Sheltered

Sheltered people make compelling characters. If a character is sheltered from an original world, like muggle-raised Harry, readers get to see the world through someone who's just as new to it as they are. When a character is sheltered from our own world, ordinary things become exotic, wondrous, and scary.

I'm currently reading Palace of Lies, a brilliant novel about a sheltered character by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Princess Desmia is fourteen years old and she’s never seen the sky. Her entire life has been spent trapped inside a palace filled with scheming courtiers. This teaches her fear. Towards the beginning of the novel, her palace is burned down by unknown saboteurs and she’s forced to flee the city. Her first glimpse of the raw blue sky, unhemmed by  buildings, sends her into hysterics and she screams uncontrollably. Her traveling companions resort to carrying her on a stretcher with a sheet over her head to keep her quiet. 

At the start, Desmia’s only characteristics are her shelteredness and paranoia, though of course she grows as the story progresses. You’d think that would make her hard to like, but it doesn’t, because she featured as a non-POV character in Palace if Mirrors, a companion book to Palace of Lies. We already know this girl and now we get to see things from inside her head. I was impressed with the author for taking shelteredness to such a realistic extreme. Margaret Peterson Haddix has also written Claim to Fame, a book about a girl who hears gossip about herself in her head whenever she steps out of her house, and the Shadow Children Sequence, a series about kids who are raised in hiding because they were born illegally under population control laws. This is my favorite of her takes on sheltered kids.

Showing shelteredness in characterization is hard to pull of, but you should at least acknowledge it in dialogue. I’ve read a few books where young girls were raised only by women-either Rapunzel style where they only know a mother, or Wonder Woman style where they grow up surrounded by other women. And yet when these girls first meet a man, they have no trouble using male pronouns. Sure, they might have heard he/him/his words in conversation with other women, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to use them flawlessly. You know what the word “whom” means but don’t get much practice using it. If you found yourself transported into a society where whom was common usage, you’d stumble through conversations and need to adjust to using it. 

I once read a Rapunzel-style isolation story where a teenage girl doesn’t know what sex is because she’s never met a man and her mother never needed to explain it to her. Yet she can use the word “whorehouse” in a sentence in a way that implies she has a vague notion of what a whorehouse is. Sex seems to be a favorite element authors like using when showing the effects of sheltering on a character, though I think it's less interesting than the linguistic side of things.

Being sheltered stunts your entire vocabulary. Sarah Miller’s nonfiction book The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets tells the story of five sisters who were raised in public isolation for nine years. The Canadian government seized them from their parents, built a nursery with one-way mirrors for tourists to gawk at them, and left them in the care of doctors and nurses until they were nine years old. Because their nursery operated on a strict schedule, they didn't need to ask for things. Everything was given to them at predictable times. They didn't get to meet new people and identical sisters raised together have a natural understanding of each other, so there wasn't much need to talk at all. At one point, they only knew about 75 words when average toddlers know a few hundred.

Basic social skills will be affected, too. Patricia Kindl's The Woman in the Wall gives us Anna, a girl who lives secretly in the walls of her family's huge house. When she steps out of the wall to talk to someone, her first spoken words in years are hoarse because she's forgotten that you need to inhale before speaking. 

Everybody lives sheltered to some extent, or at least lacking in knowledge. I knew a girl who had never used a vending machine at age nineteen. I didn't learn the word for tupperware until I was about twelve because I heard them called "plastic containers." Sheltering either leads to a lack of confidence, when people realize they're missing something, or a bumbling display of overconfidence when people want to disguise the fact they don't or they've never realized the lack in the first place. Again, sex seems to be a fascination for people writing sheltered characters. At my first bachelorette party, a girl who thought she'd learned a lot about sex and sexualities from the University of Tumblr made statements she thought helped her sound woke-"I wonder what asexual people do at bachelorette parties"-but she didn't know a basic female body term when I used it in a sentence. 

On the under-confidence side, I grew up with a mom who didn't let us play with face cards, so I still have trouble keeping track of what order the non-number cards go in and I get the clubs and clovers mixed up. In my teens, there were opportunities to play card games with friends, but I remember standing off to the side sipping sodas at one party because I didn't want to lose in front of everyone. My parents invited my brother and me to play cards with them this week and they learned that neither my brother or I could shuffle a deck.

Equally as important to your characterization is what they're sheltered with, not just what they're sheltered from. The Dionne sisters were raised with an iron-clad sister bond, Princess Desmia with political paranoia, woman-raised Rapunzels and Wonder Womans with a ubiquitous feminine presence. All those things will inform their perception of the outside world they grow to know. 

