A question of Voice

Funny Boy, by Shyam Selvadurai is a book about “growing up gay in Sri Lanka” (Kirkus Reviews) and for that I would love to love this book. Books that can take new information or a difficult topic and make it interesting and engaging to me as a reader are easily my favorite types of books. It is for those reasons that I do like this book. Before reading Funny Boy I probably couldn’t have found Sri Lanka on a map. I certainly had no understanding of its people, culture, or the violent tensions that have been tearing the country apart for a very long time. In terms of educating me about the setting, the people, and the culture of Sri Lanka, this book was extremely effective. 

The problem, for me, arises when confronting the rest of the book. Arjie is the main character, the “funny boy” who grows up in front of us and it is through his slow understanding of his own sexuality and his immersion into the tension filled adult world that we are introduced to all of those things. He is the medium through which the information in the book is presented and he is blindingly uninteresting.

One of the most important aspects the Main Character of a book should have is willful activity. In order to relate to a character, the audience needs to see in that person something they think they are. We, as humans, believe that we have wants and needs and that we are actively pursuing the things we want. Therefore, a main character should have distinct wants and needs and be actively pursuing them. For the most part Arjie doesn’t. Yes, he fights at the beginning to stay in the girls’ group, so that he can keep playing bride-bride, but after one serious confrontation about the issue he simply gives up. Later we see him make a decision and stand up for himself and his boyfriend by messing up the poetry reading in front of the school. But what does it get him? He does it to defend himself and his boyfriend against the principal but we never see if it works or not. Is Shehan saved? Does the Principal lose control of the school? There is no emotional pay-off for the reader in that conflict. Instead we are merely dumped into the next bit of plot, completely unconnected in almost every way from the previous issues. In a way just like Arjie is dragged along by other, far more interesting and willful characters, into their lives and their stories. In a way, it almost seems like this story would be more interesting with just about any of the supporting characters replacing Arjie as the main narrator. 

The other thing that bothered me about the book was its one-foot-in-each-world feeling, not about the conflicting emotions Arjie has, but the writing style. In a lot of ways, this books seems like it can’t decide if it’s supposed to be an adult novel or a YA novel. It has many of the criteria of YA lit, with the first person narrator, the teenage main character, and the coming of age issues, but it is written in the voice of an adult. It isn’t merely first person past tense, it is first person nostalgic, a look back at the narrator’s childhood. It puts a distance between the audience and the immediacy of what is happening that detracts from the action. 

That being said, the prose in this book is very pretty and, as I said, the book is very informative. But overall I would say that reading this book is like drinking a glass of apple juice with a layer of salt in the bottom. Everything tastes just a little bit off and every so often you get a really nasty mouthful. 

Works Cited:

Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1994. Print.

What Are You Trying To Say?

INT. BRAIN – DAY

Unsure of how to approach the dense topic of Monster, SARAH, 24, English Major, turns to outside sources for input.

FRIEND 1 (V.O.)

Monster? Yeah, I’ve read it. I love that book, but…

FRIEND 2 (V.O.)

Oooh. That book was so good, but…

FRIEND 3 (V.O.)

For a kid’s book it was really thoughtful. I

loved reading it, but…

Friend after classmate after coworker,  I was shocked by the number of people who had read Monster, surprised to find that almost everyone loved it. Loved it, but…

But what? But I couldn’t understand the script stuff. But I read scripts all the time and I could barely get through this, it was so bad. But I don’t know if he did it! I could never figure it out! It sounds like two different issues, but they really amount to the same thing. What everyone was talking about are authorial choices of format. The issues presented to me by my audience are not really about the plot or the characters. They aren’t complaining about the dark themes in the novel. In fact, they greatly enjoyed and appreciated the social commentary that saturates Monster. The problems, instead, are about how Myers chose to package all of that information for consumption.

If ever there was a novel that begs for a discussion of format, it is Monster. Written in a strange mix of 1st and 3rd person, we are still only given one point of view. Steve’s. This is accomplished through the use of the screenplay format, with a majority of the story told as a script written by the main character. 

