Beginner's Mind and Revision

[Before I get into it: this has been widely reported already, but just in case you haven't seen it, there's a Divergent extras casting call for Illinois residents over 16 tomorrow in Chicago. More information here (after the bold heading "casting call").]

---

A few years ago I went through a series of huge changes in my life. They were good changes, for the most part, but they left me strangely...blank. I was no longer sure what sort of person I was, or what I wanted, or what I enjoyed. It was nerve-wracking, but it was also an opportunity.

Not long after this, I started dating my current husband. When we were getting to know each other, he would ask me questions like, "Do you like this?" or "Do you like that?", about food or clothes or movies, etc., and my answer was always: "No. Well, maybe. Let's try it and see if I like it."

As I said, it was an opportunity-- an opportunity to get to know the world again, like I was an alien who had just landed on earth and needed to be introduced to everything for the first time. I discovered that I liked high heels and short hair and fashion and sausage pizza and Flannery O'Connor, and that I didn't really like watching television, or Mark Twain, or "that's what she said" jokes, or arguing for sport. I discovered a lot more important things than that, too, about the baggage I carried and the person I wanted to be and the way I wanted to look at other people. I'm different, now, because of those explosive, terrifying, jarring months.

Over a year later, during a therapy session, I learned about a concept in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy called "Beginner's Mind." Very simply put, beginner's mind is the practice of approaching things--even things with which we are very familiar-- without preconceived notions about them, with the openness and eagerness of a child. I had a beginner's mind in those months I was just describing. Periodically I have to remind myself to try to get it back.

When I read Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" in high school, this quote stood out to me and has stayed with me ever since: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." I may be misinterpreting it, of course, but to me it means, you don't have to like the things you've always liked just because you've always liked them. You don't have to think the things you've always thought just because you've always thought them. Let yourself change, because it's better to be accused of inconsistency than to be closed to most experiences or ideas.

As with most of my life lessons, this is also a writing lesson. As I revise the third book, it seems more important than ever. When I received my editor's feedback about Book 3's manuscript-- and this happens to me every time I receive feedback-- part of me recoiled from it, frustrated and afraid of seeing my book in a new and different way.

Good feedback forces writers to re-envision certain parts of our work. To the stubborn, defensive writer, this new vision is hostile; it threatens us and our writing, and we try to come up with excuses or defenses for what exists in our work so that we don't have to change it. To the writer with a beginner's mind, though, this new vision is an opportunity to experience our work in a new, different way-- like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, offering a different path that may actually be more enjoyable than the first.

Example: when I first wrote Divergent, the scenes that showcase the positive aspects of Dauntless life (ziplining off the Hancock building! Capture the Flag!) were not there. My editor pointed out that without some evidence for the good parts of the Dauntless, it doesn't make sense for someone as determined and brave as Tris to stay there instead of just defecting to the factionless when it's clear that the Dauntless way of life is deeply flawed. She also pointed out that the manuscript as it was was sort of a grim slog through a truly horrible initiation experience-- without high points, the reader would never actually feel the contrast of the low points, would not mourn with Tris when bad things happened to her.

My initial reaction to this was that my editor had not understood my vision, not just of the Dauntless, but of Tris's story and what it meant. Still, I decided to give it a try, so I wrote the Ferris wheel scene, and I wrote the ziplining scene, and my vision of Dauntless life and Tris's story expanded rapidly. To this day, those scenes are two of my favorites in the book, because they took away the simplistic view I had had of the story and the world and replaced it with a more interesting, more nuanced one.

I dragged my feet finding my way back to a beginner's mind then; it wasn't so difficult the next time. The next time, I discovered that even though revising is difficult, it can also be fun-- fun, to see the story in a different way or to try out new things, to show different aspects of characters or places, to explore the world you've created as if you're a beginner.

And really, I'm not an expert at anything, particularly at my age-- not writing, not food, not relationships, not even my own brain. So why do I try to have an Expert's Mind instead of a Beginner's one?

The take away from this, I guess, is that when someone critiques your story, or asks you if you like something you haven't tried in awhile, or tries to get you to see something from a new point of view, it's okay (and maybe even good) to say, no. Well, maybe. Let's try it and see.

RTW: Writing Seasons

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. Check out the other responses here!

This Week's Topic is: How does your writing (place, time, inspiration) change with the seasons?

To answer this, I am going to quote George Eliot: "Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."

(source: blmiers2)

Ah, autumn: that special, brief time between the soul-crushing heat of summer and the onset of my mild winter-related seasonal affective disorder! It's when I wrote the rough draft of Divergent, it's when I did my most successful revision of Insurgent, and now, God willing, it will be the season in which I finish the rough draft of book 3, provided my hands don't crap out first.

(Seriously, my right hand is all throbby and upset right now. It's making life difficult, since I can barely grasp a cup in my left hand without dropping it. In other news, I am a whiner.)

Summer is the season of sunshine (or at least, the season in which we most celebrate sunshine), and I hate sunshine. And heat. (No, I am not a vampire.) Yes, yes, I recognize the necessity of sunshine in promoting life and in keeping me from going crazy, but I usually groan when I wake up and it's all bright and perky outside, because that means I don't get the instant cozy feeling of a rainy day that I so cherish. It's hard for me to write without that cozy feeling, for some reason, so summer is always the worst writing season for me.

However, Instant!Cozy is what autumn is all about. Hot beverages and crisp air and scarves and the crunch of fallen leaves when I walk to my "office," aka a coffee shop, and the thoughtful reflections that necessarily arise when the world is dying around me-- these are the things that put me in the writing mood. (Oh, look-- more morbidity! No wonder people die in my books.)

(source: Zara Tcherneva)

(source: katebartnik)

Winter is almost a tie, because while it is also cozy and I love snow and blankets and seeing my breaths and winter holidays and all those things-- I even love winters HERE, which tend to feature below zero temperatures and slush and salt stains-- my emotional state does tend to take a plunge when the days get shorter, so I have to whip out my light therapy lamp and think cheerful thoughts to compensate. Which eats away at writing time.

And spring in Chicago is very drippy and cold and bare and gross and lasts a maximum of two weeks, so whatever, spring. Whatever. 

For me, writing feels the best when I feel calm and cozy and thoughtful, and that's during autumn and winter, for me. It's also the time when the Midwest feels most like the Midwest, to me-- more about that fascination/obsession here.

What about you? Favorite season, go!

Loud, Ugly, Wild, Free

I was in my high school choir. I was a second alto. We had a pretty competitive choir program, packed to the brim with extremely talented singers. Was I one of them? Uh...not really. My voice is competent at best, the sort of voice that sounds good in a choir because it blends and there's very little vibrato, but not so great in solos. I also can't read music.

But I like to sing, so in high school I was also in a girls barbershop quartet and, what is more relevant to this story, I took voice lessons for four years. One of my biggest struggles in voice lessons, which should not surprise you at all if you know anything about me, was to loosen up. I tried to control my pitch and tone quality by bearing down as much as I could on my body and my voice, and, far from improving things, it made my tone quality and pitch worse.

My voice teacher, who was a patient man, devised many exercises that might help with this problem, and as I sat down to write today, I remembered one of them in particular. He told me to sing the scale as loudly as possible. As ugly as possible. He told me to go completely overboard, throw everything I had into it, without worrying about how awful it sounded or how loud it was or how "on" it was.

I sucked at this exercise. 

I do not willingly submit to error. No way, man. I am a perfectionist to the very core of my being. I scrutinize every single thing I do. That includes writing. That includes writing first drafts, which by their very nature are supposed to be shitty.

I use the word "shitty" because there's a wonderful chapter in Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird called "Shitty First Drafts." Here is a quote from it (emphasis mine):

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.

Here are several truths that I know but simultaneously cannot convince myself of:

1. A first draft will always, always, always need to be revised, and possibly rewritten. This cannot be avoided.
2. Perfectionism harms the creative effort, not just because it impedes progress, but because it restricts the creativity itself.

Or, to put it simply: perfectionism actually makes your art (whatever it is) suck more.

