Janni Simner

Janni Simner is the award-winning author of over 35 short stories which have been published in many anthologies, novels, and the distopian Faerie trilogy.  Janni writes an informative and fun blog. Be sure to go visit her.

Her latest book, Faerie After, will be released May 28.  You can read an excerpt on the book’s website.

Today in the Tollbooth, Janni answers some question about writing her Faerie trilogy.

Sarah: You have written about your writing process, which includes writing exploratory drafts, on your blog. Did you use the same process of an exploratory draft for Faerie After, the last book in the trilogy?

Janni: I did! I’ve learned for me the first draft of a book isn’t about telling the story so much as about getting a sense of the terrain the story will be told on. I basically go kind of stream-of consciousness as I write, following the words from one sentence to the next to see where I wind up. I’ve had friends with more orderly processes suggest that I do my thinking on the page instead of in my head, which may well be true–if so, thinking on the page works better for me than waiting until my thoughts are all neatly arranged to write.

And besides, it’s fun.

Sometimes my exploratory drafts have nothing at all in common with the final story–for one book, I wrote an exploratory draft set in the wrong town with the wrong characters in the wrong season with the wrong plot. Except “wrong” isn’t the best way of describing it, because I don’t think of my exploratory draft as a “mistake” so much as a necessary step on the road to my final story.

My exploratory draft for Faerie After was closer to the “right” story than some of my exploratory drafts, if you ignore the fact that it took 30,000 exploratory words to find the final book’s first scene. On the other hand, I really had to work harder than usual to get the last third of the book to work out, and added a sixth draft to my five-draft process just to focus on the final scenes.

Maybe that’s because saving the world is hard, and since Faerie After is the final book of the Bones of Faerie trilogy, it was both my and protagonist Liza’s last chance to try to save it. Or maybe it’s just because every book is different, and while knowing our own best processes is hugely helpful, each book has its own individual challenges, too.

Sarah : Any hints or useful tips about how to craft the overall plot arc for a trilogy? What about crafting the character arc over three books?

Janni: I didn’t start off planning to write a trilogy, though I did start off hoping I’d get to write more books in the Bones of Faerie universe. I wrote Bones of Faerie to stand alone, but was delighted when I got to write a second book, Faerie Winter, as well. Then I finished Faerie Winter, and realized that there was so much going on in that book that I needed a third book to make the trilogy feel complete. (Among other things, I’d always envisioned Faerie Winter as the book where Liza would return to the Faerie realm, but there was so much going on in the human world she never did! Instead that return is much of the focus of Faerie After, the third book.)

My editor gave me a useful bit of advice about my protagonist’s arc when we decided to continue the series. I’d been afraid Liza had become too powerful, by the end of Bones of Faerie, to remain a protagonist for future books. I was considering choosing a new protagonist for book two when my editor said, well, what if Liza’s challenges are bigger? This was both obvious and something I needed to hear directly. While each of the Bones of Faerie books are at least somewhat self-contained, each also now has stakes that are higher than–and that build upon–the challenges of the earlier books.

One other thing I did for the final book, Faerie After, was to re-visit some of the decisions my protagonist made in the first two books. I found that some of the things Liza did that were very right in Bones of Faerie were suddenly much more complicated and ambiguous in Faerie After. That strongly played into her growth as a character, too.

Sarah:  In addition to your novels, you have published numerous short stories. What differences have you found in world building for short stories versus the trilogy?

Janni: In some ways it’s not all that different. I take an idea, or a feeling, or a character, and I jump in with my messy writing process and see where it takes me. I think the difference is not so much in world-building as in final structure. With a short story, I usually stop after the main character’s first “turning” or moment of change, while in a novel there are several turnings, and how those turnings interact with one another to create the story is more complex. And in a trilogy, the turns and changes of multiple novels are interacting with each other, too.

