The first two weeks of April we have been discussing personal stakes and ultimate stakes which has led us to what Donald Maas in Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook calls the irrevocable commitment—the moment of no turning back.
Let’s go back to look at Betti on the Highwire by Lisa Railsback. Refugees Betti and George are attending their first 4th of July celebration with their adopted families. Everyone is joyous, relaxed, and having fun at the typical 4th of July celebration, but no one has warned Betti or George about fireworks.Railsback writes:
Maybe the Buckworths, and the rest of the Americans, didn’t know about the BOOMS. All of them were very busy pointing at the sky. “Ooooooo,” they cooed. “Ahhhhhhh! Ohhhhhhh!” Some rose to their feet and a few Melons in the audience were actually clapping.
Auntie Moo said there is no way in America, but sometimes war comes out of nowhere. Sometimes it comes for no good reason at all. A people disaster.
George peeked up from the ground. “Babo?” His eyes were scared and sparkly and wet. We looked at each other and nodded. We didn’t have to say a single word.
I grabbed his hand and we shot up from the blanket and…
We ran like crazy (258).
One does not think of the “irrevocable moment” in the novel as a running away. But for George and Betti (known as Babo in her native country) disaster can strike at any moment. War has come to them—in the form of booms and sky explosions and together they run to safety.
This works and works well not just because of the juxtaposition of what the child reader knows about the 4th of July but because of the juxtaposition of what usually happens near the climax—the main character charging ahead. Here when Betti and George retreat, their adopted families know in a very different way than they have known before of the internal scars and survival skills Betti and George have. Also, this irrevocable moment, Betti and George hiding in a port-a-potty on the 4th is followed by another. Once hidden will Betti and George come out? Will they try to save their adopted families? Will they learn that not all men with black boots are soldiers? One reads on to find out.
Take Away:
Where and when is your main character’s irrevocable moment? Is it expected by the reader? Is it the opposite of what the reader thinks will happen? Why or why not?
Ah, so I missed doing a round up last Friday as was preparing to leave for a family memorial in Georgia and my fiancé and I were waiting on my “official” engagement ring to arrive. It did and once it did, V took me back to the spot where he first asked me—a week ago—and he slipped the vintage inspired glittery and gorgeous new ring on my finger.
We then took off for Atlanta. Saying goodbye to my aunt Susan was difficult but her service and us all being together had its own bumpy grace attached. Along with our goodbyes, we had hellos. V met the all the family who lived in the area. We went to the Marietta diner and feasted on pancakes, cake, omelets, and other yummy dishes. The kids, my mom, and my sister went to the movies where Bella conked out—as did my mom. I read books to Tehmin and Bella—signed books I’d collected for them since the last time I was home. We devouredHoller Loudly,All the World, and the Hallelujiah Flight. We took funny pictures and tucked the kids in and before you knew it we were back in Austin.
I signed copies of Truth with a Capital T for my family and I pointed out to my mom this passage from the acknowledgments at the back of the book:
To my parents, Allan and Beth Hegedus, for sealing my fate and moving the family to Georgia. To the Bells, the Browns, and the rest of the Hegedus crew, and to all those who’ve ever been to the Kiss-Me-Quick Bridge: family is family. Our hearts have been healed.
And, that’s what this trip home to say hello and goodbye was: healing.
Truth with a Capital T has been named a Bank Streets Best Book of 2010. As a prior New Yorker, I love the Bank Street School of Education and the Bank Street Book Store. And like last year when Between Us Baxters made the list, (with an extra special *) I was glad to see Truth be one of the 600 out of 6000 books which were endorsed by Bank Street. Truth is on the list in the Nine to Twelve, Today category.
What’s Happening for Grandfather Gandhi
An illustrator announcement for the Gandhi book is expected soon. Fingers crossed.
