Category Archives: Second Fiddle

To #%& or not to &^%$#: Swearing in Middle Grade Fiction

The expectations for the use profanity in children’s fiction are pretty clear. It’s commonplace in YA novels and completely absent in picture books and easy readers. But middle grade fiction takes the middle ground. Is swearing okay in a middle grade book? Well, it’s complicated. The issue is balancing authenticity with respect for your audience. Everybody encounters profanity; it is a language intensifier and can be useful in conveying the weight and reality of your characters situation. And yet it is the nature of profanity to offend, so any use will have consequences in how the book as a whole is received. As a practical matter MG books with profanity tend to be shelved with YA no matter how young the character is. This is not necessarily a problem, To Kill a Mockingbird and it’s 9 year old protagonist Scout have been doing just fine in the YA section of the library for the last five decades. Even so any use of profanity should be carefully considered. When I’m confronted with an opportunity to use a swear word in my novels, here are five choices I consider.

Omit

Every time I use profanity I rewrite the scene with out it, let it sit for a day or two and read the result out loud. I have been surprised by how often the scene was stronger without the swear word. Sometimes profanity is just a habit of the author and not integral to the character’s worldview or the movement of the plot.

Reduce

My editor once told me that swearing is loud on the page in a way that it is not in real life. I think of it as the equivalent of yelling or texting in all caps. As the mom of many I can tell you yelling is most effective when used sparingly—usually when lives are at stake. I think the last time I actually yelled at home was when someone’s sleeve caught on fire while roasting a marshmallow. Because swearing functions as an intensifier, it’s power is diluted by overuse. If I am working with a character who would naturally swear a lot, I’ll run a word search and see if I can limit the swearing to places where it will have the most impact.

Evade

Sometimes you can duck the issue when the swearing is done by a non-viewpoint character. When I was working on Second Fiddle I knew that the moment that the girls discovered that they were all alone in Paris with no money, no passports and no return train tickets, any normal eighth grader would swear. But my main character wasn’t really the swearing type. Instead, I had her report that her friend said every swear she knew in English and then moved on to exhaust her supply of swear words in French and German. This preserved the authenticity of the scene without getting into a specific swear word.

Substitute

Here is one of the more entertaining devices of MG fiction. Most kids get in trouble for swearing, and yet they have the same need for the occasional language intensifier as everyone else. So kids are great at making up substitutes. It’s the “drat, darn, and golly” solution, and it has great comic potential. The advantage to a curse word substitution is that it can also serve to convey information about the character and setting and lighten the mood of an otherwise tense situation. We had a fascinating conversation at a bookstore event recently with some women who wrote adult mysteries. There is an expectation in adult cozy mysteries that swearing is omitted so this author had her spice shop owner detective say things like, “Well that just frosts my chili peppers!” I had no idea such rules extended to the world of adult books.

Commit

There are circumstances in which the first four choices are wrong for the voice of the character or the gravity of the situation. And in those cases swearing maybe appropriate. Freedom of Speech means nothing if we never use it, and if you have used profane speech appropriately in your book you will find both people who passionately attack any use of profanity and those who just as passionately defend your right to tell the story as you must, free of censure. I opted to use swearing to a very limited extent in Heart of a Shepherd, having considered and discarded the above considerations, and it has done no harm whatsoever to the book. It was warmly received, sold well, and was carried by Scholastic Book Clubs. A few libraries don’t shelve it in k-4 schools. I really have no argument with that. Most teachers who read it aloud chose to skip or modify the swear word in the classroom. No argument there either. On the other hand, many teachers and parents have told me that because they weren’t expecting profanity in a middle grade book, it gave them a good opportunity to discuss where profanity is socially acceptable and not, and what it was about that particular scene that made a character swear when he ordinarily wouldn’t. In my opinion that’s a conversation worth having.

I’d love to hear what other people consider when making decisions about profanity, both in terms of writing and in terms of sharing books with middle grade kids as a parent or teacher or librarian.