It is also true that for a trilogy, every decision needs to be remembered across the whole series, and even small details can affect everything that comes later. What’s fun is getting to discover what those details mean in later books, because I don’t always know right away. In Bones of Faerie I knew I had a protagonist who didn’t like to lie, for instance, but it wasn’t until Faerie Winter that I thought about magic and faerie lore and realized that she couldn’t lie, even if she wanted to, and neither could anyone else with magic.

Sarah: You have said that part of the fun of writing is hands-on research. Did you have any fun research experiences while writing your Faerie trilogy? How did they appear in the books?

Janni: In a way, my research for the Bones of Faerie trilogy goes back decades, since the book is set in St. Louis, where I went to college. I had a lot of fun returning to St. Louis years later, map in hand, to trace Liza’s route for Bones of Faerie and to imagine how the city would change after the war with Faerie. I kept looking over my shoulder, imaging my characters watching me from the city’s post-apocalyptic future.

(Sarah: Here are some Photos from Janni’s research trip.)

I also did tons and tons of plant research for the trilogy, writing with printouts of Missouri plants and trees beside my computer, and I did some St. Louis-area hiking to observe the vegetation more closely. The trilogy’s wildlife research wasn’t quite as hands-on as for my Iceland-based Thief Eyes–for which I got to meet an arctic fox up close–but I did enjoy reading up on wolves and raptors for the books, too.

Actually, I’ve been doing lots of wildlife research for my next book (about endangered raven shapeshifters living in the New Mexico Wilderness), too. I think sometimes the process of writing and research can show us what our obsessions and fascinations really are, and provides a great place to explore them further!

Sarah: Thank you, Janni, for visiting the Tollbooth today.

Sarah Blake Johnson

Released this week from Running Press Teens!

As a brand new author, I’ve been encountering tough questions, and I wanted to take this launch announcement to discuss what I consider to be the hardest question:

The most succinct answer is that I was thinking about writing a gritty, YA sci-fi. Ideas came and went until one night, I woke up to the steel and flint spark of two ideas:

RAIN’s dedication

 

After the initial spark came a day when I sat down to write, and instead, called my best friend, Mario. Mario has a reputation for brutal honesty, so when I said, “prostitutes in space” I chewed my nails while I waited for his verdict.

Happy Day After Mother’s Day! Mother’s Day is really “Appreciation Day.” We get to spend the whole day telling Mom what she did well. We send flowers. We eat chocolate. We give her the recognition she deserves.

Today I’d like to take that feeling of appreciation and recognition and apply it to the writing life. The timing works for me! Today is also the first day of my newest online class. During this first week, many good things will happen. We will introduce ourselves. We will start an intense ten week conversation about the craft of writing. We will share our work.  We will become a community.

Last year, I wrote this piece on fostering creativity in an online community. A strong and satisfying online experience definitely begins with trust.

Trust begins with listening. And recognition. And appreciation. (See where I’m going now?)

When it comes to critiquing–possibly the most emotional and potent part of the process–most writers who come to my class have experience. They have already begun to “read like a writer.” They already know that they learn a lot by reading critically. They’re well on their way to completion and publication. But what they often still don’t know how to do is how to hear and expand upon a critique, especially the part we’ll call “the good stuff.”

Are you in that camp? Are you a writer who only wants to hear what is “wrong/bad/not working/could be better????

As a teacher, I work very hard to show writers what they are doing well. I think this is important for the process . . . and the soul. We do this work without the kind of recognition most jobs begin with: money.  It always makes me nervous when  a new writer proclaims: Don’t worry. I can take it. “I have teflon skin.”

(These manuscripts are our babies. We all near to hear they are beautiful!)

I think that knowing what’s right is even more productive.

In class, I try to give them specific examples of great chapters/lines/characters, so that they can build off those strengths. Still, I am no longer surprised when someone will accuse me of making up “the good stuff.” They say to me, “You’re just saying that, so that you can get to the stuff you mean.”

