building better boy books, part 2

Last week in Part 1 I suggested that the elements of “boy books” could be broken down into two categories, The “Nons” and the acronym I coined called HEAVES…

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We’ll begin with the one area that can grab a boy faster than almost any other in fiction, which is H, for Humor.

To many people, humor is one of those slippery areas like art – you know it when you see or hear it, and too much explanation ruins it. But there are subtleties to some forms of humor that boys respond to above others that can be incorporated into fiction. Knowing these elements might help explain what makes many boys – both readers and characters – tick.

Professor Thomas Newkirk at the University of New Hampshire, author of Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture, notes that boy humor consists of two types: physical and verbal. Boys are either saying funny things, or doing funny things. This counters the feeling boys tend to have that school is about reading and writing – fairly static activities – while humor is active, and dynamic, and something seen as generally outside of the classroom.

Boy humor is not cerebral.  This is probably the most understood aspect of what boys find funny, because so many books that try to be funny tend toward the cerebral.  Especially in YA fiction which has a greater tendency toward the first person point-of-view, this idea that a boy is constantly thinking funny thoughts or coming up with witty comebacks is the most unrealistic form of boy humor.  Fictional boys are too clever and witty to be real, and as a result their cerebral humor is annoying to a boy reader.

Parody, on the other hand, becomes a tool boys like to use when they are feeling subordinate. It is a form of catharsis, it is their weapon against the bully and other authority figures that make them feel small and insignificant. It is also a way of maintaining social standing among their peers while at the same time distancing themselves from “sincere” behavior (Wouldn’t want to come off looking sincere in front of our peers, now, would we?).  Making fun of others, which is often how parody and satire are viewed, provides an outlet for frustrations while allowing for temporary empowerment sharing.

The longevity of such television shows like The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and South Park owe a debt to the boys (and boys posing as grown men) that have kept them on the air. As adults we may view these popular shows as juvenile or immature in their humor, but what keeps bringing the boys back is that they take on politics, pop culture, and authority figures, through verbal and physical comedy – occasionally dolloped with a generous helping of bodily functions.

More on those bodily functions in a moment.

Jon Scieszka’s Time Warp Trio features three boys who find themselves learning history the hard way through the aid of a book that transports them into different eras. In Tut, Tut our trio has found themselves in what they presume to be the Tomb of Tutankhamun when they spy a High Priest named Hatsnat brandishing a whip and ordering his ancient Egyptian henchmen around. Like most clichéd villains, the High Priest isn’t beyond monologuing, the fine art of gloating over his evil plans. Here, while the boys attempt to contain themselves, he is trying out the new names he will be called once he assumes the throne.

“Great Hatsnat. Most Awesome Hatsnat. The Wonder of All Hatsnat.” That little bald guy paced around the room, trying out all his different names. Fred, Sam and I bit our lips, trying not to burst out laughing.He walked to the doorway and turned for one last look at the treasure. We were almost safe. Then he said, “The Grand, Glorious Most Awesome Wonder of All… Hatsnat.”

That did it. Fred snorted out a laugh.

Hatsnat jumped three feet in the air.

Sam and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. We fell on the floor laughing. We had just barely managed to stop howling, when Hatsnat held his torch toward us. “Thieves. How dare you defile the temple of Hatsnat.”

Have you ever been someplace where you’re not supposed to laugh, but you just can’t help it? That’s exactly where we were.

“Hot Snot?” I laughed.

“Cold boogers,” laughed Fred.

“Not robbers,” laughed Sam.

We laughed so hard we could hardly breathe.

Hatsnat did not look amused. In fact, he looked mad enough to kill.

Boys are always stepping in it, digging themselves in deeper. They know a pompous authority figure when they see one, and Scieszka knows that the best way to subvert that authority is by giving him a name worthy of ridicule: Hot Snot. As bodily secretions go, mucus is fairly tame, but its enough to set off these boys and heighten the tension of the story at the same time. The fact that their lives are potentially in danger doesn’t make boys any more able to contain themselves, or be any less “boy.”

