Tag Archives: YA fiction

February 20, 2013 · 10:53 pm

The Next Big Thing – I answer 10 questions

The Next Big Thing is a blog chain where writers answer ten questions about their writing, then tag other writers to do the same. I was tagged by Kathy George, prize-winning short story writer, and author of the wonderfully atmospheric Gothic novel Sargasso. You can read her post here. My answers follow.

Ocean channel between rocks 1. What is the title of your current book?

Still Water

2. Where did the idea come from?

I’m a clinical psychologist by background, and my specialist field is adolescent mental health. Over my clinical career I’ve worked with many brave, funny, ingenious, dignified, dauntless people aged 13-18, battling severe and complex mental health problems in often horrific life circumstances. My protagonist, Storm, is inspired in a general way by the privilege of working with these amazing young people.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

It’s young adult fiction. The genre is realism, which I know is unfashionable (not a vampire lover or zombie apocalypse in sight), but I believe young people are still interested in reading about the kinds of problems and situations they encounter day to day. Love, friendship, families, sex, bullying, teachers, trying to work out where you’re headed and what you really want out of life – little details like that.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Showing my age, the only people I can think of to play Storm are Ally Sheedy from The Breakfast Club or Lizzy Caplan from Mean Girls. Maybe Ellen Page from Juno. Except Storm’s Australian. I’m sure there are wonderful young Australian actors out there, who’ll be ready to play Storm brilliantly when the time comes.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Sixteen year-old Storm wants to become a world-class documentary maker – but life has bigger ideas.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m working on finding an agent (do you know one?)

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft?

The first draft took a month to actually write – it was, quite by accident, a NaNoWriMo effort – but I’d been working on the story for a year by then because I’m writing two versions of the same events: one from Storm’s perspective (Still Water) and one from the perspective of an adult character called Susan (The Child Pose). It’s taken another three months of feedback and polishing to turn Still Water into a finished manuscript. The Child Pose is slowly getting there.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I read quite a bit of YA fiction but I haven’t come across a book that’s similar to Still Water in plot. I guess it’s a coming-of-age novel. It has some similarities with Kate Constable’s Crow Country – a city girl unwillingly transplanted to a small town forms a close relationship with a boy, meets some wildlife, and comes to appreciate what lies below the surface of the place.

But no time travel. Sorry.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I’m fascinated by questions of how people interact with places – with the natural environment, and with other people in that environment. I’m from a country town that still doesn’t possess a traffic light (let alone traffic). I think small towns in fiction are manageable microcosms, providing insights into big questions about environmental, family and community responsibilities.

I started out focusing on the adult character, Susan. But in the course of writing The Child Pose, Storm really got under my skin. From the start I found her funnier, more complex, and yet easier to relate to, than any of the adult characters. Maybe I just like teenagers better than adults. As soon as I started writing Storm’s diary, in first person, the story flowed out. It reminded me of interviewing: all I was doing was writing down Storm’s words. I still feel a sense of responsibility to do justice to her story, as if she were a real person.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

The town of Stillwater, where the novel is set, is a mix of places from up and down the Queensland and New South Wales coasts, with an occasional touch of Tasmania, South Australia, and Papua New Guinea thrown in. So you might recognise a beloved spot from real life, slipped into the fiction.

And Storm’s bloke Nathan is – in the words of my test readers – “a spunk and a sweetie”. If he were real, and I were several decades younger, I’d almost want to sail away with him myself.

I would now like to introduce you to two lovely Brisbane writers, who will be posting their answers to the 10 questions in a week’s time.

Kate Zahnleiter holds a Masters degree in creative writing. In 2011 she was the recipient of the QUT Postgraduate Writing Prize, and her short fiction has been published in One Book, Many Brisbanes; Rex and Review of Australian Fiction. She is currently working on her first novel, Fitting in with Normal People, which was recently accepted into the QWC/Hachette Manuscript Development Program.

Kim Douglas has completed a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing at QUT, and plans to articulate to Masters. She is working on her first novel, The Black Dog in Greek, and has just started blogging as a strategy to manage writer’s block.

