Bruised, Wiser and Triumphant

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review included Adam LeBor’s
essay on the challenge of writing thrillers after journalistic training:

In theory, writing a thriller is simple. The basic formula reaches back through the ages, to the “Odyssey” and the Bible. Take a flawed but likable hero, send him on a perilous journey where he is forced to confront his inner demons, increase the danger at every stage, have an ally or two betray him, but ensure that he eventually vanquishes the enemy, emerging bruised, wiser and triumphant.

The practice, however, is rather more complicated. At first, I found my experience as a foreign correspondent a positive hindrance when it came to fiction. . . . The essence of journalism is revelation and explanation: We present the causes and consequences of an event for the reader. We answer the questions, convey the complexities and do the thinking so you don’t have to. Or not too much.

The essence of fiction, especially thriller writing, is exactly the opposite: obfuscation, mystery and deception loop through a maze of switchbacks — ideally strewn with the dead bodies of double agents, dupes, femmes fatales, sinister businessmen. “It’s important to be judicious with the facts in a novel,” the writer Alan Furst told me in a phone interview. “Not to give too much away too soon and to move the story along to keep the reader hooked.” A large part of the reader’s pleasure in reading thrillers and crime and mystery books is finding his way through and making the connections himself…

I recall hearing Mark Peter Hughes, author of A Crack in the Sky, speak to the same point in a workshop. Part of making a good plot is to throw up obstacles and frustrations in the way of your protagonist, he said—but what you’re really doing is throwing obstacles and frustrations in the way of your readers.

Making Lemonade Mouth a Little Sweeter

I heard an interesting publishing story at last week’s SCBWI New England conference. Mark Peter Hughes originally published Lemonade Mouth as a young adult novel in 2007. This story of a teen-aged band got good reviews, and Mark and his family toured the country to promote it.

Earlier this year the Disney Channel unveiled its adaptation of the book to big audiences. Even a moderately successful television show reaches more people than solidly successful book by multiple orders of magnitude, and the Lemonade Mouth movie was more than moderately successful. It may not be a High School Musical phenomenon yet, but it attracted a lot of Disney’s core viewers.

The only problem is that those core viewers aren’t “young adults”—they’re tweens, and possibly tween wannabes aspirants. What would those readers find when they looked for Lemonade Mouth in bookstores? What would their parents find?

Mark and his publisher decided to tweak the text for the book’s likely new readers as they reissued the paperback. The adaptations seem small—nothing to the plot, little to the language. The result is, I suppose, a “Disney version,” but it also speaks more directly to most tweens’ interests. It may also reflect a future of authors tailoring books to different readerships, something that digital formats will make even more economic.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if sixth-graders will whisper to each other to check out the library’s old hardcover copy of Lemonade Mouth.

The Adventure Begins

Lemonade Mouth author Mark Peter Hughes's first audio postcard on becoming a full-time YA writer ran on NPR's All Things Considered this week. Listen here.

Pulling It Out with Lemonade Mouth

At last weekend's SCBWI New England annual conference, Mark Peter Hughes, author of the teen novels I Am the Wallpaper and Lemonade Mouth, offered an energy-filled workshop on character development. Now his website offers the character-building exercises from that workshop.

Mark also served as conference registrar, and he lent me his laptop for my Powerpoint presentation on Sunday morning, helping me set up and--even more important, as it turned out--close down.

I'm a Mac person, so I've been trained to eject every data storage device on the desktop before daring to touch the hardware, at the risk of damaging the device, or the computer, or the fabric of the universe. Therefore, at the end of my session, with my sister's college graduation an hour away (both by the clock and by the highway), I was stuck, trying to figure out how to tell Mark's PC to stop thinking about my flashdrive. That's so easy on a Mac, so hard on a PC--because you don't actually have to do that on a PC. Finally, Mark came over and yanked out my drive, for which I'll always be grateful.

This summer Mark and the whole Hughes family (stars of the Friday night dance party) embark on 28-city van tour to promote Lemonade Mouth. As I understand it, public radio will give us regular updates. And I'm sure that trip will build character in many ways.