What the Bleep? People want to put profanity ratings on young adult books?

Posted on May 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Kiersten White’s bestseller, Paranormalcy, famous for its “bleeps”

This week I stumbled (via Twitter) onto a discussion about whether books for young adults ought to carry parental warnings based on language–that is, based on the frequency of specific curse words.

Two young adult writers, Gayle Forman and Kiersten White had terrific posts at their blogs on the answer (no, and why, and what instead) that got me thinking about the question itself. It had never even occurred to me that books should carry ratings of this sort. Somehow, to me, books were in a category quite different from movies or video games or even music–other things that carry ratings.

I curse quite a bit. But I never curse in front of my children. When we discovered that my older daughter was an early reader we had to take down a piece of art containing profanity that she (whoops) read aloud one evening at the dinner table when she was three.

My general idea is that when my kids start using words I don’t want them to use, I’ll tell them those are 18-and-older words that they can use when they are grown up. I censor them for more than one reason. First and foremost, I’d just rather they learn more nuanced ways to express themselves–even inventing their own curses on occasion–than resorting to worn cliches too soon. But not a small part of my concern about their vocabulary is the fact that they don’t have the white privilege of being thought precociously, irreverently cute when they curse. They are more likely to draw a racist–even a subtle, unconsciously racist–response from middle-class white adults if they use profanity. I also don’t want my kids to be “those kids” who introduce the other kids to swearing before their parents are ready for it.

So like I said, I curse (and my characters in my books sometimes curse, depending on who they are and the context), but never in front of my kids. And I protect my kids from hearing or reading swear words.

But my kids are five and seven.

When they are twelve and fifteen? I am not sure, but while the under-eighteen speaking rule may still be in place, I seriously doubt I will censor their reading based on cursing.*

I myself never got much into “young adult” literature as a “young adult.” This was possibly because there wasn’t so much of it at the time (in the eighties), but it was also because when I was a teen, I didn’t like being put in boxes (you know, like all teens) and I resented the idea that I ought to like a book because it was aimed at my developmental level. That felt condescending, and nothing could be more offensive to a teen than condescension.

I am still a little baffled by this today, even as I write “young adult” books for the bourgeoning category. Perhaps the fact that so many young adult books are being read by adults allows teens to embrace them without feeling condescended to. (This is not to say that I think young adult books are in fact condescending to teens, only that as a teen, I would have felt the label itself to be so.)

All I can suppose is that putting parental warning labels on books (especially ones based on profanity for heaven’s sake) would really turn teens off. I mean, talk about condescending!

In my own under-eighteen reading life, I was not censored by my parents at all.

There was a lot of benign neglect in my childhood, as both of my parents worked for pay, away from home, full time, and my brother and I were what the eighties coined “latch key kids” for many years of childhood. Combine these conditions with a house whose walls were literally lined with books–many of which my parents didn’t even know the contents of (my father owned an independent bookstore and the things just arrived, often unbidden, in boxes on the doorstep with regularity) and with the fact that I have been an avid reader ever since I learned to read and you get a young Shannon reading widely and chaotically and not always–almost never, in fact–age-appropriately.

But here’s what happened. The “bad” stuff flew right over my head (as did plenty of not-so-bad, but just beyond my education level stuff). Alternately, I learned things I was ready to learn, though I might have been wary of asking my parents about it directly.

As for my own parenting, I like Kiersten’s advice to read with your kids. (and don’t get me wrong, latchkey kid or not, my parents read with me, to me and near me throughout my childhood. Some of the age-inappropriate books were gifts from my parents, who nevertheless thought I’d get something important from them or just plain enjoy them.)  And I feel this is the way to go about a lot of things when it comes to my kids–let them read or hear or watch certain things with me and discuss those things. We are beginning to hit this stage a little now that we have school peers with different experiences and levels of permissiveness in their families. (I spend a lot of time these days critiquing Batman’s problem-solving techniques with my five year-old and trying to figure out what could possess anyone to admire Justin “Beaver” when his music is so awful with my seven-year old.)

But I still think books are different from television, movies, video games–even music–in an important way. Reading stretches a person, but it stretches her slowly. The pace of reading is such that digestion can happen almost as the reading happens–unlike a video that can smack you with information before you get any time to process it. You can put down a book and look up a word in the dictionary (or ask your mom or your BFF what something means) and go right back to where you left off and read on. (Or you can let that word sail over your head and get on with the rest of the book as I so often did in childhood.)

