Headwaters of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca (Omushkos) in Minnesota

I tucked my laptop into the trunk of the car just before four generations of family and I headed north to rustic cabins near the source of the Mississippi River.  I was ambivalent about bringing along anything electronic.  When I couldn’t honor a friend’s request for a GPS of the headwaters, due to the lack of a signal on my iPhone, I felt this perverse pleasure in there still being a few places on the planet where one is unreachable.

Days later, a message did reach me, however, in a sitting room furnished with old wicker and new WiFi, at the state park’s lodge.  It came from an agent – well, actually, the person I’d already begun to think of as my agent.  A few weeks earlier, his assistant had responded quickly to my query.  She’d asked for a “full,” told me she and the agent both wanted to read my tween novel, and the sooner the better, so could I email it right away, please?

I’d done my research on this guy and we were definitely simpatico, kindred spirits regarding literary preferences, philosophy related to life and children’s literature, you name it.   The man even has a sweet tooth – welcome news for a woman known as the Dessert Queen.  I made up my mind to send him my infamous Rocky Road Fudge Bars as soon as we officially connected.

I hang out with a lot of folks who believe in the power of intention — the sense that thoughts are things, that they create our reality; hence, these thoughts better be positive ones, and, ideally, be simply expressed in the present tense.  Visualize the ideal relationship as if it already exists, and it’s more likely to manifest, the thinking goes.  In short, your basic head trip.

So by the time his email shows up in the middle of Almost Nowhere, we are, imaginatively speaking, BFFs.  He’s selling my breakout tween novel at auction, then taking a look at my middle grade novel, asserting that it has that Beverly Cleary je ne sais quoi from start to finish.  He knows just how I should revise it to make it more compelling for an editor… and as soon as I do so, he reps it, too.  Then turns his attention to other manuscripts in my files.  My agent’s all over my sequel to the tween novel as well, supporting me and my creations.  I stop in to see him every time I visit my friend Gayle in the same city.  He chills on my deck when he’s here.  Yeah, we’re tight.  A match made in heaven and all that.

Which is why, when he gives me the old heave-ho via email, it is such a shock, despite his kind words (“you’re very talented;” “your manuscript is a cut above most of the work that we see;” yada yada).    One moment — in my mind, at least — we re talking books and laughing and ingesting sugary substances, and the next, our mutually rewarding, literary partnership is kaput.

To my credit, I do not stay in my head.  I check in with my heart, which telegraphs back:  Very, very sad, that’s what you are feeling; deeply disappointed.  For God’s sake, shed a tear, if you need to. The random morbid thought flits through my mind, like possibly celebrating the tenth anniversary of my blog about this journey to publication, or having actual readers one day say what this agent wrote:  “…just didn’t completely connect with it.”

As luck would have it, five minutes ago our mail carrier delivered a box with another “full” in it – this one from the vice president and uber-agent of a different well-known agency.  She writes… “…although I still like the story, I’m not ‘in love’ enough with it – and I wish I could put my finger on why that is, but I’m having difficulty doing that.”  She’s the one who requested a revision.  No suggestions here and now from either about what might be improved, what needs fixing.  Just their joint, close-but-no-cigar.

This manuscript is about the paranormal being a normal aspect of reality, a concept that makes it a harder sell.  And so far I have made a mere smattering of forays into Agentland.  That’s what I tell myself so that I don’t call it quits and get a job selling Spanx at Bloomingdale’s or Von Maur.   Somebody else reading this — who has survived twenty, forty, seventy or more rejections — is surely telling himself or herself that hosting a pity party at this point is unwarranted.  The veteran probably agrees with Paul Coelho (who wrote in The Sahir):  I don’t regret the painful times;  I bare my scars as if they were medals.

I may feel alone in the face of two particularly disappointing rejections, but I’m not, really.  For most writers, these rejections and these blues come with the territory.  Occupational hazard, if you will.  But it’s still a good life.  Nothing to do, but give thanks for the opportunity to live it.  Then to begin.  Again.

The journey begins here...

Cafe near Itasca State Park in Park Rapids, Minnesota

Ashley and I admittedly are gaga over this green guy.  Sara Pennypacker, whose quirky and irrepressible Clementine is one of my favorite book characters, somehow created the horticultural hunk (pictured below).

