Category Archives: canon

March 02, 2012   Michael   canon, guest post, Michael, middle grade, questions, submissions, writing  
32

Everything you ever wanted to know about middle grade…and were willing to ask

As promised, editor Molly O’Neill and I are going to have a dialogue about middle grade. After a lot of thought, we decided to have a conversation via email that we’d transcribe (minus our distracting tangents). Your questions as we go will help shape the discussion, just as your questions are getting us started, so let us know what you think!

MB: It seems only natural to start with this question (plus, you told me to): What is middle grade? It seems a much simpler question at first glance. If we’re looking at bookstore sections, it’s the 9 – 12 part of B&N. These aren’t chapter books or early readers, which are usually quite short, often in series, usually contain education content, and are aimed at a slightly younger audience, 6 – 8 year olds. But they’re also not teen novels, which are usually categorized as 12 and up (though can be 14 and up when there’s more “content”). YA novels often deal with more “controversial” subject matter, and often involve romantic story lines. But that brings us back to the question, what is middle grade? We can define it by age group, but I’d argue that classifying by content is more difficult.

MO: As you know, I have a marketing background, which means that whether or not I intend it, one of the first things my brain starts thinking about for a book is its readership: who is a book FOR? What kind of reader is it going to reach, and how? Maybe instead of asking “What is middle grade?” it’s easier to think about “Who is the middle grade reader, and what is he/she looking for in a book?”

I think that a middle grade reader is often (and note, I’m speaking BROADLY, here) reading for one of two reasons: to understand, or to escape. Middle grade readers who read to understand look for stories that help them piece together the truths that seem to be opening up all around them, about the world and their place in it, and the connections between themselves and their family, their community, their friends, etc. Or they’re reading to understand about a different time/ place and what it was/would be like to be a kid then. Or they’re reading to just understand how stuff works, period—from the everyday mundane stuff to big concepts like justice and honesty and friendship and happiness and love.

The middle grade reader who reads to escape is the kid who is commonly BORED—like middle-of-summer-vacation-bored!—with his/her ordinary life, yet has no means for alleviating that boredom, or even escaping his/her house or classroom. Or maybe he/she is craving excitement or adventure or entertainment or a sense of power and autonomy that family and school simply don’t offer. So that reader dives into an epic story, or something quirky or witty or fantastical or humorous, in order to escape and live in someone else’s world for a while.

The trick is, most middle grade readers are BOTH of those readers at various points, one who wants to understand AND to escape (I certainly was, anyway). So there’s not just one kind of story that appeals to them, which means that middle grade books can be ABOUT anything. So maybe the line between middle grade and YA maybe has more to do with perspective than content?

MB: As publishing professionals, we’re always asking ourselves the question Molly posed above (paraphrasing): Who is the reader for this book? On the one hand, I sometimes wish writers wouldn’t ask themselves that question, at least not at the outset. Too many times, I get a submission and it’s clear that the writer is writing to a specific market or reader. A symptom of this problem that I see very often in middle grade submissions is “writing down” to the reader. This is can take the form of trying-too-hard dialogue (“Zoinks, bud! We need to skedaddle out of here before our ‘rents come biz-ack.”), narrator-as-character (think Lemony Snicket done badly), or message-driven novels (books written only to teach a lesson). On the other hand, it’s important to think about your reader, especially during revision. I always encourage my clients to be as creative and rule-breaking as they want when conceiving of ideas or writing initial drafts, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t then rein things in based on market expectations. For instance, one of the mistakes I see all too often is a mismatch between the age of the protagonist and the intended reader. A 12 year old doesn’t want to read about a protagonist who’s 8 or 80–they want to read about someone in the same general age group.

How to figure out what the audience wants? Do what I always recommend: read. Go to the bookstore and buy some of the recently-published* middle grade. This will give you a good idea of what the audience is looking for, and just how broad the category is.

*Please, please, please: don’t reference books published decades ago as comparisons for your books. What worked years ago probably doesn’t work now–trends and tastes change. “But The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe still sells!” you say. Classic books sell because they are classics, and I would argue that many of them would not find an audience today.

MO: Oh, I heartily second the need to read recently-published books, even if you’re a great appreciator of the classics! Unless you have a time-travel machine to go back to a different era in publishing to sell your book, it’s today’s market and audience a new book you’re trying to sell it to. Someone asked in the comments about whether there’s a middle grade canon and I think there’s a canon in every genre of literature, even if its an informal one—that’s why it’s so important to read widely, to have a sense of where your book fits and be able to articulate the things that both make it a natural fit within the genre AND a stand-out addition to the genre.

