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Storytelling for All (Or As Many As Possible) Ages – Chris Nuttall

Storytelling for All (Or As Many As Possible) Ages – Chris Nuttall

 The youngest fan I have, at least as far as I know, is fourteen.

The oldest fan, again as far as I know, is in his eighties.

What struck me as interesting, when I started looking back at my emails, was that they shared interests in the same books: Schooled in Magic and The Zero Blessing.

This surprised me, although – in hindsight – it probably shouldn’t.  I wrote both of those series to be YA, with The Zero Blessing originally aimed at younger readers.  On the other hand, I did my best to avoid many of the things I disliked in YA (and younger books) and worked hard to build up a semi-plausible pair of universes.  The characters may be young – Cat is twelve – but they’re not childish.

I was still thinking of this when a fan asked if I’d ever read a book called Bras and Broomsticks.  The title didn’t sound very promising, but the blurb – two sisters, one of whom has inherited her mother’s magic – sounded good.  So I got a copy, read it and … well, I want that hour back.  <Evil Grin>.  There’s nothing particularly bad about it, but the main character is very much an irritating teenage girl with stereotypical concerns (friendships, breast sizes, boyfriends, etc), the plot is depressingly predicable and the moral at the end somewhat trite.  I have no doubt that teenage girls will like the story – it has some good reviews on Amazon – but it wouldn’t have appealed to me when I was a teenage boy.

This started me off thinking about other YA books I’d read as I grew up.  Like most kids in my school, I read Judy Judy Blume and Paula Danziger.  And yet, most of their books have not aged well to me.  The one I loved most, when I was 10, was This Place Has No Atmosphere, a story about a girl who moves to the moon.  This was no Heinlein novel of struggle and survival against the odds.  No, it was a typical ‘teenager moves town, makes new friends, comes to terms with it’ set on the moon.  When I looked back at it, a month or so ago, I found it hard to believe that I had ever loved the book.  The handful of glimpses of future life do not make up for the simple fact that the story itself is just like thousands of other stories along the same lines.

And so I looked back through my old reading lists (and what part of my collection from those days remains intact.)

The books that still spoke to me were written at a number of different levels.  The Worst Witch and its sequels and Hood’s Army are very clearly books for preteens; The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Little House, The Demon Headmaster and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone are aimed at older children and young teenagers; Discworld, Heinlein’s juveniles and other books along those lines remain in my collection.  They still speak to me, even though I am no longer part of the targeted audience.  I still smile when I reread Matilda or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And why should I not?

(Is it actually a coincidence that most of these books didn’t turn out well when adapted for television or the movies?)

The books that no longer speak to me are legion.  Judy Blume and Paula Danziger are no longer on my list of favourites.  Enid Blyton is now thoroughly absurd; Milly-Molly-Mandy is ridiculously twee.  Nicolas Fisk has not aged well.  There are so many books that I have forgotten, over the years, that have made no impression on me at all.  (And most of them don’t have the excuse of being jammed down my throat at school.)  I vaguely recall reading a teenage romance novel when I was fourteen, but I have forgotten the details.  And don’t even get me started on Twilight …

 Thinking about it, most of the books I still like – and reread, sometimes – have a few things in common.  On one hand, they don’t talk down to their readers.  The Worst Witch is written for children, but it doesn’t treat kids as idiots.  They also have likeable characters: Mildred Hubble, Christopher Chant, Matilda, Dinah Glass and even Harry Potter are likeable and, more importantly, relatable.  (Christopher Chant, Harry Potter and Matilda have moments of delinquent behaviour, but they’re not openly malicious.)  It’s easy to follow their stories and feel for them, even if they live in very different worlds.  One can believe in them.  And, perhaps most importantly of all, the stories aren’t focused on a particular age group.

The books I don’t like break some or all of these rules.

