Blog Hop - The Next Big Thing

My thanks to The Tex Files for inviting me to join in this very user-friendly, low-stress blog hop.  Several weeks ago.  Fortunately, I had permission to take my sweet time.  So here goes:

Rules of the Next Big Thing

1. Use this format for your post
2. Answer the ten questions about your current WIP (work in progress)
3. Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

• What is your working title of your book?  KEEPSAFES
• Where did the idea come from for the book?  A girl I taught in 3rd grade who struggled with being different and made an insanely bold choice at the 5th grade talent show that transformed how everyone saw her.  I felt like I was watching her literally transform into a bird and soar before my very eyes.  I wanted to somehow capture that feeling and pay homage to her spirit and struggle.  The story and character have evolved quite a bit since then.
• What genre does your book fall under?  YA magical realism.
• Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  I have no idea.  I think that's getting way ahead of myself.  I want to finish the damn thing first.
• What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?  When her mother forces her  to move away from her childhood home and her best friend Stella, rebellious, overweight Hope Armandino throws a fit that rends the fabric of reality and sends her on a nightmarish vision quest in the vein of Terry Gilliam or Guillermo del Toro.
• Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?  Only time will tell, i.e. when the darn thing is finished.  I'm looking for an agent and find the whole self-publishing thing just a bit daunting.
• How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?  The first draft took me a year.  It was almost entirely crap, but a critique of the first 10 pages helped me see the value inside the crap.  I've been working on the "second first draft" on and off for another year, maybe a bit more, but I've digressed to other projects along the way.
• What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?  There are some elements of Karen Russell's work, and, as I mentioned, the images make me think of Gilliam or del Toro, though that's a movie reference.  I seem to stumble my way into genres sometimes, so I'm still continuing my self-education on other books in this genre that might be similar. 
• Who or what inspired you to write this book?  In addition to the young girl I mentioned above, I guess I would credit Elizabeth Rusch who, when she met with me to go over her critique of the first chapter, began by saying "I loved this.  Have you sold it yet?"  I realized then that I couldn't just throw it away, as I'd planned.
• What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?  It's an adventure, with imaginary creatures, mysterious fortune tellers and trips to an underworld, but it's also an exploration of friendship, the mother-daughter dynamic and the balance between identity and relationships, where problems that are all-too-real, such as abuse and abandonment, find their manifestation in darker visions from another realm.    

Phew!  Whose up next?  Go check out these blogs:

The Autumning Empire
Red Crested Chatter
Hey, Whitney!
The Prolific Novelista
Paddling Her Own Canoe

How You See It and How You Say It

"It's all in how you see it," some people say. For writers, that means point of view, which has to be one of the more challenging, complex and, to my mind, fascinating topics of the writer's craft. Point of view is more than just first person or third person. Point of view is about immediacy and risk. Whenever I learn about or explore point of view, I find myself thinking in cinematic terms. Where is the lens of my reader's camera located? Where is their microphone located? How tight is the close-up? Does my story need a more panoramic or epic scope?

Even tense can play a role in point of view. I just made the risky move of rewriting the first scene of my latest novel in first person, present tense. It has a level of immediacy, intimacy and high-risk involvement like no other, but it comes with a price. You have to place all sorts of limits on your access to information, since you can only share what your narrator knows at or before the point in time of the action. But I have to say, my pulse is racing and I feel like I'm going for the jugular a lot more in the first person, present tense. It's almost an adrenaline rush.

How you see it can also drive how you say it. I'm thinking about that elusive quality known as voice. So hard to define. You just know it when you see it. Too often I reread my stuff and am disgusted by how flat it seems, the way it lays there on the page after being run through my critical, analytical, disengaged and dispassionate mill one too many times. Then I'll write something for a workshop exercise and it just leaps off the page. Voice.

When I shift point of view, it can blow voice wide open. To me, finding the voice when you're not writing in first person seems so much harder, and when it comes to YA literature, I keep coming back to the first person point of view. No intermediary between the reader and the protagonist.

At a minimum, if you're struggling to find the voice of your story, I think it's worth it to rewrite a pivotal scene from a variety of points of view. You may be amazed by what you discover. If you're lucky, you'll find the right voice before you've finished an entire draft. If you're like me, you might end up rewriting your whole novel from a different point of view. But the risk is worth the pay-off. At least, that's how I see it.