So What?

Posted on 18/12/2013 by clembeauvais

My ex-PhD supervisor (who, by the way, is currently writing an amazing abecedary of children’s literature theory and criticism on her own blog) always says to her young Padawans that they must always ask themselves ‘So what?’ about everything they write. Ask yourself ‘So what?’ at the end of your article on ‘Representations of octopi in adventure stories for boys, 1870-1912’, for instance. If the answer is, ‘Well… octopi! in adventure stories!’ then your article is useless and you might as well have spent a month and a half painting the borders of your nostrils with glittery felt-tips.

The implication, of course, is that by asking ‘So what?’ you will attempt to truthfully decide whether your piece is parochial, petty and only concerned with what it attempts to describe (bad) or has wider implications, for the study of children’s literature for instance (good).

This is even more important in actual published work than it is in MPhil and PhD theses. As William Germano says in his book From Dissertation to Book (helpfully recommended by Philip Nel), one of the main differences between a PhD thesis and a monograph drawn from the PhD thesis is scope: while a PhD thesis investigates a tiny aspect of Problem X, the monograph should attempt to make claims about the whole of Problem X.

This was never a problem for me, however, because I am blessed with ridiculous theoretical arrogance. So my self-questioning always went along those lines:

Q. Piece of work finished. SO WHAT?

A. So, existence.

Q. Another piece of work finished. SO WHAT?

A. So, meaning of life.

Q. Another piece. SO WHAT, this time?

A. So, everything about everything.

Q. We are so nailing this ‘so what’ thing!

A. Yeah!

When I had my PhD viva, however, the questioning went along those lines:

Examiners: When you say ‘existence’ here, don’t you mean ‘that little aspect of existence that may or may not be there for everyone’?

Me: No, no, I do mean the whole of existence.

Examiners: Are you sure?

Me: What will happen if I say I’m sure?

Examiners: You’ll probably fail your PhD.

Me: Ah then I guess I’m not sure. In fact, I probably do mean that tiny little aspect of existence that may or may not be there for everyone.

Examiners: And when you say, there, ‘this is something which concerns the whole of children’s literature and in fact every instance of every address to a child, anywhere in the world and for the whole of history’, don’t you mean, ‘this is something that concerns some children’s books’?

Me: No, I…

Examiners: Think of what we just talked about.

Me: Yes, I mean that’s something that concerns just a few books here and there.

Examiners: Good. Do you promise not to make all these grand claims again in your monograph?

Me: Gnnhh.

Examiners: Swear on the life of J.K. Rowling.

Me: Gnnh.

It wasn’t the first time this happened. All my articles rejected from academic journals are generally accompanied by comments along the lines of ‘This is clearly the work of a deluded and vaguely despotic individual who makes hilariously grand claims about everything from the analysis of two lines of an obscure picturebook.’

So now that I’m working on the monograph, I’m going through it all and thinking about whether my answers to ‘So what’ are still absurdly grand or whether I can get away with them. Unfortunately the demon of grand theorisation often wins over the angel of scrupulous criticism.

The angel of petty description and the demon of grand theorisation

that angel is so dumb #sodumb

And I do believe in those grand conclusions that I’m now editing down or rectifying. I didn’t just put them there as a forced reply to the question ‘So what?’. I honestly think that I have good reasons to be making those claims, and if these reasons aren’t clear to the reader, it means I’ve failed at explaining them, not that they weren’t there to start with. So I endlessly edit the explanations so they lead more clearly to the Theory.

I can’t help it, I have much more patience for grand systems, grand theories, outrageous hypotheses, than for microscopic examinations of quite interesting properties of some texts. At least the former can fail spectacularly, whereas the latter will only ever achieve an uninspiring sort of success.

Well, that’s what I like to think, anyway. I wouldn’t recognise myself in a piece of work, however conscientious, that wouldn’t have those grand answers to that ‘So what?’ question.

No, I wouldn’t recognise myself, and that’s why this ‘So what’ question pertains to so much more than just research. I can’t just ask ‘So what?’ of individual pieces of writing. I also need to ask myself ‘So what?’ about the relevance of that writing to my own life. So what? Why am I doing this? What is the point? Is my existence being transformed by what I’m researching and writing? It very much is and very much has been, as I think it should.

‘So what?’ isn’t just a professional question about the impact of your research on the rest of the discipline. It’s a private question, one that interrogates your life project. What you research is a part of yourself, so what? So it must have an impact on you. The boundaries can’t ever be clear between the personal and the professional, between what you work on and what you are.

Well, so what?

so, existence.

Evil Editors who Edit

Posted on 11/12/2013 by clembeauvais

“So did you have to change a lot of things in your book before it got published?”

“Oh yes, loads.”

“Because you’d made spelling mistakes and stuff?”

“Well, sure, but there are more in-depth changes than that.”

“WHAT?! Like what? Character names?”

“Erm, sometimes, but not just. Things like deleting secondary characters, changing the main plot, taking out secondary plotlines, etc.”

“Your editor made you do that?!?”

“Yes. They’re editors so they edit.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“I said I agreed with most of the changes, since I did, and disagreed with some, and then we discussed those.”

“So basically, there’s like, lots of things that have changed between the manuscript and the final book.”

“Yes.”

“That’s awful.”

The Evil Editor who Edits is a prominent mythical figure in common representations of bookwriting and publishing. S/he barges in with a red pen and a hatred of everything aesthetic and beautiful and corrupts and destroys the pure virgin innocent manuscript of the poor author.

Example of an edited page (version 4 of the manuscript)

There is one central reason for the Evil Editor who Edits to act this way:

MAKE BOOK MORE COMMERCIAL

and absolutely no other reason, certainly not to rectify plotlines that are holey, characters that are hollow, language that is corny, pacing that is wonky and descriptions that are much too long.

