May 23 2013

CBI conference recap: the shiny bits

The Children’s Books Ireland conference took place last weekend. Basically it involved much tea and geeking out over kids’ books with some of my favouritest writerly and bookish people ever, so that was quite nice. Some of the shiny bits:

  • Sarah Ardizzone talked about translation, noting the length of time it can take for books to appear in translation but also how it can change reading patterns dramatically if there are translated works of major stories (e.g. Harry Potter). She also addressed the benefits of using translation exercises in schools, almost as a way into creative writing.
  • Hervé Tullet was quite mad and French and had played The Big Bad Wolf in the previous session. I admit to swooning. His books are really innovative and engaging – they leave room for readers to add their own stuff. Definitely worth checking them out for pre-school/early school types.
  • Was really interested by John Boyne, who was interviewed by the ever-magnificent Robert Dunbar. He spoke about his writing process – writing one book for kids, then one for adults, although he tends to think more in terms of the character age than intended audience. (Though he did note all his kids’ books were third person, while adult ones in first.) The idea for the next book comes in the late, tidying-up days of the previous one; he couldn’t jump between projects. In terms of his training, he didn’t find English (at TCD) useful at all, but his seven years at Waterstones as a bookseller made up his “real books education”. He also found the Creative Writing MA at East Anglia incredibly useful – noted it wasn’t so much about the work you did as your reading of other people’s stuff, learning to read in a totally different way and analyse it sentence by sentence.
  • There was a very cool comics panel with Sarah McIntyre, Rory McConville, and Alan Nolan, where the idea of comics going beyond just the funny stuff and superheroes, talking about comics and graphic novels being a format rather than a genre.
  • Confession: I almost skipped Alex T. Smith’s session because he writes for 5-8-year-olds and I was sure I’d be bored. Ha. He puts innuendo in his books, and also talked warmly about his grandfather and the influence he had on him and his writing. Then there was drawing. It was all rather lovely.
  • Sarah Crossan kicked off Sunday and offered up some very honest insights about her writing process. She noted that some of her own issues from childhood slipped into her debut, The Weight of Water, but that she hadn’t been aware of that, and also noted that she didn’t think good art can be therapy. Kasienka’s strength was something she would have liked at that time in her life, though. Her plotting/outlining stuff was really interesting – there were fancy slides! – and the amount of work, thought, care, time, and energy she puts into her novels was very evident.
  • The Edge of the Page session had numerous speakers in 5-minute bursts talking about Irish authors/illustrators they hoped wouldn’t be forgotten. My main memory of this one is Gráinne’s crush on Eddie Lenihan.
  • Owing to flight issues, the next panel was something completely different – Deirdre Sullivan and Sheena Wilkinson interviewed by their lovely editor, Elaina O’Neill. The issue of rebellious characters came up – Sheena noted that they were more interesting (in the case of her Declan), and Deirdre spoke about how Primrose’s rebellion comes out of sadness, as is often the case with teenagers. There was a lot of talk about gatekeepers – what you can leave in and how it has to be handled, how often having something without making it The Main Problem can be tricky.
  • Jon Klassen was utterly adorable and brilliant. He took the audience through a number of his projects, including bits from his animation work, and then the different picture books. Favourite thing said: “We’re not promising the universe is on your side. ‘Cause it’s not, a lot of the time.” Also about how problem-solving is a creative skills, and how working with your limitations and then figuring out ways around them is actually very useful.

For other conference recaps…
Sarah McIntyre talks about the Saturday
Helen Bradshaw talks about parts of Sunday
Inis recaps Saturday and Sunday

May 19 2013

Confessions of a Trekkie

… or, ‘How I Learned To Stop Hating JJ Abrams’. Spoilers abound.

“Doesn’t it have a colon yokey?” I asked as the screen about the film’s rating flashed up. Star Trek Into Darkness.

Ms IckleTayto explained that no, it was deliberate, there’d been a whole thing about it just being one title. To distinguish it from previous Trek films.

“That makes sense,” I said wearily. “That’s what this film is doing. Bringing Star Trek into darkness and despair.”

Look, it's Khan! Problematic that in original series/movie he wasn't an upper-class British white guy at all? Perhaps but it's Benedict Cumberbatch, so no one is complaining.

Look, it’s Khan! Problematic that in original series/movie he wasn’t an upper-class British white guy at all? Perhaps but it’s Benedict Cumberbatch, so no one is complaining.

