My Complicated Relationship with Classic Literature

Everyone is all abuzz about Go Set a Watchman, the new title from Harper Lee that releases shortly. Literally everyone. Or so it seems. (If you're into it, I hear the Guardian's interactive first chapter, with voice narration available by Reese Witherspoon, is very good. I don't know as I don't plan to watch/read/consume.)

It's interesting to me to watch this new trend in literature, and it comes from an overall trend in society I think. The trend is the Celebrity Author Pedestalling. I can hardly blame JK Rowling for publishing under a pseudonym (this article is worth a read about the field of forensic linguistics, though I understand the original tip came from a blabby wife of an exec at the agency or elsewhere in JKRow's world.) The fuss about Harper Lee is ... confusing.

First, a confession. Due to an odd set of circumstances in my childhood (we moved twice during my high school years so I attended 3 schools in 4 years) I have never read To Kill a Mockingbird. I've also never read Moby Dick. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Beowulf. The Great Gadsby. Old Man and the Sea. Of Mice and Men. Lord of the Flies. The Grapes of Wrath. I don't really regret these absences, though I have The Great Gadsby on a bookshelf. Maybe one day it will out-compete my massive to-be-read pile. I doubt it.

I have, however, read and dissected Macbeth at least 3 times in High School and once or twice in college. I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, which almost killed me, but then was thrilled to find it as an option on the AP English exam that year or the next. I earned a 4 on that exam. (out of 5, which got me out of first year English requirements and composition classes in college.) I've read Dr. Faustus, Madame Bovary, and The Inferno. I've read Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Ibsen, Camus (in English and in French.) I hated with a pure unadulterated passion Kafka's Metamorphosis. Don't remember ever hating a book so much.

The subject of teaching kids classic lit comes up often in the media. (Here's one very interesting article about it, featuring a number of quotes from children and parents that are eye-opening.)

So we're back to the buzz about this new book, which has it's own odd backstory, almost like a book itself (this post isn't meant to address any of that odd backstory.) But I'm so puzzled by the elevation of this book as the One Thing That Is Awesome About Literature in 2015. There are *so* many good books that came out in 2015 or are due to. So much good stuff last year and the year before. So many books to anticipate. Why all the extreme focus on this one author, this one book? I know there's some element of joy of hearing from an author who didn't publish much, but I fear when we laser-focus on one author, we risk further alienating kids from books because they look at something like this and think, meh. Maybe it'll be assigned reading this year in my son's Honors 9th grade English class. I just asked him about his opinion of To Kill A Mockingbird (which he read within the last year) and he answered, "Meh."

When we've got so much great fiction coming out, so many great authors, I fear a focus on one title by one author will take away the emphasis on these other great titles, pull from the limited time we all have these days, pull emphasis from these other authors writing great works. It's not a rising-tide-raises-all-ships kind of situation, I don't think, when one author's singular work gets this kind of media attention/spectacle. It's not the same as the Harry Potter Phenomenon, best explained as the fact that when kids (and adults) finished reading HP, they moved on to other books. (Here's a great Leaky Cauldron article about that. I searched and read several other articles, but I find the fansite the best for this particular bit of HP-related trivia.)

I've sort of mushed the idea now that I've mentioned Harry Potter, but it brings up a point that helps me finalize this post -- when there are books like Harry Potter out there which can spark imagination and literally get millions upon millions of people to read, why do we need to over-emphasize just one title, just one book, just one author who wrote this book a very long time ago? And when it comes to literature classes and teaching English to kids, why aren't we using contemporary fiction more? I'm sure I'll have more observations as my son gets into his 9th grade English class, but for now, I'm left scratching my head at the idolatry and love for one book, when there are so very many books. It's like falling passionately in love with one poppy in a field with hundreds of thousands of them.

The Chaos Method of Book Editing

(First of all, I'd like to thank the talented Karen for being my awesome guest blogger last week She has amazing stories about networking.)

It may sound odd, but I've decided that I ♥ boxes. We moved into our new house last Friday. At first it was as fun as Christmas to tear into the boxes to see what was inside, but now that we're finally unpacking things that aren't absolutely essential to survival, I get a little pang every time I rip open the lid.

 You see, as long as the box is still shut up tightly, the things inside can't escape and make a mess. It's a beautiful thing. When you are writing a rough draft, it's probably a good idea to keep your plot inside some kind of a box. Some things have to be 'unpacked' before others or your story won't make any sense at all.

But your plot wasn't meant to stay neatly compartmentalized. A good plot should be out there where your characters will trip over it, get so frustrated with it that they kick it and break their toes. You know things are working when plot lines start whacking into each other like pool balls.

