The Secret Grove Pt. 5

This should be my last post about Secret Grove, at least for a while. This is where I compare my novel, “First Monday Park,” against the genre to determine how conventional my ideas are and whether it has traditional appeal.

Child Protagonists: Yes. My protagonists are ages 8 through 12, so according to trade wisdom my target audience is 6 to 10. However, the vocabulary is a bit much for 6 and I don’t believe the limit is 10. My hope is that anyone who has been ages 8 through 12 will be able to identify with the characters and enjoy the narrative.

Orphaned or Child of a Single Parent: No. My kids don’t get to blame lack of parents, or even lack of loving parents, for their problems. Critiques of “First Monday” from my English instructors so far have been something along the lines of, “Lovely prose, smart characters, but what is their problem? What will they have to overcome?” They want me to make the parents abusive, or some other obvious, ugly flaw. I would rather highlight more subtle, common problems that we acquire as children and carry into adulthood; self-identity, finding the balance of individuality and acceptance from peers, etc.

Entrance to a Fantastic World: Yes. I’m still trying to decide exactly how fantastic it is and how I am going to fill some potential plot holes in this regard, but they definitely go to another world and it is totes awesome.

Through a portal: Yes. The book spends a pretty long time on our side, actually. It’s one of the weaknesses of the narrative, but I don’ think it drags when you read it. Maybe I’m wrong.

Travel Buddies: Yep. There are no fewer than five. I’m writing in 3^rd person with close psychic distance and rotating character point of view, so every child is a protagonist one chapter and supporting cast in the remaining four. Other writers have strong objections to this idea. They don’t like the idea of switching characters at all, saying that every reader will inevitably pick a favorite and be disappointed that the entire narrative is not related from their point of view. Decide which character is the most interesting, they tell me, and make that one the protagonist.

I think this is bad advice. I’m attempting to have wide appeal, and selecting a protagonist means isolating a gender. This is not an insurmountable obstacle, of course. Girls love Harry Potter and guys root for Katniss Everdeen, but my reasoning goes beyond gender. I cannot pick the most interesting character because they are all interesting. They have their own challenges, and help one another through them using their unique strengths and personalities. My goal with multiple protagonists is to point out that we are all stars in our own narratives, and also co-stars, supporting cast, and “person sitting on bench” in other people’s narratives.

As for the high number of protagonists, well, that’s hard. I want mixed genders and I want friends, not just family. Eliminating one character would throw off the group dynamic, making it unlikely that any of the kids would be friends. Joyce Carol Oats commands young writers to “kill your darlings” when needed, and this may be one of those times, but I’m going to try to get away with it first.

Guides: Yes. Haven’t figured out exactly how many guides, or how long they stick around, but there will be some guiding happening.

The Ultimate Evil: Yes, but I want two villains, one obvious and one subtle. I’d rather not stray into spoiler territory just yet.

Prophecy: No. At this point in literature I think prophecies are a crutch. We need to come up with other ways for children to be impactful and relevant.

Allegory: Gosh, I hope not after last week’s harangue. Still, Lewis was both critical and one of the worst offenders, so I make no promises.

Time Discrepancies: No. Again, I was tough on this trope earlier so it would be inconsistent for me to use it. Note that I have not two but four loving parents, so how am I going to explain five missing children for an extended period? How indeed?

“First Monday Park” has six of ten conventions of the genre. It isn’t the definitive Secret Grove, neither would I venture to say it is the perfect one. However, I think I hit the most important elements and bypass those that are deemed necessary plot hole fillers.

Here I go to work on it some more.

The Secret Grove Pt. 4

Here we go, more Secret Grove stuff. This would have been a college paper, but I graduated and have no other venue. You’re welcome.

Last week we looked at travel buddies, guides, the ultimate evil villain, and prophecies. Today we address allegorical challenges and time discrepancies.

Allegorical Challenges: Allegories are essentially extended metaphors with a philosophical or moral objective. When done right they clarify complicated ideas and moisturize dry reading. The most popular examples are Plato’s cave found in “Republic,” Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” and Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

As a general rule, allegory and entertainment are not natural partners. It’s fine for Plato because no one reads “Republic” expecting to be entertained, but to be educated. The cave helps us understand the philosophical concept we want to learn. However, when we look for entertainment and find a sermon in its place, we become irked. Peeved, even, and we think dirty thoughts at the author for tricking us, and taking our story in the wrong direction. Smart novelists try to avoid allegory.

