Truth And The Intentional Mistake
Cross-posted from Deadline Dames, where there is a fiction contest and tips from a contest judge up this week. Go take a look!
Two quick things today, because there is a certain birthday party I must be prepared for. It’s not anyone’s birthday, but we’ve scheduled the party today, which works out well for all concerned.
Right now I’m reading John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, the book the Tribeca-award-winning movie is based on. The premise is good, the story is tightly-interwoven and slow-paced but well done. There are things I don’t like about the book itself. Some of them are translation things, things that you can’t avoid with a book that’s been brought out of another language. Some of the others are stylistic, like the author’s apparent love affair with ellipses. I use too many ellipses myself–my beta has to ruthlessly step on their heads lest they breed–and I understand Lindqvist was trying to capture the way people really talk. That’s the trouble with dialogue. You have to walk that line between how you know people actually talk, with all the ums, ahs, and the things left unsaid, and balance that against what dialogue needs to be, a revealing and unfolding within the story.
It’s a hard act.
Which brings me to the intentional mistake. After you’ve been writing for a while (I want to say ten thousand hours, because I’ve read Outliers recently too, but maybe it’s between five and eight thousand) you start seeing the mistakes a little differently. Once you have the basics down and begin to have a good solid grasp of craft, then you can start breaking the rules.
Just like in life, breaking the rules to break them is a stupid kid’s game with unintended consequences. Knowing the rules and breaking them to effect is something else entirely. Stephen King talks about this in On Writing, one of the only two writing books I will ever recommend.
I am willing to put up with what I see as Lindqvist’s mistakes in this book because he has vouched in other ways that he knows the rules and he’s breaking them for a reason. The rest of the book is good enough that I can overlook the ellipses. There is a lesson in this. Readers are very forgiving if you give them a reason to be. Don’t abuse their trust, and they will follow you down the dark road of a book.
The other thing I want to talk about today is truth. Lindqvist’s book is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Some of the main characters are children, but it would never be published as a Young Adult novel.
As a writer getting into YA now, I’m running up against some of the conventions of the genre. Well, not exactly conventions. I am running up against the laudable adult urge to protect the young, and the not-so-laudable urge to censor what is said to them.
In my house, we have a “reach it and read it” policy. If you can reach it, you can read it. If you can’t reach it–get a stepstool! I do not believe in censoring my childrens’ experience with the written word. Are there things I wish they wouldn’t read? You betcha. Do I put those books out of reach?
I do not.
Instead, I keep track of what the kids are reading, and I talk to them about it. The conversations are alternately funny (like when Astronomy Girl ran across a fade-to-black sex scene in a book and asked me what “orgasm” meant) and terrifying, like when the UnSullen was reading Food of the Gods and started asking me about hallucinogens.
Ah, the joy of parenting.
In each case I firmly believe in telling the truth in the straightest, most age-appropriate, and simplest way possible. This is, I think, the best policy. (Obviously, or I wouldn’t be doing it.) The more armed with simple knowledge my young oes are, the less danger there is of them doing something stupid. I mean, we all have lapses in judgment. That is not the exclusive province of the young.
But one is far less likely to have a stupid lapse in judgment if one has been calmly given straight answers. And kids who get straight answers, who know they can go to an adult and ask difficult, ticklish questions, are far more likely to check in when something happens they’re unsure of. Check in, that is, before the situation becomes an unholy tangle.
The best way to protect the young, then, happens to be not censoring the information given to them so much. Kids are smart and they love to learn (until the public school/jungle system beats it out of them, but that’s another blog post). They want to ask adults questions, and they want straight answers. A kid who doesn’t feel alone and adrift is a kid who is going to talk to someone before they go and do something silly, at least most of the time. Age-appropriate doesn’t have to mean “complete blackout of information”.
This is why I’m feeling okay and not so okay about my forays into YA. On the one hand, I feel like I have something of value to impart, a story to share with younger readers. On the other hand, dealing with a lot of forces who want kids kept in the dark about a lot of things–sex, drug use, violence, abuse–for a variety of reasons, whether to “protect” them or because of an adult’s profound discomfort with kids knowing about the darker things in life…well, it gets wearying. The fear in the publishing industry of being “too edgy” and setting off some of the more conservative elements in our society is immense. The writer gets asked to change things, to dial it back and not be so direct. Sometimes it’s necessary, sometimes it’s not.
There’s a fine line to walk there, too. You need to know when you’re too attached to something that doesn’t really move the story along. Conversely, you need to not give in when someone is asking you to bullshit for the sake of selling more books or not pissing someone off. The two are not mutually exclusive, and they’re hard to tell apart.
Telling the truth in this way is difficult. It’s dangerous. But I think it’s worth it. My kids are worth the truth. I think every kid out there is. It doesn’t mean I have to force the knowledge of the darker side of the world on them, but it does mean that I have a trust (I would go so far as to call it sacred) to tell the truth when I’m asked, and when the occasion calls for it.
Why else would I do this job?
