Where Characters Come From

I have recently finished a draft of a second novel, tentatively titled "Saving Nuria," in which most of the main characters are based pretty closely on members of my family; however, some are completely invented. When I read the novel (chapter by chapter as I wrote it) to my children, they recognized themselves and events and places from our life, but there are two major characters who are not based on anyone.

I had always imagined that authors either borrowed from life or didn't, but my own experience now shows me that one author in one text can take both approaches. The character Elizabeth, for instance, is loosely based on me--she's the mother in the story. The things that she experiences are (for the most part) not things I have experienced, but her general character is mine. In contrast, Nuria is someone I made up. She's not based, as far as I'm aware, on anyone at all. I invented her. Yet, I feel just as strong a sense of who she is, what she looks like, what she would do in different situations, as I feel about the other characters who have at least distant roots in real people.

As an example, I was in a shop the other day, and a young woman came in. I was sure I knew her or had seen her before, but I couldn't place her. Finally, I realized she looked like Nuria, but Nuria is fictional! Still, she is real enough in my head that I was able to recognize someone like her in the real world.

So, where do characters come from? The protagonist children in the novel--Micah, Jamie and Celia--are versions of my own children. They are fictionalized, certainly, but I can clearly trace their origins. Nuria is a different matter. Is she based on someone I know but I haven't myself made the connection? This is possible, but I don't think so. Is she based on a fictional character? Not that I'm aware of.

To be honest, when it came time for Nuria to enter the story, I had to stop writing for a few days because I wasn't sure how to craft her. I had a sense of her, but it was vague, abstract. Finally, I envisioned a pretty face with a crinkle of worry between bright eyes, and then Nuria came to life for me. I knew Nuria before I used the crinkle to develop her character, but I don't think I could have put her on the page without the vision of the crinkle.

I don't think I've answered my question. I guess I still don't know where Nuria came from, but I do know that characters are strange creatures that come from life and from imagination and grow into people who seem truly, deeply real. I don't flatter myself that my characters are as vibrant as some of the great characters we all know and love, but they are real, at least to me.

Save the Humanities -- I

Stanley Fish, writing in The New York Times, exhorts college presidents to fight for the humanities. He is prompted by the recent cutting of programs in the humanities at SUNY Albany (programs like French, for goodness sake), and he points out what all of us who work in the Humanities already know: that this tragic assault on knowledge in NY is not new.

Since I began teaching English literature in the mid-90s, I have had to explain to students why they should major in English, and/or what arguments they can use to persuade their parents that majoring in English is not a waste of time, money and intellect. Frankly, despite the alarming frequency of this conversation, I am always somewhat flummoxed by the question: Why WOULDN'T a person study the humanities?

I don't have a magic answer, certainly not one that can save what has been lost at SUNY Albany and other universities like it, but I will fumble through an answer here and try to fumble toward a better one in time.

So, why should a person study the humanities? Because we live in a world with other people, and to do our jobs and to have relationships and to live in this world, we must be able to communicate with these other people. Communicating does not mean forming nice sentences with subjects and verbs, though this is important and is a skill those who study the humanities generally perform quite easily; communicating means having a common vocabulary with which we observe, understand, and discuss what happens in our lives and in the world. That common vocabulary includes words well put together, but it also includes images, metaphors, allusions, what is known, in short, as cultural literacy. A person who studies the humanities is culturally literate.

I want to stress, however, that I am not talking about the version of cultural literacy best demonstrated at cocktail parties where a person might drop a line from a classic work of literature and thus appear erudite. No, we can all say "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" in a knowing way. What matters is knowing where the sentence comes from, what it's original context was and what it's relevance is to a particular moment. To go farther, it's knowing how Dickens's representation of the French Revolution, almost a hundred years after it happened, has a certain nostalgia to it, and when quoting the opening phrase of A Tale of Two Cities, meaning to evoke that nostalgia along with complex meanings of "best" and "worst." And when a person evokes all that meaning, she communicates more profoundly about her own moment, whether a private, personal moment or a public, national moment.

And, of course, I'm just using here the example of quoting a sentence. A person who studies the humanities can do so much more, can communicate with such richness, can understand depths of personal and cultural experience, and can articulate with such nuance and clarity what she understands that whether she's a banker or a baker, her life will be richer and her job better done.

Stay tuned for how the humanities don't offer only a common vocabulary, but how they also give us the tools to value difference.

The Jane Austen Workout

I haven't posted to this blog in a long time. I've spent the summer traveling and am now settled in Barcelona for my sabbatical. I spend my days working on some scholarly articles and thinking about my second novel. It's a good life!