There’s something inherently educational–and self-educational at that (which I think is the best kind of education)–about reading, even when the material is less than great, or simply beyond you.

So I guess that’s me, with a big no on the question of whether or not to rate books for teens. What do you think?

* And no, I’m not so naive as to think that my kids won’t curse behind my back, among their friends, just like I did as a tween/teen. But the Official Family Rule still molded my understanding of cursing in a way I want my children to learn as well.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in arts and crafts, reads and reviews

Do You Write for the Market?

Posted on January 19, 2012 | 6 Comments

My Favorite Local Bookstore: Women and Children First

A little while ago, I came across this post about the importance of writing to genre conventions for marketing purposes at edittorrent. It reminded me of a question that comes up from time to time when I am talking to other writers.

For instance, I will tell someone who is in a similar career position to me (as-yet-not-conventionally-published-but-working-to-be) that in the course of writing my first two books, I learned more about the market and wrote my third book accordingly. Invariably, I will get some version or other of a head tilt, a look-down-the-nose, and a pronouncement of “oh, I couldn’t think about things like that, I have to follow where my creative spirit leads!” Nine times out of ten, this is followed up by a snide remark about vampires.

(Fear not! They say vampires are Right Out, so there’s no need to lose any energy feeling martyred now if you don’t want to write about them.)

But here’s the rub, as far as I’m concerned: you don’t have a creative spirit. You don’t have a muse. (Neither do I.) I have spent too many years deconstructing literature to believe in any of that romantic claptrap about Literature being Magical. You have a brain, influenced by the society in which you live, the company you keep, the job you do, the beliefs you hold, question, overthrow, rebuild (with your brain) on a daily basis. Writers, as I long have told my literature students, make choices. Writers make choices. Perhaps they do not always–perhaps they rarely–make those choices consciously, but they make them.

The product of the artist is informed by all kinds of unromantic things that are not in the least Magical. I understand that it  feels like a muse or a creative spirit. I too have those voices that talk to me and to each other in my head; those characters that I could swear are real people just asking me to put words and flesh upon their living spirits by means of my books, but in the end, I decide what to write. I decide what to plot. I decide whether or not to write to a recognizable–marketable–convention or not and that decision will make a difference to whether or not I succeed in the kind of traditional career I want.

I am a highly creative person, mind you. My brain is just brimming with ideas and story fragments I long to fill out. But when choosing among those fragments, why not line them up with what seems to be the wisest market information available and choose which one to tell on that basis?

Someday, if I am rip-roaring successful, I will perhaps step outside of conventions (or into a less popular genre) and play there.

I may not even care to do this, though. After all (elephant in the room alert) some of this writing-to-genre/market stuff is about learning to write well. I am not saying all uncatagorizable writing is bad writing, but I am saying that being forced to fit your writing into a certain shape can be an excellent exercise for getting really good at saying exactly what you want to say no matter the form. It’s why I like to write sonnets and haikus. Once you master various forms, you are better equipped to play with them or outside them.

Mind you, I don’t exactly think that my gender-bendy historical adventures full of girl/girl and girl/boygirl kissing are exactly a tool of the man. So it isn’t as if my writing is without edginess or risk, but there are other aspects to the stories and the forms in which I am telling them that do fit conventions and categories, the better to sell my books.

How about you? What part does marketability play in your choices of what and how to write?

→ 6 Comments

Posted in arts and crafts, cha-ching

The Dead Lesbian Rides Again!

Posted on December 13, 2011 | 1 Comment

Gertrude and Alice, Happy Together in 1934

Recently, Sarah, purveyor of all things sparkly and romantic for lesbian teens, got my attention with her revolt against so-called realism in young adult stories featuring queer characters. She points out two important things, one, that in this case “realism” means an unhappy ending and two, that only the queer characters (usually not the main characters, but their gay friends) are subject to this rule of the realistic.

It’s a bit of a reverse “It Gets Better” campaign I suppose. After all, in order for it to get better in the future, it has to be rotten now, right? Maybe. But not necessarily (especially, but not exclusively, in books that, as Sarah points out, are full of fantastical elements of all kinds).

To a certain extent, Sarah’s post reminded me of my own recent musings about why the coming-out story–though it will probably always be relevant–is not the only one that matters in young adult fiction featuring queer kids. But most of all, Sarah’s post got me thinking about the Trope of the Dead Lesbian.