There is no way an Editor could possibly do anything like literary appraisal of a manuscript; Editors are cohorts of agents Smith from the Matrix, therefore all they do is make sure that all books published reinforce the general numbness of the docile population. They are controlling and aggressive towards authors because authors are constantly threatening to produce things that will awaken citizens of the world to their situations as Alkaline batteries for gigantic machines.

Your editor edits? You must be weak-willed and lily-livered.

You “shouldn’t be so easily influenced”, “should put up a fight”, and “shouldn’t take any of this”. It’s like you have no self-respect, no respect for your work, and no respect for your readers if you let the Editor do anything to your text.

Your editor edits? Your manuscript must have been awful.

Clearly your book was such a pile of fresh cow dung that it needed to be entirely rewritten by an army of anonymous pen-pushers (god knows why it was taken in the first place, since I’m not Kim Kardashian).

Editors edit; how dare they?

Well that is their job. Editing means modifying a text to make it better, not just Tipp-Exing over typos. Editors are trained readers (see ‘that is their job’); they can spot exactly not just where a text goes wrong but how it could potentially be improved. They will not rewrite but suggest possible ways for the author to rewrite.

Traditionally published authors are not the sole creators of their work (I think self-published authors shouldn’t be either, but that’s another story). The book is the work of a collective and editors have the difficult job of pricing, timing and supervising that collective. Of course they need to ensure the commercial viability of the work, because the book needs to end up in readers’ hands, because the point of a book is to be read. You also need the book to sell or else you won’t eat, remember.

Most of the time, edits are negotiable. If there’s truly a non-negotiable edit and you really, really can’t see why it should be done, your agent will try to intervene. You’re not alone faced with the Evil Editor who dares to edit your work. And you’d be surprised about how little Bowdlerisation actually takes place even in children’s writing. People at Hodder never asked me to modify the vocabulary in the Sesame books, for instance, even though there had been some concern that it was too complex. I couldn’t joke about sex, that’s for sure, but the books talk about money, drugs, poisoning, animal testing, etc.; themes even I thought were probably not going to be accepted. They were.

Inadvertently offensive expressions, however, were rectified.

Yes of course there is censorship in children’s books – god knows we’ve been trying to sell my French books to the UK but they’re too ‘violent and dark’ – but that selection takes place before the book deal, one should hope. Why would an editor take on a book and then ask for all the central sex, drugs and murder plotlines to be removed?

In the best cases, the editor will work tirelessly with you on an extremely ugly first draft and after months (yes, months) of redrafting, two-hour-long phone calls, and dozens of emails, a beautiful swan will emerge from the ugly duckling that Draft 1 was. This is the kind of privileged experience I had with my latest YA in French, Comme des images, which is coming out in February.

First drafts are never publishable as is, and almost never publishable without considerable edits. Yes, even first drafts by established authors. People don’t realise that, because they never see a first draft; all they see is the finished product. Interning in publishing has been such an eye-opener for me: 99% of manuscripts in the ‘slushpile’ truly are terrible; out of the 1% that’s left, almost none of them will actually make it through to publication without several weeks or months of rewrites.

Let me say this again: if you’re still outraged that editors dare to edit, you clearly don’t realise how rubbish most first drafts are.

That’s not to say you can’t either get lucky, or get better at writing first drafts that need less editing. Gargoyles Gone AWOL needed much less editing than Sleuth on Skates, and Scam on the Cam even less than Gargoyles. Does it mean I’m getting ‘better’ at writing Sesame books? Well, in a way – in the sense that I’m getting better at anticipating my editor’s issues with the books. If you know an editor well you can preempt their queries, and immediately delete that secondary character you know they’ll say you don’t need.

There’s only one case so far in my writerly ‘career’ (blah) when I was very lucky and got away with the most minor edits, and that was for my YA novel La pouilleuse, which came out last year. It was almost unchanged by my then-editor Emmanuelle. But when I was chatting to my new editor, Tibo, from the same publishing house, he said to me he would have asked me to rewrite quite a lot of the ending if he’d been my editor on that book.

Would it have been a worse or better book? Neither. Both cases, I think, would have worked perfectly. It would have been a different book; my book and Tibo’s, as opposed to my book and Emmanuelle’s. There’s no book without an editor, and the editor’s vision is an integral part of the book.

(As well as, sometimes, his marginalia:)

Editor getting annoyed at the amount of ‘I said’ in a dialogue (‘J’ai dit! J’ai dit! J’ai dit!’)

Yes, I am eclipsing in this blog post the numerous problems one can still run into with some editors. It’s because this is a blog post In Defense Of. I know that not all editors are sweet unicorn fowls with manes of caramel fudge. And yes, there are some edits on older books I regret doing and certainly wouldn’t do today. But all of the above remarks are valid in the case of a professional, mutually respectful relationship between a reasonable editor and reasonable author who are both hoping to get a good book out of the ‘evil’ edits.

Turning the thesis into a book

Posted on 27/11/2013 by clembeauvais

This is me a little while ago, having just passed my PhD viva:

(The boyfriend would kill me if I put a picture of his face on my blog so I decided to replace it by another face I also like (and which, coincidentally or not, looks pretty much exactly like him (and yes I know, I’m a genius at Photoshop.)))

This is me a few months later with the hard-bound multicoloured thesis:

Look at that self-satisfied little face. Blessed be the innocent.

Look at that self-satisfied little face. Oh if I had known.

At the time, in the words of J.K. Rowling, all was well. I had passed the viva, the thesis was bound and was going to write the Book from the PhD which I already had signed a contract for.

