Category: Books

Start Thinking of Your Thoughtful Comments

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You know that feeling of hope when you craft a new blog post and hit Publish? Ah yes, you say, this will truly get them talking! This will be the post all my readers love! Viral, here I come.

And then you wait. And wait.

That’s the nature of blogging. For the most part, you put it out there without any kind of response. That’s why it should be something you find personally fulfilling, not just fulfilling because it gets you attention.

But!

The Fourth Annual Comment Challenge is all about spreading the blog love. The details: you comment on (at least) 5 kid lit blogs everyday for 21 days. Get conversations started. Let bloggers know their work is appreciated. Maybe they’ll even comment back!

Head over to MotherReader to sign up. I’m excited to find lots more awesome children’s/YA blogs to add to my rss feed. Please share any cool blogs you think I’d like!

Getting Excited for The Fault in Our Stars

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If you are online and like YA, you probably know* John Green, author and internet icon. His new book The Fault in Our Stars is coming out next week (hurray!). To promote the release**, EW has an exclusive book trailer. Unfortunately, exclusive means that I can’t post it here–maybe after the release?–but for now just click through to see the really lovely video, plus an interview with Green. I was already excited for the book and now I’m way psyched.

Also I need to download the song in the trailer.

From the interview:

I’m sure one of the things people are going to comment on most about this book is the humor. Was it difficult infusing humor into a story about teens with cancer, or did it come naturally?
It came pretty naturally. I don’t see them as separate in my life or the lives of my friends. Humor and sadness co-exist everywhere and always. It was really important to me that the book be funny, and that it be kind of celebratory of life and these people and their lives. The last thing I wanted to write was a dreary novel about illness. The world has those. I wanted it to be, you know, fun to read. That’s your first job as a writer: Write something that people want to read.

I love the combination of humor and sadness, which I think is something John captures well in his books. This is another reason I love contemporary YA–there’s a lot of that balance, and it’s all very grounded in everyday love, loss, and hope.

*If you don’t know John Green, just google “nerdfighter” and you’ll get a sense of the community of readers surrounding him.

**John is also going on a book tour for the release of The Fault in Our Stars. I’ll be at the Boston reading, and last night I had a dream that I was there. I had a great seat and there was a lot of excitement–cupcakes! balloons! songs!–but at the last minute I realized I’d left my bag on the train and had to frantically run to the train station. Now I’m paranoid about the real event.

 

A Book is a Gift that Keeps on Giving

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One of my favorite bookstores is Brookline Booksmith, which is a short walk from my apartment. (Hurray!) On their blog today, Emily talks about how the best books are given from the heart. They create an intimate connection between the giver and the receiver–the giver wants to share something personal they felt, or wants the receiver to experience a similar joy, etc. Gifts, and books in particular, are personal.

Her post reminded me of my friend Akshay who always give books to friends–not just on their birthday, or because they did something gift-worthy, just because he thinks that person will enjoy the book. Sometimes the books are new; sometimes they’re his old copy. He doesn’t make a big show about it or expect anything in return. He’s a very generous book-giver. I think it would be great if more people swapped books with the same enthusiasm. Maybe that’ll be my resolution this year. (After losing not one but two copies of The Princess Bride, I have a tendency to hoard my books.)

What kinds of books do you give away, and to whom?

A Shot of Inspiration…and a Giant Bear

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This post by Chuck Wendig has been making the rounds, and for good reason. It’s a good kick-in-the-pants approach to a new year’s writing resolutions. A few of my favorite points:

Stop Thinking It Should Be Easier
It’s not going to get any easier, and why should it? Anything truly worth doing requires hella hard work. If climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro meant packing a light lunch and hopping in a climate-controlled elevator, it wouldn’t really be that big a fucking deal, would it? You want to do This Writing Thing, then don’t just expect hard work — be happy that it’s a hard row to hoe and that you’re just the, er, hoer to hoe it? I dunno. Don’t look at me like that. AVERT YOUR GAZE, SCRUTINIZER. And get back to work.

Whether you’re writing family memoirs or historical romances or books about chicken feed or paranormal thrills, writing isn’t glamorous. It’s work. It’s easy for people to think it should just require a little time at a computer, maybe a heavy sigh or two, but it’s a lot of though and effort and revision. And then you have to deal with all the rejection. It’s certainly not a job for the faint of heart.

Stop the Shame
Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out there fighting wars and fixing cars and destroying our country with poisonous loans — and here we are, sitting around in our footy-pajamas, writing about vampires and unicorns, about broken hearts and shattered jaws. A lot of the time we won’t get much respect, but you know what? Fuck that. Take the respect. Writers and storytellers help make this world go around. We’re just as much a part of the societal ecosystem as anybody else. Craft counts. Art matters. Stories are important. Freeze-frame high-five. Now have a beer and a shot of whisky and shove all your shame in a bag and burn it.

Books save lives. Maybe not in the way that open-heart surgery can, but books and stories and art is essential to the human race. Think about all the great historical figures. At least a quarter of them are artists, right? So there’s no reason for people to scoff when you tell them you want to be a writer.

Stop Caring About What Other Writers Are Doing
They’re going to do what they’re going to do. You’re not them. You don’t want to be them and they don’t want to be you. Why do what everyone else is doing? Let me reiterate: do your own thing.