This is not true. And it is not a good practice. It doesn’t make you a vain person to acknowledge that you are successful. At every stage of the process, you must learn to celebrate and build on what you do well. Ask any published writer about editorial letters. You need to know! If you’re not, it’s really hard to go back into the cave of revisions.

Even if you are a writer with teflon ears, here are some tips to help you accept, enjoy and build on the good stuff.

1. Stop reading the critique before the suggestions begin. Enjoy and celebrate the things you do well. Let that feedback settle in. Let that feedback inspire new ideas. Don’t immediately go into fixer mode.

2. Reread the sections your critiquer thinks work. Ask yourself why they are working. Are they active scenes? Does the reader know what your character wants during these moments?

3. Look at the good scenes and ask, “How could this be even better?” Trust me: this works.  It’s easier to begin to re-imagine your novel when you start at scenes that are working well. Chances are they are your favorite scenes. Chances are spending time on them will make some of those harder scenes more fun to revise.

When you can acknowledge your good work and successes, you are more likely to thrive and write well. I know I write my best when I know that someone believes in my story. This kind of confidence can happen at every stage of the journey. When you know what you do well, you will feel better about the work. You’ll write with more confidence. You will be able to hit those all important goals.

May every day be an appreciation day! Have a great writing week!

I’m writing a sequel, and I’m terrified. Yes, I know, there’s not a lot of pity for someone who has to write a sequel. Boo hoo, you sold two books.

But, I never intended to write a series, and I am a YA book buyer for an indie bookstore who leads a monthly group of teen readers, so every four weeks, teens complain to me that the second or third book in a series is a HUGE disappointment.

Why? The character changes in book 2. The dynamic girl they fell in love with becomes weak and needy. The romantic triangle turns boring. A character they didn’t really like in book one takes over book two.

Not surprising then, that writing a sequel that will equal book one feels impossible to me at times. In fact, I had a dark night of the soul after I signed the contract and committed to delivering a 100,000 word manuscript in one year.

It was ironic and, perhaps, predestined when I snagged a last-minute spot at a weekend retreat with Martha Alderson, The Plot Whisperer. It was after midnight in my dark night, and I’d begun to read and work through her approach, and to feel my way towards book two.

I knew my sequel had to resolve the unfinished business of book one. My character had transformed from tentative to strong, but she was still in danger. Her romance had blossomed, but was still at risk.

Luckily, I was finishing rewrites on book one so I could leave more plot points unresolved. And my genius editor had forced me to add a hunky character in the last part of the book–insisting that I didn’t need to write a love triangle–but that I should insert the potential for one in the future.

Martha Alderson emphasizes character transformation–but how was my character going to continue to transform when she’d already gone from helpless to powerful?

How could her story be more than a run for safety?

And what part of my protagonist’s character had to die so she could be reborn?

For two days I listened to Martha, did her plot exercises, and finally talked through the plot of book one with her. The Aha moments started to happen.

How could my protagonist continue to transform? She could stop thinking primarily of herself while others sacrificed themselves. She could finally commit to the cause.

And what could prompt her to devote herself of the plight of others? Witnessing suffering even greater than her own. The world I’d built had to be even more perverse than she or I’d had ever imagined.

And the climax? The worst thing that could happen to my character who was on the run? She gets caught! No longer evading capture, abandoning all hope of rescue, she would have to face her biggest antagonist.

When I go to write every morning, I don’t always know where I’m going, and I’m not sure how all the plot points will weave together, but I know that I must be harsher, and braver than I was in book one. Maybe book two won’t please my readers, but unless I risk it all, it will be a faint echo of the first.

The Shocking Truth!

Novels have plots.

I have a confession-

For me, and a lot of other novelists, plotting feels IMPOSSIBLE. As unfathomable as an algebra problem. And just as bound up by some weird set of rules I thought I’d never understand.