So, hilariously, my attempts to make my first drafts perfect actually make my first drafts more shitty than they would have been if I had just loosened up and let myself be creative.

Case in point: I wrote Divergent with all the wild freedom of someone who believes that their writing will never be seen by anyone. I wrote Insurgent with all the neurotic controllingness of someone who is aware that their writing will be seen by people-- a lot of people.

Guess which one required more extensive revisions?

If you guessed Insurgent-- DING DING DING, you are correct!

If we can return to the vocal exercise for a moment: yes, I was terrible at it-- I was terrible at being terrible! Who knew? But I always found that after that exercise, when we moved on to something else, I sounded much better than before. Even the tiny amount I was able to loosen up made me so much better at singing. Basically, the louder and uglier I was able to be, the better my voice became.

The crazier and wilder and freer I am with my first drafts, the better they turn out.

I have known this for awhile, so I try to write by just letting the errors happen, but I think that's maybe not the right way to think about it, for me. For me, it doesn't really help to decide to write a shitty first draft and let that be the end of it, because it goes completely against my nature and the core of my person-- it's too hard for me, in other words, to just say "oh well. It's going to be bad." That means traveling too far away from who I am.

I think, instead, that I should try to make it as BIG and as LOUD and as CRAZY as possible. Just like in voice lessons, when I was honking out those notes as loudly and as comically ugly as possible, like a goose with a throat infection, and somehow, I found my way to something more beautiful. The trick for those of us who are such strong perfectionists that we can't even conceive of writing something deeply flawed on purpose is not embracing error but embracing something else: freedom.

This is true of every single creative effort. My mother is an artist, and I have watched her migrate away from careful, meticulous watercolors and a kind of internal desire to make things pretty, and toward a style that is nightmareish and, frankly, a little weird-- and it is so much more beautiful. And how many episodes of So You Think You Can Dance does a girl have to watch before she realizes that the brave, free dancers who are able to let go of perfect technique are the ones that make Nigel tear up-- the ones that create something truly genius?

We think, somewhere deep inside, that we are helping ourselves by being perfectionists, but what we are doing is squeezing ourselves so hard that barely any air can escape.

I, for one, would love to stop doing that, but it's not as easy as wanting it to happen, is it?

Part of it is finding a way to get lost in the work, I think. To submerge yourself in it and let it get messy and ugly and insane and oh my god no one should ever read this and why did I write that paragraph and this section is downright hilarious and what does that word even mean and this is ridiculous and this feels amazing and somehow, from a particular angle and in a peculiar way and maybe only to me, this is

beautiful.

Official Writer Philosophy of Character Death

(Note: this post will be packed full of Divergent and Insurgent and surprisingly, Harry Potter, spoilers, so don't read it if you don't want to be spoiled!)

(Also, there is no reason to infer anything about book 3 from this post. Just responding to a bunch of questions that have popped up in my tumblr ask box recently. To quote Conan O'Brien: keep cool, my babies.)

Many people ask me variations of this question:why did soandso have to die? A couple times I've also been asked: Why don't you just kill minor characters or ones we're not attached to?

Let me address that last one right away: I think it's a good thing that the characters I "kill" are ones we're all attached to, so that those deaths are not gratuitous. Why? Because I don't want the books to be like Grand Theft Auto, where people get killed all the time but no one really cares or thinks about it. (That game can be fun, by the way, but it just wouldn't make a thoughtful book!) Even though I write violent books, I don't want to make people desensitized to violence, ever. That means that when someone dies, I want to feel it, and I want you to, too.

(Whether I have succeeded in that goal, by the way, is up for the readers to decide. But I'm just talking about what I try to do, not what I do perfectly!)

But my real philosophy of character death in the Divergent series is that the world Tris lives in is supposed to be messed up. And there's a war going on. And from all I've ever learned about war, if you're involved in one, people you care about will be killed, and it won't make any sense to you, and it won't be fair, and it will be at all the wrong times, and some people will lose more than other people, and that's just how it is.

It would be far too convenient for Tris to retain all her friends and family while all these other people are losing theirs. Especially since Tris's friends and family choose to directly involve themselves, perhaps more than others, in violent and difficult situations. I try to be just as unfair as the world is; I take away characters when I have to, and I don't really think about whether it's balanced. Tris loses both parents; Tobias and Christina lose neither. Tris gets to keep her boyfriend; Christina's is taken from her. It's not fair either way, and that feels honest to me.

I think I learned this lesson from Harry Potter. Would we would really, truly have believed that Voldemort was a heinous villain if no one Harry loved had died? Would we have believed that his world was being pitched into darkness? Would his sacrifice, in book 7, have felt truly necessary to us? I really don't think so. I was very attached to the characters that died. I remember crying like a baby in my bathroom before school when I read book six. (Big mistake, reading the end of that one before school. Seriously.) But their deaths made Harry's world, and the state it was in, so much more real to me; they made his search for the horcruxes and his defeat of Voldemort feel so much more urgent. Those books wouldn't have been the same without Rowling's willingness to make sacrifices. That, more than anything, made me decide that if I was going to be an author, I had to be willing to make sacrifices too.

As for why certain characters over others, well, I don't know. I think people-- even writers themselves!-- sometimes have the impression that the authors of stories are completely in control of those stories and the characters that inhabit them. That really isn't true for me, though. I know it sounds crazy, but I create the characters and they become real to me and then they do whatever the heck they want. (Especially Peter. Whoa.) And when characters die, it's usually because I hit a point in the story where I don't feel any danger anymore, because no one Tris cares about is in peril, and then someone goes. BAM. Who that is depends on the moment in the story. It's often a shock to me.

In any case, what I'm saying is: I don't have that much control, and I try to follow each character's nature. (IE: the Abnegation will be more likely to die because they have that impulse to throw themselves in front of others. The Dauntless are more likely to die because of unnecessary heroics and recklessness. Etc.) I also try to be real with myself about what kind of world Tris lives in. She is not immune to its corruption or its violence. (And frankly, I think it already requires some suspension of disbelief that she didn't die in Insurgent.) All that I can do is try to have her react to her losses as realistically as possible, which often means that she's unlikable, as grieving and guilt-ridden people sometimes are.

So, that is my Official Writer Philosophy of Character Death.

In other news, will I ever be able to write a blog post without referring to Harry Potter? I'm not sure.

The Mistakes Writers Make

(Warning: Divergent spoilers in this post. Also, discussing sexual assault, which may be a sensitive topic.)

Here is the thing about getting a book published: there will always be things you regret. If you're lucky, those will be things that you just didn't catch in copyediting, the wrong word or the wrong character name here and there, or some things you didn't research well enough (like how easy/hard it is to pull a trigger, for example...). If you're not lucky, those will be things you wish you hadn't included at all. Or that you didn't know you were saying until people started reading and reacting.

What do you do, when you start to see these things? Well, I tried to justify them in my mind. I talked them out with friends. I tried to let them go and resolve to do better in the future. All these responses are okay, I think. But at the end of the day, it just doesn't sit well with me to pretend that I haven't made mistakes. I believe that confession helps us to move past shame and regret and into determination for the future. Confession also sucks to have to do, but here we go.

This month is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And in the past year, I've seen a lot of blog posts from very smart people about a new and problematic trend in YA: the "throwaway" sexual assault trope. This trope is included to artificially raise the stakes in a plot or situation, or to further establish how bad a villain is, but it doesn't actually affect the character all that much moving forward. It is problematic to include a sensitive issue in your work as a plot device only, without making it important for the character. Not just on a moral level, but on a storymaking level, too.

I have felt deeply convicted by these posts. In Divergent, there is a scene in which Tris is attacked by three of her fellow initiates, and in the process one of them grabs her chest and makes a snide remark about her physical appearance. Yet after the fact, while the attack does bother her and make her scared, it doesn't really factor into her character development.

Now, here's the thing: some people who have been through sexual assault really do push it down inside and try to stop thinking about it, or even don't realize how bad the situation was at the time, until a few years later when they take gender studies classes or something and they find out that some things are Really Not Okay-- sometimes they don't realize it at all. And there is an argument to be made for how Tris's fear of intimacy partly results from this incident she suffered through. But as I was saying to someone earlier, if her reaction is realistic, it is completely by accident, and that's what bothers me. That is the big mistake.

