YA Fiction: Prestige-free?

damppanties said:

Click to expand...

OK. That got an actual snort out of me.

Whatever JKR's failings may be, she fulfilled the entire task of a writer (and sorry, I have to quote Joseph Conrad again): she made you see. Only that--and it is everything.

estragon said:

Whatever JKR's failings may be, she fulfilled the entire task of a writer (and sorry, I have to quote Joseph Conrad again): she made you see. Only that--and it is everything.

Click to expand...

Estragon, I assume you were continuing conversation with me? In which I case I'll add a few words, but I don't want it to look like I'm going on and on as if you must agree with me. I liked hearing your opinion and I can only hope you don’t mind hearing mine.

That Conrad quote is nice and I do understand it, but like all such pronouncements, it's only as true as it goes. You could read a story that's vividly written (makes you see) and whose treatment of its subject is shallow, ignorant, or downright vile (makes you feel—namely, revulsion and anger with the author), and I'll bet you'd like to formulate an opinion about it that's not limited to “according to Conrad, this story passes with flying colors.” To illustrate the point (and invoke Godwin's law all at the same time), imagine the story is a piece of fictional Nazi-apologism.

It may rarely get quite as bad as that, but there are plenty of ways to make the reader feel that are not quite the hallmarks of fine writing. Graphic violence and cruelty, excessive sentimentalism, children and animals in danger, pointless provocations that amount to literary trolling, and such. All of them are quite successful in provoking some kind of feeling, but the words we usually use for this are exploitative, manipulative, gratuitous, etc.

This is not to say that JKR is guilty of the above. As a general point, though, it was worth making. It’s not irrelevant what a story makes you see and feel so long as it does.

Now, as to this feeling thing, in the best sense. Let me draw another comparison with Tolkien, with an understanding it’s not a competition. There’s place for more than one wonderful book, and consequently, there’d be no point in all of them being the same. I just think it may help with illustrating.

Do you remember, say, the first appearance of a Nazgul? I’m pretty sure I could still read it today and feel the terror and the sense of foreboding. What about the appearance of Voldemort, though? It got me in the movie because Ralph Fiennes was awesome. On paper, not so much. And that illustrates my opinion about JKR’s prose. While I’m sure I speak for most of us when I say we can only dream of having her facility with the craft (and in my case, even dreaming is presumptuous), her prose accomplishes the tasks reliably but never for a moment rises to the level of sending chills down your spine. Not for me, at least.

Secondly, there’s feeling as sympathy for the character, and JKR didn’t evoke more than a token amount from me. Yes, I can list all the reasons why Harry is deserving of sympathy and why it would have been really bad for Voldemort to win, but I did not, in fact, feel the stakes any more deeply than one does in an action movie in which one roots for the guy in the white hat because he’s the guy in the white hat but does not really care. Had Voldemort eaten him for lunch then and there, I’d have thought “well that’s a silly and nasty gimmick” but I wouldn’t have felt punched in the gut.

You may have felt differently, or you may say I’m placing the bar too high and you may be right. We got a lovely ride out of it, and some of the book’s failings may have been inevitable. It may have been impossible to juggle the demands of the plot with other demands without something losing out. One book can’t be all things at the same time. But neither do I want to praise it for precisely the features I found weak.

If you wanna capture the reader you gotta learn how to cast spells on them. The best writers do it intuitively but there are formulated processes that make it easy for larval writers to get similar results. In most cases doing the unexpected is the ticket.

My all-time favorite work of YA Fiction (possibly because it came out right when I was the perfect age) is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. It was written by a man (Avi) and was told in the first person by a female character breaking many of the standard "rules" of YA fiction. It went on to win the Newberry Medal and is commonly used in school curriculum now. It doesn't get a lot more prestigious than that I would think.

That really is a good book, TinyBeth.

As far as "making people see" there are more ways of "seeing" than just the visual. I want to see "who" "why" and "how" as well as "what" "Where" and "when."

Stella_Omega said:

That really is a good book, TinyBeth.

As far as "making people see" there are more ways of "seeing" than just the visual. I want to see "who" "why" and "how" as well as "what" "Where" and "when."

Click to expand...

I played a bit with Conrad’s meaning, because it has the potential to be misread, and also because the book under discussion didn’t accomplish his ideal for me in some important ways. What I think he really meant could be paraphrased as “My task is to put you into the character’s shoes, and that is everything.”

Verdad said:

I played a bit with Conrad’s meaning, because it has the potential to be misread, and also because the book under discussion didn’t accomplish his ideal for me in some important ways. What I think he really meant could be paraphrased as “My task is to put you into the character’s shoes, and that is everything.”

Click to expand...

Agreed, I was unimpressed with Rowling's ability to make me see the 'sights' if you will, that are most important to me.