Plot = bizarrely confusing + tediously proscriptive   

A few great writers, including Tollboother emeritus Carrie Jones, dive into their drafts with plot in mind. Carrie wrote a wonderful series of Tollbooth posts on plot here (step 1 and step 2) If you struggle with plot (or even if you don’t) I STRONGLY urge you to take a look at Carrie’s posts. I refer back to her sophisticated yet no nonsense understanding of how a story fits together often.

But many of us don’t “get” plot. What do you do if plotting feels like a foreign language?

Is there any hope? YES! YES! YES!

Of course there’s hope!   If I can understand and conquer plot you can, too.

It’s a simple matter of ORGANIZE AND REVISE. (And it even works for the hopelessly disorganized! I’m living proof.) I call this plotting for the plot impaired. Plotting is actually easy if you break it into really obvious, can’t believe I didn’t notice this before, parts.

Here’s what works for me:

Step 1 Write a messy (or not messy) first draft.

It doesn’t matter how you get your draft done. Fast, slow, outlined, by the seat of your pants. Just do it. Then put the draft away.

Step 2 List all your scenes

I get a pack of notecards. Then I list the scenes in my novel from memory, in the order I think they should appear in the final (a long time from now) draft. Norma Fox Mazer called this a “story ladder” but it doesn’t matter what you call it. Make a list, one scene on each card.

(While I’m doing this I’m thinking a lot about motivation- what does my character want? why? what does he do to get it? what will happen if he doesn’t get it (stakes)? what stands in his way?  I write all this down in my brainstorming notebook, pondering. When something doesn’t seem to make sense I rethink and re-imagine the story I’m trying to tell.)

After I’ve listed all my scenes I lay them out, take a step back, and see what I’ve got.

Step 3 Identify key scenes. I search my plot ladder cards for several super important scenes. If I find them among the scenes I’ve already written, great! I highlight or rewrite those scenes in red. Or re-do these cards using brightly colored index cards. The point is I want them to stand out.

If I don’t find all my key scenes among the cards I’ve created I brainstorm to come up with new scenes for the next draft. Then I make cards for those scenes, highlighted in pink or some other eye catching color that designates them as important unwritten scenes.

These are the specific scenes I’m looking for-

A. Where does the story really begin? This can be hard! Often your novel’s true beginning is NOT the first scene in your first draft. In fact I’d argue that you can’t really know where your novel should begin until you’ve written the ending. Consider whether you’ve started in the right spot. Be sure there’s a card for that first scene, already written or not.

B. What’s the inciting incident? What scene sets the events in motion? Often the inciting incident takes place in the opening scene but it may come a short time later. Make  a card for it.

C. The end of the beginning. The Plot Whisperer, Martha Alderson, talks about the first quarter of a novel finishing with a scene where the protagonist leaves his old world and enters the new world he will explore during the course of the novel. You can think of it as the start of the protagonist’s journey, or the moment when nothing can be the same again, or the end of the first act. Just be sure to include a card.

D. A good strong midpoint. When middles sag stories wander. And your readers’ attention will wander, too. Think literally for a moment. Imagine a tent pole that holds your plot aloft. If you hoist your story’s middle with a strong plot point scenes before that point will build toward it and scenes after it will result from it. It’s just that simple. I promise. Look at a hundred novels that work and you’ll believe me.

What makes a good soaring midpoint? Carrie says “halfway through the book and suddenly there is a STUNNING PLOT TWIST. This is the point of no return.”  This shift, twist, obstacle, whatever you want to call it will force your protagonist to recommit to his goal (reluctantly, enthusiastically, fearfully, angrily… whatever) And guess what. It inflates a saggy middle every time. So if you don’t have a strong scene midway through the novel come up with an idea for one now. And make a card for it.

E. Crisis  Usually something happens just as the middle is finishing up that makes it appear the protagonist’s goal is absolutely unachievable. Hero’s Journey people sometimes think of this as the hero’s ritual death. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the low point, often both emotionally and actively. Do you have one of these scenes? Find it! List it! Plan it!