This Place Has No Atmosphere and Bras and Broomsticks, for example, feature teenage girls who are, in many ways, whiny self-obsessed little brats.  The same can be said for most of the other books by the same author (the male characters have the same problem, with predicable results.)  It’s difficult to like such characters, particularly if you happen to be twenty years older than them.  You want to pick them up and shake them for being such annoying little morons.  Other books, such as Twilight are so intensely focused on their target demographic that there’s no appeal to younger readers (who probably find it soppy) and older readers, who are aghast at all the unfortunate implications.

Thinking about it, there’s actually a further issue caused by focusing.  It can and it does turn people off.

There are people who try to ban Judy Blume because she discusses – frankly, particularly for her era – issues such as menstruation and sex.  On one hand, writing about this is a good thing.  Children who are growing into teenagers, then adults, need explanations of what is happening to their bodies, instructions on how to handle it … and, most importantly, reassurance that they are not alone.  On the other hand, these issues are often off-putting if you’re not part of the target audience.  I found Judy Blume’s female-focused books to be uncomfortable, in many ways, and I suspect that many girls think the same of her male-focused books.  Now, I feel that they haven’t aged well (which probably explains why so many parents want to ban them, forgetting what things were like when they were young.)

This has wider implications.  Books tightly focused on a particular demographic will not always appeal to people outside that demographic.  A teenage romance story would not have appealed to me as a teen, still less now.  A story focused on a homosexual character grappling with his sexuality wouldn’t appeal to me either, even though I would have a great deal of sympathy for anyone caught in that position.  I suspect that female readers are put off by exaggerated masculinity – although the success of Fifty Shades of Grey may argue that I’m wrong – just as male readers are put off by exaggerated femininity.  If nothing else, a teenage male who reads Bras and Broomsticks will come away with some pretty silly ideas about teenage girls.

One does not need to discuss adult situations – either in the conventional sense or this – to write a children’s or YA book that appeals to all ages.  But one does have to remember that focusing the book on one demographic tends to limit its appeal to other demographics …

… And that it isn’t the fault of those demographics that they don’t like the book.

Heaven Weeps

Heaven weeps

(or it is raining. It’s a matter of perspective and characterization, if you think about it)

We’re in a world where real tragedy, from Muslim extremists who find murdering little girls something to celebrate, to the little personal tragedies – not making ‘phone call to your mother until that tomorrow – which was too late, that can cut us to the quick. For many of us, we read to escape this, not to have it dragged up again.

Yet it is a very real part of great writing.

One of the things I am weakest at, and yet both admire and hate in the work of other writers who do it so much better than me, is the effective use of tragedy. It’s, probably, of the literary forms, slightly easier than comedy. That’s not hard to understand: we at least have some common ‘buttons’ across at least most of western civilization that make us want to weep, or at least get dust in our eyes. That’s not true of humor, where one man’s joke can easily be another man’s chosen political candidate.

Of course, as has frequently been observed, nothing is simple, and then you die… which is almost inevitably tragic from at least one perspective. Tragedy too can be a question of perspective, but, for the writer anyway, that a controllable perspective. The character suffering, or dying, is a character we have built. Everyone but rare psychopaths find suffering or dying pretty unpleasant if they identify and/or care about the character. (Yes I know. Poor psychopaths, sadists, masochists etc. so left out. Especially the intersectional ones. Look, feel free to start a hashtag campaign on twitter for them: we’re trying to sell books, preferably a lot of them, and that means that we worry about large enough chunks of the demographic to make a living selling to. Outside of Political Correctness, there is little point in endless appeasement of microscopic parts of the population, if you want to make a living selling books. Don’t worry, traditional publishing will cater for them.)

As I said, heaven weeps, or it is raining – depending on perspective of the reader about ‘Heaven’ (if you the author have managed to apply anthropomorphism to the sky and clouds, well, you’re following in ancient traditions. If you’ve carried the reader along, maybe a theological career is for you after all.) Whether the reader cares will depend on character that you, the author have created for ‘heaven’.

