I am insanely jealous of a co-worker who can't eat M&Ms because the candies give her migraines. If only that were my trouble. It's Tuesday, it's past time to post, and I've got nada - except a party sized bag of (peanut!) M&M's. Which is rapidly dwindling to a snack size bag, since of course getting my behind out of my chair and walking the nine steps to my kitchen pantry totally burns enough calories to eat another handful. Will someone please take the chocolate away from me?

I could blame this need for chocolate on my daughter's insistence that I read from Laura Ingalls Wilder's By The Shores of Silver Lake for bedtime stories tonight. I can't read that second chapter, where Laura's faithful dog, Jack, dies, without tearing up, and this time I choked through three of the pages, never managing to get it back together after the description of how the gray hair has spread from the dog's nose to the rest of its body. But the honest truth is that this craving hits every time I sit down to write. So apart from giving up writing or starting a twelve-step plan for this addiction, what's a writer to do?

1. Appreciate gender differences and send zoned-in-on-the-hunt husband grocery shopping, ensuring that the chocolate (and anything else not on the list, including the toilet paper we desperately need) doesn't come home in the first place.
2. Take a walk or a shower and let ideas mull, so I've got a starting point. Boot up computer beforehand and don't take anything to write with on the walk (and no using my daughter's bath crayons in the shower), so that I'll get my fingers on those keys as soon as I return.
3. Invest in Extra's mint chocolate chip gum - a lot of it. (Does Costco carry this brand? If so, I may need a membership just for that!)
4. Always leave my work the day before with a sticky note about where I plan to go next. Preferably detailed.
5. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

So it's not twelve steps, but it's something. My name is Katie and it's been three hundred and sixty-two words and twenty minutes since I put the rest of my M&M's down the garbage disposal. Happy writing and I'd love to hear about your own writing distractions and how you deal.

This book has been on my to-read list for a long time, and my only regret is that I didn't read it sooner. Samantha's next door neighbors, the Garretts, are everything her family isn't, and she longs to be one of them. The heart of the book resounds with serious themes, yet Huntley Fitzpatrick does funny in a fantastic way. Some of the dialogue made me laugh so much I had to wait for the book to stop shaking before I could keep reading. The cast of characters was so interestingly flavored that I didn't mind that the plot simmered a bit slowly at the beginning. While Jase was maybe a little too perfect, I don't mind my book boyfriends that way. Tim (one of Samantha's friends) and George (one of Jase's brothers) were wonderful for comic relief. I especially love when four-year-old George acknowledges to Samantha, "I might marry you," and when recovering-addict Tim, upon hearing the revelation of Samantha's horrible secret about her mother, responds with "I picked the wrong day to give up amphetamines." Both of these one-liners are just the tip of these two funny bones. It's official - I've got an author crush on Huntley Fitzpatrick. :-)

Visit Huntley Fitzpatrick online at http://www.huntleyfitzpatrick.com

I'm sorry, I lied. I promised an essay on my addiction to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice series but I'm finding (surprise, surprise!) that sometimes the VCFA writing experience is just like...writing. Sometimes things don't work and drastic changes are needed. While I will always love the Alice series, I found I could describe my addiction with a couple of paragraphs, which just won't cover the ten page essay I need to submit this month. New plan: The Year of Billy Miller versus The Stories Julian Tells. (It's a long one, click read more if you're up for seeing the match!)

You read and commented on The Boy Next Door, formerly titled Pairing Up, and now the big announcement is here! Macmillan will be publishing the novel under their Swoon Reads imprint with a release date of February 3, 2015. The Boy Next Door will be available in print or as an e-book AND the Swoon Reads team wants your input on what the cover should look like. New cover designs will be available for browsing and voting on the Swoon Reads site, tentatively by the end of May.

In the meantime, check out some of the other novels on Swoon Reads - your comments help determine the winners for the second list. (I'm reading How to Say "I Love You" Out Loud right now and also enjoyed Chemistry.) And YA authors, there's still time to submit! Swoon is accepting manuscripts for their second list until April 30, 2014.

