I am on a very, very tight deadline, which of course explains why I’m procrastinating here on my blog. As I do this edit, I think I will add to this post all the things I’m learning. Free advice for you!

What I have learned so far:

1. If your editor questions your choice of words, the easiest way to fix it is to simply delete it.

2. Take lots of breaks so your head doesn’t explode.

3. Tea is your friend (as long as you’re also close to the bathroom).

More to come…

4. Turn Twitter off.

I know…I know…I have not been a good blogger. I have not updated Need To Read much because I’ve read a bunch of stuff that I either wasn’t that enthusiastic about or was adult fiction that I didn’t really feel like blogging about. I have not updated here though for a very good reason.

I am writing a brand new book!

Yes! It’s true! And I’m really excited. But I need your help! The life advice I need is not for me. It’s for my main character, Jamie Lexington-Cross (fancy name, eh?). Here’s the deal…and I need your brilliant ideas…I need to come up with something cool for Jamie to do after high school that definitely requires a HS diploma, but is NOT going off to college. At least, not traditional college.

Here are some ideas I have already:

The military

The Peace Corps

Beauty School

There’s nothing wrong with any of these ideas, and Beauty School might actually work, but I’m not sure that you have to have a diploma. And it is IMPORTANT that it is an actual diploma, and not a GED. So hit me with your best ideas! If I use yours, I’ll send you an ARC from my stash (and I just got the Penguin Fall ARCs, so I have about 50 to choose from!). Thanks, everyone!

After I signed with my brilliant agent, I sent him a long letter (yeah, it could probably have been cut by 30%) telling him all the things I would do as a writer to make his job easier and to help sell books – like publicity stuff, and meeting deadlines, and blah, blah, blah.

I ended the letter with this:

I have never been able to write an outline and three chapters. I write whole books. If you tell me you need an outline and three chapters, I will try. I will do my best to say yes when you need me to do something, even if it’s out of my comfort zone. Or maybe, especially if it’s out of my comfort zone. After all, a stretch is good for everyone.

You really shouldn’t say something like this if you don’t mean it, because yeah…I’m now writing three chapters (well, 50 pages) and an outline/synopsis, per my agent’s suggestion. And guess what, I can actually do it! And I am LOVING this approach. Seriously.

I had one totally false start a few months ago, and have scrapped that idea, which is this huge relief because I put a couple of weeks into it, not months or years. Now I am onto something that is really working out and I am sooooo excited.

This approach has forced me to design a story and not to wing it. I think that there will be a lot less revision. Heck, there probably won’t even be any more pages unless my agent and editor likes what I’ve got. There’s something very freeing about starting a book knowing that it’s an experiment and not a commitment for the next year. It allows you to play. Of course, I am happy because I’ve got the 50 pages mostly done, but ask me next week! The synopsis is still in my head…wish me luck extracting that!

Do you outline? Do you write synopses and do character work (I did this time and it’s already paid off)? Or do you dive in?

When I started college, I was a theatre major. My grandmother kept telling me to take classes like accounting and typing (yes, this was way back when everyone used typewriters and computers were still in the future). I was not about to take anything so that I could “fall back on it” when my acting career did not pan out, but I did decide to take typing just so I could get through college. Believe it or not, way back then, you could still turn in handwritten papers. But they had to be legible and that’s where I was a failure. I had handwriting that would make you mistake me for a doctor!

I’m not proud of this, by the way. In fact, every day, I write three full pages in my journal and every single morning I open the journal, look at the fresh white pages and think to myself, “Today is the day I am going to write carefully and my handwriting will be beautiful.” but no matter what I do, it’s always basically loopy chicken scratches. When we got married, my husband addressed all the invitations so that, you know, people would actually get them.

I know some of you are probably wondering how the math study is going, and while I did sort of forget about it and the book is now overdue at the library, the bits I did on prime numbers was really fun. I’m now thinking that my next project should be a handwriting improvement course. I’m not exactly sure why I need to improve my handwriting when everything I write these days has to be typed, but there are always thank you notes, right? And it’s best if they’re not only legible, but they actually get there too.

There are debates in schools right now about the need to even teach cursive writing at all. What do you think? How is your handwriting?

I know I haven’t posted here much, but I’ve been reading some adult fiction and also the couple of YAs I’ve tried just did not work for me. However, I am HAPPY to say that Audrey, Wait! is fantastic. I first heard about it on Meg Cabot’s blog, but my library didn’t have it and I forgot about it. Recently, Alexa mentioned it to me, and my library had purchased it, so I put it on hold. It came in last week.