Along with reading and writing (and the occasional delectable meal out--who can live in Barcelona and not make eating a high priority?), I am also getting into a regular gym routine. And I think I have finally stumbled into a workout that may actually work for me. I'm calling it the Jane Austen Workout.

While most people are motivated by Lady Gaga or Cyndi Lauper while they bounce to the beat on the stair stepper, I have always gotten bored with my techno playlists after one or two workouts. I don't like to watch TV at the gym, especially when the only channel is BarcaTV, a channel entirely devoted to the Barcelona futbol team (I'm a fan, but really?), and I can't read without my glasses, don't like to wear my glasses while I exercise, blah blah blah. So all this aural and visual finickiness leaves me bored and uninspired at the gym.

I've also tried listening to assorted podcasts, and this has been somewhat more successful. However, I need to be listening to something that really holds my attention or else my mind wanders and then I'm wondering why Melvyn Brag is chortling about Boadicea (In Our Time) or which Middle Eastern pottery shard (History of the World in 100 Objects) we're learning about now.

So, what really holds my attention? A good book! If it's a book I haven't read before, then I don't have the patience for an audiobook because I want to tear through it quickly. If it's a book I know really well, then I have the mind wandering problem again. Taking all of this into consideration, I settled on the Jane Austen novels that I don't know very well.

Of course, English PhD that I am, I have read all of Austen's novels, but Pride and Prejudice and Emma are the ones I teach and thus read over and over again. I haven't read the others more than once and not for a long time. I know what happens, so I don't need to hurry through the books like I do with first reads, but I don't remember the details, so I enjoy savoring them in the slow format of the audiobook. Plus, these books are in the public domain, so I have found free audio versions through Booksshouldbefree.com. I'm listening to Persuasion first and finding myself, for the first time in a long time, quite happy to go to the gym.

I could go on about an aging heroine and an aging exerciser, but that would be unflattering to both Anne Elliot and myself, so I'll just say that I'm thrilled and surprised to have discovered that after all these years of resisting exercise, it was Jane Austen who would help me get in shape!

Reader, I Married Him

Many of my readers will recognize the title of this post as a key line from Jane Eyre, a novel famously written in the first person. I am at the very beginning of a second novel, which, unlike my first novel, is written in the first person. I am struck by how much easier it is to convey voice and character with first person but how much harder tense is.

Tense may seem like syntax 101, but in narrative, tense locates the voice in time vis-a-vis the action of the novel. Jane narrates in the first person from a time several years after the events of the novel, so she has knowledge that she chooses to keep from the reader and to dole out as she (or really as Charlotte Bronte) sees fit. The narrating Jane knew all along that she married "him," but she keeps the reader in suspense. The past tense in the sentence that titles this post reminds the reader that the narrator knew this key event would occur.

In my novel, the character is caught up in a mystery that he doesn't yet understand, so while I am firmly committed to the first person for this narrative, I have to make a really important decision about tense.

Does my protagonist narrate in the present tense? "I walk in the room, and I see a dragon." With a present tense first person the reader and the narrator are pretty much equals in terms of access to information about the events of the story. This has merits, but you lose the ability to allow the narrator to frame the events. I can pretty readily rule out present tense.

The real choice is between a past tense that puts the narrator in medias res and a past tense that puts the narrator at a time after the events of the story (like Jane). To put the narrator in medias res might mean that my character is narrating from a point midway through the story: the narrative would be in the past tense to a point and then shift into present tense. This can be exciting, but I'm not exactly writing an adventure story.

I do want some reflective framing on the part of the narrator, so I think it does make the most sense to follow Bronte and have my narrator temporally based after the events of the story. Thus, he can write about himself and what happened to him in the past tense while using the narrative to guide the reader's understanding and feeling about the story. For example, "I didn't expect to see anything out of the ordinary when I walked in the room, but the dragon was evidently expecting me." This is a much more interesting sentence than the present tense version above.

Yet, some readers are annoyed by Jane's vantage point outside the action and, in a way, above the reader. They find her manipulative, but maybe she is, and maybe that's part of her character's complexity and Bronte's genius. I don't want my readers to find my character manipulative, but I'd like them to find him smart and self-aware, characteristics I may be able to convey with the narrative voice.

When I commit to a past tense first person narrative in which the narrator is beyond the events in the novel, I have to think about why the narrator wants to tell the story, what he thinks about it after the fact, what he learned along the way, and what all that distance means for the tone he will take, the words he will choose, and the ways in which he will place emphasis. The narrative voice, thus, not only tells the story, but tells the reader what impact the story had on the main character. And it must tell this meta-story without spoiling the plot, so when whatever my "Reader, I married him" sentence comes along, my reader is at once pleasantly surprised and really knew it all along.