Sara Pennypacker's Moss Man

A first visit to this site had a big impact on me – a visual reminder that creative pursuits beyond writing and illustrating are part of the natural order, part of the creative person’s job description, if you will, in the same way that Stephen King insists in his memoir On Writing, that reading is not merely recreational if one is a writer, but a necessary and inviolable part of any work day.   Such reading and creative efforts, seemingly unrelated to the work-in-progress, can’t help but rejuvenate the reader/creator and enrich one’s subsequent work.  For me, the immersion in b-girl culture has been proof of this dynamic.  My delight in the dance form not only has enriched my life, but, ultimately, the content of my tween novel.

On the same day that Ashley shared news about the site, I heard a portion of an interview on NPR with Julia Schor, bestselling author of Born to Buy and, her latest book, Plentitude:  The New Economics of True Wealth.  This economist responds to the huge challenges of the current moment by preaching sustainability, but suggesting that it is not a paradigm of sacrifice.  I listened to her praising the people around the country and world who are creating lifestyles that offer a way out of the work-and-spend cycle (see: “The Story of Stuff”).  She gave examples of the richness inherent in creative endeavors.

Timberlake’s site and a kidlit community at the cutting edge of this change provide inspiration as well.  Those examples make me more determined than ever to sign up, with seven-year-old Ryder, for the intergenerational hip hop dance class this fall and to dust off my floor loom, standing unused for years.  I’ve been ignoring the periodic emailed schedule of Riddle’s Elephant Experience Weekend openings – not sure I’m up to cutting pachyderms’ toenails, though bathing and feeding them would thrill me.  I ought to decide if I’m going to finally do this… and when.

A plunge into something entirely foreign would be good for the soul and good for the work, too, I suspect.  The perennial garden that surrounds our abode is a source of deep pleasure now – definitely an example of Schor’s metric of “wealth” — but  I remember the drizzly day when I began the project with a dozen tiny tiarella plants, looking overwhelmed and pathetic in a plot that was a fraction of a grassless expanse — once our poor excuse for a yard.  “When pigs fly….” was a thought that crossed my mind during that first foray into gardening.

When pigs fly...

Watering elephants in addition to hosta might be just the thing.  Or something that inspires me at “Show and Tell Me.”  I’m adding it to my list of links because it’s definitely worth checking out.

Jack, chillaxin' on Ober's Island

Only days ago, Margo emailed to say she and her buddy Jack were just back from another visit.  We met on this magical outcropping a half-mile from the Canadian border a couple of summers ago, she and I, and Jack (pictured above), all sleeping under the same roof in one of a batch of dwellings with ladders-for-stairs and hidden alcoves and secret doors and the ghosts of those who first visited in the first part of the last century. That’s Margo, in the doorway of a sky-high room where she found me chillin’ and invited me to come out to play.

I’m talking Pippi Longstocking-worthy play, the kind that is usually only the province of childhood.  Unselfconscious play for sure – everybody in unspoken agreement about practicing the willing suspension of disbelief, as when Jack, a loquacious pooch, mesmerized listeners with one of his stories or when the small band of us, in such high spirits that alcoholic ones weren’t needed, found ourselves under a full moon, banging drums and ringing bells, hooting and laughing, in a ragtag procession to one end of the island.

Yes, child’s play, both spontaneous and absorbing.  Whenever and wherever the spirit moved her, one of the cohabiting creatives took to making mandalas from bits and pieces of the natural surround.  Each one — appearing in this glade, beside that hint of a trail, even atop an overturned wheelbarrow — surprised the rest of us on our rambles. (At Margo’s urging, I threw together a mandala in yet another unlikely spot, the top of Margo’s head, a surprise gift for the mandalas’ creator.)

Margo as Mandala

One of the Mandalas

I’m certain that if I were scribbling and roaming and playing there as I have over a long string of summers, I’d soon forget all about last week’s submissions, in the same way that at the age of eight, I forgot I’d submitted a poem to Katy Keene Comics, until payment in paper dolls arrived in the mail.  Surprised by joy!

I’ve just read Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog and reread Jacqueline Woodson’s Locomotion—two books about boys who resist the siren song of poetry but ultimately experience its therapeutic power in the writing of it.  One goes:

Sometimes

when you are trying

not to think about something

it keeps popping back

into your head

you can’t help it

you think about it

and

think about it

and think about it

until your brain

feels like

a squashed pea.

