Teen Writers Bloc

I can’t believe it’s almost over. How did two years go by so quickly? When I first started the program, I didn’t have any real goals in mind. I think all I was really expecting, as the thesis requirements stated, was to have “a manuscript of 50 to 70 pages of stories or other fiction or nonfiction, or a completed children’s book in a state appropriate for publication.” (I also noticed that the term “state appropriate for publication” is only specified for the Writing for Children concentration. The others are only required to have a novel or book in progress.)

Was it worth it? And if I could do it over again, would I do it differently? Some parts would be yes. I would have written more. I would have been more active in going to the weekend workshops and other writing events. But the parts I wouldn’t have changed were the people I met. Our class was filled with talented people who also became great friends. We had amazing authors and editors who taught our workshop and seminar classes. Just the awesome people I got to know made it worth it.

There are two things I would love to take with me after I graduate. The first is the connection with my classmates. Not only do I value their opinion when they comment on my work, but they’re pretty cool people to know. Of course, anyone who follows Teen Writers Bloc would already realize that! The other is having a thick skin. One thing I’ve learned from the past two years is that some comments about my writing are going to be positive and others will be pretty harsh. Don’t let the bad ones discourage you. When it comes down to it, listen to them all and weed out the ones that will benefit you the most.

So I’ll admit my thesis is not something that’s ready to be published. But working with my peer group and hearing their critiques was a huge part in helping me to improve it. I hope, someday, you’ll be able to find it on the shelves of your nearest bookstore.

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April means warmer weather and the temptation to go out and enjoy it. And when I’m outside, it means I’m not writing. I’ll admit that one of my worst habits is procrastination. I’ve always had good intentions when it comes to deadlines. For example, if I need to get 20 pages written in the next two weeks, I’ll tell myself, “I can write two pages a day and that means 28 pages as a result!”

Sounds like a good idea, right? Not really. A day will pass and I’ll have nothing done, but I’ll tell myself, “It’s okay. I still have 13 days and I’ll still have 26 pages.” The same thing will happen on 12 days, 11 days and 10 days.

When I have only nine days left, I’ll realize that I have a little more than two pages a day to write if I want to get those 20 pages done. But it’s still doable. Fast forward until there are only five days remaining. Now I have to write at least four pages each day. I have to come up with approximately 6,000 new words that will form into a story. That’s when the panic sets in. I’ll sit at my laptop staring at the screen trying to figure out what to write.

Sometimes I finish in time. Most times I don’t. But every time I end up feeling stressed and promising myself that I’ll never get myself into a situation like that again. Of course, it’s not a promise I keep and it happens again.

For me, the best way to break this bad habit is to just deal with it directly. My procrastination comes from my belief that I have plenty of time before my deadlines so I can slack off. My solution is to just start on my projects right away and get as much done as possible before they’re due. Like now. I’m proud to say my post for April was finished in early March. Hopefully, I’ll be able to apply the same discipline to my thesis project deadlines!

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I had several favorite female authors when I was growing up. One was Ellen Conford, who usually wrote about pre-teens and teens going through problems that were familiar to most of us, such as first love and being bullied, and the unfamiliar, like finding out you’re the long lost princess of a small country. But no matter what the subject was, Conford’s characters always had confidence and a sense of humor.

I read The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin for our seminar class last spring, but I was already familiar with her works. When I was in the sixth grade, I discovered The Westing Game in my local library and I loved how it was a mystery book just for kids. I searched for more works written by Raskin and found similar books like The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel). These last two also had mystery themes, which appealed to me.

But out of all the female authors whose books I’ve read, Judy Blume is definitely one of the most well known. Her stories, sometimes viewed as controversial, dealt with the pains of growing up. Comparing her books to some of the ones that are available now, the subject matters seem almost tame.

I can’t say I have a favorite female author now, but there are two that have definitely caught my attention. The first is Laurie Halse Anderson. My first experience with her was reading Wintergirls in David Levithan’s seminar class. Wintergirls was well written and Anderson skillfully caught the pain of her main character who was suffering from an eating disorder. I was inspired to read Speak and Catalyst. In each book, Anderson knew how to express the isolation and confusion her narrators felt without overdoing it.

