I picked up The Shackas an audio book from the library. It's a bestseller. And it was originally a self-published novel, and was picked up by Windblown Media once it gathered a following.
The New York Times wrote an article about how the publishing industry needs to change. And I agree. But, the article listed books like The Shack, that were skipped over at first, only to become best sellers, as examples of what is wrong with the industry.
I disagree. Because The Shack is a terrible book. It's clunky, preachy, written with a thick filter over the characters so that none of them ring true or seem real. The exposition is long and tedious, the details are bland and usually rest on cliches or adverbs, and the surprise appearance of God is ... not so surprising. God is in the book from beginning to end. You never get to forget that this is a book about GOD. Which means you never get to get into the story.
It's not just because it's Christian propaganda (which it is); it's poorly written Christian propaganda. Frank Peretti writes Christian propaganda, and I've read several of his books. The Oath was awesome.
So why does The Shack have so many readers? And why did it eventually find a publisher?
1. Christians love to read stuff about being a good Christian. It's why they read the Bible so much. 2. People are lost, scared, and looking for answers. Books that claim to have them (even pedantic books that dole out wisdom with a hand heavier than stone) are bound to be popular. 3. Publishers are made up of editors and businesspeople. Artists and financial wizards. The ones who love words and the ones who love numbers.
My suspicion is that most editors (or EAs - we are the gatekeepers) rejected this manuscript because it was ... bad. It's a great idea, but Young is not a talented enough writer for the material. Neither am I, but I didn't try to publish my book about God.
But, then Factors 1 and 2 came into play, and the book began to make money. The second kind of people in a publishing house, the Numbers People, swooped in, put together a Profit & Loss statement, figured out some quick sales averages, and came to the conclusion: this book is a seller.
A seller. Not a good book. Not a well-written story. A money maker.
Which is more sad? That the industry I love is warped by sales and editors mutate their ideals of literary value based on profits? Or that enough people will read this and, because it is a best seller, think it is a good book.
This is important information, not only because I am a mark for all things Hardy, but because the story of Jeff Hardy is an excellent lesson in Character.
Humble Beginnings – everyone likes a hero they can identify with. The Hardy boys are from Cameron, North Carolina. You’ve never heard of it. No one has. I don’t even think it registers on most maps. They grew up redneck, blue-collar, and loving it. These were country boys with big dreams.
Sibling Rivalry - Jeff is the younger brother of Matt Hardy. Characters in the younger sibling position are good too, because there is a built-in adversarial relationship. Siblings, no matter how close, struggle to attain identity beyond their family role. Matt and Jeff used to be Tag Team partners, then split and eventually both became champs on different shows.
Your story might be two sisters, one of whom wants to be a princess, the other who finds herself the object of the Prince’s affection. It doesn’t matter what scenario you put them in, siblings will eventually have to compete, and then reconcile.
If not siblings, then your hero might have a best friend to struggle against. A straight story of Good Guy stranger versus Bad Guy stranger does very little for us, because it is less believable. Even in Stephen King monster stories, there is some link between the characters that goes all the way back to childhood. These are the strongest bonds, and the best for character development.
People’s Champ – not The Rock. Readers like a hero who is a hero. Who sticks up for what is right. We want a hero who is loyal, even if it’s to his own detriment. (Even anti-heroes have a code they live by, and are loyal to their own.) Jeff Hardy once jumped off a ladder, sacrificing his chance at the title, just so he could injure the guy who slept with his brother’s girlfriend. Yeah, that kind of loyalty.
Think about it. Jeff Hardy is still a southern boy, at heart. He’s a rock star to his fans, but he still likes to ride his motocross bikes and have watermelon fights with his friends. This makes for an endearing hero, someone who has two sides to their personality.
Perhaps your character is a guy who finds piles of cash secreted away in their dead father’s estate. Your character is a lawyer, and knows something is amiss. He should also be a regular guy, interested in dating, perhaps a good cook, or a running enthusiast. And he should have a brother who is a screw-up. (I have just given you the plot of John Grisham’s The Summons.) Although, it is Pat Conroy’s characters who are always good cooks.