Raising the Stakes

 

No, not those stakes. 

John Green’s novel Paper Towns has the highest possible stakes for a high schooler: suicide of a friend. Q’s friend and crush, Margo, disappears without warning. He and his friends don’t voice their concerns about suicide much, but it’s always there in his head. They finally figure out Margo’s location the morning of their high school graduation. Her location is time-sensitive and they peace out of graduation, still in their caps and gowns, to find her before it’s too late.

The best case scenario here is that Margo is alive and willing to return and be Q’s girlfriend. The worst case scenario is that she’s dead. She has a little sister, who is just as much in the dark as the rest of them, who’d spend the rest of her life mourning a dead sister. I was so stressed about Margo that I skipped to the end to make sure she was alive before I read any further. When they find her alive but unwilling to return, it’s a happy ending, even though the guy doesn’t get the girl, because at least she doesn’t die.

The movie lowers the stakes catastrophically. No one ever discusses the possibility that Margo’s dead, so the worst case scenario is that she’s alive and has made a happy life for herself somewhere. The timing is shifted to well before graduation and shortly before prom. Q’s friends are annoyed with the hunt for Margo and want to turn back before she makes them late for the dance. When Q finally finds Margo, he asks her to at least keep in contact with her sister, to which she smirks, “We talk every day.”

The ending stays that same, but now it’s a downer because the stakes are “Does he get the girl?” instead of “Is the girl alive?”

Death is about as high as your stakes can go. I once read a query in an online writer's forum for a book about a girl whose best friend died in a hit and run accident. The query went on to talk about the girl's relationships and grieving and life in a small town. The author wanted to know how to make her query stronger, so I commented that she needed to put the actual plot there. What is our detective girl doing to track down her friend's killer?

She commented back and said her character did nothing at all. This wasn't a mystery, it was a YA contemporary book about working through grief.

Yes, in real life people do die mysteriously and their loved ones are left without answers. But that's not okay in fiction. Death as a stake is fine and there are plenty of grief novels. But unsolved death is a stake you can only have in mystery novels because it begs resolution. 

A successful example of lowered stakes is Black Panther, my favorite Marvel movie. Usually Marvel gives us a universe in danger, a galaxy in danger, an Earth in danger. Black Panther gives us a country in jeopardy. The stakes aren’t “Will the entire population be killed” but “Will these people lose their privacy and way of life?” The conflict feels so much more personal.

A small-scale stake imbedded in a large-scale stake can personalize the conflict, too. In one of the Alex Rider books, Alex, a teenage British spy, learns of a terrorist plan to bomb Washington D.C. Big deal, he’s British. What happens in America doesn’t affect him. Except his friend Jack is visiting Washington D.C. that week. Killing off a huge number of people (as well as obliterating the government of a hugely influential country) wouldn’t be great, but Jack’s what matters here.

I've read lots of YA contemporary retellings of myths or fairy tales about royalty set in modern high schools. Princes are demoted to quarterbacks. Marriage is demoted to dating. Betrothing yourself to Prince Charming is a big deal because you get to be queen one day with power, money, and influence, but all the quarterback can give you is popularity. No one at my school cared about popularity. There's your friends, the people you know, and then the people you don't know. 

The same goes for schoolifying stories about war. Any modernized story does this, really, even if the characters are adults and more permanent things like marriage and careers are at stake. 

Part of the charm of romantic comedies, stories for children, and Christmas media is the low stakes. The subtle risk "Will this small town have a merry Christmas?" is what makes it so heartwarming in the first place. Lowering stakes isn't a bad thing. Not when it brings the conflict closer to home and your character's heart. When calibrating what's at risk for your characters, make sure your lowered stakes intensify the conflict rather than bringing it down a notch. 

Thanksgiving Holiday Reads: The Mayflower Bride and Weetamoo

I recently made the goal to read one holiday book for each month of the year. For November, it was important to me that I read both a Native American colonial era book and a Pilgrim book. I'll tell you right off, it's a lot easier to find Native American historical fiction that it is anything having to do with pilgrims. Revolutionary War books? Sure. Salem Witch Trials? Absolutely. But there's little on Plymouth or Jamestown and you have to reach back to the nineties or early 2000's to find it. 