AND A DEADLINE

which at the time sounded very very faraway (this was July 1st; deadline January 31st).

‘OH I’VE GOT AGES!’ she said at the time.

‘I will have all the time in the world to turn the thesis into that perfect thing it was supposed to be!’ she said at the time.

And the PhD viva was mostly about what I should change in order to turn the thesis into a book anyway. So I felt Guided, Secure and Happy.

Please don’t think I procrastinated and didn’t start working on the Book immediately. I barely took two weeks off after my viva and then started working on the Book. But somehow it’s already November The Endth and this is what I’m looking like now:

The book is not going well, people. But this is the opportunity for me to theorise about book-writing from the thesis (hurrah). And this is what, according to my theorisation, I’m doing wrong:

I’ve basically decided to rewrite the whole thesis. I’m only going to be reusing something like a quarter of it, and most of it completely transformed. It’s a stupid idea.
I somehow seem to be acting as if this is the only academic book I’ll ever write in my life. I’m therefore cramming every single thought I’ve ever had about children’s literature into it. It’s a stupid idea.
I’m panicking that I’m running out of time, therefore I’m writing faster than I should, therefore it’s not good writing. It’s a stupid idea.
I’ve taken on zillions of hours of teaching and lecturing and marking and doing tons of other things which are preventing me from writing the book. It’s a stupid idea.
I randomly decided to spend two weeks writing an article on something completely unrelated. It’s a stupid idea.
I randomly became interested in a different theory which will not in any way find its way into the book, instead of working on the theories that are important for the book. It’s a stupid idea.
I keep whining about the book. It’s a stupid idea.

Yes, the whole thing is currently driving me insane. Of course there’s a voice in my head (aka that of my ex-supervisor) which helps me a bit:

So yes, I know it’s completely normal. It’s still terrifying. Some days I feel like I’ve said all I’ve got to say, and I still have forty thousand words to write. Some days I feel like I’ll never be able to cram all I’ve got to say in forty thousand words. Some days I want to restructure the whole thing entirely, some days I just think ‘whatever, let’s just take the old structure from the thesis and be done with it’.

My main problem is that the book presents a theoretical model articulating several different concepts, and I’m finding it really hard to do without a super-long overall introduction. It’s pretty hard, too, to introduce the different parametres of the theory as I go along, because they’re all related to one another. I also feel like I’m being extremely repetitive in my effort to be understood. I also feel like I’m being very descriptive when I talk about the philosophical system I’m using.

And why wasn’t that a problem for the thesis itself? Because a thesis is an academic exercise, where it’s perfectly acceptable to have a very long intro that spells out your theoretical framework, explains what you’re going to do, what your methodology is, etc. And it doesn’t matter if you repeat yourself a bit because it shows that you’re signposting your work. But in real academic books you can’t do that because it’s ferociously boring and not good practice.

When I submitted my thesis I wrote about the pain of realising that it’s never going to be what it should have been (see “How my real thesis was kidnapped by trolls“) (oh God, typing this last sentence I Freudianistically wrote “How my real life was kidnapped by trolls”). I’m having, predictably, the same symptoms now. Even if I hated the thesis in the end, I was still hopeful it would be turned into a Perfect Book. And it’s not going to happen, of course. It will always be a draft in my mind.

For now I’ve made a list of Things to Remember When I’m Having an Acute Book Crisis:

It’s completely normal.
No academic book is a perfect and coherent whole, without repetitions, clear and concise all the way, and revolutionary in both form and content (that’s definitely true).
I’m twenty-four and it’s my first academic book so people will be nice to me (HA. SURE.)
The reviewers will have good advice and recommendations to make it better (if they don’t reject it outright).
There are some good ideas in there.
The publishers won’t let me publish something completely rubbish.
There will be other books, articles, talks and ideas.
The sun will die one day and swallow up the Earth and everything that has ever lived in it, including the ruins of our long-extinct civilisation.

The last of which is the only truly comforting one.

Anyway, I’ll keep you updated on how it’s progressing (or not). In the meantime I need to stop blogging and start drafting again and leave you with this memegenerated kernel of wisdom.

How to Write a Picturebook Text in 10 Minutes

Posted on 20/11/2013 by clembeauvais

Step 1. Wait for the half-baked ideas you’ve been collecting and mulling over to coalesce into a Good Idea for a Picturebook. (estimated frequency: once to twice a year).

Step 2. Develop that Good Idea into a story which would work as a coherent whole formed of interdependent and mutually enhancing words and pictures. Think of the size, shape and orientation of the pages for the story. Think of the style of illustration. (estimated time: 1 week to 1 month).

Step 3. Structure the story into a number of pages divisible by four, making sure that pacing is right, the story arc has the right balance and there aren’t any unnecessary or slow doublespreads. (estimated time: 1 week to 1 month)

Step 4. Now work on the text in your mind, picking the right words to express the right things in relation to the right illustrations you’re also imagining. Juggle with all that in your mind. Pay attention to rhythm, imagery, vocabulary, grammar. Make sure you don’t repeat in the words what is already visible in the pictures. Imagine the pictures at all times. Say the words out loud to make sure they sound good. Think of an adult reading the picturebook to a child. Think of a child reading the picturebook to an adult. Tweak the words in your mind until they’re all necessary and sufficient. Repeat them to yourself until you know the whole text by heart. Read the picturebook to yourself in your mind (close your eyes to see the pictures). (estimated time: 1 week to 6 months)

Step 5. Open a new Word document. (estimated time: 11 seconds)

Step 6. Write down the text of the picturebook, as well as explanations between square brackets of what should be shown by the illustrations. (estimated time: 10 minutes)

You’re welcome.