Not writing allegory, however, isn’t always easy. J.R.R. Tolkien said, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations,” but his seminal work is rife with political and religious symbolism. His friend C.S. Lewis wrote to him concerning “The Lord of the Rings, “The two things that came out clearly were the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader.” Thus, Lewis advocates flirting with allegory without fully crossing into it. There are times, however, when Lewis steps, and even throws himself, across that line. The second of his space trilogy, “Perelandra,” and many novels in “The Chronicles of Narnia” are arguably allegorical. He isn’t alone. So is “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “The Phantom Tollbooth,” “The Neverending Story,” as well as the Christian and anti-Christian series that have been written in response to Lewis’s series. Allegory in entertainment is supposedly distasteful, but Secret Grove is lousy with them.

 There are three reasons that allegory and Secret Grove apparently go together like stink and cheese. First, Secret Gove tends toward Fantasy, and Fantasy handily lends itself to allegory. Since Fantasy authors are given more than typical allowance to invent their settings and the personalities that inhabit them, the temptation to make a fantasy world symbolize the author’s pet issue has proven irresistible many times over. Second, kids have less experienced than adults. It’s hard to recognize the sexual symbolism of vampires before puberty, for example, so the symbolism often flies over their heads. Finally, people love to preach but hate to sit in the pew. Reading through a lecture, no matter how imaginative it may be, implies the reader has some sort of deficiency. Adults don’t like to be told they have a deficiency unless they already know it, but kids are used to having their shortcomings listed in detail all of the time. When they do recognize the symbolism they shrug and accept it because everyone else tells them what to do, so it’s no big deal when their books join in the fun.

There is reason to believe, however, that if kids had the choice they’d rather not be preached at, either. When 5 year old Malachai Nicole got the chance to write his own stories with his adult brother illustrating them into graphic novel form we were given Axe Cop, containing narratives that have shown surprising depth with plot twists, foreshadowing and sympathetic villains alongside bizarre physics and copious poop jokes. However, it takes a child psychologist, not a literary analyst, to find the symbolism in the maelstrom of distilled awesome that is Axe Cop. Go ahead, try it. I dare you.

Time Discrepancies: As explained three weeks ago, the end of any given Secret Grove can be predicted fairly easily. If the protagonist’s surviving parent lives in the alternate fantasy world, they will get to stay, leaving their foster family behind. Nobody cares that the foster parents will probably do some prison time for not being able to explain what happened to the child placed under their care, because they were jerks and they had it coming. If the child has one or more loving parent(s) back home, they will return to this world to discover that “time works differently” for the parallel worlds, and nobody will have even noticed they were gone. Exceptions, are early Secret Groves “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and the film version of “Oz” opted for the cheap, “but it was all just a dream” trick that nobody finds clever. Additionally, J.M. Barrie completely ignores this trope and shows real world consequences for children’s adventures. Director Steven Spielberg upholds Barrie’s vision in his 1991 film “Hook.”

Time dilation is used because it solves “the parent problem.” Under normal circumstances, parents will notice if their kids are gone longer than an hour. Heck, they’ll notice if everything is quiet for 15 minutes. There are plausible excuses for allowing the kids to disappear for an hour or two, but after they miss dinner it gets hairy. If they show up any later than two hours tops, parents will demand to know where they were. The kid essentially has only one option: lie. If they initially tell the truth their parents will not believe them and insist on a more plausible answer than “the fairies kidnapped me, I swear.” If the kid persists in telling the truth they will wind up in counseling, either to mend their lying ways, or to uncover the horrific trauma they must have experienced in order to develop such a complex illusion for themselves. That option shuttles us off into dark grown-up territory that is completely out of character with the rest of our lighthearted children’s narrative. Or we could just say, “time works differently” and it just so happens to work differently in our favor, so nobody has to lie in order to avoid getting punished for having an adventure. The unintended consequence is that, like the “it was a dream” trick, the rest of the narrative is cheapened. Narnia leaves no hint of its existence behind save in the memories and imaginations of the children who have been there, but Neverland? Neverland is real.

Next week: a rundown of which tropes I want to keep, which I want to break, how I want to break them and why.

The Secret Grove Pt. 3

Last week we covered the reasons behind four key Secret Grove conventions; child protagonists, often orphaned or child of a single parent, enter a new, fantastic world through a portal. Today we tackle the following conventions; travel buddies, guides, the ultimate evil villain, and prophecies.

