Joey Goes To War

Before Christmas I went into a Barnes & Noble hoping to score a copy of War Horse by Michael Morpurgo for my niece. I figured the movie adaptation was being advertised to death, a Christmas Day opening was planned, I should find a case of the books right by the front door. Nope. While checking out the situation with a sales clerk, I said, "Gee, I thought you'd have this out in a rack because of the movie." She was looking the book up on her computer screen and in that  bored or tired way that sales clerks have when they're doing that sort of thing said, "We had it. I can order you a copy."

I don't recall how I got Rebecca her book. But for the next few months, I kept thinking, Wow. What an opportunity missed. That's an older book that should have sold by the truckload with all the attention it has gotten not just because of the movie, but it's a Broadway show. Come on.

Well, I didn't need to worry about War Horse's sales. According to the book's author, they've gone from a couple of thousand a year to over a million copies total, and it has now been translated into over 40 languages, up from 4 or 5. It looks as if here in the U.S. Scholastic is promoting it for its book fairs.

It may be an odd book in terms of audience, though. The main character is Joey, the war horse, himself. He has a lovely, elegant voice, but the humans around him tend to sound alike. They also often speak in an intense...er...I hate to say it about a fairly grim war story...but, sort of sappy way. Maybe it's because Morpurgo is trying to recreate the speech patterns of another era. Or maybe it's because these people are often talking to or about animals. I have some family members who can be quite cloying when they're talking to or about my mother-in-law's cat. At any rate, the age group that's most interested in animal main characters may not be as interested in war experiences and battle scenes. And the age group that appreciates war narratives may not be crazy about having one told by a horse.

Of course, the fact that a million books have sold probably suggests I'm talking about a nonissue.

World War I was the forgotten twentieth century war for a long time, always existing in World War II's shadow. War Horse's renewed popularity is part of an upswing of interest in the earlier war and the era surrounding it.  A lot of what is portrayed in the book seems historically accurate as far as my knowledge of WWI is concerned. It could be argued that the outdated tactic of sending cavalry and single soldiers across battle fields into machine guns is handled in a pedantic, instructive way, but it did happen. An article on a horse that actually "served" in the war supports the end of Morpurgo's book, which shows the British army selling off its horses in France rather than bringing them back to Britain. I've seen some talk on-line about the book and the movie being sentimental, but at least with the book I think enough characters are killed off to avoid a claim that it glorifies war.

As with a number of children's books that are set in a specific era or time different from our own, I wonder if my knowledge of the events portrayed here helps me to understand the book in a way that younger, less well read readers won't be able to. Do you have to know something about World War I to get this book? Or is the horse main character enough to bring this long ago war to children?

Plot Project: I'm sure some readers would claim that this is a give-a-horse-a-problem plot and keep him from solving it. Poor Joey is at war and needs to survive it with one event after another putting him at risk. I would argue, though, that this is a plot that is definitely built around a disturbance to a character's world. Joey was a farm horse, and his world is disturbed when he is sold to the army. From there the plot just plunges into battle.

I Would Watch This Movie

Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber   sounded like a movie thriller when I saw the review for it in The Horn Book  a while back, which is why I sought it out. Hey, I like thrillers. It also reads very much like a movie, so it's not surprising to read that movie rights sold around the same time that the book was accepted by its publisher.

The book is an entertaining mash up of two genres. First you have your traditional (or stereotypical) YA story of an older teen boy getting ready to head off to college soon and having problems with his successful, powerful, and demanding father. And, of course, the boy is in a rock band. Secondly, you have your traditional (or stereotypical) violent assassin who is actually seeking revenge for some terrible wrong. We've all read or seen those stories before. Putting them together in one place makes them if not actually new, at least more interesting and fun.

Okay, I feel a little bit of guilt about finding murder fun. Or, actually, I feel a little bit of guilt about not feeling guilty about it. But, it's a book, right? Lighten up, Gail.

Crazy European Chick has a lot of narrative drive and a wonderful female character who can always be counted on to pull a razor out of a sock or a helicopter out of thin air just when one is needed. She's not actually a YA character, the male lead is the YA character, but she's the one who makes the book.