PowerPoint in academic conferences (from abstinence to incontinence)

Posted on 06/11/2013 by clembeauvais

This isn’t a blog post on ‘how to use PowerPoint’. I’m no PowerPoint expert, and anyway I’m often too lazy to put together properly thought-through PowerPoint presentations for conferences. But I’ve been pondering about the different uses of PowerPoint I’ve witnessed and/or tried, so here are some brief thoughts on their strengths and weaknesses.

1) No PowerPoint

If you’re not over a hundred years old, then not using PowerPoint means either you think you’re God, or you actually are. I’ve listened to exceptional presentations not using PowerPoint. I’ve also listened to atrocious ones. I think it attracts both ends of the spectrum: outstanding people and terrible ones; the brightest and the laziest; the most captivating and the dullest.

Weaknesses:

The correct reaction to a presenter saying, ‘I don’t have a PowerPoint for you today…’

Not having a PowerPoint immediately gets you some negative karma from 90% of the audience.
Such presentations can be a pretext for reading an article tailored for publication rather than a paper tailored for a conference, which is a terrible idea.

Strengths:

If you do it well, it’s extremely impressive.
If you do it well, we’ll all remember your ideas.

People whose non-PowerPointed presentations I like are those who go the extra mile to structure and signpost their talk very carefully, compensating for the lack of visual anchoring. People whose non-PowerPointed presentations I hate are those who take it as a pretext for endless digression. You must be über-rigorous and have some seriously good ideas if you want to convince the audience that they wouldn’t have benefited from any slideshow. (You must also be prepared to see some people closing their eyes or doodling – which probably means they’re much more focused than if you were flashing lots of pretty pictures.)

2) The (almost-)all-pictures PowerPoint

Some people use PowerPoint as visual stimulus, but don’t want to distract from the verbal content of their talk by providing words or sentences on the screen. Their PowerPoint shows a book cover while they discuss the book, or a painting of a reading child while they discuss children’s literature.

While not necessary in any way, those decorative PowerPoints provide staring material.

Weaknesses:

Like number 1, they can be a pretext for people to read off an article to which they’ve added some pictures, rather than a proper conference paper.

Strengths:

With a bit of imagination, it can become extremely interesting.

Yes: it’s wonderful when this type of presentation – with a little help from picturebook theory! – offers the opportunity to have interesting gaps between the verbal and the visual – between the text you read and the pictures you show. This can create surprise and laughter, and tremendously increase audience interest.

A good example is Scott McCloud’s Ted Talk on comics – obviously, as a comic artist and theorist himself, McCloud knows better than anyone how to take advantage of the gap between words and pictures.

The trick to get a laugh is to avoid mentioning the picture. Pretend it doesn’t exist and has a life of its own. In a talk I did a while ago, I was saying that adults don’t read children’s books like children do, and meanwhile the picture on the screen was this one.

The hope is that the part of the audience that’s asleep will be woken up by the part of the audience that sniggers.

3) The ‘hybrid’ PowerPoint: where words and pictures meet

This is the type of PowerPoint I usually do: more pictures than words, but still a healthy dose of verbal signposting – which stage I’m at, which concept I’m discussing. If I read an important quote, I will have it written too so the audience can follow. This type of PowerPoint is pretty good, I think, for people who, like me, have a problem with speaking a bit too fast (that’s an understatement in my case). The PowerPoint ‘underlines’, so to speak, some important concepts and quotations from the presentation.

Weaknesses:

It can feel like it’s just ‘crumbs’ of the presentation, keywords and key pictures but not much around them.

Strengths:

Personally, I feel this is the Goldilocks of PowerPoint: just enough visual stimulation in the form of pictures, just enough handpicked information from the verbal material. It seems to be the type most people go for, too, which creates a feeling of familiarity from the audience.

4) More words than pictures: the verbose PowerPoint

This is the PowerPoint strategy adopted by ~~overcontrolling~~ people who really don’t want their audience to miss anything. This type can go from the relatively word-heavy to the frankly verbose, and it’s generally a lot of quotations, bullet points with the central information of each paragraph, complete references for every sentence cited, etc. Generally the structure of the presentation will also be part of this, so everything is full of Roman and Arabic numerals fighting for every last bit of blank space. It is likely that there will be a slide for acknowledgements listing every funding body, anyone who once approached the presenter while s/he was preparing for the talk, and almost everyone else.

The presenter is generally a former or future schoolteacher, or should be one. S/he is certainly very pedagogical.

Strengths:

The PowerPoint can easily be put online as is, since it will work essentially as a paper in its own right.
You don’t have to listen to the presenter, you can just do what you usually do very well, i.e. read by yourself.

Weaknesses:

See strengths.

As you can tell, I’m not a huge fan of those.

5) The psychedelic PowerPoint of the person who should be working for Pixar.

Also known as the Prezi user, but some PowerPoint presentations I’ve seen have been so full of whirls and twirls and unidentified flying objects that they do just as well. These are the kind of presentations that give you proper vertigo, emit stroboscopic light, trigger three-day migraines if not epileptic fits, and make the scene of the destruction of the Death Star by Luke Skywalker feel a bit slow and lazy in comparison.

Those PowerPoints seem to be implying that a book cover that doesn’t reach its dedicated part on the screen by first dancing the Macarena for ten seconds will not fully imprint itself on the minds of the viewers. They are often full of videos which will rarely play as the presenter intends it, and will require two technicians to be called from the other side of the faculty while everyone in the audience is checking Facebook on Eduroam.

