I've Been M.I.A., But I'm Back With a College Degree!

This blog is something I treasure. It allows me a platform to write my thoughts on topics that are important to me in long form, and then to distribute those thoughts to a large audience. It provides me with a place to practice my writing, which, to a young writer trying to sell her fiction, is valuable no matter what the medium. It also produces instant feedback from readers and gives me the opportunity to interact with them.

So why haven't I written anything here since June of 2014? Why have I been neglecting something so important to me for almost a year?

Well, a number of life-changing things have happened to me in the past ten months. For your convenience, here's a chronological list:

• This person wandered into my life and made me fall in love. Rude. I would recommend following said person on Twitter and Instagram though, since both include quality content (Danny is both an amateur photographer and sassmaster).
• I went to the Caribbean on a family vacation and met some donkeys. The donkeys in Bonaire are morally offended by any form of journalism and so refused to allow me to write a blog post in their country.
• I started my senior year of college, which is the primary reason I wasn't updating this blog. Because of how draining senior year was, both academically and emotionally, I actually fell behind on everything, including writing/editing/revising my novels, reading for pleasure, keeping up with the publishing world, etc. Even playing video games started to feel like exerting too much effort.
• During my senior year, I taught a class on Leo Tolstoy, one of my favorite classic authors. If you're interested, we read Anna Karenina, selections from War and Peace, part of his essay "What is Art?", and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (a compilation of his shorter works), using the award-winning translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The class was small, but a big academic and personal success. It also took a lot of work, as you would expect. If you're into beautiful prose, expertly crafted characters, and emotions in general, I recommend you read all of these things.
• I ended up smack in the middle of a censorship controversy at my university (which, now that I no longer attend the school, I am comfortable stating is the University of Redlands). I was co-editor-in-chief of the student newspaper The Bulldog Weekly when, midway through the year, our student government decided to cut our funding. Suspiciously, this came after we published an article that didn't make the university look very good. My co-editor and I wrote about it here, but I plan to write a blog post talking more extensively about this as well.
• I graduated from college, earning my bachelor's degree in Writing Fiction: Listening, Absorbing, and Creating, which is a combination of the literature, creative writing, and psychology fields. If you're wondering why my major sounds made up, that's because it is. During my undergrad, I was part of an incredible program called the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies that allows students to design their own majors, which requires a lot of extra thought and self-motivation. I have a lot of negative feelings toward my university right now because of the whole newspaper drama mentioned above, but I can't speak more highly of Johnston and it will always have my heart. So, if you're considering the U of R, DO JOHNSTON.

And now I'm doing some traveling in Europe as a sort of graduation gift to myself. But what comes next?

Originally, I had planned to pursue a master's degree immediately after finishing my undergrad. Senior year helped me realize that I'm pretty burned out on school, at least for now, so I'll be spending the next year focusing on my novels, catching up with the publishing world, pleasure reading, and keeping up with this blog. I'm so excited to finally have time to participate in these things again, without having to schedule them around homework.

After that? We'll see. What masters degree would I want to pursue? Many might think I'd go for a creative writing MFA. I considered that at first, but now I know that's not the path I want to take. I have many reasons for this, which I hope to discuss on this blog at some point in the future.

What about literature? Tempting, but I think I'd rather indulge in all the pleasure reading I can in the years to come. Pursuing a masters in literature means committing myself to whatever my professors list in the syllabus. While I'm sure they'd assign some excellent reading, it means another several years of not having time to read purely for pleasure. Also, the niche I'm most interested in learning more about is Russian literature, and I'm pretty sure that requires learning Russian. Which would be great, and I would love to do that eventually! But I'd prefer to focus on getting my writing out there first.

If I'm going to pursue a masters in anything, my ideal choice (for the moment) is a masters in publishing. I'm really interested in becoming involved with publishing from the editorial side as well as the author side, and I've looked into some publishing programs that seem like excellent networking opportunities.

So, expect more posts from me now. I don't have homework taking up my time anymore and I'm looking forward to posting my thoughts somewhere less restrictive than Twitter. For those of you who have stuck with this blog, thank you so much for reading. For those of you who started following me within the past year, welcome, and I'm glad to have you!

I hope this is the beginning of a fulfilling and educational new era for this blog. Keep an eye out on Instagram for photos of England, Ireland, Scotland, and more!

