Blog Chain: I'm a Schizo and So Am I.

Welcome to another awesome blog chain.  This one is brought to you by the fantastic Cole, who will be 29 forever (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!).  Her question is:

How do you get inside your character's world?

Usually with a crowbar and some rope.  Oh.  Characters.  Got it.  I thought you meant--

The real answer is:  any way I can.  Sometimes characters come up and start shouting in my ear.  They tell me everything there is to know about them and lots of stuff I don't want to know.  But sometimes they're shy and they string me along and getting info is like stealing candy from babies (which is NOT easy, btw..babies scream loud...and they bite).

There are some things I do to help me figure out my character's world.  I like to find pictures of them.  Be it actors or models or random people on the street.  For example, the physical appearance for my MC in Deathday Letter is modeled after this dude, who plays on a show called GREEK.  There are differences of course, but it gave me a place to start.

I also use wiki's.  You know, like wikipedia.  What I do is start writing info about my story and then that leads to more and more.  If you know how a wiki works, the articles can start to expand exponentially, but it's a great way to get loads of info down.

Another way is to handwrite.  I'm a fast typist, but when my MC clams up, I find that talking to him or her via a fountain pen and a cool notebook helps me connect.

The best way though to get into my character's world is to just listen.  Example:  I got this story in my head about this teenage boy who was living in a hospital.  I didn't know why or what he was doing.  I didn't know his real name or anything.  Just that he was living in a hospital.  I wanted to know why, but my MC wasn't talking about it.  He did talk about a lot of other stuff though.  So I followed him around. I watched LIFE IN THE ER, I drew on my own experiences from EMT classes and the shifts I did in hospitals and on ambulances.  Sometimes he told me stuff and I never knew what was true, but he told me his routine and introduced me to his friends.  66k words later, I knew everything I needed to know.

I've done everything to get into a character's world from contacting a magician, to stalking Google street view, to talking with a bad British accent to my dog.  But the thing that worked the best is just listening to my characters.  They give me all the info I need to know.

So I guess I'm the last link in this chain, so catch us again on March 1 when Eric, who wrote the post before me, starts off.  Good luck, Eric!

Feminism?

I was waiting for Damages to come on last night and The Devil Wears Prada was on FX.  I've seen it.  Don't laugh.  But something always irked me about the movie.  It's supposed to be about a young woman who decides to forgo her boss's cutthroat ways to prove that a woman can make it without having to act like a psycho.  Seems pretty straight forward.  But I want you to take all the roles and reverse the genders.

Meryl Streep's character is a ball busting woman who gets what she wants.  She's a little devious and very demanding.  However, had the character been played by a man, he would have been the hero of the movie.  Now take Anne Hathaway's character.  She's mousy and loyal with a bushy-eyebrowed boyfriend and preachy friends.  Over the course of the movie she does what she needs to to be great at her job.  And then she's punished for it.

Her friends judge her for missing her BF's bday party and for EGADS letting a man kiss her cheek, and then her boyfriend breaks up with her for doing her job.  If the genders were reversed, the woman would be expected to keep her mouth shut while the man worked hard to get to the top.

Then, the ending really got me.  Because after Anne H's character gives up the best job she'll ever have and grovels to her boyfriend, he announces that he's applied for and is taking his dream job in another city.  And she's all like, YAY!!!

In the end I'm not sure if this movie is supposed to be pro feminism or if it's supposed to demonize the working woman and sending her scurrying back to the kitchen.

It's one thing when women are sexualized and minimized by men, but when women do it to each other in movies aimed at women, it's frustrating.

Unfortunately, in this case, I think the devil was the one behind the camera.

Incoherent mini-rant over.

Make 'Em Walk the Plank!

I'm going to keep this short today.  This weekend I was shocked when I read this article about a man who was given two years in prison for recording The Dark Knight and then selling the cam recording.  I was immediately like, "WTF, Missouri?"