I am not a JJ Abrams fan. In fact, up until this latest film, I might have described him as my nemesis. (But not in a terrible tenth Star Trek film kind of way.) I despaired of his first Star Trek film, and with his taking over Star Wars – well, at a certain point you just have to say “Stop hogging all the franchises!” (My friend Eimear, who was also at the film, pointed out that it would be totally fine if it was someone else hogging all the franchises. Like, say, Joss Whedon. At which point I imagined a Whedony Trek and my head exploded a little.) I have issues with the end of Felicity, and everyone has issues with Lost, and I still haven’t watched Fringe which has Joshua ‘Pacey Witter’ Jackson in it because of its Abrams-ness. (I mean, I will, because, y’know, Joshua Jackson, but still.)

My expectations were very low for the new Star Trek film. I’d spent much time sighing wearily over the first one, and despairing that any Trek fan could actually enjoy it. And yet I was going to see it – for the same reason I stuck with Enterprise for two and a half seasons (and am nearly contemplating revisiting), for the same reason I have seen the ninth and tenth Trek films more than once even though they are truly awful. I am a Trekkie.

Sometimes I feel not-quite-nerdy enough to claim that title. I don’t speak Klingon (although it pleases me there is a Klingon edition of Hamlet available). Nor do I own a pair of Vulcan ears. But. I do love the shows, a lot, in a rewatching-obsessively kind of way. Deep Space Nine is my favourite, and then both TNG and Voyager have a special place in my heart. I like the original series too, a lot, but not quite as obsessively. And then there are the movies, which have always been a tad hit-or-miss. We know this, we know the rule – even numbers are the good ones – but this is defied in spectacular fashion by the tenth movie, Nemesis, and partly why it does is because it throws out TV continuity and amps up the ‘cool special effects’ at the expense of characterisation.

Which is basically what the first Abrams movie does, too. I don’t just mean the rebooted timeline – when I think about it, I actually adore parallel universes and time travel and ‘what if’ scenarios. I mean the fact that the rebooted timeline doesn’t quite make sense, that there’s still all this stuff that is just (Spock-face) illogical even if one accounts for those changes. Some of it is making-things-shiny for the big screen, of course (which happened in the pre-Abrams movies too), but not all of it is. (Second movie is also guilty of this, with the ship’s super-fanciness and also more crucially the ridiculous hats.)

So yes. I was fairly ‘meh’ about the whole thing. And then along Into Darkness I went.

Spock and Uhura, in a rare moment of not-kissing.

Spock and Uhura, in a rare moment of not-kissing.

There’s a moment where a secret branch of Starfleet is mentioned. A covert-ops unit known as Section 31. And I squeaked. Section 31 first comes up in Deep Space Nine. It is one of my absolute favouritest things about the series, because it’s part of its attempt at looking at the underbelly of the shiny-happy Federation, and it was about the last thing I expected to be mentioned in the film.

I think from that moment on, they had me. Because there were also Tribbles. And there was a reference to Nurse Chapel. And we had Carol Marcus, and then they went in exactly the way I hoped they would with playing with what Kirk and Spock had done in the second film, and Spock doing the “Khaaaaan!” line was quite frankly hilarious. (I’m not sure if it was intended to be, mind you.) And Uhura had actual stuff to do!

There’s this rather scathing review of the film over at io9, and it has this quote which I think sums up the reason why I liked the movie, why I left the cinema feeling bewildered at the bounce in my step:

“…the fanservice becomes the movie”

And that’s it. It’s not really Trek, re-energised and re-imagined in a clever way that brings nuance and depth with it (versus, say, the 2000s Battlestar Galactica). It’s fun and it’s a sandbox and it’s like fanfiction except with a big budget and some cool actors behind it. It’s playing about with the source material and it’s not doing something terribly exciting with it, but it’s fun. And of course you’re not going to take it too seriously.

JJ Abrams, you are no longer my nemesis. I won’t say all is forgiven, but I didn’t leave the cinema filled with rage, despair or bewilderment at what you were doing to the franchise. Nice job, dude.

May 14 2013

Writing Imaginary Books for Generic Teenagers

The post below was originally written for and published at the Writing4All.ie guest blog in 2010. It’s since vanished from the internets, so I thought I’d repost here. I think most of it is still relevant…

“So would you ever think about writing, you know, a real book?” Writers for young audiences hear this a lot – slightly less so since the success of Harry Potter, Twilight et al, though even these tend to be ‘excused’ away in the best tradition of dismissing anything readable. (“They’re fun! I mean, they’re not Great Literature or anything…”) I’ve had nine books for pre-teens and teenagers published but apparently these are on another plane of existence altogether – they’re imaginary books, perhaps. Real books are for adults. Writing for young people is the ‘easy way out’.