A squashed pea… well, not exactly, but, despite my best intentions, I’ve been dogged by stray thoughts regarding the whereabouts of my queries and copies of the manuscript.  Is it still in an agency mail room? In an editor’s satchel?  I’m hoping that after the wedding, a family pilgrimage up north to the headwaters of the Mississippi for a week will do the trick because if there’s anything that can free a brain from feeling like a squashed pea… it’s magical thinking.  It’s inspired fun.  It’s kid-style, full-tilt, forget-about-all-else play.  And once we return,  I’m all for being surprised, once again, by joy.

It’s also possible, of course, that she has read the 200-plus pages and is putting off breaking the news that she’s passing on the book.  She’s a kind, gracious woman who surely recognizes the time I’ve invested in a re-do; perhaps she has no idea that I celebrate how much that revision has enriched the work.  I’m grateful for her nudge, whether she agrees to represent this book or not.  I’d just as soon she send a rejection sooner rather than later, if necessary.

Hmmm.  Negate that.   It’s plain old counterproductive to go there – you know, imagining rejection.  Everything I’ve been reading in recent years attests to the power of positive thinking… and imaging… and speaking.  I do believe that thoughts are things… and negative, fear-based ones corrupt the best of outcomes.

Things get a bit more complicated, however, when one chills with friends who happen to be seriously psychic.  A week or so ago I was talking on the phone with one who does this kind of thing for a living.  We were chatting about something fairly inconsequential when mid-sentence, she stopped and said,  “Somebody’s reading your manuscript right now.  Is the agent petite with brown hair?”

“That would be no, and no,” I told her.  “I know she’s a blonde.  And I’m fairly certain she’s tall and lanky.”  (So there.)

This friend was undeterred.  “Well, the woman is definitely petite and brown-haired and she can’t believe she’s been asked to read the whole thing because typically she doesn’t buy into the paranormal as valid or real.  She loves your writing, but she doesn’t want to change her mind about mediumship.”

Swell.  Could be the assistant, I told myself.  She was the reader who only read the first 75 pages, even though another reader, who wrote, “Think Tuck Everlasting and Bless Me, Ultima, with a bit of The Babysitter’s Club and you have [this book]” insisted that one has to finish the book to” get it.”  Could be anybody, really.  Could be this verdict will be reversed by the agent herself, I offered.

This is when my pal, my buddy, my GF, added,  “A guide here is saying you have to keep sending it out.”  (Thanks for that.)

I hung on to the concept of malleable futures.  Any reputable psychic will tell you that there are many ways our wills and others’ can alter an initial vision of what’s to come.  And I wondered aloud if she herself isn’t too invested in an image she has received more than once of two women in California (assistants? agents?  booksellers? grocery clerks?) enthused about the book.

The skeptical reader is surely saying,  “What the….?  You believe in that crap?”

And all I’ll reply at the moment is:  Seeing is believing… and this friend has been successfully prescient enough times – from telling my daughter she’d change jobs and host a radio show in a matter of months at a time when she was immersed in running a company she created for General Mills to… well, trust me, the instances are mind-boggling.  More medium than prophesier, she’d be the first to tell you, however, that she’s not always right.    So stay tuned.  Bottom line:  This A.M., first thing, a doe and her twin fawns ambled by within five feet of me.  That’s really all the soul-stirring happiness I need today.  I hope your day holds a share of such happiness for you, too.

So I’m driving along – you still in the backseat? – on the journey to this novel’s publication, feeling like I’m really making progress.  A lot of miles covered yesterday.  Additional research on a trio of stellar agents to query next, if, by the fast-approaching due date, the agent with the “exclusive” hasn’t responded, or, regrettably, nixes my novel.  I’m feeling grateful for blogs like Casey McCormick’s Literary Rambles, the lodestone for summaries and sources of more in-depth info on agents who handle kid lit.

I’ve finished a synopsis, a standard request of one of the agents, thanking my lucky stars that a special issue of Writer’s Digest called “Get An Agent” called out to me at B & N only days ago.  It’s loaded with tips, including the standard format of the synopsis. (Who knew that each character’s name needs to be in caps when it first appears in this summary?)  Still learning, I took time yesterday to read most of the issue’s features and congratulated myself on how far I’ve come in a year’s time with regard to being “query savvy.”   I already knew what part of my track record’s worth mentioning, how to craft the pitch paragraph, why I must first make a personal connection.

