NaNoWriMo with Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld
Photo: Niki Bern

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  Nanowrimo.org has set up all sorts of tools to aid writers who want to take the challenge of writing a novel in one month. Scott Westerfeld is writing a companion for his novel Afterworlds on his Web site called How to Write YA. 

This week, Westerfeld posted about point of view ("POV failure is one of the most common reasons why agents and publishers cast aside submissions half read," he writes). He talks about his process generously and clearly. To give you a flavor of how thoughtfully he approaches each of his novels, here are a few highlights from a conversation I had with him for School Library Journal about Darcy, the teen novelist in his book, Darcy's love interest Imogen, and Lizzie, Darcy's heroine in the book Darcy's writing called Afterworlds.

Q: Without mentioning individual tweets between characters, you do discuss the effects of social media and the influence of the Internet. How much has social media changed the field of YA lit?

Scott Westerfeld: YA novels are a lot about identity. The way people construct and determine an identity these days has a lot to do with the way they are online. I always say the main difference between the Americans represented on television and real Americans is that in real life, Americans watch a lot more television.

In a funny way, one of the things about writing a contemporary YA novel is not getting involved in the amount of time that teens are spending online. What I was trying to do was to acknowledge the amount of time Darcy and her friends spend on it and how that shapes who they are, rather than talk about it.

Q: Tell us about this quote from Darcy: “Maybe that was the price of loving someone: You lost your grasp of where they ended and you began.” Isn’t that true not only of Darcy and Imogen but also Darcy and Lizzie?

SW: By calling the characters Darcy and Lizzie, I’m suggesting there’s a certain amount of tension between the writer and the character--also characters and ghosts. The ghosts that Lizzie sees are on the one hand not real, really; on the other hand, she has a moral responsibility to them. Writers don’t want to betray our characters and make them do things they wouldn’t do, for a plot contrivance. I wanted Lizzie to grapple with the question: Are the ghosts real people? Are they just stories? I wanted to make these same concerns parallel Darcy’s ethical concerns. Should it be a happy ending? Should it not?

Q: There’s a cutting-edge quality to all of your books. How do you manage that time and again?

SW: Probably a lot of it is taking conversations that are happening in the adult world, particularly in adult science fiction, and applying them through a YA genre filter. Most things are more interesting when you look at them through the lens of a teenager.

The First Superheroes

George O'Connor

George O'Connor refers to the Olympians--the Greek gods led by Zeus--as "the first superheroes." They may not undergo a Clark Kent–like transformation, but O'Connor portrays them with some very human qualities. Poseidon, for instance, has never quite forgiven Zeus for taking full credit for the demise of their father, Kronos the Titan, "the all-devouring." 

The Greek myths have always fascinated me, from elementary school right through my college thesis (on James Joyce's Ulysses; Poseidon hates Odysseus--another name for Ulysses--for blinding his son, the Cyclops called Polyphemos). I thought I knew a great deal about these stories, but O'Connor prompts us to consider them from a number of perspectives. Poseidon is his fifth in the Olympians series.

The author-artist demonstrates the Olympians' difficult childhood (a father who ate them out of fear they'd cause his demise--they caused it anyway) and their infighting due to jealousies both petty and well-founded. My favorite of his retellings thus far may be Hera, because O'Connor brings to light another side of her; she's so often portrayed as the jealous wife overshadowed by Zeus. O'Connor's take on the 10 labors of Heracles (also known as Hercules) posits that Hera's assignment of them strengthened Heracles's character, to complement his physical prowess. However, with Poseidon, O'Connor's use of the comic book format hits a new level, even by the high standards he'd already established with his first four books. 

Chiefly, in the series of images that chronicle Poseidon's son Theseus entering the labyrinth to face the Minotaur--O'Connor blows open the confines of the book-as-object. O'Connor divides the pages to emulate the labyrinth itself. The first double-page spread shows Theseus tying the red thread (that will help him find his way back) in the upper left-hand corner, a series of horizontal L-shaped panels track his journey, and his first sighting of the Minotaur appears in a vertical panel at the far right of the spread. A turn of the page reveals the eye of the Minotaur (with Theseus reflected there) in the upper left-hand corner, a series of vertical L-shaped panels depicts their struggle across the double-page spread, and, in a vertical panel in the lower right-hand corner, Theseus reaches for his sword, which he'd dropped in the conflict. The next page shows Theseus's climactic victory. It's an achievement in design, pacing and visual storytelling.