In the first section, on page 4, Steve says “I think to get used to this I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else. I wish I could make sense of it.” (Myer 4) To do this, Steve begins writing down the events of his incarceration and trial as a screenplay.  That screenplay takes the place of the traditional narrative form and provides Steve, and subsequently the audience, with an emotional distance from the action. We are told what is happening and what people are feeling instead of being shown it, breaking the first rule of fiction writing. Yet, this is intentional and not the downfall of the script format. 

The problem has nothing to do with the choice of using a script as a literary tool, but rather the issues of translating a script onto a novel-sized page. The point of the script format, the way it works, is through the use of white space and sentence style. It is designed to allow the reader to read through it at a rapid pace, visualizing the scene as it progresses. Therefore, the first issue should be obvious. The amount of white space available on the pages of a novel is much less than the amount in a script, which is printed on standard 8.5” x 11” paper.  This cuts down on the readability. It takes the short paragraphs of action, description, and dialogue, and makes them narrower and longer, distorting the clear reading style of the screenplay. 

While this might not be irredeemable, Myers also chooses to include all kinds of camera shot information, which is not something normally placed in a Spec script. (A Spec script is the kind meant to be read by regular people and not professionals.) This adds additional blocks of text, packed with shorthand that is explained but isn’t necessarily something that is easy to read. Finally, Myers chooses to bold everything that isn’t dialogue, further thickening already dense blocks of text. 

These issues are especially present in the beginning and end of the book, during the set-up and the attorney speeches. Considering the feedback on the novel, these are not insurmountable issues. They don’t overpower the story itself, or the message. However, they do make the case that how you write, and the choices you make as an author will directly affect how the story is received.

Works Cited:

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Spoilers Inside – Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak

There is a lot to say about Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak, which is the first point I would like to make about it. For a book that doesn’t quite make it to two hundred pages, for a book about a girl who doesn’t talk, where silence isn’t just a counterpoint but is the point, this book says so much. 

To summarize the book, for me, seems nearly impossible, but the closest I can come is: Speak is a novel about a girl who is raped, and because she ends up a social outcast at the same time, succeeds in hiding the attack from everyone she knows. Which summarizes the plot in a way, but does nothing to capture the feel of the book. On every page is a problem, a striking image of the world, from intolerant teachers to bureaucratic/governmental interference to the dysfunctions of a loving family. Yet, not one of these issues is dealt with through the lens of melodrama. As the book is First Person, Present Tense, we see these things through the oh-so-jaded eyes of a teenage girl. For her, these things are normal and so we see them through the lens of normal. Verisimilitude, for those of us who like our ten dollar words. Realism, this book feels real to me, for the rest of you. That is the normalcy that Melinda oozes with every carefully thought word. “The hot lunch is turkey with reconstituted  mashed potatoes and gravy, a damp green vegetable, and a cookie.” (8) We all know that kind of food, it is the world around us, which, perforce, brings up the more troubling thought: does that make the rest of Melinda’s normal… well, normal?

But the complexity of Speak isn’t merely in its subject matter. There are some books where the words are the medium through and in which the author tells the story. It is the mode of expressing their art. And then there are stories where the words themselves become the art. Speak is the latter. From the very first page it is obvious that this is not a run of the mill novel. There are no chapters here, the books is broken up into sections called marking periods. There are no scenes, there are smaller sections, usually just a page or two long, all carefully titled with things like “Our Fearless Leader” (17) and “Peeled and Cored” (65). There are no scenes, paragraph, dialogue, paragraph, dialogue. There are paragraphs, short, choppy sentences clinging to each other in the middle of all that extra white space. Extra line breaks linger between thoughts on the page, drawing the reader’s attention, their focus to each mental moment in time, as if it were important. Forcing it to stand alone as a coherent moment, only loosely connected to the rest of the story. And when there is dialogue it is marked off, blunt and direct. He said/she said are invisible, as any English teacher or major will tell you. They are invisible tags that the reader will just skip over automatically. When writing, you want your reader to know who is speaking, but the tags, the bits of action, the minute are supposed to flow away from the words, from dialogue to paragraph with no mental interruptions.

In Speak Anderson interrupts. “Heather: [smiling with her mouth but not her eyes] We were never really, really friends, were we?...” (105) It’s like the format of a script or screenplay, and yet even more in your face. Who is speaking isn’t supposed to be periphery knowledge here. Who is saying it, how they are saying it, those things are just as important as the words themselves. In a blunt and simple way, merely through a bit of formatting Anderson is forcing the character to step up and take responsibility for the words they speak, even if, within the universe, they don’t seem to care.  The words we speak are not insignificant, which, cliché as it sounds, is the whole point of the novel. New summary: Speak is a novel about human interaction and how influential a word/gesture/action can be, in both the positive and negative. 

