CRAFT (sort of) with accompanying rant about characterization

I kind of melted down today at the Peeps writers' critique meeting. I think I snapped at a couple of people, actually.

I didn't MEAN to. It was just that . . . the first two readers/critiquers kept saying that Camille was inconsistent, that if she's a prostitute (and nowhere in the book did I say or imply that she IS, but more about that later, because they came away with that impression and I'll have to make sure that other readers don't) she wouldn't be naive about other things. They said similar things last time when they read the first chapter.

I thought I had that stuff covered. I pointed out that I already said twice that she ran away from home to escape her stepfather, that she has been gone since her sixteenth birthday three weeks ago, that she spent the past couple of weeks in the company of one traveling salesman who seemed to be just lonely (but was actually a sorcerer--and thereby hangs a tale), that she left because he wasn't going far enough away fast enough . . . that I never said she was a prostitute, but that it should be obvious that when someone hooks up with you, that person is going to expect something from you in return. She's a lost and confused little soul who is having to cope with the reality of life on the streets. Other readers haven't brought this up, although some have said they don't feel sympathetic towards her.

Perhaps the character is a bit like me. A person may feel that she has to be someone she's not, put on an act, take on a persona in order to survive a situation until she can get somewhere else. A young person may take on several roles, trying them on to see what she's comfortable with. This is a time of experimentation. If you're put into a bad situation, you might act differently (and I say this in the opening of the book, that her life had changed and that she blames her stepfather because he gave her no choice but to run away--she didn't want to go into the foster care system, which I explain as well.) You might not be just the most consistent little robot in the world. In fact, I know that *I* am not very consistent. (It's what makes me so charming.)

Some of what they're objecting to is the sex--that she doesn't see it as a hugely intimate act. Well, partly that's because she was abused. Partly that's because nowadays, the kids *don't*, in general, consider it an act of bonding with the other person *every* time. Sometimes it's just a hookup. In Camille's case, she has to do it for convenience, so she can get food and shelter for the night--she pretends to like the guy, she gets to stay in the hotel room and travel with him. She isn't mature enough to figure out that he might also have an ulterior motive, but there's plenty of time for readers to figure out that he has one when they get to the chapters in his point of view. She sees him as a lonely traveling businessman, when in actuality there's a much darker side to him that he has hidden from her. She's still too trusting and has the way that sixteen-year-olds tend to have of trusting people and not seeing beneath and being properly suspicious. However, you can't come out and say this all in so many words. You have to imply it from characters' actions. I've tried to hint at this stuff and raise story questions instead.

But anyway, the sex attitudes (from what I can tell) and attitudes toward taking things are making the critique group say that she's acting like a hardened street hooker, and I don't agree. Okay, so I was a virgin when I married (and the two critique partners who were saying all this said that they were, as well--they're oldsters like me), but most people aren't nowadays (and possibly weren't ever.) I see this character as having had relationships, perhaps even having slept with her boyfriend Jerry and possibly had some hanky-panky with other guys (she's 16 now, after all). She's not Truella Pureheart. But then neither is she a hardened street hooker. I don't believe that I portray her as such (talking about her teddy bear in her backpack, the dog tags of her late dad's that she keeps, actually believing that her cousin in California really IS an actress--on the basis of that postcard she got--and that she'll help Camille get into show business when she gets there, etc.) But that's what they kept coming back to--that if my character does X or Y, that she must be a hardened street hooker. And that therefore she can't have any of the beliefs or behaviors that the young impressionable girl trying on the new life has. I don't agree.

When you're sixteen (and this character just turned sixteen), you have a different way of thinking. This is the proverbial "wise child" who is in some ways wise beyond her years, but in other ways is still a child who wasn't finished growing up. She was studying for the SAT and being an "A" student when this stepfather turned her world inside-out. Suddenly that stuff didn't matter. She's still precocious and highly verbal, but it doesn't mean she's fully formed. She wasn't ready to be out on her own, but she figures it's better than being THERE. Just because she has slept with her boyfriend and maybe messed around with a couple of other guys on dates doesn't mean she wants to be molested and raped by her stepfather, and running away seemed preferable to the family uproar and going off to live in a foster home that could be even worse.

She's inconsistent in human, consistent ways. She found a coin purse on the bus and kept it, thinking she'd find the owner through the library card that was inside and take it back, yet when she's locked into the supermarket's office and accused of stealing, she rifles the desk thinking idly of finding some cash. To her, taking money from The Man (especially when she's being accused) is not a sin, while keeping some poor fellow bus-rider's coins would be. (Although all sin is equal in the eyes of God, it isn't necessarily seen as so by lesser mortals, especially younger ones.) One person in my group cited that as making her inconsistent, but I don't see that.