Scenes like this not only make the characters real, they make the book relevant to the reader’s lives because they can see something of themselves in it. It isn’t just a punchline to a joke or convenient bit of cleverness inserted by the author, it’s a safety zone for feeling something that when blended with humor becomes a release valve for conflicting emotions.

Adult authority figures, naturally, can come under attack, and can be made to bear the brunt of some boyish prankstering. As can the captain of the football team, the local bully, or an antagonistic mean girl. Anyone who assumes a mantle of authority can become a power figure subject to ridicule by a boy.

And it doesn’t have to be deserved ridicule. Conflict with boys often comes from pulling a prank, making a joke, or humiliating someone and having it backfire tremendously. This goes back to the idea that what boys find funny tends to be physical or verbal, perhaps impulsive, and occasionally politically incorrect. The repercussions can be as dangerous or as benign as necessary to the story in question, so long as they remain true to boys. Even the most serious of boy books needs a bit of humor, otherwise, no matter how edgy, gritty, or violent, it just isn’t realistic to a boy reader.

I promise you, if you find a story with a boy protagonist that doesn’t seem to be “working,” where something about the story just doesn’t click, chances are good the author’s inner censor has blinded them to a very real boy lurking in the wings.  You know, the one who’s just off to the side setting a paper bag full of dog feces on fire on someone’s porch.  And where a book is trying to be funny but it falls flat, see if it isn’t that the humor isn’t too cerebral.

My advice to writers of books with male characters, whether protagonist or supporting – Whenever possible:  Make. It. Funny.

Next time we’ll go from one extreme to another and find out what puts that first E in HEAVES…

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Those of you who caught my brief appearance in last weeks Twitter chat #genderinYA probably have a pretty good idea what this E stands for, but I trust you’ll be as surprised as I was by what I discovered about this particular element that boys respond to in fiction. Part 3 appears this coming Thursday.

building better boy books, part 1

As part of my graduate residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts I needed to give a lecture to the faculty and my peers on some subject concerning children’s literature.  After a comment by a classmate to “talk about what you love” I realized that I’d spent the better part of the last two years talking about boys, boy books, and boy literacy.  Though I never really thought of myself as a boy advocate, it was clear that the subject hits close to the bone. And thus a lecture was formed.

For the next four weeks or so I’ll be breaking down my lecture into smaller, internet-friendly chunks.  It won’t be exactly as delivered – I can’t keep from revising this thing! – but it will be close, at least in the beginning.

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Part One: By Way of Introduction

While I’ll be writing here on behalf of boy books, and boy readers, I freely admit that aside from the biological definition of what constitutes a boy, I don’t know that the terms “boy book” and “boy reader” can even be adequately defined. You know a boy reader when you encounter one. You may have seen the species in action in your own homes or classrooms. Some of you might be surprised to discover that you’re married to one.

Despite this lack of concrete definition I still think it’s a vitally important topic of discussion. Boys have this knack for negatively demanding our attentions. They do so by insisting they hate books. They call attention to themselves with lowered test scores and decreased literacy. They behave in ways that almost seem calculated to goad writers and publishers into either dismissing them as an audience, or pandering to them in an attempt to win them over.

But they need us, desperately. They need our help in understanding that reading can and should be a vital and important part of their lives.

To be fair, authors need them just as much. If for no other reason than the fact that they represent potentially fifty percent of their reading audience.  I sincerely believe authors write partially to reach the widest possible audience that their books deserve. How finite that audience is unknown, but there’s no reason to arbitrarily limit the possibilities by not taking into account the boy side of the equation.

There is currently a wave of “boyhood studies” that attempt to “correct” the seeming imbalances between raising boys and girls in Western culture. It isn’t my intention to reignite the gender wars here, I mention it simply to point out that these recent studies have given us quite a wealth of observations and data about boys.  Out of this emerging research, some interesting information has come from observing the sort of things boys like to write. In research done by Ralph Fletcher in his book Boy Writers, Reclaiming Their Voices, it is noted that when boys write stories:

• Fiction tends to concern freedoms and powers the boy writer doesn’t possess in real life.
• The narrative is quick, but it does include reflection, primarily in how protagonists handle situations but not how the experience has affected them.
• The dialog is snappy, full of slang and pop culture references.
• The writing is cinematic, with the pace of an action movie or a cartoon, and full of sound effects.
• The work celebrates and solidifies friendship groups.
• And stories tend to be exaggerated, extreme, absurd, slapstick and silly.