I was not intentional about what I wrote and how I wrote it. If I could go back and do it again, I might take that part of the attack out completely. Or I might change the way Tris reacts to it. I might make sure that it surges inside her every so often, no matter how hard she tries to shove it back down. Maybe it wouldn't be a huge plot point-- given everything else that's going on, she probably wouldn't focus on it-- but it would still be there, as a part of her.

It's hard to write about sensitive issues, especially in sci-fi/fantasy where those issues will rarely be the big focus of the books. But that doesn't mean we should shy away from them. It means that we should realize that they are real things that happen to real people. We should make sure that they have a real impact on our characters. Four, for example, has a sensitive issue in his past, but it affects him every day, and in really significant ways, the way it would in real life. It doesn't define him, in the same way that victims of sexual assault are not solely defined by what has happened to them. But it does really, deeply affect him.

To my fellow writers, I'm learning this lesson alongside you, and it is: be intentional about what you write. That doesn't mean we should avoid the hard stuff, or the dark stuff. It means we should take it seriously, do the research, do the thinking, do the feeling. We don't have to be preachy or spit out platitudes or make sure that it all turns out okay, like an after school special, but every writer (I think, anyway) has a responsibility to tell the truth with his or her work and part of that is being careful (as opposed to careless) about what we write and how we handle it. And for me, part of it is honoring the real people who have suffered these real things by telling stories like theirs as well as I can.

It's hard to see your own mistakes, especially when there's no way you can fix them, especially when they are out there for the world to pick up and read. But I've tried getting defensive, and I've tried ignoring things, and you know, it just doesn't work for me. I'm committed to learning to be a better writer and human being, and to opening my eyes to parts of the world I never had to see, and this is a big part of that process.

This is all to say, quite simply, that I wish I had done better, especially for those of my readers who have gone through hard things like these. I am learning, and I will do better in the future.

FAQs: Four and The Names We Choose

**Note: If you haven't read/finished Divergent, this post will spoil some things for you, so...don't read it!**

*
*
*
*
*
*
*

Will Four go by "Tobias" or "Four" in INSURGENT?

I thought I would address this more generally before the book comes out because I think the answer is interesting (and because I get asked this a couple times a week). Obviously I have a thing about names, or else "Beatrice" would not have become "Tris," and "Four" would have gone by "Tobias" in the beginning. I believe the names we choose on our own can be powerful, and they can embody a new identity for us.

When I was young my mother wanted to call me "Nikki" (a less popular short form of Veronica) and I absolutely refused to respond to it. The same thing happened when people tried to call me "Ronnie." I just wasn't having it. The nickname I chose was "V." I think it's because it sounded less cutesy or girly. What I chose for myself was something that fit with my personality-- I'm not exactly cutesy. (Though I am girlier now than I ever used to be-- maybe that's why I don't go by "V" as much anymore?)

Name changing is also interesting from a religion scholar perspective. In the Torah, when a biblical figure has an encounter with God, sometimes he or she is given a new name. Abram to Abraham, for example. Jacob to Israel. Sarai to Sarah. Same thing in the Christian Bible-- Saul becomes Paul, Simon becomes Peter. This usually signals the beginning of some kind of transformation, or indicates that a transformation has already taken place.

If you want a more current example, think "Mr. Anderson" versus "Neo," or "Augustus" versus "Gus" in The Fault In Our Stars (a little different, but interesting to consider, I think), or "Andrew" versus "Ender" in Ender's Game, or "Tom Riddle" versus "Voldemort," or "Anakin" versus "Darth Vader." (Wow, apparently I really AM attracted to this concept, because it's in all the things I like...)

It's like we have some kind of need, once we feel that we have changed, for people to call us something different. Is it for us, to suit the way we see ourselves? Or is it for them, to force them to think of us differently? Or a combination of both?

So now you might be thinking, whatever, I just think "Four" sounds hotter/cooler/like the lesser evil compared to "Tobias". Sadly, this is just how the inside of my brain is. Sometimes I get lost in here. Bear with me.

It's these musings about names that led to the Tobias/Four divide in the first place. Four views "Tobias" as the name of a helpless little boy, so he chooses "Four" as the name of his adult self in an attempt to leave the pain behind him. It signifies his strength rather than his weakness. But what he finds is that he can't ignore his past; it keeps creeping up on him, especially in his fear landscape. So in Divergent, he "gives" Tris his old identity-- he trusts her to know his vulnerable side, the side of the child and not the man. She recognizes the significance of this, which is why she starts to call him Tobias. It's the name he gave her, the one he trusted her with, and she begins to treasure it for that reason.

In Insurgent, this name issue becomes a bit more complicated, but for Tris it's the same. "Tobias" is the name she chooses for him, because it represents his secret self, the one he showed her and her alone. She calls him "Four" when she's with other people, to help him keep his secrets, but in her head, he's always Tobias.

Now, I like the name Tobias (I seem to be in the minority, but that's okay!), but I, like most of you, do prefer the name "Four," and honestly, I always intended for him to be called "Four" most of the time. So I tried really, really hard to make some kind of shift in Tris's mind so that it would make sense for her to call him Four in Insurgent. There are plenty of arguments for why she might do that, and I made all of them, I promise you. But what surprised me was that it never felt right; it didn't feel like what Tris would really do. So Tobias it is. She's very stubborn, you know.

So the short answer: in Insurgent, he's Tobias 95% of the time, because that's how Tris wanted it. You can feel free to keep calling him "Four," though-- I do!

Be Brave and Revise (Or, Alternately, My Struggle With Fear)

Before I get into this post, I want to say that I am not complaining about any of the wonderful things that have come my way. If this post comes across that way, that isn't how I intend it. I have been blessed with manymanymany good things, but life is fraught with difficulty no matter how many good things happen to you. So I'm writing this post because one of my goals, when I started this blog, was to be honest about my mistakes and the things I struggle with. I haven't done that recently, and I want to do it now. That's all.

Anyway. Enough with the disclaimers.

The rough draft of D2 was the hardest thing I have ever written, and I had no idea why. Why, when I sat down at my computer in the morning, would I do anything, ANYTHING to avoid typing a single word in the word document? Why would I write a sentence and then immediately delete it? Why did I develop such an affinity for cleaning instead of writing?

I explained it to myself several different ways, desperate to figure out what had turned the hobby and job I loved into something I regarded with such dread. And after discarding every explanation I came up with, I was finally able to land on the one that was actually true: it was all related to fear.

Something I have not shared, because I wasn't sure how to share it, is that I am A Person With Anxiety Problems. I have spent many an hour on a therapist's couch. Once I spent several hours breathing into a paper bag, and not just because it smelled nice. Most of that anxiety comes from my constant assessment of other people's opinions about me. Am I making him angry? Am I disappointing her? If I please everyone, I will finally feel safe. I must please everyone, all the time. I have made many unwise decisions in my pursuit of safety above all else. Decisions that were often to my detriment and, even worse, to the detriment of the people around me.

So, you can imagine what happened when I entered into a profession in which assessments of my work (and therefore me, or so it often seems to my somewhat neurotic mind) are constant, abundant, and very, very public. But in case you can't, I'll tell you: the anxiety got much worse.

Writing used to feel safe because it was so private. I could keep it to myself, and decide only after I was finished if I would show it to anyone. So when I was writing, I was secure; I could do whatever I wanted. But it didn't feel that way with D2. I was constantly aware that people would read what I was writing. And the assessment of other people's opinions crept into my safe space. What will she think of this? What if he doesn't like this? What if I let them all down? I have to please everyone, so that I can feel safe.

Several weeks ago I met with my pastor, and he asked me, in the course of our conversation, something to the effect of: do you think it's significant that, as someone who struggles so much with fear, you chose to write a book about bravery? Well if I didn't before, I do now, Jason.