Plot Project: This is definitely a plot that is dependent upon a disturbance early on. Young Perry is just your regular upper middle class YA guy who has been wait-listed at Columbia and is a member of a rock band. Then his mother and pushy father force him to take their incredibly dumpy eastern European exchange student to the prom. Gobi has big plans for prom night, but none of them have anything to do with dancing or going out drinking later. She needs Perry to drive her around from hit to hit in his father's fast, expensive car. Once Perry's life is disturbed, he's got to deal with the consequences for the rest of the book.

I May Have Experienced A Plotting Breakthrough

A few weeks ago, I read Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell. Because I am Gail, I didn't get with the entire program. But there were any number of bits and pieces that grabbed me.

For instance, Bell talks about plots beginning with a disturbance to the world of the book, or the world of the character, however you want to think of it. There was something about that that I thought sounded far more useful than all this stuff about give your character something to want and then throw stumbling blocks in her way so she has to struggle to get it. For one thing, that seems like a formula to me, not a plot generating method. For another, being an organic writer, as I am, I always wonder, What character? What does she want? What stumbling blocks? Where am I supposed to get all that stuff? None of this material just comes to me. A disturbance to the world of the book, on the other hand, seemed far more useful. It could be a real jumping off point for coming up with a plot, I thought.

I'd been thinking about disturbances off and on ever since I finished Bell's book, particularly how they relate to my books. I'd been thinking that my books have all started with disturbances. The disturbance at the beginning of my very first book, My Life Among the Aliens, is the arrival of aliens. At the beginning of A Year with Butch and Spike it's the main character finding himself sitting between the bad boys of his class on the first day of school. With Club Earth another alien arrives with news. In The Hero of Ticonderoga, the main character is given the Ethan Allen research project. With  Happy Kid! the main character is given a book that influences his life. Even the Hannah and Brandon Stories, which are collections of connected short stories, have a disturbance at the beginning of each book--a neighbor with a dog moves in with the first book and the wild kids next door start moving in on Hannah and Brandon's lives in the second. The two books I've written and haven't sold yet start off with disturbances. I can see it in some of my short stories.

I was aware of all that, but it wasn't until this morning while I was out working in my yard that I realized something. (Breakout experience!) When I was writing all those books, I didn't realize any of this disturbance at the beginning of the book thing. If I had known what I was doing, couldn't that have made my plot creation process dramatically easier? If I had realized that my characters' worlds were experiencing a disturbance, wouldn't that have helped me with plot points because I would have known that I was dealing with the impact of the disturbance, its consequences, how characters respond to it? It would have generated a lot of material for me, and for organic writers, generating material that we can work with is a big part of our work battle.

Over the last couple of years I've been doing what I call the Plot Project here at Original Content: When I do a reader response to something I've read, I speculate about whether the author developed the plot through the give-a-character-something-to-want formula or if it could have come about in some other way. Going forth, the Plot Project is going to be about looking for disturbances.

Not A Lot That Was New

I was a big fan of The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. I found the sequel, The Fox Inheritance, to be a lot more traditional dystopian future story.

My recollection of Jenna Fox is that it was a more complex and subtle story, without clear bad guys. The Fox Inheritance has a very archvillain type of character, and he is a scientist. Scientists are often the heavies in dystopian novels. The main characters are being pursued through a Big- Brother-can-see-you kind of world. I didn't feel I was seeing a lot there that I hadn't seen before.

There were some aspects of the book that I wish had been developed more or even had become the focus of an entirely different story. Two secondary characters have been alive for hundreds of years. One has outlived her husband by a long, long time. The other has buried six of them. So what would that be like, outliving everyone you know, over and over again? I wish Pearson had written that book. Though, of course, that probably wouldn't have been YA.

Plot Project: Sometimes when I'm speculating about plots, I have to wonder about the initial idea for the story. I'm speculating here that Pearson wanted to write about two characters who are sort of just referred to in The Adoration of Jenna Fox. This may have been a story that began with characters. Then the author had to come up with a situation for them, and then a plot. I would have found that a difficult thing to do.