A Hero Falls – Above all, we want a character that is believable. Human. Flawed. This is because we ourselves are flawed. On some level, a reader celebrates a hero’s fall from grace, because they are not falling. At the same time, if the story is well told, the reader has probably grown to love this character, and doesn’t want to see them fail. So there is that dynamic going on. Add to that the reader’s fundamental desire to see the hero rise from the ashes. This is the relationship between Reader and Protagonist. And it is
When Jeff Hardy was suspended for prescription painkiller use, the fans reacted. They love Jeff; they understand he throws himself down for us over and over again. Of course he’s getting hurt, of course he needs to take meds. Of course he may have been addicted to them. Thus is the tragic cycle of the hero, brought down by his own heroic actions.
That’s Shakespearean, baby.
So that is how Jeff Hardy is like Hamlet. Wait, was that my point?
Characters should be natural and bigger than life; they should be better than you and inherently flawed; they should rise to the stars, fall to the earth and then pick themselves up and start climbing again.
A sample of memoir writing,. I wrote this on a dare, a bet, made over Thai food. I won. $50 bucks and fifteen solid pages of a memoir. Someday I'll finish it. I'd like to do that, for Amber. She deserves to have her good name cleared.
BOTTLE ROCKET: A Memoir
"I hate my sister, she's such a bitch. She acts as if she doesn't even know that I exist." My Sister, Juliana Hatfield
This is how it happened, because this is how I remember it.
It was dark; the shadows of the live oaks had spread out across the edges of the field. The grown-ups I only remember as disembodied legs, dusty in blue jeans and boots, or naked to the thigh and gold like a tannin-stained river. I don’t remember which grown-ups were there, except that when I woke up in the hospital Mama was with me.
It was loud; the adults were all talking across the field to one another, shouting over the bluegrass music and the yelling of the children. There was a dog, a terrier I think, and it yapped and barked and darted between feet. There was a bonfire, and someone had thrown a bicycle into the fire.
There was no bonfire, my sister shakes her head, no bonfire, no bicycle.
But there must have been a bonfire, because I remember the burn of it on my cheeks, and there must have been a bicycle, because I remember the spokes burning white and golden in the fire, then fading to a tarnished black.
The boys, who had dirty faces and hair like patches of scrub brush, had stolen fireworks from inside the house. I don’t remember the house. They clutched their stolen rockets in their fists and ran to the hill. We didn’t know the boys, we didn’t know anyone there, but they were close to your age, and it was a party and so we followed them.
The hill was really a mound of dirt, with no grass and no tree roots holding the hill together. The boys put their hands into the dirt as they climbed, and they easily scaled the hill. They had a Coca Cola bottle, a glass one, with them. I remember they danced at the top of the hill, holding up the pink stalks of the bottle rockets, ready to hurl them like Zeus hurled lightning bolts, ready to play with fire.
No one knew how they got the bottle rockets, my sister adds. This should be our mother’s line, and because our mother isn’t here Amber speaks as only first children can, as a defensive advocate of her parent.
We tried to climb the hill, but the dirt kept slipping into my shoes. My shoes were patent leather and they were very sore on my little feet. You climbed much faster than I, because you were seven and I was only four. You made it to the top of the hill, but I couldn’t. I shouted for you to wait.
No, she tries to stop me.
I shouted and looked up, and you were up there with the boys, and they had put a rocket into the cola bottle, it was pink as a stalk of rhubarb, and I was crying and asking for you to wait for me, but you were already up there, with the boys, and then one of them knelt down and lit the rocket.
That’s not what happened, Amber says.
The charge of the gunpowder tipped the bottle, and the rocket shot down the hill. I was crawling, my fingers digging into the crumbling dirt that kept sliding me back down the hill. The rocket stopped in front of me.
Then, it was white and gold again, everything was white and gold, and hot, like the bicycle in the bonfire.
I never left you, she says, I was right beside you and I shouted for them to stop. I was right there when the rocket went off. I was there with you. Don’t you remember?
***
"My sister, I love my sister, she's the best. She's cooler than any other girl that I have ever met." My Sister, Juliana Hatfield
The Chinese set off firecrackers at funeral ceremonies to ward off bad spirits. What kind of bad spirit could live inside a four-year old girl?