What’s Happening for Hunger Mountain
I’ve served as HM Co-Editor for about two years now and the editorial hat is one I’ve grown accustomed to wearing. I love putting the issues together, reading submissions, approaching authors to write for Hunger Mountain, and I love digging deep into the “gushy” stuff of an essay or a fiction piece and getting my editorial hands dirty as the author of the piece creates and shapes and digs a deeper, more substantial pocket of earth to lay their creative seeds in. (Ah, it is spring and flowers, planting, etc. abound). I was more than pleased to do this work with Linnea Heaney and even more pleased to see she wrote about her HM experience over on her blog, Linnea’s Illuminated Notes.
We did go through revision, with Bethany’s gentle, but to-the-point comments. During this time, I learned about addressing editor suggestions and how to rewrite to find the story in the snuggest and most illuminating way. By the time I sent off the final version near the deadline and heard my phone ringing, I knew it was Bethany with the call all writers want to get. I thanked her for being my first teacher in the writing world!
If you haven’t read A Real Best Friend, the picture book manuscript Linnea discusses revising for me, go do. It’s a real good read!
In Awesome Austin
Congrats to Jo Whittemore who celebrated the release of her latest book, Odd Girl In this last Sunday at BookPeople. Check out Jo’s post over at Diversity in YA, Against Tokenism.
For all the Austin TLA buzz go check out the Austin author schedule over at the Austin SCBWI. I will be there walking the floor on Wednesday and attending the All Publisher Party at the Four Season’s Residences Wednesday night.
The YA A to Z Conference kicks off this Friday. I am bowled over at the fab line up and will be busy beyond belief but I am excited to be a part of this inaugural event. Along with my WLT Office Manager duties, I will be sitting on two panels and also doing a Q&A with Uma Krishnaswami. Check out the fab book trailer of Uma’s new novel, The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, which is racking up starred reviews and has early Newbery buzz.
And, as I’ve got to get the office in Awesome Austin, this Tuesday wrap-up has no Outside Awesome Austin links this week but maybe that is a-ok. After all, TLA kicks off today and this year all those librarians are here, keeping Austin weird and well-read (and protesting cut backs and everyone is doing all we can to Keep Libraries Open!)
Last Monday we discussed creating personal stakes for our main characters with insights ala Donald Maas and his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. This week we are going to discuss ultimate stakes.
Maas writes:
When life tests us to the utmost, our motives grow exponentially greater.Our deepest convictions rise to the surface. We care still more. We become more determined than ever to make a difference, to persist, to overcome all problems and obstacles. At the ultimate testing we summon our deepest beliefs and nothing, nothing will stop us(50).
Looking at Polly, my main character in Between Us Baxters, she faces the ultimate stakes as the novel nears its climax. Polly who has worried her father may be involved in the rash of racial fires that is taking place in Holcolm County and who now has a strained friendship to say the least with her childhood best friend Timbre Anne needs to decide whether or not to warn her friend about the suspicions she has against her father. The personal stakes for Polly—to tell her friend or not—to believe the worst of her father or not—are at hand.Polly who has gone to Timbre Ann’s school to warn her is waylaid…
I scraped the bark of the tree. Peeled it off like a scab. “But sisters make up. They fight but they make up.”
“Don’t, Polly.” She took my hand. Stopped me from hurting the tree. “I wish there was a way, but there’s no making up for this.” She sighed, taking in the sight of our day-and-night covered hands. “It’s how we were born.” She sounded as old as Henri. Older, even.
I swallowed deep. I didn’t want Timbre Ann to teach me anymore. Not about how or why we couldn’t be friends.
She dropped my hand. She went to Peter and took his. The leaves crunched as they walked away, same as they had crunched when I climbed out my window last night. Tarnation! I had meant to warn her. Tell her what I knew, even if it got Daddy in trouble.
“Timbre Ann,” I called, but what came out wasn’t about those fires. “I won. I won the spelling bee. The first one of the year.”
They’d gotten as far as the school yard. Peter kept walking but Timbre Ann turned around. She didn’t hoot. She didn’t holler, but a soft smile crept across her face. Before she could help it, it grew as wide as it would have if Henri had set down a piece of her coconut cake before her. It was plenty enough praise for me” (261).