I find it bewildering any time I hear this, usually with phrases like ‘ah, sure children will read anything’ or ‘teenagers are reading this rubbish’ tagged on. I heard two middle-aged men discussing the Twilight phenomenon on the radio recently, talking about ‘teenagers’ as though they were all of one mind, all with low expectations and no critical faculties whatsoever. Well, sure, that’s middle-aged men for you. Ah, but hold on now . . .

For the most part, we don’t make sweeping generalisations about age groups unless they’re the very young or the very old, and even with the elderly we all know many who defy the stereotype, making it more of a caricature than anything else. But with teenagers – ah, sure they’re debauched and idiotic and self-absorbed and lazy and irresponsible and stupid. It’s their hormones or it’s the school system or it’s Society. And they read rubbish. And we should be grateful they’re reading anything at all (unless it’s dangerous, because they’re too stupid to know the difference between fact and fiction, and if you put sex or drugs into a book they will almost certainly fling the book aside and go find one or the other to experience immediately).

It’s easy to fall into the generalised-teenager trap. Occasionally I find myself doing it, and then I stop. Stop and think. I think about me as a teenager, as my friends as teenagers. I think about what’s changed since then, and what hasn’t. I think about summer camps and school-year workshops I facilitate where teenage participants say and write smart and funny and wacky things. I see them be silly and obsessive and intense. I see them be self-conscious about certain things and gorgeously unself-conscious about others. Most of all I see them be different in some ways and similar in others, the way that a group of adults of a similar age might be. They can be obnoxious or kind, organised or chaotic, enthusiastic or bored. They can be anything.

It’s what we need to remember when commenting about books for teenagers, but also when writing them. The Generic Teenage Protagonist based on a handful of clichés thrown together simply won’t do. The Generic Teenage Novel doesn’t exist – apart from the age range of the central characters, teenage fiction spans almost all the genres that ‘real’ fiction covers (erotica excluded). Teenagers are not a separate species who through some accident of nature all share identical reading habits and critical faculties. And if as a writer you find yourself pondering the fact that some of them do seem to resemble mindless zombies, it’s a good idea to look around the office or the neighbourhood and ponder how well any particular age group looks when its least enchanting specimens are held up for scrutiny.

May 4 2013

Book-review post!

This round of book reviews – titles for YA and 9-12s.

Keris Stainton – Della Says OMG!
Della’s shy and kind of insecure, so when her diary goes missing – the same night the guy she’s liked forever starts taking an interest in her – she is, understandably, freaked out. This does a great job at presenting teen insecurities and relationships, including the nastiness of some characters, and it’s really nice to see something that addresses sex in an open way (both via Della and her best friend). A fast-paced read for anyone who enjoys contemporary teen fiction.

Jessica Rothenberg – The Catastrophic History of You and Me
I love the premise of this book so very much. Brie’s boyfriend breaks up with her, and it breaks her heart in two – literally. She narrates from the afterlife, where she is coming to terms with being ‘Dead & Gone’ (but still aware of what’s going on among the living). As she moves through the different stages of grief we learn more about the events leading up to her death – and what comes next. There’s a lot of really cool stuff in here, but it’s a 4-star rather than 5-star review because I think one of the niftiest bits (the end – and that whole thing, she said vaguely) could have done with more explanation and set-up. That being said, it’s well worth a read.

R J Palacio – Wonder
I was underwhelmed by this book, which I read for bookclub, and had many grumpy things to say about it. The premise, as you may know, is that there’s this kid, August, with facial disfigurations/abnormalities, and the story focuses on what happens when he goes to school for the first time. The novel has numerous narrators, so we get to hear from a lot of different characters – but it’s all about August, and this sort of overshadows them as individuals. August’s sister is really interesting, but again – the focus is all on how they see August, and that’s pretty much it. I think this is a book with a great message, about being kind, about seeing past appearances, but as a story it just didn’t appeal to me all that much. (I also thought it was going to go much darker than it did, at the end.)