For the past–oh–two hundred years, a lesbian in books, plays and film has pretty much been consigned to two possible endings: either she dies or her love interest leaves her for a man. There are variations on these endings of course. Maybe it’s a murder-suicide and both women die! Maybe she gives up her love interest willingly because she knows she’s not as good as a man. Maybe the man kills her and “rescues” her love interest from her debauchery.

When I began writing stories that featured women who were passionate about other women (“lesbian” being a bit of an anachronism in my historical fiction) I swore that none of my main characters would die tragically and they would all get happy endings. Perhaps that’s a bit of a give-away, but plenty of drama can occur without the whole story ending in some Jacobean bloodbath. After all, we know that the main characters in, say, Star Trek are not going to die (that’s what the nameless red shirts are for, right?) but we watch with rapt attention and bated breath anyway, right up to that last split-second when everyone is saved by tetrion particles. (By “we” of course, I mean, um, “I.”) There are undoubtedly good, artistic, educative, and interesting reasons to let your lesbian die in fiction, but someone else can have that job. Mine are going to be breathing on the last page.
Boardwalk Empire [spoiler alert]did this three episodes ago and crushed my hope that we had entered an era in which we could follow the story of a lesbian into territory that did not include blood and/or an utterly broken heart. Instead, a truly Jacobean bloodbath–two, mostly naked, dead lesbians–ended Angela’s subplot. (Last season, poor, long-suffering Angela got the “love interest leaves with a man” ending, but since the whys and wherefores of that leaving were left a bit hazy, I kept hoping HBO would turn her story around. Instead, Angela got both tragedies.) It would be one thing if this were only one of the many lesbian stories out there, but to me it was proof that HBO was only using the lesbians as a sensational motif to prove their edginess, rather than having any interest in telling a story about a lesbian in the 1920s.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again, “lesbian chic” means it’s cool to know a lesbian. It’s still not so cool to actually be a lesbian.

Was Angela’s demise “realistic?” I’d argue that it was less realistic than a considerably happier ending might have been. There are all kinds of ways it could have gone. She could have had an open agreement with Jimmy–whom she was coming to respect and treat with honesty, and he, her–and had her affairs on the side, just as he did. She could have left him, as planned in Season One, with less drama and fanfare and moved to a bigger city with her new girl friend as a “roommate” and lived as a typist or a magazine advertising illustrator and raised Tommy. She might have survived Jimmy’s death and inherited the Commodore’s money and started some very interesting combat with Jillian. In short, I can see all kinds of “realistic” dramatically interesting, lesbian plots for Angela that don’t require her bloody demise on the bedroom floor and maintain the show’s gritty realism and intense character relationships.

Hey, HBO, wanna hire me?

The fact is, most lesbians have the same basic life trajectories as anyone else. Some die tragically. Some commit suicide. Some have their hearts broken (well, probably nearly all have their hearts broken sometime, just like everyone else). But most just live a mundane life with its highs and lows, its conflicts and injustices, its triumphs and its long stretches of peaceful, uneventful contentment. Just because there is homophobia in the world (and in history, though over time, oppressive structures shift and change in their strategies and so are different, in different times and places) doesn’t mean it is unrealistic to show happy queers. After all, we are GAY, right? If anyone knows how to sparkle in the face of adversity, it is my people!

Not to mention, there is/was sexism, racism, rapacious Captialism and class oppression, ableism, etc. ad infinatum and yet, people oppressed by these things manage to still pull out some satisfaction in life. There’s no reason “realistic” has to mean “unhappy” in any kind of writing.

I’m a happy lesbian and I’m here to attest it.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in arts and crafts, Now and Then, reads and reviews

Workplace

Posted on November 15, 2011 | 3 Comments

My favorite cafe these days is an independent one about six blocks from my kids’ school. I can drop the little one in the afternoon (the big one heads out with her other mom in the morning and stays all day) and squeeze almost three hours of work in before picking them both up again. This place has excellent music, that, somehow, doesn’t drive me nuts when I’m trying to write, nice workers (who are very much overworked, as the management underschedules) and comfy furniture.

In addition, it’s one of those cafes that have used books all over the place–shelves and shelves of them.  Northwestern University is nearby and somehow, I always end up sitting near theology–or other subdivisions of religion–graduate students. Occasionally you can find Jurgen Habermas in the German or an Oxford Annotated NRSV Bible slipped in among the Danielle Steele hardcovers and Penguin Classic paperbacks on the shelves. I like to sit on the sofa, by one of the larger bookshelves and pile the books up like this to make a little coffee table for myself.

