Reading Like a Writer: Maggie Stiefvater’s THE SCORPIO RACES and Magical Realism

Magical realism is a phrase I never completely understood until I recently read Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races. The term seems contradictory: how could a realistic story contain magical elements? What does a writer do to introduce those elements without throwing the novel into the terrain of fantasy? I suppose some readers will argue that The Scorpio Races is fantasy, but I’m going to take the side of magical realism, and this analysis approaches her fabulous story with that in mind.

Her setting is entirely believable – an island off the coast of, well, something like Ireland. There are references to the mainland, the Atlantic, and America, and the names she uses have that Celtic ring: Finn Connolly, Sean Kendrick, Skarmouth, Thisby. Our heroine’s nickname is Puck, conjuring Shakespeare. People live in proper houses, drink in pubs, drive Morris cars, raise sheep; the rock-strewn grass hillocks are contained by hedgerows and stone walls. Altogether this is a place we know, its familiarity bred of our familiarity with Anglo-Saxon literature and lore, even if there is one extremely odd thing about this place.

The sea that surrounds the island is inhabited by flesh-eating water horses.

By the time I was ten pages in, I completely believed that Thisbe exists, and that I’d better watch out for those frightening yet beautiful uisce. That this magical element of The Scorpio Races also derives from our Celtic heritage is part of what makes it feel real.

The deadly November races on the backs of the uisce forms the heart of the concept, but this is also a love story, a coming-of-age story, a love-of-horse story, and a triumph of the spirit over soulless financial power. Sean and Puck tell their tales in first person present tense, enhancing the immediacy of both characters and plot: “this is happening to me, and it’s happening right now.” Once we buy into these characters, we buy the whole tale, hook, line, and sinker.

Puck is a game girl with a face full of freckles and unruly hair in the middle of an unruly orphaned life:

For a moment, I see the room like anyone else might see it. It looks like everything around Finn has crawled out of the mouth of the kitchen sink drain. It’s a mess, and we’re a mess, and no wonder Gabe wants to leave.

‘Let’s go,’ I say.

Sean’s voice is hard, born of his hard luck, and he knows horses. He knows horses better than anyone. He’s also a boy of few and well-chosen words:

I slide off her and hand him the reins. He takes them with a puzzled expression on his already puzzling face.

I say, ‘This mare is going to kill someone.’

The strong and enticing Puck and Sean, who are (as the reader sees long before they do) a perfect match, are also so much fun to live with that the story’s magical element is almost unnecessary. As a writer then, I've come to think that the best magical realism must possess this quality: that the realistic aspects of the story are even more engaging than the magical aspects. 

In a true fantasy, our perception of the story itself may be clouded by dwarf behavior, elf antics, or fairy godmother wishes. In magical realism, the author could dispense with the magic – and still have a heck of a great tale. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Stiefvater writes beautifully, conjures a complete and visible world, and that her secondary characters are every bit as engaging as her protagonists.

But I maintain that in order to write great magical realism it is necessary to write a great, rich and complex story that rises above the magic – that the realistic part of the story makes a magic all its own.

My donation drive for the American Red Cross continues all month, including comments on this blog post. Many thanks!!

The Gut Shot: Hitting Readers Where it Counts

Okay, disclaimer time: Kelly Bennett is one of my favorite people. She was one of the first published writers who treated me like a equal (when I was a naive newbie). And she's enormously talented, having written acclaimed, fun and charming books like Your Mommy Was Just Like You, Not Norman, Dance Y'all Dance...and many more, including her most recent release One Day I Went Rambling. Plus, she's a Vermont College grad! 

Check out her website at http://www.kellybennett.com/ and all her fabulous books.

So when Kelly agreed to write me a guest post I told her to have at it, and she suggested writing about...FOOD. 

Who doesn't like food? (Silly question.) But, how can food be used in story? Here's what Kelly has to say:

Children know food. Eating is something they’ve been doing all their lives. By middle childhood most have accumulated a trove of textural, olfactory, visual, and aural food memories: the crunch of celery, the stinky sock stench of ripe cheese, the sticky spicy-cool sweetness of candy cane, the rasp of dry toast against the roof of a mouth, the slurp of spaghetti, to name a few. They’ve formed opinions about foods and, through the media and stories, have knowledge of foods they’ve never experienced personally. Additionally, they’ve amassed food memories, some with strong emotions attached (think mother’s milk, birthday cake, “clear your plate” and “no dessert until you…”). Why not draw on what readers already know—food—to connect them with your characters and spice up your stories? In other words: Aim for the gut!