But at the same time, it is a book about a girl, and she was raped. It is a book about depression. About social isolation. About families that are screwed up but in a socially acceptable way. It is about high school. Self expression. Speak is about girl-on-girl crime and boy-on-girl crime. It is a book that defines friendship and what it isn’t.  Speak is complicated and complex. It’s the way it should be.  

Works Cited:

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. Puffin Books, 1999. Print.

Well, you might ask, why are we here?

It was the middle of January, likely cold, possibly blustery, and probably a bit overcast outside. Absolutely nothing remarkable happened on that day, but I did end up being born at which point I'm fairly sure I knew how to read. In my family, you see, reading is as much a genetic trait as the size of my nose or the shape of my knees. The written word, it's kind of what we do with ourselves. We love it, create it, critique it, and judge it, but what we do most, and what we do best, is consume it. I honestly cannot remember a time when I couldn't read and I still don't know of any other pursuit that I would rank above lounging out with a good book.

Part of my early obsession probably comes from my mother, who used us kids to shamelessly indulge her own bookaholism. For all of my early life she read aloud to me and my siblings. There are dozens of books that I will never associate with anything but the sound of her voice and the feeling of the carpet under my back as I lay and listened. The fact that our local library was two blocks from my house made it an easy way to tire out the kids and stock up on the literary all at the same time. I'm fairly sure the librarians knew my name before I could properly write it.

It was there, within the brick walls of that tiny library that I met and married the other great love of my life: the SciFi/Fantasy section. It was through this medium that I turned my frenzied consumption of the written word into an equally obsessive production of the same. The first story I ever decided to write, not because I had to, but because I wanted to contribute to the world of words around me, was a horrible little Star Wars fanfiction. I was twelve, you see, and Luke Skywalker was god. He was my first crush and I was so in love. And that love grew, but not through a consumption of YA fiction. I was a big girl by then, at twelve, and I read the big novels. Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn series. The X-wing books. The grown-up stuff. I was living proof of what Chris Crowe said in his article “Young Adult Literature: The Problem with YA Literature.” I was a mature reader, or at least that’s how I thought of myself. I wasn’t remedial. There was no reason for me to read the cheesy, formulaic ‘kids books’. 

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I finally stopped caring about the categories assigned to the books and allowed myself to branch out into the YA section. I think this distance allowed me to see YA books through a different lens. As a child and a teenager I defined books by what I liked vs what I didn’t like, with no real substance to those opinions. I didn’t have a good grasp on why I felt that way. I couldn’t quantify my feelings, and I didn’t really try. It wasn’t until I really got some experience with writing that I was able to put those opinions into words. I liked Tamora Pierce’s books for her universe building, but most YA fiction is enthralling due to the strength of the characters. The people in the books, the voice, the personalities, the characterization is usually so strong in good adolescent literature that it becomes interesting and memorable. Despite the shortness of the story. Despite the occasional implausibility in the plot. 

            It is this slightly backward approach to YA Lit that keeps me interested in the genre. As I try to learn how to write and seek to improve my skills as an author I find myself studying YA lit more and more. The problem is, when adults write for adults, they have a tendency to out think themselves. But when they write ‘simpler’ stories aimed for teenagers, frequently the bare bones of writing can be seen better. You don’t have to try and pick apart two main plots and fourteen subplots, all with layers of foreshadowing and subtext to try to figure out what the author is attempting to do. With a more straight forward structure to the story, a close analysis of the book can reveal not only what the author is trying to do, but how and why they’re making those choices. Analyzing adolescent literature, then, becomes an interesting journey into how books and stories and novels are formed, and how they become the purposeful, impactful commentaries on human nature that so many of them are. It is my hope to improve my own knowledge of this topic, and to share what I learn with my fellow fiction writers as the semester goes along.

Bibliography:

Crowe, Chris. "Young Adult Literature: The Problem With YA Literature." English Journal 90.3 (2001): 146-150. Web. 19 Aug 2010. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/821338>.