I credit political change. We're living in an era where rebellion is a virtue, so the revolution plays nicely, and the Salem Witch Trials have a built-in victimization narrative. But pilgrims are associated with colonialism and racism. I think it's unfair to center that guilt on the early colonial era. There were certainly massacres and persecutions of Indians during the witch trial and revolutionary periods. Any point up through the end of the nineteenth century, really. And is not the theme of religious freedom inherent in pilgrim narratives an important one for our day? 

After a few weeks of searching, I finally found The Mayflower Bride by Kimberley Woodhouse, which is, from what I can tell, the only pilgrim novel to be published in the past ten years for any age group-adult, YA, or middle grade. There are some picture books. I think the stage of my life where I remember the cultural history of Thanksgiving being discussed the most was early elementary school (I'm a millennial, so that lands in the early 2000's). Is that because Thanksgiving fiction peaked around the turn of the millennium or because young children are usually the ones being introduced to holidays? 

It's called The Mayflower Bride and not The Plymouth Bride for a reason. Expect to spend most of the book on the boat. Mary Elizabeth is a shy, humble Separatist (Pilgrim) girl who sets out for the New World in a spirit of apprehension. She's already lost her mother and she knows both the voyage and the destination will jeopardize the lives of her remaining family, but she puts her trust in the Lord. 

William is a street kid turned carpenter with no background in religion, but he keeps his roots a secret as he gains an interest in both Christianity and Mary Elizabeth. I love that these two desires come independently. Lots of Christian romance featuring a believer and a non-believer has the non-believer changing themselves to, at least initially, win favor with a lover. That rings both problematic and inauthentic from a conversion standpoint, though of course their are real-life people who change religions that way. I was pleased to see William come to his faith independently. 

The moralizing is constant, both in Mary Elizabeth's and William's POV, and in comments from side characters. Lots of prayers, lots of quoting specific bible verses. Sometimes it felt a bit heavy handed, even compared to other religious historical fiction I've read, but I reminded myself that they were, after all, religious refugees. So really, the moralizing is honest to the time period and to skimp on it would dishonor the people it portrays.

I came out of this book with an increased respect for the Pilgrims. I had a few ancestors aboard the Mayflower but didn't know much more than their names. One of them, Elizabeth Tilley, had a quick cameo and I was sad to learn that she became orphaned during the voyage at age thirteen. The constant threat of loss is very present. There romance is subtle, not just physically but emotionally, too. Mary Elizabeth is a shy, modest character who blushes at any mention of her romance with William by a third party, so there's not a lot of overt affection. But again, this could also be a consequence of the time period. 

Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocasetts by Patricia Clark Smith is part of the Royal Diaries series I adored as an elementary schooler. It takes place about a generation after the first Thanksgiving. Most of the titles in the epistolary series feature princesses who came from an eras and cultures where they could keep diaries. But Weetamoo, the girl who grew up to be a sachem (chief) of the Wompanoag people, couldn't read or write, which brings me to my favorite part of this book: the structure.

The "diary" element is a series of stream of consciousness narratives, presented as Weetamoo meditating on her life in quiet times when she goes to sit in nature and be apart from the rest of her village. These narratives are interspersed by birchbark drawings Weetamoo makes of objects and animals from her everyday life, elders' oral tales, and prayers to her favorite goddess, Squant. Weetamoo's tale takes place about a generation after the first Thanksgiving. I was floored by the structure in just the first few pages. An epistolary novel with a protagonist who can't read or write!

 White people (called the Coat-men) are around, but Weetamoo's mostly isolated from them. The story opens with corn harvesting and a great fall feast, which reads as a nice nod to the Thanksgiving vibe. Sometimes the slice of life stuff gets boring and I was itching for her to have more interactions with the Coat-man instead of reading more "Dear diary, today I ground corn again" type stuff. But I remind myself that I'm no longer the target age for the book. I remember reading the other Royal Diaries books when I was nine years old and being fascinated by the day-to-day details of exotic cultures, so I think it's fitting. I read this one first before listening to Mayflower Bride on audible and some of the historical details check out. Weetamoo talks about Native people being hurt when Pilgrims steal corn out of "abandoned" food storage pits when the pits' owners have migrated away to a winter village. Mayflower Bride shows the desperation and heavy death tolls of named characters leading up to the corn robbery. 

I was pleasantly surprised to find a spiritual narrative here, too. Weetamoo undertakes a coming of age ritual where she fasts and sits apart from her village for two straight days. She enters a dream state and has a visions, both a peaceful one of Squant and an ominous one where she sees her adult self marked for death as a leader of an uprising against the Coat-men.

