A lot of people having been sending me Yale new recruitment video with gasps of horror. Oh, it’s so cheesy! Oh, it’s so campy! Oh, it’s so ridiculous!
Yeah, sorry, guys, I’m not with you there. I loved the video. I thought it was creative and poignant, and it reminded me of the feeling I got on my own high-school visit to Yale, when I got the feeling that I didn’t at the other universities I visited. When I knew that this was the college for me. Yes, I shed a bit of a tear. What can I say?
And then afterwards, just because Sailor Boy and I are cheesy like that, we put this on:
Sometimes Google Alerts sends me the most awesome things. Like today, I got a link to this amazing fanmade movie trailer, that imagines Secret Society Girl as a Roland Emmerich thriller starring Isabella Swann, Little J, and Cyclops.
While in New York with Mitali last week, I was talking about the secret stories I wrote in 2009. In the lead-up to the release of the final Secret Society Girl novel, Tap & Gown, I wrote a bunch of short stories told from the perspective of the other characters in the series. They were released first as password-protected goodies for subscribers to my newsletter, and then later for everyone on the website.
I did it for fun, and to celebrate the conclusion of my first series, but it definitely re-awoke in me a love for the short story format. I loved it so much, I went out and sold a few new short stories, which will be out this year. And the fan response was great. I know a lot of folks read them and discussed them. One fan even translated one into Portuguese for my Brazilian readers.
I’m swamped with work right now, so you probably aren’t going to see much of me until after the new year.
But I did want to share with you two things. Thing the first is from my fan community, a highly amusing fan imagining of what would happen if Astrid Llewelyn joined Rose & Grave. (Which, obviously, she would first have to graduate from high school, then matriculate to Eli, then do really well there for four years, then decide that the only thing she wants to do, having escaped her nunnery, is tie herself to another old musty building filled with bones two days a week. Which is a stretch, but let’s just run with it.)
Speaking of secret society buildings, yes I have been pointed to this video of what they are calling “allegedly” Skull & Bones. I can tell you: nothing alleged about it. That is indeed the COURTYARD of the Skull & Bones* tomb on the Yale campus. Let’s give the dude a prize for hopping the fence with a video camera. Please note: you can actually see this courtyard for yourself by going to New Haven and peeking in down the alley between the tomb and one of the Art History buildings. (This is why, in Under the Rose, the knights lose that statue they have to break into Dragon’s Head to retrieve. It’s because it’s in the courtyard, and anyone who wants can just hop in and take it.) The “underground” portion in the video is a cistern/construction site, because, as they teach you in introductory Geology classes at Yale, the foundation of the Skull & Bones building was laid wrong, and is crumbling, and periodically needs to be reinforced. When I was at Yale, you would constantly see construction workers wandering in and out of the Skull & Bones tomb.
If anything, this video merely reinforces the message of the SSG books, which is thatthese places are not as mysterious and unreachable as you think.
Oh, and if you look there’s MUCH better footage of the tomb available on the internet. No, I won’t tell you where.
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* I have reached a point where I don’t know if I’m talking about real places or fake places anymore. I had to stop myself from typing Rose & Grave just then.
So I got up on the rightest side of the bed this morning. To start with, it’s a gorgeous day outside. Bright and clear, not too cold. And I was in a good mood already because I did some serious work yesterday, and I’m still buzzing from that.
And then I found out that Teenreads.com is recommending RAMPANT on it’s 2009 holiday gift buying guide, What To Give, What To Get.
“It was the premise (in four words: “girls hunt killer unicorns”) that initially drew me in, but the fantastic, battle-strewn plotting and frantic pace that kept me there. For the first time in ages, I stayed up late–too late!–to read, consuming the entire book in two big night-time chunks.”
Also:
“Peterfreund puts a remarkable deal of care into crafting her urban-fantasy world, particularly the mythology behind the unicorns. We’re given a small handful of bloodthirsty species, and she even manages to make two unicorns into believable characters. Though one unicorn, Bonegrinder, is tame, she certainly isn’t a saccharine-Lisa-Frank-kind-of unicorn, but instead a gritty, feisty, and fiercely loyal killer.”