Speaking of problems you often see, I think one of the most common ones I run across in middle grade is “low stakes.” I think this can happen as a result of writers wanting to make a story feel familiar, but when I was a kid, other people’s lives always felt more interesting than my own, so why would I want to read about everyday, average things like homework and piano lessons and third-period math class all over again? I guess I’m trying to say that there can be a fine line between stories that feel familiar and those that feel, well, dull. This is a big reason I often encourage my authors to push past their initial ideas and explore the unknown creative wilds beyond the very first idea/solution/problem/mystery/story point/etc that they think of – because often the really fresh ideas live deep in writer’s minds, not at the very forefront. Like you said, Michael, you can always rein an idea in later, but too much of the middle grade that crosses my desk in submission feels like it never got a chance to be as creative as it maybe could have been.

Of course, sometimes it’s not always the idea that is the magical part of the story—an incredible voice or character can make even the most average story-moments feel vivid and memorable. But that’s just it—memorable is important. I think about middle grade being the time when a lot of readers discover “that book”—the one that turns them into a lifelong reader, or explodes their world open with new ideas, or shares exactly the right truth at exactly the right moment in a way they’ll never forget. You know, any time I tell people at a social event like a wedding or a party what I do for a living, there’s an odd compulsion—people simply HAVE to tell me what their favorite book was as a kid. And as an editor, those are the kind of books I want to publish—the ones that a reader of today will recall decades from now as being “that book.”

MB: I think it’s great that you bring up the issue of stakes, which can be an issue in any sort of novel. What’s on the line for the protagonist? What makes this story important enough to tell? To be clear, that doesn’t mean that you can’t be writing wonderful, contemporary, realistic middle grade. One question we got (perhaps from a client of mine) was, is there room for a “quiet” middle grade novel? I’d argue that the best books, even when they’re not deal with the end of the world or magic, aren’t really “quiet.” They may be a smaller story, with very real, relatable stakes. But if the story is constructed well, and the voice is strong, the writer can make us care very much what happens in these more everyday struggles. While not contemporary, The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt comes to mind.

As an agent, I too have spent my my career looking for those kinds of books. Books that have a lasting impact on readers, that stick with them long after they’ve turned the final page. It’s why I keep hunting for great middle grade.

MO: And as a matter of fact, I think it’s why we’re doing this blog conversation. And it’s getting good! But now we have to get back to work. Check back late next week for a second installment, on Molly’s blog.

September 07, 2011   Miriam   authors, canon, college, culture, fun, great books, Miriam, opinion, reading  
4

Syllabi

Yesterday, as I headed north on Broadway toward the 125th street entrance to the West Side Highway in a downpour not seen since, well, last week when gregarious Irene was paying a visit to the entire East Coast, I found myself stopped at a light in front of the main gates of Columbia University, my alma mater.  The street was teeming with rain and fresh faced freshmen looking vaguely shellshocked.  Watching them hurry to cross the street before the light changed and the homicidal cabbie in the next lane hit the gas, their overstuffed backpacks and grim expressions sent me into a reverie about my long ago school days.

One of the reasons I chose Columbia was its mandatory humanities courses—philosophy, literature, music, and art survey courses composed of the “canon” of great works.  As those of you who read this blog regularly know, most of us here at DGLM love a reading list and what better reason to go into thousands of dollars worth of debt than to emerge with a reading list full of masterpieces chosen by…old white guys, reflecting the ideology and intellectual tradition of…old white guys.  Wait!  Even with the occasional nod to a woman or person of color the canon really was rather limited and limiting in its choice of authors. All these years later, it still is.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved many if not most of those canonical choices, but I wonder what I would have changed in that syllabus for my lit hum class.  Instead of the Iliad, perhaps One Thousand and One Nights?  Borges instead of Dreiser?  Zora Neale Hurston instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald?  How about genre literature?  I know I would’ve traded a great mystery novel for the millions of pages on whaling by the esteemed Mr. Melville in a heartbeat.

Obviously, there’s no right list of classics, but if the idea is to shape young minds that will then go out and shape the world, what would your reading list include?

June 24, 2011   Lauren   canon, fun, Lauren, lists, reading  
12

List time!

As you know well if you’ve read this blog around year’s end, we’re awfully fond of lists around here.  And judging by the proliferation of lists on the internet, they must appeal to a vast number of others as well (unless the internet is written purely for the sake of us at DGLM, in which case, thanks!).  So I was delighted to come across this Guardian list of greatest nonfiction books.  Unlike with lists of novels, where I usually feel pretty confident that I’ll come out OK if I go through to see how many I’ve already read, this one’s pretty daunting.  I’ve partially read Said’s Orientalism for a class, have always pretended to myself that Decline and Fall is coming up real soon on my list (plus Sally Draper read parts of it that time), and I’m pretty certain I once got assigned Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and claimed to have read it.  I minored in philosophy in college, so I’ve read parts of some of each of those texts, plus all of The Symposium.  Likewise, I’ve dabbled in a number of the politics books for classes.  Like most people, I imagine, I’ve read Anne Frank’s diary, and like most English majors, I hope, I know all about Virginia Woolf’s very own room.  I think I may have read Ways of Seeing for a class as well. But of everything on this list, all 100 titles, I’ve read only two in full, purely because I wanted to: Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Philip Gourevitch’s riveting and heartbreaking We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families.

