educator resources, a virtual event, and encouragement to watch more television
Hello, readers! It is February, the most February of all the months, and nobody can argue with that.
We are two months out from the release of Hunters of the Lost City, and my publisher has put together some resources for educators and readers. There is an Educators' Guide, which includes discussion questions and suggestions for classroom use, and an Activity Kit, which offers some imaginative brainstorming and baking fun. Both resources are free for anyone to use, download, replicate, and distribute.
Both resources are also linked on my website, as are numerous places where you can preorder Hunters!
And it's time for the events to start rolling out, starting with School Library Journal's Middle Grade Magic, a free virtual event that will take place on Thursday, March 10, 2022. I'll be participating in a discussion on "A Matter of Life and Death," with Aya de León, Lev Grossman, Sylvia Liu, and Jenna Yoon, at 2:15 PM ET. Check out the schedule and register to join on the website.
A new article of mine was published on Tor.com at the end of January: The Best Niche Genre? Creepy Books About F*cked Up Films That F*ck People Up, in which I discuss books about weird and dangerous films, and the comments provide so many recommendations I can barely keep track.
I’m talking about stories about evil, haunted, mysterious, or just plain fucked-up filmed media. Stories in which a film of some sort is an active component in the mystery, thrill, or horror, in which the fictional filmed media in question—whether it’s a dusty old reel of unknown origin or a scratchy home movie or a viral video—has an effect on the characters and the narrative that stretches into the realm of the terrifying, unsettling, or weird.
This does include found footage horror and various mixed-media, epistolary, or documentary styles of fiction, but the category is so much bigger than that… It also includes stories about lost and forbidden films, inexplicable recordings, secretive records, haunted home videos, and so much more. If it’s a story about a visual recording that spawns mystery, dread, and terror, I am here for it.
Just to be clear, all of my Tor.com articles happen the same way: I have an idea of something I want to write about, I write a short pitch for the blog editor, and she approves or comments on it. I'm not on any sort of staff; nothing is solicited or assigned. It might be different for reviewers or people with regular columns, but I literally just throw my ideas at the editor as I have them--and all of my ideas are about things I love, things I am excited about, things I really want to talk about for whatever reason. I think I would make a terrible critic or reviewer, as I have no interest in talking about things I don't like. But free rein to talk about what I do like, in various different ways, is a great deal of fun.
All of my various articles are listed and linked on my website.
On the topic of things I love, I have been thinking a lot lately about the different ways people experience stories. I made a jokey post on social media the other day about how some readers will say my books are "action-packed and fast-paced!" while others will describe the very same books as "slow and nothing happens," and how this amuses me because people tend to think about story pacing as something intrinsic to the story, rather than an aspect of the perspective of the person experiencing the story. That's not exactly what I'm going to talk about here, but it is what led me into thinking about this topic.
Thanks to an old friend's gentle prodding, I've recently started watching Langya Bang/Nirvana in Fire, as is inevitable when one develops an interest in Chinese dramas. (I reward my friend's recommendation efforts by texting her incomprehensible reactions that consist mostly of exclamation points and emojis.) I'm maybe about halfway through the 50+ episodes. It's every bit as brilliant as everybody says. Maybe even better. I'm going in completely unspoiled and loving it, and I could talk about all the reasons why, but the one thing I'm thinking about today is what means for the audience experience when a story has trust in both itself and its audience--or when it lacks that trust.
I generally think of myself as not being terribly interested in a lot of stuff described as "court intrigue" or "political scheming." There are exceptions, like Megan Whalen Turners' Queen's Thief series or C.S. Pacat's Captive Prince trilogy, but most stories centered on political scheming don't really grab me. Except, apparently, when it's revenge scheming about imperial politics in 6th century China. Langya Bang/Nirvana in Fire is about 85% people sitting around talking about political schemes (the other 15% is martial arts fights and painfully awkward dinner parties) (sometimes at the same time), and I find it to be so insanely engrossing I have stayed up way too late way too many nights in a row, without any real awareness of how much time has passed.
Maybe it means that I'm a sucker for pretty costumes and sad-eyed men (it's true; I am), but I think there's something else going on, something that has got me wondering why it feels so refreshing for a story to so completely capture my attention for hours on end, and how rare that is these days.
So there's this episode that is focused almost entirely on a single sequence of scenes. That sequence consists of two men, sitting on the floor of a prison cell, explaining a complicated conspiracy and some backstory to each other. And that's it. It is literally just talking. In a dark room. There’s hay on the ground. It is a lot of talking--and monologuing from the main character, including the absolutely glorious moment when he says, and this is a direct quote (in translation), "The reason you lost to me is because you are stupid, and because I am smarter than you." Then proves it. At great length. Including explaining a great number of things we have already learned in some other context or watched play out over the previous twenty-some episodes.