It’s possible Bonegrinder and Phil are going to have to have a cage match for “most popular character in Rampant.
And then, to my surprise, some reviews popped up of Secret Society Girl. Like Helgagrace’s:
“…an action-packed series opener that had me eagerly ordering the second book through ILL.”
“Usually when I read YA or chick-lit (of which this could be considered both), I find that I dislike the characters. This is an exception. I love Amy and her spunky, bold personality. I love that she has real problems (best friend in love with her, roommate issues, making the grade on that final paper, boy troubles) in addition to her heavy Rose & Grave issues. And the guys in the book—swoon. Oh, boys. I love a good male character who I can fall in love with and, honestly, these books have more than one! Sure, it might not be as problematic as the Team Edward v. Team Jacob debate, but I bet some arguments could ensue about just who is best for Amy.”
And, last but CERTAINLY NOT LEAST, Alexa Barry makes my day complete by naming Astrid & Giovanni #6 on her top 10 favorite literary couples of 2009. She shares one of their more… um, close scenes… then says, “Seriously, after this, I don’t know how you’re still a Unicorn Hunter, Astrid!” LOL
Okay then! And now I’m off to squander my good mood making the dogs and house look presentable again. It’s very muddy outside.
Sailor Boy and I have an old joke based on something we once saw on Felicia Day’s blog, or perhaps twitter feed. Day said something to the effect of “Saw an audition announcement looking for ‘a Felicia Day type.’ Guys, I am a working actress.”
So according to all those Q&As, which time after time name-checked Secret Society Girl, I’m New Adult.
I’m intrigued by the team at St. Martins’ new mission. Intrigued because my standard answer to the dozens of emails I get every year from aspiring writers frustrated by all the rejections they’ve received from editors and agents calling their college-set books too old for YA, not of interest to adult readers and how did I do it is: it’s not an easy sell. The fact that my book sold in a week and a half after submission in a six way auction is a bit misleading and more a factor of the time period in which we sold the book (YA heating up, adult chick lit winding down, my book straddling the fence) and the subject matter of the book (not just “college” but “secret societies” in a year that The Da Vinci Code was king, and a short six months after 2 Skull & Bones members were vying for the US presidency).
Most of these writers end up revising their books down to high school and selling them as YA. I know one who revised it down to middle school and has a crackerjack MG series going on right now.When I sold SSG, we got rejections from YA houses for being “too old.” Some YA houses offered, and one even offered upon the condition that I rewrite the characters to be 18 year old college freshmen.
Those of you who have read the SSG series (oh, and I wholeheartedly recommend that each and every one of you who hope to write New Adult for St. Martins run out and buy the entire series right away — you know, for research purposes. I only have your best interest at heart) know how vastly that would have changed the tone and storyline.
When I wrote the proposal for SSG, I thought (like all those people who email me) that it was young adult. My agent very wisely realized it could go either way, and the rejections we received from young adult houses bore that out. After we sold it as adult novel, it was developed as such, completed as such, and the series was written with a slightly older audience in mind. If you recall, PREP was really big then. It was a story about a high school girl written for adults.
When SSG was sold and then came out, we were living in a very different literary marketplace. Young Adult as a marketing category to be reckoned with was just starting to heat up. Twilight came out late in 2005 (I sold SSG in April of 2005) and though a bestseller very soon after its release, was not the market juggernaut we know today. In the adult writing community, you were just starting to see established writers jumping the chick lit ship for YA: folks like Jenny O’Connell, Sarah Mlynowski, and Ally Carter. YA was still pretty young. You didn’t see quite so many –if any! — plotlines revolving around marriage and motherhood (hello, Breaking Dawn, Impossible, Ice, A Curse Dark as Gold, Madapple). It was an entirely different landscape.