-Morgan

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Classics and Contemporary Novels: How Both Can Improve Your Writing

A while ago, I wrote what I now consider to be a fairly naive post about how I am at a disadvantage in the literary industry because I love to read classics, and my novels are consequently influenced by them. I couldn't understand what the literary world had against archaic language, flowery descriptions, and novels that went on forever when I went wild over them. Why must I conform? I cried to the skies. Why must I cooperate with the rules The Man set down?!

Well, I was right about one thing: limiting myself to classics did put me at a disadvantage. But I acted like this was outside my control. I acted as if enjoying classics meant I couldn't enjoy anything else.

Before I get to the point of this post, let me ask you something. Have you, as a writer (or as some other kind of artist, or even just as a human being going through the world), ever heard the same rule beaten into your head over and over, and you understood it was a rule, but you never really understood why? For instance, as a kid, you probably knew your parents wanted you to eat your vegetables and cut down on the candy. This was an accepted fact because your parents said it, yet some tiny voice in your head went, but, why? You couldn't fathom why someone would make such a rule. Candy is awesome. Vegetables aren't awesome (or maybe you were like me and you thought vegetables were awesome, but not quite as awesome as candy).

For me, there was a rule like that in the writing world: use simple language. I saw this and thought, but...I like my pretty, adjective-filled descriptions of bathroom tiles. I like sophisticated vocabulary you don't often see in the twenty-first century. You...you want me to be a minimalist, like Hemingway? But I'm not him! You people are all against me! I literally scratched my head over this rule for six freaking years.

Then, while studying abroad in Ireland last semester, I had the wonderful opportunity to read contemporary and classic novels side by side. I took a class called Contemporary Irish Fiction as well as 19th Century Irish Writing. Now, keep in mind, I'd started picking up contemporary novels again recently, so I was already starting to learn my lesson. I read a slew of YA novels over the summer, The Hunger Games series the winter break before that, etc. But this gave me the opportunity to read them at the same time. To compare. To see that--

Oh.

Oh.

There are reasons many of the qualities often found in classics are now extinct in contemporary literature. Good reasons. Suddenly, I'd lost my patience with seven-page-long monologues about the same thing, because I'd re-entered the world of contemporary works, and those authors, uh, cut those parts out. Because they didn't want their readers begging for mercy.

However. You may have noticed the title of this post. I am not here to bash classic novels. Now that I've been enlightened and have familiarized myself fairly well with both "genres," I feel like I better understand what writing lessons can be gleaned from each. Let me tell you, my prose has improved immensely ever since this epiphany. I am simplifying the hell out of my latest draft, and I am reevaluating those anachronistic words, but I'm also remembering what classics taught me.

Here's a list of why you, writer, should read a healthy balance of both classic and contemporary novels and, more importantly, why.

CONTEMPORARY NOVELS

1) Simplify your language. I'm starting with this one for obvious reasons. I was editing one night, reading over one of my overwrought sentences, and then I thought to myself, "Morgan--you're trying to get a complicated concept across to your reader. So why the hell would you use complicated language to confuse them even further?" Even worse is when your characters are performing a simple task and you write it out in the most convoluted way possible. I'll provide a sample of my own writing so you see what I mean. Here's the sentence from the unedited first draft, about a teacher's reaction to my main character asking to go to the bathroom because she's upset: "At first, [the teacher's] wrinkled lips thinned, accentuating the pinkness of her lipstick, but her features softened as she scrutinized Ama’s face, which Ama had been forced to scrunch in order to tether it to what was socially acceptable, and to prevent it from bursting like a pressured dam." Whoa whoa whoa, hold the phone, what the hell? Slow down. That is way too many words for such a simple thing. Here it is after I simplified it: "At first, the teacher’s wrinkled lips thinned. But her features softened when she studied Ama’s face, which Ama forced herself to scrunch so it wouldn’t burst like a pressured dam." There, that's better. The action remains and we still understand Ama's emotional struggle without getting beaten over the head by it. We lost the bit about the lipstick, but who cares? No one will miss a useless detail like that.

 2) Concision. Yeah, I'm still struggling with this one, but I'm getting better. Ever notice how contemporary novels tend to be slimmer, while older novels could be doorstops? There are exceptions, of course--1984 is tiny, while the Harry Potter books are famously huge. Contemporary novelists have realized that the more quickly you get your point across, the less likely you are to lose your reader's attention. The Perks of Being a Wallflower wasn't 500 pages long because it didn't need to be. It said everything it needed to say in about 200 pages and said it beautifully. Conversely, I love Dracula, but it definitely didn't need to be that long. In fact, I started to get really sick of how long it took to reach the climax. Older novels were sometimes longer because authors got paid by the word, or because the novel was serialized--the books would be released a few chapters at a time in magazines and readers would beg for more. Those days are behind us, so try not to write a doorstopper, unless it really works for your story (and, again, this is advice from someone who...writes doorstoppers).

