fiction writers call their world building by different names, chief among them research, setting, and characterization.”
The entire series is well worth reading, but this part stuck out to me because, of course, my SSG books, which are very much real-world based, and have no vampires, fairies, or other magic creatures in them, also contain huge heaping scoops of worldbuilding. I cover an entire subculture, complete with its own rules, mores, jargon, etc, and I have to set up that world, its timeline, its history, etc., in order to be able to write the books. And I, too, make up maps. I have a map of the island of Cavador Key (in the third book). I have a floor plan of the tomb at Eli. I remember doing revisions and getting into conversations with my editor about exactly where the Rose & Grave tomb kitchen was in relation to the everything else, and how exactly they managed to shove Amy off the stair landing and whatever else I wrote about in the book. And though much of the setting and jargon is stuff I gleaned from the workings of real secret societies, I made up a lot of stuff as well. But whether real or imagined, I needed to make it understood to the reader… hence: worldbuilding.
And if I thought the worldbuilding was intense just from making up a secret organization, you wouldn’t believe the wake-up call that happened when I moved into the magical! Forget making up my own planet with its own climate and ecosystem (a’la Herbert) — I don’t know if I could even swing the “earth-like planet” of Wilson’s own high fantasy. Leave me be in real-world Rome!
(In passing, it’s much harder than one thinks to build a believable alien planet. There is a particular well-beloved SF series that was ruined for me when a supposedly educated-in-biology character, late in the book, remarked casually on the almost ridiculous lack of biodiversity on this well-settled planet. I only took a few biodiversity courses to complete my Geology major, but a lack of species indicates an unhealthy ecosystem — this is pretty much a rule. If I were a terraforming scout with even a marginal grasp of ecology and I found a whole planet teeming with uniform life like this, I’d jump back into hyperspace so fast you wouldn’t even know I was there. This still bugs me, years later. Why those idiots ever settled on that planet is beyond me. I was all, “Wait: there’s one tree, one bush, one bovid, one reptile, one fish? Run! Run now! Of course you’re all going to die!”)
Where was I? Yes, worldbuilding. Good stuff. Go learn from a master!
Speaking of worldbuilding masters, my pretend literary boyfriend* Scott Westerfeld is selling clothing inspired by his novels. What should I get? I’m leaning towards either the Special Circumstances v-neck, or the Polymath symbol long sleeve T-shirt. (I’d love the one that says, “You’re so 11:59,” but Mindcasters scare me.) I always wished I was a Polymath.
How long ’til Extras is out again?
* See the things I say when Justine is trapped on a train to DragonCon?
I’m pretty caught up in my book right now. I feel like the Little White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. “No Time To Say Hello, Goodbye! I’m Late I’m Late I’m Late!” (Except I’m not late yet.)
Justine talks about YA SF here. Aside from Uglies trilogy (and Peeps, too, if you want to be technical), and Feed, which is mentioned in the comments, I don’t think I’ve read a lot of YA SF either. I wonder why that is? Would After be considered SF? What about Lois Lowry’s The Giver books? Those were awesome. And there was this book I saw maybe a year ago, adn I failed to pick it up at the time and now I can’t remember what it was called, but it was set in the future and people were worried about germs or something, and this boy gets a rash and is sent to reform school in Alaska…? Ah… RASH. See I knew I’d remember!
A debut author friend of mine just got her first cover. And it rocks. I have so much cover envy that it’s not even funny. I’d put the elements in her cover in my book just so I could get a cover that cool. Speaking of covers, Colleen Gleason just got her newest, too. Where is the Cover Gods altar, folks, and what sort of sacrifices do they prefer? Animal, vegetable or mineral?
There’s been some interesting talk on one of my lists about whether or not you have to “know someone” to get anywhere in publishing. The answer to that is no. I really don’t understand why this myth is so pervasive, as pervasive as the one that says that you can’t get an agent until you’re published, but you can’t get published until you have an agent (both happen, rather frequently), or that no one publishes debut writers (this last one is particularly shocking to me because it means that the believer somehow missed the myriad articles written about debut authors in every paper in town).