The bottle rocket damaged the retina of my left eye, but it didn’t blind me and it left no scarring or disfigurement. I’ve never seen a picture of what I looked like then, but my mother tells me it was puffy and red.
My older sister was there the night the bottle rocket exploded in my face. Amber– that’s her interjecting into my memory. She was supposed to be watching out for me, but my memories of that night have her on top of the hill, out of reach. I always felt like that’s where Amber was.
Amber was beautiful; I was funny looking, with Yoda ears and a persistent double-chin. Amber was graceful; she could dance and do cart-wheels and even twirl baton. I was smart, but Amber was popular. Amber even got the better name. In the early 80s, Autumn was just uncommon enough to be warranted “weird”. Autumn Star was even weirder. Where all I wanted was to fit in, blend in, disappear, people were always stuck on my name.
“So unusual,” they said.
“Where’s Spring and Summer?” old men joked. (People still do this. As if they’d just thought of it, as if this joke had never been delivered before. And I never knew how to react. Even now, I honestly don’t know whether to laugh at their stupidity or cry in frustration.)
The worst though, was reserved for the school playground. “Autumn-Autumn-Big-Fat-Bottom!” Kids are cruel, and I was fragile. I believed them. I was Autumn-Autumn-Big-Fat-Bottom. I was a joke, a bad punch line. I was not only unusual, I was weird.
When kids weren’t calling me Autumn-Autumn-Big-Fat-Bottom, teachers were getting my name wrong altogether. “April, can you read Chapter 3 aloud?” Of course I could read aloud, but my name wasn’t April. I’ve been called, along with April, Aubrey, Donna, Summer and Eden. But, of course, there was one name above all others that I hated being called. The name that tops the list, that I still get called most often: Amber.
People who don’t even know I have a sister call me Amber.
It was bad enough growing up under her shadow. When people called me her name, it felt like an erasure. Like they were rubbing me out, laying her better image over the spot where I used to exist.
Growing up in not just the same town but the same house for our whole lives meant that Amber and I always had the same teachers. She was three years ahead of me, but that wasn’t enough time for her glimmer, or her glint, to fade. All through school teachers would see the name Kindelspire on the roll, and they’d look up to find me.
“You’re Amber’s sister?”
In grammar & middle school, I’d nod and slouch down a little further in my chair. I didn’t want people to get too good a first look at me, didn’t want them to see how different from her I was. In high school, that switched. I’d carved out a reputation as “the smart one” and I fiercely defended that role. Amber’s popularity hit its peak in high school, but she’d started drinking excessively and skipping school. She’d been arrested more than once and was in a Drop Out Prevention Program. At home, my father had broken up fights between her and my mother. She’d been thrown out once, and came back as defiant and headstrong as before.
In high school, when teachers peered down their glasses to find the face of the new Kindelspire, I couldn’t object quickly enough. “I’m nothing like her,” I said, and there was always a ripple of laughter from the class.
Did I feel guilty, throwing my sister under the bus? Labeling her the “bad seed” and never trying to understand her motivations? No. Not back then. She’d abandoned me long ago. As far as she was concerned, I was a pest who couldn’t keep up.
That’s not what happened.
We’d never discussed it, the bottle rocket incident. It was a story I’d told a thousand times to friends and strangers at parties. Mama and I had talked about it, about where she was when the explosion took place, why she wasn’t there. She’d left Amber and me in the care of her friend while she’d gone to get the car. She hadn’t liked the way the party was going, and she’d been ready to leave when she heard people screaming, and then saw her friend holding me in his arms, Amber racing behind him, crying.
I never left your side.
It wasn’t until many years later, when we were both adults, that Amber was finally able to refute my version of that night.
We sat in the lawn chairs on our parents’ pool deck. It was night, and the moon was elsewhere. We were smoking in the dark. I’d had a fight with Mama, about my divorce, about my behavior. Amber had defended me. She was married too, and though I didn’t know it then, she was equally unhappy and getting ready to leave her husband. When Mama left to cool off, Amber and I had gone outside to talk. The conversation started by poring over my husband’s faults, our mother’s reaction, the practical matters of divorce.
