Mentor Monday: Strengths and Weaknesses of the First Person Narrative

            Over the years, it has become common for YA authors to use the first person when writing young adult novels. Using first person brings readers into the story in a “You are there” way. First person can be limiting, however, and if you’re thinking of writing your story in first person, read some novels that use this technique before you start. I’d also like to recommend finding a copy of Sherry Garland's Writing for Young Adults. It’s a very good introduction to the YA genre. Garland is well-read and uses many examples of fine YA literature to illustrate points in each chapter:

"Some examples of excellent first person YA novels are Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson, Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers and S.E. Hinton's books, The Outsiders and That Was Then, This is Now."(p. 106)

Hinton sold The Outsiders, her first novel, when she was around sixteen years of age. The book, Garland says, ushered in a new type of YA:

"Many authorities believe that the YA literature revolution erupted in the late 1960's. In a turbulent social and political climate young adults adopted the war cry "tell it like it is," and authors like S. E. Hinton (a teenager herself) emerged, creating fiction with realistic adolescent characters in realistic situations."  (p. 8)

The Outsiders is the story of fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, his brothers (Sodapop and Darry) and their gang. The Curtis brothers have been on their own since the death of their parents.

"Since Mom and Dad were killed in an auto wreck, the three of us get to stay together only as long as we behave. So Soda and I stay out of trouble as much as we can, and we're careful not to get caught when we can't." (p.11)

Garland suggests "part of the process of developing characters is giving them appropriate names. . ." (p.124) In an on-line interview S.E. Hinton said she felt the teen years are ". . .an age when you would like to have an unusual name. It helps establish identity."  (Barnes and Noble Chat Transcripts, December 3, 1997)

I didn't feel Hinton's characters' odd names added anything to our ability to understand who or what the characters were. "Ponyboy" and "Sodapop" would have been more believable as nicknames. But the author says these are the boys’ legal names, given to them by their father:

"My dad was an original person," I said. "I got a brother named Sodapop, and it says so on his birth certificate." (p.30)

I found the idea, that an adult would saddle children with such names, distracting when I first read the book. Then Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple. But I digress…

Sometimes I got lost in Hinton's novel and other times I was thrown so far out of it I wondered why she bothered to use first person at all. Author intrusion is prevalent. I am amazed Hinton's editor let so much of it pass:

"Soda is handsomer than anyone else I know. . .He's not as tall as Darry, and he's a little slimmer, but he has a finely drawn, sensitive face that somehow manages to be reckless and thoughtful at the same time." (p. 16, italics mine) 

I could not imagine any fourteen-year-old describing a sibling in that way. S. E. Hinton may have been a well-read teen, but Hinton was not being true to Ponyboy's character with such flowery language. I will even risk being politically incorrect when I say that I was also not convinced this was language a boy would use—at least not the boy she was trying to create.

Walter Dean Myers' Fallen Angels makes a useful counterpoint. Compare Myers' protagonist, Richard Perry, describing a soldier just arriving in Viet Nam:

"One of the new guys who came in was from Fort Dix. He looked like one of the characters in an Archie Andrews comic, but he was so scared it wasn't funny. He told us his name was Jenkins." (p. 20 Fallen Angels)

            In Fallen Angels, Myers' character, Richard Perry, tells about his tour of duty in Vietnam. Perry is educated, and, like Ponyboy Curtis, well-read, yet his description of the new guy in the platoon, while sparse, accomplishes a great deal. Reference to the Archie comic books not only brings readers into the 60's with Perry but allows us to participate in the description of the character. We add our own details to Jenkins with our own mental references to Archie, Reggie and Jughead.

Sherry Garland suggests that dialogue can be used to convey the setting of a novel:

". . .dialogue is a shortcut that eliminates the need for long passages of description." (p. 133) 

Both Hinton and Myers present their novels' settings through the use of dialogue. Myers sets his novel's scene in the first two pages, preparing the reader in a matter of three sentences:

                        "Somebody must have told them suckers I was coming."

                        "Told who?" I asked.

                        "The Congs, man. Who you think I'm talking about?" (p.3)

I read thirty-one pages of The Outsiders before I realized that the setting was not New York City:

                        "Didn't he use to ride in rodeos?  Saddle bronc?"

            "Yeah. Dad made him quit after he tore a ligament, though. We still hang around rodeos a lot. I've seen you two barrel race. You're good." (p.31)

            Now I can't say that Hinton misleads her audience with suggestions that the setting is specifically New York, but neither does she indicate until the sentences above where the story is set. Bits of description spread throughout the book hint at least at a Big Apple-type setting until suddenly, rodeos are part of the conversation. Once again, I'm catapulted right out of the story while I let my brain process this new information. The knowledge essentially becomes a red herring. Rodeos, horses, and riding are barely mentioned again and have no place in the plot. In an interview, Hinton mentions that she is from Tulsa, Oklahoma. "Write what you know?"  Maybe, but the section reads like an afterthought ("Oh!  Maybe I ought to put something about the setting here.")