O'Connor takes ancient stories we may think we know well and take for granted, and endows them with immediacy and emotion, proving their relevance today. Triumph, defeat, love, jealousy, strength, weakness, joy and sorrow. It's all here, playing out in well-orchestrated panels and full-spread illustrations. Twelve are planned, but perhaps he'll do more? We can only hope. 

The author-artist is not only extremely talented, but generous, too. When I interviewed George O'Connor for School Library Journal's Curriculum Connections, he shared the 5 steps of his creative process, so kids can make their own comics.

Finding the Fireworks

One of things I love most about Marla Frazee’s projects is the way she chooses them. “When I read a book to consider illustrating I don't want to fully understand it. I want to puzzle it out,” says Frazee. “I almost want to be afraid of it.” You can see just what she means when you look at her artwork for Stars by Mary Lyn Ray. The text is poetic and lyrical and closely observed, yet it does not include a set group of characters. Frazee found ways to connect the images and build relationships among characters so that you feel an emotional connection to them.

Frazee spoke at the Society of Illustrators in the same presentation as Stephen Savage (which I mentioned last week). She said the text of Stars reminded her of Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Krauss, a former teacher, once said something along the lines of she hoped her students didn’t sue her for lifting their conversations verbatim and recording them in the book. Stars has that same loose, free-associative quality as Krauss’s book.

If you look at Frazee’s illustrations for All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, and Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, the same is true there, too. Frazee creates the narrative through line with her images. We recognize her characters from certain details—pigtails, a slouchy posture, striped onesies, overalls. Although they go unnamed, we feel as if we know them.

Marla Frazee’s Web site, in addition to showing a picture of her studio under an avocado tree (she's sitting on the porch of her studio with Rocket, above), gives all sorts of insights into her work. At the Society of Illustrators, she talked about how she starts with a series of single images. “Sometimes the way into a book is just that--just a way to get started. Like you tend to have polite conversation and then you click,” she said, adding that you have to give yourself permission to make mistakes.

She talked about painting with a tiny brush. It made me look anew at the spread of the yellow sky with its hundreds of dandelion seeds, and the winter scene veiled by snowflakes (“Of course each one had to be unique,” Frazee said with a laugh). Cecilia Yung, art director at Penguin Books for Young Readers, who helped organize the presentation, made this wonderful observation: “The starring character is the sky.” Going back through Stars after that, I thought about the sky’s many moods, and how it envelops the stars in all its incarnations—as celestial body, as the blossom shape that precedes the pumpkin, and as the shiny kind a child keeps in his pocket or gives to a friend to lift her spirits. And that fireworks finale merges the human- and nature-made creative forces into one. Brava!

A Matter of Trust

When Sharon Creech and her editor, Joanna Cotler, talk about how they began to work—and continue to work—together, they both say that it all boils down to trust. Sharon needed to know she could trust Joanna with her words; Joanna needed to learn how Sharon liked to work so that she could earn Sharon’s trust.

The parallel struck me that this is just what children face at the beginning of each school year. Can I trust my teacher to look at my work and see what I’m trying to do beneath that? If I make this new friend, can I trust him or her? Young people may not express it in quite that way, but that’s what is happening—we know that as adults. It takes so much courage to begin to trust. Georgia O’Keefe, whose glorious paintings often feature one flower that dominates an entire canvas, said, “To see a flower takes time./ To make a friend takes time.” Friendship, and trust itself, means seeing someone fully, listening closely, observing carefully.

This is the theme of The Unfinished Angel, Sharon Creech’s novel published this month. Angel observes the little town of Ticino so carefully and over so many hundreds of years that Angel knows its “peoples” and all of the small events that have shaped each one. So when young Zola comes along and notices a group of orphaned children taking refuge in a nearby shed, Angel has trouble believing it. How did Angel miss that turn of events? And who would let a group of children fend for themselves? This becomes the turning point in Angel and Zola’s relationship, and also in their growth as individual beings (one otherworldly, one human). Through that experience of trying to protect the children together, Angel and Zola begin to trust each other.

In this video of a conversation between Sharon Creech and Joanna Cotler, they talk about how they developed that trust, as writer and editor, and they use the example of Love that Dog. But when they move on to talk about its companion, Hate that Cat, they demonstrate what can grow out of that kind of trust--the ability to delve into deep questions together. Joanna asked, of Jack (the hero) but ultimately of Sharon as author, “Why do you write?” Often it’s not about giving someone an answer, it’s about asking the right question and then companionably standing by while she plumbs the depths to find the answers for herself.