It operates like a fable or a myth, a story in which outlandish and extravagant figures and events serve as conduits for universal experiences. Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/06/14/100614crat_atlarge_miller?currentPage=all#ixzz0r9T9l6r7

Miller notes that the interior logic of The Hunger Games does not hold together unless you regard it as a reflection of the adolescent mind.

Of course I am thinking about this subject because of my decision to revise my dystopian novel All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything) as a young adult series. (I’ve since learned there has been a novel of that title published weekly, so I will have change the title — right now, I’m thinking I’ll call it The Zones. It’s too bad because the thread of narrative in the Bauhaus song was such an inspiration to me.) I began writing the novel when I was nineteen, just out of adolescence myself, so I feel like it has the rawness of my teenage years in it — and also the rawness of my relative inexperience as a writer.

The two main characters, I admit, are a bit Mary Sue — idealized and stand-ins for aspects of my personality. (Much like the Mouse and the Minx in “Minx Mouse Monster.”) I didn’t realize it as I was writing it, but Cat, the privileged young woman with prophetic dreams, represents my desire for being a near-perfect person. (The point of the Endowment in the novel was to help society become perfect by privileging those whose genes mark them as “perfectable.”) She is pretty, smart, and nice — a little naive, too, but of course that changes. Nina, the volatile magic user, is a femme fatale — and also hot-tempered, mercurial, often mean. She’s something of my shadow self. Her flaws are mine writ large.

So what I need to do is not so much change these characters, or the other characters — they fit almost exactly the “outlandish and extravagant figures” that Miller describes — but make them more into people. I also need to gather up the narrative and start making sense out of it, giving it stronger structure that has three acts. I kept changing what I was doing when I was writing it — first it was going to be a short story about Cat (I was inspired by the novella version of “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress), then it was going to be a series of short stories set in the same universe. I even toyed with the idea of making it a comic book series at one point.

I have so much more experience with writing with intention now that this will be something I can do. It also will be fun. I’ve missed these people and this world.

I think a lot of people think of English as a kind of touchy-feely area of study, for people who swoon on misty moors and recite poetry and the like. But the reality is that in order to be a successful English major you have to be able to both understand the emotional content of literature and wield logic with rapier-sharpness. You have to be keenly observant and care about how other people think and act. You must know your own mind well enough and have enough command of language to express your thoughts in an organized, clear, and eloquent manner. And you have to have a creative mind. These are the skills you need to recognize themes and strategies when you encounter them in literature, come up with compelling theses for essays, and to write those essays and take part in classroom discussions.

These aren’t skills that lead to accomplishments that are clear for a lot of people outside the English major community: you’re not building anything tangible or receiving an education that has a clear career path (unless you’re going into teaching, which everyone will assume anyway). However, they are skills that are immensely transferrable to a variety of careers. I regularly imagine how my English skills would help me if I had decided to become a lawyer or an advertising executive or even a police detective.

I didn’t decide to enter those careers, though. I chose to be a writer and an editor, so the benefit of my education has been pretty obvious, but I think what I learned as an English major would help me no matter where I ended up in life.

All We Ever Wanted is thirty-three chapters long, 150,000 words, and rather heavy-handedly deals with themes of biology, destiny, and death-and-resurrection. It’s set in a world where the “genetically perfectable” live in fancy “Endowment Communities” and everyone else fends for themselves outside of them in an urban wasteland called the Unincorporated Zones. The main characters are Nina, a mercurial magic-using young woman who is the dead-and-resurrected god figure (she tries to retrieve her beloved friend Luna from the dead, Orpheus-style, gets stuck in the realm of the dead herself, and is resurrected some twenty-five years later); and Cat, a young woman from an Endowment community who has to run away to the Zones. But there are tons more characters, all with quirky names (Trout, Zoe, Gibson, Spark, Romero, Noah, a creepy guy called The Messiah).  I finished it in 2001, when I was twenty-three years old.

Warner Books offered to publish it as an e-novel, but I turned them down. I thought I would find an agent, find a publisher, and be a critically-acclaimed young author by the age of twenty-five. I was wrong. The novel was rejected by agents and publishers alike. A few agents expressed interest, only to balk at the novel’s format when they received partials. It’s told in both third person and in several first-person voices, something I was not willing to change. After about a year of rejection, I trunked the novel and regarded it as an unpublishable exercise — an important part of my development as a writer, but ultimately not destined for public consumption.