            Myers writes what he knows, too. Richard Perry, like the young Walter Dean Myers, is from Harlem and is in the Army. The difference is Myers doesn't ever pull me out of Viet Nam when he is providing this background information.

            Hinton's novel was published in 1967 and is supposed to deal with contemporary themes. Myers' Fallen Angels was published in 1988 but deals with the Vietnam War during 1967-1968. I would have been within the same age-group as the protagonists in both novels, yet I could not relate to the characters in The Outsiders. It was not because I had never been a member of a "greaser" gang. I never fought in Vietnam either. It shouldn't matter. Myers’ book does a better job of "You are there."

            That’s what you want to accomplish, too.  You want your first person story to take the reader intimately along for the protagonist’s ride.  Without throwing the reader out of the story.

Women of Wednesday - Gerda Lerner

Gerda Lerner died this past week on January 2.  She was 92 years old.  If you’re asking yourself ‘Who is Gerda Lerner?’ she was the person who brought Women’s Studies (the history of women) to the world.

Gerda was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein in Vienna, Austria, on April 30, 1920.  She grew up in a wealthy family and noticed the inequities of life even as a child.  In a house full of servants, she watched her mother drop her books, newspapers, and clothing where she pleased while the servants picked them up.  She didn’t think it was very fair.  And then there was the bat mitzvah incident.  As she prepared herself for the ceremony, she realized Judaism did not allow girls and women to achieve the same positions as men.  She announced she did not believe in God and refused to take part in the ceremony.

As she grew into her teens, Adolph Hitler was growing his Nazi party and, by the time she was 17, he had annexed her homeland.  Her father, a pharmacist with several drug stores, heard he was to be arrested, and fled to Lichtenstein.  The Nazis arrested Gerda and her mother instead.  For six weeks she languished in jail while the Nazi’s hoped her father would return and sign over all he owned to get them back. 

Jail wasn’t easy.  Gerda believed she would either be killed or sent to a concentration camp.  Along with the mental stress, there was also little to eat.  Food for prisoners was minimal, and Jews received even less than others.  But Gerda was lucky.  Two other prisoners - gentile women, arrested for their underground work with the resistance - shared their food with her and her mother.  When Gerda asked them why, they replied, “We’re Socialists.”

Eventually, Gerda was released and joined the resistance.  In 1939, she and her boyfriend escaped Austria and immigrated to America.  They married but the relationship didn’t last.  Gerda was alone in a New York.  She took odd jobs while she learned the language, and wrote stories about the Nazi takeover and occupation.  By 1940, she had met Carl Lerner, a communist and theater director.  They married and moved to California.

Gerda began working with CAW, the Congress of American Women, and by 1946, had helped found the Los Angeles chapter.

“In Vienna, all the people I worked with were women: the people in the jail, the people in the underground . . . I saw women being active in every levelexcept the executive level.”

She continued to write, producing a novel and a musical, and co-authored the screenplay, Black Like Me, with her husband.  She was active in the causes of trade unions, civil rights, anti-militarism, and McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist.  She was also a founding member of NOW, the National Organization of Women.

In the late 1950’s, she decided to go back to school.  She attended the New School for Social Research and went on to get an M.A. and Ph.D from Columbia University.  When she told her professors she wanted to study women’s history, they laughed at her.

 “They made me a laughingstock.  They thought I was crazy.  Graduate school was not a happy experience for me.  I was presented with a narrative of the past in which women did not exist.  I kept saying, ‘Where are the women?’  I was told they were having babies.”

Gerda studied women’s history anyway and wrote her dissertation, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967.)   She found their story to be so fascinating she decided to teach a course on them.  Once again, the men she had to deal with made that difficult.

In 1968, she became a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and started the first program ever to offer a Masters degree in women's history.  She also worked in the civil rights movement, which led her to write Black Women in America:  A Documentary History.

“ . . . when I worked with black women, I was overwhelmed by the talent and persistence of their effort—and their total invisibility.  I was told they left no record.  I knew that to be a lie.  My experience told me that.  This was the first collection of primary sources by black women at a time when everybody told me that it was impossible to do that.”

In 1980, she created the nation's first Ph.D. program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  From 1981 to 1982, she served as president of the Organization of American Historians and helped make women's history accessible to leaders of women's organizations and high school teachers.  In 1993, she wrote The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, which deals with how exclusion from the historical record affects women.  In 1997, she published two more books – Why History Matters:  Life and Thought, and The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimke.  In 2002, she published Fireweed:  A Political Autobiography.

Gerda stayed active and involved until the end.  It’s said she ‘even agitated at the Oakwood retirement center in Madison Wisconsin’ where she lived her last few years.

“It’s such a total absurdity that one half of the human population had accrued to itself the pretense that what it did was significant and what the other half did was insignificant.  The emancipation of women is irreversible. You can’t wipe women out.”

Mentor Monday on Tuesday - Conquering Writer's Block

Most of us have probably experienced writer’s block at one time or another, that frustrating inability to make the words come.  As a beginning writer, I faced it often, but as I learned more and more, the problem arose less and less, and eventually disappeared altogether.  And that has led me to the belief that writer’s block is, perhaps, simply a state of unpreparedness. 