3) Pacing. This kind of ties into concision, but it gets its own category because it's the most stark difference I've noticed between classics and contemporary novels. The first contemporary novel I picked up in a long time since my classics phase was The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (I read The Golden Compass in ninth grade but didn't finish the series until I was nineteen). For the first time in years, I found it extremely difficult to put the book down. I'm crazy about War and Peace and will recommend it to anyone who breathes, but it also drains your mental energy, so putting it away for a while takes less willpower. With Subtle Knife, I could keep turning pages and not even notice how quickly I was moving. The story drew me in, and I felt a desperate need to know what happened next. Sure, parts of classic novels can create this effect, but they're more likely to drag. Contemporary novelists know to eliminate the parts that drag, or at least minimize them as much as possible. For a slow reader like me, this is helpful.

 4) Understanding the market. This is more for writers who are looking to get published than anyone else, and part of what made me complain about my "disadvantages" in that post from 2012, because I was a snot-nosed brat. If you read nothing but classics all the time, how the hell do you expect to get published? You're not competing with Austen and Dostoevsky and Joyce. I mean, you are to some degree, since your books would hopefully be sold in the same stores as theirs are (eep!). But it's not the same. What if your idea has been done before, and you don't know it because you haven't read much past 1960? What if you thought your protagonist named Katniss had the most unique name ever, and you're not Suzanne Collins? What if you make the amateur mistake of comparing your novel to Great Expectations in a query letter? (Don't do it. Please don't.) If you know what people are reading right now, you have a better chance at making a difference. You can spot the stories that aren't being told. You're more likely to sound original because you've done your research.

CLASSIC NOVELS

1) Learning new vocabulary. "Morgan, what the hell?" you must be thinking. "Didn't you just say to simplify your language? In bold, multiple times?" Yeah, but sometimes, a situation calls for a sophisticated word. If you've never paid much attention to a classic novel or English class, your vocabulary will be limited. And, as a writer who will be tempted to repeat the same words no matter how expansive your vocabulary is, that isn't good. When you're stuck, say, describing how someone is feeling, and "sad" just isn't cutting it, what do you do if your arsenal lacks words? Maybe your character's sadness is really deep, quiet, and thoughtful, so "melancholy" would fit better. There is no other single word to describe that feeling, so use it. You need it. Classic novels are obsessed with the word melancholy. I can't remember any contemporary novels I've seen it in, except Because of Winn Dixie, though I'm sure there are some. If it fits, then please pull a word like this from a classic. Just don't overuse it.

 2) Creating unforgettable characters. This is not to say that all characters in contemporary novels suck, or aren't memorable. Far from it. My ears will probably perk when they hear a Harry Potter character's name until I die. But dude, think about Peter Pan. Alice in Wonderland. The Greek/Roman gods. Society has held onto these characters for decades, centuries, millennia, and still hasn't let go. Who doesn't want to create a character who millions of people take into their hearts as if that character is a living, breathing person? Readers have met characters who touched them in some personal way, inspired them to do something with their lives, even saved them. I will encourage all my children to read Jane Eyre at some point not just to see how a woman can behave against a society that dislikes her, but how admirable and courageous a person, male or female or somewhere in between, can be. I want everyone to read to the end of The Brothers Karamzov so they can sniffle at the last five pages and want to hug the hell out of Alyosha Karamazov. Like I said, this can happen in contemporary novels, but such novels can sometimes be harder to find. This is partly because there's an emphasis on plots and ideas in the literary world today--which is necessary, since a cool concept is often what will get someone to read a book in the first place. Good contemporary novelists, like Emma Donoghue and Rachel Hartman to name two very different ones, will balance well-written characters with interesting plots. But many spend more time on plot than character, and finding the gems can become a challenge.