Chick lit, which has enjoyed an enormous popularity for the first part of this decade, was also just fizzling out. The summer my book came out, marketed as chick lit, Curtis Sittenfeld (author of the aforementioned Prep) called chick lit writers sluts in The New York Times and participated with several other women writers in an ill-tempered anthology mocking and degrading their fellow writers who did write in that genre. Urban fantasy, which has now stepped in as the genre of choice for 20-something women, was barely a blip on the radar. The backlash against “pink books” (my hardcover was pink) was intense, and intensely disturbing for a baby debut author who got shoved into the middle of it and was asked at every interview to respond to the allegations that I was single handedly destroying the face of literature as we knew it. A New York Times bestselling author who gave my book away on her blog on its release date admitted it looked good, if you liked books about shoes. (Though my characters wear shoes — a common trait of characters in books of all genre — I don’t think they ever mention the fact.)
In passing, it’s interesting to me the way that urban fantasy has become the new chick lit. You’ve got the same, young, usually first person, almost always snarky, female voice. You’ve got the twenty-something character usually stuck in a scut job (before she realizes she’s the last in a long line of vampire slayers/werewolves/fallen angels/what-have-you), you have the romantic subplot, and you have the mockable/interchangeable covers (instead of candy colored headless chicks wearing high heels, you have magenta and indigo colored headless chicks in leather pants with swords).
Anyway, Secret Society Girl came out, an adult book in the adult section. Adults read it. And teens read it. Lots more teens, I htink, than anyone expected. It got named in the NYPL’s Books for the Teen Age list. My publisher looked at how well YAs like Gossip Girl and Traveling Pants were selling to the adult market (see, it was heating up) and rebranded my paperbacks with Gossip Girl style covers, hoping to hit a crossover market. They set the price of the trade paperback at a teen-friendly and “I’m living in a fifth floor walk up closet with three friends and eating ramen” post-grad-friendly $10 (except for the fourth one, and that’s a whole other story). Young, post grad, ramen-eating young adults read it. More teens read it. Some adults read it and were totally disgusted that it was not marketed to teens. Some adults read it and were totally disgusted that they thought it was marketed to teens.
In some places, it is. Many of my foreign rights sales were to teen imprints, and the books there are released as young adult novels. This is not unusual, in either direction. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is published as teen here but adult in Australia. Ditto Graceling and Fire (teen here, adult in the UK). Some independent stores here in the U.S. (as well as a few chain stores where they know me) cross promote the books in the adult and YA section. I watch with interest the rebranding of Maria V. Snyder and PC Cast’s old adult novels as YA novels in the new HarlequinTeen imprint, and wonder if that would benefit the series.
And I watch with interest the creation of this new marketing category. “New Adult.” As with the explosion of chick lit in the early part of this decade, there are some YA titles out right now that probably shouldn’t be classified as such. Fire of Fire is a teen, I guess (barely), but I read plenty of “adult” romances where the heroine is nineteen as well, and they aren’t YA for all that. The ubiquitous talk of taking lovers and controlling one’s own landed property and armies and who sired who else’s illegitimate bastard children in Fire just didn’t have a YA feel to me. I mean, Hamlet’s a teen too, you know? (Cf. with Graceling, where you got the sense she was a child under the thumb of her uncle and how the book was about her escaping that). Fire, note, is not published as YA overseas. There are other books out, especially of the “I’m a successful UF writer doing YA UF right now” variety that read just like the adult versions of those authors books, except they say the protag is 16. There are “adult” UFs, like Rachel Vincent’s bestselling STRAY books that read younger to me than some of these new YAs. Faythe starts her journey from grad school.
I suppose that would fall under “New Adult” too.
I am curious to see how this does. I’m curious if, when there’s a place that the target market can go to for books, if it will increase the sales (much like creating a YA place did with YA). (however, it didn’t work for Dorchester’s Shomi line, though that might have been too focused on the niche market of futuristic cyberpunk, and did not have the leather-clad covers that were selling so well for the UF crowd).
