Dead Parents Syndrome

I recently had a problem when trying to recommend a middle-grade book for my eleven-year-old daughter. I noticed that she was very resistant to the action-adventure book I'd picked out for her, which normally would have been right up her street. When I quizzed her, it turned out that she'd read the back and didn't like the fact that the plot hung on the main character's father dying early in the story. So I found something else - no good, I realised, more dead parents. Again and again, I picked up books only to put them straight down. Eventually, I found a Michael Morpurgo book that I hadn't read, but which didn't sound too bad. Half an hour later, I went back upstairs and found my daughter in tears. What was the problem? Oh yes, someone's dad had just been killed.

The more I looked, the more I realised that there are a lot of dead parents in children's fiction. Some might even call it an epidemic. I blogged a year ago about the reasons why dispatching a parent is dramatically useful, but for this post I wanted to concentrate on the emotional effect on the reader. Parental bereavement is clearly an issue that my daughter worries about. More than that, it's something that I worry about, and I wonder how much I might be trying to work through my own fears of premature death via my book selections. I've been aware of the looming presence of death in my own fiction for a while - could I even be choosing what I read on that basis?

But maybe this isn't an issue that only affects me. I know a surprisingly large number of children's writers who lost a parent when they were themselves children. Many more have had to cope with parents dying since. With such emotive material, it's not surprising that writers consciously or unconsciously explore these issues in their fiction. But the fact remains that the statistical chance of a child losing one or both parents before they reach adulthood is something like 1 in 20 - the ratio expressed in contemporary middle-grade and YA seems much higher.

Amongst the recent debates on taboos in YA, I firmly agree with the view that young people need hard-hitting books, that these provide teenagers with a way to explore painful issues in relative safety. But I also feel that they shouldn't have these issues forced upon them - they must go to these books when (or if) they are emotionally ready. But how to avoid dead parents syndrome when it's so often used as a dramatic device that is more or less incidental to the plot? I think about how many classic stories begin with the main character orphaned and wonder if those are out-of-bounds as well. Time and again, book awards will recognise dark and downbeat novels rather than ones that are fun and uplifting - it's little wonder that in trying to fill my house with good quality children's books, I've picked quite a few with challenging themes.

Of course, perhaps my daughter was just feeling vulnerable for other reasons that day. She has, after all, read and re-read the Harry Potter series - no shortage of dead parent issues there! But I do see a problem, in that both she and my younger daughter have a reading ability that is running ahead of their emotional development. It's great to push boundaries in children's fiction and to keep up with the needs of our ever more complex audience. But let's not forget that sometimes, all they really want is some good old-fashioned escapism.

Nick.

On Writing and Rioting

Are you a part of the problem or a part of the solution? A pertinent question after this week's riotous activities, and one that gives me significant pause. In my day job, working for a company that defines its profit margins by the number of shiny new smartphones it can unleash upon the world, I'm firmly part of the problem. As a children's writer, I should balance this by being part of the solution, shouldn't I? After all, I'm promoting youth literacy, social mobility and all the good things that can empower our beleaguered underclass to drag themselves up in the world. But I can't escape the idea that writers are increasingly irrelevant.

The idea that the only shop in Clapham left untouched by the looters was a Waterstones, initially made me laugh. Then it made me sad and ultimately it made me feel kind of useless. These are not rioters infused by the spirit of 1968, fuelled by Marxist ideologies or the Situationist writings of Guy Debord. Their revolutionary texts are the instruction manual for Call of Duty and the latest Samsung product catalogue. They are revolutionaries without a purpose, tanked with rage and battered daily by the shiny propaganda of the consumer economy.

Books are becoming an ever-marginalised activity, not because of e-readers but because the very nature of consumption is changing. I think the Nintendo DS can take its share of the blame for distracting would-be young readers, but to be honest it's just accelerating a trend that began with the original Playstation. Games offer us instant feedback and challenge, they engage our brains on a primitive level and constantly reward us for our efforts. Of course, you could argue that a good story does the same thing, and can actually take us much deeper into our primal responses as the tale pulls us through to the climax. But in a culture that is built around quick bite-sized rewards, who has the patience to wade through 250 pages to get that buzz?

