Jones on “Birthing a Book”

The Horn Book just reposted Diana Wynne Jones’s 2004 essay “Birthing a Book,” in which she confesses:

I once, when asked to give a talk about my book Fire and Hemlock, did have a stab at describing what went on while I wrote it. I teased out every layer of the book. Starting with what I felt about heroes and the heroic, I went on to describe my passion for cello music and how a rereading of Eliot’s Four Quartets sparked the actual book and gave rise to the presence of a quartet of musicians in it. I charted the various myths and folktales that surfaced and sank in the course of it, and of course I expounded on the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer — regarded as the negative and positive of the same story — which were the framework for the narrative. I gave the paper and the audience nodded wisely. This, they seemed to feel, was real stuff. I then went to New York, where my publishers had taken a great interest and had asked for a copy of the talk. I went in to see Libby, one of the editors — a wonderful wise lady with a voice like a sack of gravel being shaken. She was just finishing the paper as I walked in. She looked up from it and shook gravel at me:

“Very nice, Diana, but writers don’t work like that.”

I wanted to shout, “Yes, I do! It’s all true!” Instead I sort of gulped and answered, “No. You’re absolutely right.” As soon as I thought, I realized that the book had not been written in at all the analytical way I had tried to describe. The second draft might have been, when I was trying to make clear all the various elements that went into it — a process I always liken to pointing up or grouting the basic brickwork — but the first draft had been written at white heat, in a state where I was unable to put it down. I worked at it in any spare five minutes I could find. I even got up at six in the morning to write. This was so unheard of that my family wondered if I was ill. And such was the passion with which I was going at it that it seemed to pull in all sorts of queer but relevant things from daily life — I can’t tell you half the weird things now, but I do remember being followed around by a van labeled King’s Lynn, and going to a lecture where the speaker turned out to be the image of Mr. Leroy, with great black bags under his eyes, who proceeded to talk about both the Four Quartets and the ballad of Tam Lin, in a lecture that I think was supposed to be about Shakespeare.

Yet the book got written with a shape and a coherent story. The various elements I so carefully dissected in my talk got fed in at the right places. And I know I was very careful throughout, even in the first draft, to keep all the supernatural elements just a bare thread away from things that could have a normal explanation after all. This was one of the prime requirements from the book itself when it first came thundering into my head.

Later Jones reports, “I had no idea what Chrestomanci was going to be like until he first appeared in Mrs. Sharp’s kitchen. This is in spite of the fact that Charmed Life was a book that came into my head almost whole and entire from the start.”

There’s lots more of value, but one shouldn’t read this essay as a guide on how to write. Every writer’s method is different. The main value of such author essays, I think, is in how they show the wide range of working styles, with bits and pieces that others can pick up while leaving the rest to wonder at.

Tor.com has fantasy scholar Farah Mendelsohn’s essay on Jones’s career and passing. Neil Gaiman’s very personal appreciation is here.

Shifts in Shifting Point of View

Not so long ago, authors were strongly advised to define their point-of-view character for each novel, or at least for each chapter or scene in a novel. While it was possible to describe events that character wasn’t privy to, the informal rules said, a good novel’s narration should show readers only one person’s thoughts or feelings at a time.

Shifting from inside one character’s head to inside another, the tastemakers warned, could confuse readers and/or remind them that they were reading fiction. If one had to make that shift, it was imperative to wait for a chapter break or other obvious signpost. And ideally such a book should be about different views of life; the shifts should not be driven merely by narrative convenience.

There were exceptions to this rule, of course. Many novels of the past had shifting points of view, and readers still enjoyed them—but new authors had to look at what was being published today. There were also some individual exceptions, such as Phillip Pullman.

Something changed over the last decade. Perhaps Pullman’s success undercut the rules. Perhaps the rebirth of the intrusive narrator via Lemony Snicket opened the door to other types of old-fashioned narration. However it happened, three of the last four novels I read had shifting points of view.

Catherine Stier’s The Terrible Secrets of the Tell-All Club works with very close point of view in part one, with each short chapter following one of four kids. The point-of-view character’s name even appears in each chapter title, and the story focuses on how different characters view and misinterpret the same events. That type of narrative complexity grew in popularity over the last couple of decades.

But when Tell-All Club’s action shifts to a school camp, Stier abandons those delineations. Part two is titled “All Together Now.” (The first part has no title.) The narration starts jumping from one protagonist’s head to another within the same chapter and scene. That speeds up the action, but I’m not sure it serves the story—in part because I thought the story sort of petered out into valuable lessons about life.

M. T. Anderson’s Agent Q, or The Smell of Danger!, like the previous titles in the Pals in Peril series, features an intrusive, metatextual narrator who shifts point of view like a silent-movie comedian wrestling a fire hose. But all three books introduce us first to the thoughts of Lily Gefelty, the most normal of their three protagonists. The first couple show us the least normal, Jasper Dash, mainly from the outside, with the third finally letting us into his highly trained brain.