It’s really easy to compare yourself to your successful friends or that 22-year-old novelist with a huge book deal. I do it all the time. But no one’s career path is the same, just like no one’s ideas are the same. You can be happy that they succeed because it means more art in the world.

Stop Being Afraid
Fear will kill you dead. You’ve nothing to be afraid of that a little preparation and pragmatism cannot kill. Everybody who wanted to be a writer and didn’t become one failed based on one of two critical reasons: one, they were lazy, or two, they were afraid. Let’s take for granted you’re not lazy. That means you’re afraid. Fear is nonsense. What do you think is going to happen? You’re going to be eaten by tigers? Life will afford you lots of reasons to be afraid: bees, kidnappers, terrorism, being chewed apart by an escalator, Republicans, Snooki. But being a writer is nothing worthy of fear. It’s worthy of praise. And triumph. And fireworks. And shotguns. And a box of wine. So shove fear aside — let fear be gnawed upon by escalators and tigers. Step up to the plate. Let this be your year.

This is a hard one. It’s easy to be afraid: of the blank page, of the rejection, of never making it. But there’s no reason you should be afraid of wanting something. Of wanting to be an artist. So get your fireworks, shotguns, boxes of wine, and get to work.

Read the full post here for more ass-kicking inspiration.

I feel like this post should end with something hardcore, like bears on fire fighting old-timey ships. So here’s that too.

Let’s Begin

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It’s hard to pinpoint the hardest part about writing a novel, but trying to craft the perfect first line is certainly up there. The first line can grab a reader; it can guide a reader into the novel; it can present tone and voice immediately. And for writers who are querying agents/editors, the first line can be the make-or-break moment for the manuscript.

At Fiction Notes, Darcy Pattison has put together an extensive list of great first lines, broken up by style and type. My favorite tends to be the “Set up.” Examples are from Catcher in the Rye, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and The Great Gatsby. Not bad company!

How do you start your novels, and which are your favorite opening lines?

(via NESCBWI Kidlit Reblogger)

A New Ambassador

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Congratulations to author Walter Dean Myers, who has recently been named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature! Myers is probably best known for his novel Monster, which won the Printz and was a finalist for the National Book Award, among others. But his bibliography is very extensive; check out his website for the full list.

From a recent New York Times article about Myers:

“He will receive a medal at the Library of Congress next Tuesday. One of the first things he expects to say is that reading is not a Victorian pastime.

“People still try to sell books that way — as ‘books can take you to foreign lands,’ ” he said. “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”“

I love Myers’s assertion that reading isn’t optional. Reading is a necessary part of life and can deeply affect the everyday experience. I’m excited to see what Myers has in store as the National Ambassador.

(via The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance)

It’s a Dangerous Business, Frodo, Going out Your Door.

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Even if you don’t read much fantasy, you’re probably familiar with the name J.R.R. Tolkien. Author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, he basically created modern fantasy and influence many writers in following generations. And today is his birthday! The Hub has a great post about Tolkien’s influence on contemporary literature.

To celebrate, here’s the trailer of the upcoming movie version of The Hobbit:

Let’s all be a little more adventurous today!

Dear Ms. Cleary

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From an interview with children’s book legend Beverly Cleary:

Your website says that you are still writing–is there anything ahead that we should be looking for? A third volume of your memoirs, perhaps?

No, I don’t plan to publish any more. After all, I’m 95. I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

I think that’s such a lovely sentiment, and I’m sure many fans of Cleary’s work have gone on to be lifelong readers. That’s one of the reasons I love children’s literature and YA. These books touch you at such a special time in your life and can propel you on the path to reading for decades to come.

Public Works

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The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law has an interesting article about why there are no authors/books entering the public domain this year in the United States. In short:

“Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year, or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019….When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.”

The idea isn’t to destroy copyright entirely; that would be detrimental to working authors. But why shouldn’t Virginia Woolf’s works be available this year, or Rebel Without a Cause? If artistic works such as these could be more easily used in schools and libraries and in other works of art, isn’t that a good thing? I’d be okay with waiting until an artist/author/copyright owner is dead, but 70 years after? There needs to be some compromise.

The Need to Read

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Reading isn’t just a fun pastime or a way for high school teachers to torture their students. According to one study, t’s a neurologically transformative experience:

“They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative”. The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways.“

When you read, your brain is creating the world and people about which you’re reading. You develop new ways of thinking about the real world. With that, we can be more empathetic and creative people. Gail Rebuck sees this as a very necessary part of our past and future as humans:

“If reading were to decline significantly, it would change the very nature of our species. If we, in the future, are no longer wired for solitary reflection and creative thought, we will be diminished. But as a reader and a publisher, I am optimistic. Technology throws up as many solutions as it does challenges: for every door it closes, another opens. So the ability, offered by devices like e-readers, smartphones and tablets, to carry an entire library in your hand is an amazing opportunity.”

This is another reason I think the e-reader isn’t the destruction of books. It gives people the opportunity to have more books more readily accessible. But a paperback or library copy will expand your brain just as well, too. All you have to do is pick up a novel or autobiography or travel book and get your brain working. It’s all part of our evolution.