3) Complexity. When I read the introduction to War and Peace, the translators claimed that Leo Tolstoy had taken life and put it on paper. Sensory observations, understanding of humanity, realism in general--all spot on. I thought, pfft, yeah right. Then I read it, and oh my god, were they right. It's one of the reasons Tolstoy has gone down in history. He gave us three dimensional people and a world that breathed, and breathed so truly that we could recognize that world as our own, despite the fact that we don't live in 19th-century Russia. He also layered the book with ideas, meaning, philosophies, and questions regarding life that we might never have thought about. I'm not talking about complex vocabulary here. I'm talking about complex characters, complex worlds, complex ideas, complex morality. This is, once again, something more easily found in classics, because it's usually why they're classics. To Kill a Mockingbird pointed a finger at racism, but through the eyes of a young girl named Scout, so Harper Lee couldn't quite point at it directly. The social commentary becomes clear without any character having to explicitly say, "This is wrong" or "This is racist." In the same novel, a character previously thought to be evil, Boo Radley, turns out to be sweet and sensitive, which surprises Scout. There is still clearly something wrong with him, but not in the way Scout thought--it's more complex than that. Yes, this is present in plenty of contemporary novels, and boy do I love those novels. Yet so many of them employ cookie-cutter characters, stereotypes, and black-and-white morality, so you've got to work harder to find the good stuff.

4)  Understanding what has stopped working. A big mistake I made during my classics phase was thinking that if a book won the honor of becoming "classic," that meant everything about it worked. I didn't understand why I couldn't write endless sentences when James Joyce could (other than the fact that he was actually good at writing them). Why was Melmoth the Wanderer allowed to be 600 pages long when mine wasn't? Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald get to use all those adverbs in The Great Gatsby? The answer is this: no book is perfect. No, fifteen-year-old Morgan, not even a classic. A really good book is a book with so many strong points that the weaknesses fade into the background, or at least seem to matter less. Melmoth the Wanderer's length was mostly excused because Melmoth was a fascinating character with an intriguing perspective on humanity. James Joyce was long-winded, sure, but look how unique, and often beautiful, his language is. The Great Gatsby took a jab at the corruption of luxury, and did it eloquently enough that people tolerate the excessive adverbs. By reading classics, you can isolate what made it so memorable (not necessarily to the world, but to you) as well as what made it a struggle to read. Eliminate the bad, but keep the good in your brain. Then you can strive to improve your own writing without outright imitating everything about the classics, either.

Hope this helped someone. It sure helped me.

-Morgan 

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Stuck Between A Rock and An Old Place

EDIT 1/3/2014: Over a year later, I now consider this to be a fairly naive post. I wrote this before I'd really researched the literary industry and before jumping back into reading contemporary novels, which I learned can be pretty damn awesome. Sure, classic novels are great, but reading only classics is limiting. I am now happily reading fiction from both "genres" (including YA fantasy!) and enjoying the merits of both (more on that in this post). I'll keep this post here, though, as a testament to how much someone's opinion can change if they open their mind and do some research.

Since I've been learning about the literary industry and the world surrounding it for the past few months, I've picked up on a couple of things concerning my placement in it. For those of you who are unaware, if you're gonna sell your work, you have to know what genre and category your book falls into. My series, for example, involves an alternate universe where its inhabitants practice magic, so genre-wise, it must be fantasy. It is also told from the perspective of a teenager and deals with teenage problems, so it is categorized as young adult fiction, or YA (something I only recently discovered because I was very...confused. I didn't quite get that anything other than slang-heavy language in YA can be acceptable and that length doesn't determine the category, so for a while I thought it was adult fiction. Whoops.).

And then there's something else literary agents and publishers tell you to do: know your genre. That means if you're writing fantasy, they expect you to read widely in fantasy. That way, you will know where your book belongs in the current market, and how to sell your book to readers. It makes perfect sense.

Now, here's my deal: most of my favorite books are at least fifty years old. My favorite authors at the moment are Leo Tolstoy and James Joyce, who both died in the early twentieth century, meaning they wrote and published their best work even earlier than that. I can't help it. Whenever I visit a bookstore, I automatically wander into the classic fiction section and find myself reaching for a Conan Doyle or a Wilde or a Bronte. I do not read classic fiction because I think it will make me smarter, or because I think all of it is good, or purely because I want to understand my literary roots. The latter was my initial reason for getting into classics--my first was Austen's Pride and Prejudice--because I thought it important to familiarize myself with the canon if I wanted to be a writer. And then I fell in love with it.

Classic novels fascinate me. There is something powerful enough about them to transcend generations. Someone in the early 1900s was equally as mesmerized by Joyce's "Eveline" as I was in 2011. That is a one-hundred-year difference. If there's any mark I want to leave on this world through my writing, it's one of universality. I want to affect people beyond my own lifespan. This is one reason I write so much about emotion--everyone can identify with emotion, even if only in a general sense.

