LTUE

For those who are unaware, I’m going to be a guest at BYU’s Life, The Universe and Everything symposium this week. I won’t be a guest of honor, though, probably because I have a beard.

This will be my first time hanging around the campus since I graduated. I look forward to it. I’m particularly excited to sneak out of the con and go to the Carl Bloch exhibit.

Anyway, my schedule for the week is this:

Thursday

4:00pm—Dystopias/Utopias

(Panel with: Robison Wells, James Dashner, Jessia Day George (M), Lesli Muir Lytle)

I’m quite excited for this one, because I really love these genres and like to talk about them and because James and Jessica are really awesome. (I’m sure Lesli is awesome too, but I don’t know her.)

5:00pm—The Art of Podcasting

(Panel with Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and Robison Wells)

I find this one to be all kinds of hilarious, since my podcast is all of three episodes old. Still, I’m a rabid podcast fan, so assuming we’re talking about podcasts rather than how-to podcast, then I’ll be fine. And if it’s how-to, then I’ll defer to the brains.

Friday

5:00pm—What You Can And Can’t Do In A YA Novel

(Panel with Mette Ivie Harrison, Elana Johnson, Bree DeSpain, Robison Wells, J. Scott Savage)

This one promises to be interesting, because the obvious answer (having read lots of YA) is: you can do anything in a YA novel, and people have. The stickier question is: what should you do in a YA novel.

Saturday

1:00pm-3:00pm—Writing Excuses podcast

With Brandon Sanderson away at another convention, I’m going to be filling in as the third wheel as they record several episodes of the show. We’re also going to be playing several games from The Appendix podcast. It’s a crossover episode!

Project Six Weeks

I haven’t been updating every day, but things are moving forward well. Last week I had an epiphany of why the beginning of the book was so terrible, so I’ve actually gone back and rewritten the first four chapters from scratch, and I’m quite pleased with the change. Today I’ve already gotten 4000 words!

Not too long ago I blogged about how authors can waste a lot of time speculating about the market. When we sit down to write a book we’re making such a big investment of our time that we want to make sure, from the very beginning, that the concept is as bulletproof as possible. There are few things so disheartening as to work on a story for months only to discover that someone else is writing something with a similar premise–and theirs was finished first! Now yours will never sell, or worse: you’ll look like a plagiarist!

We authors tend to be neurotic anyway, and things like this only make our mental problems worse.

I recently read two novels with a very similar concept. The first was Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer.  The story follows a teenage girl as the world around her is falling apart; a massive asteroid hits the moon, knocking it closer to earth. The change in the gravitational pull causes all sorts of problems: tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes. Civilization begins to crumble, and the main character and her family hole up in their house to ride out the devastation and try to survive.

The other book was In a Perfect World, by Laura Kasischke. This one was adult fiction, not YA, but the premise was similar: the main character (a flight attendant) has to hole up in her house as civilization collapses around her. The catastrophe this time was a worldwide epidemic–the Phoenix Flu–rather than earthquakes and volcanoes, but the results are the same: massive depopulation, disintegration of government and infrastructure, and the resulting survival scenario.

Both books have a similar setting: they both take place almost entirely in their homes, and we very seldom see the outside world or hear the news (since the power is out and the radios run out of batteries quickly). So they’re both very insular and claustrophobic, dealing with day-to-day survival rather than the typical flashy Hollywood disaster scenarios.

But here’s the cool part: the books are completely different. The writing styles are wildly unique. In Life as We Knew it, the book is written in first person as a diary, in simple teenspeak. In A Perfect World is third person and beautiful and literary (the author is a poet). The former is straightforward and stark, while the latter is non-linear and intricate.  The conflicts are different, one being all about character issues while the other being mostly plot.  And both books are good.

Several months ago, when I finished reading James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, I emailed him to assure him that I hadn’t plagiarized him in my upcoming novel, Variant. On the face of it, the premise of mine is very similar to his: both are Lord-of-the-Flies situations where the characters are captured but don’t know why (though they know they’re being observed).  Sure, reading that synopsis makes the two books sound extremely similar. However, the stories, characters, setting, writing styles and themes are completely different.  As James pointed out in his reply: “Neither one of us came up with the premise; we were just smart enough to create really awesome versions of it.”

There’s a great line in the musical Sunday In The Park With George (about the painter George Seurat). George is discouraged about his accomplishments as an artist:

-Dot-
Are you working on something new?

-George-
No.

-Dot-
That is not like you, George.

-George-
I’ve nothing to say.

-Dot-
You have many things.

-George-
Well, nothing that’s not been said.

-Dot-
Said by you, though, George?

I think that a lot of us writers can get so discouraged or worried about whether we’re truly original and new that we limit our opportunities to create.   In the two books I mentioned above, the premises are basically the same, but the authors each created a unique, enjoyable book.

Dot’s advice later in her song applies just as well to writers as it does to painters:

-Dot-
Stop worrying if your vision is new.
Let others make that decision–
They usually do.
You keep moving on.

US Cover

The Maze Runner, by James Dashner

I’m not really expecting this blog to be dedicated to book reviews, but lately that seems to be what’s on my mind.

I recently read James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, a book which I should have read a long time ago.  When stripped to it’s most basic premise, The Maze Runner is similar to Variant: a teenage boy enters a Lord-of-the-Flies society, he doesn’t know who his captors are, but he thinks he’s being observed/experimented upon.  However, the story, setting and characters are all completely different.  In The Maze Runner, the protagonist, Thomas, has no memory of his past and finds himself being deposited in the center of a maze. There are dozens of other boys his age there, and they’ve created a little society for themselves; some grow food, some clean, some build, and some spend every day running out into the maze, looking for a way out.

I’ve known James for years, and read most of his books. If there’s one thing James is great at, it’s coming up with amazingly inventive ideas.  His stories are packed with bizarre and ingenius details.  And there’s never any dearth of action.  (I was going to say that there wasn’t a dearth of violence, either, but I also just read The Forest of Hands and Teeth and now The Maze Runner’s violence looks like “Tom and Jerry” by comparison.)

In past books, Dashner’s occassionally fallen into the trap of having really cool ideas and action but ignoring the characters. I was happy to see that wasn’t the case with The Maze Runner. While the main character, Thomas, is a fairly standard male hero, without a huge arc, I found the side characters to be lots of fun. Two, in particular, really seemed to jump off the page: Chuck, who had been the newbie to the maze before Thomas showed up, and Teresa, a girl–the only girl–who comes the day after. The dialogue with Teresa was especially well done; half the time she’s speaking telepathically (Belated Spoiler Warning!) so Dashner has to show her personality entire with dialogue (since Thomas can’t see her).

UK Cover

If there’s a flaw to the book (and there is) it’s that a lot of information is withheld for no good reason. (Well, the reason is to keep the reader reading, but there’s no realistic story reason.) For example, when Thomas first shows up, no one even explains to him where he is, or what the maze is, or what’s going on. They tell him to sleep and find out the next day–but there’s no reason not to tell him. And this kind of thing happens a lot over the course of the book.  It got irritating.

But still, the book was a lot of fun, and definitely worth reading.