The other author is Libba Bray, who came to David Levithan’s class as part of an author panel to speak to our class. She had a great sense of humor and I hoped that was apparent in her writing as well. It was. Bray had a knack for picking unusual topics for her stories and giving them a twist. Going Bovine had a 16-year-old male narrator who contracts a life-threatening disease and goes on a quest for a cure with an angel, a video-gaming dwarf and a garden gnome for his companions. I thought Bray did an excellent job writing from the point of view of a teenage boy. Beauty Queens is about a group of teenage beauty pageant contestants whose plane crash lands on a deserted island. Bray uses just enough humor to let the situation still feel serious, yet believable when the contestants find ways to use their various pageant skills to survive.

I’m sure there are so many more excellent female authors that I’ve never read. Any recommendations?

Book cover image courtesy of Penguin Group USA

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While I was growing up, most of the characters in the books I had read were portrayed as white. In fact, the only book I can recall having an ethnic main character was Cassie Logan, a nine-year-old African American girl, from Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I wouldn’t have even known about this book if it hadn’t been assigned in the seventh grade. Not only was I fascinated by how the main character was not white, but that she was also strong. I was impressed.

I was in high school the first time I saw a book written by an Asian author. When I saw The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan on the library shelf, I picked it up only because I recognized that her name was Chinese. As soon as I saw her photograph on the back cover, I checked the book out, not even bothering to find out what the story was about. I felt the ethnic connection to Amy Tan’s characters from the very first page. Later on, I began seeing more and more books with Asian narrators on the shelves. I read everything I could find.

Even though I read all the books I could find that had Asian narrators, I never thought about making my own main character anything but white. When my classmates encouraged me to try writing a story with an Asian character, I felt like I was being pushed into an area where I wasn’t comfortable, so I resisted. At first, I thought it was because I spent so much of my life in America and I just didn’t feel I knew my own culture well enough to write about it.

But then I began to re-read some of the books I had discovered during my younger years and I noticed that the all Asian narrators appeared to have similar characteristics. They had non-Asian friends and they were disconnected from their culture. They tried to hide from their friends how “weird” their families were for practicing Asian traditions. Apparently, Asian authors aren’t comfortable making their characters truly Asian. I guess I shouldn’t worry about not being able to write about an Asian narrator.

I’m trying to change. Although the main character in my most recent story is not fully Asian, it is part of her background. Her grandmother is Korean and she is closely connected to her culture. I’m not ready to make my narrator 100% Asian, but I’m hoping I can make that happen in one of my future books.

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When the Fall semester finally ended, I was relieved. For some reason, I felt that it lasted longer than it should have, although I wasn’t sure why it seemed to feel that way. Maybe it was because I had to take a non-children’s lit seminar. Or I was submitting a story for workshop that I wasn’t completely into. While time was dragging, I felt like it was pulling my writing along. In other words, my story was going nowhere. I didn’t feel the drive to work on it and find out where it could go.

But towards the end of the term, things changed. I came up with another story idea that I was really excited about. As I mentioned in my last post, I met up with Dhonielle Clayton, who shared her wonderful methods on outlining and this fueled me even further. For part of a 14-hour plane ride to Asia over Thanksgiving break, I sat and outlined the first five chapters of my new book.

And it got even better. Another classmate, Kevin Joinville, had a fantastic system of using index cards to map out his stories that he shared with me as well. I recently sat with Amber Hyppolite, another TBWer, in Barnes and Noble while Kevin demonstrated how he used his index cards to revise and refine his writing.

My goal for the New Year is to finish a first draft of my latest story. I not only have the means and the motivation, but I also have a great peer group to support me through the process. I have a feeling that this new semester is going to fly by, but I also know it’s going to be a great year.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles

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It’s our third and final semester of taking actual classes at the New School’s MFA program in Writing for Children. I’m really going to miss seeing all the other TWBers for Tuesday workshops. Other students have told me that they’ve heard our group is a close-knit one and they’re right. Over the past year and a half, I was amazed and grateful that so many different personalities found a way to get along so well.