But oh, woe is me (please read that sarcastically). I read classic, literary novels, yet for some inexplicable reason, the story that popped into my head and forced me to fall in love with it was a fantasy.

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that, since I don't generally read YA fantasy (at least not yet--if I wanna work in this business I'll need to put on my big girl panties and read some!), I'm not as familiar with my market as regular YA fantasy readers are. I can almost feel the agents wrinkling their noses now (I'm exaggerating, of course--many of the agents I've researched and follow on Twitter seem like lovely, fun people, and I've heard several of them say things like this aren't a total dealbreaker. But I enjoy mocking the stereotypical, rigid, stick-up-the-ass agent many writers seem to think inhabit every single agency in the world). I am not yet as informed as others might be about what's been done and what hasn't, what's popular right now, and what fantasy stories readers are connecting with these days. If I don't work really hard, it may be harder for me to sell my book.

But by primarily reading classics, I also have an edge. I'm coming at fantasy from a perspective many fantasy readers/writers do not have access to unless they read classics as avidly as I do. I am free of the temptation to imitate other fantasy writers' ideas and styles, making it easier for me to develop a fantastical world and story that does not inadvertently rip off a popular fantasy writer. My works reference Joyce and Dostoevsky (where appropriate). And best of all, I read works that have persisted through the ages. I have carefully studied their prose, the way they play with words, the figurative language they use, the detail they commit to description and to subtlety. I've paid rapt attention to which characters are the most compelling and have captured the hearts of millions of readers, past and present. I have immersed myself in what these stories say about humanity, how the context the book was written in (era, location, etc.) impacted its story/character/prose elements, and how it influenced the people of its time.

Of course, I am in no way insinuating that classic fiction is "better" than current fiction, or better than current YA fantasy. Modern fantasy novels can have all of these wonderful things. The advantage the classics have, though, is that they've stood the test of time. The novels of today haven't had the opportunity to do that yet. By focusing on books that haven't been forgotten despite being decades, perhaps hundreds of years old, I am exposing myself to books that stand out. And from what I can understand, agents and publishers love any book that stands out.

I am also not claiming that my own writing comes anywhere close to matching the quality of the classic novels I read. Hell no. If you hear any writer say, "I'm the next [insert classic novelist here]," feel free to roll your eyes, because no one can claim that. No one. But hopefully, if I continue to be a good, attentive reader and apply what I learn from classic novels to my writing, some of their masterful techniques will rub off on me. If I ever write anything that stands the test of time, I know I'm very, very far away from reaching that point right now. Maybe I'll get there, maybe I won't. But that "maybe I won't" turns into "I definitely won't" if I stop trying.

Until recently, I was ashamed of the strange contrast between my reading interests and my writing interests. I felt embarrassed and out of place. But then I thought, so what? This is who I am. This is what I like to read and this is what I like to write. And I think what I read makes me a better writer, regardless of its genre. I don't even like to place my work, or any work, in a genre, but I know it's necessary for agents and publishers to do so. I am writing the story I love, literary leanings and all. It just happens to have magical elements and take place in an alternate world. I'm proud of this series. I have been since I started writing it, and I doubt that will ever really change.

To be fair, I have read some YA fantasy, so I'm not going in completely blind. Anyone who Googles me can figure out pretty quickly how obsessed I used to be (and still am, to an extent) with Harry Potter (but really, who wasn't?). I plan to read more YA fantasy so I know what's been done and what hasn't.  I also probe the fantasy literature world in different ways--for years, I've frequented websites visited by hordes of writers who primarily stick to fantasy, and I read their discussions about cliches they see often, what they like to see in fantasy, common mistakes made in fantasy (including the brilliant, well-known essays by limyaael [offsite link], which are more helpful than I can describe), tips on worldbuilding, etc. In addition, I'm aware of the many resources I can use to track what fantasy literature is currently popular. There are multiple avenues I can take.

So, I'm stuck between a rock and an old place. I swoon over the work of long-dead authors, yet I still wanna break through that daunting rock, the literary industry. The nice things about rocks is, if hit with a powerful enough force, they erode. They are molded by that force, changed into something new. The literary industry is constantly meeting new waves and adjusting to the altered currents. Today, literary professionals may not want to see the work of a fantasy writer influenced by Stoker and Capote. Tomorrow, they may be wild for it.

If I ever get a literary agent, he or she will not care that I don't write typical fantasy. That agent will believe in my writing and in my story. I believe in me. Maybe someone else will, too.

-Morgan

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