F. Climax  Way back in the begining, my protagonist really really really wanted to achieve his goal and now he’s fought his way back from the depths of that crisis scene to accomplish it. Maybe he won’t get what he thought he wanted… but he will achieve something (even if its just wisdom.) Otherwise what’s the point of the novel? List the scene where your protagonist gets his just deserts, whatever sauce they’re dished up in.

4 Smile. Because guess what…It’s a plot! Those key scenes are the bare bones of a plot. The other scenes on the cards are the meat on the bones. I did it!!!

I have a real story! Or at least I will have one when I get to

Step 5 Revise! 

I arrange my scene cards on a big table or open patch of floor, adding new scenes where I see gaps, shuffling scenes to build tension, and cutting scenes to avoid repetition or trim narrative fat.

I make a story board to help me re-imagine what isn’t working or to make weak spots strong.

I stare.

I tweak.

Then I sit down and start writing. Again. And Again. And Again.

Do you think a novel has to have a plot? How do you do it?

~tami lewis brown

More thoughts on fully realizing your fictional world… 

No matter how fantastical or faraway your fictional world, it begins inside you, as the writer. We are all from some place, even if we are displaced. All a product of what we know and don’t know. Of who are, our culture, our parents, the landscape where we were raised.

If you doubt this, the next time you have an opinion about something, ask yourself where the opinion comes from. Your parents? Your culture? The books you read or movies you watch?

When I ask myself where I am from, I get many different answers, but they often begin with the natural world. I’m not only from water, but from mountains, canyons, trees and starry nights, the sprawl of a river town and its highways, as Ray Carver writes about in “Highway 99E from Chico”

The mallard ducks are down

For the night. They chuckle

In their sleep and dream of Mexico

And Honduras. Watercress

Nods in the irrigation ditch

And the tules slump forward, heaving

With blackbirds.

Rice fields float under the moon.

Even the wet maple leaves cling

To my windshield. I tell you Maryann,

I am happy.

I tell you Maryann, I am happy. Carver remembers this highway, this windshield, these birds, this trip, because of the emotion behind it.

If we seek to understand the emotions behind what we write, it can make our fictional world real.

Another California writer, Brenda Nakamoto, who writes about growing up as a third generation Japanese in Peach Farmer’s daughter, talks about creating her book out of a sense of needing to understand her roots, and a yearning for a grandfather she never met.

In missing the rural farm where she grew up, Nakamoto recreates it with sensory details. The peaches heavy on the trees, and her Dad’s old Ford truck bleached to the color of a faded sky.

And while she never knew her grandfather, who killed himself before she was born, she re-imagines him as an immigrant on a ship bound for Seattle. Although he was only 5 feet tall, she sees him as “a big so huge I cannot put my arms around it.”

A big so huge, I cannot get my arms around it. I love that line. And in creating place through specific details, Nakamoto’s world has become universal.

What makes a fictional world believable? How to you find the right words that will paint a place that feels every bit as real as Dad’s old Ford truck bleached to the color of a faded sky?

I believe these exquisite details emerge through the work of mining your own subconscious, to uncover your true reasons your writing. As Alice Hoffman says, don’t write what you know, write what you feel.

And when you are writing what you feel, symbol and metaphor naturally follow.

Listen to this moment in The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo when Rob cries at his mother’s funeral:

“They were both dressed up in suits that day; his father’s suit was too small. And when he slapped Rob to make him stop crying, he ripped a hole underneath the arm of his jacket.

’There ain’t no point in crying,” his father had said afterward. “Crying ain’t going to bring her back.’”

That hole in his jacket underarm is a symbol for the whole in Rob’s life.

In Cynthia Voights Homecoming, the story of four abandoned children walking to their grandmother’s house, the children are in constant search of food.

“Dicey and James pulled mussels from the rocks and washed them off in the water, while Maybeth and Sammy climbed back up the hill for twigs and larger pieces of wood. Soon they had a large mound of mussels waiting beside a crackling fire…”

Food in this way becomes not just a meal, but stands in for the missing mother, their loss and their yearning… a type of extended metaphor that TS Elliot called an Objective Correlative: or a “Set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for a particular emotion.”