Lost: The End

Apologies to the readers of this blog who don't watch "Lost," and SPOILER ALERT to those who do but haven't yet watched the series finale. These are my thoughts on the final episode of the show I watched loyally from the very beginning.

I liked a lot about the finale. For one thing, I thought it was exceptionally well written. The echoes of conversations past were moving and well done. In particular, I found Kate's redelivery of Aaron to be lovely. I also quite liked that Jack passed the island torch to Hurley (which I anticipated BTW), though I would have really enjoyed even just one scene showing Hurley stepping into that role. Maybe we get that a little bit when he asks Ben to be his second in command. I also really liked that moment: all Ben has wanted is to be wanted, and he's been such a rich and complex character all along, I was happy to see him get what he wants. I also thought there was a sweetness to him happily accepting second-in-command. I thought all the scenes of remembering were good, and it's not easy to dramatize remembering. These scenes served the dual purpose of reminding the characters of their other life (nice echoes of "I'll see you in another life, Brother."), and allowing the viewers to savor key moments past.

I did not like the end. Let me say first how I interpret the end (and I will concede that I DO like that they left us with things to interpret). I do not think they all died in the plane crash. I base my assertion on (a) the fact that if they all died in the original crash, then the whole show is a cipher, and I can't accept that and don't think the creators would want to leave us with that, and (b) Christian Shepard's comment that some of these people died before Jack and some long after. I think it's pretty clear that Christian is meant to be the voice of authority at the end, and so I think we can believe what he says. Thus, I conclude that some characters died in ways we know about (like Boone, Shannon, Libby, Locke, etc.) and others died later in life. Kate and Sawyer, for instance, got off the island and lived lives of one kind or another until they died later on of causes unrelated to the island (presumably). Jack died on the island, killed by Smokey, having "fixed" everything one last time, his eye closing on his life and on the series. A really lovely (if expected) final image.

OK, so I don't think they all died in the crash. I believe Christian. The primary reason I found the end of the series so unsatisfying is because the show ultimately failed to reconcile science and faith. All along this reason/faith conundrum has been a major theme, running most notably through the character arcs of Jack and Locke. And the show has, in my opinion, consistently done reason (read: science) better than faith, which is by definition slippery. Case in point: one of the best episodes of the series was "The Constant," in which we get insight into Daniel's theoretical physics and learn that Desmond is a constant when it comes to a form of time travel. In the finale, Desmond's constancy became much more amorphous and angel-like, rather than plausibly interwoven into something like real physics. The fact that Daniel really had no role to play in the denouement (other than the piano!) and didn't get to go to church with the rest of the lostaways signifies how the creators had moved away from the scientific themes.

Did Oceanic 815 crash because Jacob brought broken people to the island to replace him, or did it crash because Desmond failed to push the button and thus released an enormous amount of energy? I would have really liked the final answer to be both, but the creators ultimately shoved Desmond's action under the carpet and left us with Jacob. Similarly, and worse, was the sideways world an alternate reality created by the strategic detonation of a hydrogen bomb, or a purgatory that doesn't really exist in any sort of reality? Again, why couldn't it have been both? I'm fine with them leaving Sideways behind (with the massive exception of Jack who has a son and a much better life in Sideways than he ever had in reality), but did the show need to so completely obliterate the reality of sideways?

Finally, I find it sad that so many characters didn't go on to have better or more meaningful lives than they had on the island. (Sayid is the saddest of all: OK, he never gets Nadia, but he never gets to do better than Shannon, either?). Again, if we believe Christian, all these folks who lived lives of varying lengths (Hurley, for instance, may have lived a couple thousand years a la Jacob) never experienced anything more important than the time they were on the island? I appreciate that the show's creators wanted to leave the viewers with a sort of happy ending, but we've been so invested in these people getting better lives for themselves that to learn they never, ever did is a horrible blow.

I would much rather have been left with a flash forward montage of Kate and Claire cheering on Aaron at a soccer game; of Rose and Bernard placing flowers on Jack's grave, while Hurley benignly commands a group of latter day Others who are much more functional than their predecessors; and of Sawyer shedding his assumed name and the many ghosts of his past.

"Lost" was a great show, game changing in many ways, and the last ten minutes of the finale don't undo six years of amazing television, but I wish they could have lived up to their own potential in THE END.

It's All About Stupid, Stupid

I'm enjoying my first critique session (is it a session if it's virtual?) with a fellow middle-grade writer I met at SCBWI, and I want to take this opportunity to wax poetic about the value of critique. I've had lots of people read my book--some friends and family and some English-professor colleagues--and all have been helpful, but now what I can benefit from the most is someone who is as embroiled in the genre as I am. And someone who is able and willing to read at a level of detail that I simply can't see anymore.