Tris is someone who can step off the edge of a building not knowing what will meet her at the bottom. The moments in which she faces her fears are largely physical, far louder and more intense than any of our bravest moments will ever be. I don't know why I didn't realize that I wrote about her because I longed for that quality of hers that is so distinctive to me: she chooses the true thing instead of the safe thing. And what she discovers is that the freedom to become who she wants to be is worth the danger.

What I know now, after much reflection, is that I have brought much of this intense anxiety upon myself, because I have started to make decisions that do not feel safe, like Tris. I have let people down. Hurt them, sometimes. Pissed them off, other times. Surprised them, almost always. Yet I have not been able to translate this newfound insistence upon bravery into my writing.

I've been working with my bodyguards (agent, editor, etc.) to create a safer space to write, one in which I can stop the assessments of other people's opinions before they take me to darker places. But I know that's only a temporary solution, because I've learned from Tris that there aren't really safe places-- or that if there are, I don't really want to be in them, because it's not who I am. The permanent solution is something I learned from another character in DIVERGENT:

"I ignore my fear. When I make decisions, I pretend it doesn't exist." (145)

Writing is about decisions. Your characters make them, but more often, you make them. You decide what you are going to say and what you are not going to say; what you believe and what you do not believe; where you want the story to go and where you do not want it to go. And I don't want to be a writer who is ruled by fear. I want to be the one who says: they may not like it, but this story is as true as possible, so I don't mind.

Anxiety doesn't just disappear. I will probably always be someone who struggles with fear. But I am determined not to consult my fear when I make decisions, in life and in writing.

I think I wrote all this on the off-chance that you, like me, struggle with anxiety-- or just fear in general-- and might benefit from knowing that you're not the only one. Or maybe I just wrote it because there are no moving trains to jump off around here and this was the next best way to face my fears. Either way, it's time to be brave and revise.

Some Advice for Young Writers: Above All, Do the Work

I think I've gotten asked about what advice I would give to young writers a few times recently, so, here goes.

My advice to young writers is manifold. The first is: learn to love criticism.

When I was a young(er) writer, I never wanted anyone to read my writing because I was afraid they would tell me that it sucked. So I hid all my stories away until college, when I took my first writing class, and no longer had the option of hiding anymore. So I lovingly crafted my first short story, revised it a million times, and then submitted it for workshop, thinking, "I'm pretty good. Maybe they'll like it."

And I. Got. Smashed. To. Bits.

Ouch.

But this story has a good ending, or I wouldn't be telling you. I went through the obligatory period of mourning, involving some anger and some tears. And then, several days later, I finally sat down with my story and something interesting happened. I found that I was able to look at it honestly. To see what some of my classmates had seen in it.

Soberly I set about revising it, toning down its ridiculousness, refining its rough edges, and reworking some of its themes. And the story, while still not very good, got better.

I've always been awed by people who do extreme sports (you know: skateboarding, BMX, etc.) because they continually get injured (and not just injured, but REALLY freaking injured) and then, weeks or months later when they finally heal, they're right back on that giant ramp on that little board with wheels, itching to try again. Is it masochism? Or is it something else?

But the thing is, if you want to be a good writer, you have to be a little like people who do extreme sports. For me, critique always hurts. But I keep throwing myself back into it because I love to write-- and not just to write, but to see my writing improve over time. There was nothing more rewarding than taking another class with my first writing professor, about a year after The Story We Do Not Speak Of, and hearing her tell me how much I surprised her with the progress I had made.

So my advice? Let people read your work. Not just ANY people, mind you, but people you trust to give you honest and constructive feedback. And when you get that feedback, don't be so stubborn that you can't listen to it. You're young and you don't know everything; I know that because I'm young too. But that's okay, because you have time to learn.

One of the quotes I see most often from writers is this one: "Ever try. Ever fail. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Samuel Beckett) I'm not REALLY into inspirational writer quotes, but I take that "fail better" to heart. I find it extremely useful to think about my writing that way. Because I still get criticized. (The only difference is, now a lot of it is/will continue to be public!)

I just tell myself to fail better next time.

The second piece of advice is: be persistent. I will say this: if you're only writing because you like the idea of being published, or something like that, you probably won't be able to make it through all the criticism you're going to get before you reach the "published" point. If you write because you love stories and you love words, you will continue to write no matter how hard people hit you with critique. And you should. Write your adolescent fingers off. Write so much your family thinks you're turning into a recluse. (Mine did!)

And last: be patient. It's hard, because everything in life feels like it's hurtling along so fast when you're a teenager that you get used to it, and you want everything to work that way. But if you declare your book finished too soon, and send queries too soon, you will get frustrated too soon. Take the time to learn, not just about writing, but about the publishing world and how it works.

Really, it all boils down to this: do the work. Writing is fun, but it's also work, and improvement and success don't just fall into your lap. That's true of any profession.

(But ours is the best one.)

Knowing Character Vs. Knowing About Character

Recently it occurred to me that I might need to simplify things, as far as the writing goes. Writing advice is a good thing to hear, from time to time, because it gives you fresh ways of approaching your work. But ultimately, writing is not quite that methodical, at least not for me. I can't learn how to do it better in the same way that I can learn a language or how to complete a math problem. There isn't a formula. There's what I see and how I talk about it, and a lot of that is inexplicable.

Why do the words come out one way with one story and another way with another story? I have no idea. Why do little pieces of myself work their way into my work without my knowing? I don't know. Do I need to know? Probably not.

Anyway. For me, the first task of this new year is to pare down all the tidbits of advice floating around in my head in the hope of rediscovering The Basics: me, the word document, and the characters.

The other day I listened to a recording of Marilynne Robinson speaking at DePaul University, a talk titled "My Faith and My Fiction." (It's on iTunesU if you want to hear it! It's fascinating.) And I thought "AHA! Here is someone who is talking about writing in a way that is currently helpful to me. Perhaps I should transcribe part of it and put it on the blog!"

(No, this is not, word for word, what I thought. I rarely say AHA to myself. Or "perhaps.")

Anyway, enjoy:

"For me at least writing consists largely of exploring intuition. The character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose, from reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections as we all do all the time. These moments of intuitive recognition float free from their particular occasions and recombine themselves into nonexistent people the writer, and if all goes well, the reader, feel they know.

There is a great difference in fiction and in life between knowing someone and knowing about someone. When a writer knows about his character he is writing for plot. When he knows his character he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own."

And later on...

"It was then that I had the sense of this, that I knew this man. ...I didn't have trouble sustaining the voice because I felt as if I knew him so well. It seemed more as if I simply had to pay attention to him than that I had to do anything else. I liked him; I enjoyed his company. Who knows where he came from?"

Cool, right? The last time I really knew a character was when I sat down to write the first draft of Divergent. Maybe one of the reasons I've been having trouble with the end of D2 is that I've lost touch with her.

Just some thoughts I'm having.

Anyone else have some writing resolutions?

Talking To Myself, Or Alternately, Freedom and Life In Stories

A lot has happened to me this year. Some of it I've talked about, and some of it I haven't, but suffice it to say that landing an agent + getting a book deal + graduating college + all the other stuff is a lot of change to process.

Unsurprisingly, the best method I've developed to process big changes is forming a narrative. That's a slightly more fancy way of saying that I retell this year to myself, over and over again, starting from different places, pulling in different details, focusing on different themes. I try to explain the gaps between the events I don't understand, searching for reasons that make sense-- and then find them unsatisfactory, and begin again. (I think you'll find, if you start to do this, that real life doesn't make nearly as much sense as fiction. This is difficult for me to accept. I'm trying.)

What I've learned is that retelling my own life is not only useful for processing changes. It helps me with the way I think about my fiction. A real life is so rich with detail and so packed with events that it can be told in a thousand different ways, each one slightly different and each one completely true, if incomplete. In fact, it is impossible to capture this last year of my life in a single narrative. I just can't hold that much information in a line at once-- I would have to double back every few seconds to flesh out the parts I missed.