But let’s be brutally honest for a moment: boys are a pain in the ass.

They’ll say they hate books and reading, and the next thing you know they’re driving books like Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series onto the bestsellers list.

They’ll ask for something exactly like what they just finished reading, a beginning reader series like the Time Warp Trio or Geronimo Stilton, and then quickly lose interest because they’ve discovered and become bored with the formula.

They’ll read a page of grade-level text aloud in a halting stammer, then read the sports section of the newspaper as smoothly as professional television announcers.

The conundrum that is a boy reader is enough to drive any adult mad. Fortunately, boys aren’t so mysterious. There is enough information available about their preferences and predilections that we are able to put together a list of elements that boys respond positively toward in fiction that might help us understand them better. Some of these areas overlap, or have common intersections that might seem inseparable, but this sort of organized confusion is what we can expect when discussing boys and reading.

So let’s take a closer look at that wedge of the pie called “boy readers” and see what sort of things entice, engage, and retain this particular demographic.  Or to put it another way, let’s take a look at what it takes to build a better, more boy-friendly book.

I’ve broken down my research into ten general areas and, in trying to organize them, discovered they break down into two categories.  One category I call the NONS will come later, but first I’d like to discuss the group that is best organized as an acronym that is easy to remember.

I call them The HEAVES.

The letters H–E–A–V–E–S represent six common things boys tend to look for in their reading. No book should (though it isn’t impossible) contain all six of these elements, but any combination of these six areas when worked into a narrative can help draw in and retain boy readers.

So to begin with we have the letter H, which stands for…

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Well, that’s probably a good place to break until next week.  I think most people can correctly guess what the letter H stands for, but if you’d like to hazard a guess in the comments below you can claim bragging rights when I post Part Two of Building Better Boy Books next Tuesday.

forthcoming, in manageable chunks

I spent the better part of last fall (and the holidays, and quite a bit of January) working up my required lecture for my graduate residency.  So much anticipation and anxiety for that forty-five minutes of me talking in front of my peers, and it washed over me like a swelling tide that hardly seemed like five minutes had passed.  People seemed to like it.

“The Boy Book Manifesto: A Six Point Plan Toward Making Books More Boy-Friendly (and why we, as writers, should care)” wasn’t so much a political screed as it was a general outline of the sorts of things boys tended to respond well toward in their reading.  Speaking to a group of published writers and graduate students in the field of children’s literature, over 95% of them women, I felt a little like I was treading on dangerous territory; after all, shouldn’t boys be able to appreciate a well-written book without being pandered to? And how dare I suggest that it falls on writers to be more proactive in reaching, building, and maintaining boy readerships!

But my lecture was an exploration in understanding that most puzzling of questions: what, in a quantitative way, do boys want from their reading?  In seeking out answers I found a whole bunch of data about what boys are drawn to, what sort of topics can hold their attention, and was able to come up with a list of general ideas that could be incorporated into a writer’s approach to storytelling.  That list was originally ten points that, due to time limitations on the lecture, I had to whittle down to six points.  It seemed a shame I couldn’t include them all, but some of those points could have been an entire lecture themselves.

Many suggested that I could rewrite the lecture as an article, and encouraged me to do so.  I admit, I probably could, but honestly?  My heart isn’t in writing about boy books any more, I want to actually write some boy books.

So I’ve decided to break up my lecture into manageable chunks and try to present it as a series of blog posts.  I can already see that I’m going to have to modify some of the sections for “print” but otherwise the first parts will be pretty close to my original lecture.  Beginning next Thursday, February 4th, and for each Thursday after that I’ll be posting another section of what I think I’m going to call Building Better Boy Books.

I realize that by saying “better” the implication is that boy books out there aren’t as good as they should be.  You know what, sometimes they aren’t that good.   And while the general focus will still be on the creation of boy-friendly books I found that the information helped a lot of parents and teachers better understand the reading preferences of the boys (and men) in their lives.