This week is a slight digression from my exploration of character, but as a side project (you know, when I'm procrastinating other writing I'm supposed to be doing...), I've been trying my hand at fantasy. I have a love-hate relationship with this genre, there's really no middle ground for me. Harry Potter? Love! Lord of the Rings? Movies yes, book no way.  Last month, I explored why in one of my critical essays for VCFA. (My apologies in advance to fans of Graceling - I toughed it out until chapter four because I so loved the idea of its premise but then I couldn't take any more. This essay is in no way intended to dismiss the capabilities of the author, who is a very talented writer and arguably better at many other aspects of writing than Rowling.) Here's why:

The map at the beginning should have stopped me right there. Attention, now entering Fantasyland! Warning, worldbuilding ahead! But I am a Potter fan who longs to go to Hogwarts. I like fantasy worlds and the premise of Kristin Cashore's Graceling intrigued me. Then I encountered too much information about Graces in the first chapter. When the second chapter began, surely enough, with “It was a land of seven kingdoms” (Cashore 17), I was done.

No one would argue that fantasy could be done without worldbuilding, it is as essential to the fantasy genre as happily ever after is to romance. But what is the best way to transfer knowledge of the fantastical world to the reader? Fantasy author Elizabeth Bear states that “oft-reviled, the infodump used artfully is nevertheless one of the best means of delivering information” (Bear 199). Yet personally, the mere hint of an infodump leaves me saying “screw the dragon ride” and using my own two feet to run from Fantasyland as fast as I can. Was this the determining factor for me in my love-hate relationship with fantasy, how artfully infodumps are used?

As I was never able to finish J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (yeah, it's a map thing), I decide to examine the second most popular fantasy novel of all time, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the story of an orphaned boy who learns he is a wizard.

Rowling artfully avoids any worldbuilding infodumps in her first chapter, choosing instead to provide back story on the Dursley family. Delivered in a fashion similar to the work of Roald Dahl, this serves two purposes. It distracts from the magical shimmers of the wizarding world already being revealed - “None of them noticed a large, tawny owl flutter past the window” (Rowling 2) – and also puts the reader in a position where to disbelieve in the wizarding world means siding with Team Dursley. Anyone up for membership in the most boring tie club? Anyone? Anyone?

Rowling repeats this trick in her second chapter, using a short series of three events from Harry's past to show that, well, there's something about Harry. His hair mysteriously grows back after a bad haircut, a revolting hand-me-down sweater somehow shrinks in the laundry, and he manages to jump onto the roof at school when being bullied. Additionally, “[S]ometimes he thought (or maybe hoped) that strangers in the street seemed to know him” (Rowling 30). This could be a massive infodump of observations about these strangers, who are of course wizards, yet Rowling refrains from explaining, merely noting that the people have odd fashion tastes.

When mysterious letters begin appearing for Harry and follow him and the Dursleys even out to an island in the middle of a stormy sea, Rowling still does not submit to an info-dump. Instead, she reveals glimmers of Harry's past through an argument the giant Hagrid has with the Dursleys, raising more questions than she answers throughout two pages of escalating fighting that builds to this:

“STOP! I FORBID YOU!” yelled Uncle Vernon in panic.
Aunt Petunia gave a gasp of horror.
“Ah, go boil yer heads, both of yeh,” said Hagrid. “Harry – yer a wizard.” (Rowling 50)

Though some of Rowling's other writing in this excerpt could be questioned, her suppression of info-dumping is admirable. Harry, you're a wizard.