I want my stories to be the same way. Sometimes when I get revision notes that say things like "there should be more of this character" or "can something like this or this happen?" I find myself resisting, thinking, well, that character just wasn't there or no, that can't happen, because it just didn't-- duh. (Okay, I don't actually say "duh" to myself, but...let's move on.) As if the story is always restricted to the course of events, or the details of the event's realization, or the rationale of a particular character, that I decided on when I wrote out the story the first time. Which it's not.

The story could have a life. I can approach it differently. I can focus on different events and bring out different themes. I have even more freedom with fiction than I do with telling my own life narrative, if I can be creative enough to fill in all the spaces it has. I say more because I have no real events to be faithful to, no real people to capture with some semblance of accuracy.

I have noticed this in some of the things I've read recently. Sometimes I get a glimpse of another part of a character's life, one that doesn't directly relate to the story at hand-- a detail that seems to be arbitrary, that hints at a different story, or at least a different way of telling that one. Part of me resists that kind of thing in writing, because I want everything to be intentional and relevant-- take only what you need to get to the top of the mountain, right? But done right, I think these kinds of details can do something important for the story. That is, they can make the story feel real.

I think there's a line in Divergent, or maybe it's in D2, that mentions Tris jumping over cracks in the sidewalk. ...Come again? Is this behavior superstitious? Is it a game? Or is she just bored out of her mind? Why did she start, and when did she stop? And why am I even spending time thinking about this? I'll never answer any of those questions in the narrative itself, because it's just not relevant. But I like that it's there. I had no idea that Tris jumped over sidewalk cracks until it appeared on the page. But it breathes a little more life into her anyway.

But that's kind of a tangent. What I'm thinking, mostly, is that I am trying to free up some space around my stories to let them form in different ways, like the narrative I'm developing of this past year. I think it will help me both with writing the rough draft-- if something's not working, for example, I can come up with a different way to tell it, or a different thing to tell entirely-- and with revision-- because I haven't limited myself to a particular way of thinking about the course of events in a character's life.

I'm one of those people who likes rules and limitations in writing, because they have a way of forcing creativity, but there is something to this whole freedom thing, I think. Letting the story breathe. Not as concrete as my practical self would like it to be, maybe, but there you have it.

LET THE STORY BREATHE.

That is all.

A Planet Full of Narrators

I am reading an essay by Karen Brennan called "Dream, Memory, Story, and the Recovery of Narrative." (from Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, edited by Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi)

Basically, it's about what Brennan has learned about the importance of narrative since her daughter's traumatic brain injury, which affected her daughter's memory. And not just her memory, but her ability to connect one moment to the next: "I did this, and because of that, I did this next." Something I never realized was so important. It's what writers do all the time, of course, but more than that, it's what human beings do in order to function.

What I'm taking from it is that stories are essential-- and actually, instinctual. We're hard-wired to create narratives. What does that mean for writers? I have no idea. I'm going to let it all percolate. But here's a good quote from the essay:


Memory, according to Bergson, occupies the space between mind and body. It conveys mind to body and body to mind. It gives us our quality of life—makes possible, in other words, the narratives that keep our lives going forward to the next thing. If the thing is not next it loses its richness—isolated and unlinked to a history, it becomes meaningless, even ridiculous. Biologically and neurologically, we are creatures of context, of narrative.

Consider, for example, the activity of the neurons or brain cells. Unlike the body’s cells, which divide and multiply, microcosmically illustrating the propagation of the species, neurons are systems of communication. Their most salient features are a clutch of dendrites, which branch out to receive information across the synapses between cells, and a long, single axon, which reaches to the synapse—literally the space between neurons—through which chemical and electrical information are conveyed to the next cell.

By nature, then, the activity of the neuron is narrative, metonymic, associative. The information conveyed by each neuron accumulates along a complex circuitry of neurons and produces a thought, a corresponding action in the mind-body.


Oh! And also, this one's pretty interesting too:


Memory is always configured on a gap-- to re-member suggests the forgetfulness, the loss upon which it is founded.

Sonnets = Discipline + Constant Failure

I am writing sonnets.

Yes, that's right. On the one hand you have me, who barely got through my required poetry writing class alive. And on the other you have sonnets, which are a very difficult form of poetry to master. And now those two hands are coming together. In a...clap-like gesture.

There are several reasons for this sudden plunge into poetry. Among them is that in the absence of constant instruction about craft, which is the sad part about not being in school, I feel like it's important to work on the actual writing part of the writing again, when I have been so focused on the structure.

I don't care if you like poetry or not, if you dabble in poetry or not-- if you're a writer, you should try this sonnet thing. And here's why.

Sonnets require discipline in a way that novels do not-- that is, novels do not have a definite structure, though they certainly have elements of structure in common. Also, while you're writing novels, you're so deeply involved in what you're doing at the moment that you can't even see the whole structure until later. That's not the case with the sonnet. It is completely rigid. Every line has a set amount of syllables and patterns of emphasis, and must end with a rhymed word. Groups of lines have to relate to each other in a specific way. And the poem itself must be a complete unit-- an idea first expressed, and then complicated, and then resolved-- maybe. This is an insane level of organization. And mostly, you have to stick with it, or it's not really a sonnet.

What this means is: you constantly have to think of new ideas and then discard them, moments or hours later, when you realize they won't work. You have to write lines that you love and then cross them out when they don't fit. You have to fail, over and over and over again, and when you revise, a problem in one line might cause problems for the entire poem.

Constant failure: it's good for you. I promise. Because you will fail repeatedly in your struggle to get things right-- in writing as in life-- and part of improving as a writer is learning how to work through that feeling of inadequacy. Maybe even learning how to ignore it.

This also forces you to be more resourceful in your writing. If you have something you need to say, you have to think of half a dozen ways to say it before you'll find one that works. That means constantly reinventing your idea, which means coming to a greater understanding of what you're thinking and all the ways in which it can be viewed and explored. If I did this while writing a novel I might never use another cliche or idiom. Imagine that.

Beyond all this, though, what I find most helpful is that sonnets are small. They require a lot of focus. Writing them is like dropping each word into place with tweezers. And if any of the words aren't working, you can see it-- the error will be staring back at you, no matter which line you're working on. It's a huge strain. But it's like when you train a muscle: the gym is a foreign environment in which you strain yourself beyond your normal capacity. After you've been going for awhile, though, you probably notice that it's easier to do things in your normal life, like walking up a flight of stairs. After a few sonnets, working on the novel seems easier, like I can breathe better.

So, because I'm not such a fan of Shakespeare's sonnets, I'm going to leave you with one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who is famous for that "how do I love thee? Let me count the ways" line (but I like her other stuff better).

XXII-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curved point,—what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved,—where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

The Midwest Enthusiast Speaks (About Writing the Ordinary)

Hello, residents of lands far and wide. I am a Midwesterner.

I was born in Mount Kisco, New York, but I don't remember it. I have also lived in Hong Kong and Germany, and I do remember that, but that's neither here nor there. Because regardless of where I've been, the Midwest is where I'm from.

Sometimes I feel like we get the reputation of being dull and small-minded people, and our surroundings get the reputation of being cold, ugly, and miserable. Certainly there were moments in my youth that I longed for mountains and warmth in the midst of Chicagoland's flat, winter frigidity, but ugly this place is not. It just depends on what you think is beautiful.



(All taken within fifty feet of my home, with my old, crappy camera.)

The Midwest, at least from my understanding, is practically synonymous with "ordinary." And I didn't want to write about ordinary, so I used to write about places I wasn't in. Places that didn't exist, maybe, or mountainous places with lush forests and gentle winters. But I started to get frustrated, because I knew that I had only a vague knowledge of what it was like to live in those places, so whatever descriptions I generated felt false to me. Too easy, too convenient to feel new. And it is the writer's job to make everything feel new.

I am not arguing for writing exclusively what you know, because if I believed that, all my stories would be about young white girls from comfortable backgrounds from the suburbs, and that would be a shame, both for the literary world at large and for me as a human being. It is important to stretch yourself. But don't forget yourself.

I started to write about the Midwest for the writing program at my school. I took my characters to Macomb, Illinois, where I spent a week each summer for a few years, at a music festival. I wrote about the long drive through miles of empty land, and how the sky hit the fields at a straight line. I had never realized before I wrote about it that there was something stunning about that emptiness, and how much of the sky you could see, how huge the clouds looked.