I like that when people email me now I can tell them that there is possibly a place for their college-aged protag at St. Martins. Many of their strategies seem familiar to me: lowering the price point on the paperbacks to YA-friendly/ramen-friendly levels, marketing to a crossover audience while shelving in the adult section and hoping teens read up. And hey, if this becomes a thing, perhaps it will widen the audience for my SSG books. I’ve already seen folks going out to buy it because of the online discussions (thank you, St. Martins and everyone else, go check them out!)
And thank you also for making me feel, even for a moment, a little bit like Felicia Day.
There’s been a lot of talk around the blogosphere recently about the general love of bad boys. I’ve seen a few folks saying that nice guys can work too (and a few more actually claiming “bad boy” status on characters I would certainly categorize as “nice guys”) but it’s pretty much nothing compared to the wave of bad boys taking over books.
My writer friends have been noting the phenomenon as well. One writer was bemoaning the current trend of “the badder the better” and saying it used to be the bad boy hero was some dude who’d just killed a man. Then it became an assassin with a heart of gold. Then just an assassin. Then just a murderer. Another writer wondered if this onslaught was a factor of readers wanting to live vicariously through the exploits of a fictional heroine who walks on the wild side with a lover who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But, hasn’t that always been the case with bad boys in fiction? This isn’t a NEW trend. So why now are books filled with ever more reprehensible men?
Bad boys never did it for me. I never had a thing for Heathcliff (abusive, horrible puppy-killer!) or Mr. Rochester. I liked Gilbert Blythe and the fine, upstanding, stick-in-the-mud (if jerky) Mr. Darcy. (Actually, I *really* liked Captain Wentworth, who I suppose had the technical bad boy edge of being a privateer.) I thought Angel was a sociopath, and though I liked Spike as a character, I was never attracted to him and found his relationship with Buffy to be utterly laughable (as opposed to his relationship with Drusilla, which I actually found quite effective and moving). Me, I liked Riley — til they ruined him, that is.
(It is important to note that I do not think that angst=bad boy. Edmund Pevensie, upon whom I have a crush I’ve actually been paid to write about in detail, is angsty — but not a bad boy. He had one little lapse in judgment, and proceeds to spend the rest of the books atoning for it. A lot of bad boys are, however, angsty, which is usually our entry into sympathizing with them.)
So the only bad boy I ever fell for was Logan Echolls of Veronica Mars. And I fell hard. Perhaps it helped that Logan was still a child, and it was possible for him to rise above his abusive father and horrific home life that was making him into a psychotic jackass (See above re: angst and sympathy). I watched the end of the first season of VM with my heart in my throat worried/terrified that Logan had murdered his ex-girlfriend Lilly in a fit of jealous rage. And through it all, I loved him. My one bad-boy crush.
Perhaps my love for Logan helped when I found myself crafting my own bad-boy love interest — or what one reviewer (positively, if you can believe it) called “the asshole love interest.” It certainly hadn’t been my intention to write that guy, and it was really challenging too, to make it believable — to me — that a reasonable woman would take that kind of risk with her heart or with her safety. It took the better part of a book to set up a situation where I could even get her to a point where she’d initiate it, and another book entirely to get the relationship off the ground. It had to be believable for me.
And it worked, if the reader responses are anything to go by. People love Poe. I sometimes wonder how much they love him, and how much they love the trope of the bad boy. I worked hard on him, but most folks were on board right from the start. There’s something about bad boys that gives them that capital. Ironically, though bad boys have a population of readers ready to love them from the word go, good boys have to work five times as hard.
Here are the struggles they face:
If they are sweet and considerate, they are perceived as weak.
If they are steadfast, loyal, and sure of their feelings for the girl, they are perceived as desperate, lying, or too good to be true.
If they are fine upstanding citizens, they are perceived as bland and goody-two-shoes.
And to those naysayers, I present Mr. Lloyd Dobler:
Let’s face it, we all want John Cusack standing outside our house with a boombox.