If you have a blog and are working on a book (or have recently completed/published one), you may like to participate in The Next Big Thing yourself. Contact me, Kate or Kim!

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January 15, 2013 · 1:07 pm

Dear Diary

diary

For my current YA novel, Still Water, I’m using a “diary” structure. This has its pros and cons. Some pros:

  • The diary form provides a good justification for first person narration, very popular in YA fiction. The reader is placed in the position of the diary – the recipient of the protagonist’s confidences. This creates a very personal connection between protagonist and reader, since the protagonist is sharing her most private and powerful thoughts and feelings, including internal conflicts. Being placed in the role of sympathetic “listener” predisposes the reader to identify with and care about the protagonist.
  • The form emphasises the passage of time, while allowing flexibility in the way events are narrated. My protagonist, Storm usually brings her diary up to date a couple of times a day. However, sometimes she’s writing in the middle of an unfolding drama, while other times days go past before she updates her diary.  I like the variety this brings to the narrative.
  • We get a sense of immediacy in our relationship with the protagonist. We get to “see” where Storm is, who she’s with and what she’s feeling at the moment of writing (like a FB update!) and also to hear about what’s happened in the past few hours or days to bring her to this point. Sometimes she’ll say at lunchtime, “This afternoon I’m going to try this“, then at dinnertime “That didn’t work! Let me tell you what happened…”  The mix of past-tense and present-tense narration keeps things interesting.
  • The diary is a tool for showing changes in the protagonist’s mental state, not just through the content of what she writes, but through the form. Longer or shorter diary entries, frequency of entries, length and completeness of sentences, punctuation or lack of it, repetitiveness, misspellings, and so on can show that the protagonist is upset, angry, confused, semi-conscious, borderline psychotic – whether she tells us or not.
  • The diary form lends itself to a sense of continuity – that the protagonist has a life beyond this particular novel. I’m planning a prequel and a sequel to Still Water, which I don’t think I’d have had the urge to do if the novel wasn’t in diary form. Storm explains at the start that she’s been diarizing for the past year, while hospitalised for depression and self-harm. This “new” diary begins when she leaves hospital. Now, as her author, I’m curious to read her hospital diary – and I’m also interested in what happens next, after this one ends. I’m hoping her readers will be equally inquisitive!

However, the diary form also raises some challenges. So far I’ve identified these:

  • Some readers consider the diary form to be overused, particularly since the 1990s, so a novel in this form now seems “old hat”. (Personally I can’t say I feel that, but some people do).
  • If your protagonist is keeping a diary quite conscientiously, it’s reasonable for the reader to ask why? Does she expect someone else to read it someday? Does she feel she’s participating in historically important events that someone should chronicle? Is she collecting raw material for her memoir? Is it a school project? Or just a way of coping with the stresses of life? Especially today when many people blog or micro-blog rather than keep a diary, it may be important that your protagonist has a reason for journalling – and this reason can also add another dimension to the character/story.
  • Switching between past-tense and present-tense narration can feel “clunky” or jarring, unless carefully managed.
  • The diary form privileges the protagonist’s view of things so completely it can be a challenge to show the reader anything else. The protagonist is more interesting if she doesn’t fully understand herself and her own actions. Other characters are more interesting if the reader can see things about them that the protagonist is blind to. As the author, sometimes you want to share a secret with the reader without letting the protagonist in on it. This can be tricky in diary form – but it’s fun!
  • Because your protagonist is placed explicitly in the role of narrator, mediating or translating events for the diary/reader, it can be easy to slip into using the protagonist as a mouthpiece for your own views. Readers are quick to detect preachiness. It’s especially important in a diary to maintain the voice of the protagonist consistently, and this can be challenging if he/she is very different from you the author in age, sex, socio-economic status, cultural-linguistic background, etc.

How about you – have you written in diary form? Or read novels that use a diary structure? What inspires you about this form? What challenges you? What solutions have you found to these challenges?

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