For instance, it turns out that about the only adjective one of my characters uses is "stupid." I knew I was overusing the word, but it took my critique partner highlighting again and again for me to realize that I need to vary my word choice. In my latest revision, I think I actually got better at describing this particular character's attitude in select moments, but I need to sustain that in all moments and take my red pen (or my delete key) like a weapon into the land of all those stupids.

Perhaps more important than overuse of a pretty lame adjective, my reader is also showing me places where she is confused. Of course, I am never confused because I always understand what's going on in the narrative, so I can be pretty blind to places that create confusion for my reader. Realizing I need to explain or clarify in certain scenes is invaluable.

And finally, as I always tell my students, I am also getting a lot out of the experience of reading my partner's chapters. She does some things a lot better than I do, and I might learn a thing or two from her about voice and pace. And when I find myself occasionally confused by her text, it helps me to think more clearly about the challenges all writers (including myself) face in balancing mystery against confusion.

So, in sum, all readers are good readers in one way or another, but an extra big, enthusiastic yay for critique partners!

Meter Tag

On Friday, I visited my son's 4th grade class to teach the kids about poetic meter. I used an activity that I actually use at Bucknell where the students invent movements to go along with each metric foot (like a skip for an iamb -- an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) and then have relay races to see which metric form is fastest. On Friday, dactyls won the race. It was highly entertaining, and showing kids that poetry can be fun is pretty awesome.

Today, I got a packet of thank-you notes, many with pictures of the kids leaping around and some with poems they wrote. They thanked me for teaching them about meter, and many of them wrote about meter in ways they showed they really understood it. One kid wrote, "Thanks for showing us how to dance to poetry," and another wrote, "I learned more about meter and poetry than I will ever learn." Reading their notes has completely filled me with joy!

In my novel, the main characters attend a poetry camp, and I feel a renewed sense of commitment to that part of the novel. Poetry is accessible and interesting and entertaining to children! Maybe I can find a way to get some of the joy from meter tag and from the thank you notes into my book.

Why Homework is a Good Thing

This post is not about the homework I ask my students to do, though obviously that is also a good thing. Rather, this is about the homework I was asked to do for a workshop on writing historical fiction that I will attend next week at the Eastern PA SCBWI conference. We were asked to write the first paragraphs of three different novels set in three different times and places. I suppose if I'd ever taken a creative writing class, I might be jaded about this sort of exercise, but I am hungry for prompts, and I really enjoyed writing my paragraphs.

Not only did I have fun, I also tumbled into my next book. I've had an idea for awhile, bumping around in the back of my brain. It was the opening of a novel, a fabulous, surprising series of events, but it ended with a dramatically unfinished "and then..." My homework helped me to finish the sentence: the paragraph met up with the story fragment in my imagination, and now I have a whole plot. Actually, I also had an important conversation in the middle of all of this with my nine year old who has turned into an outstanding sounding board. So the process was (1) idea, (2) homework and epiphany, and (3) conversation to talk through kinks. Of course, the process isn't over either.

I'm pasting in the paragraph. I don't think it will actually be part of the book, but it led me to the story, so it deserves to be "published" here:

Xavi leaned against the gas stove, holding his book away from the heat of the flame and absently stirring custard in the pot, his eyes fixed on the page. He didn’t know how long he had been stirring, but during that time the hero Ramon had fled the marauding bandits and was about to tell his great love Christina where he’d hidden the jewels. Xavi dropped the spoon to turn the page, but before he read a word, the book was knocked out of his hand. “Que faix?” the housekeeper screamed at him in Catalan. Xavi knew she was angry because they weren’t supposed to speak in Catalan anymore. He looked at the pot and realized he’d scalded the custard. It would have been their first desert in nearly six months.

Since this was homework (and since I wax poetic in my classes about peer review), I do welcome any feedback. Thus the process goes on.

Gregor the Overlander

I finished the first book in the Suzanne Collins Underland Chronicles (I think that's what the series is called...) I was leary at first because the talking bats and cockroaches were offputting, but I got used to them pretty quickly, and I found myself deeply engrossed in the Underland world. I'm eager to move on to the next book in the series! So many books in this genre ask us to believe in children as authority figures, and Collins really gets it right. When Gregor assumes authority at a couple of key junctures in the book, I was right there with him, ready to follow.

The book, as Collins says in the Acknowledgements, is about family, so it seems appropriate to have read most of it while with my family and my extended family in Tennessee. It is also about families that are separated, so as we leave tomorrow to go back home, saying our goodbyes, I feel strengthened by Gregor's heroism. And I am reminded of the original sentiment that inspired this blog: C.S. Lewis's claim that we learn from the fantasy worlds of books lessons of heroism that help us in our real lives.