When I started writing, I didn’t know a single, solitary other writer, and the only person I knew in publishing was a friend of a friend who was an assistant copy editor at a non-fiction reprint and translation imprint at Penguin, which, if you’re making a friend for networking’s sake, is kind of like trying to meet the President by buddying up to the man who trims the thorns in the Rose Garden. When I joined RWA, it wasn’t trying to meet people so much as it was trying to figure out how this whole writing industry worked. It’s not quick, and it’s not always intuitive. Luckily, there are a lot of resources to help you out. I’ve even written a few.
But the thing to remember is that no matter how many people you meet, how many connections you have, they are only as good as the work you have to present. By the end of my apprenticeship, I was face-friendly with a bunch of editors. They’d wave, we’d chat, they’d even hug me when they saw me at conferences, and then they’d merrily send me rejection letters for my books. It wasn’t personal. I’m sure they thought I was a fun gal, but that didn’t mean they were going to publish me. A total stranger with drop-everything-and-read material is going to trump the BFF with mediocre stuff every single time. This is a fact. And the person who did buy my book? (In fact, every person who bid on it?) Had no clue who I was. Because, think about it — the readers don’t know you either. They’re only buying because of the material.
I’m having the strangest sense of deja vu — like I’ve spoken on this subject before. But I can’t remember and a cursory glance at the blog archives hasn’t helped me, so here goes:
(Update: found it!)
Serenissima asks:
Since Amy is in college, was part of the marketing plan for SSG and UTR to crossover to YA?
Bantam Dell is an adult publisher, and the books have been written with that in mind, so the marketing has been aimed primarily at adult audiences. However, the folks at my publisher are incredibly, incredibly savvy about the marketplace, so they’re aware of the potential. After all, very few teens read exclusively YA novels. (I certainly didn’t!)
We’ve been lucky to develop a great audience in the teen market as well, and got named to the NYPL Books for the Teen Age for the debut. I’m THRILLED that teens have appreciated the books the way they have. Surprised? Not necessarily (most teens read up, and I imagine quite a few high schoolers are curious to see what happens in college). I do think the new covers are more “youthful” and everyone involved is aware of the teen audience that the books have. I’ve even seen bookstores that have that prerogative cross shelve. This makes me happy. The more folks that are exposed to my work, the better. Yet overall, my SSG books are adult books in content, publishing, positioning, and marketing.
I’m kind of curious as to just how old a YA protagonist can be without scaring off agents/editors. (Seems like 15 or 16 from the stuff I’ve read in that genre.)
My advice: make them teenagers. I can’t think of a YA book where the characters weren’t teens. I’ve seen a few where they were in college, but they were usually freshman or at the most, sophomores (or would-be sophomores, as in the case of Scott Westerfeld’s PEEPS), so 18-19 is probably your upper limit. I wouldn’t make them much younger than 15, or you’re looking at MG novels. Remember, most kids read up.
When I started writing Rampant, I was very consciously trying to break into the YA market, so I looked at teen TV shows, where all the characters start out at 15/16, and made Astrid 16. There are two other main characters in the book. One is 18, one is 15. I wanted the book to be solidly YA, and I think the issues I’m dealing with in that book are much more YA-related than in SSG. (More on that below.)
However, you’re not necessarily scaring them off. I’ve heard of at least two novelists in the past two years who wrote college-aged books and signed with agents who promptly asked them to rewrite the books set in high school instead. I do believe that you are opening yourself up in the market if you do that.
Having written a manuscript with a college-age protagonist who has college-age issues, I’m trying to figure out how best to pitch it to agents. Just curious on how you dealt with that issue in your endeavors.
My characters are all seniors in college by necessity. That’s the year you get into secret societies. When I was first developing the book, I spoke to a YA author friend who told me that she thought that 21 was too old for YA. Her opinion, and I’m inclined to agree with her, is that the situation with 21 years olds is very different. You’re dealing with people who have been adults for several years, with all of the responsibilities and rights that entails, can legally drink, have lived outside their parents’ houses (and often control) for several years. I have YA writer friends who get nasty letters because their books feature “underage drinking” and “underage sex.” Well, my characters aren’t actually underage for any of those things. They are truly young adults.