While it does fall on Hagrid to explain a bit of Harry's past, Rowling again avoids an info-dump, focusing the story on Voldemort over the magical world, raising as many new questions as she answers old, and skillfully weaving all of this into dialogue with Hagrid:

[Hagrid sat down, stared into the fire for a few seconds, and then said, “It begins, I suppose, with – with a person called – but it's incredible yeh don't know his name, everyone in our world knows–”
“Who?” [Harry answering]
“Well – I don't like saying the name if I can help it. No one does.”
“Why not?”
“Gulpin' gargoyles, Harry, people are still scared. Blimey, this is difficult. See there was this wizard who went...bad. As bad as you could go. Worse. Worse than worse. His name was...”
Hagrid gulped, but no words came out.
“Could you write it down?” Harry suggested.
“Nah – can't spell it...” (Rowling 54)

Rowling continues this scene to basically establish that no one knows why Voldemort went to Harry's house or why Harry survived or what exactly happened to Voldemort, including if he is even really gone. A far cry from an explanation of the magical world, this is essentially the opposite of an infodump. Rowling uses a similar reverse infodump in a later scene where Harry meets Draco Malfoy as the two are getting measured for their school robes:

“Have you got your own broom?” the boy went on.
“No,” said Harry.
“Play Quidditch at all?”
“No,” Harry said again, wondering what on earth Quidditch could be.
“I do – Father says it's a crime if I'm not picked to play for my House, and I must say, I agree. Know what House you'll be in yet?”
“No,” said Harry, feeling more stupid by the minute.
“Well, no one really knows until they get there, do they, but I know I'll be in Slytherin, all our family have been – imagine being in Hufflepuff, I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?” (Rowling 77)

Instead of telling us about the magical world, Rowling lets us explore it with Harry as he buys his school supplies in Diagon Alley and magnifies the extent of it through the questions raised by her reverse infodumps.

In contrast, here is an excerpt from the second chapter of Graceling:

The kings of Wester, Nander, and Estill – they were the source of most of the trouble. They were cast from the same hotheaded mold, all ambitious, all envious. All thoughtless and heartless and inconstant. King Birn of Wester and King Drowden of Nander might form an alliance and pummel Estill's army on the northern borders, but Wester and Nander could never work together for long. Suddenly one would offend the other, and Wester and Nander would become enemies again, and Estill would join Nander to pound Wester. (Cashore 18)

This infodump tells about the world but doesn't develop character, advance the plot, or raise questions for me as a reader, apart from how will I keep all these kings straight?

Rowling does use one small paragraph that could be argued as an infodump at Ollivander's wand shop, where Mr. Ollivander says:

“Every Ollivander wand has a core of a powerful magical substance, Mr. Potter. We use unicorn hairs, phoenix tail feathers, and the heartstrings of dragons. No two Ollivander wands are the same, just as no two unicorns, dragons, or phoenixes are quite the same. And of course, you will never get such good results with another wizard's wand.” (Rowling 84)

With Mr. Ollivander's amazing memory about every wand he's ever sold, however, even this paragraph seems more about salesmanship than worldbuilding. A similar very short paragraph much later in the novel allows Harry to quote off some Quidditch trivia but is unnoticeable to the casual observer as Harry was reading a school library book on the subject, a natural activity for a student at any school.

Mostly, Rowling writes confidently about her world. No explaining that ghosts exist, they simply stream through the wall. She allows magical events to unfold as any other event, such as the song of the Sorting Hat: “A rip near the brim opened wide like a mouth – and the hat began to sing” (Rowling 117). No explanation about how this occurs also conveniently prevents questioning of the magic involved.

It is not until halfway through the novel when Harry begins classes at Hogwarts that Rowling succumbs to a couple of pages of infodump, describing the tricky staircases at Hogwarts, the characters of Peeves the poltergeist and Filch the caretaker, and the various classes required of first years. And apart from the first couple of paragraphs, this is not so much worldbuilding as a summary of Harry's first few days of class. Judging by the length and popularity of Rowling's ensuing books in the series, this summary could have been eliminated entirely and given over to active scenes following Harry through those first classes just as the reader has followed him thus far on his journey into the magical world.

Rowling's novel stands apart from many fantasy novels in the fact that her main character, Harry, is, like the reader, new to her world. This begs the question as to whether complete exclusion of infodumps would work for all fantasy novels. For example, the scene in which Quidditch captain Oliver Wood explains the game to Harry would not have been natural nor believable if Harry were not new to the magical world himself. But in avoiding the infodumps stereotypical of her genre, Rowling merged fantasy and reality and this may be what brought many new fans to the fantasy fold. While infodumps continue in many fantasy novels, mine won't have a map.