Travel Buddies: Dorothy picked up several friends on her yellow brick adventures that turned out to be an irresponsible practical joke on the part of Glenda “The Good” Witch, but she had Toto from the beginning. In “The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles” and “The Tower of Geburah,” it is a family of three with identical gendered birth order that make their journeys. Once again, C.S. Lewis uses a variety of mix and matches with siblings, family members and friends for each of his novels. Also once again, “The Horse and His Boy” is excluded because, despite taking place in the same universe, it does not qualify as a Secret Grove.

The friend/sibling (hereafter referred to as “friebling”) is brought along as reassurance for the protagonist, to raise the stakes, and if the author is feeling preachy, to teach a valuable lesson about friendship. When crossing the otherworldly threshold it is comforting to have someone from the original world to remind you of who you really are and what is important. The friebling is an anchor to reality. That same friebling, however, can be vulnerable in the new world and become a focal point for rescue operations, from imprisonment by the ultimate evil and possibly part of a “Sadistic Choice.” The best example would be Peeta from “The Hunger Games,” who serves all of these roles flawlessly, but with sexual tension and love triangle elements thrown in to satisfy YA audiences.

It appears a balance needs to be struck with the number of kids. Lewis starts with four, but with limited word count it is difficult to make all of the characters sympathetic and compelling. We feel limited connection to Susan in particular, so Lewis pares the number down to three in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” It still feels a little crowded with Edmund in the mix, so he works with pairs for the rest of the series. Many others work with three children, possibly to extend character identity to any possible reader. Birth order is a defining factor for children. Three kids allows a child to relate to the oldest, middle or youngest without superfluous characters running around.

Guides: When dropped into a completely alien socio/political situation that may or may not involve unfamiliar creatures, natural laws and/or technologies, both the protagonist and reader are in desperate need of exposition. Who better to deliver the 411 than the first person the protagonist meets, a person who happens not only to speak the same language as the protagonist, but also has an identical values system and access to the Prophecies? This time saving trope greases the plot and moves the characters along to the exciting stuff. Let’s face it, a logical progression of these events would be tedious. Tedium is bad for any book, but kids are far less forgiving than adults. Why do you think the training montage is a thing?

The Ultimate Evil: Antagonists are amazing. They are the yin to the protagonist’s yang, the shadow cast by a heroes’ light, they are harmonization, counterbalance, salt in the mashed potatoes. Villains define heroes. They give heroes agency, purpose. We wouldn’t cheer for the plucky underdogs half as hard if their opponents were gracious sportsmen. We wouldn’t root for the hapless suitor if his potential father-in-law were patient and reasonable. Think about Luke without Vader, or Enigo without Rugen. Without Jafar, Aladdin is just a homeless creep with an elaborate con to get into Jasmin’s fashionable Hammer pants. In its original 1981 rendition, without the eponymous villain Donkey Kong, the princess does not require rescue, Jumpman has no barrels to jump over, no chance to prove his mettle, no chance to become Mario. These examples show that villains first provide the skeleton of a plot. Second, they contrast with heroes to bring out their best qualities.

You can experiment with villains. Make the villain someone unexpected (Watchmen). Make the hero only slightly morally superior to the villain (Interview with the Vampire). Reverse morality so the villain is the protagonist (The Godfather). Make the villain more sympathetic than the hero (The Phantom of the Opera). Make the hero and villain personal friends (X-Men). Make the hero realize that he is really the villain (I Am Legend). Make the protagonists realize that the villain is not really a villain, and it was all just a huge misunderstanding (The Sandlot). Make the hero and the villain the same person (spoiler!). Or you can just go with the straight, inexplicably malicious, rotted soul, black as carbon villain to contrast your gold hearted hero. You can do just about anything except leave villains out.

Another function villains serve is to raise the stakes. If your protagonist saves a child from being hit by a car they are a helpful bystander. If the driver of that car is drunk they are a hero. If the driver of that car is Adolph Hitler they are a saint. The status of the protagonist changes on merit of the antagonist alone, without having to do anything extra. Therefore, when the villain’s evil plan involves not only murdering a few innocents, not only world domination, but tearing the fabric of space-time itself and destroying all worlds in the multiverse both known and unknown, the heroism of the protagonists is immediately elevated to the highest degree.