Reading through the rest of the list, I can flag any number of things I feel I should read (A Brief History of Time, The Communist Manifesto, The Medium is the Massage, The Prince, The Periodic Table) and a few I think I even genuinely want to (In Cold Blood, Slouching Towards Bethlehem).  For the most part, though, it looks to me like a lengthy and, while perhaps edifying, boring homework assignment.  So help me out here, readers:  which of these have you read, and of those, which would you really recommend?  I actually love all kinds of thoughtful and educational nonfiction, and feel a silly amount of pressure to be “well read,” but at this point in my life and with the near infinite number of book options and finite number of hours, I’d prefer not to read anything else merely because it proved to be important.  I think I have enough of an education to have a good sense of why some books matter in the grand scheme of things and why they find themselves in the canon, but since no one’s asking me to write essays about them anymore, I just don’t have it in me to read them solely for that reason.  For a moment, let’s categorize greatest simply as most enjoyable or entertaining or moving.  By that rubric, I’d definitely keep Gourevitch on, but I’m not sure I could say the same for Orientalism, which is a bit of a slog. What do you think still belongs on this list?  What would you add?  What would you definitely remove?

June 21, 2011   Stephanie   canon, children's books, favorites, middle grade, opinion, reading, Stephanie  
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The lasting effect of literature

With each passing year comes a certain degree of increased life experience and maturity—we all gradually become a little less impressionable, a little more jaded.  I think that, in many ways, the same can be said for the reading experience.  When read by a grade school or high school student, the influence that a novel’s themes or imagery can have are understandably deeper and farther-reaching than when absorbed by an older, more well-read adult.  Unfortunate? Maybe. I can remember a few certain novels that I first read years ago that, upon rereading, felt somewhat less emotionally impactful than I remember.

Despite this, what I felt always remained, thankfully, was the same sense of enchantment that certain stories evoked, regardless of age.  Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, and yes, even the Harry Potter books still manage to provide for me the same thrill that they did years ago. And this article from the Wall Street Journal poses the same concept from a slightly different viewpoint.

Do you agree/disagree? Are there certain books from your youth that still manage to draw you in and give you the same sense of admiration that they did as a child?

May 20, 2011   Lauren   canon, characterization, fun, gender, Lauren, writing  
5

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman who Looks an Awful Lot Like James Joyce

It was a frequent source of frustration to me that when it was time to read aloud in English classes, teachers tended to want to dole out the male parts to the boys and the female parts to the girls.  In freshman English class, I had a bit of a tiff with my teacher, who thought I ought to read Juliet, but I frankly wasn’t interested.  Mercutio’s the only one who comes off well in that whole ridiculous affair, as far as I’m concerned, and Juliet is far too pathetic for me to want to give her voice.  He told me that if I could make a compelling case, I could read the male part.  I cited that quite useful bit of information that since all the parts were played by men in the beginning, it was no less authentic with regard to the characters’ genders than the world premiere.  He caved, and I didn’t have to do the silly swoony balcony scene.  Ever since, despite no interest at all in acting or performing of any kind, I’ve been on the lookout for good female characters, and I find I’m often left wanting.  If I were an actress, I think I’d be kind of pissed.  The guys get all the good roles, and the ladies get to be people that matter primarily in relation to them: wives, mothers, daughters, mistresses.  Forget that.  Fortunately, I think that in an age where so much of publishing is made up of women, from publishers to editors to agents to authors to readers, even the books that are not setting out to make a point about gender can have some pretty great female protagonists.  And it sometimes looks like television, at least, is starting to make similar changes.

So I was delighted when Michael sent me this LA Times piece on Daniela Comani’s gallery exhibit which takes major canonical fiction with gendered titles and reverses things.  I hate Of Mice and Men, sorry Steinbeck fans, but would I love Of Mice and Women?  Well, probably not.  Still, it’s an interesting idea to think about how things would change.  Monsieur Bovary and Lord Chatterley’s Lover would probably not be so controversial, would they?  Unless, of course, the genders of the lovers stayed fixed as the originals, which would add a whole new layer—it would be interesting to contemplate which issues overlapped in the possible versions and which were made radically different.

This makes me wonder, as an author, how much thought do you give to your character’s gender?  Do you ever consider flipping?  Do you always stick to what you yourself know or do you prefer to write from the opposite perspective?  And have you ever tried to write something gender blind and then assign a gender later?  In theory, it shouldn’t matter, but in practice, how much of the characterization would shift depending on the direction?