Maas states above that nothing, nothing should stop our main character. But Polly gets stopped. She is hurt and upset about her fractured friendship with Timbre Ann—which is of her own making, and Timbre Ann’s—but is also inevitable as society is pulling the two apart. Because of Polly’s failure here to act to warn her friend the stakes still rise. What will Polly do now? How does she feel about her failure? How does getting Timbre Ann’s approval at the end of the scene shape her? And what about Daddy—his ultimate stakes are yet to come.
Take Away: Can you pinpoint the ultimate stakes in your manuscript? What is happening? Does your main character succeed in letting nothing stop him/her? Or is there another hurdle, like there is for Polly, and more yet to come.
Today at Inside the Writer’s Studio we welcome the magical Rhonda Hayter to our midst. Rhonda is the author of The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams (Dial, 2010) which is about to be released in paperback. Rhonda may live in Hollywood but her heart is with Abbie, inquisitive and open to other realms. Both she and Abbie realize the stray cat brought into Abbie’s life is none other than great inventor Thomas Edison. Ha!
Here’s a bit more about the book:
Abbie Adams is a witch. She can't tell anyone, even her best friend, Callie, who notices Abbie acting strange. Instead she uses memory-erasing spells to keep things under control. Abbie hopes for some normalcy when her father brings home a kitten, but when Abbie looks into its eyes, she sees a trapped boy. Now Abbie needs her magic more than ever. Saving him becomes even more important when her family realizes the kitten is actually the young Thomas Edison. The world will be a much different place if they can't return him to create his famous inventions!
"Whether facing familiar issues or fantastical ones, Abbie is an appealing, peppy protagonist." -Booklist
Thank you Rhonda for being with us, but if another great inventor wanders into the room in the form of a beloved family pet, feel free to dart away. We don’t want life as we know it to come to a halt because you are with us here today. Now on to the interview…
Is there a story behind The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams that you wish to share? (Ie: the ah-ha or lightning moment where the story inspiration struck)
When my youngest was young, he was always a darling, lovely, well-behaved child.... except when he wasn’t. He had shall we say, a little problem processing big feelings and he’d have horrible tantrums that went on and on. In the midst of one of them one day, I sweatily turned to my husband and said, “My God. It’s like he turns into a werewolf.” And that gave me the idea for a little boy who really did turn into a werewolf when he got upset. Then I wondered what it might be like being a big sister to a boy like that and eventually, the whole magical family in The Witchy Worries grew out of that moment.
If you had a writing mentor or teacher, in what way (s) did he or she keep you inspired during your apprenticeship?
I’d always written but never, never finished anything because my internal critic always convinced me that it wasn’t worth continuing. Sometimes I think the more you read, the nastier your critic gets because you’re always comparing yourself unfavorably to writers you admire. But when my kids got old enough to leave me five minutes to myself, I finally took a creative writing class at UCLA Extension. It was run by this great husband and wife team, Harry Youtt and Judith Prager and the whole focus of the class was on telling you how wonderful your writing was. Everybody would read their stuff out loud, and Judith and Harry would point out what was unique and original and interesting about it...and the thing is, it was all true. Even the writing that wasn’t particularly good always had something about it worthy of praise and certainly what it was saying couldn’t have been said in that particular way by anyone else. Then, the whole class would make comment but they would only remark on stuff that moved them or was interesting in some way. There wasn’t one negative or critical word...and it freed me up in a way I hadn’t imagined possible. Killed my critic dead, dead, dead. Even now, if I show any part of something that’s in progress to anyone, I give them strict orders that they can only tell me it’s absolutely brilliant. Once it’s all done, I’m able to accept criticism, but not while I’m trying to make it up for the first time. I urgently recommend this technique to anyone with a talkative inner critic. My husband has developed a thousand and one ways to tell me I’m an utter genius and irreplaceable gift to the literary community.
How important is community in keeping you inspired? What authors are a part of your virtual and/or hometown community? How do they keep you inspired? How do you inspire them?