Here are some examples to get you Thinking Food:

Plot: Each of us spends “more than fifteen full days a year doing nothing but eating” (Food Rules by Bill Haduch), so at its most basic food plays a central role in reader’s lives. Use it in character’s lives, too. Food issues, the quest for food, preparation of food, lack, need, or abundance of food, can serve as a plot points.

•       Perfect by Natasha Friend, teens with eating disorders.
•       James Cross Giblin’s The Boy Who Saved Cleveland, a survival story all about corn.
•       Joan Bauer’s Close to Famous and Sprinkles and Secrets by Lisa Schroeder both center on cupcakes. 

Characterization: Consider the immortal words of J. Wellington Wimpy “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Thoughts, attitudes, and opinions about food add flesh to our character’s bones.

• In Ruby Lu, Brave and True by Lenore Look, this description of the new girl says it all: “When the ice-cream truck came down the street, Christina was always the first in line.”
• Tracing the Stars by Erin Moulton, stars Indie Lee Chicory who loves chowder almost as much as she does her golden cola drinking lobster.
• The Chocolate Touch, John Midas is a nice boy with “one bad fault: he was a pig about candy.”

Mealtimes:  Back-story and motivation are revealed, stories unravel, and secrets are shared.

• Who’s coming to dinner? Meals are an excuse to bring all manner of characters together.
• What’s for dinner? Mealtime fare reveals economic situations and informs readers about other times, places & cultures.
• Where’s dinner? The place and table establish setting

Descriptions: Food is often used to describe color, especially skin color: white as cream, honey golden, mocha, Joe’s face “pale as an onion” (How to Eat Fried Worms, Thomas Rockwell). At best, food references create multi-sensory descriptions.

• Sid Fleischman describes the prince’s face as “lobster-red from running” in The Whipping Boy. Readers unfamiliar with lobsters will visualize a reddish face and read on. Those familiar with lobsters will round out the image by picturing the prince’s face as hard and crusty like a lobster shell, and a whiff of sea salt.
• Richard Best calls a classmate’s legs “Slim Jim pretzels” (The Candy Corn Contest by Patricia Reilly Giff) –long, thin, pretzel salt, bumpy, too.
• Ruby Lu’s ink “as lumpy as tempura batter” (Ruby Lu, Brave and True by Lenore Look)—Look is a master of food imagery. Here’s more:
• “At night the rain was a lullaby of a billion grains of rice falling on the roof”
• Ruby likens her father’s fast knitting to “a starving man’s chopsticks at a feast
• Her brother was “wrapped up like a burrito”

Food names serve double duty as they conjure a multi-sensory image while giving name to a person, place or thing:

• The island of “Tangerina” and port of “Cranberry” (My Father’s Dragon, Ruth Stiles Gannett)
• Dogs “Fudge-Fudge” and “Marshmallow” (The New Animal by Emily Jenkins)

One of Kelly's inventive Halloween costumes...

Emotion: To quote Pillsbury:  “Nothing says loving like something from the oven.”

• When disappointed in her brother, Ruby “felt all her love for him drying up like spilled soda on a hot sidewalk.”
• When Ruby’s mad she feels “hotter than microwave popcorn.”
• Lowji, Candace Fleming’s Indian character in Lowji Discovers America gets mad, too, he turns “hot, hotter than Bape’s curry sauce.”

Final Words on Food:

If it speaks; it eats. Therefore, as plot, character, description, or emotion, there’s room for food in every story. Bon appetite!

Warning: Food references are like wine and chocolate: as much as we’d like to think otherwise, for best results they should be used in moderation.

Voices You Should Hear: Tami Lewis Brown

Kidlit writers are some of the nicest people on the planet. And one of my favorite people in the kidlit world is Tami Lewis Brown. 

Tami is not only sweet and generous, she's also talented. Her middle grade debut novel, The Map of Me, is outstanding - I predict that it will be read and loved and rewarded. Tami has written a wonderful blog post for me, and I'm proud to bring it to you.

Middle grade novels and their protagonists come in every flavor—Nancy Drew to Artemis Fowl to India Opal Buloni. Eight to twelve year olds want to be entertained with fun light reads, but kids who love to read also want to dive into a book that touches their budding emotional lives. They yearn to explore horizons beyond home and school and a serious middle grade novel can chart the way.