In my own novel The Lucky Place, I returned to my water roots with my character Cassie. In this scene she is realizing that the stepdad she loves may die, as she walks into the ocean and is swept under:

“I’m underwater.

I’m rushing backward and down and hit something hard and sand stuffs my mouth. My cheek burns. When I hit I can’t hold my breath and I suck in water. I can’t find the air. I kick out for the surface, but it’s not there. My chest aches enough to burst. The blue is gone, replaced with black and bits of silver star. I’m sucked out to sea and I’m going to die.”

She doesn’t die, though, and is spit back out.

“My cheek feels scraped where it hit the sand, but nobody realizes. Nobody knows how scared I was. Or that I finally understand. Cancer isn’t a gypsy curse. It’s a huge smashing wave. It catches you and drags you out. And anybody can be spit back up, and anybody can drown.”

Earlier I said that just as in the real world, a fictional is not simply a place, but what is happening to a character in that place. And that what is happening to a character—the tension between her inner and outer landscape, at just that moment, is not static, or generic. It is specific, in motion, has cause and effect, like a crackling fire or a crashing wave, and if it rings true it’s because it’s part and parcel of the story itself.

Take the opening scene in Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light which not only begins in motion, but sets the story world beautifully in time and place:

“When summer comes to the North Woods,” she writes “…time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. They sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can’t help but stop what you’re doing—pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps—to stare up at it. Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam. As I stand here on the porch of the Glenmore, the finest hotel on all of Big Moose Lake, I tell myself that today—Thursday, July 12, 1906—is such a day. Time has stopped…”

Time has also stopped for the reader. We want it to, at least the time outside the novel. While in the world of A Northern Light time is already on the move. Soon a girl’s body will be brought to the porch, and that idyl will be shattered.

Donnelly has created a perfect fulcrum between this sweet moment and what will happen next. And it’s worth noting that her character is crossing a threshold –literally and figuratively in this moment. And so are we, as readers.

A story world is created from within, they are your themes that manifest in your character’s point of view. This world is already moving as your reader crosses your story threshold. It is dynamic, changes as your character changes, is the world where your character is hot, or cold or moody or in peril. It is the place where a character first makes love or loses a loved one. It is set in time and has a spot on the map. It begins in the white hot center of experience, in all its sensory detail, and is the spark between your character’s inner motives and outer action. And building your world with emotionally powered, specific details allows your individual story to become universal.

Katherine Paterson notes in Spying Heart that the Japanese word for idea is “i, which is made up of two characters—the character for Sound and the character for Heart—so an idea is something that makes a sound in the heart (the heart in Japanese, as in Hebrew, being the seat of intelligence as well as the seat of feeling).

Paterson is talking about the “power of the imagination” that comes from the sound of a writer’s heart. It’s from this imagination that we create the symbols and metaphors that invite young readers in to figure things out for themselves. To be caught up in a story so fully that their own imagination then allows them to, as Paterson says, “listen to the sounds of their own hearts.”

                                                                                     –zu vincent

Thoughts on the art of creating place…

by zu vincent

From the moment I knew I wanted to be a writer, which for me was somewhere around three years old, I was writing about place.

Place for me is California, where in one way or another I grew up on the water. Ocean water, lake water, river water, irrigated farmlands with the Delta Breeze blowing through. And I was forever trying to capture in words, a rain dimpled puddle in a parking lot, the knuckled hills on the way to the Pacific, or the creek’s rush past the warm, fresh smell of river rock. Each of these sensory details were wondrous to me because they reflected the experiences, feelings and  emotions I had while in those places I loved.  

And just as in the real world, a fictional world is not simply a place, but what is happening to a character in that environment. And what is happening to a character—the tension between her inner and outer landscape, at each moment, is not static, or generic. It is specific, in motion, has cause and effect, and if it rings true it’s because it’s part and parcel of the story itself.