I’m a very proud member of the Classof2k10. We’re an on-line community of debut authors in Middle-Grade and YA and we pooled resources, nursed each others wounds, cheered each other
on, met up at various functions like BEA and enjoyed great fellowship. It was one of the loveliest parts of the whole year.
What were some of the challenges you encountered when working on this novel/picture book? How did you overcome those challenges?
After I took Judith and Harry’s class, The Witchy Worries just came pounding out of my keyboard without pause...until about two-thirds of the way through. Then, I realized I’d painted myself into about fourteen different corners and had no idea how to get out. I had to sit down, brainstorm and outline before I was able to finish the book.
Speak a bit about the importance of dialog? How important is it in your work and how do you craft realistic dialog?
In the beginning, I had almost no dialogue. The book was a kind of stream-of-consciousness thing from an eleven-year old narrator. She was very well developed but she was the only character who was. After I showed my manuscript to a terrific writer named Betsy Haynes, I found out that there are certain rules for middle-grade and one of them is lots and lots of dialogue. Then I discovered a great thing. Once I started writing dialogue and gave the other characters their own voices, they all came to life. I don’t think in terms of crafting the dialogue specifically, the work is in understanding the character and his or her needs. Once you’ve got that down, they really start speaking for themselves. The only one I really had to pay attention to was a character in the book who visits from the mid-nineteenth century. I looked to Mark Twain for the kind of idioms he might use. Everybody else just chattered away with not much help from me.
Which character of yours do you hope your readers most relate to? And why?
Well it’s Abbie of course, and kids have written me the most wonderful observations about her. One little girl said she liked that Abbie didn’t hate her little brother, even though he was kind of a pain. She said she was sick of characters in books hating their brothers. Somebody else wrote that they liked Abbie because she doesn’t always manage do the right thing. I love hearing the echoes of their own lives as they tell me how they experienced Abbie.
In researching new novel, author consults leading expert in animal behavior.
In ode to Maebelle, the main character in my new book Truth with a Capital T, who keeps a book of little known facts about just about everything, please share a wacky piece of trivia that has stuck with you or please share a little known fact about YOU.
I can’t resist this because I just came across it yesterday while researching something. Did you know up to 9% of sheep are gay?
Ha! Thanks Rhonda. I think that is a fact Maebelle would definitely want to know. Congrats on The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams being released in paperback on April 14th! In honor of the paperback release, everyone enjoy the book trailer.
For the month of April we are going to be discussing each Monday morning what is at stake—for our protagonist, for our antagonist, and also for us as the author.
Personal stakes are more than just what a hero wants to do. They illustrate the why: Why this goal and the action that must be performed matters in a profound and personal sense. The more it matters to your hero, the more it will matter to your readers, too 40).
Such is the case in one of my favorite novels of 2010, Betti on the Highwire by Lisa Railsback (Dial, 2010). Betti couldn’t have higher stakes. She is an orphaned refuge (in an unnamed country, which is what the author intended) and at a circus camp she oversees the “leftover children”—others who have been harmed, orphaned and almost killed. Soon, however, she is adopted—as is her friend George and is living in America.
Can one think of higher stakes—a higher wire for Betti to walk?
Here’s a passage:
That’s why the villagers say our circus camp is haunted.
They say that the circus ghosts are still flying all over the place. They can hear the circus music floating through the woods on windy nights. Sometimes they think they hear gasps and clasps from the audience, and faint, happy singing from the circus people. The villagers won’t visit our circus camp because they are afraid.
That’s what happens during a war. Everyone is afraid of everything( 3).
In my own novel Truth with a Capital T, the stakes are far less dire than surviving and healing from a recent war, but for Maebelle, they are just as high.As she tries to find out what her talent is—what makes her special as she has no longer is in the gifted & talented program Maebelle does many a foolish thing. She attempts to bake a blackberry cobbler from an old family recipe—to disastrous results. She clogs—persuading her friends to join the dance competition with her and the stakes rise drastically when Mr. Phelps, the town librarian and historian sends Maebelle home with a research book: Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad( Anchor Books, 2011).