My favorite passage is one where she reflects on the pros and cons of modernization and what that would mean for her tribe's spirituality and oral culture. 

One thing is plain to me. I do not want iron kettles or glass beads or anything to do with this reading-the-marks business, not if it means living in square Coat-man towns and not being in the care of our Creator and Squant and Mother Corn and all the rest of the Beings who quicken our world.

This is the other thing I have been thinking about the Coat-man's writing. If we do learn it, it might make us lazy...what if, whenever we waned a story, we could just reach out and read it from a paper, instead of waiting for the right time and place and the right storyteller to tell it to us?

-pg. 93 and 94

I don't know if I would've been so moved by the significance of this passage as a young reader, but as a college student who's studied folklore, I was floored. The two books complement each other nicely and provide a fuller picture of what was going on in New England in the early seventeenth century. Together, The Mayflower Bride and Weetamoo formed the perfect pair of contrasting religious freedom reads for the Thanksgiving week. 

Will Covid Actually Leave a Literary Legacy?

 As an English major, I was assigned books dealing with wars, from the big wars to the mini Spanish-American War. A professor told me once that nearly every author who was alive at the time of the Titanic sinking wrote a poem or essay or something about it. But I never read any literature about the 1918 Influenza or other disease outbreaks. If it existed, it didn't survive the tests of time. Modern authors do touch on it in historical fiction-occasionally. 

I read four books about the 1918 Influenza during my childhood and college years. The two that deal with the pandemic as a main plot are Palace Beautiful by Sarah DeFord Williams, which I reviewed on my book blog back in middle school, and Gracie's Angel by Launi K. Anderson. Both were set in my home state, Utah, so I thought back to them during the early stages of lockdown for a model on how my community would react to this. I don't know if I would've been aware of these books if they weren't local titles. Gracie's Angel is part of a seventeen book historical fiction series and I get the sense that it's only being written about because after so many books, the author had to scrape the bottom of the historical barrel. No Peace with the Dawn is another local read. It's about World War I, but towards the end it touches on the pandemic as it affected the student body of Utah State University. The only non-local book I'd read was Shoeless Joe & Me by Dan Gutman. Stosh, a teenage boy who can time travel with vintage baseball cards, goes back to 1919 to prevent the Black Sox Scandal. He meets his great-great-uncle, an influenza patient, and Stosh just so happens to have modern flu medicine on him. When Stosh comes back to the present day, Uncle Wilbur is living with the family.

Two months ago, I saw an agent or editor on twitter saying she wanted to read a YA covid romance. She added, "must wear masks and follow social distancing." I rolled my eyes so hard. The people of September 2020 did safe things the people of March 2020 would think are paranoid. The people of spring 2020 did "safe" things the people of September 2020 know are paranoid, like healthy people wearing a mask while jogging. If we can gain that much perspective in six months, what will the people of March 2021 think of their younger selves? It takes roughly two years for a book to get written, queried, agented, edited, and published. Often it takes much longer. A modern person cannot write about the pandemic without their perspective becoming dreadfully dated. 

I saw another writer tweet that she's writing a book where characters wear masks in the winter and do distance learning if they're sick. I think distance learning is a safer bet, but I don't know if healthy people will still go masked several years down the road. They didn't after the influenza. The only part of our society the 1918 pandemic really reformed was the health care system. Germany had an unsuccessful revolution that was spurred, in part, by the pandemic worsening economic conditions and some churches did switch from communal cups to individual sacrament cups. But I didn't know about those sacrament cups until this summer and Germany's aborted revolution is minimized by the legacy of World War II. Covid is front and center in everybody's lives, but in a few years, something else will be.

 

I don't think books dealing directly with covid will sell well for three reasons. First, this is a boring apocalypse. I'm part of the Hunger Games generation, I know how these are supposed to go. Unless you lost a loved one, all your covid memories are blah. Both of the two books I mentioned previously that put the pandemic front and center killed a main character. Shoeless Joe & Me unkilled a character. My mom and grandma have covid right now, my brother and I are quarantining while we wait for test results, and I'm in no mood for character mortality. How do you write an interesting covid book without making readers gloomy? I interview people about covid experiences all the time for a research project I'm working on. I thought those interviews might provide fodder for a non-fiction covid book, but after doing so many of them, I've realized that most people's pandemic experiences are pretty boring. 