Which is not to say that they don’t have issues with their parents. But older adults have parental issues as well. It’s just a different scene, in so many tiny ways and several big ones as well. My protagonist isn’t being a rebel, a bad girl, or– most notably– a law-breaker if she goes into a bar and orders a martini. The fact that her roommate is basically living with a boyfriend isn’t particularly shocking. The list goes on and on.
My agent (genius that she is, she shopped it to both YA and adults houses) did get a few rejections from YA houses who loved the book but thought it were too old for the YA market. One YA house wanted to buy it if we’d make the characters freshmen and — wait for it — teenagers. (And yes, we got offers from YA houses as is.) We ended up selling it to an adult market and I couldn’t be happier there. I can’t say how the books would have changed if written for a young adult market. We’re three books in at this point, so it’s tough to imagine back that far.
What I do know is that now, in ROS(B), Amy is twenty-two. She has a lot more in common, both in experience and in outlook, with the protagonist of The Devil Wears Prada or The Nanny Diaries than she does with someone in high school. (Though Bella is getting married, right? So she’s totally got Amy trumped, because I can guarantee you right now, there are no wedding bells at the end of SSG.)
It’s interesting though, to move from Amy to a character like Astrid, who is six years younger, and a whole world away in terms of experience. Astrid’s never been away from home before, and to Amy, Eli is home. And that’s just the tip.
A few distractions. I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend. I think I’m officially over my prejudice against Matt Damon. I may even watch Good Will Hunting now. Unfortunately, I don’t think it was the best of the Bournes. The actual camera work left much to be desired. I couldn’t even follow what was happening on the screen half the time, which is unfortunate, because I thought the way the action was filmed in the last two movies was one of their strongest suits. I wish filmmakers would realize that super shaky extreme close-ups actually don’t put us in the scene at all, but quite the opposite. I can’t follow the action, and I begin not to care. I hate going, “Ho hum, another car chase where I won’t be able to tell what’s going on, another shot of Julia Stiles’s pores.”
All that being said, Jason Bourne is rather outstanding.
Moving on, I was playing around on Yahoo today, and look what I found: Avatars! Oh, this was too good to resist. I promptly made myself an Amy (in the left sidebar) for Rites of Spring (Break) and then, because one Avatar is never enough, I made one of Astrid, the heroine of Rampant.
Unfortunately, with Astrid, the templates Yahoo provides failed me (though props to having the “old Roman house” and the “unicorn”). Though with some hairstyles, they have a light, white-blonde option, they don’t with waist length hair, so I’m stuck with this darker blonde. Also, they don’t have any crossbows, not even in the “outdoor sports accessories” so she has nothing to shoot the unicorn with. Finally, I had her in the traditional costume of a hunter, but then the whole thing looked too historical, so I chucked it in favor of street clothes. Otherwise, yeah, that’s my girl.
 Speaking of YA, I got the most amazing package today! A box of books from my new editor at Harper Children’s, Kristin. Ooh! Books! All books I’ve not yet read (and in the case of Repossessed, not a title I’m familiar with, but it looks great!) Woo! Can you say “incentive?” The new Cabot! I’m so excited!
Actually, the note from Kristin even says “for your post ROSB-deadline reading pleasure.” Thanks, Kristin!
And, what is that on the left? Indeed, it’s Rites of Spring (Break) itself, all printed out and covered in sticky notes as I work my way through revisions. (Get all excited if you want, but the page shown in the picture is the same as the excerpt in the back of Under the Rose, so I’m not spoiling anything for you here.) I’m so making Post-It earn their 3m licensing, I’m telling you. I should buy stock in that company. Embarrassing confession: I actually went out and bought new Post-its because I didn’t like the color options in the first pack that I bought. The greens looked too much like the yellows. This is important stuff, people. Vital, really.
Because who can write a book without the perfect color of green Post-It?
…when you read your own book reviews.
So I finally made IvyGate Blog, the so-called “Gawker for the Ivy League.” (One year later.) The actual review is Spoiler Central (with warnings), so I don’t recommend clicking on this link: Ivy League Beach Reads — unless you’ve read both Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose. And if you have, check it out. There are all kinds of fun tidbits to be found therein.