With all the “essentials” in mind, I spent the afternoon crafting three customized query letters, two for agents I’d seen in action at the January SCBWI conference in New York City, resulting in a keener sense of why we’d make a good match.  The third’s another dream agent, whose passion for kid lit equals, if not exceeds, mine.   Conference attendance also opened a door to a senior editor at Little Brown and Company who presented a workshop and gave me the green light to send her my revision.  I printed it toward the end of the day and wrote a cover letter.

All in all, a dream day, I thought, cruising to the post office where I sent those queries winging their way to both coasts.  After a break for supper and a meeting, I decided to run through the special issue again to pick up any tidbit I might have overlooked.  This is when I happened upon the piece I’d missed (or dismissed) on word count basics.  I’ve had a twinge of concern about the elevated word count of the revised book — about 4,000 more words than pre-revision – despite the fact that I cut line after line to improve the pacing.  There were characters to flesh out, a setting to make more vivid.  And immersion in the world of underground hip hop inspired attention to detail, including more content related to each of six lessons the main characters take as aspiring b-girls., all of this supporting the theme.

I let the count be what it was.  Teen readers of advance copies didn’t comment on the length.  Neither did either agency reader.  Besides, I’ve recently plowed through a couple of YA works that are mammoth. Surely, the word count for tween fiction was similar to that for young adult;  my characters are thir-teen, right?  Here, friends, is where the humongous black hole in the road swallowed me up, the pages of my 63,811 word manuscript fluttering far above me.  Here is where I made the horrifying discovery that it’s standard practice to couple tween fiction with higher middle grade rather than YA novel counts, the latter running between 40,00-65,000 words.  My range, it turns out, is 32,000 to 40,000.

Did you hear the primal scream as I plummeted into the abyss  without you?   I suspect not.  It’s a hole so deep that nobody could possibly hear me whimpering “help” in the dark.

Things look better in the morning.   I may have to claw my way up and out, word by word – more than 23,000 of them – but I’m already dusting myself off and looking up.  If somebody asks me to start climbing, I’ll do it.  Such is the madness of the writer’s psyche. Onward and upward.  (Or, in this case, is it upward, then onward?)  Gotta say, this is quite the trip.

When I read Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard, a middle grade novel that won the Newbery Medal in 2002, the powerful writing transported me to 12^th century Korea.  The characters grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.  I read the last pages in an altered state that any avid reader probably understands, freed from the claims of current time and place, and sensing that something of the divine had touched the work.  There’s a presence in and between the lines, communicating through the writer.

The wonderful Children’s Literature Network here celebrates books and their creators and one evening, members got to meet the author.  After her talk, Linda Sue joined a group of us at our table for dinner.   Tablemates departed, post-dessert, one by one. Finally, only Linda Sue and I remained.  How could I resist the opportunity?

“Were you given A Single Shard?” I said, out of the blue.

And without a moment’s hesitation, she said all she needed to say.  “Yes.”

It was immensely satisfying to have my suspicions confirmed that she had felt the presence of something beyond her that informed the book’s creation.  I don’t mean to suggest that it wasn’t hard work birthing that beautiful story, but, for whatever reason, its light bears the mark of a mysterious collaboration, an unknowable source offering the gift of inspiration to a greater degree than most writers typically experience (including Linda Sue, I suspect).

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, speaks in a recent TED talk of this “genius” that seems to reside outside of us.  It can sometimes feel “downright paranormal,” she insists, but makes “as much sense as anything, in terms of explaining the utterly maddening capriciousness of the creative process.”  Gilbert relates the poet Ruth Stone’s confession that there were times when she was outdoors that she felt and heard poems coming at her with such speed that she’d have to “run like hell” to fetch a pencil “in order to catch them.”  Tom Waits told Gilbert of the time the fragment of a melody presented itself while he was driving on an LA freeway and he addressed the open air –“Excuse me… can you not see that I’m driving?”  This was his acknowledgment of the collaboration between himself and “a strange external thing that was not quite Tom.”

The writer Henry Miller speaks of this presence, too:  “I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room.  Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony.  Nothing doing.”

It’s the visitor I wait and hope for.  It’s the company I want to keep for as long as the muse is willing to stick around and uplift me. Preferably, it’s an extended stay that lifts the work from self-conscious pap to something extra-ordinary, writing that’s inspired.  I agree with Gilbert that the persistent notion since the Renaissance that creativity comes completely from within results in a culture where artistry too often leads to anguish, whether it’s over a success which one fears cannot be repeated or a failure… to gain acclaim, to earn a readership or a living, even to publish, at all.  There is something liberating, yes, in the notion that if I show up and put everything I have into the effort, I’ve done my job.  If I’m lucky, my guide, my daemon, my collaborator will choose not to sleep in… and show up, too.  Next Monday morning would be good… or at your convenience, really.  I’m open to just about anything.