 J.K. Rowling is an absolute master at this. If you read Harry Potter as intensely as we do in our family, you will start to notice a pattern that looks something like this:

Something exciting happens to Harry
He wants to talk about it with Ron and Hermione
Other people's plots get in the way
Daily life gets in the way
Finally he talks to them and they come up with a plan
Something exciting happens to Harry
He wants to talk about it with Ron and Hermione...

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, Harry has just finished detention with an evil hag named Delores Umbridge. When she touches the raw skin on the back of his hand, the scar on his forehead sears with pain. He hurries off to tell Ron and Hermione, but when he gets to the Gryffindor common room:

 1--Everyone is celebrating because Ron has just been made Keeper of the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Ron is too happy to discuss evil hags at the moment.

2--To make matters worse, Ron's feelings are hurt when he finds Hermione sound asleep by the fire.

3--Hermione is asleep by the fire because Fred and George have given her a potion to put her to sleep. They are testing magical joke products on first year students, and Hermione would stop them if she was awake.

4--Before Harry can explain this to Ron, Katie Bell calls Ron away to get new Quidditch robes.

5--Angelina pulls Harry aside to tell him that Ron isn't a great keeper, and she'd like Harry to help him practice.

6--Finally he wakes up Hermione, who says she's tired because she's been making hats for the house elves. After ping ponging through all these subplots, Harry finally gets the chance to tell Hermione what happened. Hermione suggests that Harry should talk to Dumbledore, but Harry is too upset at the way Dumbledore has been treating him, so the next morning, he decides to write a letter to Sirius.

7--On his way to the Owlery to mail the letter, he runs into Nearly Headless Nick who warns Harry to take a different corridor because Peeves is playing a trick in the main corridor.

8--Then Mrs. Norris, the cat, brushes past his legs.

9--He gets to the Owlery, mails a letter, sees a thestral, and runs into Cho Chang, the girl he has a crush on. Then Filch accuses Harry of being in the Owlery so he can order dungbombs. Harry wants to talk about these strange events to Ron and Hermione... And the cycle continues.

 Whose story is this, anyway? 

The whole Harry Potter series is filled with that kind of pattern. Harry spends much more time reacting to the other character's plots than he spends on his own. It could be argued that the other character's plots become his plot. Of course, the part I just summarized came from a chapter in the fifth book in the series. J.K. Rowling has had a lot of time to give her characters stories that can trip Harry up. That's the main reason every one of her books gets exponentially larger. It's harder to do in a stand-alone novel, or in the first book of a series, but it's so worth it.

I'm not privy to the inner workings of J.K. Rowling's mind, obviously. But I doubt that things happened in this order in the first draft. I imagine everything was much more compartmentalized in the beginning. One gargantuan box held Harry's story, and stacked on top of that was a box containing Hagrid's story, and another box had Fred and George's joke shop in it.

Eventually though, she was wise enough to unpack all the story ideas and let them play with each other. I imagine her thinking, "Hmm...things are going too smoothly for Harry right now. What can Filch do to mess things up? And it's probably time to move on to the next piece of Fred and George's story. And I know! Peeves is always good for at least half a page of frustration."

Wait a minute, what's a thestral?

In my imaginary first draft of Harry Potter 5, Harry didn't see thestrals while he stood in the owlery. Instead, what happened was that somewhere in the editing process, J.K. Rowling realized that she wanted thestrals to play an important part at the end of the book. So she had to fit them in to the book in several major places. She does that by creating a mystery around the thestrals. Only Harry and Luna can see them, so he fears he is going crazy. Smaller references to thestrals scattered throughout the book serve to keep them fresh in our mind so that we're not thrown off guard when they become important at the end.

 In the first draft of my own novel, Earth's Gate, a dragon and a griffin showed up in the last quarter of the book. Adding major magical elements to the last quarter of a fantasy novel is usually a bad idea, so I had to sift through my novel to find places to reference them. I added a meeting with a captive griffin to the first chapter, and a bear attack in chapter 5 got turned into a dragon attack. Then I started finding ways to add references to the creatures everywhere I turned, and pretty soon I had an unexpected sub-plot. J.K. Rowling's thought process was probably so much more organized than mine that they are barely comparable. Still, I would pay good money to get a sneak peak at her first draft. 


Ring, ring! 

 In television shows, have you ever noticed the way that phone calls come right at the end of important conversations? (This even happens in my beloved Burn Notice.) When I'm editing a story, I like to at least consider having the phone call happen at the least opportune moment. I like to think of it as the Chaos Method of Book Writing. Unpack all your boxes. Shake well. See what happens. But be sure to save your first draft. Just in case.

Check out this amazing blog post, in JK Rowling's own words.

 Do you write your subplots one at a time? Is your mind organized enough to keep them all chugging along at the right pace? If so, how do you do it? I'd love to hear your tips.