The bulk of the review concerns itself with chronicling the real-life counterparts to the invented world of Eli, such as comparing my made-up society names to the actual ones. Also, they picked up on the origin of the name “Prescott,” which most have not. I’m incredibly impressed with the writer’s devotion to detail.
And then there were a few surprises. For instance, who knew that Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth were Princeton-bound? Not me, for sure. But apparently, it gave my in-passing description of an affair between starlet Marissa Corrs and George Harrison Prescott (in book one) a ripped-from-the-headlines flavor. Lucky me! Also of interest is the observation that my character Harun is actually the “high-achieving son of Pakistani diplomats.” I’m so intrigued by this revelation.
Anyway, a fun Friday diversion. Thanks, IvyGate.
Back to revisions on book three.
In the comments section of Tuesday’s post, Rachel asked:
Somehow I’ve missed your discussion on dividing the plot into four acts. But I’m fascinated. Do you think that would work for…say…the fourth book in a series, if the previous three were not divided into acts? At least consciously? The longer I do this, the clearer it becomes just how little I actually know. 
Rachel, honey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And you, Miss USA Today bestseller, don’t have it broke. Confession: Here’s where I feel all guilty. Even though I bought Stray the week it came out, it’s still on the TBR pile. Sorry! It’s been a crazy summer!
Anyway, what’s interesting is that, despite the fact that I’m a very dedicated plotter, I don’t think too much about structure until I reach the rewrite phase. As I said in the other post, 4-act structure comes pretty naturally to me. I think that some of this is what writing instructors are talking about when they say that writers need to read a lot. You need to absorb the building blocks of story like conflict and rising action and climax and resolution through reading of a gazillion other stories. So when I first read about the 4 acts, I just went, “Oh, I do that.” But I don’t usually know what an act climax is until I’ve written it. Sometimes I don’t even know what an act climax is until I’ve written the whole book and am looking at it as a complete piece.
So I tend to use the idea of structure post-writing to see where I might be letting my tension lag, or where I can punch up a scene because I now realize it’s an act climax, etc. But I do usually find that, without thinking about it on a conscious level, most of the ducks are already in a row. I’m just organically using the building blocks of story to craft my own.
And I’d put money on the fact that you are too. Now, here’s the point where, if I’d read Stray, I could email you and go, “You’re fine. Your act breaks are here, here and here.” But I haven’t. (Catch me in September?) However, I bet if you do go through your books, thinking about structure, you’ll find them just fine and that will help you see where they need to be for your fourth book.
The other thing to keep in mind is that we’re not always going to be looking at the acts in the same way, because each act can have mini-climaxes as well. I might come up with entirely different act breaks than another person would for the same book. It depends on what you think is the real conflict or crisis or etc. For instance, I was having a structure discussion with someone and one of us argued that the end of the first act of SSG is when Amy accepts the Tap, and another one of us said the end of the first act was when she’s completely initiated into the society. Both arguments have merit.
This is how the acts work:
Act One: Ordinary world and inciting incident
Act Two: Complications leading to a crisis.
Act Three: Consequences of that crisis leading to a climax.
Act Four: Climax and resolution.
So for SSG it might be (whited out for spoilers, highlight to view):
Act One: Amy’s ordinary world until she is initiated into Rose & Grave at the end of chapter five (pg 94).
Act Two: Complications of being a newly-initiated member of the society, dealing with her barbarian friends, the new secrets she has, her new society brothers, the patriarchs, up to the point where (crisis) the tomb is padlocked and the patriarchs threaten Amy and the others (pg 181).
Act Three: Consequences rapidly pile up, including Amy and others losing their jobs, Malcolm getting threatened, Amy starting to question whether or not she really wants to be involved until she makes a decision to fight back (pg 249).
Act Four: Climax and resolution (through pg 291).
And then for UTR, it might be (again, whited out for spoilers):
Act One: Amy’s ordinary world in the society, leading up to the point where they are directly threatened by the website (pg 103).
Act Two: Complications of that threat leading to the crisis of Jenny’s disappearance (pg 168).