When I started the program, my first story was a middle grade fantasy about monsters under the bed. Then I got stuck and decided to do a YA novel about bullying. That didn’t get very far. In my second semester, I went back to the monsters, but I only got as far as having my characters run into the monsters. I didn’t know how to save them. So as of now, they’re still stuck under the bed and I don’t know when they’ll come out.

For my third semester, I began another middle grade story about a girl who’s learning how to deal with her parents’ separation. I even made up what I thought was a great outline for the story — something I didn’t do for my previous works-in-progress. I started running out of steam on this one, too, and I discovered the outline I created wasn’t exactly helping me. So I called on the help of fellow TWBer, Dhonielle Clayton. I picked her brain about her outlining methods and I got some great tips. I was ready to start on yet another new story. This one takes place in the future and involves memory and transplants. Thanks to Dhonielle, I have my story set up and ready to go.

As we head into our thesis and final semester, I’m looking forward to finishing this latest project. I know what my character wants, I have a plot, and I have a story arc. Most importantly, I have the drive to finish this one. I’m definitely going to miss our Tuesday workshop classes, but working on my thesis will definitely occupy that empty time slot.

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It’s our third semester in the Writing for Children program at the New School, and we’ve run out of Children’s Lit seminars to take, which means we have to enroll in classes that are outside our genre. I decided to take a class in fictional autobiographies and I got lucky. The reading assignments are pretty interesting and the classes are bearable, but I still need my children’s and YA book fix. So this semester, I’ve been spending a lot of time at in the YA sections in of the bookstore and the library, either looking for new releases or finding books by my favorite authors that I previously haven’t read before.

These are some of the books that have caught my attention:

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin. Mara Dyer (which is not her real name) is a 16-year-old girl who mysteriously survived a building collapse that killed her three friends, Rachel, Clair and Jude. Mara begins to recall what happened the night her friends died while trying to navigate a new school, bullies, and hot guys.

You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis. A year after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Luna finds her mother’s forgotten cell phone, still plugged in and fully charged. Luna discovers there are seven messages that have not been heard. Each message reveals a facet of her mother’s life that Luna never knew about and each message is a clue that leads to the cause of her mother’s death.

And a book from one of my favorite authors:

Bronxwood, by Coe Booth. The sequel to Tyrell, written by New School Writing for Children alum Coe Booth, features a now sixteen-year-old Tyrell, whose family has been broken apart. His little brother is in foster care, his mother cares only about her own interests and Tyrell is figuring out how to make it on his own. Tyrell’s father has just gotten out of jail and he has plans that Tyrell doesn’t want to be a part of. Tyrell needs to figure out how to navigate through his life in the best way possible.

I’m always on the lookout for interesting new reads. What books have caught your attention?

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When I was a kid, Halloween costumes were extremely simple. The mask would resemble a Saturday morning cartoon character’s face with holes punched out for seeing and breathing. An elastic band went around your head to keep the mask on. The costume that went with the mask was usually a plastic outfit that was colored to look like what the cartoon character would wear. This went over your own clothes, similar to disposable rain clothes.
Looking at Halloween costumes today, I’m amazed at how sophisticated and original they’ve become. There are the witches and monsters that appear every year, but I can see how much time and effort goes into the makeup. There was one year where I saw someone dressed as an armchair for the Halloween Parade in the Village. Another year, a friend of mine decided to go as a geisha. Her costume was an actual kimono that she had brought back from her trip to Japan.

What would I dress up as this year? My first choice would be any Dr. Seuss character. I love how they all have the same fuzzy head of hair and round belly, yet they’re each different. Another fun costume would be Max, from Where the Wild Things Are. Of course, you would need an entourage of monsters to walk around with you. Or if I didn’t want to go out to buy materials just for one Halloween costume, I could color my hair red and put on anything dramatic – such as fairy wings, a feather boa, or a tutu – and go as Fancy Nancy.