We’d laughed about past break-ups, which led to childhood stories, which led to my usual complaints. That night was different though. That night, Amber responded. Amber set the record straight.
Remember when you were ten, I said, in that Minnie Mouse leotard, twirling baton in a parade? The pom-pom puffs on your white socks never got dirty, even while you twirled and cart-wheeled down the street. That was the kind of perfection you had. Your socks never got dirty.
You were the one who always succeeded. You could read and write and draw before anyone else your age. You were always so smart.
But intelligence has no place in the competitive lives of children. How could my I-Can-Read books measure against a baton spiraling through the air, how could my stick figure horses stand against a cart-wheel?
You were everyone’s favorite. Amber, with the adorable freckle above her lip, like a beauty mark. Amber, with her green and golden eyes and her lips deep pink, like Mama’s azaleas. Everyone always adored you.
It was you we all loved. You had the blondest hair, it was almost white. And your cheeks were so fat you had dimples when you smiled. No one could resist you.
I always felt like I couldn’t possibly measure up to you, like no matter what I did, I wasn’t good enough to be your little sister. That you would move through life ahead of me, without me, and I would always be scrambling to catch up.
I always wondered why you hated me so much.
And then, we talked about the bottle rocket.
No, that’s not how it happened. I was with you, on the hill. I was right beside you. Don’t you remember?
But I don’t remember it her way. I think it must have happened this way, the way that I remember it. There must have been the bonfire, the burning bicycle. She must have been on top of that hill, laughing at her little sister who couldn’t climb up because her shoes were full of dirt.
It had to have happened the way that I remembered it. Because I’ve based everything I know about Amber from that night. My whole life I’ve judged her from the day she wasn’t there to save me. But, what if she was there all along?
Largo. Lar-ghetto. Land of orange groves, the Restaurant Supply warehouse, crack whores, alligator-infested lakes, burnt houses, ghosts, railroad tracks but no station, and Dead Ends. A lot of Dead Ends. Growing up in Largo, we thought the entire town could be summed in those two words: Dead End.
The curse: If you were born in Largo, you will die there.
This used to be my playground. Take my hand, we'll go for a walk. In Largo, you could walk to almost anything dangerous, dark, and fascinating. If not walking, most certainly by bike.
The Dead End got its name from the sign bolted to the reflective, road block fence that barred cars from entering our neighborhood from the back. It was an odd, afterthought kind of cul-de-sac that ended abruptly in that sign. Only one house faced the Dead End, and the kids who lived there were weird. The girl grew up beautiful. I don't know what happened to the boy, but when we were all young I bullied him mercilessly. No mercy for the weak in the Acacia hierarchy.
The Dead End separated our neighborhood from Dansville, also known as Rainbow Village. It was the projects, ugly concrete block buildings painted hideous pastel colors that must have looked old and cheap when they were still in the can. Mostly black people lived in Dansville. Our neighborhood shares a fence with the people of Dansville, but they were never our neighbors. You borrow sugar from neighbors; you don't erect roadblocks.
Between Acacia and Dansville, after the roadblock and ominous sign, was the real Dead End, a mesh of dried, tangled vines and pine trees surrounding a green, fetid bog. A kid could wander in the Dead End, circling that bog, and not find their way out for an hour or more. Like Rabbit in the Mist.
The stories of The Dead End were myriad. A girl was raped there. No, she was murdered. No, she was kidnapped, tied to a tree, then raped and murdered. They found her body tied to the tree. No, it was fed to the gator in the bog. She haunts The Dead End.
We told each other these stories, psyching one another up. Who was brave enough to walk to the bog and back? Alone?
The Dead End is gone now. The fence is still there, but the sign is gone and the bog has been plowed over. Land in Pinellas County has become too valuable.
The strip malls in Florida are legion, and all of them have one, blighted stand-alone store. For the Kash'n'Karry by my house, this blight was affectionately called, at least by the skaters who went there, The Bank. It had been a bank, once, but now it served as skate park/meeting ground. The boys would skate, their pants eight sizes too big, their hair shaggy and colorful, some with piercings, some with tattoos. The girls would watch, trying to look both seductive, and bored. Or maybe that was just me. We bet whether TJ, a 5th grader, could buy smokes at the Newsstand across the street. He did, and smoked them with us. The skaters were smart, defiant, sexy and nihilistic. I knew them when they were in grade school, but somewhere between 8th and 9th grade they had become gods. They smoked cigarettes, cursed liberally, bragged about their drug use and their dick size. They swapped girlfriends regularly, and with a casual sense of sexual liberalism I can't believe was faked. I was on the outside. The Girl They Knew from Anona. A friend. A little weird, but basically a Nice Girl.
