In case your other March Madness brackets are a little too good-natured, check out the Half-Price Books Tournament of Villains. Lots of great literary villains included!
My picks for finalists? Darth Vader and Voldemort. You can’t get much more evil than these guys! (That is, if you ignore the Star Wars prequels, which I do.)
(image: Mary GrandPré, via The Harry Potter Lexicon)
At Writers Digest, Steven Harper Piziks talks about how to write paranormal/fantasy novels. One big difference between fantasy and other kinds of fiction obviously boils down to the magical elements. Piziks says:
“The need to explain the magic [is] the biggest challenge, really. It’s so easy to use big expository lumps, but that bores the reader. “
I can definitely see this as one of the hardest parts of fantasy writing. You want to make sure your reader understands what makes this world/these characters magical, but you don’t want to bore them with an infodump. If your character is living in a magical world, wouldn’t he/she not really call attention to a lot of the magical elements? It would be like a character in a contemporary novel explaining in length what a television is or how a garage door opener works. (Although I bet Arthur Weasley would find that pretty fascinating.)
I think the introduction of these elements works best when they’re introduced gradually and naturally. For example, in The Hunger Games, Katniss doesn’t really talk about what led to the collapse of the US and the rise of Panem. She wouldn’t because she doesn’t need to think about it. But we find out what Panem is and how classes are structured because she has to worry about who’s in charge and where her family will get food. In The Golden Compass, we meet daemons long before we find out what exactly they are, and can slowly pick up on the subtle differences between the real Oxford and Lyra’s Oxford.
Being able to balance necessary information with compelling forward momentum is enormously difficult, and I salute any writer who can do that well. What are your suggestions for creating compelling magical worlds without all the exposition?
With the clocks shifting ahead an hour on Sunday, you might feel like your sense of time is off. Fortunately, there are two lists of time travel-related reading. We’ll get that hour back somehow!
At The Hub, Sarah Debraski has a great list of mostly YA time travel stories, including Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver (which involves a time loop) and The Midnighters Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld (in which time stands still). At Secrets & Sharing Soda, Katie expands a little to MG, bringing in titles like The Time Trilogy by Madeleine L’Engle (love!).
When I was in middle school, one of my favorite time travel books was Both Sides of Time by Caroline B. Cooney. It had everything I liked–romance, the Victorian era, feminism, vague fantasy/sci-fi elements, and mysteries. When I found out there were sequels, I freaked. (The last one didn’t thrill me, sadly.)
For very mature YA readers (probably junior/senior high schoolers) I’d also recommend The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I assumed it would be kind of schlocky, but a friend gave it to me with enormous enthusiasm, and I found myself really enjoying it as well.
And of course, if you’d rather watch something about time travel, you need to check out Doctor Who. Immediately.
(image: Emo DJ Steph)
When I was in high school I came across Weetzie Bat and fell in love with Francesca Lia Block’s novels. With the perfect combination of magic and grief, struggles and hope, it was exactly the kind of book I needed at the time. So I’m very sad to hear Block is going through such a hard time with her home:
“For close to a year, Block, author of the Weetzie Bat books for kids, has been calling and talking to various representatives at Bank of America. Some call her back, some disappear, some give one answer, some another. She says she’s underwater on the mortgage but has never missed a payment — all she wants to do is renegotiate terms and save her house. On Friday afternoon, she posted a record of her travails on Facebook and a new blog, Save Francesca’s Faerie Cottage.”
It sounds like the media attention might get Bank of America to look at her mortgage. It’s also a good reminder that there are lots of people across the country who are hardworking people and got really bad mortgages when the market was up. I can’t even imagine dealing with that and not being able to get any media attention. I hope Francesca’s campaign is able to help her family, and also to bring to light what other families are going through.
Recently NPR had an article about how The Hunger Games and YA dystopian novels were the new Twilight/vampire books. As someone who follows YA, this topic feels a little dated (is it 2009), but it is nice to see a major news outlet looking at what makes dystopian YA a compelling genre. Plus it has suggestions for further reading, including the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness.
