The wrong end of the stick is the right one

I’ve been listening to a CD of The History Boys, Alan Bennett’s brilliant play about a group of boys preparing for the Oxford entrance examinations. The headmaster, desperate for good results, hires spin-master Mr Irwin to help the boys stand out in the crowd.

Suddenly it’s not just the story the boys can tell, but how they tell it.

The wrong end of the stick is the right one. A question has a front door and a back door. Go in the back or, better still, the side.
Flee the crowd. Follow Orwell. Be perverse.
And since I mention Orwell, take Stalin. Generally agreed to be a monster and rightly, Sow dissent. Find something, anything, to say in his defence.

The advice struck a chord. Isn’t this what I’ve been trying to do, in the name of resisting cliché and sparking well, sparks, in my novel-writing? When my characters want to head in one direction, I do everything in my power to make their progress difficult. When one character expresses a conviction, I set another character to thwart him. When someone says no, another says yes.

Contrariness is just the thing to oil the engine of a plot. Sol Stein, in Solutions for Novelists: Secrets of a Master Editor, writes:

Successful writing is permeated with an adversarial spirit demonstrated in suspicion, opposition, confrontation, and refusal.

But he’s talking about craft. What about the whole submission process? Agents want quick sales, grabby manuscripts – why not give it to them? Surely, this is a technique that can also help sell novels.

“I get it,” says Rudge, the most working class of the History boys. “You want us to find an angle.”

An angle, a unique selling point, a hook. “It’s a performance,” says Irwin. “It’s entertainment. And if it isn’t, make it so.”

If you read through the blog of Miss Snark, the anonymous literary agent, who disguises her excellent advice with hard-hearted wit, you find the whinings of writers who are trying to find just the perfect angle to make that connection with an agent. Which chapter should I send? What should I say in the query letter? How should I package my manuscript? Etc etc etc.

Miss Snark’s response intermittently repeated throughout the blog is the best advice to all who are searching for that angle:

"Write well."

And how.

Who are we writing for? More stuff from the readers

Who are we writing for?

I'm always saying we writers must resist carmudgeonly declarations that kids these days

• Don't read
• Have short attention spans
• Are dumbing down because of TV and technology

On the contrary, kids these days are amazing!

And we YA writers are so lucky. Because the people we are writing for have the means and talent to talk right back at us!

YA author Maureen Johnson was thrilled to discover her readers had created a homage using one of her blog posts as their script:



These guys really rock!

If only we could write half as creatively as kids use language

YA writers are constantly asking themselves who their readers are. This week, the Education Guardian helpfully published a glossary of words from the "MySpace generation" and it's a great eye-opener for the YA author.

I especially liked "404", as in "he’s got the 404" — from the internet error message. I just love the mind-blowing inventiveness of it all!

Last year, I posted a piece on slang, quoting Uglies author Scott Westerfield on teen readers:

When you are a teenager you are still in the act of acquiring language. One of the reasons I really like YA is that teenagers are more interested in voice than adults.

His comment woke me up to the fact that the YA reader is a tough act to follow:

Teenagers, . . . write more poetry per capita. They play more word games. They memorise more song lyrics. They like to spell things creatively. And a high percentage are in fact learning a language in school.

The blogging agent Kristin Nelson recently described learning the word 'EMO' from a 15 year old at a dinner party.

His best friend calls himself an "EMO."

First time I’d ever heard the word but I guess this is quite the rage at the moment in high schools (and yes, I did start feeling a little ancient). “Emo” is short for "emotionals." According to him (and yes, I understand that one source is hardly scientific), EMOs like to wear tight jeans (really straight leg), color their hair (but they don’t always have to), and like to listen to death metal or something that might be similar (that was a little fuzzy for me and the bands he named weren’t ones I recognized).

I felt like I had been given a peek into a secret world.

Then what do you know, Agent Kristin got a submission featuring — guess — EMOs! And when you google it, you find . . . well I'm not sure if this is some kind of 'mock-you-mentary (the actual film is on YouTube, generating a lot of hate mail from EMOs) and there's this too.

I’d never heard the word either, until I saw it in the Guardian's glossary ("The new goth. Likes depressing and angry music and has long black hair swept across the eyes").

Whatever the politics of EMOs, all I can think is . . . if only I could write half as creatively as kids use language — how daunting to serve such an audience!

And what a privilege!

'You're so Emo' art by Chris Marzuola