Books may have lots of sex in them, but they are rarely sexy as an object. Even the Kindle is really only attractive to the kind of people who read a lot of books and wish they didn't have to lug them around. True, people with iPads read books, but they also spend a lot of their time surfing the web and playing slightly dull games. Books, movies, albums - these are all just more content to shove down the magic funnel towards the shiny device. This news piece about "tentpole" movies didn't surprise me in the least (you can see the evidence at your local multiplex right now), but it was unusual to see a movie executive openly espousing the view that story was dead.

So where does that leave us? Short of another wave of popular book culture like Harry Potter (unlikely), the readership of books seems likely to contract further. Should we be happy to live in a world of middle-class writers preaching solely to middle-class (increasingly female) readers? In some ways, that's no worse than the niche occupied by folk singers, documentary filmmakers or conceptual artists. But books used to be so much more, they used to really matter.

Children do not come out of the womb unwilling to read, no matter how deprived their family background. But with an increasing number of parents of all classes disinterested in reading for pleasure, and libraries teetering on the edge of extinction, how can we reach those kids? Or should it be us that adapts, turning our ideas into apps and games and two-minute YouTube clips rather than 85,000 word novels?

Children's stories bring excitement, laughter and wisdom. But most fundamentally, they bring hope. There are a whole lot of hopeless young people out there in the world right now who could really do with some of that.

Nick.

The Saga Habit

Except for the tendency to write articles about the Modern Girl and allow his side-whiskers to grow, there is nothing an author to-day has to guard himself against more carefully than the Saga habit. The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him. He writes a story. Another story dealing with the same characters occurs to him, and he writes that. He feels that just one more won't hurt him, and he writes a third. And before he knows where he is, he is down with a Saga, and no cure in sight.
P. G. Wodehouse

That quote comes from the preface to Blandings Castle, published in 1935. Side-whiskers and proto-feminists aside, the condition Wodehouse describes is still true, 75 years later. Look at Philip Reeve, joyfully immersed in his wonderful Mortal Engines series to the tune of seven books and counting. Or Lemony Snicket's thirteen-book odyssey. I hardly need mention J. K. Rowling, do I?

Many attribute the popularity of the saga to market pressures - the need to create a franchise and build reader momentum over a multi-book series. But there's another side to this coin - writers love them. If being an author is like having your own personal sandpit, then how much better would it be to have a really, really big one full of colourful characters and cool steampunk gadgetry? What if you could excavate as well as widen, digging into the fascinating backstory of your world and its most beloved inhabitants? Lets face it, for George Lucas, the real world basically ceased to exist about twenty years ago.

The downside of the continuing saga is over-elaboration, the urge to explain things that were best left to the audience's imagination. This is a weakness that Star Wars has especially suffered from - Darth Vader and Boba Fett were great baddies who lose more of their glorious ambiguity with every cartoon spinoff. When a writer is in the midst of story, it's easy to forget how much a reader brings of themselves to the worlds we create - over-elaboration can destroy that. Lemony Snicket, on the other hand, went the other way and failed to explain enough about his world. Each book in A Series of Unfortunate Events unveiled more and more delicious mysteries, and it seemed that the author was poised to explain all of them in a glorious final volume. But book 13 - The End - was simply that, more of a stopping point than an answer. Never have I been more frustrated about the exact contents of a simple sugar bowl!

When I was researching the children's market back in 2007 (my previous YA novel having been written in complete ignorance of what was actually selling), the multi-book series seemed like a sure-fire way to get published. So I conceived an elaborate five book saga detailing an ongoing zombie war and set to work. With the first book done, I discovered that even though everyone seemed to want these series, it was bad form to actually mention them in your letter to an agent. No problem, I thought, and came up with the following nifty phrase:

The 51,000 word book tells a satisfying and complete story, while offering considerable scope for expansion into a series.

Pretty good, right? And it worked up until the moment that I sat down in front of my would-be agent and she shot the whole idea down in flames. Her reasoning was very simple and very sound:

1. It's much harder to sell a series by a debut author than it is to sell a standalone novel.


2. You shouldn't save ideas for later - put all of your best concepts into the first book and make it as good as it can possibly be.

My friends Teri Terry and Paula Harrison have both recently sold multi-book series as debut novelists, so these are clearly not hard-and-fast rules. Nevertheless, I have taken my agent's advice to heart and it's driven everything I've done on the manuscript I've just completed - to the great benefit of the story. By trying to take the central concept as far as it can possibly go, I've engineered an ending that - if it remains the way it is - could only be diminished by a sequel. So why then, did I find myself yesterday writing the synopsis for a prequel?