Of course, this is where it starts to get complicated. Obviously, not all readers are the same, and a substantial part of getting readers to care is some degree of being able to identify with the character and thus their distress. I suspect the slew of traditional authors contracted by angry, tearful publishers to write horrifying, tragic distrumpias (it’s the new big thing with traditional publishing. I suspect it will be for at least the next few years. It has a ready market with 95% of NY publishers. I wonder how it’s going to do outside that bubble.) may come to some startling discoveries. I’m sure it will be the readers’ fault, the insensitive boors, because the features that make a tragic tearjerker in NY publishing and their social and political circles… mean nothing to ¾ of the readers. In fact it may well be like the politician who gave the Guardian reporter a ‘body-slam’ (AKA a good shove). The media saw it (their perspective) as making the fellow an un-electable villain. Plainly – as he got comfortably elected, this was not the case from the perspective of many people.

Having had Guardian writer Damian Walter attempt to damage my career by attacking my book without actually reading more the first paragraph of CHANGELING’S ISLAND… I know who I would probably have voted for. A bit of defenestration, with a nice picket fence to land his derriere on and it would have been even more vote-grabbing, if hard on the fence. #NotAllFences!

That of course is an example how tragedy is a matter perspective… when the character is a stereotype of whom we see an ‘upper’ layer. It’s a lot harder – no matter what your perspective is, when the writer tackles the characterization well, from the basics up. Because yes, most of us are, at that level, remarkably alike. It is far easier to get a reader to identify with and care about a character after showing him or her, for example, trying to comfort a crying baby – especially if that is at 2 AM and the adult has no idea what is wrong, and is full of that odd mixture of helpless despair and utter exhaustion that every parent dealing with this goes through. You’ve done all the obvious (diapers, feed, attempt to wind, cuddle, sing, check temperature, panic a little, etc.). Pretty much every decent parent has been there. If I’ve seen these aspects of character, showing their human-ness, I care at least a little, even if they are the villain, or a Guardian reporter.

If all the reader has seen of them is at a busy day villaining (or being a hero, depending on perspective) at least to some, if not all of your audience, that tragedy you agonized over writing, is either ho-hum or a comedic interlude.

Another aspect of tragedy within the novel – besides eliciting the sympathy of reader, or providing motive or shock value a la GRRM (I disapprove. It’s like adding cocaine to your bottled soda recipe to sell it. It’ll work. But by next month you need add a little more. And the month after, more.) is one that I think is often missed. It is that of contrast. Now, I’m a mediocre to poor tragedarian, as I tend to be too involved and fond of my characters to be as nasty as I probably should be. I’m also pretty poor at this style of drama, as I tend to blunder into comedic interludes. I stand in awe of authors who can hold me while it is nothing but drama, the whole way. I fail at that. But tragicomedy (both in the ‘happy ending’ and the Satyr play sense) is my natural métier. This is where ‘contrast’ really comes into play.

Take a bottle of white paint, and a bottle of black. Mix them equally and your picture is gray. Do various proportions and you can achieve a wonderfully complex picture. If you want elements to stand out… you put extremes against each other. A piece of music with the same dynamics, same pace… makes a good lullaby, which is great if you’re selling your books as soporifics. Otherwise – a tragicomedy is an orchestration, a balancing act of pathos and humor, of fast and slow pace (slow – used judiciously makes the fast seem a lot faster).

It does require sometimes killing beloved characters (I have never quite forgiven Diana Wynne Jones for the death of Olob – even if it was a key feature of that book. She did it well in the Dalemark Quartet. Worth learning from.) which is never easy.

However – the good aspect of tragicomedic writing, for me anyway, is that one can – at least in part, resolve the tragedy, or ease it. That’s not always true in real life.

I guess that might explain why Ilike to write it and read it.

Every Author for Branding

No, this isn’t about body-modification. That’s next month. This is, well, it’s less about writing, and more about the author-as-public-figure. Now, for those who aren’t aware, former NYC mayor and billionaire in his own right Michael Bloomberg formed a gun control advocacy group a number of years ago. They’ve lent weight – and money – to any number of state and national political campaigns and legislative efforts, as well as bankrolling other astroturf gun control groups.