So I think I’ll start gathering the ingredients and start tossing them in the blog pot.  The stirring will begin in a week.  Hope to see y’all then.

six word memoir

I missed the memoir lecture on the last day of the last residency of my MFA career.  I did not want to miss it, but last-minute graduation details propelled me to make some decisions.

In preparation for the lecture we were asked to come up with a six word memoir.  At least I think this was the request.  I don’t remember anyone talking about it before or after the lecture.  Perhaps I dreamed it.  But before I left for the residency, just before I drifted off to dreamland, I did sort of come up with the following:

stubborness +
impatience =
late bloomer

You have to read the symbols as words, and I thought that even if it was fairly reductive (and others will have to vouch for the accuracy) it works as a word problem as well.

I’m still steeping in the last bit of residency and gearing up to start my new post-grad life on Monday.  I can’t help thinking of the line Evil uses in the movie Time Bandits when he’s complaining about how the Supreme Being wasted his time during the creation.

If it was me, eight o’clock, day one, lasers.

That’s how I feel about every new project going into them.  No messing around with shrubberies and pill bugs.  Big things from the beginning.  Bam!

Monday.

nine newly minted mfa’s rejoin the world

we journey home. we
ignore phone. we

fuzzy head. we
sleep like dead. we

transcribe thoughts. we
outline plots. we

cherish sweat. we
publish yet?

Yeah, I went there.  Apologies to Gwendolyn Brooks.

Part of me knows that returning home from the VCFA residency means at least a day of readjustment.  Some have to jump right back into work and suffer the jolt of real world like a case of concentrated emotional jet lag. For those of us who can ease back into things it’s still quite disorienting, not unlike the feeling on the first mostly-normal day after a long sickness.

The lines above came to me while shopping for groceries.  One of my classmates mentioned sleeping like the dead last night, another about catching up on email… things flipped around a bit in my head and found their way into Ms. Brooks meter.  I don’t pretend to fully understand how and why my brain works.

So as we VCFAers emerge from the fog of our Germelshausen, some of us never to return, back into a world of cheese sandwiches and pause buttons and emotional trajectories, there is a bittersweetness.

We are forever of two homes, but only one is real.

frog and toad are enemies

(Warning: the following post may be inappropriate for young children, or those who love Frog and Toad)

There is a tradition at VCFA.  Actually there are many.  In fact, traditions keep getting invented with each residency.  Pretty soon they’re going to have to add days to the residency just to fit in all the traditions!

Like I was saying, during the dance – or party, or prom, as prefer to think of it – there is usually a theme and a writing contest linked to the theme.  The theme was Western, as the Old West, as in shoot-em-up.  I wasn’t able to put together The Man With No Name costume I wanted to do back at Halloween, but that’s okay because I don’t think I could have done anything but pose if I was wearing that get up.

But the contest, right.  So we were asked to have two characters in children’s literature have a Western style showdown.  It seemed easy enough but I couldn’t find the right characters.  After our faculty dessert night last night I had been mulling it over.  What two kidlit characters would be natural (or unnatural, as the case may be) enemies fixin’ to gun one another down.  Of course, as a writer, I needed to go looking for a reversal of some kind.  So I start thinking the opposite of enemies is friends, and what two friends would make for natural enemies?

Well, Frog and Toad are friends.

And so I took the story of Toad trying to coax Frog out of hibernation as my jumping off point.  And this was what came out:

Frog and Toad Are Enemies

(featuring Miss Sally Mander)

Frog ran up the path to Toad’s saloon.

He pushed through the swinging door.

The bar room went silent.

“Toad, Toad,” shouted Frog,

“Git down here!”

“Bah,” said a voice

from an upstairs room.

“Toad! Toad!” growled Frog.

“You stole Miss Sally from me!

You took mah gold! I aim t’ kill you!”

“I ain’t here,” said the voice.

Frog stayed hid in the room.

It was dark.

His gun was missing.

“I’m-a count to three,” called Frog.

“Go ‘way,” said the voice

from the upstairs room.

Toad was crawling out the window.

“If’n you don’t come down,

I’m-a comin up,” said Frog.

“Suit yerself,” said Toad.

Toad tip-toed across the balcony.