One part struck me in particular:
“In the beginning, The Hunger Games was not considered a sure thing….David Levithan, editorial director at Scholastic which publishes the books, says the company took a risk on The Hunger Games because they trusted the writer, Suzanne Collins. It wasn’t until Collins turned in the first manuscript that Levithan understood what he had. “It came in on a Friday,” he says, “and I and the other editors who worked on it read it over the weekend, and we came in on Monday and just looked at each other and said: ‘Wow.'”
Since Harry Potter showed the world that children’s literature can be hugely successful, there’s been a question of what will be the next big thing? You can find any number of articles about how vampires are the new wizards, or zombies are the new vampires, or mermaids are the new zombies. But the quote above indicates that there’s no real way to tell what the next trend will be. The Hunger Games might have sounded weird on paper, but the story itself is compelling. It shouldn’t be about finding the next hot thing that will be a huge explosion of book sales. It should be about finding that compelling story that will resonate with a lot of readers.
Also, it’s really unfair to claim anything is the new anything else. Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games might all be fantasy-esque and exciting series, but they all offer very different reading experiences. Do we really need to link them together like this?
Finding hundreds of new fairy tales is an awesome way to start the week:
“A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.”
I am so into this kind of thing. When I was in high school I wrote a paper on the Grimm brothers and their connection to German nationalism. (And kind of had fun writing it.) Now we have more folk tales and verbal history/culture to talk about*? So cool!
*ie, to inspire more YA novels. (via bookshelves of doom) (image: Gustave Dore, via SurLaLune)
At educating alice, Monica Edinger has shared a wicked cool video about the German history of fairy tales:
Kind of want to take a trip down Fairy Tale Road now.
Monica also mentioned the Grimm Legacies conference, which I didn’t know about before. It sounds so awesome! Sad I missed it.
When I first read The Princess Bride, I thought Florin was a real place, or at least that it had been at some point. (Prussia was real.) Goldman crafted his novel so well that I really wanted it to exist. Also, my copy of the book included a map. It had to be real if some cartographer had written it down!
Okay, so I was a naive little reader. (Um, I still might be waiting for Goldman to finish Buttercup’s Baby–WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, GOLDMAN?!) But there is something exhilarating about fictional lands. World-building is difficult, but so necessary for novels, particularly in the fantasy realm. The Pevensies are great, but what I love most about Lewis’s books is the possibility of Narnia. As a reader, you want to go to these places.
Part of world-building requires actually knowing where these places might exist. Maps like the the one in The Princess Bride can help a writer figure out how events can unfold and keep the narrative on track.
The Awl has a great collection of some literary maps, including Goldman’s. Others I hadn’t seen, like A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood or Baum’s map of Oz. Although it wasn’t included in the actual books, the recent map of Panem also gets a shoutout.
In case that’s not enough map-love for you, make sure to check out this gorgeous post from the Horn Book by Julie Larios. One point I especially enjoyed:
“I ask my writing students at Vermont College of Fine Arts to think long and hard about the setting they develop in their books for children. Kids want to be explorers, too. They don’t always want to identify with a familiar character in a familiar world. Books, says Fran Lebowitz, should be doors, not mirrors. So I ask my students to think of offering the setting of their stories to young readers as a gift that opens doors. By doing so, they turn their readers into explorers, and what child doesn’t want to explore?…We explore, and we come to know the unknown.”
I love the connection between maps and children’s literature in particular. Books are a major way (maybe the only way) children get to freely explore. Why not have fun with it?
Another cool book trailer, this one for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente, illustrated by Ana Juan
The song in the trailer creates such a fantastic eerie vibe, and the illustrations look gorgeous. Very excited to pick this one up!
Austin Allen looks at how Madeleine L’Engle combines fantasy and religion in her potentially most famous work, A Wrinkle in 
Time:
“I think she’s being careful, ducking accusations of parochialism, and leaving everything up to the reader’s interpretation. But I also think the variety of her idols suggests a restless imagination, one that was more confined than inspired by doctrinaire Christianity. Her impulse toward sermonizing wrestles with her impulse toward a vision that is—like her extraterrestrials and shimmering presences—unclassifiable.”
This is one reason that I like L’Engle’s work in general. She acknowledges a greater purpose in the general and, even as she tends toward the Christian, suggests that whatever the universe is, it’s beyond our current power of comprehension. But that doesn’t mean we should strive to reach out toward it.