Strengths:

You will amuse and entertain.
It’s a fun reason to procrastinate actually working on the paper.
At least some people will be seeing a presentation like this for the first time.

Weaknesses:

Statistically speaking, I have observed that these are rarely accompanied by good papers, but I’m willing to be challenged on this.
So much distraction that the audience might be more interested in the next somersault of the Papyrus subtitle than by what you have to say.

Here are my thoughts on the matter. Feel free to share your own strategies and preferences.

Writing book proposals

Posted on 30/10/2013 by clembeauvais

In the past few months, I’ve done little else than writing book proposals, i.e. being in the hellish no-man’s-land of half-written books and super-polished synopses.

What are book proposals for?

For books following the First One. Even if your publisher has an ‘option’ on your next book (or series), that next book will likely need to be outlined to them before they give you the money and the deadline.

So, in short, the first book (most often) got bought in glorious, fully-armed completeness, like Athena springing out of Zeus’s skull. However, the second must woo the Editor and the Acquisitions team half-finished, half-naked – stripped down to its synopsis and a few chapters.

Birth of the First Book.

Book proposals are evidently a ‘good’ thing: if you’re at this stage, it means you’ve got a publisher who likes you and wants to see more of your work. But god, are they a pain to write. Book-writing eroticism degree zero, my friend; degree zero.

The first book was similar to your stumbling in your everyday clothes with graceful naturalness into a roomful of people, and one of them falls in love with your little quirks and endearing youness. A book proposal, meanwhile, is like a long-planned date with a man whose head you’d quite like to see on your pillow (with the rest of the body still attached). You’ve spent the past few weeks checking that you’ve got absolutely everything right to achieve the desired outcome. You’re wearing your hair the way he likes it and have revised all the topics he talks about on Twitter, while making sure you retain some of the aforementioned graceful naturalness.

The sexist undertones of the above paragraph are not fortuitous; there is, in book-proposal-writing, something ineffably demeaning and unnatural, something that kills the uncertainty. Like dressing up in a certain way to cajole someone into liking you, it may give you an impression of control, but definitely not one of power.

What should a book or series proposal contain?

Personally, I write a few chapters; how many? As few as will give the Editor a good sense of the tone, characterisation, and appeal of the book. I write a character list, with short descriptions. A general plot summary. A rough evaluation of the genre(s) that the story belongs to, and the age range. And then a very detailed synopsis.

The synopsis isn’t the worst part for me. I always write synopses for books I’m working on – not always chapter-by-chapter, but I don’t mind doing that. I’m a plotter, obsessively structured. But I can guess how horrible those must be for the many writers who are ‘seat-of-the-pantsers’ – i.e., who don’t know where the story is going before they write it. It must be like asking an explorer to chart a territory they haven’t been to yet.

The writing sample is not hugely fun to write. First, there’s this dull feeling that you can’t get too attached to the story because you might never get to write the rest. This is a strange phenomenon, because when you start something which you’re entirely free to finish, you often lose interest in the story and fail to finish it. But it’s all due to your laziness and/or disenchantment with the idea. Whereas the prospect of someone else effectively preventing you from writing the rest makes you extraordinarily keen to finish the book now.

Why am I saying ‘effectively preventing you’? Well, of course, if your Editor rejects your proposal, it can still be offered to other publishers, though that could cause diplomatic drama which your agent might not want to get into. But if they all reject the proposal, then evidently you’ll never write the book, no matter how much you ‘believe in it’. You won’t waste time in finishing a book no one will want.

Secondly, the sample is dull to write because you know exactly what it has to do: give a feel of the whole story, explain who’s who, set the tone, convince the reader that this will be the best story ever, etc.

Once again, that’s something you’d do anyway in the first few chapters – and yet, when you know you have to do it, you suddenly resent the very concept of an exposition scene, and all you want is to begin with a story-within-a-story, a postmodernist mise en abyme, crazy prologues: in short, everything you really shouldn’t do.

Does it sound like I have a problem with authority? Yeah maybe.

Don’t get me wrong, writing book proposals is a very useful skill to master. It teaches you to think more commercially than you would; it turns you into a judge of your own project in its entirety, not just of the emotionally-charged finished story. It also makes the writing process much more secure: once you’ve got the contract, all is well. A deadline and advance are excellent remedies against writer’s block. And you do feel like you are doing something professional, efficient, controlled.

But I have now been working for months on proposals. I have a book proposal that I worked on all August, and I still haven’t shown it to my Editor because my agent (very rightly) wants me to modify it significantly so it’s more likely to be taken on. Then there’s another one I’m working on for yet another project.

The time it takes for rewriting, redrafting, re-synopsising and discussions is enormous, and all that’s before you even have a contract. It also feels artificial: contrary to the first book, when the Editor and agent didn’t know what would happen, and were reading it literally like normal readers, the book proposal gives away the whole plot. This is good, because it allows the Editor to spot potential plot holes before you can dig them, but also bad, because they’ll never have a ‘virgin’ read of the book.

It’s difficult to get excited, I think, about a book you’ve seen in proposal form. Explaining plots (especially the convoluted ones I like) is boring; everything sounds much more complicated in this condensed form than it will be when it’s developed over two hundred pages. And a story is, of course, not reducible to its structure and plot elements.

I don’t have a romantic view of writing, by the way: I’m very much in favour of demystifying book-writing and publishing. This is a job, and book-proposal-writing is part of the job. I don’t have any patience for people who say it’s all about inspiration, emotion and spontaneity; I think we should take time to think about what we’re doing, to structure and nurture our ideas, and to debate them with editors and agents. A book is the work of a collective. Even in self-publishing, there should be no writers who think they can do it all themselves and know better.

