Raise Your Lantern High, chapter 11: Midwinter Nights

RAISE YOUR LANTERN HIGH

Summary: In which Remus and Tonks fight battles, arrest criminals, befriend werewolves, overcome inner demons and, despite it all, find themselves a happy ending. A love story, and a story of the Order years. (My Remus/Tonks epic, which has been years in the making! This is the second half of the story, set in the Half-Blood Prince year.)

( Chapter 11: Midwinter Nights )

"Telling Better Stories"

Well, I seem to have found my cause in life...or at least my latest one!

As you all know, I think about books and writing a lot (what with having been a massive book-lover all my life – not to mention now having a job in a library!)

I also think about issues of diversity/representation/racism/sexism/equality-of-all-kinds a lot (what with, you know, existing as a human being in this particular world of ours).

I'd already been thinking about diversity in my reading; after stereolightning took me to an panel discussion by the amazing folks at We Need Diverse Books (check them out, check them out, check them out!) I started thinking more about diversity in my writing, too. (That timely increase in awareness on my part is why the werewolf pack in "Raise Your Lantern High" includes characters from a wide variety of backgrounds, rather than just the same old generic-nonspecified-white-people-by-default that so much American/European writing unfortunately defaults to.)

As I've been reading book-buying catalogues for work (yes...my job is indeed awesome!) I've actually been pretty pleased/relieved to see that that state of the publishing industry seems to be doing pretty okay at this, at putting out books that represent a wide variety of characters and a wide variety of authors and a wide variety of backgrounds. That's really heartening! Obviously, this is one of those things where you can always be improving and striving to do better – and it benefits everybody when you do! – but the "powers that be" in publishing (at least for children's books and YA) do seem to have gotten the message about the crucial importance of all kids getting to see characters like them in the books they read, and that's huge.

Anyway, this month's Booklist catalogue featured an interview with three different authors on matters of "diverse books" – especially in the realm of writing YA fantasy. The whole thing's worth a read – it's not long – but here were a couple of my favorite bits:


Booklist: You all approach the genre in different ways, but it becomes a vehicle for, among other things, discussing a variety of multicultural issues. So why fantasy?

Daniel José Older (author of "Shadowshaper"): [...] Fantasy offers unique ways to think about race, power, and culture, because with fantasy we have a chance to dream up new rules, new arrangements, new forms of power, and also complicate and dramatize existing ones. I think it's important to allow literature to multitask. Our characters can confront racist microaggressions or police brutality and fight off evil zombie dudes, and they should, because one doesn't cancel out the other, and there's a truth in there that's important to acknowledge.

[me, starfishstar: I love this, because yes, not every book with a person of color character needs to be an "Issue Book." We also need books about characters who happen to be people of color, and also happen to do awesome, interesting things! And of course his point about fantasy being an ideal place to explore questions of race, power and culture makes me think of JKR, and how Harry Potter is a parable for bigotry and tolerance in the world. Sci fi and fantasy have long been the go-to places for exploring these sorts of questions.]


Booklist: It's been widely acknowledged that publishing needs more diversity, both in terms of characters and authors. At the same time, many writers are concerned about writing about cultures and experiences that aren't theirs. What are your thoughts on this issue?

Cynthia Letitch Smith (author of "Feral Pride"): I refuse to tell a teen that someone who, like them, is, say, Chinese American or Jewish or gay or living with OCD could not appear in my fictional worlds because I’m not a strong-enough writer to pull it off. That’s a fear-driven cop-out. At the same time, I’m not so overconfident that I’d plunge in before I’m ready. I respect that certain stories and insights will arise only through lived experience, and I’ll gladly step aside and signal boost those. It’s not an either-or debate.

Sabaa Tahir (author of "An Ember in the Ashes"): [...] One of the saddest things I have ever heard is that authors are too frightened to write diverse characters for fear of getting it “wrong.” Because when authors say that, they are telling every single kid who is underrepresented in books (and that’s a lot of kids) that their lives, experiences, and stories are not worth learning about and listening to. And that’s just shameful. Our readers deserve more effort and courage from us than that.


The whole interview is here: "Telling Better Stories: Writing Diverse YA Fantasy"


All of this makes me so happy to be a person thinking about books and writing at this particular moment in time! Hmmm, maybe I should indeed start thinking seriously about getting a library science degree. Specifically in children's literature, of course! :-)

Of Water Horses and What to Write Next

More thoughts about writing...

(Can you tell I only really get a chance to get online on the weekends these days, and have to post all my thoughts all at once then??)

Anyway:

Perhaps surprisingly – given that Harry Potter is one of my favorite things – in my original writing I've never felt particularly drawn to write either fantasy or YA. My writing tends to be quite serious and realistic, looking at questions of life and human connections, and character-focused almost to the exclusion of all else. (Er, much like my fic, yes. And yes, even in my Harry Potter fic I've often had to remind myself to add magic bits in, because I'm so focused on my character explorations, I almost forget to even nod to this whole fantasy setting that was the source of it all!)

When I made a stab at writing a novel a couple years ago, though, I quickly realized that going on about character development for 50,000 words is not actually enough. A novel needs a framework, be that "mystery" or "quest" or "romance" or whatever other type of plot, to form the scaffolding; then the character development can drape elegantly over and around that structure. Or at least that's how I've come to see it.

So I've put my energy into writing fic (yay!) and especially into trying out stories with more plot, stories based around a mystery or action or adventure, where the character stuff is woven in around that, rather than being the sole focus. It's been really fun! I'm learning a lot!

But every now and then I check back in with myself to see whether I have any ideas about what kind of story I might want to tell whenever I do circle back around to writing original stuff, and every time the answer seems to be...uh, nope, sorry, still no ideas.

Which brings us to:

I'm finally reading a book by Maggie Stiefvater. (I say "finally" because her name seems to come up constantly in YA circles, so I decided I really needed to pick a book of hers and get to it!) This one's called "The Scorpio Races" and I'm really digging the world-building. The premise involves "capaill uisce," or water horses, scary mythical beasts of Celtic legend, and the author both draws on the folklore about these creatures and also plunks them down in a quite mundane setting of cars and shops and tourists, and lets you figure out gradually how the particular magic of these creatures works, in this modern-day context.

And I love stuff like that! I've contemplated the idea of a Sherlock/Song of the Sea fusion (i.e., as selkies), and for Holmestice I wrote a fic where Sherlock was a dryad and Mrs Hudson was a griffin (and Lestrade was a very baffled, normal cop trying to figure out what the hell was going on around him) and it was so much fun! Also: I have loved writing the werewolf pack OCs for "Raise Your Lantern High," and researching Celtic/Pagan traditions for them has been one of my favorite things about that story.

So maybe there's something there for me, some potential to play in the fantasy genre by discovering and reimagining something out of this kind of folklore/mythology and turning it into something "original". (As much as any story in our collective storytelling tradition is ever completely new!) I mean, I know I would also still have to come up with an actual plot, and not just "hey, look, it's got this cool mythical creature in it." But it's an idea and a start, and the first thing that's pinged my "ooh, that might be fun to write about!" sense in a while. (Outside of fic, I mean. I have "ooh, I want to write that!" moments about fic constantly.)