Mr Ultimate Mapmaker!

One of my fellow Hamline students, Michael Petry, is doing his critical thesis on maps in novels this semester, but what intrigued me was the huge map Mike has created on his garage floor! So of course I had to ask him more about that, and maps, and writing and stuff...

Where did your interest in maps come from? Is it only maps in books (like fantasy novels) or all kinds of maps?

My undergraduate degree is in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. The founder of Landscape Architecture was Frederick Law Olmsted. He designed New York City’s Central Park and many other wonderful parks and cities as well. My interest in maps grew from there although if I think about it I’ve always been fascinated with knowing where I stand. Maps in novels to me are a wonderful bonus. Some books would probably be just fine without them but with them we know where the story is taking place and how that character moves through his environment. I really like all kinds of maps.

I’ve spent seven years as a civil engineer. I’ve drawn maps of new roads, sewer systems, water systems and storm drainage systems. The coolest part of doing that type of work is that these maps or plans have been built and people use and live in them today.

 Why do you think writers and readers find maps so interesting?
 

Maps ground us, they give some sense to what lies ahead. Maps give both the writer and reader a sense of the setting. Are we near a river or a seaside, in a mountain valley or the Dead Marshes found in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings? Personally I love to know the path that a character has made through a map and if there is a map with a novel and the story mentions places that are not on the map it can be a bit frustrating.

 Do you think maps are always necessary in fantasy novels? What other fiction books have maps?
 

I don’t think the maps are a necessity in fantasy novels. Like Ron Koertge mentioned this summer at Hamline, they can aid in the writing process and help move the plot of the story forward. I’m not one hundred percent sure but the more I have thought about this the more it seems to make sense. If you have a character in your story that moves through a space that he/she interacts with, more than just passing through, then a map is needed to get the writer to be consistent. This deals with a sense of scale as well too.

 I just finished reading Patrick Rothfuss’s King Killer Chronicles where Kvothe spends a great deal of time at the University. Patrick drew up the University. These smaller scale places like a University or Hogwarts tend to be three dimensional. Often the main character explores and gets to know these spaces much more than any flat character would ever dream of. For example, Kvothe goes to classes just like the rest of his schoolmates but he spends time on the roof tops of the University buildings and spends time below in the sewer ways and steam vents and finds running water and tunnels his way into places that are off limits to him. Harry Potter does the same thing at Hogwarts. These places and the maps that are either quickly sketched up or meticulously drawn out become part of the stories’ characters.

What benefits are there for a writer to create a map, even if it doesn't go into the final book?
 

First and most importantly they are fun but maps will map the writing process out. If you know that Christopher Paolini’s Eragon and his dragon Saphira are traveling with some dwarves and an elf on the eastern edge of the map from the Beor Mountains down the Az Ragni River eventually to end up in the elf city of Ellesmera in the Du Weldenvarden forest you have much of the plot laid out for you not to mention all the cool setting that they get to travel through. All kinds of cool adventure can happen but you know that your character will start at point A and end up at point B, aiding in moving your plot forward.

What inspired you to create the map on your garage floor? Can you tell me about it - where, when, what, how?

My Critical thesis is what started it really. I’ve wanted to create a place away from my wife and three daughters that I can call my own, to write and be inspired by my surroundings. The cool thing about what I drew up on my garage floor is that it isn’t any place just yet. I have a coast line, some mountain ranges, some swampy areas, and dry arid climates too. I think that the when is the question I can answer right now, I’m jumping head first into my critical thesis and surrounding myself with maps.

Anything else you want to add?

 Oh my name implies my interest too, Michael Adam Petry (MAP) kind of cool huh.

Thanks, Michael! I think your garage floor is amazing!

Try a mini verse novel!

Recently, I was asked to teach a poetry workshop on longer works, specifically sequences and verse novels. It gave me a chance to pull out all the terrific books, collections and verse novels I’d read over the past few years, in order to share them with the group. Everything from Dorothy Hewett’s “Upside Down Sonnets” to picture books such as Janet Wong’s Night Garden and my own Now I Am Bigger to verse novels by Helen Frost, Karen Hesse, Sharon Creech and Allan Wolf.

I like to think of a poetry sequence as a mini verse novel, although not all sequences work this way. But where a sequence tells a story, I think it can. It means you can write ten or twelve poems (or more) that have a narrative behind them, and start to consider the other elements that a verse novel has.

These include voice and character, for a start, but also a sense of progression. Where are you taking the reader? Are you simply showing them different aspects of the same thing? A short example of this is Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, where each small poem is numbered. I would call this a “poem in parts” – you could stretch it to a sequence. I’ve seen poets who write, for example, a series of poems about their father or mother, or about a childhood or life event. Again, those poems fit together because they are about one thing, but they still would not be a mini verse novel to me.

A mini verse novel may well be the short story equivalent to the novel (of the novel?). It means you don’t have to write a book-length work, but you can still explore a narrative through poetry. Think of it as a short story in poems.