Halloween is a great time to be something or someone I normally wouldn’t have the chance to be. I can’t wait to start on my costume!

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Earlier this year, I went to visit family in Alabama. During my stay, we went to a bookstore which was part of one of the largest chains in the area. (I’ll call it Store X.) The first thing I like to do is go directly to the YA section and look for certain authors, such as ones that I’ve heard at readings or whose books we read in our seminar classes.

So I searched the shelves and found most of the writers I was looking for. Libba Bray, Judy Blundell, M.T Anderson, Laurie Halse Anderson… they were all there. But some were missing. Julie Anne Peters wasn’t there. Nancy Garden wasn’t under “G.” The books that David Levithan co-wrote with other authors were on the shelves, but I couldn’t find any that he had written on his own. In short, there were no teen books about gay and lesbian characters.

Interestingly enough, there was a bookcase containing the Twilight series and other vampire themed books. Harry Potter and his wizard adventures were prominently displayed underneath a sign proclaiming “Reader Favorites.” And an entire section of the bookstore was dedicated to Bibles and Bible accessories. But I still couldn’t find Boy Meets Boy or Luna.

To be fair, I went to Store X’s website as soon as I got home and I found that they sell these books online. But my guess is that readers who come to this bookseller’s site aren’t aware these books are available, since they have significantly fewer reviews in comparison to other book selling websites.

My concern is that they chose not to put these books on the shelves. Young readers who come into the store would never know about great stories that could expand their points of view, like Brian Katcher’s Almost Perfect or Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez. I know this isn’t outright censorship, but this particular store appears to be controlling what they want people to read. If a teen happens to come across Annie on My Mind while browsing the shelves, let that person decide if they want to read it or not.

Of course, being a private establishment, Store X has every right to put what books they want on their shelves. As much as I loved J.K. Rowling, maybe Store X can remove some copies of the Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince from the ten that are on display and make room for some Julie Ann Peters titles. If Store X could open up its shelves a little, I’m sure they could open so many minds.

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I thought that once I quit my day job, it would be easy to just sit and spend all my time writing. I expected to sit in front of my laptop every day and produce a completed novel before the end of summer. I was wrong. I’m disappointed to say I’ve made little progress on my story. But one good thing that came out of this is that the time I should have spent writing was used for reading some great books!

Two of my favorites are:

Bumped by Megan McCafferty. Melody and Harmony meet for the first time at the age of sixteen. They live in a society where a virus renders anyone over the age of 18 infertile, so teenagers who can get pregnant are a hot commodity. Melody is one of those hot commodities and has signed a lucrative contract with a couple to have their baby. Harmony, however, was raised in a community that taught to believe that sex and children should come after marriage. A result of mistaken identities have the twins questioning if what they were taught is actually what they believe.

I thought Megan McCafferty did a great job of showing two different perspectives as she alternated the chapters between Melody and Harmony. I also loved the twist McCafferty made by taking an issue from current times, teen pregnancy, and turning it into a situation that could help maintain the human population,

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. A plane filled with contestants for the Miss Teen Dream beauty pageant crash lands on a deserted island. How will they survive? Will they be able to keep their hair frizz-free until help arrives? Will they be found in time to compete in the pageant?

Libba Bray did a fantastic job weaving suspense and humor (as well as advertisements from the Corporation, the official sponsors of the Miss Teen Dream Beauty Pageant) into a story that is definitely not the female version of Lord of the Flies.

On a fun note, one of our former workshop teachers sent out an announcement for MFA students to be photographed for the cover of Poets & Writers magazine. I decided to go to the photo shoot and will appear with 20 other MFA students in the September/October issue, which will focus on MFA programs. There’s also going to be a slideshow on www.pw.org, where each student gives a brief account about their search for the right MFA program. The issue will be come out on August 15, so be sure to look for me!

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