Camille also doesn't see any problem with bribing that crooked police officer with a (now, how can I phrase this delicately) bl*wjob--in order to get him to let her go (instead of taking her downtown and booking her, which would mean her mother would get called and she'd get sent home to that bad situation.) The guy has let her know that he's crooked, and she's just naive enough to think that he'll play fair with her. I mean, she's used to hitching rides with truckers now and has compartmentalized this part of her life--she knows that the rules for riding are "grass, gas, or ass," and so to her, this is a way out that's acceptable. She's a bit grossed out, but hey, this is not even considered sex by most kids today (and not even by some Presidents.) Sure, *I* feel differently, but that's the author. This is the character.

She's still naive enough, however, that when he reneges on the deal and says he's taking her in anyway, she cries and argues. This (again) is the way I feel a sixteen-year-old would act. When you're that age, you are a grown-up one minute and a child the next. You are not fully mature, even if you have had to adopt the surface sheen of a hardened traveler so you can survive. And yes, she HAS had to. But she's still a marshmallow inside and has to cope. It's life in the school of hard knocks.

Let's face it. When you wake up the first morning after you have run away and spent the night on the street, you're changed. Either you run back home crying and decide to deal with whatever it was (if you can), or you struggle to your feet and say, "This is me now. I have to do whatever it takes to survive." That's what she has done. It doesn't make her a prostitute because she has traveled/hitched with guys and ended up staying a couple of nights with them, because that was how she could stay in a hotel room instead of on the street. It was only a couple of guys, one in particular who'll be a major player in the story. She considers them "tricks," but she thinks she's a lot more sophisticated than she is and has been picking up street talking and thinking because of being immersed in it. A bit of research on runaways reveals that many of them fall prey to the predators who are out there, and if it takes some scheming and maneuvering to stay off the street, I think your typical sneaky sixteen-year-old girl would do it (and maybe not even realize that she's getting into a bad situation). She'll adopt whatever stance she thinks a runaway should, according to what she's seen on television. That's where her experience comes from--it's all vicarious, and she THINKS she knows what will happen because of that.

Characters can't be as contradictory and multifaceted as real people; we know that. However, give me a break. What they're pointing at as being traits of a "hardened street hooker" (after I wrote, in the first couple of paragraphs of the book, that she'd left home about three weeks ago after her stepfather had molested her and she saw that her mother was taking HIS side) are just aspects of being an immature kid who has gone out and is trying to figure life out and make it on her own. She has her own reasons for believing as she does. She's a woman AND she's a child. This is the way you are at that age.

That doesn't make this a YA novel, in my opinion. YA novels are not as deep. They don't explore as deeply or extensively as a "grown-up" novel. Many new and new-ish YA novels that I've read (because people I know have written them) seem like a good first draft on which to build a full-fledged novel. (Paul Zindel's novels, written in the 1970s, didn't have that hollow feeling so much, although they were fluff YA in many ways. This is a new trend, IMHO.) Camille's story is more of a contemporary fantasy starring people of many different ages.

However . . . I suppose the truth is that I'm just overreacting, that I can't take criticism, that I'm a prima donna. Perhaps you're thinking exactly that, and you might be right. Perhaps it's just an emotional thing where I feel more and more hopeless as I look at the impossibility of ever writing something that the market will accept. After being at this for twenty years and having mastered (mostly) the form and developed my voice, I'm ready to get something right. Maybe it was just the pile-up of criticisms of the character all in a row that cracked the vessel. Possibly the vessel is already cracked.

I'm also on that VLCD (very low-calorie diet), a medically supervised fast with one "meal" (1-1/2 cups of salad or raw vegetables with 7 oz of chicken or 5 oz of beef) per day, and that can put a person on edge. At least it can if that person has been coping with stress by relying on food for twenty-odd years now. There's nowhere for stress to go now but inside. (Though it is getting better. I'm feeling the benefits of being able to breathe all the way to the bottom of my ribcage. I am going to show Dr. Bell that tomorrow by singing a chorus of "Last Night (I Didn't Get To Sleep At All)" while on the breathing test machine. I had a lot of water and some fat stores just where I needed that air to be.)

I don't know. Anyway, I should probably have apologized for being defensive. And/or for snapping back. But I didn't think of it at the time.*

[*Regular readers of this saga already know I am a bad person. No need to explain further.]