And the whole point of Say Anything, really, is that Lloyd embodies everything that a bad boy is not. He’s sweet, and considerate, and unassuming, and steadfast, and stand-up, and absolutely, unequivocally in love with a girl that everyone thinks outclasses him.
MIKE: I wanted to ask you: how’d you get Diane Court to go out with you? LLOYD: I called her up. MIKE: Yeah, but how come it worked? I mean, like, what are you? LLOYD: I’m Lloyd Dobler. MIKE: This is great. This gives me hope. Thanks.
Lloyd isn’t boring or weak (he can manhandle drunks at a party pretty handily), but he’s also pretty accepting of the fact that his general lack of ambition and his vague idea of being a “professional kickboxer” doesn’t hold a candle to Diane’s future and destiny. So why do we like him so much?
A friend of mine told me it’s because Say Anything is, ultimately, Lloyd’s story. It’s not the story of a high-powered ambitious girl who accepts the gentle love and devotion of a nice guy like Lloyd Dobler. It’s about Lloyd, everyone’s favorite everyman, who through true love and devotion wins his prize of the beautiful girl. We’re with Lloyd. We really want him to get his heart’s desire, and when he does, we cheer.
But what if this was Diane’s story? Would we then perceive Say Anything as being about a very successful girl who takes pity on the class slacker, has a little summer romance, and when her life goes all topsy-turvy, settles, knowing this guy is willing to be her house-husband and general shoulder to lean on in England? Comforting, sure, but not exactly the stuff of high passion.
Heck, even Lloyd’s cadre of girlfriends (a delicate balancing act, from a writer’s perspective, to present Lloyd as being platonically beloved by women without coding him as someone who is not boyfriend material) have to have a discussion about his catch-factor:
REBECCA: Hey, I know this is a strange thing to say, but maybe Diane Court really likes Lloyd. COREY: If you were Diane Court, would you honestly fall for Lloyd? (long pause) Yeah. DC: Yeah! REBECCA: Yeah.
And maybe it also helps that Lloyd is so in love with Diane — standing-outside-the-window-with-a-boombox kind of love. But of course, that kind of thing can backfire on a nice guy. In high school, my friends and I used to say that a romantic gesture had nothing to do with the gesture — it was the guy doing it. If you liked the guy sending you secret notes and flowers, it was romantic. If you didn’t, it was lame and stalkery. If it wasn’t cutie-pie John Cusack — Lloyd Dobler who we were all rooting for — standing out there with the boom box, we’d probably recommend that Diane call the cops.
I ran into that problem myself with Brandon. The sweeter and more romantic Brandon was to Amy (and, most importantly, the less that Amy responded to it) the more his actions were viewed by the readership as lame and desperate. So maybe it’s that Amy actually likes the equally lame (from an objective standpoint) stuff that Poe pulls. I mean, a half-eaten pack of LifeSavers as a present? Not exactly diamonds and chocolates.
As the reactions to the boys in the SSG series came in, I was fascinated by what readers chose to believe of Amy’s narration and what they discarded. All first person narrators are to some extent, unreliable, in that the reader only sees what they see. Even if they are telling the absolute truth to the reader, they are not omniscient, and they bring their own biases into the situation. Take, for example, Amy’s initial reaction in SSG to Clarissa’s overtures in the library. Because Amy hates Clarissa, she thinks Clarissa is trying to be bitchy to her and to question Amy’s right to be tapped by Rose & Grave. Later, of course, we discover that Clarissa was honestly curious. Readers assume Amy’s version of events, and are corrected only when Amy is.
(Of course, some of them are never corrected. I am always surprised by the number of letters I get from people who hate Clarissa, even though Amy grows to love her.)