Second, the dystopian books of the Hunger Games era boom still exist. Why would I go read a new disease book when I have Lauren DeStefano's Wither trilogy? Why would I read about an oppressive or dysfunctional government when I have Gemma Malley's The Declaration and Neal Shusterman's Unwind series? The third and most important reason people won't want pandemic books is fatigue. I don't like the way covid is dominating every conversation. In the first few months, my memories of those influenza books were important to me, but now I wouldn't read one. People are so over this. 

While we probably won't get a crop of covid books out of this, we will get authors. Forcing work and school online will turn some people into writers who wouldn't have written normally. After months to reflect on it, I really think people don't have more time during the lockdown than they do normally. If you're unemployed, that's different, but people are still bound by time even if they aren't by place. You still go to work or school, you just zoom it. But the drudgery of online working promotes procrastination. I have two jobs and I'm a student and I really was supposed to do things today, but season four of The Crown is great, thanks for asking. Some people will be motivated to write by lockdown boredom. Some published writers who are laid off from their day jobs will focus on writing more to make up lost income. 

Pandemics and all their effects-like lockdown mental illness, government inefficiency, hypocrisy in public spaces, and the virtue-signaling of mask wearers posting to all their mask-wearing followers about how cool mask-wearing is-will produce new thoughts in people. New thoughts make new books. John Green and Kathryn Stockett both wrote their first published novels to cope with 9/11 grief. Neither has anything to do with terrorism. People process emotions through all kinds of stories and the books we see coming out of this latest pandemic won't necessarily be the ones we expect.

I was already working on a project when the pandemic hit. My main character lost the bottom half of her face in a fire and covers it in a veil. I usually wear cloth masks, but I do have a bandanna, and I probably would have had her use a bandanna if I'd started it during covid. I have no intentions of changing her veil, but I did add a new scene with another burned character recently and had that character wear a bandanna. 

That book is an other world fantasy, which is what I usually write, but I finished the rough draft of a contemporary YA last week. I don't know when that book will be published, so I refer to covid only in the past sense and don't mention how old my seventeen year old character was when it happened. I figure so long as covid has taken place within the past twelve years, she will have been old enough to have solid memories of it. She references covid twice. In both cases, I made sure to make the references hopeful, even when I was talking about death. One was a quick reference to the protagonist taking virtual tours of historic sites. The other direct reference takes place on a college campus where a door is painted red to memorialize the school's use as a hospital during the influenza. I got the idea from a red door at Utah State University. My own college also had a building used as a triage, and though that building's still standing, I've gone here four years and only learned about its history last week. There are no books dealing with BYU's covid experiences that I'm aware of, so all I had was USU as a model. My main character and an older college student use both the influenza and covid to talk about how the future is long, tragedies fade, and life always gets better. 

The Karl G. Maeser Building was used a triage during the influenza outbreak

Ultimately, covid is going to end. Parts of the world will change, yes, but probably not in the ways our dystopia-trained brains expect. Authors may wish to shy away from disease books, but it will prove a ripe breeding ground for new authors who deal with troubling times in creative and reflective ways. 

Are You Zapping the Fun from Your Historical Fiction?

I once picked up a historical fiction novel that imagined the life of a wife a certain man in ancient history. The man in question had fascinated me since early childhood and I've often wondered about his wife, whose name in lost to time. I was thrilled to see that someone had finally given her a story of her own and looked forward to seeing their love story and adventures together. 

That wasn't what I got. Instead, I was treated to several chapters detailing her interactions with her sisters  and details of the day-to-day household chores women did in 600 B.C. Her husband didn't show up until several chapters in. I suppose you could argue that I was seeing a more feminine side of history, but I felt like I was watching women do chores while the menfolk were off having adventures. There was no reason, absolutely none, to care about this historical woman except her connection to her husband. He needed to get on screen sooner. 

Around the same time, I read a historical fiction novel about a famous abolitionist. I assumed the story would be set against the dawn of the Civil War and involve her interacting with a number of black characters yearning for freedom. Instead, the novel took place many years before the war and black people only appeared twice, never as named characters. There were a few discussions of race among white characters, but that was it. The vast majority of the story consisted of our heroine sweeping her kitchen floor, polishing the stove, and racing against time to get dinner on the table before her husband came home. Instead of the nation-wide drama of war, I watched the small-scale drama of her disagreeing with her husband, sister, and mother-in-law over topics that usually had nothing to do with slavery. I began to feel like I was reading about some other, far more nineteenth century ordinary woman with the same name as this abolitionist.