Learning to Love your Book-alikes

When my very first book Heart of a Shepherd came out back in 2009 I met Suzanne Morgan Williams from the Class of 2K9 marketing group whose book Bull Rider was astonishingly similar to mine. It was all the more surprising because they were western stories about ranching families with family members deployed to the Middle East. Not exactly the most crowded genre. It was very tempting to think of this as a disaster, a head to head competition, a diminishment of what I had worked so hard on. But my husband pointed out that selling a book is not like selling a car. It’s not like a person buys a book and then doesn’t need another for 5 to 10 years. A very helpful perspective. The beauty of the book business is that the more people read good books the more they want new good books.

And the really terrific thing was getting to know Suzanne and working together to promote our books because we’ve found that if a reader likes one of our stories, they will probably like the other. They aren’t identical books after all. The main character in Suzanne’s story is a little bit older. Heart of a Shepherd is about the experience of having a deployed parent. Bull Rider is about the experience of having a brother return from war with a traumatic brain injury. We’ve done joint book store appearances, spoken together on panels and in workshops at writers conferences, and even sold our books together at the Reno Rodeo. And much to our mutual delight these books have flourished side by side.

But I’ve also known people who’ve worked for months, years even, and seen a book published which is very similar to their own manuscript, and then decided to drop their own project completely. It’s such a shame because there is often plenty of room for multiple

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books on a topic. I think of them as “book-alikes” and in some ways they can be an asset to your own work. If somebody has written a book similar to mine then it’s a great strategy to encourage my book to be grouped in with a similar book. Often teachers are looking for several books from a historical era so that there will be something to suit every reading level in her class. Many bookstores prefer to host multi-author events. The picture to the right is myself and Elizabeth Rusch (dressed as Nannerl Mozart) and Virginia Euwer Wolff. We are doing an event which drew dozens of vocal and instrumental performers and lots of families to a community center to celebrate our three music-themed books: Virginia’s Mozart Season, an absolute classic YA story of a girl preparing for a music competition, Liz’s picture book biography For the Love of Music about Mozart’s big sister, and my middle grade novel Second Fiddle.

I’ve learned to love my Book-Alikes over the years and have become good friends of people whose books are similar to mine. And in celebration of that here are four books who like my story Written in Stone are set in America in the early part of the 20th century. They are Crossing Stones by Helen Frost, A Whistle in the Dark by Sue Hill Long, Born of Illusion by Teri Brown and In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters.

Gratitude for Booksellers and Librarians

My parents first took me to Powells Bookstore clear back in 1972 or so when it was a tiny place tucked away in northwest Portland. I’ve been a fan of indy bookstores ever since. In fact the kind of books I write would not be possible without knowledgeable and passionate booksellers helping readers find just the right fit.

So I was elated today when I saw that the independent bookstore Andersons in the Chicago area had named WRITTEN IN STONE to it’s 2013 Mock Newbery list. The complete list of 25 contenders for the Newbery medal here at the Anderson’s website.

I am also very grateful to the librarian’s who have chosen Second Fiddle for this years Oregon Battle of the Books list for 6th to 8th graders. It’s a fabulous program where kids form teams, read a slate of 15 books, and answer questions about them in a quiz bowl format. It’s great fun and I’m proud to be on the same list as my friends Laurel Snyder with Bigger than a Breadbox, Operation Redwood by S. Terril French, and Night of the Howling Dogs by Graham Salisbury. If your school does not know the joy of the book battle here’s where you can go for more information.

So happy new school year to all you wonderful school librarians who do so much to help kids find books to grow on.

And a big thank you to the following independent bookstores who have invited me to come share my books. I’ll have a full list of bookstore appearances up on my calendar soon.

A Children’s Place Bookstore in Portland, OR

Waucoma Books in Hood River, OR

Klindt’s Bookstore in The Dalles, OR

Rediscovered Bookshop in Boise, ID

Aunties Books in Spokane, WA

Village Books in Bellingham, WA

Secret Garden Books in Seattle, WA

The Linden Tree Books in Los Altos, CA

Stay tuned for dates and times!

Using Pinterest with Middle Grade Novels

I don’t like to think of myself as a Luddite. I enjoy technology and social networking, but I confess when I first heard of Pinterest I was filled with dread. I didn’t need another distraction from my deadlines. I didn’t have an overwhelming desire to look at every cute kitten that ever lived or learn about people’s quirky taste in shoes. I had every intention of giving this new social network a pass.