Works Cited

Bear, Elizabeth. “Tactics of Wordbuilding.” Writer's Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Ed. Michael Knost. Lexington: Seventh Star Press, 2013. 193-200. Print.

Cashore, Kristin. Graceling. New York: Graphia, 2008. Print.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1997. Print.

At Vermont, it's a requirement of the MFA program in writing for children and young adults to read widely. YA authors read picture books, too, and for good reason. They're a treasure trove of concise, lyrical writing - poetry with pictures. With two young children at home and my experience in education, I've read many a picture book. MG and poetry are two areas where I need to increase my reading. Looking in search of some poetry, an area I've especially neglected in my studies this semester, I came across a collection of Langston Hughes's poems at the library this week.

The Dream Keeper and Other Poems is beautifully illustrated by Brian Pinkey. I love how Hughes can tell a whole novel in a single poem and I confess to crying every time I read the poem The Dream Keeper to my students. What is it about this poem that touches me so? I've spent years working with inner city children and I want to be their dream keeper, to give them that "blue-cloud cloth" to protect their dreams "from the too-rough fingers of the world." It's what drew me to teaching, the desire to communicate with the next generation that if they can dream it, they can do it and that hard work and dedication will take them anywhere they want to go. This poem tugs at my deepest heartstrings.

This pull is not only for my students but for myself. Encouraging my students to reach for the stars and follow their dreams brought me to VCFA in pursuit of my own dreams. This month for my Vermont coursework, I'm embarking on a quest to delve into character. What is it about certain characters that binds me to them with the emotional impact of "The Dream Keeper?" How can authors create characters who pull our hAs a young adult, I fell in love with Phyllis Reynold Naylor's "Alice" series to the point where when Alice's boyfriend broke up with her in one novel, I got a stomachache from it. I'll be analyzing the first book in the series to study craft techniques for establishing connections between characters and readers.

In a post on The Cambridge Children's Literature Students' Blog, a student remarked, “One thing I have decided on for sure in my quest is that children's literature cannot help but be didactic. In its very essence, it is an adult's construction of what children should be exposed to” (Ashley, n.p.). Yet while some children's books leave readers feeling the stiffness of the pew, others leave them feeling they have discovered something new about the world. Apart from the obvious advice of “don't preach,” however, how can writers avoid being didactic?

The premise of Angela Johnson's novel, The First Part Last, seems to lend itself to the pulpit. A teen boy gets his girlfriend pregnant and she ends up in a vegetative coma after suffering a complication from the pregnancy. Yet this love story between teen father and daughter is no Sunday morning special.

Remember how at six you were sure your parents knew everything? How that had changed by the time you hit sixteen? As much as parents would like their teens to listen to them, the truth of the matter is that adults don't know everything. Few things in life are clearly black and white, and one way that Johnson avoids preaching is by making even Bobby's parents unsure of what to do. After Bobby is arrested for graffiti, his mother takes him and baby Feather to live with his father. But after moving them there, “she got back into her Jeep and sat there without turning on the ignition” (Johnson 101), illustrating her own uncertainty about her choice.

Bobby's peers don't preach, for they don't know what to do, either. When Bobby first tells K-Boy and J.L. his news, they both laugh at him, even making jokes at first. Bobby's example isn't allowed to be a lesson to his friends, either:

            Two girls pass by us and stare at K-Boy. I mean they stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stare. He smiles back.
            I grab him by the arm. “Uh huh, they are so fine, but not today.” (Johnson 39)

That's as far as any “conversion” goes. Bobby knows his peers will continue to have sex and doesn't ask for any abstinence beyond that one day.