That feeling came back early this summer, when I read a novel about Annie Oakley. Annie was renowned as a sharpshooter. She could shoot a cigar from her husband's lips and split a playing card held sideways with a well-aimed bullet. But very little of that appeared in the story. After several hundreds of pages into the book, Annie had only fired a gun three times. I began to feel like I was reading about some other girl named Annie and not our Miss Oakley. I don't want to read about sharpshooters who don't shoot, abolitionist who don't abolish, and historical wives who don't spend page time with their famous husbands. 

I've also seen historical fiction bogged down by accuracy. Writers want to show off their work and have their princesses staying in the right castle at the right time in the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and whatever, rather than putting her in the castle where all the action is. An intrepid reader may eventually care about accuracy if they do their own research, but most just want a good show. As a young reader, I was always saddened with a historical fiction book about women's suffrage turned into a young character whose life was consumed by school and friends while her mother was off winning rights, or a Salem Witch Trials book where the protagonist was tangential to the trials instead of being an accuser. 

Remember to let your characters do the job readers hired them to do-shooting, abolishing,  and voyaging with their husbands to discover new and ancient lands. 

One Tale to End All Tales?

 

When I was fifteen, I wrote my first novel and I was determined it should be revolutionary. It wouldn’t employ a single trope or similarity to another work of fiction. Before long, this proved tricky and I stayed after class one day to ask my English teacher if anyone could create a truly original story. She responded by sketching a Hero’s Journey monomyth diagram on the board. That is how, a few weeks ahead of my entire class, I learned that the Hero’s Journey was the one tale to rule them all.

Until college. Four years later, again a sophomore, I took a literary theory class where the course text was a book of essays and autobiographical fiction by the Native American writer Zitkala-Sa. While analyzing it in an essay, I once more broke revolutionary ground when I realized Zitkala-Sa’s stories didn’t fit in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth model. Why, this was because Joseph Campbell, the great white male, had neglected to take women and native people’s stories into play. Oh, the injustice of it all! And so I set out to write a semester long research paper about how the Hero’s Journey in all its colonialist glory had overlooked marginalized storytellers.

Until the night before my paper was due. I’d been going off a Hero’s Journey diagram I’d found on the first page of google and assumed, because the website mention Campbell’s book The Hero with A Thousand Faces, that it was all accurate to the book. With my paper all polished and peer edited and ready for submission, I decided I’d check out the book itself, find a few quotes to throw in, and call it good. But when I flipped to the index, I found the names of several Native American tribes listed. Campbell had taken Native American myths into account.

I overhauled my entire paper overnight.

Two years later, I took a myths, legends, and folktales class and discovered that there are myths, legends, and folktales. Campbell’s myth model was only ever intended for myths. If you want to analyze a fairy tale, you don’t go to Campbell, you use Proppian analysis. Though Vladimir Propp tracked some elements common with Hero’s Journey stories (heroes, villainy, overcoming), they’re more tailored to fairy tales.

Proppian analysis starts with a family member absenting themselves from the home. Beauty’s father leaves for a journey, Hansel and Gretel are led to the woods, Cinderella’s mother is dead. It ends with a wedding and ascension to the throne. This can either be literal (Snow White marries her prince) or more figurative (Dorothy and her traveling companions are rewarded). Fairy tales feature a donor character, like Cinderella’s godmother or the dead Wicked Witch of the East, who grant the hero magical a magic talisman or assistance.

Last night I watched a stage production of Mary Poppins. Neither Miss Poppins nor the kids have a hero’s journey. The kids have a problem (distant parents) but don’t take action to fix it on their own. Mary Poppins takes action but she doesn’t have a problem. Fixing the Banks family doesn’t give her anything. At no point in the story is she really threatened or endangered. This bugged me for a while until I realized Proppian analysis is probably a better fit. Suddenly, this story follows the rules. Michael and Jane absent themselves to play in the park and their parents are emotionally absent. Mary Poppins functions as their donor. A wedding is the happy unification of a family and that’s exactly what happens to the Bankses at the end. 

Proppian analysis is the wrong choice for non-fairy tale stories, like YA contemporary novels. Popular author Sarah Dessen’s YA contemporary books usually feature a teenage girl on summer break. She has a job, family issues, friends, and, eventually, a boyfriend. But she’s not locked in battle with an evil overlord or witch. Some YA novels might include triumph over a sports rival, school bully, or an opponent in a class election, but  in many of them, like Dessen's, the end result is something like "the shy heroine learns to have confidence." 

