nindogs

Well, have we? A lot of writers struggle with balancing action and suspense with realistic development and emotion. I've received a couple emails about concerns that in writing physical struggles at the forefront, internal conflict plays second fiddle.  In many ways, characters vs. plot  or even the conflict in pleasing your readers vs. pleasing yourself. We get caught up in all the little opinions - agents condemn certain features and talk about the importance of "emotion" and issues relevant to the YA audience, and critics on sites like Goodreads can be absolutely brutal about their preferences.  We as authors have a tendency to reconsider our choices and our work in their desire to be relevant and pleasing and, well, good. But it's all about balance. And I do mean action-oriented   and not action-packed .  All plots have a sense of urgency to them, and that pacing is absolutely vital. It's important not to forgo that in the mistak...

I know we like to believe we hold the keys to the city of invention, and we are the ultimate force that defies physics and logic on a hourly basis, but here's the thing: you, especially if you're treading water in a whole new genre pool, have no idea what you're getting into. Just as fantasy-paranormal writers have cardinal rules outlining the behaviour of nasties, the weapons available to fighters against nasties, and the general course of worldbuilding, science fiction, the new shabang, has rules of its very own. And the thing is, well, it overlaps with science sometimes. I know, I needed to sit down after that too.  But you can't well go treading through space the internet, searching for reason amidst technical terms and mathematical equations and theories with really long words/phrases and maths . For God's sake, man, we're writers, not physicists! And if you get lost, well, in space no one can hear you scream. So, as a YA writer in need of some ...

There is the infamous tar and feathering of SMeyer for her dream guy by the online community, and the condemnation of Mary Sue's and a fair amount of Crucible  witch hunting for author insertion. But it begs the question: what exactly is the spectrum of wish fulfilment, and is it ever okay? In many ways, writing itself is a form of wish fulfilment, beside the cathartic relief, in which you as a writer experience pretty urgent desires for adventure, love and triumph that you share with your readers. That  is the secret to the runaway bestseller, to the eleven-year-old at heart wanting to belong in a magical school for wizards, or a misfit thirteen-year-old girl who's beginning to believe boys think she's ugly and repellent. But it's when wish fulfilment detracts or damages the novel that I have to stand against it. It's almost inevitable in new and/or young writers, and is something that you grow out of with experience and practice. It is important to keep in ...

Teams and larger casts are set to boom, methinks, especially if these team-based casts (a la Hourglass ) and YA sci-fi, what with the starship crews and armies and expeditions to desolate planets, etc., continue to increase. But the problem with this is that YA is so used to focusing on a trio, with a couple memorable secondaries whose appearances are based purely on comic relief or plot, that some of these larger casts are having trouble growing from this trio. A book I recently read had this problem. Fluid, fast-paced writing, enjoyable. I hadn't felt any criticism itch until we got to introducing the "team" and what it is they could do/why they were there in the first place. Admittedly, introducing people with a focus on their abilities has the potential to be clunky, and a lot of writers take the easy way out with a dollop of didacticism.  This is Jack. Jack is sheepolopath. That means that he can read the minds of sheep, and it also means that he can contr...

As writers we know there is an explicit relationship between the stories we craft and the perspectives of our audience. And we can manipulate this relationship to convey a delicious subtext or to hint at (and when I say hint, I don't mean preach) a social comment to an open-minded audience who are looking to learn, to enjoy an intellectual pursuit, and have their growing perspectives challenged and further developed. Take Austen. In Pride and Prejudice , she endorses the value of independent thought in a society which enforces collective thought, of a "truth universally acknowledged". Think about it. Transformation stories, novels and films reminiscent of Pygmalion, or My Fair Lady , or Pretty Woman , are about the movement from independence and ostracism into collective thought , a common role. Pride and Prejudice , however, documents a fantasy in a classist society - 19th century England. Elizabeth and Darcy would never  have happened. Never. I'm not saying...

BBC's  Sherlock -  the reincarnation of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective in 21st century London. In its second series, it only has six episodes, but confounds me in its ability to be perfect. I'm a snob about film and TV, but I'll also be first to say it's the finest piece of storytelling on TV in a while. We writers can learn from it, so welcome to my all-rounder series: Honey, You Should See Me in a Crown . I will be dissect this king of entertainment, created by Steven Moffat (of Doctor Who fame, a fan favourite since Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace and  Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead ) and Mark   Godtiss Gatiss (who also plays Mycroft Holmes in the series). From plot, to pacing, to characterisation, to relationships and dynamics, from themes to subtext, to stereotypes and archetypes, and all literary bad-arsery. (And thankfully this will tie in with my HSC crime studies, so HA! Board of Studies, ha!) I've talked about hero-villain dynam...

Harper Lee said something like "Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts", but we can't always rely on our characters to lead us down the right path. That's where the beauty of our community really comes through. Whether it be writing bloggers like me, or authors divulging lessons they've learned along the way, we have a plethora of different sources to turn to. So, I thought I'd compile a list of some of the posts and such that I've found helpful lately. I'll add more to it as time goes on, and hopefully, you find these interesting at least. WRITING Click : What Veronica Roth learned about explanations from Project Runway. Click : Maggie Stiefvater gives us ten writers dissecting their earlier drafts and final drafts. Click : Nick Mamatas on 10 pieces of advice writers need to stop giving the aspiring. Click : Has Word affected the way we work? An article at the Guardian. C lick : A post at Omnivoracious abou...