Feedback from the Other Side

Yesterday I wrote about having gotten feedback from an agent. Today I finished grading a set of papers for a 200-level class, so now I am the feedback giver. Because I have been feeling reflective about how it feels to get feedback, it seems appropriate for me to ponder what it's like on the other side. I should acknowledge that I'm pretty sure I care a lot more about my book than any of my students care about their 4-5 page analysis of a Victorian text, so the stakes are really, really different. Still, I am aware that it is sometimes hard to remember that the comments are about the writing and not the writer. When I tell a student she is too wordy, she may feel that I challenge her identity. The student who didn't really have much focus to his argument may wonder if I am questioning his focus in life. In short, even with lower stakes, nerves can be raw and feedback can hurt.

The trick as a teacher, in my opinion, is to treat the writer like she is always revising. Even when one assignment is wrapped up, there will be another assignment. Even when the semester ends and the class is over, there will be other classes. Even when they graduate and go out into the world, they will still write. So every comment is a suggestion for next time, and thus is rooted in a fundamental sense that there is potential everywhere. And because every comment implies a belief in the writer's potential, I hope that the writers will not be hurt by criticism but will learn from it and move forward. Onward and upward with the arts, as they always say at Carleton.

Feedback, Thank You

I got feedback from an agent today. Those of you who are in the business of querying agents know that there is an art to rejection letters--some are total form letters (Dear Author) with no attempt at soul, others are kindly meant (I choose to believe) form letters that at least express some respect and understanding, others seem to be personal rejections, at least they mention the title of the manuscript or even reference some other specific that allows one to assume the rejection was carefully, lovingly crafted for you and only you. None of these rejections contain any feedback.

However, today I got a short e-mail from an agent who was specific about why my manuscript doesn't work for her, and while that makes the rejection harder to take in some ways, it is the most respectful and certainly the most helpful rejection I've received. Of course, one should be cautious about assuming that one agent's concerns are all agents' concerns, but it is in any case useful to have some concrete criticism to move forward with.

And I've just been revising my first chapter, which I knew wasn't completely perfect a la George Eliot but which I had felt was pretty dang good. Now, I am able to see some places I can improve. It probably took that agent less than five minutes to write up her response to my book, and now I am able to make the book better. Aside from this (I hope) increasing my chances of finding an agent who wants to represent me, this simply helps me be a better writer, and isn't that really the idea?

Riordan, Haddix, and Barrett Browning

Those of you regularly check out The Wardrobe Door might have noticed that the "What I am Reading" sidebar has gone unchanged for sometime. Last night, I finally finished Rick Riordan's The Battle of the Labyrinth, and I enjoyed it a lot. Riordan balances well the epic and the mundane, exemplified in the scene near the very end of the novel when Poseidon shows up at Percy's birthday party. The awesome presence of the sea god along with the awkwardness of Percy's mom's ex meeting her new boyfriend illustrates the apples and oranges tone of the whole series. This mostly works for me, though there are times when I find it jarring. All in all, I find the basic premise of the books fabulous and inventive. I think Riordan crafts one of his most complex and interesting characters in Nico, and I am eager to see how he develops in the final book of the series.

I should say that I also read Margaret Peterson Haddix's Found recently, but I read it too quickly to post it here as in process. It's a compelling story which presents some classic issues (adolescent identity, adoption, and time travel) in a new way. I couldn't put it down and am eager to move on to the next in the series. I recommended it to my 9-year-old who also really enjoyed it.

Finally, I get to the meat of this post. The reason it takes me so long to read whatever I am reading is that I also read for a living. I tend to divide my reading into professional reading and reading-for-pleasure. While I do teach a course in YA fiction, I still consider Riordan and Haddix pleasure reading, whereas Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, which I've just finished reading with my seminar, is professional reading. However, I do take great pleasure from most of the professional reading I do. Aurora Leigh, for instance, tells a fabulous story in a lush and impressively crafted form. I think I've read it 4-5 times now, and each time it is a different text to me. This time, I was less interested in Aurora's personal story and more interested in her professional story. Of course, those of you who know the poem know that those stories ultimately come together, and that's my message here.

All the reading I do pleases me, and much of the reading that I think has nothing to do with my job ends up finding its way into my writing or into my classroom. When Aurora Leigh comes to discover that her engagement with the world around her and her attempts to put her soul into words on the page are fundamentally the same project, she reminds me that my students, my profession, my family, myself and even the texts themselves are better served if I do not separate the professional from the personal.

Books Have Minds of Their Own

Authors often make statements about their books wanting to be written or characters dropping fully formed into their minds, and I have generally found these sorts of statements annoying. You may feel like the character came to you as an already assembled entity, but really you have been busily assembling him yourself, even if you have been doing so beneath your own radar. Yet, now that I am spending more time writing fiction and thinking hard about writing fiction, I find that, indeed, my story does seem to have a life of its own.