YA contemporaries attempt to model real life more than mystery books do. In real life, a friend could be killed in a hit and run accident and your journey is one of grieving and healing. In a mystery novel, you track that sucker down. There are as many ways to understand stories as there are kinds of stories. Zitkala-Sa’s stories didn’t match Campbell’s pattern because she was writing biography, not because Campbell was some kind of racist. Myths don’t read like fairy tales, fairy tales don’t read like biographies, biographies don’t read like YA contemporaries, and contemporaries don't read like mysteries. The more you study different plot structures, the more you familiarize yourself with the breadth of different genres and learn new ways to frame your character's journey. 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Effie Trinket is the Best Character Name Ever

 The Hunger Games trilogy offers a spread of aptly-named characters. Katniss is  an edible plant with arrow-shaped leaves. Katniss Everdeen is an archer who knows how to survive in the wild. Katniss are useful plants, but not pretty ones. Evening Primroses are a delicate, prettier plant with medicinal properties. Her sister Prim is a delicate, pretty girl who wants to be a doctor. Peeta (pita) is a baker. Panem echoes ancient Roman civilizations in many ways and several Capitol officials have Roman names. 

My favorite name is District 12’s Madge Undersee, Katniss’s friend who gives her mockingjay pin. This name is fun to unpack. Madge gives her the badge and M for Mockinjay. Her last name comes from her father, who, as mayor of District 12, is supposed to oversee everything. But since he and his family let Katniss get away with poaching, it could be said he undersees everything.

Effie Trinket’s name gives us even more to unpack than Madge’s. First, let’s look at her first name. I always imagined Effie was a nickname for Frances. A google search tells me it’s short for Euphemia-a Greek name for well-spoken. But never mind meaning or origin. All that matters is that Euphemia is an old-fashioned name no modern woman would ever saddle her child with ever. There’s something beautiful about it, but it’s a stuffy, antique kind of beautiful. Euphemia sounds like a Victorian lady of wealth, influence, and reputation. Additionally, it puts me in mind of the word euphemism-a polite term for something dreadful.

But Suzanne Collins doesn’t call her Euphemia Trinket. She’s Effie. “Effie” sounds to me like Euphemia or her parents looked at this name and said, “How do I make this cute? How do I make this trendy?” and the resulting Effie was the best they could come up with. I can’t imagine any modern parents calling their daughter Effie, but the name might work for a poodle. Effie, as a whole, sounds like an older, wealthy lady trying (and failing) to be stylish.

Her last name, Trinket, is a real word. Trinkets are jewelry of knickknacks, sometimes expensive and never useful. Decorative. Showy. Not a weapon you’d fear and not a tool you’d go to for help. Trinkets are there to sit still and look pretty. The site MyHeritage tells me it is, in fact, used as a surname in our world, but unless you have a friend by this name, you’ll probably think jewelry before people.

Now, who is our woman? She’s a resident of the Capitol, which makes her wealthy. Her job as Reaping announcer and pre-Games escort puts her in the public eye, but she’s a pseudo-authority rather than an actual one. She selects contestants for the Hunger Games but can’t be held actively accountable for their deaths. Katniss doesn’t feel the same disdain for her as she does Capitol politicians and gamemakers. Unlike Cinna, Katniss’s stylist, and mentor Haymitch, she’s useless in terms of tactical game preparation, image control, and outside assistance. Her role is to accompany rather than coach. Her hair, makeup, outfits, and accessories aim for the height of fashion but hit a ghastly kind of flamboyance. And overall, she’s a walking euphemism. She’s the reader or viewer’s first introduction to the games, a fight to the death couched inside the glamour of reality television. She knows Katniss is slated to die, but perkily downplays every pre-game milestone as “a big, big day.”

Overall, Effie Trinket carries with it the airs of:

Wealth

Influence

Triviality

Glamour

Tackiness

Old-fashionedness

Sugarcoating

Try following this pattern to create a name for a similar character. Let’s start with the name Frances. We’ll bypass the common name Fran the same way Suzanne Collins doesn’t pull the ordinary Mia out of Euphemia. If we go to the end of Frances instead, we could turn it into Sissy, a weak woman who could be cute but certainly isn't useful in a fight. Now let’s brainstorm words similar to Trinket:

Treasure

Antique

Jewelry

Bauble

Decor

Knickknack

My favorite from this list is Bauble. If we change the spelling, that gives us bobble. Bobbleheads are bouncy, entertaining, decorative, and useless. Sissy Bobble sounds like a silly, useless sort of woman.