April 27, 2011   Miriam   canon, fiction, fun, great books, inspiration, Miriam  
4

Art imitates art

Herman Melville’s pompous dictum, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation,” notwithstanding, I love retellings of great stories.  From Marion Zimmer Bradley’s wonderful The Mists of Avalon to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (some of my favorites) it’s hard for me not to see the possibilities for retelling in a book or play or television series or film that I especially enjoyed.  Of course, the closer a work is to classic status, the easier it is to imagine a modern spin—in part because the author is probably long dead and unable to complain that zombies and werewolves have been inserted into their 19th century storyline.

This  Flavorwire post got me thinking about what books would benefit from a new retelling.  Madame Bovary as a Real Housewife of New Jersey, anyone?  Moby Dick with spaceships and a lot less talk about whale fat rendering?  A Tale of Two Cities set in the present-day Middle East?

What are your favorite retellings and which stories would you like to see retold?

January 11, 2011   Stephanie   canon, fun, lists, reading, Stephanie  
8

Taking on Modern Library

Happy New Year, readers! I’ll be honest: I miss December a little and I’m still adjusting to this new year. But I need to hurry up. After all, I can only mistakenly write 2010, cross it out and write 2011 for so long. But I digress.

Today, I wanted to share with you this post on Edward Champion’s website that I thought was very interesting.  Part his own personal challenge, part a literary case study, Champion plans to read the entire Modern Library list of top 100 novels of the 20th century from #100 to #1.  Throughout the process, Champion will write about each on his site in an effort to “track some quirky course of literature.”  I find this interesting for a few reasons. First, I appreciate Champion’s ambition. I’ve written in the past on lists and reading the classics, and I think this list is a respectable and broad representation of titles considered canon, even within the temporal limits of the 20th century.

But I also wonder about his aim to somehow trace a path, whether linear or not, through literature.  When these one hundred books were chosen, I imagine they were selected for their distinction as individuals, not as a whole.  So I guess I’m just a little skeptical. And of course I wonder how books of this century measure up, and whether in ninety years we’ll be able to make a similar list and track a similar progression.

At the end of the day, I admire Champion’s drive. I’d love to think I could take on a challenge like this, but honestly, where is he going to find the time? Would any of you ever attempt something like this?

October 26, 2010   DG&B   canon, editing, favorites, opinion, publishers, Stephanie  
10

The Austen question

by Stephanie

As a former college undergraduate who majored in English literature, I was never too far removed from the world of Jane Austen. Hers are novels that are firmly situated in the literary canon, and rightfully so. Her writing is more than well-known for its ability to weave elegant moral thought with comically ironic plot turns that prove to be not only witty but profound as well.

So I was interested to see this article at BBC News regarding a three-year-long study that suggests that someone else was heavily involved in the editing process of Austen’s manuscripts, namely an editor who worked for her publisher, John Murray II. This is a pretty big revelation, and indeed one that could incite both discussion and derision. Some could argue that the claim diminishes Austen’s prowess, making her writing not the product of her own talent, but rather something from an editor’s red pen. In other ways, as the article suggests, it could stand as an indicator of Austen’s openness to trying new things with her writing.

Either way, it’s interesting to think that new discoveries can still be made two hundred years after a book is published.

September 20, 2010   DG&B   canon, opinion, Stephanie  
3

But Hey, Who’s Keeping Score?

by Stephanie

I found this piece over at the Guardian to be very interesting. In it, Robert McCrum considers the sometimes touchy yet seemingly ubiquitous concept of the “number one writer.” McCrum makes an undeniable point—that devising a list whereby there is always a top dog is part of the human condition. I find it interesting that the prevailing notion still tends toward nailing down a singular individual who encompasses the talent, finesse, and self-awareness to be considered top dog. To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time wrapping my head around it; this kind of thing may have been possible, and certainly more feasible, in times past. But these days, the range of literary material out there in the market is so expansive that it seems entirely impossible to make such a definitive and exclusionary selection.

But maybe I’m wrong, and maybe in one hundred years people like Toni Morrison and Jonathan Franzen will replace Charles Dickens and C. S. Lewis in the textbooks.

September 10, 2010   DG&B   canon, fun, Rachel  
4

Check yo shelf

by Rachel

We don’t mind a bit of rap here at DGLM, as Lauren pointed out in her recent blog entry. So, if you are a fan of rap and literature also, you’re in for a real treat! Margaret Eby over at Flavor Wire has put together famous rappers and their 20th Century literary doppelgangers. From Ja Rule to Jay Z, Hemingway to Nabokov, you can see which rap artist matches up to which writer. Eby seems to hint that rap is on the rise and reading will soon be outdated by the new tech age, but I disagree—I think there’ll always be just enough space in our world for rap and reading!

So, can any of you match some of my favorite rap artists with their literary doppelgangers: Snoop, Lil Kim, Eminem?

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