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4/9/09 10:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyYesterday I was walking home from the grocery store and I got to thinking, wouldn't Such Deliberate Disguises (the historical fantasy I was working on around 2004-2005) work as a YA? It has a couple of different plotlines going on, but one of them is about a human girl, kidnapped by the faeries for breeding stock as a baby and raised underground with them, now a teenager and in love with one of them--until her father finds her and he's determined to kill all the fae.
It's a bit different from the usual YA paranormal romance because the fae boy she's in love with isn't some mysterious stranger but the kid she's grown up with, and the fae world is ordinary to her--it's the human world that's frightening and strange. So I read it over to see how well it would hold up to being reworked, and what struck me was, what happened to me between then and 2007, when I was working on A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend? I cannot believe how much I did not know about writing back then. And this, mind you, is after having written three whole novels.
I have scenes where characters do nothing but talk about their problems and what they want. (Although even then, I was learning, if you're going to have a talky scene, at least give the characters something else to do.) I have snatches of dialogue that go past without me conveying shifts in emotion, and the way characters make guesses about each other's motivations. I have dialogue that comes right out of the Big Box of Dialogue Cliches. A lot of the scenes are poorly structured, existing to move the plot forward but without having their own development and climax. If I were critiquing this book, would I see any potential in the writer at all?
I don't know for sure what changed. Maybe it's just practice. Maybe it's that, at that point, I was still trying to translate the emotional highs of anime into prose, with long volleys of high-intensity melodramatic yelling, and you don't have to worry about describing body language or scenery or facial expressions because it's all there in the visuals -- and the characterization-heavy, introspective style of literaryish YA novels gave me a new toolbox to work with. I think that just trying to write a characterization-heavy introspective YA novel forced me to break out of bad habits -- I remember the sudden realization that the "My feelings, let me show you them!" stuff would never happen in real life. And Samuel Delany made me get over my fear of style.
So it's helpful to be reminded that I really am a lot better than I was. And it's interesting to find the roots of this anxiety that Love Story is somehow a fluke and I'm actually not capable of writing that well, or that I don't know how to write fantasy.
(Also, when I was guilting myself about how little time I was spending on Love Story, and really frustrated and angry about how bad it was and how little I knew how to write it... well, like I said, that's what writing a novel IS. But maybe it was also that my writing-skill-plateau stopped short suddenly, and at the end there was a sheer cliff.)
As for Such Deliberate Disguises, the paranormal romance hype may have worn off by the time I get around to revisiting it. But I still like the premise, and it seems like it might actually work...
It's a bit different from the usual YA paranormal romance because the fae boy she's in love with isn't some mysterious stranger but the kid she's grown up with, and the fae world is ordinary to her--it's the human world that's frightening and strange. So I read it over to see how well it would hold up to being reworked, and what struck me was, what happened to me between then and 2007, when I was working on A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend? I cannot believe how much I did not know about writing back then. And this, mind you, is after having written three whole novels.
I have scenes where characters do nothing but talk about their problems and what they want. (Although even then, I was learning, if you're going to have a talky scene, at least give the characters something else to do.) I have snatches of dialogue that go past without me conveying shifts in emotion, and the way characters make guesses about each other's motivations. I have dialogue that comes right out of the Big Box of Dialogue Cliches. A lot of the scenes are poorly structured, existing to move the plot forward but without having their own development and climax. If I were critiquing this book, would I see any potential in the writer at all?
I don't know for sure what changed. Maybe it's just practice. Maybe it's that, at that point, I was still trying to translate the emotional highs of anime into prose, with long volleys of high-intensity melodramatic yelling, and you don't have to worry about describing body language or scenery or facial expressions because it's all there in the visuals -- and the characterization-heavy, introspective style of literaryish YA novels gave me a new toolbox to work with. I think that just trying to write a characterization-heavy introspective YA novel forced me to break out of bad habits -- I remember the sudden realization that the "My feelings, let me show you them!" stuff would never happen in real life. And Samuel Delany made me get over my fear of style.
So it's helpful to be reminded that I really am a lot better than I was. And it's interesting to find the roots of this anxiety that Love Story is somehow a fluke and I'm actually not capable of writing that well, or that I don't know how to write fantasy.
(Also, when I was guilting myself about how little time I was spending on Love Story, and really frustrated and angry about how bad it was and how little I knew how to write it... well, like I said, that's what writing a novel IS. But maybe it was also that my writing-skill-plateau stopped short suddenly, and at the end there was a sheer cliff.)
As for Such Deliberate Disguises, the paranormal romance hype may have worn off by the time I get around to revisiting it. But I still like the premise, and it seems like it might actually work...
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(no subject)
4/9/09 17:12 (UTC)This sounds really interesting!
(no subject)
4/9/09 21:04 (UTC)Obviously, this isn't the first time I've been startled by how much I improved between one book and another, but I really hadn't gone back to SDD since I finished revising it, and it was startling just in that respect. And, yes, I'm prepared to be embarrassed in the future by any of my to-be-published books!