As I recall, the Pals in Peril series was originally presented and re-presented as a trilogy, which harmonized with its three protagonists and the first volume’s tripartite structure. But commercial success and the lack of any narrative limits in this universe put Agent Q in the interesting position of this trilogy’s fourth book. No single protagonist’s point of view or genre dominates as much as in the previous volumes, which results in a lot more switching from one head to another.

Agent Q also brings on a couple of claimants to be fourth member of our heroic threesome. However, neither of those young men gets point-of-view time, nor cover space on this volume or the next to come. (All I can say is that someone else appears to have disliked the Alex Rider books.)

Finally, Diana Wynne Jones’s Enchanted Glass has two protagonists/point-of-view characters, middle-aged Andrew and adolescent Aidan. Indeed, it proceeds for quite a while from its opening with no child in sight, still an unusual feature in a novel for children. As in Pullman’s novels, the narration jumps from one main character’s thoughts to the other within chapters without any section breaks or other typographical signals. But at that point in her life, Jones was well able to break the rules.

Divided by a Common Language under Enchanted Glass

One consequence of the late craze for British fantasies is that US publishers are much less worried about letting young American readers see original British language. Indeed, readers of the sort who know what Hogwarts house they would belong to might even demand those exotic details.

Here’s an example from Diana Wynne Jones’s Enchanted Glass, as a character flips through a telephone book:

“I’ve been through all the Browns twice now,” he told Aidan, “and there’s no Brown of Melstone Manor in here! The wretched crook must be ex-directory. He would be!”

Context makes it easy to figure out that what this British character calls “ex-directory” an American would call “unlisted.”

Another character in the book regularly makes “cauliflower cheese,” and to confirm that dish exists here’s a recipe. It even has a Wikipedia entry. In contrast, the “big, sloppy bowl of potato cheese” that same character sets out in chapter 8 has no equivalent webpages, indicating that she’s just thrown stuff together, and the result doesn’t even necessarily pass muster as rural English cuisine. I wouldn’t have gotten that nuance if I hadn’t tried looking up both phrases.

Revisting the First Boy Wonder’s Boyhood

This cosplay in its purest form comes from the website of WSOC in Charlottesville. Evidently it’s Charlie, one of the station’s deejays, around age six.

And speaking of childhood, this week DC and Grant Morrison addressed a detail of the Batman and Robin saga that nagged me ever since I read Batman: From the ’30s to the ’70s when I was a little older than Charlie here.

The original Batwoman was Kathy Kane, a socialite/circus performer. (In the world Bob Kane created, almost all heroes had to be rich. And it didn’t hurt if they had names similar to the one he adopted.) Batman figured out Batwoman’s identity by noticing she used circus slang. Robin, despite having grown up in a circus, was left with the “Holy jargon, Batman! I never realized!” routine.

For a while I rationalized that by telling myself that Dick Grayson was just so used to those terms that he didn’t realize they were unusual. But then I read other comics fans expressing bother at the same detail, and I could acknowledge it a sign of disrespect for the Boy Wonder.

Thanks to the billions of dollars humans have invested in the internet, I can even pin that down on science-fiction novelist Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977). The Grand Comics Database credits him with scripting Batwoman’s debut in Detective, #233, published in 1956.

But Hamilton may not have known Dick Grayson’s background. He started writing regularly for DC in the late 1940s, years after Robin was introduced. Today’s superhero comics constantly refer back to major characters’ backgrounds and origins, but the comic books didn’t retell Robin’s backstory between his arrival as the sensational character find of 1940 and Batman, #129, twenty years later. (There was a 1943 pilot for radio, never broadcast, that made his doomed parents trapeze artists and FBI agents.)

As a result, most of Hamilton’s young readers had probably never read about Dick’s upbringing in a circus. But when I saw Robin’s origin in the same volume as Batwoman’s, the discrepancy popped out. As I’ve noted before, Grant Morrison read the same collection as a wee lad in Glasgow, and perhaps he had the same thought.

In the latest issue of Batman, Inc., Morrison reinterprets the first Batwoman’s role in Batman’s past, as he forecast doing two years ago in a story collected in Batman, RIP. But this time Dick gets to spot the circus slang. He doesn’t tell Bruce what he knows because he’s conflicted about his adoptive big brother falling in love. And because he’s a grumpy thirteen-year-old. Now that I can believe.

Remembering the Stories of Diana Wynne Jones

This morning brought news of the death of Diana Wynne Jones. Though she started publishing fantasy novels in the 1970s, they didn’t make a splash in the American market for years. I therefore didn’t read my first Jones novel until after college and a few years of work, when Harry Potter was making U.S. publishers once again see lucre in British children’s fantasy.

