curiosities from a children's book editor
And some favorite lyrics…
“I’m on my own / You’re selling our old ways / Stop telling me the right way to go / You are free.” (“You Are Free”)
“I know it’s impossible, but you should try to shake it off / and if you really wanna shake it off / you gotta re-arrange, re-arrange, re-arrange us.” (“The Re-Arranger”)
“I’ve been waiting for a sign / I’ve been waiting for a sign / To tell me where / Tell me where I belong.” (“Now”)
I’m a sucker for a good romantic storyline. In books, movies, tv shows, songs . . . whatever. But what makes a romance plot thread a good one? I mean, I know it when I see it, but I’ve been letting this question percolate for a while to try to articulate the answer a little. And two things that have crossed my path in the last few weeks have helped to clarify it for me a little.
The first: Entanglement Theory. If you wikipedia that, you’ll come across a pretty dry definition. But I was clued into it by the To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast from January 23, “The Wonder of Physics.” At the end of the episode a writer explained it as the quantum physics theory that when two subatomic particles are spend a significant amount of time in each other’s orbits, they shadow each other . . . even after they are separated. If one spins a certain way, the other will, even if it’s moved far, far away. It gives me little goosebumps when I think about applying it to us, too, and the people we let enter our orbits–whether romantic, platonic, or family.
The second: the poem that Molly posted yesterday, “Those Who Love” by Sara Teasdale.
Those who love the most,
Do not talk of their love,
Francesca, Guinevere,
Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise,
In the fragrant gardens of heaven
Are silent, or speak if at all
Of fragile inconsequent things.
And a woman I used to know
Who loved one man from her youth,
Against the strength of the fates
Fighting in somber pride
Never spoke of this thing,
But hearing his name by chance,
A light would pass over her face.
But without further ado, here’s what I’ve come up with as some keys to a good romance. I’m sure there are things I’ve missed, or exceptions to the rule. Feel free to point those out in the comments!
1. The main story–the orbit–has to be about something other than the romance itself. Love stories are best when they’re subplots. The characters need an orbit to be in with each other, after all.
2. The two characters have some sort of immediate connection. Not necessarily a good one, but something that fascinates, intrigues, or challenges.
3. Their interaction is neither neat nor easy. There are complications, heartbreaks, arguments. The two of them don’t necessarily even know that they are in love, or that it’s going to work out. (Are you thinking Darcy & Elizabeth Bennet with these last two? I sure am. And West Wing’s Josh & Donna, and MWT’s Eugenides & Attolia, and Graceling’s Katsa & Po, and DWJ’s Howl & Sophie, and Sarah Dessen’s Wes & Macy, and . . . see, I told you I’m a sucker for romance.)
4. Most of the romance is not directly talked about. It’s there in gestures, actions, reactions, and feelings, but rather than telling the reader how the characters feel, the writing makes us feel it along with them. As the poem points out, do the strongest loves need words? Are there even any words that could contain it right, anyway? Of course, that’s not to say there aren’t any direct declarations. There have to be one or two scenes when one of the characters holds a stereo over his head, or tells the other “how ardently he admires and loves her.” It’s payoff for all the signals and longing–and we do need to know that the characters realize what they feel for each other.
5. Along the same lines, a lot of the romance occurs in small, subtle details. It’s the build up of those everyday moments that make the grand gestures mean something. (I know I for one always think about the moment at the end of Lioness Rampant when George is there to catch Alanna before she even knows her knees are going to give out.)
6. There’s build up, yearning, tension as the characters circle each other, sometimes coming closer, sometimes further apart.
7. The ending isn’t a “happily ever after” that’s all sunshine and marshmallow fluff. Rather, it’s a hopeful choice that both characters are making together. They are a team by the end, a team that will take on whatever comes next, which is bound to be imperfect, but good because they can count on one another.
So, what do you think? Is this list a good start?
My Heart Is like a Zoo by Michael Hall.
Or, for something a little more on the silly side, check out:
A couple of weeks ago, I got to learn and participate a little in an African drum circle. Which isn’t something I would have ever sought out myself, probably, but I’m really glad the opportunity came my way. The man leading us made sure we understood that a drum circle is just that–a circle, a community. You can’t just take a drum and go off in a corner by yourself (because that would clearly annoy your neighbors pretty quickly); you have to be with a group, practicing a rhythm and beat together. It’s about belonging to something larger than yourself, and connection.
The African word he taught us is “ubuntu.” Which, as he explained it, means: I am me because of you, and you are you because of me. So simple, and yet . . . not. In a time of year when ads want us to believe that love and connection can be shown with things–things as superficial as a mass-produced necklace or an overused saying–I think ubuntu stands out as even more real and solid. A day, a life, has meaning because of the people who are connected to it and to us. The memories, traditions, gestures, and affections.