Act Three: Consequences of her disappearance (Amy’s alienation from her brothers, her forced association with an enemy) leading to a climax where Amy discovers that she can’t trust anyone she’s been counting on throughout the book, including Poe and George (pg 274).
Act Four: Climax and resolution (through pg 352).
Theoretically, you could re-break all those acts with the focus on the romantic plotline instead of the suspense plotline. And that works too. (By the way, I am available for workshops, conference coordinators!) I find it fascinating that subplots will follow the same pattern as the main plot, and I personally like it best when all the subplots simultaneously climax, so to speak. I loved it when I was putting together my subplot workshop and realized just how many subplots of Pride & Prejudice climaxed at the Netherfield Ball. And Jane Austen never took a screenwriting class, so it IS something that just happens naturally.
At its core, all this is just jargon. It’s just people who analyze this stuff for a living trying to put a name to what they’ve seen work. So if it works to say that your third act climax is a little sloppy, fine. Or maybe it works for you to say that you’ve got a sagging middle. Or that the purple moon quadrant is imposing itself on the golden tulip sector. Seriously, whatever works. Just because a certain theory doesn’t parse for you doesn’t mean you aren’t doing it, or aren’t doing it right. It’s just not the way your brain has decided to recognize a particular storytelling technique.
 Bet you didn’t know I was this cool (from The City Paper):
As the Borders manager said last night, apparently the writer of the Secret Society Girl books is much better connected than anyone suspected.
Thanks so much to everyone who came to the signing. A special shout-out to lurker Robin. Hi, Robin!
I read, answered questions about my books, my time at Yale, my working wardrobe (hint: pajamas) and my wedding colors, and signed books. They had a positively enormous display of Under the Roses right out front in the window. Also, I found out that when I’m not undercover as Madeleine Albright, I’m undercover as Diana Peterfruend. Check it out:
Close enough, right? I’ve learned that people have a hard time pronouncing it, no matter what way it’s spelled. Man, that poster is big. I’m so glad that the Borders employees didn’t show it to me until AFTER the signing, or I really would have had a panic attack.
 Here I am with Borders publicity coordinator Stephany. (By the way, there are still some signed copies at the Rockville Borders for anyone interested in picking some up.)
And a good time was had by all.
Back to rewrites! This morning has been such a wash. First Blogger was down. Then my computer crashed. *my* computer. My Mac. Fearful, I did a huge backup, and that’s been my day so far. Pantalaimon the iBook, whatever am I going to do with you?
So today is the day of the big Under the Rose Booksigning. Luckily, I do not have time to be growing too nervous, since I will be working incredibly hard on the next book up until the time we hop in the car and head out to said booksigning. And since I know that at least one person got to my blog by Googling my name and “book signing” today, I hope that I will have at least one companion not named Sailor Boy. I do, however, have a tendency to get nervous about these things, in a very middle-school “I’m throwing a party, what if no one comes?” kind of way. (Sailor Boy’s attitude is “More candy for me!” Oh, yes, there’s candy. Did I mention the candy?) I’m also a bit nervous because my head is so much into ROS(B) right now that I’m afraid of giving everything away if someone asks me a question about UTR. As we established tonight during board games with my best friend and her husband, I have no poker face. None at all.
I haven’t actually done very many official booksignings. I did one last year on the release date of my first book, and all my friends came, so that was fun. I did one at RWA, and one at my house, and one at a bookstore in my hometown after a TARA meeting. All of those had pretty captive audiences. Other than that, I’ve been the queen of the drive-by booksigning.