Fetch the smelling salts, Jeeves. I seem to be coming down with a Saga after all.

Nick.

Do Not Adjust Your Internet

I'm on holiday this week and having a strict no-writing policy (put down the notebook, Cross!). So, instead, here are a few other blog posts that are well worth your time:

Notes from the Slushpile - Remembering Margaret Carey

In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series

Notes from the Slushpile - Writing's a struggle. And then Life gets in the way.

Nicola Morgan - ROCK OF AGENTS

Absolute Vanilla - Self-Publishing Part One

Exposing Exposition

I'm in a bit of a hurry at the moment, trying to sort out the apparent mountain of exposition at the end of my novel, so I can get it sent off to my agent before I go on holiday. So excuse me if this post isn't quite as well structured as usual. But in the spirit of what I'm supposed to be doing, what better topic is there to discuss than exposition itself?

Robert McKee gives a very succinct definition of exposition in his invaluable book Story:

Exposition means facts – the information about setting, biography and characterization that the audience needs to know to follow and comprehend the events of the story.

So by this yardstick, exposition is essential – without it, a book simply does not make sense. But it seems that exposition has become the unwanted stepchild of novel writing, the thing we must ration at all costs lest our audience get bored and demand another action sequence. Yet, when watching Harry Potter and the Collection of Meaningful Stares 7.2 last night, I was struck by the fact that it wasn’t the elaborate scenes of magical carnage that really impressed me, it was a 4 minute sequence of emotionally-devastating flashback. Here was a scene that should have been in the way of the forward momentum of the story, yet it managed to encapsulate the underlying sadness and stoicism of the whole series. Suddenly, Harry Potter felt very grown up.

Withholding information like this is definitely a powerful tool – ironically, the problem I’m having right now is that perhaps I’ve been withholding too much and have now got to explain it all! I’ve been emphatically putting this together as a standalone novel, so all the loose ends do need to be tied up – perhaps I can see the appeal of writing a trilogy now...

I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with exposition and I think writers are conditioned to dislike it. Do audiences really notice the endless expositional dialogue in modern blockbuster movies? Perhaps they feel like they’re simply being told the story and that's ok? Certainly the meteoric success of Doctor Who and The Da Vinci Code suggests that people are pretty comfortable with a character popping up and spewing out a load of information to move the plot forward.

One of the reasons I decided to have a main character with amnesia in Zomboy was that it freed me from the burden of backstory in the opening chapters. Not for me a massive info-dump in the middle of page two – my first-person character had to discover the rules of his world at exactly the same time as the reader. Of course, I did have to explain things eventually, but as a writer that uncertainty was empowering because I wanted find out what was happening as much as the character (and ultimately the reader). I don’t think you should underestimate the power of discovery in a novel and that’s one of the reasons why planning too comprehensively can be detrimental. Sometimes, you just have to take that journey with the character and see where it leads you.

Ok, I’m rambling now. My protagonist’s journey is almost at an end and all that remains is to tell him what he doesn’t know and let him make his climactic decision on that basis. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone to do that in real life? I may have to look into it…

Nick.

What's the Big Idea?

"Where do you get your ideas from?" is one of the more difficult questions for a writer to answer. "They float into my head on a wave of magical inspiration," isn't a particularly satisfying response, and neither is "I stole them all from Stephenie Meyer."

We all have our own rituals and thought processes for idea generation. Some will brainstorm, others will take a keen interest in dental health because they know the best ideas come when brushing their teeth. For my part, I've recently discovered a talent for literally forcing ideas out, a way of worrying over my lack of inspiration until the right concept drops from my brain. In addition to being a positive application of my neuroticism, this technique has given me two great ideas - the concept behind my work-in-progress (or work-almost-finished as I like to call it) and a shiny new idea for my next novel.

So is a writer simply an ideas factory? An industrial process that hoovers up inspiration from other real and fictional worlds, filters it through the experience of a lifetime and produces a string of book-shaped sausages? I'm sure we could all point to authors whose work appears to have been produced under those production line conditions, carefully controlled and packaged in a protective atmosphere. These are the authors who rarely surprise, but always satisfy - you know what you're going to get from their books and that's precisely the reason you pick one up. Other writers have a more wayward and capricious approach - sometimes genius, sometimes "what were they thinking?" Is there room in the market for both? Perhaps the key is not being so wayward that you alienate your readers entirely.