I know, of course, that I make up the characters, and I decide what happens to them, but once those people exist in the fictional space that I've created, and once I've set certain experiences in motion for them, there is a logic, a mandate, an organic something or other that emerges.

I will explain with an anecdote. For quite a while, I have known what would be the main plot arc of my second book, but I hadn't given a lot of thought to the particulars. I was waiting for time and also for a sense of momentum. Slowly, as I thought more and more about what would happen in this book, that momentum began to build. I think of it as key pieces falling into place. I visited a place a couple of months ago, and in that place, I spotted a detail that I recognized right away as something that belongs in this book. I held on to that detail, waiting to decide how I would use it. As time passed, other details fell into place. Now, enough pieces are there to give me and the story the momentum it needs for me to really start writing, but all those pieces also demand certain treatments. In other words, the pieces out of which I will stitch together the book, all come with their own stories, and it is those stories that seem somehow outside my control.

So now, like so many authors, I find myself saying things like, "Silvia does X," as if Silvia is a real person with agency. I know she's not. I made her. But, yet, somehow she is real. I made her and then released her and now she sort of does have a life of her own. I couldn't, say, turn her into a vampire or a drunk because she is nether of those things: she has an identity that I created but that now exists on its own.

And as I work on the details of the plot for the second book, outlining chapters, I discover that I do have a sense of the story existing in some abstract, unwritten form. I will write it and give it shape, but it does exist, even without my words. Of course, no one will every know that unless I give the story words.

So I will.

Gotta Keep Reading

My middle-school librarian friend Gretchen posted this on her Facebook page, and I have to share it here. It's a fabulous video that celebrates middle-schoolers reading.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6D9jiEYxzs

The joy on these kids faces, and the way they hold their books while they dance is simply wonderful.

Craft of Writing

In my classes, we always talk about how authors have made choices: when Dickens begins Bleak House with the one-word sentence, "London," that is a choice. When a megalosaurus waddles through London later in the paragraph, that is also a choice. A dinosaur didn't just fall into the novel; Dickens put it there. And he put a megalosaurus there, not a pterodactyl or a t-rex. He made a choice. Students of literature can have great fun wondering about these choices: why a megalosaurus? What does this choice tell us about Dickens' London, or about Dickens' aims in writing about London? This is a conversation I have often and always enjoy.

Now, however, I find myself puzzling over being the one making the choices. I have outlined the sequel to This Powerful Rhyme, and I have written some pages, but I'm not crazy about them. I have a very clear sense of what my characters are up to in this book, and I have some vivid images in my mind that I'm confident I will transfer to the page eventually, but at the level of starting to make choices, I find myself flummmoxed. Does the book begin in the present or in the past? After some drafting and some outlining, I will surely know the answer to this question, and my readers (when I have some) will talk about my choice. Why did the author choose to begin in the past? What does this choice tell us? For now, I can't answer these questions because I don't know yet what choice I will make.

When I have this conversation about choice with my students, I imagine a decisiveness that I now discover is sometimes elusive. Dickens may have agonized for weeks over what sort of dinosaur to put in the middle of London, and I suppose that agony just means his choice is careful and important. So, I am in the stage with this second book of making careful choices. Will I begin in the past or the present?

For the moment, the choice I am leaning toward is the present because that's where my readers are, and I think they are most likely to choose to enter into the book if I meet them in their own time. There, I just made a choice. Stay tuned to see if it sticks. After all, Dickens may have started off with a pterodactyl!

Villette and Sledding

I have always loved winter and especially snow. Even when I was at Carleton and spent most of the winter with snow on the ground, I never tired of it. Of course, the truth is that sometimes snow is an inconvenience, but when you are a snow lover like me, that inconvenience becomes an identity crisis.

We had our first proper snow of the season Friday night and got in some good sledding Saturday morning. We go to a fabulous hill a few blocks away: there is a steep slope, then a short level bit, and then another steep slope, so it's a really fun ride, as long as you steer clear of the nineteenth-century brick posts and stop before you fall in the creek. These obstacles just raise the heart rate, though, making the whole experience more fun.

After the morning on the hill, we spent Saturday afternoon reconnecting with old friends near Wilkes-Barre, and then my husband left to spend a few days with his father. This left me to manage the three kids alone, and on Sunday, I also had about 100 pages of Villette to read for my seminar. Thus, when the kids said they'd rather watch a movie than go back to the hill, I happily acquiesced. The two hours they spent in front of the TV was about forty pages of Villette, some dishes, and a couple of loads of laundry. They were happy, and I was productive. A win-win, but was it?

