The Liebster Award Blog Hop

One of the best reasons to go to writing conferences: you meet AWESOME people there, people like the truly spectacular Julie Artz. I'm excited to say she nominated me for a sort of "writer's chain letter" blog tour where we get to learn about how we all work (or fail to). With no further ado, let me tell YOU about ME...and the people that come out of my head: 

Can you share one example of how you came up with the idea for a story? 
Well usually I come up with just the tiniest hint of a character. All my stories spin from characters.

One book (that's in a drawer right now) started with "what about a really dorky social misfit who's actually quietly picking off the people she got too obsessed with and who failed to live up to her idea of their 'friendship?'" Teasing out the two girls who wound up as the central characters in the story, and what they loved and hated, and how they got along, and what was actually going to HAPPEN was much more involved, but the story IDEA sort of came to me like a character logline.

Sometimes. Other times I go through something funny or sad or awful in life and I say "some day, when I'm ready, THIS is becoming a book."

What Did You Call Me? On Labels.

A while back, I wrote a piece called "Reasons Women Aren't Funny." The day after it came out, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a writing friend, and because I'm a compulsive spaz and/or JUST LIKE EVERY WRITER EVER, tracking its progress.

"You should write something else about feminism," she said. "I could maybe help you get it into Slate."

Slate was fantastic, of course. I'd burn as many bras as Slate wanted me to burn if it meant they'd take my stuff. But still, what my friend was saying didn't make much sense to me.

"Yeah, but I'm no expert on feminism. I don't even think of myself that way."

"Seriously, Jilly? Your name is basically synonymous with feminism right now."

Really? Because of one humor piece?

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.

Are You Living in a Comedy or a Tragedy?

There are two kinds of people, people who come up with arbitrary splits that are supposed to tell you something that's not totally inane, and people who think these "two kinds of people" lines are trite, simplistic, and annoying.

BUT.

There are also two kinds of people, I heard recently, and for once I tended to agree: people who think they're living in a tragedy, and people who think they're living in a comedy.

I'm definitely the latter. In the moment, of course, I'm as liable to get frustrated, or melodramatic, or just plain sad about the awful things--death and casual cruelty and the bus being really, REALLY late--but when you look at it from a bird's-eye view, doesn't the whole thing just seem like a loopy Tom Stoppard play?

The way I see it, there's nothing--truly nothing, and yes, I'm including very hot-button issues under this umbrella, like for instance the big-r-as-in-"R__ is never funny"--that you can't make funny. It takes some time, both to gain perspective and because raw flesh isn't tough enough to stand up to the razor-slice of a cutting joke. But if you ask me, the general absurdity of human existence (because cosmically speaking, just about everything we DO is absurd) means that even our pain can be mined for humor.

Big News (No, Really)

ICYMI, a series of letters I learned just last week means "in case you missed it," I had a serious announcement this weekend:

I finally signed with a literary agent, namely Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa. In fact, I just sent off the contract to the last person who needs to John Hancock it up.

It's for my humor writing, and it's with my writing partner Mike MacDonald (who founded The Smew, the satire news site I wrote for and eventually helped edit a few years back). In a total bonus move, though, Dawn also represents Young Adult, at least if you're already her client (and may eventually regret telling me that).

You see a lot of these blog posts--the "it's finally my agent soul mate, and in the end, it happened so fast!" posts--but that's kind of how it was. I sent in a query on a Tuesday morning, Dawn got back to me within the hour requesting materials, and by the end of the work day, we were setting up a Skype chat for Thursday night. We chatted about all kinds of book-related things, and life-related things, and while I am 100% sold on Dawn's expertise and her track record, the thing that made it feel so right was her personality (cynical and mordant, practically a pre-requisite for getting along with me) and her enthusiasm. She GOT this book. She loves it. What more could you ask for?

So enough gloating. I'm feeling super-effing-lucky, and it was a fairytale in the end, and dreams come true, sometimes even before you turn 30 (just barely), blah-blah-blah.

The happiest of endings...

But I want to put something out there that I think people don't say enough, and that, as a writer who's still in the middle of the endless-rejections-from-agents phase of your career, you need to hear:

It only happens "overnight" after a LONG slog of nothing happening.

The Lowest Form of Humor?

I'm heading to the Yale Writer's Conference this weekend, where I'll be joining a bevy of fellow authors in a humor workshop.

Of course we've all been emailing in advance, figuring out where we'll meet, and what we'll do, and how long it will be until we can drink, and of course it led ME to respond the only way I know how:

Terrible puns. Specifically, in this case, on kindred spirits vs. drinking spirits, but there have been a lot of emails, and therefore, a lot of terrible punning.

In one of the first classes I took in college, "Wit & Humor," we read Freud's book The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (as you might have guessed, it was a laugh-RIOT). In a series of profoundly unfunny--and often super-bigoted--examples, Freud laid out his theory of humor: what causes us to experience something as humor, what it means about our desires for our parents, you know, the usual Freud stuff.

I know the first thing I think of when I hear "Sigmund Freud" is "laugh factory"

Tucked away among his many blanket pronouncements on a form he was clearly incapable of producing, Freud ranked different forms of humor. Wordplay, I believe, was considered the "highest" form of wit.

Punning was considered the "lowest."

Which always confused me, because I would think of punning as a sort of wordplay-subset, the squares within the larger category of wordplay rectangles, so to speak (i.e., all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares).

Either way, I took umbrage. I did and do LOVE puns. Especially bad puns. The kind where you groan first, and MAYBE laugh second. Maybe.

I know I'm not alone in this. Nabokov was indisputably one of the best English-language writers in the last hundred years, and just as indisputably a pun-lover. According to my Nabokov professor, an especial favorite was delivered when a nun, attending one of his lectures, was offended by some back-row hanky-panky between a pair of students.

Dreaming up his next sweet-slash-lame burn...

"Sir," she fumed, approaching the lectern. "How could you carry on your lecture when those two young students were...spooning there?"

"Be grateful, madam," he said, ever the gentleman, "that they weren't forking."

Please tell me I'm not the only one who unabashedly loves punning. I've always thought they add flavor to otherwise dull conversations (but then I'm often in poor taste...).

Belief Systems

I feel like a big part of growing up is discarding, or trading up on, previous beliefs. You realize, for example, that the bag of baby teeth in your dad's nightstand drawer is related to your regular installments of tooth-cash. Or--much later if you're me--you start to understand that toilets don't just magically stay clean.

I was thinking about some of the truly inane things I used to believe earlier today, things that lingered longer than they should have. Am I the only one who thought that:

* You have a pre-determined amount of hair, coiled up in little hair-spools inside your head, and at some point, you'll run out, just like with Hollywood Hair Barbie.

* If you're so unlucky as to sneeze when your eyes are crossed, enjoy a hellish life of permanent cross-eyedom.

* Velveeta with ketchup on it is perfectly acceptable "food."

* Bloody Mary is actually in that mirror. I still believe this, honestly, at least enough not to try my luck.

* This one I'm 99.935% sure no one else has, because it involves my 6-year-old memory of a monster in a specific episode of the Ghostbusters spinoff Saturday-morning-cartoon series...but basically, don't sleep with your hands outside the covers. Don't even spend much time with them out in the air, grabbable, when you're rolling over. Just...trust me.

* There are healthy candy bars, like Pearson's Nut Rolls, that frankly you should be eating more of.

* People are interested in the content of your dreams. 

* It's only the flu if you throw up.