Illustration by David Weisner

Kahil Gibran

The same week I was putting final touches on the revision of my novel, Garrison Keillor wrote in an op-ed piece:  “… I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.”  Referring to today’s writer, “blogging like crazy” and more inclined to self-publish his or her books, Keillor painted a picture of “18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives.  Average annual earnings:  $1.75.”

Yeah, yeah… a bunch of publishing insiders were quick to challenge this view, suggesting in so many words that Keillor is a misinformed, nostalgic old fart and that book publishing is merely evolving, not disappearing.  But bytes of info that crossed my desk and my screen last week engendered a sense of trepidation as I delivered my manuscript to the P.O.

There was the news item about Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, the fourth best fiction seller of 2009, with two million hardback books in print only 15 months after publication; I was in mid-cheer when, reading on, I discovered that her book garnered 40 rejections before anybody decided to take a chance on it.  Huh?  Forty pros in publishing failed to see its potential?

There was the Facebook post from Michele Young-Stone, friend and author of the widely-praised The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors.  She posted a request for somebody, anybody, to come over and visit the Barnes & Noble where she was sitting alone at her book-signing event.  If nobody showed up to buy an autographed copy of her debut novel, recently cited as one of the top ten, how, I had to wonder, must lesser books and their creators fare?  She also blogged last week about the work-in-progress — specifically, the 1000 pages she herself rejected, the 17 revisions of the subsequent 400-pager, and its recent rejection by her editor (whom Michele, nonetheless, celebrates for having “the balls to tell the truth”).  A long-haul, this business of writing to publish.

Oddly, enough, the war stories keep me going as well as my refusal to think much about this manuscript during the next four weeks when, ideally, the agent will read it.   I have family and friends who reinforce for me the power of intention. The universe is conspiring in my favor, I tell myself, regardless of outcome. Today’s email to me from TUT.com reads, in part: In the end… it’s ALL going to be about… how much you enjoyed your life.

There you have it, I thought.  The act of writing is easily as much the enjoyable part of my life as anything I can think of — more enjoyable, dare I say, than a few of the most primal of pleasures.  Take the act of eating, for example,  I’m not one to ever miss a meal, but a week ago, while tweaking my manuscript, I completely forgot to “do lunch.”  Totally absorbed in the wordplay, I’d have skipped supper, too, if someone hadn’t reminded me to show up for it.

Illustration from Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson

The times when the right word or next step in the story eludes me can be downright crazy-making, but at the best of times, for me, putting a pen to paper (or tweaking words on a screen) is the best kind of play.  When, like Harold of Purple Crayon fame, I’m deeply into scribbling forth a world all my own, I become the kid who has to be called in to supper and complies, but only reluctantly.  So why enter the fray by writing to publish?  Why not simply enjoy the writing process itself?

I scribble because, increasingly, I feel it is something I was born to do.  This may be a huge conceit, but I’ll say it, anyway.  I envision readers, too, entering the world I’ve scribbled into being, and, if I’m lucky, reluctantly removing themselves from it only when forced to do so.  My growing sense is that not only is writing something I’m meant to do for pleasure, but that at least some of what I end up scribbling –  that work placed in my heart — is meant to be shared with the world.

I think I did pretty well considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. Steve Martin

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write. Gertrude Stein

It’s done.

Again.

The manuscript is on its way to New York City and into a receptive agent’s hands.  Yesterday I delivered it to the post office, assuring myself that this was the right place and the right time to let it go.  After the reconstruction process, especially intense in April, the sole remaining task had been page-by-page “tweaking” of this and that odd phrase, not-quite-right words for the right ones.  I easily could go on “tweaking” forever, but my instinctive feeling and even recent journal entries provided a push to send it off.

In one I wrote:  The novel seems a kind of Everest – my having created a plot, fleshed out characters, completed the revision.  I really believe it is the best I can do at the moment.  And I believe in it.  Dear Tuck is sleeping at my feet –as if he’s still hanging on to see the completion of this project, too…. I’m def ready for the next stage.  Whatever comes.