As a beginner, I was a panster.  I made it up as I went along.  I got an idea, played it out in my mind a bit, and started writing.  There was no plotting for me, no outlines, and while I finished several novels, they were long, hard hauls because, sooner or later, I always hit the point where I didn’t know what came next.  I would go for months unable to write a word.  At the time, I didn’t know why.  I knew where I wanted the story to go.  Why couldn’t I make it go there?

Well, now I know.  I didn’t prepare.  I didn’t make the map that would take me from the beginning of my novel to the end, so I had to sit there for days, weeks, months, until I figured out the next part of my story.  Once I did that, the writing came easy again until I got to the next part of my story that I hadn’t figured out.  I wrote five novels that way, and they’re decent, but they’re not good enough to sell.  I call them my learning novels.

 And then I wrote novel number six, which I still didn’t plot or outline on paper, but I did have it all in my head.  I wrote 50,000 words in four days.  No writer’s block.  And it was a much better novel than any I had previously written. 

Now, I still don’t do outlines because it’s my nature to add way more than I really need, and my outlines turn out almost as long as the novel, but I do plot.  On paper.  It’s not one event after another.  It’s the opening, the inciting incident that gets the ball rolling, and then the major events along the way, until I reach the climax and ending.  Then I flip the paper over and do the same thing for the internal plot.  It’s generally only 7-10 lines each, and when I’m done, I throw it away because it stays in my head.  It takes me from beginning to end, and I have never had writer’s block since I started doing that. 

 It seems a no-brainer now.  Plan ahead.  But when you’re just starting out and you think you’re doing the right thing, you’re not looking for a different way.  What I did worked for me.  Sure, I had those bouts of writer’s block to deal with, but I was completing novels.  Why would I do anything differently?  I thought that was just a normal part of writing.

What I’ve since learned is that it doesn’t have to be.  It’s like driving from Boston to L.A.  If you have a map, whether on paper or in your head, and you’re aware of all the detours and construction along the way, you’re going to get to your destination quicker and easier than someone who doesn’t.  They’ll eventually get there, too, but it won’t be as easily or as fast. 

So take the time to make the map.  It doesn’t have to be my way or someone else’s way.  Maybe a synopsis will work for you, or a chapter by chapter outline.  Whatever it is that works best for you, do it.  Yes, it’s tedious, especially when you want to just dive into the writing, but in the end, it pays off.  You’ll always know where you’re going, and you’ll eliminate all the logic problems and dead ends before you start.  And it’ll be a much smoother ride.

Poetry Friday: Dark Birds

All the dark birds,
but one,
rush from the river
leaving only the stillness
of their language.

                 -- Anita Endrezze, Yaqui

You can check out more great poems at Matt Forrest's blog, Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.

Women of Wednesday: Lucretia Mott

Tomorrow (Jan. 3) is the birthday of Lucretia Mott, one of the better-known heroes of the woman’s suffrage movement. Write Sister Janet Buell profiled Lucretia in the Massachusetts volume of the America’s Notable Women Series, Women of the Bay State. She was in many ways similar to many of the other women suffragists, and yet, of course, unique. Two hundred and twenty years after her birth, she continues to inspire those who seeing wrong, try to correct it. We can best honor her, and the many others who worked with her, by identifying the injustices in our own world, and working to eliminate them.

Born to Quaker parents in Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth century, Lucretia Coffin grew up on the island of Nantucket. At 13 she was sent to boarding school off-island, to a Quaker school in the Hudson valley region of New York. The school had been coeducational from its founding in 1797, and it was there that Lucretia met her future husband, James Mott. Her family moved to Philadelphia while she was at Nine Partners, and when Lucretia and James married, they settled in that city as well. Lucretia was very active in the thriving Quaker community there, especially in the rapidly-developing abolitionist movement. Even while her children were small she held leadership positions in Philadelphia, as they became independent she traveled across the northeast, organizing and speaking at anti-slavery events.

Many of the women who worked to outlaw slavery in the mid-nineteenth century developed a parallel interest in woman’s rights. Their experience in leadership among the abolitionists gave them the confidence to turn their considerable expertise and passion to the cause of their sisters. Lucretia met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, when the women attendees were forced to sit behind a screen! Eight years later, of course, the seminal Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls marked the beginning of the struggle for suffrage for women in the United States (although voting rights resolution was the only one of the original eleven that the convention did not pass unanimously). Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the Declaration of Sentiments and Lucretia Mott was the first to sign it. Until the Civil War, most of the women continued to divide their efforts between abolition and women’s rights. In 1866, Lucretia was elected to be the first president of the Equal Rights Association. For the remainder of her long and active life, she campaigned for the rights of women, not only to vote but be educated, to own and inherit property, to have custody of their children, and other basic rights so fundamental that we sometimes forget they were once denied to us.

Only one of the signers of the 1848 Declaration (Charlotte Woodward) lived long enough to vote in the federal election in 1920. The example of Lucretia Mott and her sisters reminds us that “justice for all” is worth the struggle, even if we personally will not reap the benefits.

Happy Birthday, Lucretia.