Recently, Everytown has announced the formation of an Author Council. 130 authors have signed on to prevent gun violence. Notables include Jodi Picoult, Lev Grossman, and Tim Federle. (Truthfully, those were the only names I recognized. I don’t know whether that reflects the make-up of the group, or of my reading tastes. (I’d also like to note that I’ve never read a Jodi Picoult novel. Not my fandom.))

I’ve seen a middling amount of reaction from my online circles. Everything from shrugs to calls for informal boycott. Me, I don’t care. I’ve never let political leanings get in the way of enjoying (or writing) a good story, and I don’t look to start. That said, as so few names are even on my horizon, I’m unlikely to look to this list for my new favoritest author evar.

Regardless of your opinion on gun rights, Bloomberg’s opinions, or politics in general, the Author Council’s call to action is an important point for writers to consider.

Do you like money? Do you want people to commit egregious commerce with you, turning gobs and scads of their money into your money? I know that’s one of my major writing dreams (too far off to be a goal, at least until I get more writing time into the schedule). I’m really somewhat admiring of this council thingy. They’re rocking their market targeting by doing this. By simply publicly signing their names to a gun control group, they’re advertising what kind of people they want to buy their books. Jodi Picoult could probably drink puppy smoothies for breakfast and not lose her readership, and Lev Grossman has a successful television series based on his big work, so there’s less courage there.

But for anybody less well-known, or well-selling, this is a great way to tell whole swaths of readers that you do (or possibly more significantly, don’t) want them to give you money for your efforts. As an author, causes you come out in support of or opposition to are going to mark you to readers. Some readers. The ones who pay attention to that kind of thing, at least. And among certain genre (like ourn) this is a more fraught venture.

Witness the fallout of the Puppy campaigns.

Any number of writers were outted (rightly or wrongly) as one thing or another, and calls for boycotts were loud and shrill. “Friends” were shunned and writers lost readers. Which is a shame.

How does this matter to you? Simply put: be aware. Know your genre, know your industry, and know your readership. For example, I suspect most of the authors on the council aren’t writing milSF. Joining a gun control group and writing scifi gun porn would be almost as poor a choice as writing stereotypical high fantasy and publicly raging about the evils of western civilization.

Should you then not stand for principles in an effort to gain more readers? By no means. If you’re passionate about something, you should advocate for it. Just be aware that doing so will likely lose you some readers, though that may simply be in potentia. I doubt my eventual milfantasy will get me many leftist readers. Certainly my views on individual liberty and the proper role of government would lose me them.

And I’m fine with that. They wouldn’t have read me in the first place. I’m too publicly associated with the rest of this band of reprobates, and I don’t much care who knows it. I’m also the smallest fry among the MGC.

It likely doesn’t matter, anyway. Who we are as writers comes out in our writing, and people will love or hate that as they’re individually bent. I don’t read Larry Correia for the heart-wrenching scenarios (though I still haven’t forgiven him for Sam), just like I’m not pulling out my much-thumbed copies of David Eddings to read his exhortations about which firearms to choose and how to plan a military campaign (he rightly implies that the most exciting campaigns are often the ones where things go spectacularly wrong. At least for the heroes.)

Look at Sarah’s Darkship books. Written by a statist, they ain’t.

The message to you, the writer, is as I said above. Be aware of your market. Know what they want to get out of your writing. Do they want polemics? Do they want entertainment? And what kind? I read for fun, and tend to avoid certain things. Lev Grossman’s Magicians looks (admittedly, from the television spots) like a rich world with complex characters and a compelling plot. That doesn’t mean I’m going to like it. The way it was first described to me didn’t sound like something I would actually want to read. Which is fine. You can’t snag every reader, and he won’t miss my book budget.

And be wise about how you choose to advertise your causes. I suspect most of the authors on the council aren’t trumpeting their involvement. Certainly not where it’s impacted my life. Maybe a blog post. “Hey, all, I’m in a thing,” is probably the extent of most. I hope. Should your championing of something extend beyond that to, “and everyone must kowtow to my thing for reasons,” you might want to consider dialing back the intensity. Just a mite.