Add to that we’re writing for children and young adults, and what is happening may be a first. Your reader may never have been exposed to this landscape, this idea, this raw emotion before.

To understand how place infuses a fictional world for a young audience, think of the place you first fell in love, first experienced joy, or shame. First felt death’s grief. No doubt your experience wrapped that place with emotion, too. And then consider that the essence of world building begins in your own reasons for writing. Which means place cannot be separated from character, plot, or theme, is created out of symbol, metaphor and sensory detail, and relies on your character’s as well as your, emotional state.

Façades…

The story goes that in 1787, after Potempkin had wrested control of the Black and  Caspian Seas for Catherine the Great of Russia, she took a large group of dignitaries on a triumphant journey to the Crimea to view her holdings.

At one point, Potemkin led the party on pleasure boats down a river, to show them that only happy people lived in Russia. From their pleasure boats, the dignitaries viewed the facades of houses Potempkin had built, with smiling Russians waving out front. Yet the villages were fake. Behind the bright facades were ragged beggars, collapsing huts and desperately poor people. These fake villages were later to become known as “Potemkin villages.”

Creating fictional worlds is not like creating a Potemkin Village. We aren’t erecting a façade. Our readers need to climb off the boat, across the muddy river banks, walk up to the door where, even if it’s unpleasant, we want them to step through.

And when they do, they must encounter a world fully realized.

 Next: Some thoughts on fully realizing your fictional world….

                                                                                    –Zu Vincent

For the past several months—or possibly the past several centuries; it’s sort of hard to tell—I’ve been writing the second book in a trilogy. If you’re wondering whether writing a sequel is easier or more difficult than writing a stand-alone novel, I am here to tell you with complete confidence that I have no idea. The only thing I know for sure is that no book comes easy, and this one hasn’t been much of an exception.

To be fair, writing a sequel does have its perks. When I sat down to write the first draft, I already knew my main characters and their world. I was intimately acquainted with everyone’s personality quirks, backstories, neuroses, and food allergies. I didn’t have to worry about figuring out the story’s magic system, since I’d already hashed that out in the first book, and I knew exactly how long it would take my characters to travel cross-country via train, horse-drawn carriage, and pirate ship. I even knew where my plot was headed, since I’d done my best to set my characters up for further adventures at the end of book one.

Emotionally, however, I was stumped.

I mean, my emotions were okay—or at least as okay as the emotions of a debut author writing a second book under contract can possibly be. But at the end of book one, I’d brought Hilary, my protagonist, to a stable and happy emotional place. She couldn’t remain stable and happy all throughout the sequel, could she? No; that would be boring, and it wouldn’t give readers a reason to care about her adventures. Would I have to tear Hilary down again? Would I have to undo all the emotional strength she’d built up in the first book? That didn’t seem right, either; I didn’t want to write the same story twice or cancel out everything good that had happened in the series’ first installment. Just as I’d designed the plot of book two to build and expand on the events of book one, I wanted my characters’ emotions to build and expand in a natural way. But I had no idea how to accomplish this.

At this point, for probably the millionth time, the superheroic community of Vermont College students and alums came to my rescue. Even though I’m no longer a student, I still rely on my MFA program friends to offer smart perspectives on the craft problems I’m wrestling with, so I handed off the question to them. “Hey,” I said (more or less), “I’m working on this sequel, and I have no idea what to do with my characters’ emotions. Should I give them something new to struggle with? Should they just repeat the same old struggle they overcame at the end of book one? Can I please, please, please write a book in which no one has any emotions at all? ‘Cause that would be much easier.”

I got lots of great responses, but there were two in particular that helped me see the emotional trajectories of multi-book series in a new and really helpful way. Val Howlett mentioned that in some of her favorite series, the characters’ emotional struggles aren’t fully resolved at the end of each book. Take the Harry Potter series as a familiar example: Harry is constantly wrestling with the loss of his parents, though that wrestling match takes a different form in each of the seven books. “In all the series I’ve loved,” Val said, “there were these emotional needs that were big enough to grow and shift, but remained at the heart of the series.” In other words, a good series has an emotional core that runs through each of its books. That emotional core is part of the connective tissue that holds all the books together and unites them as a larger work.