Everything we are told about writing says: don't have your characters explain the plot to each other, don't dump backstory in giant paragraphs of information, don't take time to tell the audience things they already know, and most of all never have your characters monologue about how smart they are. This conversation does all of those things. And it is absolutely riveting.
It's playing with about seven layers of inter-character manipulation. It's full of edge-of-your-seat tension. It cleverly pulls multiple story threads together in a way that answers some questions and creates several more. There's no eruption of action or violence. There's no wild twist. Everything revealed follows logically and organically from what we already know, and when those revelations spread to other scenes It's just a few people realizing things one by one, and every revelation hits harder. Watching it feels like being stuck in one of those laboratory pressure machines that crush something slowly, slowly, slowly--then destroys it all at once, so fast you can't even see it happen. (In this case what it destroys is your heart. Then it sweeps up the pieces and crushes it all again.) It provides both catharsis for what is revealed and bone-deep dread for everything yet to come. It is so, so good.
So, yes, maybe it is just two men talking, but the conversation is accomplishing multiple things for multiple characters beyond simply relaying information, so it captures the audience's attention easily and holds it without wavering. There are a lot of good writing lessons in here! But I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. While I was watching, I was wholly captivated. The thinking came later.
And I keep thinking about that, about everything that makes it work, and how changing it might have made the whole thing fall apart. The shear commitment to focusing on a conversation between two guys sitting on the floor of a prison cell, without flinching, without any misdirection regarding what's going on. Trusting the quality of both the writing and the acting. Letting it play out for as long as it needed to.
So many other shows would have either cut the conversation down, or interspersed it with something more active or shocking or edgy (like Games of Thrones and their infamously stupid sexposition scenes). Because that's what you do when you don't trust that what's happening in the story is going to keep the audience's attention: you throw a bunch of other things in in hopes that something will stick. Cliffhangers. Fake-outs. Quick cuts. A whole lot of dumping us into things in media res. All fine to use in moderation, but should not be relied upon as storytelling life support.
In fact, we're so used to tactics of attention-grabbing that it requires a bit of a mental adjustment when they're absent. So often of it feels like people have stopped trusting their own stories to be interesting, or stopped believing that the audience can ever care. So it feels a little surprising, in a good way, when a story goes along with the confidence that it has our attention, it's not going to lose it, and it doesn't need to play any games to keep our interest.
It's especially noticeable with television, I think, because TV is the media format that most people deliberately don't give their full attention to. Many people feel like they have to be doing something else while watching TV, or else that time is wasted. I used to think that way too. I used to do crafts or chores, catch up on my phone, talk to friends, because just sitting there felt wasteful and wrong. It's so easy to become used to a feeling of busyness that even actively doing something can feel like doing nothing, when it's the wrong kind of thing, when it's not productive enough, not social enough, not useful enough. A throwaway thing to do with your time. Never the first choice.
Which is a shame, I think, because television is one of our primary ways of experiencing a wide variety of stories, and experiencing stories is something we should treat as a worthwhile activity in itself. We should give ourselves permission to acknowledge that time spent doing something we enjoy is never wasted, even if it is not in service of a larger goal or a means to some productive end. (Why, yes, I suppose I am encouraging you to put your phone away and leave your chores unfinished and pay more attention to your television.)
But it's also a shame because I worry about how much it restricts storytelling styles when we're constantly told that everything we do is a battle against distractions, and everything we create must be tailored to fight those distractions, and anything that is not easily packaged as an attention-grabber is retooled until it better suits the purpose of keeping your attention. Obviously this is not universal--I started this talking about a hugely successful show that hundreds of millions of people have watched, hardly an example drawn from artistic obscurity--but it's so easy to see those pressures creeping into the choices of writers I know, and to feel them in my own work.
The reasons for this pressure are no mystery, as it's all driven by the industry and market pressures of creating a never-ending stream of Exciting New Things That Can't Be Missed, because no matter what you do or how well you do it, the assumption is that people have forgotten it and moved on to the next shiny object before you're even finished. It's cynical and unpleasant and does not leave a lot of breathing room, for both artists and audiences, because everybody is so afraid that room to breathe is wasted time, squandered attention, missed opportunities. It takes conscious effort, I've found, to readjust our thinking to escape this habit. To step back and look at the whole story and thinking about what every moment needs, rather than only ever considering their utility as a way of promising that something more exciting will happen soon, we promise, just stick around, you can't afford to miss it.
And, yes, now I am talking about more than just television and writing.