Villette is a brilliant book, and I appreciated its nuance much more this time through than I had in the past. The narrative is smart and self-aware and even cruel--all fascinating [and, as an aside, my students did brilliantly with the book]. But I'm not sure how I feel about choosing Villette over sledding. Instead of cutting loose in the snow with my kids, I gave in to that curse of a babysitter Disney and sat alone on the couch with Lucy Snowe and her in-your-face misery. I want to be someone who can always go sledding, not someone who is relieved when the kids don't want to go.

Another snowstorm is coming tomorrow, and I've already worked out babysitting in case the public schools are closed. Again, while I yearn to be outside in the snow, I will have to stay in with Lucy Snowe, teaching Villette. I suppose it will be some consolation to watch the snow falling while we hunker down and talk deeply about the book. And it is a greater consolation to know that it will stay cold for the foreseeable future, so we can spend Thursday afternoon dodging the posts and the creek as we sled with abandon.

Los Abrazos Rotos and Lost: Two Reviews

Last night I watched the two-hour season premiere of Lost. I should offer up front the disclaimer that I had the flu so was not in top form, though was quite happy to recline on the couch for an obscene length of TV time (I also watched the one-hour series recap that came first). I am a loyal fan, not just of Lost but in general. Once I decide that I like something, I'll work hard to maintain my attitude. This has not always been easy with Lost, which has gotten unnecessarily complicated at some points, but while some may disagree, I think I do see plot strands coming together and improbabilities are resolving. Locke didn't come back from the dead: the smoke monster (a.k.a. the man in black) is possessing him. We've seen this before (Christian Shepard, Eko's brother, Alex Linus), so rather than introducing something new, the show has given us a recurrence of a pattern that has run through the whole series--it turns out that the new and different Locke is actually the monster, something we should have guessed (and many did). Similarly, the bomb blasted apart the causal loop and created two parallel universes. Each of these is consistent with time travel conventions, and the shift from the former to the latter is pretty cool, if indeed that's what's going on, and I could be wrong. So, in sum, I still find the show too complicated for my worn-out mid-week brain, but I am encouraged and hopeful that it is on track.

In an odd contrast, I found Almodovar's Broken Embraces to be too simple. I just saw it tonight, so perhaps after I think about it for a few days I'll want to revise my opinion. The characters weren't especially complex, the story unfolded in expected ways, and the themes about vision and possession were straightforward. It's a good movie but not a great one and certainly not up to Almodovar's usual standard.

On Waiting

First, I acknowledge my colleague Harold Schweizer, the title of whose recent book I have brazenly stolen for this post--thanks, Harold!

I am waiting. I am waiting for lots of things. Beginning and end of life things, like the births of assorted babies I will soon know and the death of my beloved father-in-law, who is dying so well I keep suggesting he should quick run some seminars for other old folks on the art of dying. I am waiting for some interesting work responsibilities to begin and for some less interesting ones to end. I am waiting for my sabbatical and the move to Barcelona that will come with it. I am waiting to read A Wind in the Door with my oldest son and The Chamber of Secrets with my younger kids. I am waiting for the picture book snow storm that this cold winter has not yet brought us, and I am also waiting for it to be warmer and to be able to walk out of the house without layering and layering first. I am waiting for the Lost premiere and the Oscars and the Percy Jackson movie.

Most of all, in this moment, I am waiting to hear from the agent who is currently reading the first 50 pages of This Powerful Rhyme. This particular agent has every reason to be unusually busy right now, and she has no obligation to respond to me quickly. However, a flurry of e-mails a couple of weeks ago led me to hope for a quick response. I think that no news is just no news, neither good nor bad, but it's hard not to devote lots of mental energy to imagining her response to my book. While I wait, I imagine enthusiasm and criticisms, contracts and rejections, friendships and starting over. Waiting is not passive or empty but one of the most active imaginative acts we experience.

In my fiction and my scholarly writing, I return again and again to the matter of time and the relationship between the present and the past. Waiting is a psychological limbo that inhabits the space between present and future. The knowledge that something will come or might come and the feeling of that something's absence. This is complex and fascinating: how can we feel the absence of something we've not yet had? Anticipation is the imagining of the presence of something in our lives. Sometimes we anticipate (read: dread) something we don't want in our lives, and sometimes we anticipate things we do want. In both cases, we wait for a future we imagine, and we work around the perceived absence of the fiction of what the future will hold.

Queen Victoria and Blogging

Today was the first day of classes this semester at Bucknell, and I met both my classes: Victorian Literature and Culture in the morning and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers in the afternoon. The C19 Women Writers is an advanced seminar and so I asked them to do a short reading assignment for the first day of class: the aim being to introduce stereotypes and immediately break them down and thus elevate our discussion from the get go. To this end, we read some material by and about Queen Victoria.