And when I finished Divergent (which was not related to school at all), I realized that the whole time, I'd been picturing Tris's city as a dystopian Chicago. In the months that followed, as I worked more and more of Chicago into the manuscript, I got a chance to explore the city I've lived adjacent to for most of my life. I acted like a tourist. I went on boat tours. I rediscovered my home.

And speaking of home-- for the past two years, I've noticed a little part of me is always waiting for winter. Winter is something we're famous for around here. It gets cold, and it stays cold for far longer than you'd expect. I'm not immune to occasional bouts of seasonal depression, and I get stir crazy by the time April comes around and it's still painfully cold outside, but I'm learning to love the winters here. Everything starts to look stripped of life, and it turns the same color-- gray skies, gray trees, gray roads. I think that's the ugliness some people see, and sometimes I see it too, but not lately.

Last year I read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, which is this intensely poetic literary novel that takes place in a tiny town called Fingerbone. First of all: Fingerbone is supposed to be in the West, not the Midwest. But the way Robinson describes the cold reminded me of home anyway:

"The room was dark. When Sylvie put the light on, it still seemed sullen and full of sleep. There were cries of birds, sharp and rudimentary, that stung like sparks or hail. And even in the house I could smell how raw the wind was. That sort of wind brought out a musk in the fir trees and spread the cold breath of the lake everywhere." (Pgs 143-144)

"I sat down on the grass, which was stiff with the cold, and I put my hands over my face, adn I let my skin tighten, and let the chills run in ripples, like breezy water, between my shoulder blades and up my neck. I let the numbing grass touch my ankles. I thought, Sylvie is nowhere, and sometime it will be dark. I thought, Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart." (Pg. 159)

Sure it gets cold here, and it gets empty here, but I used to think that there was nothing new to find out about coldness and emptiness, and that's not true. The ordinary-- as opposed to the exotic, as it's traditionally seen-- is worth examining simply because so many of us stop looking at it after awhile, like a painting in your house you forget is there because you see it every day. And the interesting thing is, the closer I look at all the regular, average, and normal in my surroundings, the more I appreciate it. And I start to lose the itching longing to go somewhere else, and do something else, that I had when I was younger. I start to feel deeply satisfied with where I am and what I am doing.

A few weeks ago when I was boiling water for tea, my stepfather was in the living room reading, and my mother was rushing around getting ready for her art class, and the dog was curled up on the rug, and I thought, I'm moving soon, and I'm going to live alone for a few months, and I won't see this anymore. Other people waking up. I won't get asked how I slept. I've been having the same morning conversation for over a decade and only now do I realize how nice it is.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, don't forget where you are. And when your hands are performing their usual routine, in the morning, or right before bed, think about what they're doing. Reinvent the gestures in your mind. See what's right outside like it's for the first time. Even the cold and the empty are worth examining.

Not Writing, or Why Your Brain Is An Ice-Cream Maker

The reason I haven't been blogging as much recently is that I am in the process of learning an important lesson, which is: in order to write, you have to not write.*
*This goes for other creative acts, too. Painting, drawing, photography, furniture-building, whatever. But I'm a writer so I'm going to talk about writing.

The other day I was talking to my editor about feeling a little burned out, like this book is the most difficult thing I've ever written, and not because of its contents-- more because this is the only substantial writing project I've done as a full-time writer, without school to distract me. And she told me to take a vacation. Which seems silly, right? Why would I need a vacation? Isn't my entire life a vacation? I mean, seriously. But the gears started churning.

Now, if you're anything like me, you don't do well on extended vacations. I get antsy and listless and all I want is my morning cup of tea, at my desk, in front of my computer, in silence. I am a person who enjoys routine. Who is happiest when everything is in its proper place. There are many problems with that trait of mine, namely that I find it difficult to cope with change, but that's another story entirely.

And then the Editor of Wonder suggested days (one at a time, not several strung together) of complete detachment from the writing. Days of taking the train downtown and wandering through an art museum, or going for long walks in distant forest preserves (okay, I don't know exactly what she suggested, but that's the gist of it). Days of absorption.

I used to absorb things all the time, because I was in school. If you ask me what inspired certain pieces of writing, I can look in my "school" folder on my computer, figure out what I was studying at the time I wrote it, and that's it, that's the inspiration. When I came up with the idea for Divergent I was in Psych 101. When I tweaked that idea, four years later, I was grappling with legalism and rolling my eyes at self-help books. It wasn't like I sat down and thought, what real-world ideas am I going to cram into this writing project? It's that my writing was informed by what I was exposed to in the real world.

The lesson I am learning: not writing is as important as writing. And I don't mean not writing like doing what you have to-- paying bills, and painting kitchens, and wrestling with ComEd over the phone (those are my current responsibilities), although those things are certainly important. I mean not writing like browsing the Internet for interesting articles about psychological phenomena, or reading things that have nothing to do with young adult literature (I've been reading poems. I don't even like poetry, really), or, seriously, wandering around art museums or driving to local forest preserves to reminisce about elementary school field trips or baking or watching episodes of QI to learn trivia about crab-catching off the coast of Florida. Or whatever, as long as it is completely unrelated to the words that have taken over your entire life. My entire life.

I am learning that you cannot write well if you are not engaged with the world. And I don't think that you can't write at all if you aren't engaged with the world, because you've probably lived enough life to piece together a convincing manuscript. But if the information I know and the thought patterns I've developed remain constant, I will never come up with anything new, different, interesting, intriguing, or enlightening. And what I write will be somehow lacking in texture and depth. I am sure of it.

The writing mind is like an ice cream maker. It will always produce ice cream, but unless you intervene, that ice cream will always be vanilla. You have to acquire new ingredients if you want to make the ice cream taste like something else, or have an interesting texture. Chocolate chips. Berries. Nuts. You get the idea.

Because vanilla will never be anything other than "nice" or "fine."

And if someone describes my writing as "nice" or "fine"...I will smack my head against a wall.

The world is a fascinating place. Not everything interests me, but a lot of things do, and I'm trying to get in touch with them again. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll even try to post pictures.

And I encourage you, if you're having the same problem that I am, to go! Go out into the world and remember why it's so freaking interesting! I'm on a mission. Join me.

Happy not writing, everyone.

Rules: Friends of Creativity (And Enemies of Car Accidents)

When people find out I'm a writer, they tend to ask a lot of questions about the writing process. (Generally, "How do you do that? Just sit down and write a book?") And I understand that, because it's probably mysterious to the outside observer, like I just shut myself into a room and ideas burst from every fingertip like gold ribbon and Skittles.

Anyway, I think talking about specific aspects of The Process can be interesting. So while I was considering this question a few days ago, I realized that I've started doing something that helps me immensely, and it is: I have rules.

I have rules that govern the writing of the manuscript, enforcing constraints on what can and cannot happen in a given story.

For example: my protagonist cannot get into a car accident. And not just because she's never in a car, but because of my rule, which is that the plot cannot be advanced by something that happens by accident. Now, if my protagonist had done something terrible to Some Guy and Some Guy drove his car head-on into her car at 100 miles per hour with the intention of killing her, that's a different story, but in my mind, that's no longer an accident.

Another rule is: for better or worse, my protagonist must be at least partially responsible for the things that happen to her.

I come up with these rules because I don't want the plot to escape me and become something I don't like without my knowledge. I know that I get frustrated by plots where, if the accident hadn't happened, the story wouldn't have advanced, or by characters who don't seem to have a lot of agency (agency meaning, a means of exerting power or influence), so I decide I'm going to try my best to make my plot as purposeful as possible, and give my characters as much agency as they can realistically have, and that's just how it's going to be.

Another rule I have is, always use something that was already there, rather than introducing something new. Sometimes that means characters, and sometimes it means taking certain elements of the story and bringing them back to cause more havoc. And sometimes this means ignoring the rule and coming up with something new because it's better that way, but still, at least I've given it my full consideration.