I hated being considered a nice girl.
The cops eventually banned us from The Bank. It's now a health food store. Or it was last time I checked.
The Southwest Recreation Center still exists, and is, physically at least, largely unchanged. But, I can't go there without hearing soft, teenage voices hiding in the tube slide, or wafting from the Merry Go Round like an echoed chorus. We smoked our first cigarettes here, saw our first porno magazine (I vomited shortly thereafter, with no explanation), and had our first, tentative sexual rendevous there. For me, the voice I will always here is Grant's.
"If you could walk through a portal, Autumn, and disappear into another world, be another person, but you could never come back, and you couldn't say goodbye to anyone, would you go?"
"Do you believe in UFOs, Autumn? Do you believe in spirits? Heaven?"
"What do you want to be, Autumn? Where do you want to go when you get out of here?"
I wish I could remember what I'd told him. It seems important now. Portentous. At thirteen, I wanted to be a famous writer. But I never dreamed I'd ever live anywhere but Largo. Indian Rocks Beach, maybe.
I wish I could remember if I asked him the same questions. I probably muttered something about H.P. Lovecraft, hoping he would think I was cool, hoping he might kiss me again. We hid in the tube slide, head to head, my feet pointing to the bottom, his pointing to the sky. Or we lie in the Merry Go Round, spinning the stars around us.
The Rec is still there, but Grant has been dead for years. Overdose of OxyContin. I hadn't seen him in years. I'm not sure I even have the right to miss him, but still I hear his voice at that old playground.
At sixteen, we took over Serenity Gardens cemetery. Still there, but the badlands surrounding it have been largely trampled down. Tamed. Subdued by exposing its underbelly to a unrelenting sun god. We walked among the baby graves, mourning for the children who didn't live, often half-frightened our own wombs would quicken from a boy's lustful surge. I'd had sex by now, and the line between life and death had never seemed so thin. I was a child, a grown up. I was alive, I was already dying. Weren't we all?
Do you remember the mausoleum? Before they remodeled? The crypt that read "Do not stand over my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die." We were terrified. We were mesmerized. Remember the day the sky turned red? We were at the fountain, and I was tempting Fate trying to bless myself with the dark, scummy water in the basin. The firepit, and the rabbit bones?
Satanists, we were sure. The coffin we found smashed to bits? Vampires. We knew it.
The Renaissance Festival came only once a year, but the Village remained standing all year long.
RenFest. The Village.
Shanties built of clapboard and plywood, circle after circle of store fronts that we could duck into, hide, lurk, wait, spring out from behind. Better, the roofs were connected. You could creep along the roofs, then leap down on your friends like a ninja, like shadow incarnate. The games of Hide and Go Seek we played there.
Did the others know about the homeless men living in some of the buildings? I like to think they didn't.
The cast of characters that night was the same as usual. I was there, hair flung into a ponytail high on my head, sassafras cane ready, pouches open and purse strings loose. I was a thief. In our game, where reality and D&D had been hopelessly blurred, I was a very good thief. Fearless. We met at the center, and I remember there'd been a fire. The pit was black, but the smoke had long since dissipated.
I was near the corner of the fairgrounds, across the bridge, where the witch told fortunes when the fair was running. I was alone, unsure of how I got that way, and when I stopped to take a breath I realized my character mask had fallen away. I was just me, and I was hopelessly terrified. I slipped into one of the crackerjack buildings to hide. From whatever it was I felt was watching me.
I didn't see a man. I saw a bed. A thin mattress, an old sleeping bag. It was blue. I remember being able to see it in the moonlight, filtered as it was through the surrounding vines. And I remember being aware, really aware, that the man who lived here hadn't gone far. He'd return. He was here, somewhere, in the fairgrounds.