Children’s literature offers extra challenges to the villainous character. The bad guy can’t do anything too graphic like eat foie gras made from baby livers or sell puppies into prostitution. Their activities must sound menacing without being too specific, such as destroying souls or making it atmospherically unpleasant for like, a really long time. Forever, even. Anything longer than five minutes is forever in kid time anyway. Thus, a balance must be struck; make the villain too soft and you end up with a petty, ineffectual, comical non-threat like Disney’s Captain Hook. Get too crazy and you emotionally scar your audience for life, like Der Struwwelpeter. Even if you strike that sweet spot of appropriately foreboding yet not quite nightmare fuel, you aren’t out of the woods. You may find your villain has more charisma and commands more interest than your hero. Finally, if your book takes off and your publisher asks you to spin it into a series, you may be tempted to reuse your perfect villain over and over, even against logic and to the detriment of their potency.

The Prophecy: This is not a product of Secret Grove specifically, but a combination of Child Protagonists facing the Ultimate Evil. Even in a fantastic world, there is typically not a lot of reason to trust a child with the fate of your chicken sandwich, much less the world. Unless, that is, there is a prophecy that legitimizes the child as a hero. The Prophecy is yet another device to streamline the narrative so we can get to the good stuff, with the added benefit of doubt and angst three quarters into the book due to the vague nature of prophecy. The author can tack on a lesson on either determinism or the malleable nature of fate should they choose.

I don’t know why I dislike the prophetic plot device other than the fact that it has been done so often.  When prophecies are mentioned, the proceeding conversation about who believes what, the vagueness of the text etc. is boring because it is predictable. I’d like to see a book try to plausibly have child protagonists face the ultimate evil without the support of ancient prophecies. In fact, I’d like to see that so much I just might try it myself.

Next week we’ll discuss allegory, and the consequences or lack thereof resulting from the magical journey.

The Secret Grove Pt. 2

Last week I established the legitimacy of Secret Grove as a subgenre of children’s Fantasy literature and indicated the conventions of the genre. My sister pointed out Lewis Caroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as both a Dream Vision and a Secret Grove. I only wanted to establish that genre is not by any means new, and selected Dream Vision at random. However, “Alice,”one of the earliest if not the first, Secret Grove is also a Dream Vision. This is cool, but not what I wanted to talk about today. Today I want to go over the conventions within Secret Grove, explain the rationale, and explore some of the unintended consequences.

Child Protagonist: This is a function of children’s lit, not Secret Grove specifically. We like to spend time with people that make us feel comfortable and good about ourselves, and it is just as true with books as in real life. With books, however, the reader has the choice to quit hanging out with the characters anytime they choose, free of guilt or social pressure (unless it is required reading). Kids like to be with other kids, and kids in books are the best because they want to be the readers’ friend without exception or prejudice. This means that when reading, kids can and do hang out with the older, slightly cooler social caste. Therefore, the prevailing wisdom follows; choose your target age range and make the protagonist one or two years older. This is solid, time tested advice, but I am also of the firm belief that, if they are interesting and written well enough, a protagonist of any age will work for any audience.

Orphaned or Child of a Single Parent: The easy answer to this convention is that absent parents immediately evokes sympathy. This isn’t just true for Secret Grove, it’s also prevalent in graphic novels and any other narrative where the writer wants to quickly establish character angst and moral high ground, so they can move on to the important, interesting part of the story. In many cases it’s lazy writing, but with Secret Grove it offers the added benefit of opening up new possibilities for the protagonist. Percy Jackson’s dad was never in the picture, not because he was a lazy deadbeat, but because he is a bonafide Greek god. Harry’s an orphan because his parents were killed fighting the ultimate evil, which means his adventures are not just about saving the world… it’s personal. A notable exception is the majority of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia universe. The protagonists do have a variety of parental/authority problems before crossing their portals, some that come into play later in the narrative. However, the only true use of the “abandoned at birth” trope appears in “The Horse and His Boy,” a narrative fully contained inside the Narnia universe without breaching our own, thus qualifying as a straight Fantasy, not a Secret Grove.

By circumventing this obvious childhood problem, Lewis shows a sensitivity all too rare in children’s literature. Kids can have absent parents, abusive parents, or irresponsible parents. Sometimes there are problems that are not the parent’s fault at all, but they are still unable to care for their kids the way they should. Sometimes kids have difficulties unrelated to their caregivers. They worry, lack confidence, misplace their priorities, get angry; the obstacles are typically different for children, but they often have the same root problems.