Having these rules and being aware of them actually helps me with the writing process. A few days ago I realized that one of the plot developments in what I'm working on just didn't sit well with me. I couldn't figure out why, until I remembered the rule about agency. My character exerted very little influence over what was supposed to happen to her-- actually, that was the problem, that it was supposed to happen to her. So I brainstormed a new solution. The guideline made it much easier to discard ideas as they came to me. Something would pop into my head and I would say, does that solve the agency problem? And then I would say, not really, and throw it out. Until I found a solution that did.

Sometimes it's hard to figure out if you're writing something because it's good and works for the story or because it's the simple solution and you're just plain exhausted from all the thinking you're doing, and I think the rules help. And I think the rules change for each story-- because it's not like there are no successful stories about car accidents out there, it's just that car accidents don't happen to belong in mine.

I tend to think of being creative like it involves twirling around in a field full of wildflowers, but that's not how it works. Because there are brambles in that field, and they will totally scrape your ankles if you keep up with that spinning. Creativity doesn't necessarily mean that there are no restrictions; it means that you find a way to maneuver within those restrictions toward something remarkable.

So: rules. I follow them.

What I Learned About Backstory, Thanks to James Dashner

One thing I've had drilled deep into my mind since beginning the whole agent search:

Avoid backstory. (At least, at the beginning.)

While searching for evidence that this is, in fact, a very common complaint about most people's first chapters, I discovered this quote by Mike Farris:

"Strong beginnings start in the middle of the story. You can fill in backstory later. I like to see the protagonist in action at the start so that I get a feel for who the character is right off the bat. We often get submissions with cover letters that begin: 'I know you asked for the first 50 pages, but the story really gets going on page 57, so I included more.' If the story really gets going at 57, you probably need to cut the first 56."

I think most writers have made this mistake before. You just pick a place for the story to start, and you think it's the right place, but as it turns out, you discover the real story about fifty pages later-- and yet, in revisions, it feels like too great a task to chop up those first fifty pages, so you don't. You may not even be consciously lazy about it. Sometimes the mere suggestion of removing that much content from your manuscript will just shut your brain down.

To me, too much backstory suggests a lack of confidence in the strength of the story. If the story is strong enough, it will carry the reader through the first pages even if they don't have a clear sense of the main character. Often we incorporate a lot of backstory because we think that if the reader connects with the character like we do, the strength of the story doesn't matter as much. That is, of course, not true. I know I've said this before, but it's still true: backstory is like water-soaked jeans. It sags from your story's butt, weighing it down.

(Here at my blog, I like to use classy, sophisticated similes.)

If you want to see a good example of backstory being completely unnecessary in the first few chapters, read THE MAZE RUNNER by James Dashner.

Summary (from Goodreads): When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his first name. He has no recollection of his parents, his home, or how he got where he is. His memory is black. But he’s not alone. When the lift’s doors open, Thomas finds himself surrounded by kids who welcome him to the Glade, a large expanse enclosed by stone walls.

Just like Thomas, the Gladers don’t know why or how they got to the Glade. All they know is that every morning, for as long as they could remember, the stone doors to the maze that surrounds them have opened. Every night, they’ve closed tight. Every thirty days a new boy is delivered in the lift. And no one wants to be stuck in the maze after dark. The Gladers were expecting Thomas’s arrival. But the next day, a girl arrives in the lift—the first girl ever to arrive in the Glade. And more surprising yet is the message she delivers. The Gladers have always been convinced that if they can solve the maze that surrounds the Glade, they might be able to find their way home . . . wherever that may be. But it’s looking more and more as if the maze is unsolvable.

And something about the girl’s arrival is starting to make Thomas feel different. Something is telling him that he just might have some answers—if he can only find a way to retrieve the dark secrets locked within his own mind.

First of all, I am officially recommending this book. Giant rubber stamp of Veronica Roth approval (in case that means anything). It's suspenseful, intriguing, and well-constructed. I am a big fan of uncertainty in books, and The Maze Runner does uncertainty extremely well. I was constantly asking the obvious questions: Why are they contained in a giant maze? Why would someone do something that terrible to a bunch of kids? And then the less obvious question: IS it terrible? And then every other page I'm thinking: yes. No. Yes. No. YES. No? What the heck is going on?

And in case you were wondering if the payoff of this mystery is worth sticking around for: OH YES it is.

But back to backstory. As you can tell by the summary, the only thing we know about Thomas in the first chapter is that his name is Thomas and he just woke up in a place called the Glade. Actually, that's the only thing Thomas knows about Thomas. There is no backstory at all. We don't know where he came from, what he looks like, who his parents were, or anything that happened to him in the fifteen years prior to his arrival. And it doesn't matter. You devour the story anyway.

Throughout the book, as Thomas gradually discovers things about his past, we discover them, too, and rarely has the unraveling of a character's history felt so satisfying to me. But even if I had never learned anything about Thomas's history, I still would have finished the book, because the story itself was strong enough to carry me through it.

So. If you find yourself tempted to include a lot of backstory in the beginning of your story, you probably suffer from one of two problems:

1. Your story is not strong enough on its own. You require the backstory to make it more interesting. Maybe, if you find the backstory so interesting, that's where your story should be. Or maybe you just need to rip all the expectedness from your story and overhaul it. Either way, don't be discouraged. When I say "it happens", I mean it. It happened to me. And it wasn't easy, and I mourned over it for awhile, but it led me to break out of my box and write Divergent, which was the best thing that ever happened to my writing life.

2. You don't have enough confidence in your story. And I think this is equally as likely. The best way to figure it out is to remove all hints of backstory from your first 30 or so pages and see what you have. And maybe you'll find that it's still interesting. That the voice is distinct. That the character is engaging. And hopefully, your story will be a heck of a lot lighter and quicker than it was before.

It's not that backstory doesn't have its uses, because it does, particularly if the advancement of your plot depends on the unraveling of a past event (which, by the way, is a dangerous game to play). But you want that backstory to emerge in small pieces throughout the story, not to be frontloaded onto your manuscript, weighing it down. And if you want to figure out how to do that, read The Maze Runner, and take note of where and how Thomas's history surfaces.

Actually, even if you don't want to figure out how to do that...read it anyway. Because THE SCORCH TRIALS comes out October 12th, and how can you resist a book with that title, really?

Character Priorities and Story Jet Propulsion

I have been thinking this morning about how stories begin. And I don't mean how they open, because that's a whole different discussion, one typically involving rules like "No 'waking up' openings!" and "No 'first day of school' openings!", rules that strike terror into the hearts of writers everywhere as they frantically revise their first five pages. No, I mean how they begin. Here, check out my chart:



This is an extremely basic map of a story. Generally speaking, most stories match up with this map. A character is living in his or her state of equilibrium-- Harry Potter is in the cabinet under the stairs, Frodo is living in the Shire, Elizabeth Bennett is chilling in the Bennett home, and so on. Then an inciting incident occurs that thrusts the character out of equilibrium-- Harry finds out he's a wizard, Frodo discovers the ring, Elizabeth lays the smackdown on Mr. Darcy-- and into The Story.

I'm really only concerned with the first part at the moment:


Right. So it occurred to me today that this chart/map/thing is misleading. Because it isn't really the incident that propels the story into motion, it's how the character responds to that incident that launches us into the story. I'm thinking that the story begins when a character responds to an incident in an unexpected way.



I say "unexpected" not because you're always surprised by the way that a character responds to The Incident, but because there are two kinds of fictional people: normal, average people, and the kind of people that we write about. (I say "fictional" because I'm not convinced that anyone is really normal or average in real life.) And normal, average people have a certain set of priorities. They go something like this:

1. Survival
2. Good health
3. Safety/Security ($$$, Family, Home, etc.)
4. Status (social, mostly)
5. Sensual stimulation (Look at the pretty colors!)
6. Mental stimulation
7. Altruism
8. Suspended action (or "rest")

(I'm going to credit Dennis Hensley with those, although I'm sure variations of that list are floating around everywhere.)

Want to get nerdy? Because that list of priorities loosely fits into Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a (debatable) psychological theory of human motivation. Yeah, that's right. We're getting FANCY on the blog today.