So perhaps readers’ disdain for Brandon’s romantic efforts is a result of Amy’s disdain. And yet, Amy is plenty disdainful of Poe through both SSG and UTR, and I got lots of letters at the end of UTR that were pro-Poe. (Which, honestly, was a relief, given what I was about to do with the storyline.) It’s hard for me to say, since I’m the writer. Were there subtle manipulations coding the reader to root for Poe over Brandon? Sure, why not? Are my skills as a writer, then, not up to snuff if I haven’t succeeded in making you root for the romantic coupling of my choice?
Now there’s a question to get neurotic over.
It’s interesting that there seems to be a definite line between “steadfast” and “obsessive”. The former is the realm of the good boy, and it’s apparently boring and desperate. The latter is the realm of the bad boy (he climbs in your bedroom window, he stalks you, he’s always there, watching you). It’s apparently sexy. Spike is an excellent example of this. He chased after Buffy no matter how much she told him to stop, no matter how much his obsession with her became increasingly desperate and pathetic (first making his real girlfriend, Harmony, dress up like Buffy for sex games, then later, making his own Buffy sexbot), and viewers still found him incredibly attractive and cheered him on. Now, tell me truthfully. If you found out that some dude had a crush on you and when you rejected him, he dressed up a sex doll to look just like you — ummm. Hot? I don’t think so.
(I found the most lovelorn pic of Spike I could for this part, and, sidebar, do you know if you just google the word “Spike” this is most of what comes up? No actual, you know, spikes.)
There are some old screenwriting tricks writers sometimes use to create sympathy for an otherwise unlikeable character. If he’s mean, show that other people — people we’re inclined to like — like him. Have him be sweet to children or small animals.This is called “save the cat.”
When we see Logan going to get the belt his father will beat him with, we understand there’s a reason behind his jackass nature. When Spike risks death to protect Dawn, we see that he really does care about both Summers girls. Personal sacrifice, vulnerability, unshakeable interest in the heroine (who can’t help but be at least flattered, though returning the interest is the brass ring)… these are all games that you get to play with the bad boy. But the good guy? He’s not otherwise unlikeable. The readers already know his vulnerabilities. They like him.
They just don’t lurrvvve him.
Except when they do? Why do we swoon over Lloyd Dobler when he’s nothing like Logan Echols?Or are they different populations entirely that do the swooning? Are some of always going to be Team Bad Boy and some of us always going to be Team Nice Guy? And what does that make of me, Team Nice Guy, except for that one little dalliance with Logan?
I know Rampant hasn’t come out yet, but it looks really interesting (vicious killer unicorns as a short reprieve from all the vampire drama and werewolf angst? Dude, count me in). The problem: I only read series books. I’m a freak I know, but I hate getting invested in characters only for their story to end way too abruptly. So, my question: Is Rampant going to be part of a series, or will it just be a stand alone novel?
Series Freak
Dear Series Freak,
You’re in luck. I’m writing a sequel to Rampant right this very moment. Stay tuned for more news on that front, and for more news on additional stories set in the killer unicorn world.
Epically Yours,
Diana
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Hi, I was self-googling and I found my name in your book. Topher Cox is kind of an odd name, and one that was a fencer even more odd. I was just curious as to how that happened. Not a big deal, just wondering.
Or, is it just a coincidence?
I should read the book to see what he is like.
Thanks,
Topher
Dear Topher,
It’s just a coincidence. I named the character after the actor Topher Grace from That 70’s Show. You are not, however, the first person to email me about having the same name as a character. I now understand why J.K. Rowling uses unusual names like “Hermione.” She has stated that she didn’t want school children with the same name as the character facing ridicule (however, since Hermione is one of the most awesome characters in the book, and the names Harry and Ron are far more common — especially in that age group in England, given that there’s a young prince by the name of Harry — I can’t imagine how that argument holds water). I have also heard from an Amy Haskel, and, at my brother’s wedding, I met a young woman who knew a Jamie Orcutt and didn’t like him at all.
I’ve also already heard from a few Llewellyns who are not happy that Astrid spells her name with only three Ls. People are very particular about names. I understand this. I’m very particular about names myself.