I'm against piracy.  Stealing is bad.  There, I said it.  One day soon I'll write a whole post about why I think people pirate and why it's not their fault (hint: if media companies allowed people to access the media the way they're begging to access it, people wouldn't pirate) but that's not this post.  This post is about why this man's punishment is absurd.

Think about the last two years of your life.  In the last two years, I wrote a book, got an agent, sold that book, and it will soon be coming out.  I also moved and got a dog and took a couple vacations.  This man is now going to spend two freaking years of his life behind bars because he sold a cut rate copy of a billion dollar grossing movie.

I don't know who this guy is, but let me tell you about this place I went to.  In Tennessee, I visited my parents.  They live in a depressed part of TN.  We went to this "flea market" where poor people from the area were selling anything and everything.  Knives, guns, dogs, doll heads.  My mom found a set of expensive silverware that she got for next to nothing.  But there were also folks there selling bootleg DVD's.  Movies they'd cammed and burned to discs.  They didn't have much.  They were trying to make money for food/mortgage/utilities/etc.  Does that make it right?  Heck no, but we're not talking about the kind of place where jobs were plenty.

These people are NOT the great criminal masterminds of our time.  They're petty criminals who are making some unfortunate choices because they're in unfortunate situations.

I say they should absolutely be fined.  Maybe even banned from the movies or having internet.  But jail time?  That's freaking nuts.  Let me put this in perspective.  This is a list of some of the mandatory minimum sentences from Connecticut.

First Degree Kidnapping:  1 year

First Degree Sexual Assault: 2-10 years depending on age and conduct (it depends on whether they say please and thank you?)

Manslaughter with a firearm: 5 years

Computer Terrorism: 5 years

2nd Degree Sexual Assault: 9 months.

2nd Degree Manslaughter with a firearm: 1 year.

Possession of an assault weapon: 1 year

Assault or larceny of elderly, blind, disabled, pregnant, or mentally retarded person 2^nd degree: 2 years.


Driving with a license suspended due to DUI: 30 days.


You see where I'm going with this.  Now, this list isn't meant to be the end all be all.  These are just minimum sentencing guidelines.  Most people get more than this, but it illustrates my point.  Who's the bigger menace?  A guy with a video camera in a Batman movie, or the guy who's driving on a suspended license that got suspended because he was drunk?  The video cam guy isn't going to accidentally take out a whole family in a minivan.  


That's it.  I'm done.  Take from this what you will.  I'm not pro-piracy.  I'm anti-piracy, but the way we're doing things now:  it's not working


BTW, totally sorry if I rambled a lot.  Lack of sleep doesn't work either.

Blog Chain: All These Things That I've Done

Hey!  We're back on the blog chain.  This chain is brought to you by the letter X and the talented Rebecca, who wants to know:  What is the best mistake you've made so far in your journey as a writer? How has that mistake helped your grow?

The question is really:  which one do I choose?  I've tried very hard over the last couple of years to look at every mistake as a learning opportunity.  I figure, the bigger the mistake, the bigger the opportunity to learn something.

I think I mentioned it in one of the comments, but my best mistake was querying.  I hadn't even finishing revising yet before I queried.  I was so green, I didn't even have a critique group.  When I got my first MS. request, I had to stay up half the night finishing my revisions.  And it was my best mistake because it landed me my agent and my subsequent publishing contract.

But I don't want anyone to be like: this is how you should do it.  Because the truth is that I was lucky I had a strong voice and hook.  My plot was a mess and I was missing so many commas that I must have driven Chris crazy.  I went through multiple revisions with Chris and then multiple revisions with my editor.  Revisions that I SHOULD have done myself.  I sent DDL out into the world days after I'd finished it.  Now, granted, I'm a "revise as I go" kind of person, which means that I revise earlier chapters as I work on later ones, but still, if I'd sat on DDL for 3 or 6 month, I might have seen some of the glaring faults.