So these are the elements I think are important in a mini verse novel:

• ·        A balance – too much poetry or not enough narrative and it doesn’t work – you end up with chopped-up prose, or poems with no connections.
• ·        Poetic elements of figurative language and keen attention to line breaks and stanzas
• ·       It needs to be a story that will tell better in poetry, and it does need to have the elements of a story in terms of beginning, middle and end
• ·       A story that needs a lot of explanation or setting or dialogue etc generally won’t work
• ·       Rhyming the whole thing may kill you if you are not proficient at rhyme and form (look at Helen Frost’s work if you want to see it done really well)
• ·         Read, read, read what other verse novelists are doing – and learn to read critically – don’t accept that everything that says it is a verse novel actually is
• ·         Outlining will help but if you need to work by instinct, do – just be prepared to throw some poems out later
• ·         And be ruthless in revision
• ·         Recognise that much of the story will lie in the white space and you will need to learn how to use the white space as well as the language.

·         When it feels like you have enough poems, stop. Give it some time, then go back and ask yourself what is the story you want to tell, and which two poems will start and end it. Those are your lighthouses.

Australian writers - the rock and the hard place

Despite gloomy forecasts and sliding graphs recently, e-book sales are not nosediving. But here in Australia, I think the global effects of e-books are only just starting to sink in, especially with writers. This is not a whine or a rant, by the way, this post is a business discussion. What is the rock? Australian publishers who, when you sign a contract with them, demand ALL rights, which means world rights and e-rights. You need to have a lot of clout to get this amended or changed.

What is the hard place? Very few Australian books are sold to overseas publishers. We hear a lot about books like The Rosie Project, Burial Rites and Diary of a Wombat (not to mention The Book Thief and Jellicoe Road) and how many overseas territories they have sold to, especially the USA. But they are the exception, not the rule.

For most Australian writers, especially children’s writers, it’s  unlikely the overseas rights on their books will be sold, especially if the book is deemed “too Australian”. That means the market is Australia (and sometimes NZ). It’s a small market, and getting smaller.  If someone from the USA wants to buy an Australian book via an online bookseller here, they will very likely pay $25-30 for a small paperback, because of the horrendous postage charge.

Aha, you say, but now we have e-books. We sure do. But even if your publisher releases your book as an e-book, it’s very likely they will limit availability to Australia. If they do decide to sell it “world wide”, how will anyone know about it unless YOU tell them? (To put this another way, how do readers in other countries hear about Australian books without a marketing campaign of some kind in their country?)

If you’re Tim Winton or someone who has an international reputation already, it’s not an issue. But Winton’s books already sell overseas as print books, so a globally available e-book is obviously going to sell.

Aha, you say, what if you sell your book to a US publisher first? You get an agent over there, they sell your book, and Bob’s your auntie. You have two options: you can hold back Australian/NZ rights and sell them separately, or you can let the US publisher keep them and either sell your book to an Australian publisher or import it here. Here’s the other rock and hard place – if you’ve already sold US rights (and e-rights), it’s highly unlikely an Australian publisher is going to want your book, unless it becomes a best seller over there. The prospective rights that might earn them good money are already gone.

If the US publisher is allowed to import your books here after 90 days (if they decide it’s worth it) because nobody here wants to publish it, you’re going to be responsible for most of the marketing. That means a heck of a lot more than some FB and Twitter posts! Same goes for if the US publisher releases your book as an e-book. The big word in publishing and marketing now is “discoverability”. Who else is going to get your book noticed except you? A US or UK publisher is already dealing with that in their own markets. 

And there are a number of awards here that require the book to be published in Australia, not published elsewhere and imported.

Why am I writing about this? Because it’s an issue that’s come up for me several times over the past few years, and e-books have actually made it more complicated, not less. I’ve experienced these difficulties in various ways and permutations, and so far, there is no easy answer. I completely understand publishers’ need to stay solvent and do good business, but …

There are lots of aspects to this issue. Print books are not going away, but e-books don’t look like they are going to be the income earner that a lot of writers were hoping for. It’s not even a territorial copyright issue, really. I’d be interested to hear from other Australian writers with similar experiences of the rock and the hard place.

Painstaking vs Prolific - how fast do you write?

Every time I do a school visit, I inevitably get asked, "How long does it take you to write a book?" It's a fair question, but the answer is, "How long is a piece of string?" It's different for every book, and it can also depend on whether someone is waiting for it (i.e. a commissioned work). People often say, "Gee, you're so prolific", which can feel like a criticism, but I loved to hear about Monet and how he would paint all day and complete 8 or 9 works in that time.

It's all practice. Some practice takes longer. Some things take longer to learn. Some books take longer to "get right". Plus, I write chapter books as well as novels, so a chapter book might only be 2000 words. Ray Bradbury used to write a short story a week - some of his writing advice includes 'Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.'

