Tag Archives: YA fiction

LA Times Festival of Books! Day One

Photo by Carolyn Kraft

One week after a great day at YALLWEST, I was off to the annual LA Times Festival of Books! It was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire for those of us who love being burned alive. By books. By writing. By mangling a shopworn adage into a tough leathery bit on which to chomp so as to contain our excitement and not draw the attention of USC Campus Security.

Anyway…

Congrats to LATFOB for celebrating 20 amazing years! Once again it was a privilege to attend, and as always the panel discussions I sat in on were nothing short of compelling and provocative. Did you go? What was the highlight for you?

Here’s a taste of what I heard on Day One:

“I thought I’d like to start a story with someone getting decapitated on a roller coaster, which I did. It’s on page 3.”

“I feel like it’s possible to fall deeply in love while also grieving a great loss.”

“What we remember about the books we love are the characters.”

“I’m an evangelist for fiction.”

“A big part of my writing process is forgiving myself.”

“Write what obsesses you.”

“To be a successful writer you have to be extremely disciplined.”

“Every book is a different labyrinth that somehow I have to get to the center of.”

“How do you learn to write a novel? You read a lot of them and then you write one.”

“I write so much because I’m hyperactive. I have the metabolism of a weasel. I have to eat my body weight every day.”

“There are probably 300 writers in America who make a full-time living from writing.”

“You owe it to yourself to be a big supporter of independent bookstores.”

“We have to practice and behave in the literary world we want to live in. We have to be good literary citizens.”

“I think we’ll look back on this time as a golden age of fiction.”

“I have a weird memory; I remember all of my parents’ license plates.”

“It’s more fun to draw something horrible and ugly.”

“New Yorker cartoons are like a magazine within the magazine.”

“People told me that when I went through the process of selling my parents’ house all the questions I had about who they were would be answered. But there was nothing; it was like they were spies.”

“The mistakes and the problems can become the greatest thing in the book.”

“You just have to draw a lot and then eventually you die.”

WHO SAID THIS STUFF: Robyn Schneider, Emery Lord, Meg Wolitzer, T.C. Boyle, Lord, Wolitzer, Sarah Dessen, Lord, Boyle, Boyle, Stephen Morrison, Sandra Dijkstra, Dan Smetanka, Morrison, Roz Chast, Mimi Pond, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Kaplan, Chast

LATFOB – What Stuck With Me Part 1

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Photo by Carolyn Kraft

“Starting a book trying to achieve the big picture will get you into trouble.”

“You can’t be an American novelist and not be haunted by The Great Gatsby.”

“Reinvention. Characters who try always fail…and that’s a novel.”

“Cormac McCarthy has three books where babies are being eaten. How does he get away with that?”

The answer to our nation’s problems is craft brewing. It’s the artisanal movement that’s going to save us.”

“75% of all literary fiction readers are female.”

“I refuse to have a cover with a beheaded woman on it.”

“Can’t think about who’s going to like your book while you’re writing it.”

“Fiction is an act of prolonged empathy.”

“Writing is about trying to be less afraid.”

“The reward of writing is the opportunity of having a genuine experience.”

“Worst thing to do as a writer is to be afraid of writing from the perspective of gender or race other than one’s own.”

“You can’t read a great novel and update your Facebook status at the same time.”

“I want to entertain myself at the same time I’m trying to entertain my audience.”

“You never stop coming of age.”

“When you go into a project nervous–that’s a good sign.”

“If you’re from the South and someone kills a person in front of you, the proper thing to say is ‘Well, that was a very interesting choice.'”

“While you’re writing, always ask yourself ‘Is it true?'”

“The hive mind is in ascendance.”

“YA writers have established a community; they even write together.”

“This is the golden age of storytelling in YA fiction.”

“To be a reader now is really to be in pig heaven.”

“There needs to be more diversity in YA literature. Overall, there’s not a lot of people of color [in executive positions] in the publishing industry.”

“Transvaginal wanding is not just my drag name.”

“Fairytales take away the burden of originality. They are like a river of stories we can dip into and swim around in.”

“Fairytales invite us to change the world as we know it. And because it is a world of change it’s possible to take the marginal characters and make them the center of the story.”

“Fairytales are constantly recast to fit the culture.”

“Ultimately what we take away from fairytales isn’t their morals but their sense of wonderment.”

“It is so pleasurable to read as a child.”

“Finding yourself as a writer is discovering what really moves you as a reader.”

“Writing is intuitive. Like a person stumbling around a dark room, a dark forest. Images become stepping stones to get across the river.”

“Post-modern novels seem to be contemptuous of the reader.”

“The first job of the writer isn’t to cater to the audience.”

“The challenge is clarity.”

“Amazing that out of nothing can come a novel.”

The wit and wisdom above was collected onto a miniature yellow notepad Saturday April 21 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Said perspicacity was uttered by anonymous festival-goers, as well as the novelists Chad Harbach, Lauren Groff, Jonathan Evison, Anthony Giardina, Libba Bray, Pete Hautman, Aimee Bender, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Trinie Dalton, Jack Gantos, Ransom Riggs, and Thane Rosenbaum.

Shadowing The Shaded

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Photo by Ordale

Now that my novel The Chronicles of What Happened, by Cam Hanson is in the submission stage (10 agent queries have been sent as of this writing, 1 request for the full manuscript thus far) I turn my attention back to the project I started last summer. It’s a new novel called The Shaded, the first volume in a supernatural horror trilogy for the young adult crowd. There’s an excerpt from an early draft on my website, located here.

However, after reaquainting myself with the story I’ve decided to take it into a slightly different direction, although the basic premise remains the same: A teenager discovers he is a demon-human hybrid, and the battle within himself and against a sinister occultist organization over how to use his newfound powers is just the beginning of an adventure where a young man’s ability to inspire a demonic force for good may be humankind’s only hope for survival.

In the early draft, the main character is stricken with a compulsion to draw/paint/create a series of particularly detailed grotesque images. He will not stop to eat or sleep, and his desperate parents ultimately decide to have him institutionalized. In that version the story opened with the main character already having undergone months of treatment, to no avail. I decided that it was better if the reader and the main character experience this compulsion together. So the idea of the compulsive creating still exists and the images themselves play a crucial role in the story, but now the main character is kidnapped by the aforementioned occultist organization before any medical doctors have the opportunity to try and treat what turns out to not be a disease or disorder, but a spiritual awakening of sorts.

The story is still being mapped out, and really my first order of business is to get a better handle on who my main character is. He’s my first-person narrator and I need to know how he thinks, how he talks, his behavior, etc. Once I find his “voice” I can move forward with more confidence.

I’m excited about the possibilities here, and this project hearkens back to some of the books I enjoyed as a younger reader, especially the supernatural tales of John Bellairs, the Three Investigators series, and Sport by Louise Fitzhugh. I’ve been reading some current YA titles, such as Feed by M.T. Anderson, Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, and Dan Wells’ I Am Not A Serial Killer (although this last title is often kept in the adult fiction section).

Do you read YA novels? Let me know what’s on your shelf or stored in your e-reader. And I’m always on the lookout for other YA horror titles so if you’re reading one or can suggest one, I’d love to hear about those too.