You can’t do that with an e-reader. (Well, I guess you could, if you had a big pile of them, but where are you going to find a pile of them? And you really shouldn’t set your teacup on a pile of electronics–for so many reasons.)

Oh and they serve tea in giant beer steins. Really, I swear, that was English Breakfast. I don’t even like beer.

Where do you like to work?

→ 3 Comments

Posted in arts and crafts

Why Tweet?

Posted on September 9, 2011 | 1 Comment

Recently, at a writing website I have been frequenting (BookCountry.com–and more on that in an upcoming post!), some one posed a question in the forum about Twitter. He didn’t understand its usefulness to writers, he said. Could we explain what we got out of it if we used it and whether we thought it was worth his effort?

I answered this with an enthusiastic endorsement for Twitter-for Writers and it occurred to me that others might be curious about it too. So for your edification, I share my Twitter story, here.

Like many a red-blooded, hard-bound-book-loving, long-form-blogging, overeducated, middle-aged U.S. American, when I first heard about Twitter I made an ick face. “What?” I thought, “Now we can’t be literate enough to even BLOG? We have to text-speak our way through 140 characters?” Not to mention “What? Now I have to be available all day, all the time, and see what 500 people had for lunch?”

No way. Twitter must be for the Kids These Days. Not for me. I had even signed up for it but subsequently found the website completely unusable. I didn’t know that to really use Twitter you needed a third-party program like Tweetdeck (there are probably better ones now, but it’s what I was first advised to try and I’ve been using it ever since) to really make sense of the tool that is Twitter. (Again, this may not be true anymore, but it was about two years ago when I started tweeting.)

Twitter was not for me.

Then I got H1N1–you remember, the “swine flu”–and I was in bed for a month. I was bored enough to try Twitter in a more earnest way and in a week I was hooked.

Here’s what I learned:

Sure, some people tweet about what they had for lunch. Some people tweet personal ads and tacky photos of themselves. Some people use a lot of TEXT-speak in their tweets.

But Twitter pretty much lets you build your own little corner of its world by choosing who you want to “follow.” By following someone, you make yourself open to their tweets specifically. You can go look at any tweet you want, but only the people you follow need ever show up in your “feed reader.”

I keep my follow number pretty low so my feed reader doesn’t get impossible to…well…follow.

I follow a few different assortments of people and not many who fall outside these categories. (But lots of my folks overlap more than one category. Twitter allows me to sort them into these categories and overlap too, as needed with “lists.”) One of my main categories is book people: they are publishing industry professionals like agents, editors, publishers and a few writers who are just a bit ahead of me on the path I’m on (traditionally published, middle-brow, popular books) or are about the same place I am on that path. I have a few high-tech, futuristic, e-literature pioneers on this list, too.

What I get from this is many, many things.

First of all, I get to be chatty with nifty people. You can be a successful whatever, but I am not going to follow you if you annoy me or are a jerk in general. (By this, I don’t mean if you don’t agree with me. I am happy to disagree with people civilly.) The main purpose of social networking is to be social. Twitter is a very casual, shallow social network in which your favorite writer of all time might tweet about the sandwich she just had in some city she’s touring with her latest book and you can say back, “Hey! I love that sandwich place in that city! I used to eat there all the time in the eighties! Try their cherry limeade, it’s the best!” and before you know it, you’re twitter pals.

I regularly chat in this friendly way with people who are not so rock-star famous I could never meet them, but might well have a pleasant chat with at a conference somewhere, sometime. Twitter means I don’t have to wait for a conference, pay for the cost of it and travel to it before reaching this warm friendliness with people I know of but don’t really know.

This is, first and foremost, just pleasant. It’s a way to get to know people who care about what I care about (even, again, if we disagree on the best way to go about our caring), and make acquaintances. It’s uplifting to touch base with people like that frequently–especially if you’re trapped in bed with the flu, for example.

Second, because I’ve chosen people carefully, I can learn a lot from most everyone I follow. In the realm of books, I learned, within two months of following publishing professionals, what to do and what not to do (and in fact, that I had done it very wrong when I tried it the first time) when trying to get a manuscript published.

I learned this through actual tweets, some hashtagged “#pubtips,” for example. (A hashtag is a term that starts with # and is a way to organize themes on Twitter. You can follow just tweets with certain hashtags at any given moment to see what everyone on Twitter (not just people you follow) is contributing to that conversation.)