I am not saying that being thrown into foster care or having only one parent is no big deal. These are huge, true causes for angst in real life, and I am glad that they are addressed in children’s literature. It reassures kids who are in these situations that their concerns are legitimate, and helps kids who are not in these situations to empathize with peers who are dealing with these problems. However, foster kids and COSPs are overrepresented in children’s literature, which delegitimizes other problems. It feeds the misconception that, if you have both of your original parents, you don’t have any real problems or any excuses for feeling alienated and misunderstood. Being misunderstood, though, is a hallmark of childhood regardless of familial status. Kids typically lack the vocabulary and life experience to communicate exactly what it is they are feeling or want. They also are restricted by their own desire to be accepted by their authority figures, afraid that if they confess to having negative emotions, dissatisfaction or doubts, parents will perceive them as flawed or take their expression as a critique on their  leadership. Then when you consider that many adult problems and anxieties stem from beliefs subconsciously gained at a young age, it seems almost irresponsible to imply that the only thing that could go wrong in a kids’ life is their parent’s death.

Fantastic World: This world belongs to adults. Kids have limited earning potential, spending power, and social as well as physical mobility. Counters, doors, chairs, steps, shelves, eating utensils, computer keyboards; the entire world is scaled for adults. We create adult problems, often times through abuse of adult beverages and/or seeking adult activities, and we look for adult solutions. When the occasional kid crops up in adult oriented narratives, they are typically a nuisance, a McGuffin, or comic relief. Kids have no agency in our world, and it is as difficult for them to believe that they could help us fix our problems as it is for us. A Fantastic world, however, operates under a different set of rules. Perhaps in another world a child might have something to offer that an adult can not.

When we engage with narrative we are voluntarily spending time with other people in different places than where we are right now. Seeking out fantastic settings indicates dissatisfaction with the world in which we currently exist. If you more or less like the world you live in you will enjoy fantasizing about one strikingly similar to this, with more beautiful people and less traffic, of course. However, some people find themselves profoundly dissatisfied with real life, and enjoy spending time in universes that don’t remind them at all of their birth world. This, I propose, is why there appears to be a correlation with social undesirables (nerds) and Fantasy, Science Fiction, Manga/Anime, etc. These are worlds where incredible, unlikely things happen, where a simple farm boy can be the savior of the universe and a teenaged girl with a bow can be the catalyst for revolution. Children are more willing than most adults to abandon the realities of our world for magic, fantastic realms where they might have more agency.

Additionally, children are used to Fantasy. They are raised on Seuss, Boynton and Carle from birth, and smoothly transition to E.B. White and Beverly Cleary. Somewhere between “Pete the Cat” and “The Lord of the Flies” anthropomorphic animals and machines fade out and literature becomes boring, but until then kids are quite forgiving with their disbelief suspension.

Through a Portal: If kids are so good at jumping in and out of fantasy worlds, why not start in a fantasy world from the outset? The first reason is character identity. We like to have things in common with our protagonists, and it is difficult to identify with a kid who has had a completely different life experience than us. 

The second reason is that it helps with mental organization. As we read and watch more narratives we acquire vicarious experiences, which help us dive into unfamiliar settings faster. At a young age, however, beginning in a familiar setting helps orient the reader with recognizable points of reference.

The third reason is the appeal of dreaming that this can happen to you. As a kid, I searched for pixies so I could shake them down for dust, and had a happy thought ready at all times. I picked through attics and stared at pictures, and you can bet your swashbuckling pirate boots I climbed into every wardrobe I could find at least twice. I knew Neverland and Narnia weren’t real. I knew the only way I could go there was in a book, which really bummed me out because those adventures were on rails. I already knew them, knew what was going to happen, and Lewis was dead before I was born so there weren’t going to be any more. Still, that didn’t stop me from checking because you never know.

I know the solution now. Write your own story. That is how I got into writing fiction; acting out Middle Earth/Princess Bride/Neverland mashups in the backyard, the very worst fan fiction in the universe. After a lot more reading, classes and practice, I finally know enough about what is compelling about these narratives and how they should be executed to try one of my own.

Next week I will continue to ramble about Secret Grove conventions. I don’t know if you’ll enjoy yourself, but I will.