But book-proposal-writing, even with the most literary-minded, enthusiastic authors, editors and agents, gives you a weary feeling of über-professionalism; of the perfect polish, watertight smoothness of prophylactics. A prophylactic against crazy deformed, cross-generic, monstrous fiction-babies; as if no mutations could occur once the blueprint has been deemed impeccable.

I’ll be glad, obviously, if and when one of those is finally accepted for sure, and hopefully they will be just as good as if I hadn’t obsessively reworked their first few chapters and synopses before writing the rest. But I won’t forget that their conception involved quite a bit of eugenic tweaking.

How attached are you to your characters?

Posted on 23/10/2013 by clembeauvais

Oh the tedium of character onanism. Character onanism, in case you didn’t know, is a verbal masturbatory practice commonly found among authors with whom you’re having coffee; authors who, in the manner of Pygmalion, have fallen in love with their own creatures and endlessly tell you everything about them.

Now the real postmodern question is, did Girodet fall in love with his own painting of Pygmalion?

Now the real postmodern question is, did Girodet fall in love with his own painting of Galatea?

These self-absorbed monologues are never, of course, triggered by your questions; if you do genuinely take an interest in the author’s characters, ask questions and contribute observations, the discussion doesn’t count as character onanism (just setting the definition here, ok).

Character onanism is most common among people who haven’t even written the damn book yet (see ‘Just Write the Damn Book’). In which case I’ve got nothing at all to say about those non-people you’ve made up. I am so bored I might start braiding my hair in a perfect reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry.

My hair, soon.

Anyway, I marvel at this kind of ‘discussion’, because I don’t quite understand what’s going on. So I’m asking here the sincere question to all authors who might be reading this (and what good taste in blogs you have!) – How attached are you to your characters?

From talking to the lovely Robin Stevens, who does not at all engage in character onanism (at least not in front of me), I gather that maybe I’m less ‘attached’ to my characters than other people. I definitely don’t ever feel like they’re ‘real’; and I don’t generally feel like they’re ‘taking over’, or whatever vocabulary I hear regularly. I’m not heartless, note – I do get extremely attached to characters in other people’s books. But mine?… well, not so much.

Part of it might be self-defence. My first ‘adult’ novel in French (as in, that I wrote as an ‘adult’ (well, 18) never sold, and I was very attached to my characters and story – I still am, and still consider it a huge failure. But for my current works – not really. If it sells, great – if not, I’m sad, but mostly because I’ve spent time on it.

I can’t help thinking – maybe people who read your book won’t particularly care about the characters; or not in the way that you want; or even dislike them. Maybe the book will do well, but the publisher won’t ask for a sequel. If you’d treated those characters as creations for a particular story for a particular book, you wouldn’t be as likely to end up feeling like your children and best friends have been publicly shamed. You wouldn’t be as likely to feel like the whole world hates you personally. You’d understand that to most people, your inner world is a source of either money or entertainment, not complete identification.

Part of it could be, also, that I see character onanism – and ‘attachment to character’ as the path towards telling everyone about one’s innermost fantasies. If you adore your characters with unending devotion, you’re probably hugely uncritical about them. You probably ‘wait’ for them to ‘dictate’ to you passionate stories where there is a love triangle and a heroine who is oddly like you and a love interest who is oddly similar in many ways to your father (or vice-versa).

And if you keep those blinkers on, it will be frankly embarrassing when the book is finished and it surfaces that you get turned-on by domestic abuse, marital rape, infant paedophilia and rough threesomes with exotic males. Especially if you’re a Mormon.

(I’m not saying you won’t make money, though.)

I believe, maybe wrongly, that the more emotionally attached you are to your characters, the more likely you are to let them ‘do whatever they want’ , let them ‘surprise you’. This vocabulary is used all the time: ‘All of a sudden that character took control’, etc. It’s seen as evidence of the bountiful muse. To me it sounds more like inexperienced writing, but as I said, I’m willing to be attacked on this point. After all, some very good people write with no idea how their characters are going to develop, whereas I’m an obsessive plotter.

All the same, being objective towards one’s characters – treating them a bit more like narrative tools, a bit less like real humans sounds like a good idea to me.The editor who wants to get rid of a secondary character or completely modify the choices of your MC won’t be swayed by your indignant reply that it’s the way they are as people. I’ve got used, over the years, to deleting secondary characters, of significantly modifying the journey of the main character, etc. Maybe they appear to me much too malleable to be attached to them.

Anyway, I’d be curious to know what other authors around here think about this. How many of you regularly engage in character onanism? Come on, I know at least a few of you who do. Confess. How many of you honestly think, sometimes, that your characters are ‘almost real’, or whatever you call it? Are you so attached to your characters that you dream about them, ask yourself what they’d do in such and such situation, etc? How would you theorise that attachment? (that’s the academic asking…)

Clem x

The Argument from Parenthood

Posted on 16/10/2013 by clembeauvais

I briefly mentioned the accursed phenomenon in this post. That phenomenon, well-known both to children’s writers and to academics in children’s literature or education, is the dreaded, dreary, dreadful deadlock of the argument from parenthood.

An argument strangely overlooked by Schopenhauer in his Art of Being Always Right.

This argument goes like this:

A: What I mean is that Book X can be criticised for its sexism.

B: Well, my little Phlox loves it!

A: I’m not saying children don’t like it, I’m saying it’s ideologically problematic.

B: Well, she isn’t bothered by the ideology!

A: It is quite possible that she might not notice it.

B: Children notice everything. They have the third eye. They are magical clairvoyants of miracle.

A: I’m not su-

B: Do you have children?

A: No.

B: If you did then you’d know. At the moment you don’t so you don’t.