I’m not as attuned to the proverbial still, small voice as I am to synchronicity — the cosmic nudge that is the equivalent of the Universe’s pat on the back.  It is so-called coincidence that most often provides me with a sign to back off or to proceed. So when there was a snafu at the post office related to packaging and postage, I had second thoughts.  Was this a sign that I should grab the manuscript and run?   The clerk directed me to a corner to fix things.  I did, and then told myself,  “Give it up to the nice man across the counter, Tunie.  Hope for the best.”

Empty-handed, I returned to my car and the opening words of MPR’s mid-morning program about the featured guest.  I thought of a line in one of the first paragraphs of my manuscript, a reference to the only actual person named in the book.  Speaking of a boy who sees those in the community of underground hip hop as world changers, Claire, the main character says, “He’s a big fan of locals like Brother Ali. Changing the world one rap at a time…”

Brother Ali and (b-girl) Alicia Leafgreen

And the guest on the radio show as I drove away?  None other than Brother Ali.  I mean, what were the chances?  I listened with rapt attention as the articulate rapper touched on themes that are central to my own work.  He talked about his own transformative journey.  Mentioned a medium, Echo Bodine.  Revealed his intent in his brand new album, “Us” (which I ordered when I reached home).  It’s about acceptance of diversity, openness to new ways of understanding reality, and empathy for others. He celebrated his own opportunity to become more spiritual, to enrich his soul even as he supports brothers and sisters who don’t have the luxury or inclination yet to do so.   He spoke of  one’s innate spark as both gift and curse (because one fails to honor it at one’s peril).  The interview was a gift (and, as artist and human being, he is, too).   I urge you as well to listen to the June 1 program (Brother Ali’s Quest for Fellowship Through Hip Hop).

I recognize when the Universe is having a little fun with me.  I was a grinning fool by the time the interview ended.  Need a sign, Tunie?  How about this one?  Not so much a promise of things to come as a benediction and a shout-out that this is a milestone on my journey that’s meant to be.

Photo:  Alicia Leafgreen

A second look reminded me that, as in the preceding example, he dusted off a word the beats used in the 50s.  Anderson’s use of this retro word, like, succeeds, perhaps, because many of his other words are so fresh.  He also mixed in classic slang, including the last word of the book’s very first line: We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

All I can say is thank God for suck.  For cool and coolest.  For the classics freaky and weird.  Not to mention, crush,  though more typical today is crushing on — as in, crushing on a love object.  And dudes, I’m definitely for hanging on to puke, a word coined by none other than Shakespeare (who, by the way, also came up with O hell!).

True, there are some for whom cool is no longer cool, but if a writer uses the word in a novel, teen readers generally will let it pass.   So familiar to all that they hardly qualify any more as slang, such words offend virtually no one.   Obscenities and blasphemies that once were taboo –  and not only in tween and teen lit –  now offend few readers either.  Authors use them in more and more books.  In addition to deciding what texting and hip hop lingo and slang expressions my character naturally chooses and uses, I’ve had to consider what swear words, for her, are the norm.

Comedian George Carlin once riffed on the seven “dirty” words, including shit.  Today, varied forms of  it — shit-all, bullshit, give a shit, surprised and shit, holy shit, oh, shit, shit yo, nobody knows shit – appear so frequently in some YA books that I’m willing to bet that not only in its original organic form, but this other, shit will be with us forever.  It appears twice in my novel… for good reasons.

Just cause used to be the raison d’etre for inserting a swear word in a YA book:  a trauma so great, a shock so profound, an act so dastardly, that it would seem unnatural for an expletive not to escape a character’s lips.  In books like the prize-winning Going Bovine, about a hallucinating dying teen with mad cow disease, and Punkzilla, a novel-in-letters about a vulnerable fourteen-year-old’s intro to the seamiest of life experiences — each boy on the road trip from hell — the string of shocking events almost justifies the page-by-page explicit language.

I say, almost because I’m personally not crazy about wading through an unending stream of obscenities in any book.  I’m not crazy about using a lot of them in my own writing, either.  Turns out I’m in good company, as Will Shakespeare apparently felt as I do.  While all his contemporaries featured cursing in dozens of lines in each of their plays, he did so, according to Bill Bryson in Shakespeare, The World as Stage, only three times in his career.  In fact, one of his characters laments:

Why, what an ass am I!  Ay sure.