On Friday afternoon, I decided to celebrate my good writing week by reading this book. I settled into the Big Blue Chair with tea and a snack and I’d read about three chapters when my wonderful writing buddy and cat, Grinder came in and sat next to me. After a while I got up to get something and when I came back, he was settling into the chair so I scooped him up and moved him onto the bed next to my napping husband. That woke my husband up and so we were chatting while he petted the cat, and then something very sad and tragic happened. If you don’t want to read that, then the gist of it is that Grinder passed away suddenly.

Anyway, with Grinder gone and taking a huge part of my heart with him, I needed a distraction like nobody’s business. And I am pleased to say that AUDREY, WAIT! did an excellent job. This book is hilarious. It’s fun and funny, full of great music, and overall just a kickass read. It reminded me of Meg Cabot humour meets Sarah Dessen reality. In other words, it is extremely entertaining with great characters, but they’re very real in that they smoke, they drink, they do drugs, they colour their hair, they banter wickedly, and they have sex. And that’s just who they are. It’s not about any of those things, but these are teens involved in the music world in LA and if you leave that stuff out, well, then…I don’t think you have much of a book. Luckily, Benway wrote it like she sees it, and it is highly entertaining. I will be going directly to her site now to find out what else I can look forward to!

This picture was taken this morning. I was laying in the sunshine on the porch and my cat Grinder came out and climbed up onto my chest and licked my face. After a while, he crawled under this coffee table so that he could get into the box. He had never met a box he didn’t love.

I have many beautiful pictures of Grinder, but this one is just funny (a face only a parent could love) because it shows off his battle scars from the time he jumped out of a moving car on the Interstate. He used up a few of his lives that day (before we met), and today, this afternoon, he used up his last one. Our darlng Grinder went quickly, a stroke in my husband’s arms. One minute he was fine. The next he was gone. We should all be so lucky.

I have often said that if I had Grinder’s determination to get the things I wanted in life, I would be one successful girl. He never let silly things like rules about walking on the table or not drinking out of a glass stand in the way of getting what he wanted. One of my most favourite things that I’ve ever written is this piece about Grinder.

See ya on the flip side, Grinder. We miss you already.

Probably not, but over at my husband’s photo blog, there’s a great story to go with this picture/quilt. You can see it bigger there, too.

People say that writing is solitary. For the most part I agree, but I have had a bit of a change of heart lately. For years I wrote alone, only having one or two people read my stuff when I thought it was finished. I learned a lot, but it seemed like I did a lot of rewriting. Over the last few years, I have been very lucky and have expanded my group of readers to include about five regulars, plus my agent, and it has made a tremendous difference. Still, for the most part, I worked like I always had. I wrote and then I gave them the manuscript and they gave me notes and I went back and revised.

Recently my editor gave me a round of edits that included cutting 63 pages of a 313 page manuscript. This was an enormous challenge that I wasn’t too sure how to approach because I’d cut 65 pages from the previous draft and I was wondering exactly where I was going to find 63 pages more to cut when I hadn’t even been able to reach that first goal of cutting 75 pages. However, my editor asked a lot of good questions which sent me off in a new direction for the beginning and gave me ideas. The problem was, “Did they work?” For the first time I was faced with a deadline that would not allow me to write to my heart’s content and then give the pages to my readers. I knew it would take me nearly the whole month just to fix everything and so if I waited to get their opinion then and I’d goofed up somehow, I was going to be in big trouble.

So what I did was I started giving my husband (who is an excellent writer and critiquer) one chapter at a time. Sometimes I’d just give him a scene. Sometimes a paragraph. He was much more ruthless than he’d ever been before, and I think this was because he was dealing with much smaller portions. If you give someone a six course meal and ask them to give you a detailed report afterwards, it’s going to be much less specific than if after the appetizer you ask for a review, and again after the soup, etc. And that’s what happened here. He just refused to let me go on until what I had made sense and was done as well as I could do it. It was frustrating at times, especially when I reworked a paragraph three or four times before he would say, “Ahhh…yes.”

So the revisions are off and while I wait for the next round, I am working up a proposal for my next YA. I have an idea that I think will work and I ran the hook by my agent. He seemed to agree that it could be interesting. The thing is, he wants me to write 30 pages and a synopsis. He wants to see that before I jump into a whole novel. I have one thing to say to that. Nooooooooo!

Okay, not true anymore. He was right and I can do this. And so I have been working on this for a couple of weeks. Today, I felt I was ready to start working on the thirty pages, but something was holding me back…was the bit at the climax that I had in mind to stupid? Too unbelievable? Too contrived? I took a deep breath, sat my husband down on the couch, and pitched him my new book, complete with backstory, character descriptions, and as many plot points as I could get in. He found holes, but overall he loved it. And the bit that worried me at the end, he thought was the best part of the story. Whew…

So the point of all this rambling is that I think that keeping things in, not letting any of my trusted critique group hear what I have in mind just doesn’t work for me anymore and this discussion and brainstorming is going to work better for me. I think (hope) there will be less revision involved. I’ve already seen how points that I might have struggled to make work for days were noted, discussed, and resolved all in a matter of minutes by talking about this to my husband.