Ann M Martin – Family Tree #1: Better To Wish
Oh! Oh oh oh. So I am kind of a big Ann M Martin fan, and she has this new historical series out that I wasn’t sure whether I would love or not. (In retrospect, this seems foolish. History! Yay!) There are four books planned, each focusing on one generation in a family, and this first book opens up with Abby Nichols on her 100th birthday, in 2022, looking back at her childhood and teenage years. The novel avoids melodrama or making a point of educating the reader about the time period, but there’s a wonderful sense of the past with all its prejudices and limitations. Abby’s life is not easy, even though her ambitious father can provide for the family; there’s loss of different kinds as the book progresses, and a difficult choice to make at the end. We see Abby grow up (at the end she’s graduated high school, and in the epilogue she’s in her twenties), and in the next book (out October) we’ll get to see her through the eyes of her daughter, and I am very excited. Highly recommended for 10+ (age range is I think 8-12, but older readers will appreciate this too.)

Apr 23 2013

Book-review post!

This time around: two grown-up mystery-type books, although they’re about teenagers; one historical YA which is strictly-speaking probably more grown-uppy; one teen urban fantasy.

Megan Abbott – The End of Everything
A thirteen-year-old girl goes missing, and her best friend is keeping secrets of her own. This is one of those twisty ‘seedy underbelly of quiet little suburbia’ tales, with lots of slightly unsettling moments and some gorgeous writing. Enjoyed it enough to immediately order…

Megan Abbott – Dare Me
This time around it’s cheerleaders. Cheerleaders and sex and secrets and screwed-up-ness. Oh, it’s beautiful. (I have a bit of a cheerleading thing. There was this Sweet Valley High trilogy this one time… anyway.) Addy (the narrator) and Beth are best friends, pretty and when-needs-be cruel, but when their new coach arrives, determined to push them to the limit, everything changes. This is gorgeously-done, and I was immensely pleased by the last twist/reveal. Abbott’s writing is lovely, sucking you in – both of these were most enjoyable reads.

Elizabeth Wein – Code Name Verity
Read this for YA bookclub, and oh… well, what everyone else in the world has said, really. It’s the story of two best friends in the Second World War, one prisoner and one pilot, and amidst all the technical details pertaining to these roles, there’s also a lovely friendship and a lot of tension and some moments that will absolutely break your heart. I am not quite convinced of the YA-ness of this, but it’s a WWII book that’s well worth reading.

Katherine Farmar – Wormwood Gate
Aisling and Julie get separated from the gang on Junior Cert results night, and find themselves in an alternate version of Dublin, where three queens are battling it out for control of the city, and you can’t necessarily trust anyone you meet. Even though the girls have never quite seen eye-to-eye, they have to team up in this strange world and try to get home. I am not super-mad about urban fantasy, but two things really made this one work for me. First, the references to Dublin, and how they’re transformed into something magical (also worth noting: the most magical thing of all? A linked-up transport system!). Second, the relationship between the girls – which is a lovely ‘bickering pair clearly want one another but need to be in dangerous situation before this will become clear to them!’ dynamic that fits in perfectly with the events of the story. Girls kissing and a mystical version of Dublin – what’s not to love?

Apr 5 2013

Some things about short stories

Last night I went to What’s The Story? at the Mill Theatre in Dundrum, an event focusing on short fiction. Katy Hayes, current Writer-in-Residence for Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown county, chaired; guests were Martina Devlin, Declan Meade, and Éilís Ni Dhuibhne.

Some points of interest (there were many, and I rather diligently had a little notebook out to scribble down the wisdom):

  • Martina spoke about family stories, and hearing them in long car journeys as a child, but also that “families are highly selective about the stories they pass on”. The short story she read from was based on a real-life family incident, and she’s also delved into the family history for her novel Ship of Dreams. The issue of the creativity involved in this, even though working from real life events, came up later; the fact that there’s selecting and arranging and choosing the whole way through the writing.
  • Martina also noted that objects served as “a shortcut to memory” for her; having certain objects in front of her when writing was useful in terms of evoking a place or time.
  • Declan spoke about selecting stories as an editor, and approaching the submissions pile not necessarily expecting any specific things apart from “stories which deserve to be read”. In the opening paragraphs/pages you’re looking at a piece seeing what the writer is trying to do, and then seeing if they actually achieve this. In terms of picking what goes in, it’s mostly a yes or no; the maybe pile is really “a polite no” and a sense that you might want something else from this writer but not that particular piece.
  • Éilís spoke about judging short story competitions and the importance of having a very strong first page. It has to be striking, and most especially have an “imaginative use of language” alongside all the story, characterisation, content stuff.
  • Questions raised about the short story as a form – for many writers it’s a warm-up of sorts, the first thing they write. It’s manageable, and you can see the other side of it, as Katy noted in her introduction. But for others it’s what they keep writing their whole lives. Éilís suggested that most fiction writers, even if they write both novels and short stories, are more naturally suited to one or the other.