This is most brave

That I…

Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,

And fall a-cursing like a very drab –   (prostitute)

A scullion!   (the lowest kind of kitchen servant)

Teens once could use curse words to underscore their place as members of a social/age group  distanced and distinguishable from mainstream/grownup/stodgy society.  Peppering speech with an expletive or two provided a fairly benign way to rebel… not to mention an outlet for pent-up anger or frustration (which, from time to time, teens have in spades).  More recently, however, with old taboos in decline, it seems that only racist and sexist terms warrant notice if encountered in the pages of their books. What formerly was considered indecent is now pretty ho-hum, part of most teens’ everyday speech.

A writer using the first-person voice needs to be especially sensitive to that young fictional speaker’s language and reality.  It follows that I’m extremely relieved that my narrator happens to be a suburban thirteen-year-old girl rather than a sixteen-year-old sociopath/runaway or an Amish kid with Tourette Syndrome.   I’m hoping that two holy craps, a couple of shits, a double-damn, and the occasional substitution – frigging,  fricking, freaking — for the original mother of all cuss words, will not only suffice, but ring true.  An editor will, doubtless, have an opinion about this.  Do you?  As always, I welcome fellow writers’ and others’ thoughts!

One of these days soon I’ll embark on a word-by-word search and excavation of bon mots unlikely to pass a thirteen-year-old’s lips.  The occasional clinker materializes in even the best of tween and teen books.  Found myself circling a few when I read the Printz Award winner, Going Bovine.  (Others may disagree, but I couldn’t buy the teen narrator using a phrase like “baleful eye,” even though, like so many other teenage main characters who tell their own stories, Libby Bray’s Cameron is clearly at the high end of the IQ scale.) Similarly, I’ve already been cutting my own descriptive passages that use metaphors and similes reflecting more years of observation and experience than a tween can claim. The word “pewter,” for example, to describe a certain color and sheen on a lake had to go.  I admit to having the occasional daydream about describing to my heart’s content in the next manuscript which I’ll definitely write in third-person.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned about writing a story from a first-person perspective – in the voice of a present-day thirteen-year-old junior high school female, no less.  But it seemed that in most of the tween and teen novels I was reading (in contrast to middle grade novels), the protagonist told the tale.  Here was evidence of a current preference for more intimacy between the reader and a main character, a style more confessional in nature.  And I’d chosen to highlight a subculture about which most adults have a strong (if not always informed) opinion — that of psychic mediumship.  Let a young person, without preconceived notions, pro or con, tell of her introduction to this world, I decided.   Adding more content about underground hip hop to this revision, I’ve been glad it’s a teen, not an adult story-teller (even one simply in the wings), commenting on this subculture as well.

Turns out the most difficult task in this word search will be deciding which slang words to excise, change, or add.  “Less is more” is the usual dictum when it comes to incorporating the ever-shifting lingo of teens.  Online resources provide current slang by region — increasingly unnecessary in a world where virtually every inventive use of language anywhere receives almost instant exposure.  But the risk in using them is that they will become passé, embarrassingly outré, a second after any appear in the galleys.

I confess I love the phrase, it’s the shizzle – glad that a number of online resources certified that it’s both current and ubiquitous.  The phrase came up, however, during a discussion with a teen who had read my draft.  As diplomatically as possible, she informed me that shizzle is out, and that shiz or shizz is in.  Not long after, I came across yet another incarnation – it’s the shit – in a couple of new books.

Reading Lauren Myracle’s ttyl, a book written entirely in IM (instant messaging) or texting style, I recalled the comment that a woman in our writers group made over a year ago.  Her daughter had told her that no self-respecting teen would be caught dead using LOL (laughing-out-loud) since old codgers on Facebook had appropriated it.  Hence, I don’t use it in my manuscript.  I did use SLAP (sounds-like-a-plan) until several teens had to ask what it meant (once again firsthand knowledge trumping online guidance).

One of the agency readers questioned my use of hip hop terms like fresh and peace out, sending me on a quest for street-savvy info on this lingo.  B-girls in both Minneapolis and New York insisted that fresh is classic and never out of style.  (Dope, however, is the more popular term at the moment; in fact, a spoken word artist emailed to tell me I’m a “dope writer;” his intent not to suggest I wasn’t playing with a full deck, but to pay me the ultimate compliment.)   Now I’ve made sure characters are referencing Old School benedictions like peace and respectfully but ironically using terms like “bust a move” (also including the current preferred prop for executing great moves — killed it or kilt it).

One too many terms that no longer qualify as hip and a story’s cred can topple like a line of dominoes.  Too few and the character can seem clueless.  (A few words about curses and classics in the next post.)