In this group during a critique, the members will say something, then stop and look at you to make sure you understand--and will sometimes ask if you know what they mean. They like to hear an acknowledgement because they took the time to think up this objection and bring it to your attention, which is fine. But at some point, when I'm hearing things I don't and can't agree with, it's better for me to be under the stricture of the Warren Norwood-style critique circles--the one that says, "When your work is being evaluated, you keep your damn mouth shut, smile and nod now and then if you must, write evil thoughts in shorthand in the dust on the end table, but DO NOT DEFEND and DO NOT RESPOND with anything except a 'Thank you' at the end." Warren was of the opinion (which I generally share) that you need to let most comments rest and percolate for a few days before you can really evaluate them objectively. Most of the time, though, the group works well when we allow people to respond and question further during the critiques. But today it probably would've been better to have a rule that I don't talk at all.

And then my favorite person in the group (I am teasing here, although he does get extra points because [1] he invited me to join, [2] he plays music by ear and writes songs that I like, and [3] he has a cool collection of hats and shaggy-dog stories) did *his* critique and said he really hadn't been bothered by any of that. **But** then he committed the Unpardonable Sin of saying he thinks I should change some of my semicolons to those funny dots that end sentences. As founder of the FidoNet Semicolon Protection Society, I got rankled. I try not to use 'em TOO often, but only when the two thoughts or ideas need to be closely connected in the reader's mind. When I was in my twenties, I would have given an impassioned defense, talking about how the semicolon is the fulcrum and the two sentences of equal weight are related and such crap . . . I probably would have done that well into my thirties. Now that I am ancient and the earth has finally cooled*, I'm too tired to go into all that--it's not going to change anyone's mind.

[* But does seem to be warming up again. Whew.]

My target audience, after all, is not "Every Possible Reader." I just can't do it that way. My audience is my audience, and if it turns out it's the null set, then so be it.* So it goes.** That's the way the fortune cookie crumbles.***

[* Harry, "Pump Up the Volume"]
[** Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse-Five_]
[*** Grandma, upon hearing that the boy I had been flirting with for weeks in drama class had asked another girl to the dance]
****Don't spend all night surfing around that everything site if you click one of those links, OK? You have to go to work/school/the doctor/Paris in the morning.

PIANO/MUSIC: A Cute Analogy About Learning

On a piano players'/learners/teachers list, we had the following discussion.

"What about ear players? In my childhood, ear playing was frowned upon. You were never allowed to hear how a piece should sound before trying to play it at sight, as they felt that would ruin your sight-reading. You were not allowed to play around with by-ear stuff. And they would scornfully say, 'You learned that by rote,' if you did copycat monkey-see-monkey-do playing. So **IS** rote a four-letter word, something to be avoided at all costs? Do you believe that note-reading is the first and foremost thing (and somewhat the ONLY thing) that you should teach?"

Kevin Coan, a musician and piano teacher, came up with this response (essentially--any weird remarks were inserted by Shalanna, a Bad Person [TM]):

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How did you learn to speak, read, and write? If you learned to speak, read, and write English the way "traditional" piano teachers teach piano, here is how it happened.

1. No one was ever allowed to speak to you. Speaking to you might interfere with you learning to read English.

2. Your first contact with English came through books and flash cards. On the very first day of "English lessons," your parent taught you the first letter of the alphabet and its sound. Each week, you learned a new letter of the alphabet and its sound.

3. You were required to form your first sentence by reading it out of your English primer. You had to laboriously sound out your sentence one letter at a time.

4. You were required to practice your first reading sentence five times every day. You had to say all of the letters out loud first. After you got the letters down pat, you were allowed to say the whole sentence up to speed. If your tongue or lips were considered to be in the wrong position, someone rapped them with a ruler, and you had to start again in the "proper position."

5. Once you "passed" your first sentence, you got a new lesson with a new sentence to sound out. Pretty much no one ever cared if you ever said the first one again or not.

6. You were never allowed to change the words in any sentence. You had to always speak your sentences word-for-word the way they were written. And on pitch!

7. Maybe English became your native language! Or perhaps you don't even try to talk now.

Now let me share with you how I learned the English language:

1. I spent considerable time listening to people speak to me, and to each other. And to the radio and TV, where people were talking.

2. I learned to speak my first sentences by rote: I listened to what someone else said, and I repeated it back. "Da-da!" "Goo-goo!"

3. I learned, rather quickly, that I could mix the words up and substitute other words. Within a couple of short years, I was speaking dozens of sentences and English had become my native language. This was ALL BY ROTE.

4. When I went to school, I learned phonics. Phonics is an organized system for learning the letters and sounds. I didn't memorize words: I learned a system.

5. As I learned phonics, the teacher always related the words I "read" back to the words I had become accustomed to speaking.

6. As quickly as possible, the teacher made me read with expression. It was the same expression I had been doing by ROTE from having listened to thousands of people talk.

7. English became my native written AND spoken language.
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I thought this was cute and VERY telling!