That first book was Charmed Life, the launch of Jones’s Chrestomanci stories. (Chronologically, it became the third—at least.) And I was delighted by the find. The storytelling seemed to effortlessly combine quaint, quotidian details with high magic and powerful personalities. Jones didn’t take a classical approach to plot, so her stories could make sudden turns—e.g., suddenly replacing one apparent protagonist for another—so as a reader you had to stay on your toes.

Jones’s storytelling grew out of an emotionally deprived childhood. Born in 1934, she grew up in the Depression, World War 2, and Britain’s postwar lean years, but suffered most from her parents’ child-rearing. This Guardian profile explains:

Utterly neglected by their parents, she and her sisters, Isobel and Ursula, lived in a shack apart from the main house. They ran wild, washed seldom and grew very close. Because of the damp, Diana contracted juvenile rheumatism, a trial to her mother who declared: “Sympathy damages me”. Her father, who according to Diana “could beat Scrooge in a meanness contest”, did not allow the girls many books. He kept an entire set of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books locked up, giving his daughters one to share each year. Desperate for books, Diana wrote two epic novels herself, aged 12.

Troubled families and demanding institutions (her parents were busy managing a conference center) run through many of Jones’s stories. Her fictional families are messy and full of secrets, and inheritances—of traditions, property, powers—are a burden. After coming back from a Jones conference Penthe wrote of her stories:

Lots of the action is driven by children having to cope with the fairly unpleasant events set in train by their elders - parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. The kids often end up taking the consequences and solving the problems because the adults are too self-absorbed, stubborn or lazy. Or just lack the imagination to understand what they are doing, which I think is the worst sin of all in the Jonesiverse.

The “Jonesiverse” is actually made up of many dimensions. I’m most fond of the novels rooted in modern England, with balky television sets and council flats, like The Homeward Bounders, Eight Days of Luke, and especially Archer’s Goon. I haven’t dug fully into the high fantasy of, say, the Dalemark Quartet and Howl’s Castle series. But of course the power of Jones’s imagination lies in how those levels of reality are never far apart.

Boston Comics Roundtable Shows and Tells

The Boston Comics Roundtable has just co-published another anthology, this one on education. It’s titled Show and Tell: A Collection of Comics About Teaching and Learning, and comes out to coincide with the New England Comic Arts in the Classroom Conference in Providence.

Publisher Ninth Art Press says:

In these twenty short stories set in and around the classroom, independent comics creators explore the drama and humor of teaching and learning… or at least trying to teach and learn. From elementary school to college, from the perspectives of teachers and students, these tales touch on some serious issues of education, but their main goal is to make you laugh, cry, or cringe.

The press offers sample pages from Show and Tell, showing the range of styles and approaches. For example, “Iruma,” by Ben DiMaggio and Len White, is an anecdote about teaching English in Japan.

Marek Bennett takes a more theory-driven approach to “Multiple Intelligences and Comics Education,” as excerpted at right.

And Jesse Lonergan depicts the challenges of substitute teaching in a form reminiscent of daily strips, as you can see in samples of his contribution here.

Batting for the Cycle

What comes after trilogy?

Christopher Paolini and Random House originally announced his Inheritance books as a trilogy, but writing Brisingr revealed plot threads and vowels that needed to go somewhere. The trilogy therefore became a four-book “cycle,” which will conclude this year. Unless he has more ideas.

For Diana Wynne Jones, the Dalemark books are a “quartet” while other series are open-ended. For Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time grew into the “Time Quartet,” though some critics have used the term “tetralogy.”

And for Stephenie Meyer, Twilight just seems to be a “series.” That has the non-specificity of “cycle” without even the implication of a closed circle.

Book-Blog Hybrid That Works

I’m not sure how I stumbled across the blog Ultra-Gross: Your Source for Gross News, but I’m impressed. It gets the job done, which is to say it offers ongoing promotion of author Bart King’s The Big Book of Gross Stuff, published last year by Gibbs Smith.

The blog, like the book, is a compendium of short reports with a…certain quality in common. As such, the website functions as a continuation of the book, and I suppose a head start on a second volume, should the market demand one.

The site also offers a front door to draw in potential buyers through Google, with enough sampling to offer reassurance about precisely how gross the book is and enough new material to keep big fans coming back.

Not every book lends itself to this sort of promotion, of course. Even with other nonfiction topics, it would be hard to find such a steady supply of news to share.

New Nesbit and Another Nesbit News Bit

The Guardian reports that Jacqueline Wilson, one of the UK’s most respected and popular writers for children, has signed a contract to “write a new version of E Nesbit’s classic Five Children and It.”

That seemed like such a wasted effort that I went looking for more detail, but even the original report in The Bookseller adds little—only that Wilson will write a “contemporary version.”

