Guilty Pleasures

What, exactly, defines a literary guilty pleasure?

I know they exist, at least insofar as there are books I'm frankly embarrassed to admit I've read (no, I will NOT name names, so don't ask...publicly). But I'm not sure where the line is drawn between "fun, light read" and "guilt because I read."

 Guilt because you're reading about pleasure is another thing entirely.

Killing Your Darlings

We're all supposed to do this. Go in with a blood-red pen and slash through all the words that we love--GOD how we love them--but which aren't doing what we need them to.

Maybe they're part of a hilarious scene that connects to nothing else in the larger work.

Or lyrical and challenging and lovely but the character they're describing/being spoken by should be cut from your MS.

Or they're pretty-good, and have one REALLY awesome metaphor buried somewhere in the creamy center, but the entire surrounding scene is just unnecessary, under-baked novel-dough. It's the incipient spare-tire of your novel. Verbal saddle-bags.

The Other Side of the Coin: Listening

Thanks in large part to a piece I published on ELLE last week--about speaking up on hard topics but also listening to them in the right way--I've been thinking a lot about listening, lately.

There's a reason I chose writing as my medium, forever ago: it allows me to be certain that I'm expressing things the way I want to, and that I then get to be "heard" from a safe distance.

"Safe" in this context means "anywhere further away than in person, at which range I have to react appropriately in real time."

I'm really well-adjusted that way.

What if YA Were More Like Literary Fiction?

I'll admit it. Lately, I've been losing patience. I've become intolerant. Things that used to seem charming are crawling around under my skin like a bad case of verbal bed bugs.

I speak, of course, of the "look at my verbal backflips" tendency in literary fiction.

What if YA were like that? By which I mean, what if YA were so impressed with the smell of its own farts (or just the sound of its own voice, you pick) that it spent hundreds and thousands of words talking about...nothing?

Even during the not-as-brief-as-it-should-have-been, Jilly-know-yourself-better-dammit period when I was trying to write semi-literary fiction myself, I found the long-winded description tedious at best.

I don't really care about all 73 shades of pink and coral and mother-of-pearl and Orange Julius tinting a sky, causing a character to reflect, boringly, on his own mortality and also his childhood. It doesn't change my understanding of the character, or the story, or the writer's ability, to slog through an entire page of an elaborately-constructed metaphor comparing two women's church hats to multi-colored, feathered Parthenons, marching bravely through time and the line at the post office atop their some-also-overly-clever-metaphor-for-hairs. And there's just never that much worth saying about how that one tree looked.

I don't want to read about those things, even when they're done well; why would I want to write them?

Oh god, I'm gonna have to read about SO MANY NATURE MOMENTS.