But then while working on the author note for my book Written in Stone, I wanted a visual for a particular type of ocean going canoe made by tribes from the Pacific Northwest. I found a group of boards on Pinterest called the Native American Encyclopedia. It has, among other things, a large collection of historical photographs organized by tribe including a variety of images of canoes that I needed.

It got me thinking about ways I could use Pinterest to make my historical novel more useful to teachers and vivid for students.

Children in every single state study Native Americans at some point in their middle grade years. I know teachers are looking for good books with Native American characters. I also know that most people, when they think of Native Americans, default to the Great Plains tribes and picture the horse and teepee cultures of the prairie. My book is set among the cedar and salmon people of the Olympic Rainforest in western Washington. Most people don’t have a visual reference point for this incredibly rich and beautiful culture.

The Olympic Peninsula is home to the only temperate rainforest in North America. Most people don’t have a visual vocabulary for the temperate rainforest either.

I would have loved to do an illustrated book like the ones I remember from my childhood, but unfortunately illustrations would price the book out of reach for already struggling school libraries. It’s my hope that Pinterest can serve to fill the gap. I set up a board for each of my novels with images of the setting and key objects from the story.

The thing that makes Pinterest a particularly useful tool is the space at the bottom of each picture with room to write a caption. Most users put a very minimal title in the caption space, but there is room enough for 500 characters so I can give some context for an image or mention how it relates to my book.

It took me about 20 minutes to learn how Pinterest works and set up a board for each of my books. I spent about an hour gathering the initial images for each board. I spend about an hour a month adding images. That is a manageable amount of investment in time for what I hope will be an engaging and useful tool for classroom teachers and book clubs.

I’m still very new to Pinterest and I’d love to hear from teachers whether they use it already or would consider using it in the future. Here’s the link to my Written in Stone board. Please take a look and leave a comment!

The Death of Copyediting

I’ve heard about the death of copy editing many times, both from authors and librarians, lamenting the lack of time for copy edits and the multiplicity of errors in books. I can only speak from my own books at Random House, but in my experience copy editing is alive and well—distressingly so.

This might not be everyone’s experience. Perhaps it’s just my own manuscripts that go out emblazoned with the words Not Written By An English Major upon their foreheads. My most recent manuscript was copy edited by no less than three people—each with her own color of pencil. As I read through it was clear to me that Violet and Indigo did not like each other very much, but Green, obviously the middle child of the group, was there to say, “Come on, girls. Can’t we get along? It’s just a hyphen!”

I was left with my highly-embarrassed Scarlet pencil to follow after my much wiser sisters of syntax who marked no less than a dozen items on every single page of a manuscript that ran longer than 160 pages. It’s nearly 2,000 copy edit marks!

My job for and entire week was to think about every single one of those marks and make a decision. Often it was the fairly easy. “Duh, of course the comma goes there. Why didn’t I notice that ages ago?”

Although to be honest, sometimes it’s more like, “Fine, what ever you say! Who cares if concertmaster is one word or two?”

And I confess that from time to time it’s even, “Seriously? There’s a rule about that? Dang! I should have been paying attention in English.” Lucky for me Violet, Indigo, and Green were paying attention. In fact, they were the honors students, I’m sure of it.

Every now and then I have to say, “Now look, I know your suggestion is technically superior in every way but no kid would say or think this. Ever. Not in any century or any other planet. Sorry.” For reasons I do not begin to understand this is abbreviated STET.

I can see why copy edits get neglected. It’s difficult, often tedious work, it requires not just technical excellence from the copy editor, but also artistic sensibility, and it is frequently accomplished on a tight deadline.

And so, dear Violet, Indigo and Green, Thank you for your diligence. Thank you for your depth of knowledge in English, and for this book, German, French, Russian and (no kidding) Estonian. I am completely dazzled that you found a speaker of Estonian! Go Violet! Thank you for your probing questions, your willingness to hunt up accurate maps and even do the math on rates of exchange. I’ll never make fun of an English major again! Most of all thank you for respecting my reader enough to help me make Second Fiddle the best book it can be.