It's the same with picture books and chapter books. Write a picture book or a chapter book every week for a year and you're sure to come up with a few gems! In order to do that, you'll need a list of ideas. Bradbury is also famous for writing a huge list of words and then writing a story about each one. (Read Zen in the Art of Writing where he describes this.)

What about novels? John Creasey, who wrote 564 books, said, 'How many words a day do I write? Between six and seven thousand. And how many hours does that take? Three on a good day, as high as thirteen on a bad one.' Wow. Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories about his detective character, Maigret. Simenon also wrote around 300 other novels and novellas, plus pulp fiction (under more than two dozen pseudonyms) and nonfiction. He was apparently able to write a novel in just a few days, but The Guardian has a quote from him that made me wonder what drove him: "Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness." Hmmm.

Right now, I'm back writing my two pages (or 30 minutes) minimum per day. It works. On bad days, I make sure I do the minimum; on good days I write more. Earlier this year, because I was writing a novel for my fourth semester at Hamline's MFAC program, this routine led to me finishing a 66,000 word YA novel. I didn't plot this one out beforehand so it was like writing in the dark - nervewracking. There were many days when I sat with no idea what would come next. But the 30 minutes minimum kept me at it.

Revision is different. I can spend two hours on the same pages it took me 30 minutes to write! But I also think other aspects tie into whether you are prolific or painstaking. (Painstaking to me is four years on one book.) One is simply typing speed. In high school I took typing as a subject instead of biology. I still have no desire to cut up frogs, but I type fast. Another is to do with plotting. I think if you know where you are going you will write faster and write more (feel free to disagree).

Another is to do with style and language. I suspect that literary writers take a lot longer to write - they are painstaking about language and sentences. Or maybe they need more thinking time? I love to be swept along by my characters and the story, but then my second and third and further drafts have to slow down and focus more on filling in the details.

And in answer to the school visit question? The Littlest Pirate in a Pickle (1600 words) took me a week, mainly because I woke up with the whole story in my head. That was a gift. Whereas Pirate X took me ten years. It started out as a 120,000 word first draft, by Draft 5 it was down to 85,000 words, and when it was finally published, it was 62,000 words. It was only my passion for the story that kept me at it - around the fourth year, a vicious critique almost killed it for me.

So whether you're prolific or painstaking, the only thing that will get you to The End is perseverance. The pleasure in being prolific is that you get there faster!

Me and the MFAC - graduation!

Some of you who read this blog know I have spent the past two years studying a Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota. Well, this time is about to end. Tomorrow I graduate (no one has raced up to tell me my final thesis was rejected, so I guess it’s true!) It’s both a wonderful celebration and a sad time. A celebration of all the work I have done and the learning, the many, many lectures and workshops, and the massive amounts of writing, all of which have taught me something new.

It’s also sad because I am leaving behind a fabulous community of writers. I hope to see them again, but I live 20 hours flying time away – not counting stopovers – and that is going to make it difficult. Thank goodness for Facebook where my classmates and I have created our own special community, a place for support, encouragement and whining. There is always someone to hear you and say, “Me, too. Keep going.”

I have been asked many times by writers and others in Australia – why go all the way to Minneapolis to do a Masters? Quite simply, it’s because there is nothing like this in Australia. There is no specialisation in children’s and YA writing, there is no amazing faculty of experienced writers/teachers who give their students so much, there is no low residency format that allows you to both work at home, around your job and real life, and come together every six months for an intensive 11 days. We go home after each residency exhausted and exhilarated. 

During each residency the students who have just finished their critical thesis (3^rd semester) present a lecture on their topic. This time I’ve heard about silence in fiction, keeping 4^th and 5^th grade boys reading, ambiguous endings in YA fiction, hopeful endings and why we need them, and what a great beginning requires, among others. I’ve also heard my classmates read from their creative thesis work, which has been astounding in its quality and range. Everything from picture books to young adult novels, as you would expect, but I expect many of the works I’ve heard to be published. They really are that good!

All of us know (and gratefully acknowledge in our final thank-you speeches) that our advisors have helped us take our writing to soaring new heights. Having someone who really cares about your work, your processes, your struggles and your breakthroughs, is invaluable. It’s more than critiquing. It’s exploring, questioning, pushing, suggesting, demanding and, most of all, supporting.

In tangible terms, I graduate with two novels, a critical thesis on verse novels, part of a verse novel and nine picture books. In less tangible, but more important, terms, I leave with a renewed energy and commitment to my writing, a greater depth of knowledge, a much deeper understanding of the craft of writing, and a stronger, profounder approach to effective revision.

I thank Mary Rockcastle (who was the main reason I chose Hamline) and all the terrific staff, and my advisors: Marsha Qualey, Marsha Chall, Ron Koertge and Anne Ursu. Go out and buy their books and then you will want to go to Hamline, too. And I thank my classmates, the MadFACers – let’s all keep writing together. Then soon I’ll be able to go and buy your published books!