A friend recently recommended the BLUE BLOODS series (not some sort of novelisation of the cop show with Sergeant Lipton, unfortunately) to me. I scanned the blurb and found my processor not passing beyond two words. Schuyler Van Alen. Schuyler Van Alen . It took me a while to figure out how you're meant to pronounce that. Skew-ler van Halen. Yes, my mind read that as Van Halen. That, dear readers, is a teacher's worst nightmare in four syllables, or what I presume is four syllables. Who knows? I still haven't figured out how to say it. Is it Skyler? If so, why isn't it spelt Skyler? Basically, if I can't figure out how to say a character's name within a fraction of a second of reading it, I am going to put the book onto the Gifts pile. (Yes, I actually have a pile of books which I give to people for their birthdays which have only been used to the fifth page.) It isn't so bad for character names which I abhor. Usually, I'll suffer through a book ...

This is going to be me semi-ranting and mostly advising. Which is nothing new on this blog, as you all know. Particularly with YA, we are a little obsessive with our trends. We latch on to them and then people get tired and then quality downgrades with mass production within those trends and then we find something else and it all starts all over again. That, or we have tropes so deeply ingrained in us that they just crop up and we can do nothing else but throw up our hands and hopelessly theorise about what we could have done to avoid this. Everyone tries to put something fresh on old plots, or common plots, and make them work and brilliant by their own standards. But, especially with these YA trends, sometimes it's the core idea which traps us writers and inhibits our ability to see beyond the seeming conventionalities of said trend. Here's one. Let's see if you can name it. A seemingly normal girl encounters a mysterious, gorgeous boy who sucks her into a supern...

Recently, I've been addressing the beginning of my novel, finding that it's almost like dragging two semi-trailers through the snow with one of those elastic leashes that parents use for their children. So, I did what I always do whenever I find myself disenchanted by my capacity to form words, or incapacity therein - I turned to my bookshelf. And what did I find there? I realised there are a few that snatched my interest basically from the get-go. You may not have heard of JASPER JONES by Craig Silvey, but it's a cosy Australian mystery set in the 1960s, not technically YA, but starring a teenager. It's rather humble and deeply character-driven, with a sense of precociousness, but a desperate, childish ignorance and desire for understanding. The novel opens with Charlie, our protagonist, who is visited in the middle of the night by the mixed-race Jasper Jones at his window. Jasper takes him out into the bushland surrounding their town, to his "spot",...

Psychologist Carl Jung named the face which we present publicly, which we use to hide things we don't like about ourselves, the persona . He also coined the flip-side, the shadow , which is something similar to the three-dimensional version of our physical shadows. This is teeming with everything that we try to hide, sometimes even from ourselves. In order to create a three-dimensional character, we need to individuate , or integrate, their archetypal parts into a cohesive sort of unit-y whole. This, of course, includes both their persona and their shadow. Now, the mark of a good villain in any story falls under his ability to force his opposition, the hero, into the spotlight where he'll find ways to highlight and criticise the things your hero would like to hide. Now, Shadow: Recognising It The shadow is upsetting the acknowledge, so we shove our awareness of it down to an unconscious level, thereby making the only way to truly know the contents of your shadow to co...

You know the saying. Write what you know . People do it. People don't do it. People advise it and against it. People debate about it. Well, I'm here to slide my two cents across the table to you, and tell you that what you might perceive as writing what you know isn't necessarily writing what you know. Oh, and the caption on the poster to the left? It says Anyone is a weapon if you twist them.  So, today I sat down in my Extension English I lesson to a discussion with director Adam Blaiklock, whose first feature film Caught Inside  (It's actually phenomenal. Support him and Australian film and try and catch it wherever you are if it's nearby) I saw a couple weeks ago. Its theme surrounds the concept that we don't want to take responsibility for the monsters we create . Essentially, this film is about a surfing trip off the coast of Indonesia, where the only law is set by one's skipper, and a group of Australian tourists find themselves faced with a ...

In this day and age, the broad scope that is sex  comes with the YA territory. For example, contemplate the utter anarchy that follows Cassandra Clare's "Dirty Sexy" sneak-peak scenes. Kiersten White says something along the lines of or you can just go back to the kissing scenes  in her acknowledgements section. I have noted a number of readers lamenting some books for their lack of sexy time or opportunities for fantasised fanfiction of such a nature. One could argue that any book, any television show, any movie, won't see any tremendous success without sex appeal. (And to further my point, this post shall be punctuated with images of Adam Levine. ) In my final draft of PRAETORIAN, I recently wrote, reviewed and rewrote a steamy scene between two characters that soon turned rather ironic and pivotal to the plot climax. Did I do it because I felt as though it were important for any possible sale of my book? No. I did it because my characters are just like that, and ...

Bam . And she makes an appearance. You really can't look anywhere without the word Mary Sue plastered on something, or slipping over in its messy trails and into the pool of endless circular arguments. And if you try and take all of the arguments off of the table and ask one of these people what their perception of perfection was, they'd just stop and smile at you. They might be able to tell you someone's name, or something vague like success or like too pretty or something, but the truth is that we all strive for some degree of perfection, whether it be mentally, physically or emotionally, and there are many perceptions of that big word: perfection . Some may view perfection as an unfaltering sense of humour. Some may view perfection as a cellulite-free hourglass figure of a tanned 20-year-old. Some may view perfection as an ability to see the best in everyone and everything. Some may view perfection as Adam Levine deciding to strut about semi-naked and sing about ...