He was probably harmless. Just a homeless man.
They tied her to a tree.
I shrieked, slammed my fists against the door, and shot through the fairgrounds, my scream racing behind me like a comet's tail. I found Mark, who had never really liked me, (or maybe had only liked me too much and couldn't show it?), and I begged him to take me out of the fairgrounds. He did, walking me to Chris's big, ugly beast of a car. A Chevy Nova.
The RenFest Village was torn down a few years ago. A state of the art library was built there. It's the coup-de-grace for downtown Largo, which also demolished the old Restaurant Supply warehouse and a couple other old buildings to build a park and an absolutely hideous clock tower.
Where do the kids go now? What part of Largo has been left un-improved, un-revitalized, un-exorcised? If there are no shadowy places, no dark corners full of urban legends and dangers both real and imagined, what on earth do the children of Largo do nowadays?
Somehow, that scares me more than anything I've written here.
Comics are, have always been, and always will be, for grown-ups as much as they are for kids. I dare you to point to any comic in the history of comics and say, “Here, this has absolutely nothing for grown-ups in it.”
Well, maybe you could do it. (see Tiny Titans)
But even then, cute and silly has always attracted some adults. I like to call them “females”.
What has spawned this little post? (I say little because I’m on lunch at work and will have only a half hour that most likely will be interrupted – oh! The phone just rang. I really need to write these posts somewhere other than my desk.)
There are several books out that discuss comics as a literary form, and even more books about creating your own comics. The burr in my shoe on this? Many of them say, “comics and graphic novels”.
Graphic novels are comics.
Let us try to differentiate the two, and see if I can’t blow down each of the Straw Men arguments.
Comics are about superheroes – Not all of them. And why can’t superheroes be literary? The truth, of course, is that they can. For examples, see Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986). Or, Mark Miller’s Superman: Red Son.
Graphic novels are literary – True, but what makes you think comics aren’t? Sandman and Watchmen both started as comics, then were compiled into large volumes. They are now almost exclusively referred to as graphic novels, stealing much deserved critical praise from the art form “comics”.
Graphic novels are cohesive – Graphic novels have a beginning, middle and end. What about collections of short stories that are told in sequential art but bound in hardback format?
Interesting idea, that the difference is cohesion. Is this then the difference between a television show and a movie? What about movies that have sequels? Trilogies?
This gets to the root of the matter. This analogy explains the true difference between a graphic novel and a comic book.
Marketing.
Graphic novels can be shelved in Barnes & Noble or Borders. They have their own BISAC category for buyers to look for. Comic books, while sometimes available at major bookstores, are still mostly relegated to the cozy dens and caves of comic book shops.
But a graphic novel, you can market that. It sounds grown-up. It sounds literary. (Do you see where I’m going with this?)
The difference between a comic and a graphic novel isn’t the art, and it isn’t the subject matter. It’s the marketing.
Graphic novels (even ones comprised of comics, like Sandman) can be advertised, can be sold to book clubs, can win Pulitzer Prizes.
Maus, by Art Spiegelman.
Which, by the way, started out as a comic strip for Funny Animals, and was then published serially in the infamous RAW magazine.
It wasn’t until 1986 (a breakthrough year for the comic book art form) that Maus was published as a book. In 1991 Volume II was published.
Graphic novels are long – This might be the truest statement of all the arguments. Graphic novels are longer stories. Sometimes they are lots of comic book stories packaged into one book (or a series of books). But, does this make them a separate beast than the comic? Worthy of more respect than the comic?
There are such fun things happening in comics right now; it seems a shame to keep people in Borders, only looking for graphic novels, missing all the wonderful stories available.
Marvel has graphic adaptations of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, and The Stand. Marvel is also doing an adaptation of The Wizard of OZ, with the precocious drawings of Skottie Young to enchant you.
DC has an amazing imprint of less-superhero oriented titles, Vertigo. I could go on and on and on about all the wonderful books they publish, but it would take way too long and I only have 7 minutes left of lunch. (4 interruptions so far, btw.)
Not to mention all the wonderful independent comic books out there. And online comics. The world is awash in color, and speech balloons.
Today is Wednesday. New comic book day. Do you know where your local comic book store is?