A: Oh, ok then.

B: You know, I used to be like you, believing all the myths. For example, the idea that we can bring up girls not be girly and to be equal to boys. But then I had Phlox, and I gradually realised I was wrong. I observe her closely. She is naturally attracted to pink, and even at two years old she was enthusiastically helping me clean the house.

A: Ah, I guess essentialism is right then.

B: I used to believe that there was no maternal instinct, but then I held little Phlox against my chest and took my breast out of my bra and pressed the nipple against…

A: Can we not talk about this.

B: I love my children.

A: Oh I know.

B: Do you hate children?

A: No, I…

B: You must do, if you spend all your free time nastily disparaging all the books they like.

A: I don’t have anything against children.

B: THEN WHERE ARE YOUR CHILDREN?

(etc.)

I am barely exaggerating, and please don’t go and think that those things don’t happen at the most inappropriate moments, e.g. in the Q&A session at the end of a conference paper. It happens at least once in every conference, but often more. The following is a real (honest, unedited) argument from parenthood we heard at a conference last year.

The paper was a Marxist critique of the commercial myth of Santa Claus. Right after the talk, a hand shot up into the air. At the other end of the arm, a middle-aged lady. Her question, verbatim:

‘Do you have children?’

The youngish lady who’d given the paper looked for a minute like we’d have to push her eyeballs back into her head in a very short while. Eventually she stammered: ‘Well, I … Actually, I don’t think I should be answering this question…’

Not in the least disturbed, her questioner said, ‘Ok. Because I have to say, you talk about all these things, but I have children, and you don’t take into consideration the sheer magic of Christmas, the beautiful moment that it is for them, you can see it in their eyes…’

Bis repetita. I’m not quite sure what makes those people so OK, in the midst of an academic discourse, with bringing to the debate their own personal experiences of having created another human being from scratch. And more staggeringly, with asking straight out if their addressee has achieved the same ‘feat’ (presumably they would then be on the same wavelength).

What if the presenter couldn’t have children? What if she’d lost a child? This isn’t exactly the kind of revelation you want to hear in a busy panel sessions.

What if she didn’t ever want children? Would that make her Marxist reading of Christmas less valid?

Even when people don’t directly ask if the person has children, the argument from parenthood must be, I’m sure, extremely offensive and painful to academics who for some reason that they don’t need to disclose cannot or do not want to have children, and/or have had traumatic experiences in this very personal side of their lives. They must feel like they should be able to carry on with their academic work on childhood without it being hammered into their heads that it is incomplete without the insights of actual parenthood, whether or not from choice.

You don’t hear haemorrhoid specialists being asked by other haemorrhoid specialists in the Q&A session, ‘Excuse me, but have you got haemorrhoids yourself?’ You don’t see fruit fly specialists lyrically raving on about the cuteness of their three-legged, twelve-winged, forty-eight-eyed wonders in the middle of an academic conference. OK, maybe you do. But why is it that children’s literature criticism – and education in general, I think – which makes people think it’s an OK thing to do?

It is NOT an OK thing to do, for the following reasons and many more:

Arguments from parenthood, in general, are extremely conservative. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard parents implicitly justify patriarchy, ‘fear of the racial other’, etc, and their own life choices as academics, thanks to their kids. Simply from observing that their boys tend to prefer gun toys (‘even if I offer him dolls, he’ll choose guns!’), that their babies are more scared of the black neighbour than the white postman, they happily spring back into obscure essentialism.

Arguments from parenthood are a form of religious speech, in the sense that there is no possibility for anyone to refute them. If you’re not a Parent, you can’t know because you’re not a Parent. (“argument from belonging to a completely different sphere of experience”). If you’re a parent, you can’t know either, because you don’t realise that my kids are more right than yours. All I can say is that I respectfully tolerate your faith, but I personally belong to cult of the Non-Childed, or to the cult of the Childed-With-Other-Children-Than-Yours, and therefore according to your rules I can’t know.

Arguments from parenthood come from the absolute and intimate and clearly wrong conviction that one’s children can’t possibly be biased, influenced, deficient in some way or ignorant. If Phlox, Amaryllis and Cyprian are acting this way, it’s because it’s in the Great Nature of Childhood to be so. They are eternal vessels of truth. My obsessive-compulsive observation of their every move is therefore putting me in touch with Pure Childness. And it is beautiful, oh is it beautiful. (This brutally changes, by the way, at adolescence – I have much more patience for parents bemoaning the constant annoyance to their lives that is their teenager, since it at least promises some anecdotal entertainment.)

No one likes arguments from parenthood, even those people who engage most often in them. In fact, those people are probably the biggest haters of arguments from parenthood – when used by others. You can tell from their scrunched-up faces that they are exceedingly annoyed when another person has the cheek to argue from parenthood before them. They want to yell out, ‘That’s my argument!’. They want to interrupt the impertinent speaker and give their version (the true one) of Pure Childness.

Sometimes a verbal ping-pong game will engage whereby two people will issue arguments from parenthood in the attempt to prove, superficially, an academic point, but in reality, one’s superior parenting skills and superior children.

Variations on the argument from parenthood include the argument from grandparenthood, the argument from aunt- or unclehood, the argument from godparenthood, the argument from teachinghood (which I would consider slightly more acceptable), and the cutest of all, the argument from siblinghood, which is the property of young PhD students who think with anguish that there must be some truth to this type of argument and they should do their best to get into the clique. I’ve been there.

Questions containing arguments from parenthood are not questions, they are family stories. Answers containing arguments from parenthood are not answers, they are family stories. Arguments from parenthood are not arguments, they are family stories.