Eight to twelve-year-olds are fluent readers and the books written for them are windows into the great big outside world, perhaps offering them a taste before they explore that territory for themselves. Middle grade books offer entertainment—no nine-year-old will sit still for a boring book—but they can also serve up complex emotion and writing every bit as sophisticated as YA or even adult novels.

But even though every adult was once a middle grade reader, grown-ups in our country seems to suffer from some kind of adult onset reading amnesia. Many adults believe middle grade books are simplistic. Easy to read. Even easier to write.

No way.

Try one of these passages on for size:

I come from a family with a lot of dead people . . . (Daddy) say “It’s not how you die that makes the important impression, Comfort; it’s how you live.”  

                                                            Debbie Wiles’ EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS

When Jamie saw him throw the baby, saw Van throw the little baby, saw Van throw his little sister Nin, when Jamie saw Van throw his baby sister Nin, then they moved.

                                                            Carolyn Coman’s WHAT JAMIE SAW

There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.

                                                            Kathi Appelt’s THE UNDERNEATH

The stories these books tell and the writing these writers use to tell it are every bit as sophisticated as any novel for older readers. Actually they’re even better because these writers fully respect their readers, often exposing them to difficult concepts and well-chosen words for the first time. Great middle grade authors put me in the mind of butterfly hunters as they catch elusive ideas with nets spun of prose, trapping tough concepts just long enough for young readers to observe and understand truths.

I wrote about hard ideas in THE MAP OF ME—exploring tough subjects with images and language middle grade readers relate to. One of my favorite bits is when the protagonist Margie pulls on her disapproving father’s jacket, symbolically taking on his feelings.

The jacket smelled of clove aftershave and the bacon-cheddar biscuits Daddy slipped in his pocket mornings he worked opening at the store. A whiff of ink from an old ballpoint that leaked in the pocket, its oily stink left along with the mark. Old Gold Filters he’d borrowed off Al and smoked behind the World of Tires. What Momma didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Soft and sad had worked into the jacket’s old plaid lining, leftover from a thousand days on Daddy’s back. Time and space were grooved into the corduroy. I pulled the front closed, tighter than the zipper, but I still didn’t feel warm.

But is the story of a girl who thinks she can’t do anything right, who can’t satisfy her father, who worries she’s run her mother off too heavy for middle grade readers? Is this really YA with a too young protagonist? Or even an adult novel in middle-grade disguise?

I don’t think so. Margie’s voice and experience are young. And young doesn’t mean dumb or blind to the world.

Obviously every reader has his or her own taste. No book is for everybody. But many middle grade readers know all about not measuring up. They don’t have to come from a family where a baby was thrown, or a pet cat dumped, or even a family with a whole lot of dead people to understand sadness and loss. And happiness and redemption, too. I’m so glad my job is writing those kinds of hard, true stories for people just learning about life.

Reading Like a Writer: Pacing

Lately lots of people I know seem to be talking about pacing in novels. Pacing was the topic of discussion on kidlitchat a few weeks back, about the same time that a thread opened on my Vermont College of Fine Arts discussion board. These conversations were roughly coincident with the release of the final installment of Susanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay. Perhaps that was accidental; but because I think Collins has mastered the art of pacing, I’d like to take a closer look at the topic and peruse Mockingjay for examples.

I searched for a definition of “pacing” in a few of my favorite craft books, and was surprised at how few make specific mention of it. John Gardner says only “the efficient and elegant writer makes each scene bear as much as it can without clutter or crowding.” Janet Burroway reflects simply, “Drama equals desire plus danger.”

Personally, I think pacing and tension are linked, but I'm still trying to discover exactly how.

It seems that pacing is an art that must be mastered as we craft scene after scene after scene, making each scene work to the max, and bridge these scenes with perfect transitions that let the reader rest...but not long enough to put the book down.

In Mockingjay, when Katniss confronts the damaged Peeta for the second time, the scene is relatively quiet, especially when compared with the action packed scenes that comprise most of the novel:

I’ve just reached the door when his voice stops me. “Katniss. I remember about the bread.”

The bread. Our one moment of real connection before the Hunger Games… “So, what do you remember?”

“You. In the rain,” he says softly… “I must have loved you a lot.”

Now, how does Collins move out of this scene without putting the reader in a doze? By upping the emotional ante between Katniss and Peeta, by not letting them out of the trap they are in:

“…Did you like kissing me?” he asks.