Leaving the parents and friends lost in the mist of what to do lets Bobby make choices different than what might commonly be suggested for someone in his situation. When Nia ends up in a coma, Bobby decides to keep their baby. A social worker tries briefly to intervene but Bobby responds, “No, I don't know anything about raising a kid. I'm sixteen and none of those people on the wall look like the kind of family me and Feather's gonna be. But I'm doing it” (124).  Nia's parents tell him they'll support his decision but Bobby's observations make it clear they won't really be involved: “[W]hen they looked at the baby through the nursery glass, it was like they were saying good-bye” (Johnson 126). No outside force pressures Bobby into this choice. It could be argued that his choice is didactic as well, just against what is commonly accepted, but apart from the previously quoted outburst, Bobby doesn't extol his decision.

Perhaps the ultimate in “preachy” factors, even God is left out as an authority. The only time God is mentioned at all is when Nia first enters her coma:

            The whacked part was I didn't start trying to make a deal with God till I was almost running through the doors. And when I see my mom's face I know I got to catch up.
            So I start begging.
            I say how it's supposed to work out 'cause we thought about it. We made a mistake but we aren't stupid. We were going to do the right thing.
            Then I guess I start babbling about how Nia looks when she sleeps and how she smiles and eats and laughs, but I have to stop 'cause even though I don't think about God or go to church, maybe this isn't the way you make deals with him.
            Maybe he doesn't listen if you scare everybody in the emergency room and hold on to your mom that tight while you're screaming and crying more than you ever have in your whole life. (Johnson 120)

However, this moment doesn't cause Bobby to have a spiritual revelation. He doesn't develop a relationship with God, nor does he blame God for his troubles or reflect on what sins (even the seemingly obvious) might have caused this fury. He doesn't even refer to the Almighty with caps, using he instead of He. The focus of this hospital scene isn't judgment or right versus wrong but simply Bobby's pain at the loss of Nia.

Johnson neither glorifies nor attacks teen parenthood but successfully pulls off a mixture of the sweet and sour. For example, she tempers harsh reality with humor, as in Bobby's mother's rules for him about baby Feather's care:

            If she hollers, she is mine.
            If she needs to be changed, she is always mine.
            In the dictionary next to “sitter,” there is not a picture of Grandma.
            It's time to grow up.
            Too late, you're out of time. Be a grown-up. (Johnson 14)

Johnson also is careful to balance the fear of emergency room visits, the smell of spit-up, and the sleepless nights with the warmth of Feather, her sweet new baby smell, and realizations such as these: “I know something about this little thing that is my baby. I know that she needs me. I know what she does when she just needs me” (Johnson 15).

Some situations are hard to express in words, and keeping complicated issues as simple as possible also helps Johnson avoid donning the clergy robe. For example, Johnson leaves the part where Nia actually tells Bobby she's pregnant “off screen”, choosing to show only this:

            ...Nia was waiting on our stoop for me with a red balloon. Just sittin' there with a balloon, looking all lost. I'll never forget that look and how her voice shook when she said, “Bobby, I've got something to tell you.”
            Then she handed me the balloon. (Johnson 6)

Johnson thus avoids complicated and perhaps preachy discussions about exactly how this happened, whether they should/could/would have done something earlier, etc. Another technique Johnson uses that emphasizes the difficulties of the situation without preaching is having Bobby himself avoid thinking about it. At the obstetrician's office, for example, Bobby says, “I look at the skiing trophies and think about how cool and windy it must be to go down the slopes, and how I always wanted to learn how to ski” (Johnson 28).

The First Part Last is not without somewhat didactic moments, including this lecture:

            I waited to hear how they'd been talking to me for years about this. How we all talked about respect and responsibility. How [my father] and me had taken the ferry out to Staten Island and talked about sex, to and from the island. And didn't we go together and get the condoms? What the hell about those pamphlets [my mother] put beside my bed about STDs and teenage pregnancy?
            How did this happen? Where was my head? Where was my sense? What the hell were we going to do?
            And then, not moving and still quiet, my pops just starts to cry. (Johnson 12-13)

Yet this is the only lecture and notice how the protagonist lectures himself and that the attitude is one of regret but not of shame.