I am me because of the writers who have shared their stories with me; because of my family and friends; because of my teachers and mentors; because of the people who have loved me, and the people who have hurt me; the people who are here, and the ones who’ve gone; the ones near and those far; those I’ve known forever and those I’ve known only briefly.
One of the other things being part of a drum circle, even for only a few minutes, highlighted is that I have absolutely no rhythm. (Which isn’t a new discovery at all.) Think about it too much, and I completely lose the rhythm of drumming (or dancing or clapping or . . . well, anything). But if I stop thinking, and just listen to everyone around me, I can totally stay with them. With them, I can find the beat. Ubuntu.
Just now my roommate-for-the-weekend informed me that both Superman and Batman’s mothers were named Martha.
It’s a shame that I currently have no plans to have children. Because maybe he/she would save publishing.
Of course I’ve been thinking about new year’s resolutions. It’s that time, after all, however cliche it might be. I like beginnings, and I like choice. We have this whole new thing that we get to choose how to begin, how to fill . . . well, not to be too Hallmark card-y, but how to live.
A lot of the resolutions that have been bouncing around in my head are personal and uninteresting to anyone who isn’t me. And some are resolutions that I realize I make every year. Not necessarily because I fail to keep them in the previous year, but because I like to remind myself to keep going with them. Nothing’s ever really finished. One of those is not to shy away from making eye contact with people I walk by. (Unless they’re obviously crazy people, clearly.) The other is to continue to work on balancing my friends, my work, my family, and my alone time in a way that makes me feel that I’m doing my best by everyone.
But this year I’m also resolving to make time for some of the books that I own and really, really, really want to read, but haven’t yet. So here’s the list. I wonder how I’ll do!
-The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt
-Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
-Marcelo and the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
-Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier (I promise, Angie, this is the year!)
-Bonk by Mary Roach
-Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (if I wait much longer, I think the shelf life of this one might expire)
-The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
-Jacob Have I Love by Katherine Paterson
-Ulysses by James Joyce (I read this one nearly 10 years ago in college, and am curious to see how a second time might go.)
Books read (for pleasure, not work!) in 2009:
1. The Woman Who Rides like a Man by Tamora Pierce
2. Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce
3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
4. Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson
5. What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell
6. Paper Towns by John Green
7. Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
8. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
9. Fire by Kristin Cashore
10. Hate List by Jennifer Brown
11. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
12. Bones of Faerie by Janni Lee Simner
13. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
14. The Truth about Forever by Sarah Dessen
15. The Maze Runner by James Dashner
16. The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening by L. J. Smith
17. Winter Dreams, Christmas Love by Mary Francis Shura
And that’s it. Which is less than half of what I read last year. Five were re-reads, so twelve were new to me. And only one grown-up book! You might ask why the number went down so drastically. Well, my submissions went up pretty drastically this year. Those numbers?
I counted 427 manuscripts in my submissions log for this year. (Of those, 196 were agented, and most of the rest were from writers who attended conferences at which I spoke.) Thank the technology gods for my Sony Reader!
I’ve made a lot of great music discoveries this year, either through friends, or concerts, or emusic recommendations (which are almost always spot-on). One of the best shows I went to was Jason Webley’s back pretty early in the year. I wasn’t familiar with Jason Webley at all before the show, but the amazing and lovely Colleen AF Venable was, and wanted to go. I’m so glad I did! Not only was Jason Webley absolutely fantastic, but he and Sxip Shirey also recorded a video for their song “Days with You” there. I watched from the audience, but anyone who was wearing party-ish clothes (including Colleen and another friend) went up on stage to be in the video. Maybe you’ll spot her in the crowd scenes.
And since I only once every few years get my act together to collect addresses and send Christmas cards, instead this year, I made a mix cd for my friends. It’s songs by bands I discovered this year. Not all of them are new songs, or new bands, but they were new to me in 2009. Or, in the case of the last song, one that I didn’t realized I actually liked until 2009, though I’d heard it long before. Here’s the list for you to enjoy!
1. Wake Up / Arcade Fire
2. Keep Yourself Warm / Frightened Rabbit
3. Contender / Pains of Being Pure at Heart
4. Speed of Sound / Chris Bell
5. You Are Free / Mates of State
6. Dominoes / The Big Pink
7. It’s Too Easy / Dave Rawlings Machine
8. New York City Heat / Dead Heart Bloom
9. Be OK / Ingrid Michaelson
10. Hellhole Ratrace / Girls
11. Icarus / Jason Webley
12. Island Garden Song / Mountain Goats
13. Upon Viewing Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” / Titus Andronicus
14. Poker Face / Lady Gaga
15. Enjoy the Silence / Depeche Mode
I’m about to be a little cheesy.