Now I know that not all of you have someone as handy as he is (he doesn’t have a regular job because he’s an artist, so basically, if I can pry the guitar or camera out of his hand, he’s ready to read), but if you have struggled along valiantly, all alone, you might give this approach a thought. Maybe there is someone that you trust that might not even be a writer, but loves to talk stories over coffee. Or someone you can call.

I read a long time ago in a screenwriting book that, “Writers cannot write in a vacuum.” and for years I told myself that they meant screenwriters, but I’m starting to think that it’s true of all kinds of writers to some extent. And yes, I know that the clipart is not the kind of vacuum they mean…I was just checking to see if you were still paying attention!

This picture is the one that I said looks like my superhero character Enviro Avenger. The photographer noticed that people were clicking over from my site to hers and emailed and offered to let me put it up here! Cool, eh?

You may have noticed that not only have I not been blogging as much as normal while finishing my edits, but I haven’t updated much on Need To Read either. I’ve discovered that I can’t really read fiction while editing. Instead of getting into the story, I find myself thinking, “the author just used that word two paragraphs ago”. Haha! Or “Another startling green-eyed character? I must update the Red Hair list!” This is not conducive to entertainment reading.

But you know me…I could not go without books entirely. I’ve been reading nonfiction. And honestly, I can’t even really remember what. Except this book. Let me just tell you that lately I’ve been feeling kind of smug in my environmental cloak, but then I read this. I seriously dare you to check out his website or read David Suzuiki’s Green Guide. You will not feel so great about what’s going on, but you will feel very inspired to do better. And it’s possible that you might just become a vegetarian too. As you know, we are vegetarians, but I don’t really preach about it (I want to, but that’s so boring!) because it is a spiritual decision for us. However, I might start talking about it more on an environmental platform because seriously…meat production is screwing up this planet big time. Anyway…

I am now back to reading fiction, and I spent all day yesterday reading Nevil Shute’s The Far Country, possibly one of his best books. Man is he good! And I’m pleased to see that he has been a bigger influence on my writing than I realized. That’s very good news. Not that I’m saying I’m the next Nevil Shute or anything, far from it, but I can definitely see what I’ve taken from his style and incorporated into my own and that makes me very happy. I can’t link to it because it’s OP and hard to find, but your library should have it. Or you could try The Paper Tiger.

Every once in a while there are just so many cool things that I think y’all would like to see, but might miss. So here are a few links for you.

First, I would be remiss not to mention my first interview (again), right? Do stop by because I’m so much more scintillating on someone else’s website. Haha!

And if you’re in publishing in any way, writer, editor, agent, whatever, you HAVE to see this video made by one of my editor’s writers, Lara Zielin. This is tooooo funny!

You all know how much I love baseball, right? Well, if you’re struggling along, trying to get published, or you’re on the road to getting an agent, but it hasn’t happened yet, please read this story about a baseball player who has spent 10 years in the minors and just got the call to the big leagues. He’s starting in today’s Cubbies game. *He just got his first Major League Hit in the 5th inning!

Also, I’ve finally added my latest article, Avoiding the Character Cliche, to the nonfiction tab, if you’re interested.

I had a few more links in mind, but they seem to have slipped my mind. Oh, well! Maybe I’ll add to this later. Or you can put your favourite links in the comments.

This was originally published in the SCBWI bulletin in 2009. I wanted to cut and paste their formatted version, but their new site kept crashing my computer. Hopefully, it will get fixed because it looks really cool over there now!

Avoiding the Character Cliché

By

Joëlle Anthony

The very best way to avoid character clichés is to simply not have the nemesis in your young adult book be a beautiful, fashionably dressed cheerleader. If you give that a miss, you will be ahead of many, many books out there, and probably thousands of manuscripts being submitted to agents and editors right now. This has to be the single most overused character cliché that I have come across in all my reading of middle grade and young adult fiction (and I read about 100 books per year).

Most often writers put great effort into their main characters, and maybe a few others close to the story, but minor characters and antagonists often fall into the cliché category. Of course, there are many other character clichés besides the cheerleaders. If you read enough, you can identify them yourself. The real question is: what to do about it?

Agent and writer, Donald Maass, has a whole workbook filled with exercises designed to help you strengthen your manuscript. One of the things he stresses is to go beyond your first, or even your second or third idea.