Finally, I feel I should warn you in advance of reading the book: the character Topher is not he world’s nicest guy.
Hello! My name is,
Diana
______________________
I love all three of your books. I read them over and over again. Are there going to be any more?
Missing Out
Dear Missing,
You’re in luck! While on my website sending me this email, you may have noticed a few mentions of my latest book, Tap & Gown. It’s number 4 in the series and it’s already on shelves!
Glad I Could Help,
Diana
_________________________
I love all four of your books. I read them over and over. Won’t you please, please please write more in that series? [Insert suggestions for how to write more, including following Amy after graduation, following the new tap class, coming back many years later a'la Before Sunset, etc.]
Also A Series Freak
Dear Also,
Thank you so much for reading. Tap & Gown is, alas, the last book about Amy and Rose & Grave. If you wish to read more in that series, I recommend giving the free secret stories on my website a try. Though I appreciate your suggestions, I feel confident that I have said everything about Amy and the secret societies at Eli that there is for me to say. Perhaps some day I shall write a short epilogue, but I’m not feeling it now. I’m up to my ears in teenagers and killer unicorns, and after that — sorry to all the series freaks out there — I’m going to write a few stand-alones for a fresh change in pace. Stay tuned for more news on that front.
Sorry I Couldn’t Help, but Do Give Those Killer Unicorns a Try,
Diana
Carrie Ryan has sent me what has to be one of my favorite Tap & Gown in the Wild pictures yet:
The shelf talker reads:This book recommended by “A Diggirl”. I hereby confess: this is a great series — very addictive — secrets will be revealed — are you worthy?
Isn’t that awesome? Above it are some of the Rose & Grave tattoos I had made to match the tattoo on the cover of Rites of Spring (Break). I’m almost positive (if this is the right Charlotte B&N) that the whole presentation is the work of a bookseller named Angela, to whom I sent an ARC and a stack of tattoos. Thank you, Angela!
And thank you to Carrie, for stalking my book down South.
I’ve been listening to Dar Williams’s “The Buzzer” a lot while writing KU2. I listened to it a lot while writing Tap & Gown as well. On the surface, its fast tempo is designed to put you on edge, and like the Jeopardy tune, makes me want to work as quickly as possible.
Clearly, that’s not why I’m listening, though. I originally chose “The Buzzer” for my Tap & Gown playlist because it reminds me of Yale, where the experiment took place. In addition, Dar was one of my favorite musicians in college, which puts me in a “I’m a college senior” mindset. And finally, the topic of the song reminds me a lot of Poe. Or the potential of Poe.
“The Buzzer” is a song ostensibly written from the point of view of a participant in the Milgram Experiment. If you aren’t aware of these groundbreaking and highly controversial psychology experiments, here’s a very quick (and generalized) rundown of what happened: a scientist calls in two volunteers for an experiment on how negative reinforcement improves learning and memory. One volunteer is assigned the role of the “learner” and one the role of the “teacher.” They are put in separate rooms, where they can only hear one another. The teacher is instructed by the scientist to ask the learner a series of questions. If he gets them wrong, the teacher is instructed to shock him with a little machine he has. If the learner continues to get answer wrong, the teacher is instructed to up the voltage of the shock. If the learner screams/faints/begs for the teacher to stop, the scientist tells him to go on.
Now, the truth of the experiment is that only the “teacher” is a true volunteer. Everyone else is in on the experiment, and no one is getting shocked at all. It’s actually an experiment about the willingness of people to obey authority (i.e., the scientist, who supposedly designed the experiment and knows how far is too far). The experiments, done in the early 60s, came on the heels of Nazi war criminal trials.
So that’s the experiment. The song, written 40 years later, imagines a scene where the scientists explain to the narrator what it is she did, and what that makes her. And what’s really fascinating is that the narrator accepts that weakness in herself.
Right away, I knew it was like I failed a quiz.
The man said, “Do you know what a fascist is?”