Bad Books Have Value

This past month I've read two quite dreadful books. They were what I describe as skimmers because I wanted to get through them, but I'm just not such a good person that I can bring myself to read every word of stuff like this. Why did I bother reading them at all? Well, I think it's important for writers to read books they believe are bad. It's what they used to call a learning experience.

Book Number One was an adult mystery, English, a series from a few years back that I'd never heard of before. What did this book in, as far as I'm concerned, was the third person omniscient narrator. The book illustrated the problem my editor brought up when I was trying to use that sort of narrator for my second book. Unless the author is very skilled, jumping from one character's mind to another can be very off-putting.

In this case, the book was described as "A Joe Blow Mystery." However, we are in Joe Blow's mind for, I'm guessing, less than half the book. Well less than half the book. We jump from Guy B to Guy C and we even get into the head of a guy who turns up about the mid-point for the sole purpose of being killed. If the book hadn't said "A Joe Blow Mystery" on the cover, quite honestly, I wouldn't have known who the main character was because he often isn't even on stage. The constant movement meant we never knew anyone very well, never had anyone whose thinking we could follow. It also meant we weren't getting a smooth story.

The second book was YA. It probably wasn't a very unique story to begin with, and I got the feeling the author was trying to be instructive, both in terms of life lessons and history lessons.

Plot Project: I forgot about my plot project, in which I try to determine if the plots of books I've read could have been built around giving protagonists something to want and then dropping roadblocks in the way of them getting it. There's no time like the present for picking it up again.

With the Joe Blow Mystery I'd say yes. Joe Blow wants to find out who has been killing young girls. The obstacles to him finding the murderer are so big as to make the story unbelievable. With the second book, I'm guessing we could say yes, too. However, it wasn't something she was aware of wanting or working toward. It was something instructive that a writer might have wanted her protagonist to want in order to write a problemish book.

So I need to try not to do any of those things.

Eternity Stinks

I picked up Night Road at the library for one reason--A.M. Jenkins wrote it. Jenkins is the author of Repossessed, a book I liked a great deal.

Night Road is terrific, too. It involves a hemovore named Cole. Hemovores are humans--and Cole does consider himself a human--who live on blood. Though Cole looks like a teenager and always will, he is worn down by life experience. Lots of it. He's been walking the Earth for over a hundred years. He's pretty much a broken man, burdened by the knowledge of what he failed to do for his brother over a century ago and what he did to the woman he loved a few decades back.

Think some kind of lone noir hero, adhering to a code that keeps him alive but not really living.

Cole is contacted by the leader of the hemovore community because a new heme was "accidentally" created by the funny, kind Sandor. Sandor and Cole take the newby, a real teenager, out on a road trip to help him acclimate to his new existence. If the kid can't make the transition, Cole is charged with seeing to it that he meets a fate that Cole believes will be worse than death since he believes people like them can't be killed.

The journey provides Cole for a chance at redemption, a redemption he wasn't looking for.

This is a great book, but, as often happens with me, I don't see why it's YA. Cole may look like a teenager, but he sure isn't one. This guy is world weary. He isn't trying to separate himself from family. He isn't trying to determine his path in life. This poor guy isn't trying to do anything when we first meet him. In my post on Repossessed, I said that while that book was definitely YA (imho), it could just as easily have been an adult book if the devil had been placed in an adult body. With Night Road if Cole had become a heme at twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five or...you get my drift...the book could have worked just as well without changing anything.

The Plot Project: Is this a book that's plot was generated by a character wanting something and meeting obstacles to getting it? I don't think so, because Cole doesn't seem to want anything at the beginning of the book. Yes, he seems to have moved on to a better situation by the end, but it wasn't one he was seeking. This book might have begun with a situation--the classic road trip on which older characters guide a younger one. As with any situation, the author would then have to decide which character her book would be about. It sure isn't the real teenager who truly does have something he wants--to go back to his old life.

A marvelous book, whatever it is.