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Tags: books, films, Friday Writing, kid stuff, what we know is true, Writing (About)
March 13th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Having checked out Ed McBain books at the library when I was eight, I believe I have a good opinion here. If I could have asked my mom the questions I had it would have been better. Let’s just say in some departments I was over-educated. I got over it. I am not sorry. Books are the air I breathe. Anyway, I hate the putting aside of books or using age as an excuse.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
which is why when I give one of your kids a book, I know that you are aware of it, and that there will be discussion, then again, any book in your house is technically yours.. grin.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I haven’t noticed YA going out of its way to shelter the poor innocents. The last two I tried to read included a drunken 17-year-old and oral sex in a school hallway, and the last one I could actually bring myself to finish reading was brutally violent.
I believe you can write about YA issues meaningfully and honestly, and if it’s banned by libraries, you’ll know you wrote something powerful enough to scare people who shy away from reality.
Plus, being banned is the surest way to sell a bazillion copies of a book, so it’s good all around!
March 13th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
I agree. Kids need to be told the truth. If they ask and are told some quick line, they are being taught not to ask or just not to believe what they are told. If they can’t ask and rely on those answers, they try to find out for themselves. This is when they could get into serious trouble.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
> telling the truth in the straightest, most age-appropriate,
> and simplest way possible
When my very young nephew asked my sister where babies came from, she said, “From mommies.” He was satisfied because that’s all he needed at the time. Yeah, the answers got harder later
Obviously we all make mistakes, whatever our age. Having information is what allows us to recover as quickly and gracefully as possible.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Great post! Though my son is now 24 (as of Tuesday), this is the same path path I followed with him. I never dumbed down my language either. Don’t know what a word means, well ask! *s* Upshot, when he was 4, he was telling everyone he wanted to be an entomologist when he grew up and he knew what it meant. He also got a big kick out of explaining what it meant to “big people” who did not know.
In addition, I also made it a policy to try to explain why I made the decisions I made especially when they involved him. Sometimes, “because I said so” is all they *can* get at the moment but I believe that children learn deductive reasoning by seeing and understanding the process of deductive reasoning. Besides that, I *hate* not understanding process now and in my past. Why should I have thought my child was any different? (He wasn’t.)
March 13th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
When I was a kid, I was offended when an adult tried to censor what I could read. If there was a book on a shelf and I could reach it with or without a step-stool, then dammit, I was entitled to read it. I was equally annoyed when they tried to remove it from the shelf altogether. If they really didn’t want me to read it, why did they leave it there in the first place?
Luckily most of the time my elders (who were all voracious readers with big libraries) never bothered to do either of these things. The only effects I ever suffered were a healthy outrage after reading The Women’s Room when I was 12, and a sort of foggy confusion after reading Siddhartha at 14.
March 13th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Thank you for sensible parenting. Your kids will be so much more ready for the adult world, armed with information and no fear of asking questions. My cousins are some of those too sheltered as kids adults, and sometimes the ignorance of what comes out of their mouths just frightens me.
March 14th, 2009 at 5:24 am
Thank you for this! You are very wise. I think this is the right approach.
When I was young, I had a high reading level and went through books very quickly. Soon I started trying to branch out of the very young section of our school library, and wanted to check out books for older kids, including books about science.
The librarian at my very small school absolutely forbid me from checking out any book outside of a very small area – and made it a point to punish and publicly humiliate me in front of the class if I tried. It was so frustrating to me as a kid!
Luckily I had access to the public library, where I was allowed to check out things like the Earthsea series and nonfiction books on birds and dinosaurs, but looking back on those experiences, I really have to wonder what that lady was thinking.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:16 am
When I was in middle school, I was a voracious reader. Librarians knew me well and we became such friends that they’d hold new books for me to read and give my opinion one. One book in particular set my imagination on fire- I fell in love with this book, no one could tear it out of my hands. That night, I got in trouble b/c instead of doing my chores, I was too busy re-reading this book. Angry with me, my mother ripped the book out of my hands, demanded to read it and upon finishing it, tried to have it banned from the library.
Why? B/c there happened to be a suggestion of sex at the end of the book. Or the whole idea of werewolves.
And wouldn’t you know it? “Blood and Chocolate” is still one of my favorite books to this day- in fact, I have a copy hidden away in my stacks. Owning it is a simple act of defiance on my part.
And it was that moment in my life that I realized that censoring what others can read, think or experiance is just *wrong*. That no one really has a right to impose their ideas or anything else on another person without their consent. Taking away someone elses rights? Again, it’s just wrong….
I work in a bookstore (irony there) and I’ve watched the reactions of various mothers in the YA section (it also happens to be one of my favorite sections). I worry about the mothers who freak out over the littlest things, but there are a couple mothers who come in specifically to talk to me about what’s new and what the content is- I love these women, b/c they treat their kids as actual people. They encourage their love of reading. Those are the moments that make my job bearable.
March 16th, 2009 at 6:04 am
Agree, agree…. but mostly, curious: what’s the OTHER writing book you’d recommend?
March 16th, 2009 at 6:24 am
My Mum always raised me with the opinion. “If you’re old enough to ask, you’re old enough to have the answer”. I was allowes to read anything I wanted…any question I needed answering, I was never afraid to ask. We’ve always had that kind of relationship.
My father was as useful in that situation as a Chocolate tea-pot, he’s never had the ability to answer a question straight…thank goodness my Mum was terrific at it.