In other news, I spent quite a long time on Monday trying to make a plotting board for ROS(B) to help me with the revisions. It was difficult for two reasons: 1) my method of plotting-board usage has changed somewhat wince the last time I made one for one of my books, and I hadn’t really realized how much that would effect me, and 2) the Office Depot near my house had a pretty crappy selection of Post-It notes, which lead to me being forced to use colors that I probably shouldn’t have. In the past, I’ve used a green that is more like the color of Secret Society Girl’s cover, but this green I’ve been using now is pretty close to the yellow color, so it makes the board look out of whack. Anyway, here it is, purposefully blurry to avoid spoilers:
 It’s tough to tell, but some of those are green and some of those are yellow. Savvy readers will note how very different this board is to the one I did for Under the Rose, last year:
And not just because of the colors. (Curse you, Office Depot, why must you thwart my organizational system?) But the big difference comes from how I have started to arrange my plotting boards, and how doing workshops actually helped me with this.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of Four-Act Structure. (I hear it’s just three act structure with the middle act split in two, and I can’t speak to that, because what I do know is that I’ve never once been able to wrap my head around three act structure, but four act structure seems as natural as breathing to me. However, whatever works for you.) And when I was working on a visual aid for a workshop I did on subplots back in May for TARA, I made up a plotting board for Pride & Prejudice, to show how the subplots weaved through each other and crescendoed during each of the mini act-climaxes of that book. To help illustrate that point, I put each act of the book on a different line of the board.
What I didn’t realize is that I could do the exact same thing when boarding my own books to help me out with structure. I was making the plot board and looking at it in despair, thinking that the storyline was really sloppy and meandering, and then I thought, why don’t I split it up into acts? And then when I did, I realized that I’d actually color coded things wrong, and that what I thought were two subplots were actually one.
It’s also much more clear what my focus is going to need to be in the revision stage of the manuscript.* Obviously, I need to do some tightening in the third act. I think part of the issue I’ll be dealing with is that I’m not quite sure which climax of the second act is the “real” climax. There are two subplots that climax (or mini-climax) there and they don’t happen at exactly the same time. I chose the “act break” as the first subplot to climax.
And now that I think of it, there needs to be some orange in that second square in the bottom row. That’s my other issue, I have “one more” plot thread going on in this book than I did in UTR. Though that’s not really accurate. I’m just counting something that I know I have to go in and weave more as its own plot thread, to help me out with revisions. I may have to redesign this a little, come to think of it, since we’re looking at a very different type of plot progression in ROS(B) than we are in UTR. I think this is, in a strange way, a more introspective novel, despite the fact that it’s far more overtly suspenseful than any in the series to date.
Oops, should that have been spoiler-whited out?
* Note: Acts do NOT need to be the same length. In modern fiction, the fourth act should actually be quite short. Climax and resolution only.
This may well be my last post for a while. I’ve got a busy week planned.
This weekend on Plotmonkeys, Julie Leto tackled the topic of POV:
There are few subjects in the craft of writing that are more perplexing to writers than Point of View. Most simply defined, point of view is the perspective through which a story is being told. Metaphorically, it’s the camera lens through which the reader experiences a story. Except in the oral tradition, telling a story is not the author’s job…showing the story is.
And to show, you need Point of View.
Thankfully, since I don’t have time to get Indignant!Diana right now, the comments section of that post avoided the whole “I never read a book in First Person POV” and “My writing teacher told me that only beginning/unskilled/hack writers use First Person POV” so popular in online discussions about POV. (I wish the same could be said for the discussion on a certain writing list I’m on now. It floors me that people are that ignorant about literature. Faulkner, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Melville, Twain, Poe: all the greats have used FPPOV.) But since, in the discussion, Julie did bring up my books, I wanted to expand a little bit more on one of the things she said:
“Some of my favorite books, by the way, are told in first person. Julie Kenner’s DEMON-HUNTING SOCCER MOM series, for one. Diana Peterfreund’s SECRET SOCIETY GIRL series for another. But these aren’t romances. They’re women’s fiction. The focus is on the women and their experience, so no one really cares what the other characters are thinking, which is why the limited first person point of view works so expertly.”
Secret Society Girl was the first book I ever wrote in singular, FPPOV. To date, SSG, UTR, and now, ROS(B) are the only books I’ve written in that format. I’d written short stories in FPPOV up to that point, but nothing else. And though I never say never, I think that writing in this format is one of my strengths, so you’re more likely to see it out of me than otherwise.
However, it is a point of view that comes with its own problems. I disagree with Julie that readers don’t care what the other characters think (though I understand what she’s driving at, regarding “leads” vs. “secondaries”). I think they care just as much as in any other book. Unlike a romance, though, where you have two leads, in a book like Secret Society Girl and its follow ups, any character not named Amy is a secondary character. You may care what they think, they may be a fascinating, multi-faceted, complex character with an important role to play, but they aren’t a lead, and they don’t get a voice. Therefore, the trick is to get across what they are thinking through Amy’s eyes.