There’s a book that I read every year, either at first snowfall or over Christmas. And since we had that little blizzard on Saturday, it’s time for . . . Winter Dreams, Christmas Love by Mary Francis Shura. It has a heart with “romance” in it on the spine. Cheesy, right? But I just kind of love it, because actually, the story is not as sappy as you’d imagine.
This book was, I think, one of my last Scholastic book club purchases in the seventh grade. (Yes, I continued to order books long after it was cool. I don’t understand how people could resist the siren call of those paper fliers!) Come on, what 12-year-old girl is going to pass this cover up? Right?
And it’s exactly the right story for a shy 12-year-old, too. Ellen is a normal 14-year-old girl just starting high school, and she falls hard for Michael, the guy–a junior–that every girl falls for. We follow her for three years as she deals with high school and her unrequited crush. Of course, at the end, Ellen finds out that Michael had fallen just as hard for her, and they get together. It warms your mushy heart, doesn’t it? Discovering the boy you’ve been crushing on does, in fact, like you back just as much is what everyone wants in high school (or, let’s face it, far beyond high school).
But Ellen’s crush isn’t easy on her. It actually sucks pretty bad. When I was in seventh grade, the YA section of our Waldenbooks was filled with mostly Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine or really, really cheesy romances. So despite the cheeserific title, Winter Dreams, Christmas Love seemed refreshingly real. After realizing she loves Michael, Ellen thinks, “She’d seen a lot of movies, read a lot of romances. She had thought love was supposed to be stars in your eyes and joy that made you feel like dancing. She didn’t feel like dancing. Her chest ached and she felt cold. She clasped her arms across her chest and held her breath to keep from crying. If love hurt this much, she didn’t want any part of it.” Love is the exact opposite of rainbows and unicorns for Ellen, and it’s the first book I read back then that showed it that way.
There are flaws in the book, to be sure. The characters often sound oddly old-fashioned for something written in the ’90s. The chronology of the scenes doesn’t always totally fit. But neither of those stuck out to me the first few times I read it back in the day; it’s something that I’ve only noticed because of my repeated yearly reading. When I was 12, I was caught up in Ellen’s struggle. She also has wonderful friends–which has always been a draw for me in a story–and a warm family. And her crush on Michael develops into a lovely friendship, too, despite the way the unrequited love hurts her. “They were friends who loved each other,” it says at the end, “and they had all the time in the world to see what came of that.”
Yeah, it still gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
About a month ago, I read two articles by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times that kind of blew my mind. I keep thinking about them. And now Dennis Overbye’s on my list of must-read columnists/reporters.
The thing is, science is fascinating. (Hence, my love for RadioLab on WYNC.) Physics is especially fascinating, because it’s also a little crazy. I never got to take a physics class in high school or college, though I would’ve liked to, but what very, very, very basic knowledge of it I have seems to say that it’s largely based on the question “What if?” Which is the question that leads to the most interesting answers, and stories.
One article, “Setting Sail into Space, Propelled by Sunshine,” is about an organization that’s planning to launch satellites that will sail on sunlight once it is in orbit. Like boats sail with wind. Because “light carries not just energy but also momentum–a story told by every comet tail, which consists of dust blown by sunlight from a comet’s core.” Tell me that is not super cool.
The other is an essay about the Large Hadron Collider, “The Collider, the Particle and a Theory about Fate.” This is the one that I kind of can’t get over. It talks about how the hadron collider–an experiment in Switzerland that is trying to cause protons to crash and show how the Big Bang may have occurred–is basically sabotaging itself. Through time travel. Which is a legitimate vein of research. For reals. There are scientists who say that these particles colliding “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.” So because what results from the particles colliding might be so bad, that result is somehow traveling through time to stop itself.
I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, and yet I also can’t get it out of my mind–and so I guess it makes sense that A Wrinkle in Time and The Time Traveler’s Wife have had the same effect.
In school science classes, the general take on science always seemed to be that it’s the opposite of magic. It’s orderly. It’s explainable, and classifiable, and cut and dry. But I never really bought that. Sure, we can go smaller and smaller from organism to cell to parts of a cell to atoms to protons and neutrons and electrons. We can give everything a name. But does that really explain anything? We can ask “Where did the protons come from?” And maybe we’ll even have an answer to that eventually, if the hadron collider stops sabotaging itself. Still…will we ever truly know why one thing happens instead of another? Why one molecule forms instead of another? It’s all still magic, even if we put a name on it.
Even time is fluid. That article quotes Einstein: “For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”
I think maybe I like physics because there’s a sense of wonder, and a sense that a crazy theory just might be the right one. It reminds me of a quote by Roald Dahl that I’ve always liked:
Above all, watch with glittering eyes the great world around you, because dreams are always hidden in the most unlikely of places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
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