Val’s response helped me decide that I needed to return to the core of Hilary’s emotional struggle in book one—her desire to earn her dad’s respect—but I still wasn’t sure how to do that without making my sequel repetitive. Jessica Leader gave me a great solution, though, when she said, “When the author pans back to show the reader and the character the bigger problem, it mirrors the process of maturation: at first, you can only see your world, but gradually, you gain the ability to think about your place in it, and then the world itself. So there’s built-in character development at the ready!”

That’s when it clicked for me: Each book in my series could focus on the same core emotion, but it could look at that emotion in increasingly broad contexts. If the emotional core of my series was Hilary’s desire for respect, maybe she’d search for that respect first (in book one) from her family, then (in book two) from her immediate community, and finally (in book three) from the community at large—and from herself.

This concept of an emotional core that expands in scope from one book to the next has been incredibly helpful to me as I structure my series. I know I’ll be able to apply it to future stories, and I hope it’s useful to other writers, too. Most of all, though, it reminds me that a writing community is priceless, and that when we don’t have the answer to a tough writing problem, it’s not the end of the world. It’s probably just time to start brainstorming with our friends.

In less than two months my YA novel will be coming out (!) and recently, I’ve found myself giving the two-second pitch on repeat: “It’s about a teen prostitute in space.”

This description invariably sparks the question, “Is there sex in your book?”

Why, yes. Yes, there is!

I find it a bit backward to think that someone might write about a prostitute without including the business, but I understand the concern. Sex in teen fiction is a sticky subject, but odds are that if you write for teens (or adults), at some point you’re going to write a sex scene. And though I’m no expert, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

One caveat before we go forward: I’m discussing sex in Young Adult books. Not New Adult, the newest genre trend, which was created by St. Martin’s Press to capture the early twenties coming-of-age story but has been pretty much hijacked as the newest label for erotica. (For more information on the New Adult debate, check out this post on The Compulsive Reader blog.)

Three Important Things to Remember in the YA Sex Scene:

Go forth and write sexily.

When I was a teacher (I used to be a teacher), the beginning of the year was always stressful to me.  It wasn’t the planning, because I loved the planning.  It wasn’t setting up the room, because I loved setting up the room.  It was when the kids came that first day and I didn’t love them.

The problem was I was still in love with my class from the previous year.  I knew everything about them, their birthdays, what they enjoyed thinking about and playing, who they fought with and what made them scared.  I was enthralled by their ideas and loved class discussions in all subjects.  I woke up happy to be seeing them.  And then they were gone.  And now there were these perfectly fine children in front of me, for whom I harbored kind thoughts, but who I didn’t know enough to love yet.  Not really love, not with meaning.

I found that two weeks was what it took.  Every year I was worried and miserable that it wouldn’t happen and every year at the two week mark I was besotted again, besotted with this new group of kids and excited to figure out who they were and what they needed.   And every year the relief was enormous, but that never made me less worried come September.

Well, it turns out that writing is the same way for me.  I start a new book and I don’t love it or anybody in it yet.  Or maybe I sort of do, but it feels like a theoretical love for someone who I’ve been told about, who I like the sound of— a friend of a friend maybe—but not someone who is yet in relationship with me, who lives in my heart.  And it stresses me out enormously.  Am I ever going to love this book, I fret?  Am I ever going to feel it?  Weirdly, the classroom love experience does helps me realize that of course I will. Right?  I mean, I hope so.  Ugh.

Anyway, do you know what I mean?  How long does it take you to feel like a book has you by the heart?  What do you do to foster that?  Spill it in the comments!

Not like this is happening to me right now or anything.

GULP.