This becomes difficult when Amy a) has no clue what they are thinking and/or b) when Amy has grasped the totally wrong end of the stick regarding what they are thinking. Which occasionally happens.
In general, Amy is a pretty reliable narrator. Because of the confessional style of the books, she doesn’t lie to the reader about what’s going on. She may lie to the other characters (and they may lie to her) but when she says something is happening, or that she feels a certain way about something, she’ll tell the reader. (There are other types of narrators, called “unreliable” who I find particularly fascinating, but have only ever written short stories using this. My favorite unreliable narrators are Charley from Flowers for Algernon and Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense. Sailor Boy’s favorite unreliable narrator is Verbal from The Usual Suspects.)
However, all narrators are to some extent unreliable, because you can only see what they see, only feel what they feel. The simplest way to describe this is to use as an example the time Amy is stuffed into a coffin at her Rose & Grave initiation. From inside the coffin, she has no idea what is happening to her. If we were in, say, Poe’s perspective, that scene would play very differently, since he doesn’t have a biased view of what is happening to her. But we’re not. We’re in Amy’s head, first last and always. It makes some scenes very interesting.
For instance, there’s a scene in Under the Rose where Amy has no clue what a conversation is really about and still draws a conclusion from it — one that colors her perception about a character almost until the end of the book. Now, this scene could be written in first or third point of view and still have the same effect. I could even later go into another character’s head, one who did know what the conversation was about, and as long as I don’t write that character as actually thinking about the conversation, I could keep it a secret from the reader. (Unreliable I like, but characters who actively and teasingly keep secrets from the reader in the “but she promised herself she’d never think about that” kind of way drive me nuts. It’s only very rarely done well, such as in Laurie Halse Anderson’s masterful Speak.) However, I get to sidestep that problem just because we never see anything but Amy’s perspective.
The difficulty lies in trying to get information across to the reader that Amy herself doesn’t know or wouldn’t believe anyway. During revisions for Under the Rose with my editor, one of the scenes she wanted me to reexamine involved a secondary character’s motivation. It wasn’t what Amy thought it was, but Amy was so certain that her perception was correct (she’s awfully forceful, that girl), that we were concerned the reader wouldn’t grasp the fact that Amy was mistaken. I had to write the scene a few different ways before I found the perfect balance of making it clear to the reader what the secondary character was actually driving at while at the same time not making it seem like Amy was stupid for not picking up on it herself. Because every character has blind spots. In the end, the way the effect was accomplished was through a combination of carefully worded dialogue and body language. But it did give me fits!
One way to accomplish subverting Amy’s (or any character’s) narration when she’s being “unreliable” is through the same technique you use to make a reader have sympathy for an otherwise unsympathetic character. No, not “Save the Cat.” You make another character have the same reaction. For instance, Amy thinks that George is the most beautiful man on campus. Now, maybe her taste is massively screwed up, and you just get the sense that George is gorgeous because you only hear about him from Amy. Maybe in real life, he looks like Lyle Lovett and Amy is just having a Julia Roberts moment. The way the reader knows that Amy isn’t just biased on this George issue is because the other characters occasionally remark upon how good looking George is as well.
The opposite of this case is Clarissa. At the beginning of SSG, Amy says Clarissa is a bitch. Nobody backs her up on this supposition. A lot of them actually seem to like Clarissa just fine. And in fact, at the start of UTR, Lydia, who is Amy’s best friend and will hate Clarissa in moral support for Amy alone, is confused when she finds out that Amy is dragging her to a party at Clarissa’s apartment. So there you see how Amy’s bias regarding Clarissa can not only color her friend’s opinions, but also the readers, and you need to have independent, non-biased sources, like, say, Malcolm, who can quietly subvert the opinion you’re getting from your narrator.
Today’s tip was brought to you by the number 16.
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Despite their decidedly anti-Yale bent, Sailor Boy and I have long been fans of The Simpsons. So when Heather (via Celeste) revealed that you can now Simpsonize yourself, we jumped at the chance.