So you should definitely use this as an example of what NOT to do.  I'm happy with how things turned out, but I only got one chance to make a first impression on my editor, and now I worry that I'm always going to be that writer who needs lots of guidance on plots.  Always put your best pages forward.

Well, take a look at Michelle's awesome answer to this question, and then tomorrow head over to Cole's blog, but be careful, she will steal your peaches!

The Lightning Thief or An Argument Against Sex, Profanity, Violence

When I heard that The Lightning Thief was going to be made into a movie, I was psyched.  When I found out Logan Lerman was going to be playing Percy, I was confused.  When I read an article today where the scriptwriter said they made a conscious decision to age Percy Jackson up from 12 to 17, I was annoyed.

First off, I admire the young actor playing Percy.  He was in a short-lived show called Jack & Bobby that was quite good.  So I'm sure he'll bring a lot to the role.

Now that that's out of the way, here's why I'm bothered:  There's something to be said for innocence.  One of the things I really loved about the Percy Jackson series is that, like Harry Potter, the titular character grew with his audience.  He matured through each book, so that by the end, he had learned the lessons he would need to fight the big fight.  I think that's one of the reasons HP was so popular.  Kids began reading it at 11, and they grew up with Harry Potter.  I was thrilled that they allowed the same thing to happen with the movies.  The first movie was magical and innocent, and they grew darker and edgier as HP grew up.

But with the Percy Jackson movies, they decided that they wanted more violence, more edge, and didn't want to be stuck with a kiddy movie.  But the problem is that book one is a kiddy book.  And a damn good one.  It's got a real hero with real problems that kids can relate to.  He's got ADD and a distant father.  He gets in trouble at school and even his demi-god peers don't get him.  But that wasn't good enough.  The movie company felt the need to make him edgier.  But by doing so, they stole what makes him relatable.  By not letting Percy Jackson grow up naturally, they stole his magic.

There are times when it's appropriate to allow a wholesome, relatable, PG rated story, stay wholesome.  This should have been one of those times.  Sadly this feels like another instance of Hollywood ruining a great kids movie (I'm looking at you THE DARK IS RISING).  I hope I'm wrong.

Loss of Hope

I'm not sure how I missed the news that our president has scrapped all future manned space flights, but when I read it last night, I felt a deep sense of shame and loss.

The space program has never been about making money.  It's never been about what we could get from it.  It has always been purely about hope.  Having the greatest space program on this planet meant that we were a nation who looked to the future, who dared its children to dream, who strived for something more than a fancy car and a two story house and a pension.  It was something all Americans could look to and say with pride, "We did that."

By consigning our manned space program to the trash heap, our president is telling us to look earthward.  And we all should.  We should be making sure our houses are in order.  But he's also telling us that our dreams, the things beyond our own limited vision, aren't worth anything.  It's like a parent who throws away his child's paint set because his future lies in more concrete endeavors.

Yes, I know we'll still send probes into the galaxy to take photos and send them home, but that's not good enough.  That's like showing a kid a book with a bunch of paintings but telling him he can't go to the museum and see them himself.

I know that our nation is hurting.  I know that there are people who have no homes and no food and no health insurance.  And that it probably makes me sound snobbish and cruel to say that all that money we put into manned space travel shouldn't go to those people.  But a nation that doesn't dream, a nation that doesn't dare to test every boundary, a nation that doesn't innovate, is a nation that is doomed to fail.

By scrapping our manned space program, our government has surely anchored us all.  This is a giant leap backward.

Sex and Violence and Profanity, Oh My!

I vote for more of those things in YA.  More sex, more violence and blood, and more profanity.

That sound you're hearing is my agent yelling, "noooooooooooo!" But it's how I feel.

Now before you run off and tell everyone that Shaun's a nut job, you should know that I don't believe in any of those things in real life.  Except for profanity.  I think censoring profanity is what makes it so taboo, but that's another issue.  When it comes to violence and sex, I'm pretty conservative.  I've never even been in a fist fight.