For example, let’s say the mother of your character needs to have some sort of professional job. One where she works a lot, dresses in designer clothes and can usually be found talking on her cell phone. What’s the first vocation you think of? Lawyer? Talent Agent? Quickly, make a list of ten careers that meet the above parameters.

Here’s my list from when I tried this for my WIP:

1. Lawyer

2. Talent Agent

3. Clothes designer

4. Architect

5. Real estate agent

6. Some sort of CEO

7. Professor

8. Art director

9. Museum curator or gallery owner

10. Paralegal who thinks she indispensable

So which is the most interesting? Donald Maass says that it’s probably number ten, and after I did this exercise, I ended up changing the mother’s character from a full-fledged lawyer to a law school dropout who settles for being a paralegal. This changed everything from the plot to how my MC interacts with her mother. You have no idea what direction you might go in if you push yourself beyond your first choice.

Another way that it’s easy to fall into creating clichéd characters is when we make up a character that stands for everything our main character despises. It’s a really easy way to show who your character is, but it also can be very lazy.

Let’s say the antagonist colors her hair and has a tan and your MC refers to her as a “Bottle blonde” and “Fake n’ bake”. True, it shows that your MC disdains those things. But is this the best use of your antagonist?

What if instead, she had everything your main character actually wants? I’m not talking about “the boy” here. I mean admirable things like good grades, or lots of real friends who really like her. Doesn’t this make her more interesting? Admiring someone who makes your life Hell is much more conflicting than simply disliking the person because they stand for everything you hate.

The other thing I suggest is studying minor characters as you read. You will find that many of them are either clichés or flat. Some writers that create fascinating minor characters are Jerry Spinelli, Meg Cabot, and Susan Juby.

I recently participated in a writing workshop taught by the author Susan Juby (Alice, I Think, Another Kind of Cowboy, Getting the Girl) and she told us that the character of Alice was inspired by a minor character that she read about in someone else’s novel. I love that idea because I often find myself thinking, “Wow! I wish I knew more about the best friend!” or “the long lost cousin”.

While I don’t know if I’ll ever write about another author’s character, I do know that my new goal is to create such interesting ones that Susan Juby wants to write a whole novel about one of mine! Drop the clichés and trust your characters. They might surprise you.

Joëlle Anthony writes from her home in British Columbia, Canada. Look for her upcoming young adult novel, RESTORING HARMONY, forthcoming from Putman for Young Readers, May 2010. Visit her website at http://www.joelleanthony.com

Guess what? I just did my very first author interview! Stop on over at Steph Bowe’s blog and be impressed. No, not with me! With Steph. She’s a fifteen year old YA writer and book reviewer and she’s got a fantastic blog going over there, so don’t miss it.

I really wanted to use a picture from this site, but you know…you can’t just lift photos! Especially if you’re married to a photographer. But I think Enviro Avenger (my superhero alter-ego) probably looks like this girl.

I’m a little behind in that this is the first Lauren Myracle book I’ve read. I got it as an ARC and thought the cover looked fun. Of course, I’d heard of the author, but none of her books had crossed my path before.

I really liked this book. I thought the characters and ideas were fascinating. I liked the twists it took. And I felt very emotionally involved in this book. It also got me thinking about our imaginations as writers and how we are sometimes limited by our personal experiences and values.

In this book, the family is a very wealthy family living in the Buckhead area of Atlanta. What I found interesting is that when I imagine wealthy characters, they pretty much live by my values. In the YA I just finished, the family is independently wealthy due to a windfall. However, the way they spend their money is they live in a super environmentally sound house, they buy high quality and organic food, they purchase items that are made in sustainable ways, but not a lot of these items, etc., and the mother does not have a job, but does nearly full-time philanthropy work. In other words, they live how I would live if I were rich (only my husband would be the professional volunteer…I would still be a writer).

I have never even met anyone wealthy enough to live in Buckhead (that I know of anyway) and to create a story set there is beyond my imagination. Sure, I could research it…if I even knew it existed (which I didn’t…even though I’d lived in the south and heard of the neighbourhood). It got me thinking about how we, as writers can expand our worlds. Or do we need to? Is our imagined world going to expand someone else who can only imagine a penthouse on the Upper East Side, or a rented shack on the wrong side of the tracks? Hard to say.

Anyway, I loved this book and think you will too. The photo is one my husband took for his blog and there’s a bit of history behind it here if you want to read about it. You can see it better there too.

Click to enlarge. See more of my husband’s wonderful photographs here. I often link to his daily photo blog, but this link is for his professional online portfolio. Make sure you have some time, as there’s a lot of great stuff to look at. If you’re detail oriented, you might notice that it looks like I’m writing backwards. The camera technique he uses flips the image and he left it that way so y’all couldn’t read my personal and deep thoughts!