Does this mean retelling the same Psammead adventures in contemporary England, where children don’t have to worry so much about evading the household help? Or will a new set of children discover the grumpy little wish-provider and make new wishes?

Is Wilson writing The Psammead Comes Back: And This Times It’s Personal? Should we look forward to more Nesbit revamps that reflect modern lifestyles, like The Airline Children? The Enchanted McMansion? The Would-Be-Above-Averages?

Most of Nesbit’s novels are set in England a century ago, of course, and some display the racism and class attitudes of their times. But the children—almost always a gender mix of siblings, not vastly distinguishable—treat each other in easily relatable ways. The narrative style and voice in many of Nesbit’s fantasies is delightfully fresh. So I’m not sure what about Five Children and It is so dated as to demand a contemporary rewrite, which would therefore be driven by the new copyright claim and exclusive sales.

There are other ways to regain that old magical realism, of course. Edward Eager unabashedly updated Nesbit for the postwar suburban American child, and Laurel Snyder has updated Eager with Any Which Wall. In 1999 Books of Wonder commissioned new illustrations for Five Children and It from Paul O. Zelinsky, as shown above. All those editions and additions share a certain old-fashioned and nostalgic tone, but surely that’s what people seeking “a new version of E Nesbit” would be looking for. Perhaps Wilson will simply produce her own “inspired by Nesbit” adventure.

The other Nesbit news story for this week was the revelation that some beloved details of The Railway Children—particularly flagging down a train to prevent an accident and receiving an engraved watch as a reward—also appear in a novel published just a few years before: The House by the Railway, by Ada J. Graves. Since I dislike The Railway Children, this news didn’t derail me in the least.

Dick Gray and Richard Grayson

Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman and an upcoming biography of Bill Finger, co-creator of Batman and Robin, recently alerted me to the sensational character find of 1903: The Boy Wonder, Dick Gray!

Appearing in one story in the pulp magazine Brave and Bold, Dick Gray was “athletic in figure and singularly agile in his movements”—but then so were most other dime-novel heroes.

In the Comic Buyer’s Guide, David Frank reported that “The Boy Wonder, or Dick Gray’s Marvellous Pump” is “about the adventures Gray gets into with his anti-gravity device.” It thus seems to be of a piece with the Stratemeyer syndicate’s Tom Swift series, L. Frank Baum’s Master Key, and similar young men’s tales from that age of technological wonder.

I doubt this 1903 magazine had any influence on the creation of Dick Grayson in 1940. Finger, Jerry Robinson, and Bob Kane weren’t even born when Dick Gray was pumped out. But the similarity of the characters’ names highlights one ubiquitous aspect of American pop fiction until recently: the WASPiness of its heroes and heroines.

Both Baum and Edward Stratemeyer had German surnames, but practically all their main characters had surnames from the British Isles. Two generations later, many of the first generation of superhero creators were Jewish: Finger, Bob Kane (originally Robert Kahn), Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby (originally Jacob Kurtzberg), Stan Lee (originally Stanley Leiber), and so on. But they created heroes with names like Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Denny Colt, Steve Rogers, Reed Richards, and Peter Parker.

That trend in popular culture both reflected and amplified the trend in real life for some Americans to shed their “ethnic” names. Which brings me to a real Richard Grayson.

Back during the national crisis over the edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn published without ethnic slurs, one small electronic press announced the publication of The Hipster Huckleberry Finn. It replaced the “n word” with “hipster.” The editor and publisher of that edition is a writer, teacher, and activist named Richard Grayson.

In this autobiographical essay he explains:

I was born Richard Arnold Ginsberg in Brooklyn on June 4, 1951, two years after my parents, Marilyn and Daniel, had married. When I was six months old, Mom and Dad changed our Jewish last name to the ethnically neutral Grayson.

At that time, superhero comics were in a doldrum. Robin was one of the handful of costumed heroes who continued to appear often in comic books—Batman, Detective, and World’s Finest—but even he had lost his cover slot on Star Spangled Comics.

The Batman newspaper comic strip had stopped years before. The low-budget movie serial Batman and Robin had appeared in theaters in 1949 and then disappeared, and there was no TV show in daily reruns.

As a result, most Americans might not have seen any particular meaning in the name “Richard Grayson,” aside from the “ethnically neutral” quality this man’s parents were seeking.

But as the former Richard Ginsburg grew up, superhero comics came back. He even read them:

I also was a big fan of superhero comic books. I proudly possessed the early issues of Justice League of America, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, and Daredevil. At 11, I would pretend to be The Flash – Fastest Man Alive – as I bicycled around the neighborhood, playing hooky from Hebrew school.

Alas, Grayson doesn’t discuss whether he identified with Batman’s Boy Wonder, or was teased for sharing that character’s name. Perhaps one day he’ll make a story about it.