I said, “Yes, when you do things you’re not proud of,
But you’re scraping by, taking orders from above.
I get it now, I’m the face, I’m the cause of war
You don’t have to blame white-coated men anymore.”
When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game
I pressed the buzzer. I pressed the buzzer.
It really just gets better from there. And what’s so brilliant about Dar is the way she encodes these lines with the condescension of the scientist to the narrator, who we see throughout the story is not particularly educated or upper-class. “Do you know what a fascist is?” Well, maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t, but she also isn’t as weak as they are telling her she is.
It reminds me a lot of Poe — the anger, the defensiveness, the willingness to do things that he knows aren’t right and the ability to justify them within himself. I don’t know what would happen if Poe was in the Milgram Experiment. He might be like, “Screw the slowly increasing voltage. Let’s just fry this sucker.”
Or he’d knock out the scientist, take his white coat, and call in the next group of volunteers. Poe loves authority, but mostly because he expects to be authority. He accepts that this is the way life is, and only wants to figure out how he can be the one in charge. I find that potential in him to be very interesting to write about.
There’s a fun character development exercise. Who cares about their favorite ice cream flavor! Put them in infamous historical psychological experiments and let ‘em rip! next up: The Stanford Prison Experiment. (Hey, it worked for Logan and Wallace.)
I’m not one of those writers who spends a lot of time talking about theme, because I think that theme is pretty organic in writing. I don’t start out saying, “This book is about friendship,” “this book is about conservation,” etc. It’s more something that I become aware of after the book is written. I think in Tap & Gown, I explored a theme of easy vs. right, which no, are not always at odds with each other, but are often more interesting if they are. At what point does the ease of something make it “right” (if ever)? Where do those two lines intersect? Over the course of the book, almost every major character has to make the decision between something that’s right and something that would make their lives easier. Sometimes they make the wrong answer. Sometimes they make the easy answer and it’s still right, or right for them. Once, someone makes an answer that’s both harder and wrong (and no, it’s not the one y’all who’ve read the book are thinking).
But as I was working on KU2 the other day, I realized that I was dealing with a much more literal analogy of “The Buzzer” and of the Milgram Experiment. The characters go along with certain things in the killer unicorn books because “it’s the way it’s done” or because people in authority tell them it’s the right thing to do. To break out of that, to disbelieve it, or to believe there’s an alternative (let alone fight for one) — in other words, to DISOBEY the authority in society or adults or history or leaders — takes a big leap in logic. And, um, spoiler spoiler spoiler.
Damn. When will this book be out!?!?!?!
Ahem. Anyway, trying to do this without spoilers is tough. But I find it interesting that I can turn to the same song for two such different books, two such different characters, and find so much to work with.
My writer friends have been noting the phenomenon as well. One writer was bemoaning the current trend of “the badder the better” and saying it used to be the bad boy hero was some dude who’d just killed a man. Then it became an assassin with a heart of gold. Then just an assassin. Then just a murderer. Another writer wondered if this onslaught was a factor of readers wanting to live vicariously through the exploits of a fictional heroine who walks on the wild side with a lover who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But, hasn’t that always been the case with bad boys in fiction? This isn’t a NEW trend. So why now are books filled with ever more reprehensible men?
It’s interesting that there seems to be a definite line between “steadfast” and “obsessive”. The former is the realm of the good boy, and it’s apparently boring and desperate. The latter is the realm of the bad boy (he climbs in your bedroom window, he stalks you, he’s always there, watching you). It’s apparently sexy. Spike is an excellent example of this. He chased after Buffy no matter how much she told him to stop, no matter how much his obsession with her became increasingly desperate and pathetic (first making his real girlfriend, Harmony, dress up like Buffy for sex games, then later, making his own Buffy sexbot), and viewers still found him incredibly attractive and cheered him on. Now, tell me truthfully. If you found out that some dude had a crush on you and when you rejected him, he dressed up a sex doll to look just like you — ummm. Hot? I don’t think so.