“Sometimes,” I admit. “You know people are watching us now?”

Huh? Why did Katniss say that? Well, clearly, she’s thinking that maybe Peeta’s thinking about kissing her right then, and she wants to discover whether he would and whether it matters that they are being watched – in fact, she wants to discover his heart and whether it still belongs to her. Does he offer it up?

Not if you are Collins:

“…What about Gale?” he continues.

My anger’s returning… “He’s not a bad kisser either,” I say shortly.

…Peeta laughs again, coldly, dismissively. “Well, you’re a piece of work, aren’t you?”

And with that, Katniss and Peeta are emotional enemies, and Katniss is not going to settle into contentment with him (yet), promising the reader more drama (desire plus danger) as clearly spelled out in the closing lines of the chapter:

Finally he can see me for who I really am. Violent. Distrustful. Manipulative. Deadly.

And I hate him for it.

Collins is a master at manipulating pacing. This scene is less than 3 pages long. It acts as an interlude but it gives up nothing in the way of tension - and I think that's because she twists and turns in her characters' thoughts, just as we all twist and turn whenever we argue with those we love/hate.

Do you have any thoughts about pacing versus tension? What other novels do you hold up as examples of good pacing?

Reading Like a Writer: Voice

The revisions on Forgiven are done (for now – there’s always more to do!) and now on to “Reading Like a Writer” (RLAW, for short.)

Before I start, with Tell Me A Secret (Holly Cupala) and The Sky is Everywhere (Jandy Nelson), I’d like to point to blog posts by my friend Bethany Hegedus, who began her own RLAW segment not long ago (her first post: http://bethanyhegedus.livejournal.com/984.html ). Both Bethany and I are graduates of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in writing for children, and these analyses are a kind of standard ritual, and one of the ways we hope to improve our work.

There seems to be a thing in books for teens lately about dead sisters. Tell Me a Secret and The Sky is Everywhere share that theme (along with a number of other books: Jane in Bloom by Deborah Lytton and Losing Faith by Denise Jaden are two that come to mind.) Secret and Sky are both contemporary novels written in first person, both protagonists are grieving, and both – Miranda in Secret and Lennie in Sky – go through a “thing” with their dead sisters’ boyfriends.

Yet these two novels, which in my opinion are among the best of this year, have strong, distinctive voices and that’s what sets them apart. So in this segment of RLAW, I’d like to start with voice.

There is authorial voice (the way you phrase things every time you write; for example, I’m very fond of parallel construction.) But the voice of your character is unique to the work.

In Secret, Miranda speaks in past tense with an urgency that drives the narrative:

“We sat together in the silence, time passing like the stream of cars whizzing beneath us on the highway. Another wave of pain threatened to engulf me, and I isolated it in my mind. It began the size of a marble and swelled into a watermelon, pink and fleshy and throbbing. Giving in would mean going back, something I wasn’t ready to do yet. Not until I knew everything.”

Miranda’s emotional edge is driven by her secret, which is captured in the image of something “pink and fleshy and throbbing;” the narrative voice is evocative but terse. Time is Miranda’s enemy, and her deadline (which we know about right from the start) looms. Cupala chooses a sentence structure that is elegant yet straightforward. She often ends her paragraphs with simple declarative sentences: “Maybe fear did, too.” “We each had a little of both.”

In Sky, Lennie’s voice couldn’t be more different: dreamy, languid, with unique and expressive vocabulary:

“I realize something that scares me: I’d be happy, but in a mild kind of way, nothing demented about it. I’d be turtling along, like I always turtled, huddled in my shell, safe and sound.

"But what if I’m a shell-less turtle now, demented and devastated in equal measure, an unfreakingbelievable mess of a girl, who wants to turn the air into colors with her clarinet, and what if somewhere inside I prefer this?”

Nelson chooses complex compound sentences and elevated imagery (“turtling,” “turn the air into colors”) that are exactly right for Lennie.

Miranda is an actor – she may be conflicted, but she’s constantly on the move, taking things in hand (not always successfully, which is the source of the novel’s tension.) Lennie is a dreamer – processing slowly and carefully, through words (poetry), and the tension here is driven by her inability to act at the right time. And these two disparate personalities are expressed by the unique voices given to them by Cupala and Nelson.

I’m sure I could go on, but I’ll turn it over to you. What unique voice have you read lately, in which the language used by the writer perfectly mirrors the personality of the protagonist?