Penultimately, please accept my fulsome apologies for the timing of this missive. I’ve chosen to put family ahead of career, at this point in my life, and that means things like my MGC posts come after the kids are cared for. I’d like to be able to manage things concurrently, but I wasn’t given enough hands for that.

Finally, however you honor my fallen brothers and sisters in arms (or not), this weekend, please be courteous to those who do so differently than you do. Some awesome folks will be found in our national (and other) cemeteries, cleaning, tidying, and placing flags and flowers and suchlike. Y’all rock. Many, many more will be found hoisting beverages of varying levels of inebriability. Or applying heat to flesh, via grill, or outdoors at a beach or park. Or both. This is cool. Most of those who’ve died in service of our country would appreciate that, too. Be well, be safe, keep an eye on your buddy, and if you’ve had too much to drive (read: any) call Chief, or failing that, the Old Man. Both will be happy to make sure you get home alive.

Overstuffed

When you stop to think about it, all of us are largely products of our history. We make decisions based to a large extent on our experiences up to that point, and our experiences are influenced by the choices of those close to us – who are making their choices based on their experiences. And so on, all the way back to the first sexually dimorphic organisms. Probably. Possibly further, since even asexually reproducing organisms can be affected by environment and then have that impact propagate through their clones.

The writerly term for this is backstory.

Most authors will figure out the backstory of their main characters, along with some key bits of their minor characters, but it go so wrong its either hilarious or horrible depending on your perspective. And by hilarious or horrible, I mean stuff like granddad who’s eighty or so and has vivid memories of the Napoleonic wars. And the US Civil War. Oh, and it’s late 20^th century, and granddad isn’t immortal.

I believe the kindest way to describe this is “um”.

Now, okay, you’re probably not going to do that in a contemporary setting. But you can certainly cram that much living into a character backstory if you’re not careful. Partly it’s the convenience of having granddad able to tell your main characters cool stories about stuff they didn’t experience which turn out to be really useful even though they’ve been groaning to themselves every time granddad starts the whole “When I was a lad…” or “Back in the day…” But there’s only so much, “well… he gets a bit confused, you know,” you can push through. Overdo it, and instead of being pulled into your wonderful story, your readers will be wondering when granddad found time to have kids. And what grandma thought about him being off fighting monsters or wars or whatever all the time.

See, even in the most turbulent eras, there are usually bursts of “ohshitohshitohshitI’mgonnadie!” interspersed with a lot of relatively peaceful times. Even a really adventurous character probably doesn’t spend all his/her/its time battling monsters, slaying princesses and rescuing evil. Um. Or something. More likely there’s going to be a few months of high adventure with several years between times recovering, training for the next adventure, and investing the spoils of the last one (or just spending it and having way too much fun with the persons of negotiable virtue until said spoils run out and another adventure becomes a financial necessity).

Heck, even in the most war-torn areas, it’s not really battles all the time (World War 1 was something of an anomaly) in any single spot. Long sieges were rare enough to be noteworthy, and battles rarely lasted more than a few days. Even during World War 1, actually – as I understand it, the trenches were manned continuously, there’d be as close to constant artillery barrage as possible, but at the same time people were being rotated in and out all the time so an individual soldier would spend maybe a month on the front lines for every three months in the area (I’m dredging this from the stainless steel lint trap of my memory so the details might be fuzzy. If not completely wrong. But the general idea isn’t) – most individual combat engagements weren’t that long.

The point being that no matter how neat that character’s backstory is, if it involved almost non-stop adventure and said character is now elderly and relatively sane, they ain’t human. And that’s presuming you got the chronology right.

I’m not saying you need to write a biography of every named character in your books. You don’t. You do need to have some notes so you don’t accidentally regress someone’s age between novels or have Fred remember doing the thing that George did in book 1. You might not remember, but I promise you at least one fan will.

Now that I’ve managed 600 words or so of digression, I was going to say something about how character attitudes and reactions rise from their past experiences, but you know what? My recent past experiences include a cat with bowel issues, a major software release, and all the cleaning up – metaphorical and physical – both entail. I’m not sure I could manage to return to the topic and post anything sensible.

I guess that will be another post.