Basically, normal, average people want to survive more than they want mental stimulation (which is why you would choose food over television, given the choice) and they want safety more than rest (which is why you work for an income), et cetera. But the people that you write about aren't like that. When presented with an Inciting Incident, those people rearrange normal, average priorities. And that's how stories start.

Take The Hunger Games as an example. The story of The Hunger Games starts when Katniss decides to take her sister's place in the Games in order to save her. Basically, she places altruism (Priority #7) above survival (Priority #1). This leaves a tiny corner of my brain asking: what kind of person does that? And: how can she possibly survive this? And I am sucked in. Success!

Harry Potter places mental stimulation above security.
Frodo places altruism above security.
Achilles places status above health/survival.
Bella Swann sticks sensual stimulation above survival. (That's how I see it, anyway.)
Jonas (of The Giver) chooses mental stimulation over safety and status.
Hester Prynne places sensual stimulation above status

And the list goes on.

Thinking about this can be helpful, I think, when you're writing your own stories. I wasn't consciously thinking "what priorities should my character rearrange?" when I wrote DIVERGENT, but when I consider what made Beatrice so interesting to me, I realize that that's what it was. Beatrice has to decide whether to put mental stimulation above security, or to put altruism above mental stimulation. Sort of a complicated decision. And I had to write about it.

Sometimes we writers find it difficult to get the character out of equilibrium, or to figure out what happens after the inciting incident. And if you can ask yourself what your character's priorities are, and figure out what that suggests about how they will behave throughout the rest of the book, you can propel yourself right into the story.

Consider the squid. Squid are my favorite animal for one reason: they move by sucking water into their body cavities and squeezing it back out again. Jet propulsion. It's the coolest thing ever.

Rearranged character priorities are the water to your story's inner squid. If you give them a squeeze, your story will go shooting forward into...the ocean of...ideas. Okay, this comparison totally fell apart. I really just wanted to talk about squid. But you get what I'm saying.

Will Katniss continue to choose altruism over survival, or will her priorities change? And what does that say about her character? Will Harry Potter discover that he values safety a little more than he thought? (The answer to that is, of course: not really.) And what is UP with the girl who has the hots for the guy who wants to freaking murder her? All valid questions. Fascinating questions.

Do your characters re-order their priorities in a weird way? And how? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Rereading Mission and The First Lesson from SCBWI

This post is a two-parter. The first part is: I'm on a mission. And that mission is: to reread books from my childhood, and then blog about them.

I formulated this plan in LAX, while at one of the airport bookstores. Side note about bookstores. I always feel kind of silly walking into the young adult section of bookstores. I'll sort of wander around sci-fi/fantasy, and then glance to see if anyone's looking, and then dart over to the YA section really fast. I have this weird paranoia about someone who isn't familiar with YA assuming that it's only for younger people, coming up to me, and saying something like, "shouldn't you be reading at a higher level?" At which point I would flick them in the jaw. But I would rather not have to do that. I try to use my flicking powers only for good.

(Maybe that is using them for good?)

Anyway. I would love for anyone and everyone to join me on this mission. I am going to blog about The Giver on Friday, August 13th (Friday the 13th! Ominous), and if you choose to blog about a "childhood book" on that day, please post the link in the comments or tweet it at me and I will link my post to it, and we can form a giant chain of blog posts. Read any book you want, as long as you first read it when you were a kid (or a teenager, if you are a Person With More Age, and your teenage years feel far off to you) and post anything you want about the experience. If you can't do it this month, I'm pretty sure I'll do this again in another two weeks, with A Wrinkle In Time.

The first lesson I learned from SCBWI is more an interesting thing to think about than anything else. And I learned it from Marion Dane Bauer's keynote speech, "The Shape of Our Stories."

Marion said that while she was in an interview, once, the interviewer asked her a series of particularly good questions that led her to this simple realization: she's written the same book, over and over and over again. The trappings would be different-- different characters, different settings, different plots, even-- but the core of the story that lived under all those layers was the same; that basically, no matter what she wrote, she was always writing about abandonment. And when she tried to push away from that topic, she found herself stuck in the story, wondering why it wasn't working.

I realized as I was sitting there that my stories are always about transformation. More specifically, a decision that leads to transformation. For some reason, the idea of a character taking responsibility for his or her own life and doing something else with it just never leaves me.

Basically: Marion isn't alone. I think we all write about the same things, over and over, because we all acknowledge that our writing isn't just for readers, it's for us. There are things I am trying to tease out, to understand better, and because I find them confusing and compelling, I write about them, over and over, in an attempt to get somewhere. That doesn't mean that our stories are just replications of each other. It means that no matter what you write, you are the same person, and parts of you are going to make it into your work. Sometimes, the same parts. I don't think that's a bad thing.

The practical application of this is that the next time I get stuck in a story and I don't know where it's going, I can look at whether I am allowing myself to write about what I really want to write about, or whether I am forcing myself to write about something else.

The theory that I'm going to test with this rereading old books thing is: do the stories that stick with me for long periods of time also deal with the same things I am currently writing about?

And: what is it I'm trying to figure out, exactly?

This should be fun.

Anyway, think about what your works have in common. It's fun. And let me know what you come up with. (If you want.)

Dear Veronica. Freaking Jump Already. Sincerely, Veronica.

I do actually intend to write a series of blog posts about SCBWI, but today is not the day, because I've got something else on my mind.

I haven't really written in about three weeks. And it doesn't feel good.

So for the past week and a half I've been wondering what the heck is wrong with me. Am I ill? Am I depressed? Do I no longer like to write? THE HORROR.

I keep telling myself the answers to these questions:

A. No. I feel fine.
B. No. I feel fine.
C. I've been writing since sixth grade. If I haven't hated it before now, it's probably not going to happen.

After a week and a half of fretting, I think I have finally isolated the cause of my writer's block, and it's unsurprising, given my personality: fear.

I'm not going to lie to you and say that it's exactly the same now, writing under a book contract. When you have The Contract, writing becomes your job (even if it's a part-time job), because someone is compensating you for it. And not only that, but in The Trilogy Zone, you know that there are people relying on you to make the new book at least as good as the last book. And you are fully aware that several important people are going to read one of your initial drafts. All of this floats around in your mind when you write, because it's awesome, and because it's real, but the unfortunate side effect of this incredible blessing is that it's not the same, because it's not just me and my computer and my desk chair anymore.

But the lesson I am trying to teach myself is: it must become the same.

Like so many of the lessons I try to teach myself, this one is about courage.

Before, I was writing alone, and I felt secure not because I was brave but because no one had a vested interest in how my work turned out, no one but me. This time, people do, and every time I sit down to write I put this pressure on myself for it to be good. I really don't want to let those people down.

I am not, despite how I may seem, insecure about my writing. When I sit down at the keyboard and I shut out everyone else, I know exactly what I'm doing. I don't mean that in an arrogant way-- I don't think I'm perfect or brilliant or that I've learned everything I need to know. I mean that in this space, and at this desk, I am fully convinced of my ability to do good work. This is what I am supposed to do.

But this time, when I sit down, it's hard for me to shut out everyone else, so I have a problem. I have to create space for myself to mess up. Badly. I don't think I realized how scary it is to launch yourself into a draft without knowing where it's going or if anything will work the way you want it to, not because I haven't done it, but because I've never thought about it before. It's like when you're young and you'll just launch yourself off the swings without worrying about how you'll land, and then you grow up and you know about physics and broken bones and fragments of glass potentially waiting in the dirt, and you won't jump anymore. I know a lot more about what screws up a draft now, and that makes it hard for me to jump.

But you can't be afraid when you write. You have to take ownership of your talent and shut out the world's opinions and do the work you love because you love it, and for no other reason. You have to fire your internal editor, who is telling you that every move you make is a mistake. You have to realize that you are the only one who knows your characters so completely that you understand all the inner workings of their stories. But most of all, you just have to get over it and freaking jump already.

Be brave. That's my plan. It's not very sophisticated, but there it is.

(Psst. Myra McEntire also has a post about this today. And it's awesome.)