Victoria is a fascinating figure in many ways, but for the purposes of this class, I wanted us to focus on the fact that while we might imagine most Victorian women resented the restrictions placed on them by society, Victoria, the one women who could have thrown off those restrictions, chose to live with them, chose to subordinate herself to her husband, chose a simple, middle-class, domestic life.

The conversation went in a direction I didn't anticipate, though. We talked about how difficult it is to know what she really wanted or felt or even what her life was really like. Her image was carefully managed and probably carefully constructed, so even when we read her private letters to her daughter, we can detect her awareness of her image and observe how she manages that image.

And this is where blogging comes in. A blog, in my view, is an odd form at once private and public. That is, we write blogs hoping they will be read not just by friends but probably also by strangers, yet in tone and content they are often cousins to the journal or to the old-fashioned letter. As I write this now, I am pretty sure no one will read it, but when I am finished, I will click "publish post" and doing so is an acknowledgement that I am making this post public. Someone might read it. Victoria wrote letters to her daughter first and foremost for her daughter, but given her position and her evident media savvy, she likely anticipated that her letters would one day be published. So her private correspondence is haunted by the prospect of becoming public, and so she surely must have modulated her comments, her attitudes, her image with that prospect in mind.

A blogger must be sympathetic to her plight, a writer who crafts personal sentences in a space that appears private but is really public. I am appreciating for the first time what a peculiar genre a blog post is, and it is Queen Victoria who illuminated this peculiarity for me.

This Powerful Rhyme

This Powerful Rhyme is a middle-grade realist fantasy. It is my first novel. It's been in the works for some time but has suddenly transformed from a sort of pet project to a wonderfully, terrifyingly real venture. I queried two agents about ten days ago, and both of them asked to see more of the manuscript. Both are very good agencies, and I'm unlikely to get picked up by either, but to get their interest is staggeringly wonderful and surprising. So, I find myself wondering how to talk to agents and how transparent to be (I've decided to be totally transparent), and I've actually taken a little time to start educating myself about literary contracts, should I get so lucky.

I have spent so much time hanging out in a completely different part of the book world. That is, the part populated with professional readers. As I get ready for a new semester and spend some of my last precious hours of winter break reading novels for my classes, I am aware that I am still very much a professional reader. But, I am starting to feel something like a professional writer, too.

My oldest son is upstairs reading my novel on my kindle as I write this. I've tested parts of it on him over the past year, but he has never just read the book through. Tonight he announced he wanted to read it. I don't know if he'll love it, but I'm so happy that his bedtime reading tonight is by me!

Texts That Trouble Us

Yesterday, I read the student comments on the evaluations from my Young Adult Fiction class, and I was annoyed by one comment in particular: a student wrote that s/he liked most of the books, except The Golden Compass, which was too hard, and The Graveyard Book, which was too scary. Initially, I think this annoyed me because college students shouldn't find any books in a Young Adult Fiction class "too hard," but as I thought more deeply about this comment, I realized it bothers me for a more complicated reason.

I teach a lot of books that are hard, but most of them are books students expect to be hard, like Middlemarch, and the comment reveals that some students (probably most) don't expect books written for young readers to be hard. But shouldn't these books be hard, too? Shouldn't young readers get to relish the thrill of a complex plot, a complex moral landscape, even a complex sentence? Life troubles us in small and large ways, and whether books take us into fantastical or realistic places, those books should explore life's troubles. A book that is nothing more than an escape has a place, but it does nothing to prepare readers, young or old, to face life and the troubles that await. A book that is hard enriches its readers, and I am very sorry that I failed to convey that vital element of literature to even one of my students.

My Tri-Polar Intellectual Life

Academia comes with two lovely limbos--early January and mid-May. Public school is in session (so my kids are occupied all day), but the university is still idling along with students gone, offices empty and corridors so cold and unwelcoming that the buildings themselves seem to say, "Stay at home. Curl up on the couch, while you still can..." Spring semester classes start in just over two weeks, so it's not a long limbo, but it is a nice one.

Still, there is work to be done, and today I worked on three stunningly different projects. I plotted out the syllabus for a new seminar on nineteenth-century women writers, I hurriedly put together an application for research funding for my sabbatical project, and I sent a query to an agent who I hope might choose to represent my novel. It felt good to get all of these projects done, but they are so different from each other that I also feel a confused sense of professional identity. Add to the mix taking down the Christmas tree and volunteering in my kindergarten twins' classroom for an hour, and I guess I have to go with Quin-Polar, which sounds like a fantasy about a post-apocalyptic frozen landscape.