So why then am I advocating more of these things in YA?  For two reasons, really:

1.  Because it allows teens to experience these things vicariously.

2.  Because it's what teens want.

As usual, I'm speaking from a guy's perspective.  Based on current trends in literature (Twilight, Vampire Diaries etc) I'm not sure WHAT girls want.

Reason 1:  Okay, I'm a pretty enlightened guy.  I saw Julie and Julia and I'm not ashamed to admit that I like it.  But I also like movies where things blow up/the world ends/the bad guy or girl gets cut into bloody chunks.  I adore the ultra violent style of Tarantino.  I'm practically frothing at the mouth for Mark Millar's movie adaptation of his comic book Kick-Ass.  I watched Gamer and I thought there wasn't enough blood.  And in any movie where aliens land, I giggle when they blow up New York city. And I'm not alone.  Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 had a combined domestic gross of over $130 million.

Why is this?  Because entertainment like this allows people to live events and do things that they could never ever do in real life.  It's the same reason people go to see wrestling or boxing.  It's the same reason Romans watched slaves butcher each other in the coliseum.  It's these forms of condoned violence and sex and profanity that allow people to siphon off their aggressive urges in non-violent ways.  Is it maybe a little sick that I cheered on Uma Thurman's character when she dismembered The Crazy 88's?  Um, yeah.  But remember, I've also never been in a fight.  Maybe having good outlets for my testosterone-fueled violent tendencies is why.

Now I know the argument exists that children who watch violent movies or play violent games are more likely to be violent.  That, in my opinion, is where parents come in.  Because I think the children that are prone to this type of behavior are going to be prone to it whether they play GTA or not.  Parents should be there to monitor a child's media consumption (I'm a firm believer that a parent should watch/read/play all the same things their child does...how else will you know what's going through his/her head?) and make sure that they understand the difference between fantasy and reality.  It's one thing to watch the titular hero of Kick-Ass don his costume for the first time and be a hero, but another to try it yourself.

Reason 2 - It's what teens want.  It's nice of us to think of teens as quaint little people with no urges/needs/desires of their own.  It's also why so many of us adults fail to understand them.  At 16 I thought about getting laid, driving fast, impressing my friends, getting laid.  Did I mention getting laid?  And teens want to see their experiences and fantasies played out in their media/literature/video games.

One of the best teen shows on television is SKINS.  They fight, drink, swear, take drugs, and even steal a corpse.  That show is everything I aspire to be as a YA writer.  I know it sounds like the show lowers the bar down to the lowest common denominator, but that couldn't be further from the truth.  Yes, things are exaggerated.  But it captures the true state of the teenage soul.  It is all about the confusion and heartache and stupidity that comes with being a teen.  If I were a parent, would I want my kid acting like one of the kids on the show?  Hell no.  But I'd certainly want him to watch the show.

And millions of teens can't be wrong.  SKINS is so popular that it's being brought over to the US.

I've talked a lot about movies, and I know that.  But I'm a writer, so what does this have to do with books?  The answer is everything.  I'm advocating more of these things in books because they're rare.  Imagine what a YA book written by Quentin Tarantino would be like.  Have you got it fixed in your head?  Because if we're going to draw more boys to YA books, those are the kinds of books we need.  Two recent, good examples of books that I think fit this type are The Hunger Games and The Knife of Never Letting Go.  Neither book pulls back on the violence.  Both offer grim views into the hearts and minds of their respective protagonists.  And both have done pretty darn well.

If we want to get teen boys reading again, we have to provide them with a product that is similar to or better than the movies/games/comics that they love.  And that includes creating positive literature that includes a healthy dose of sex and violence and profanity.  It means creating flawed, characters that your mother would be ashamed to have you bring home for dinner.

I think this blog began as one thing and ended as another.  But that's okay.  That's how we roll.