He hopped down the back stairs.

Frog and Toad came face to face.

“Goin’ somewheres?” said Frog.

“Same place as you,” said Toad,

“But not today.”

Toad pulled a knife out of his boot.

Toad put the knife into Frog’s belly.

“See you in hell,” said Toad.

“Toad! Toad!” yelled Miss Sally

from the upstairs room.

“What happened?”

“Frog croaked,” said Toad.

Yeah, I went for the double puns (Sally Mander, croaked) but it fit, you know?  I tried not to get my hopes up on this contest, but I couldn’t help reading it in a sort of Western drawl just to get a feel for the sound of it.

It won.
And I got to read it in that drawl after all.
And it was fun.

1:05

Though the residency is hardly over – heck, I don’t even graduate until a week from today – the element I worried about the most is now past tense: I delivered my lecture on boy books to my peers.

Due to some funky scheduling issues, I had the distinction of being the only event scheduled at an odd time, something I hadn’t noticed until it was pointed out to me.  At 1:05 PM I nervously took the podium,  opened my mouth, blinked, and it was an hour later.

If I had any worries about delivering a dicey topic to a hostile audience, it was foolishness.  Vermont College has the most open-hearted and welcoming participants around, and their words of encouragement and support was beyond anything I could have imagined.

As for the experience itself, the lecture, the overall feeling was a bit like a roller coaster.  Yes, that’s a tired metaphor, but it isn’t the ride I’m talking about, it’s the anticipation.  You get in line and you watch as the riders in front of you (the classes before me in this case) step up and get on.  You study their nervousness and excitement, and you’re still in the line when they get off hooting and hollering they survived.  Another class gets on the ride, you inch closer, and you can see the shift in their intensity, the way they reason whether it is better to sit in the front or the back of the ride.  What seemed like an impossible wait at the beginning has morphed into impossible anticipation.

Today was lecture day and I was in the front of the line.  At 1:05 it was my turn to take a seat and pull down the safety bar.  There was a lurch and the climb up that first incline, and then free-fall to the end of the ride that seemed over in a flash.  The ride ends, and while I’m leaving to the sound of applause I see the faces of those classes behind my class waiting in line, unable to imagine themselves at the front of the ride, unable to believe they will ever survive.

But we do.  We weren’t the first and we won’t be the last.

And it might be a while before we get the chance to ride again.

And that’s okay, too.

final rez, day one

Has it been two years?  Two full year of writing and revising and reading and whatnot?

Day of of my final residency at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  Ten days from now I’ll stand on that glorious old stage in front of the pipe organ and receive my MFA hood.  And after that it will be official: I is a writer person.

First day is always so hectic.  Hugs all around, everyone trying to fit six months worth of life into five minutes worth of explanation.  Like we’re not going to have plenty of time over then next week to talk.  Oh, wait…

This year there’s a small ice rink set up on the green.  And a sign in front that says SKATE AT YOUR OWN RISK.  I found it both amusing and inspiring for some reason.  This poem, for example, came to me while passing the sign this evening:

rink on the green

a line, an edge
that place where invisibility
meets the cold, hard reality
that is
ice.

thin or slippery
fickle in the ways of physics
the rink beckons
and asks that we calculate
the hidden danger of our amusements.

“skate at your own risk”
the sign says
as if life ever permits us
a free pass to skate
at someone else’s.

And so the residency begins

cybiliscious!

How could I have forgotten to mention this?  The finalists for the Cybils have been announced, and in this horse race it’s anybody’s guess how it’s going to end up.  Except for the judges in each category, they have a pretty good idea how things are going to end up, but then they only figure it out a few days ahead of the announcements.  At least that’s my memory from participating in the last couple of years.

This year, however, instead of judging graphic novels I’m on the Middle Grade fiction panel.  Why?  Mostly because I spent the better part of the last year reading, studying, and finally writing a middle grade book so it seemed the most logical choice.  Call it an affinity, if you will.

That said, half of the finalist titles presented are surprises to me.  This is good because I hate going in feeling like I already know something about the book and have to separate that from my reading experience.  It makes the process of judging… cleaner?