I also learned this through scheduled “chats” (also using hashtags, but limited in time to a particular half-hour or hour or so and carefully moderated to stay on topic). One example is “#askagent” in which, of a given evening, writers can bombard literary agents for advice.

Most of all, I learned this by finding the blogs of agents, editors and successful writers, through articles in industry journals like Publisher’s Weekly or just the mainstream press, discovered via tweets with links to same. Twitter is an excellent way to index the news. Certain people are regularly linking news on certain topics. By following them, I can quickly keep up with the basics without having to read through everything myself. It’s a bit like a google alert from your friends.

A few of my warm, chatty acquaintances have become a bit more than chatty or a bit more than acquaintances and a couple, I’ve even managed to meet in person–mostly by chance, but Tweeters do often plan these things called “tweet-ups” to meet in person–at conferences or elsewhere.

I also learn from Twitter by being a fly-on-the-wall. If you follow two people and those people start speaking directly to each other, you can read their conversation. If all the literary agents I follow are all up in arms over the same Wall Street Journal article (or whatever) I can go look it over and find out what makes a literary agent tick–or ticked off, as the case may be–without having to ask a dumb question.

I have gotten a lot of other benefits from Twitter in other areas too, but this list is merely the ways in which it has helped me in the world of writing and publishing. I do think it is an invaluable tool for any writer. I think it could be used quite similarly for other fields too, and it often is. It is more than worth the learning curve it takes to get accustomed to it.

If you are interested in getting started, here’s a nice list of hashtags for writers. If you begin with those, you will soon find people who are tweeting the stuff you are interested in learning more about. Start following a few of them and before you know it, you’ll be an armchair expert.

P.S.

How NOT to use Twitter: Like any other social network, if you try to use Twitter as some kind of free advertising service for your book, service or product, no one will like you. If you already have Twitter pals and you come out with a book? Tell them! They’ll congratulate you warmly.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in cha-ching, electronica

Relationships in Young Adult Literature: Guest Post at Gay YA

Posted on August 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

The fact is that once you’ve gotten past that initial hump of coming out to yourself and to the most important people in your world, it’s not all that interesting to be queer anymore. “Gay” Y/A is going to start needing more than “gay” as a theme if it hopes to engage readers.

For more, head over to GayYA

→ Leave a comment

Posted in arts and crafts, Now and Then

If the Past is a Foreign Country, the Future is Another Planet

Posted on July 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

I have a confession. I’ve been cheating on you. I’ve been writing a novel set five hundred years into the future. I slink past this blog now and then, woefully noting how out of date it is becoming, then guiltily plunge into 2612.

But after several weeks of this double life, I have decided to come clean with you, and here is why:

Writing the future is actually not all that different from writing the past.

When I started writing historical fiction, I would wonder to myself why it wasn’t branded “genre” fiction like mysteries, romances, sci-fi and fantasy. Because the fact is, even if the world it takes place in correlates to reality in some rough way (sorry historians, I can only give you “rough”) it is really a fantasy land. I may know what people wore, what people ate, how people travelled, even how they talked, in 1880, but the fact is I have absolutely no idea what any of that actually felt like, let alone meant, to someone in 1880. It’s simply gone, like the water of the river you stepped in yesterday.

So while I can use research to create a thick, rich, colorful setting for my characters, and while I can speculate on their internal landscapes, I can’t really do anything but make it all up in the end.

Likewise futuristic science fiction. Of course, right? But I have found that 500 years into the future is actually not long enough to just make it up wholesale. I don’t feel quite as obligated to get it “right” for my future story as I do for my past stories, but I am still doing a lot of research. I am trying to take what I have heard credible people say* about the next hundred years–politically, scientifically, environmentally, culturally–and extend those predictions for another couple centuries. In some ways, that future could be quite similar to our present. But in some ways it could be quite different. For me the balance is just a little bit on the speculative side of realism, whereas in historical fiction it is just a bit on the realistic side of speculation.

Either way, and perhaps it’s just as true of contemporary realism–which I haven’t tried yet–fiction is sort of fiction is fiction.

So hello again. And please recycle.

 

* I have been angsting ever since E.O. Wilson told Bill Moyers that in 100 years, half of all species currently alive on Earth would be extinct. That happens in my new book, and then some, since the story is yet 400 more years along.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in arts and crafts, Now and Then