Maebelle reads a post it, Mr. Phelps left on the cover of the book for her, “Maebelle T.—take a good look at the quilt code. Let me know if you spot anything that looks like these around Oak Alley.”
Maebelle gets to work, reading and analyzing the patterns that made up slave quilts and what they may have signified to an escaping slave hoping to find their way to freedom. These quilts are a mystery and as Maebelle reads the book about decoding the clues the quilts contained she wonders if she will decode a mystery of her own: who is Ruby Red? And what is in the locked wing in her grandparent’s antebellum home?
By the end of her first night studying the book, Maebelle’s personal stakes, her investment in helping Mr. Phelps with his research as well as her dedication to finding out who Ruby Red is has increased.
That was enough for one night. There was a lot more to the quilt code, but my brain was all zigzaggy trying to understand. Everything Ozella had told the author was common knowledge to slaves. It wasn’t common knowledge to me. I was glad to see it was written down and even gladder Mr. Phelps had chosen to share it with me. Now I knew what to look for, even if Ruby Red still remained a mystery.(173)
Later Maas goes on to write: “Raising personal stakes is especially crucial in character driven stories…raisingthe stakes—the inner stakes—will deepen the reader’s concern about the outcome.”
I can be funny. In fact, someone once told me I should have been a comedian (umm...it was an ex, before we broke up, so I am not sure it was career advice) but I have never been good at any April Fool's trickery. So I swear, there are no misleading links or facts or anything in the weekly round-up below.
Last Saturday I presented a workshop, Creating Your Own Canon, to the SCBWI of Brazos Valley. Lots of learning was had.
Fired! You're all fired. (My Donald impression)
Scenes were read, books were analyzed, tools of the trade were swapped. Plus, there were cupcakes for when our sugar ran low. It was a great day and I would gladly go back to College Station anytime.
A big thank you for planning the event to BV SCBWI RA Liz Mertz and ARA Jacqueline Gramman.
On Tuesday night, the Delacorte Dames and Dude got together to talk shop at House Pizza. I love Shana Burg, April Lurie,Margo Raab,Varian Johnson, and Jennifer Zeigler each individually but as a group when we get together something wonderful always happens--whether one of us (or all of us) need encouragement to go deeper in a project, navigate life outside of writing, or whatever it is we have been shouldering camaraderie, pizza and friends makes it all easier.
On Thursday I visited with Mr. Farr's creative writing class at Anderson High. Mr. Farr is the kind of teacher I wish I had, and hoped I was when I was teaching. He is passionate, encouraging, and he believes in his students and their abilities. It was fun to sit at the head of the room on a big chair (no high chair jokes allowed) and talk craft and the biz with his very serious students. For an hour and a half, I shared my journey from being a HS writer to a published author, to how to develop authentic characters, to how to navigate finding the right agent, to crafting the inevitable endings and to finding the right and perfect title. I encouraged the students to enter the Hunger Mountain Prize for Young Writers being judged this year by the bestselling Austinite Cynthia Leitich Smith. I have nothing to do with the judging but I am keeping my fingers crossed one of those intent writers win.
And today, Kirsten Cappy, of Curious City is going to be at the WLT leading her one-on-one consultations. Kirsten is in Austin from Portland, Maine to share her book publicity knowledge and I'm the lucky leaguer who gets to take her to coffee.
Not to Be Missed Links of the Week
Austin's Own Don Tate makes the Huffington Post on the opening day of the baseball season. Let's hear it for She Loved Baseball, written by Audrey Vernick and illustrated by Don Tate.
All right, look. You didn’t kill him. You’re going to spend tonight in the laundry room, sitting on the dryer. Shuttered doors closed, and phone pulled as far as the cord will let it so you can start out complaining about it to your best friend.
And wrestles with the hard stuff from there on out. Bravo to Saundra for being brave and speaking about her brother's suicide.
And anyone and everyone is keeping up with the SLJ Battle of the Books. Head over and see which book has succumbed to defeat and which books are headed to be judged in the Big Kahuna round.