That said, I will say I am disappointed that one middle grade book didn’t make the cut.  Anywhere.  Some felt it belonged in one category, others in another, and its final placement, I feel, is what killed its chances in the first round.  These things happen, I’m not surprised, and they are usually the backstory behind why certain “obvious” choices don’t end up winning in awards contests.  As disappointing as it might be, it’s a great object lesson for me as a writer to not be upset should anything I write ever end up “overlooked” for awards.

Anyway, check out the lists and root for your favorites.  I doubt there are any office pools like people do with the Oscars, but who knows?  Maybe some librarians out there are running numbers in the back room near the mending desk, hiding markers in retired checkout card pockets.

what’s your twenty?

In police scanner codes, 10-20 is location.  “What’s your twenty” means Where are you? And for some reason the year 2010, when said twenty-ten, feels like a call for a similar status update.  What’s your 20-10?

I’ve been thinking about my location, about where I am and where I hope to go starting from this place.  Realizing a few days ago that my resolutions for the new year need some meaty gals and agendas attached to make them real has created a bit of a struggle; I know what I want to do but can’t really lay out the plans without more research.  This makes the resolutions seem vague enough to avoid – especially when I’m still crowded with other time constraints at the moment – and at the same time they sound more like wants and needs rather than actionable items.

Nonetheless, at my current 20, this is what I’m thinking about for the coming year.

An agent. I need an agent to represent my writing. I have waffled about the idea of hunting down an agent for years, wanting to feel more involved in really pitching my stories, but one of my mentors told me something recently I’d never heard or considered.  Agents shield writers from rejections.  If I have an advocate on my behalf able to ease me into the rejection process, the idea somehow doesn’t seem scary.
Goal: An agent by April 1st.

Three new books by the end of the year. This is possible because I’ve done the math in my head.  Weekly page goals are more than possible.  Even if I take my worst month during this last semester as a guide, I would still be able to finish a manuscript within eight or nine weeks and still have time for quality revision.  It’s ambitious, but I’ve been holding onto some of these stories for far too long.  They need to get out.
Goal: A new book-length manuscript by each of the following deadlines – April 30th, August 31st, and December 31st.

Find a writing partner and a critique group.  This is tricky because I’ve rushed into bad critique groups in the past and it actually was worse than having no support network at all.  Given the number of people in my grad school program this might already be partially settled, but I’m having a hard time giving myself hard and fast rules for when this should be in place by.  So I’m going to call this an ongoing effort with the hope that it’s accomplished sooner than my deadlines.
Goal:  Writing partner by June 1st, critique group by December 31st.

Three is a magic number so I think I’ll stop here with the goals for 2010.  I have other things that fall more into the lines of wishes and desires – things like doing more photography, making more art, maybe even learning a musical instrument – but as much as they would feed the soul they will not crush me if they didn’t happen.  No, I think these three goals are solid enough to keep me busy and able to look back this time next year feeling like I’d done what I set out to do.

That’s where I’m at.

resolution evolution

My final ‘duh’ moment of 2009 came to me yesterday, and it concerns new year’s resolutions.  As with holiday cards, I’m pretty spotty about making and keeping resolutions because, well, I guess because I’m like a lot of people.  It’s easy to imagine the year one way in January and have it become something else by December.  Sometimes something way else.

The problem, I realized, is that a resolution is not a plan.  It’s a lot like a good intention or a promise; it needs something to back it up.  I know, pretty obvious.  Thus the sterling moment of duh.

What makes it particularly silly is that I know this and have for most of the last ten years.  My first trip to Europe back in 1999 came about after years of vague talk because I actually made a plan.  It was a year in the works – how much I needed to save, research on places to visit, how I was going to ease my way out of my job, pay rent while I was gone, the works.  It didn’t really need that full year, but planning it that way made it happen.  So after a decade of saying I would make the trip, setting an actual goal made it happen.

While I didn’t initially intend to make any resolutions this year I’ve decided to look at my vague goals, wishes – and yes, resolutions – for 2010 and see if I can’t change them into something a little more formal. Time to really think this thing through.

Oh yeah.  Next year’s gonna be big.  I can’t say I feel it, but I can make it happen I think.