Writing prompt: Imagine a character who is Effie's opposite in every way-powerful, dangerous, modern, youthful, and sloppily dressed. Now, give her a name. 

Everything Wrong with Harry Potter's Astronomy Class

The Harry Potter books are full of school scenes where Harry brews potions, learns to fly, and practices spells he'll use against Dementors and Death Eaters. The one class that never seems to be important is astronomy. The classroom itself, the Astronomy Tower, serves as a location for three memorable moments. Harry, Ron, and Hermione bring Norbert there for Charlie's friends to pick up in the third book, watch Hagrid arrest in the fifth book, and, most memorably of all, the Astronomy Tower is the setting of Dumbledore's death. But though the class setting makes it a convenient location for Harry to get a bird's eye view or clandestine rendezvous, the actual class taught there isn't worth the fuss. The very existence of this class begs questions about the practicality of the Hogwarts curriculum and what it means for Harry's daily life.

This Class Meets at Midnight

In the first book, it's mentioned that Harry's astronomy class is scheduled every Wednesday at midnight. In Harry's fifth year, he has an astronomy final scheduled for 11 o' clock at night. Sure, it makes sense that a class requiring stars and darkness would meet in the middle of the night. But, what does this mean for their school schedule? A bunch of eleven-year-olds are getting back from class at 1:00 a.m. at the earliest, and then they have to wake up and eat breakfast the same time as the rest of the school. I can only hope they don't have any morning classes scheduled the days after that so they can go back to their dormitories and nap.

Holding class at night means it must be totally normal for students to walk around the castle at midnight. Harry never runs into astronomy students when he's traipsing around the castle in his invisibility cloak. Granted, they could be only hanging out in the Astronomy Tower and whatever hallways connect that tower to the common rooms. But if it's normal for students to walk around the castle at night, that begs the question of why Harry has to do so clandestinely. Couldn't he just tell Filch he's on his way back from astronomy?

They Only Ever Learn Jupiter

From the Harry Potter wiki:

Toward the end of the (first) year, Hermione was quizzing Ron on Astronomy. Their studying included using a map of Jupiter. It was noted that the studies on Jupiter continued into later years, when Harry tried to learn the names of Jupiter's moons in his fifth year of study at Hogwarts. 

Their fifth year exam has a section on Jupiter too. There are a couple of times throughout the series where they're filling out star charts, but the only planet they study is Jupiter. Yes, yes, I know there are more stars than planets, but planets are closer and you'd expect them to come up once in a while. Jupiter must be fascinating if they can study it for five years without moving on in their education. 

They Will Never Use This
Unlike real high school, a lot of what Hogwarts kids learn in required classes is directly applicable to their real lives. Harry takes Potions; he learns how to brew polyjuice. Harry takes Defense Against the Dark Arts; he learns expelliarmus for when he's fighting Voldemort. Some classes are less useful. McGonagall is a dear, but I can't think of a time when Harry used Transfiguration outside of class. Most Transfiguration spells are ridiculously specific, like turning a teapot into a tortoise. But there are still situations where a wizard might find themselves in possession of too many teapots and not enough tortoises. Astronomy is entirely useless.
It's Not One of the Useless Electives
In her third year, Hermione enrolls in a great number of fluff classes. Tell me, when did she ever use arithmancy outside of class? Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, Divination, Muggle Studies, and Care of Magical Creatures are electives because they aren't all that important, though the last two are far more applicable than the first three. Seriously, wizards are so ignorant of Muggle society that they can't dress themselves. Muggle Studies should be a required class. Since Hogwarts has other trivial classes, Astronomy wouldn't stand out so much, except Astronomy is a required class and Arithmancy is not.

 
If they learn this, why not math?
Since astronomy has no magical value, it's possible that they're taught it as science, not magic. My high school had an astronomy class, too. But if they're allowed to study science, why not math? Why not English? These poor professors are grading seventh years' essays written by students who weren't taught writing past age eleven. Surely astronomy can't be the only normal subject they allowed into the curriculum. 

They Will NEVER Use This

Most classes at Hogwarts are about spells (Charms, Transfiguration, DADA). Potions and Herbology deal with substances that could save a person's life. What's the application for astronomy? You can't mix drops of Jupiter into Polyjuice potion. There is no mention of spells that can only be cast when Jupiter is in the proper alignment. Harry never calculates star positions to stop a dementor. The only area of magic in which stars might come in handy is divination, and that's its own class.