I’m more than happy to listen to family stories over coffee and cake. But when giving or listening to a conference paper, I want to be free to analyse your daughter’s favourite book and say that it reinforces male domination and racial discrimination without it being perceived as a personal attack on her aesthetic taste. I want to be free to say that the fascination we have for childhood stems from existential concerns incommensurate with the objective value of the human beings that represent it without being told that I’ll understand when I squeeze the glutinous fruit of my own entrails in my arms for the first time.

And I really, really don’t want to hear about episiotomies.

Especially after I finally caved in and Googled the thing and realised it means this.

WHAT.

When you become an adult, will you start writing literature for adults?

Posted on 09/10/2013 by clembeauvais

I want to address without sarcasm (exceptionally for me) the common question: ‘Will you ever write books for adults?’

As a children’s author, it’s easy to take offence. Even if the asker is very tactful (which they rarely are), it’s impossible to miss the implicit assumption that children’s literature is ‘less good’; that there should be a ‘natural’ desire to graduate from one to the ‘next’.

I don’t want to write about the fact that children’s literature actually allows you to deal with themes ‘that are too large for adult fiction’, because Philip Pullman’s done it and there’s nothing to add.

I will write, instead, about one context in which this question can be valid: when it is put to youngish authors who started publishing children’s books when they were themselves barely out of adolescence.

One such fine example of author, Christopher Paolini (© Rafael A. Ribeiro)

In this case, the questioner can mean well. S/he is assuming that the young author has been writing children’s or YA literature because they are still young adults themselves; therefore they are perhaps currently interested in specific topics of childhood and adolescence. But as they mature, they might become interested in ‘adult’ concerns (whatever those are) and they might need their writing to reflect that.

It’s not idiotic to suggest that someone who isn’t an adult yet might gradually find that their experiences are changing, making them want to write about their new worries, beliefs and questions – things like libido, professional dilemmas, marital bliss, parenthood, midlife crises, and incontinence. Since those are not topics which fascinate the average child, they would probably be aimed at older generations.

In this context, the question shouldn’t be taken as offensive. But it is still useless. My only reply can be – How would I know? If I haven’t experienced yet what I might want to write about, how can I know if I’ll want to write about it? Sure, it might happen. It might also happen that I’ll write a non-fiction book on breeding Irish setters. I haven’t yet discovered the joy of breeding Irish setters, just as haven’t yet discovered the joy of mortgages, marriages and baby carriages. When I do, sure. It might happen.

The cover of my future book. (©Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez)

But it might also happen that these boring problems concerns linked to my evolving experiences will not find their way out of my system through fiction-writing. Writing fiction doesn’t define my life. I’m also an academic researcher, I’m also someone who talks (a lot), I’m also a reader, a museum-goer, etc. The assumption that I should channel every experience into writing is simply false.

It’s reductive to assume that people only write about what they actually experience. It’s reductive to think that the evolution of their concerns will ‘naturally’ make them want to cram them into their fiction-writing, as if there was no other way of letting off steam. There may be a thousand reasons why I could prefer my fiction to continue exploring topics that pertain to childhood. Maybe I find that reading about more ‘adult’ concerns, or talking about them, or watching films about them, helps me deal with them better than through writing.

Part of the mystique around writers and writing is the assumption that there is a compulsive wholeness to a writer’s life – as if it was impossible for ‘proper’ writers to have a private/ professional life divide, to have independent experiences, independent thoughts that will never surface in their works.

But it’s not dreams, it’s books. It’s not free-flowing speech on a psychoanalyst’s couch, it’s structured writing filtered by agents, supervised by publishers and sculpted by editors and copyeditors. It’s not something I can’t help. I’m not the neurotic scribe of my every experience, I’m a person who makes deliberate choices about what I want to tackle through fiction.

If I start writing ‘for adults’, it won’t be because I’ve had experiences that suddenly ‘possess’ me, that ‘ask’ to be written down. It will be because I’ve found that some of my new concerns can be explored in ways that I find enriching and that could constitute an interesting career move.

Book Giveaway – the Results!

Posted on 06/10/2013 by clembeauvais

Thanks so much to all the participants! So many buildings!

(And so many of you are scared of heights! maybe I should have asked another question – it seemed like quite a few of you would have gladly climbed down the stairs to an underground house on Tatooine rather than climb up a building)

We got:

– The Leaning Tower of Pisa for Chris

– The Shard for Sumeep

– Bag End (how Tatooinesque!) for Erica

– The Millennium Dome for Claire

– Edinburgh Castle for Jen

– The Space Needle for Philip

– La Géode for Audrey

– The Sydney Opera House for Annie

– Nothing for Sardine who is officially the most scared of heights

– The Walkie Talkie for Phil

– The Taj Mahal for Agathe

– The Qutub Minar for Rhea

– The Newby-McMahon Building for R.A.

And yes, I had to google some of them…

The Space Needle (presumably useful for sewing up black holes)

I obviously knew La Géode already, since it’s in my city, but if you don’t, you should have a look…

Anyway, here’s the pile of building-climbers in the symbolic form of bits of paper with their names on, before I turned them over…

And thanks to the Deity of Randomness, here’s the person who’s so lucky today that he should immediately go buy a lottery ticket:

Congrats, Chris! You’ve won Gargoyles Gone AWOL! I’m sure this is the single most exciting event of the last five minutes for you.

And your glee will be redoubled when you hear that the book will be signed not just by my delicate hand, but also by Sarah Horne’s, the illustrator of the books, who added her own autograph to the giveaway copy when I saw her the other day at Bath.

So email me your address and you’ll get the book!

Thanks so much everyone who took part. Safe climbing,

Clem x