One of the worst things for an author is finding out that another writer has had the same idea as you. Which happened to me this very week. Worse than that, the writer who I now discover I share ideas with, is a friend. The central concepts of our novels are very different, but there is a key plot mechanic that we've both - quite independently - come up with. How could this have happened? We share work a lot, so the fact that neither of us had read the particular drafts of these particular books was unexpected. At least we can't accuse each other of plagiarism, but nonetheless, the experience has made me very uncomfortable. Perhaps I can't see the wood for the trees here and am focusing on a couple of similarities when a hundred things are very different. But if I've discovered these ideas in a friend's book, what are the chances of my other ideas coalescing in the mind of a writer I've never met? There are quite a few of them out there, after all.

Nicola Morgan had this situation happen to her at the worst possible time - just as her first novel was about to be published. Her blog post is well worth reading and I found it quite comforting - just because someone else has the same idea as you, it doesn't mean the end of your book.

Every writer wants to believe that they are one-of-a-kind (a unique and beautiful snowflake as Tyler Durden would say). They want to believe that their hard-won ideas are original and provocative, streets ahead of the mindless formula pap that colonises our cinema screens and bestseller lists. But somehow, it doesn't always seem to work out that way. Part of the problem is that we share a lot of the same inputs - news is global and inescapable, a single film can reach billions, a group of writers will share the same books through word of mouth. The pool of inspiration, when you look at it this way, is quite small. Is it any surprise that genres suddenly pop up, or that two writers find themselves coming to the same conclusion independently?

I could spend an entire blog post talking gloomily about the impending collapse of our culture, about how we seem to be recycling ideas more and more aggressively, remaking proven properties rather than taking a chance on the new and unique. But I think I have a part to play in breaking that cycle, by encouraging younger readers to step away from the obvious and inspiring them to build a whole new culture from the ground up.

Now there's an idea for a novel…

Nick.

I Must Be Mistaken

I think I scared a few people last week with my neurotic perfectionism. I think one of them was me. So this week, I'd like to tell you why you shouldn't listen to a word I say and must immediately run off and make as many mistakes as you can. I give you my reasons:

1. What do I know? Seriously, I haven't even got a book on the shelves yet. Why are you even still reading this?


2. You appear to still be reading this. I like your style - you won't be pushed around by anyone. I bet if I told you to do something, you'd go out and do the total opposite.


3. Under no circumstances, transfer £50,000 into my bank account.


4. Also, do not give me a multi-book publishing deal, a new brain or a lifetime's supply of cake.


5. You probably don't believe me, anyway. Every year, millions of couples have their first baby. Millions of friends try to tell said couples how said babies will change/ruin their lives and said couples completely ignore them. This is a basic evolutionary trick, because if people understood how impossibly difficult it is to bring a baby into the world, no-one would ever have children. Exactly the same principle applies to writing a first novel – everyone thinks it will be easy for them, because they are "special."


6. This blog post was going to be about something completely different. But that clearly would have been a mistake. It was also, at one point, entitled "Serendipitydoodah" – you can draw your own conclusions about that.


7. Remember, no-one can tell you how to write. They will try, oh yes they will, My Pretty. But all they can ever tell you is how they write. Only you can find the method, circumstances and subject matter that suit you. I was recently praised at a crit group for coming up with a new book idea that was "Very Nick." This is only because I have spent a lot of time in the past writing stories that were "Patently not Nick." Once you exclude all of the things you should never have attempted, only the good stuff is left.


8. It's why CTRL-Z was invented. See, I just pressed it and deleted something really funny. That'll teach you.


9. You're unlikely to make the same mistake twice. Unless you are very stupid. You're not very stupid, are you? You could always try reading more slowly if you're having trouble keeping up.


10. Wait a minute, people have more than one child, don't they? Isn't that making the same mistake twice? This doesn't count because their lives are already wrecked. It's like fitting an extra person in the lifeboat.


11. No-one ever learnt a thing from getting everything right. Except how to be smug. 90% of the candidates on The Apprentice claim that they have never failed at anything.
    
    1. They are lying.
    2. This is why they are so utterly useless.


12. Art must take risks, or it is not art. Profound, huh?


13. What do you mean, "huh?" I've gone right off you now.


14. There's always a second draft And a third and fourth and seventeenth. They're only words. They are expendable.


15. Every mistake makes your writing better. For instance, I've decided that this blog post has been one big mistake from start to finish.

Nick.

P.S. I'm still waiting on that cake. Whenever you're ready.