There is also a “preacher” of sorts, who asks Bobby to consider what it means to be a man. But Johnson avoids being didactic here by twisting the traditional. Her “preacher,” “Just Frank,” lives his life “hanging on the corner, drinking forties at ten in the morning” (Johnson 7).  Meanwhile, Bobby's teacher, the stereotypical helper, turns out to be no help at all but “just hopes [Bobby is] getting help” (44).

Having played in the gray for the entire novel, Johnson doesn't tie everything up in a nice lesson at the conclusion but ends with uncertainty as well. After moving to Ohio to raise Feather alone, Bobby won't tell about saying good-bye or the places in the city he misses but says, “I can tell you how it feels sitting in the window with Feather pointing out the creek that rolls past our backyard. I can tell you how it is to feel as brand new as my daughter even though I don't know what comes next in this place called Heaven” (Johnson 131).

The secret then, is to play in the gray. All this uncertainty means Johnson avoids a didactic message. Ironically,  the novel still illustrates what many of its didactic equivalents attempt to portray: the hardships of teen pregnancy. But because of the gray, the messages are many and more than just messages. Bobby says, “I've never been closer to or loved anybody more than I love Feather” (Johnson 95) but what is love? What does it mean to be a family? What is success, what does it mean to be a man? These conversation starters are seeds for discussion and, through such discussion, personal growth for the reader.

Works Cited:

  Ashley. “Subversively Didactic.” The Cambridge Children's Literature Students' Blog. Blogger.com, 28 August 2012. Web. 27 March 2014. <http://cambridgechildrenslit.blogspot.com/2012/08/subversively-didactic.html>

Johnson, Angela. The First Part Last. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.

This is author Angela Johnson at her best, winner of both the Printz Award and the Coretta Scott King Award. Alternating between then and now in 16-year-old main character Bobby's POV with just one short snippet from his girlfriend, Nia, Johnson spins a story that's been the subject of so many problem novels: teen pregnancy. So why read this one?

Telling the story from the father's point of view already adds uniqueness, but what I really love about this novel is its authenticity. Johnson keeps it real and avoids any preaching while she's at it, a feat which deserves to be the subject of a critical essay. (And in fact, will be - VCFA packet number three due this weekend!)

At just 131 pages, this is a short read that you'll want to read again and again. (I think I'm up to at least six so far.) Beautiful language and shining examples of showing over telling, like in this excerpt from Bobby's birthday:

I never had any cake though 'cause my girlfriend Nia was waiting on our stoop for me with a red balloon. Just sittin' there with a balloon, looking all lost. I'll never forget that look and how her voice shook when she said, "Bobby, I've got something to tell you."

Then she handed me the balloon.

So if you haven't read it yet, check it out and check back in to see if you agree with my analysis - essay coming soon...

When do all my brilliant new ideas come to me? When I have a bunch of other things I need to do, of course! Luckily time is always game for another round of Chicken. (VCFA packet due in five days...) So here we go on another round with a potential new WIP and Donald Maass's WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL.

In chapter three, Maass discusses stakes. It's a scary question to think about, but if your character doesn't get what he or she wants, then so what? In my premise above, what if Kylie doesn't get to go to the championships, then so what? What is lost, besides her own personal dream?

Maass identifies three types of stakes: personal (for the character), public, and the author's own stakes, his or her reason for writing the novel. Writers should seek to elevate all three. I can up Kylie's personal stakes by meshing her desire to win with a desire to belong to the world of skating, a world that generally requires good looks and high finances to inhabit. If Kylie doesn't win, she's not only losing the opportunity but she's also proving that she doesn't belong in this world, that people who are overweight or poor can't skate. She is losing her ability to believe in herself, to believe that her dreams are reachable no matter what her background is. By incorporating the work for gay rights, I've raised the public stakes as well and conflicted them with Kylie's personal stakes. If Kylie doesn't take a stand in order to win, she thus undermines the work of those who are fighting for her acceptance. And this is part of my personal reason for writing this novel as well. I have close friends and family members who are gay and have shared their struggles with their feelings and coming out with me. Telling Kylie's story is a way for me to share pieces of their stories.

So what are the stakes in YOUR story? Why does it matter to your characters, you, and the rest of the world?