I’ve been thinking about All We Ever Wanted lately. It started as just thinking about the characters and the world when I had insomnia, kind of inhabiting a place and spending time with people that I created. And then I started thinking that perhaps there was something I could make out of it after all. After almost ten years, the characters and world were intriguing to me again. Dystopian fiction is popular in young adult fiction now and I could perhaps make a three-volume series out of it.

It’ll be interesting to look at it and see what has changed and what remains of my writing style. The multiple points of view — that has stayed. I remember that the novel starts out fairly melodramatic and then mellows into the more quiet conflict that I write now. And it begins with horses — they remain as well. The most recent short story I wrote has horses in it.

The contest reminds me of the “Project Song” series on All Things Considered, in which songwriters write a song in two days, based on a photograph. One of the songwriters was public radio darling Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. Merritt is one of my favorite song writers (so is Nellie McKay, another Project Song participant), so I’m always interested in hearing about his creative process.

Merritt’s songs are often very short but also very textured — with story and characters that often get my own creative mind working. I recently heard Merritt on another All Things Considered story about The Magnetic Fields, and he reveals a very craftsman-like approach to writing songs. Often, he gives himself a technical challenge — the last three Magnetic Fields albums are the “no-synthesizer trilogy,” 69 Love Songs is an album of, yes, sixty-nine love songs, and all the songs on my favorite Magnetic Fields album, i (also one of the no-synthesizer trilogy; another one, Distortion, features distorted sounds), begin with the letter “i”. In this latest interview, Merritt comments that when he’s writing songs, “I’m thinking about is rhymes more than I’m thinking about characters. And I think the characters make themselves.”

This attitude got me thinking about how it can be applied to writing fiction. I heard prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates on the local public radio show Forum recently, and she cautioned the host, Michael Krasny, not to go too far with the delusion that characters in novels are real people to the novelist. It is admittedly a real feeling, but the rational mind of the writer also knows that the characters are her invention. However, it does seem that real characters arise out of good craftsmanship — if you write about people in a realistic way, the way they think, talk, act, and interact, they will indeed begin to feel like actual people. And if the illusion of personhood can come from good craftsmanship, surely so can art.

We all have our moments. This particular one is coming at 6:30 a.m., after I’ve been up for two hours after four hours sleep and I’m contemplating yet another narrative approach to the next novel I’m trying to write. (I’ve decided that first person wasn’t working.)

And the doubt I have is telling me that I’ve done too much of that — contemplating — instead of acting. A lot of my self-criticism is justified, I think. However, I think that people who have to regulate their own productivity — especially creative productivity — need to temper self-criticism with acknowledgment of what they have accomplished. Otherwise, you can paralyze yourself. Then you think about how you have accomplished those things and try to apply it to where you think you’re flagging. So:

Self Criticism: I have only finished one prose short story since graduating. (Albeit one I like and am trying to get published.)
Counter: I have also finished two complete revisions of my novel, which is in the hands of an editor at a good book publisher. And I wrote and had published 24 columns for Publishers Weekly, short comics for Newsarama and Comic Book Resources, and a short story in the anthology This Is A Souvenir: The Songs Of Spearmint & Shirley Lee.

So what’s going on here? The big difference is that writing short stories is something I have to do completely of my own motivation. There’s no one asking me to write them, no editor giving me notes on them, no guarantee of publication. It’s an expenditure of effort without guarantee of reward. But I used to write short stories regularly, and, no accident, get them published a lot more often, too. What happened?

For one, I shifted my focus. I used to write speculative fiction, which, I think, is easier to sell than straight literary fiction, since the submission and publication pools are smaller. Part of this change was due to ego — I wanted to be a literary writer, not a genre one — and part of it was just due to a change in interests. However, seeing as I still write stories with a tinge of the magical, it could be that I should return to doing what I was kind of successful at — writing and selling literary speculative fiction.

Another thing that happened is that I learned to be less active in promoting my work. I got writing gigs because editors asked me to write something for them. I won a contest because my friend Peter O’Sullivan submitted a story I wrote (he was acting as an agent of one of my professors). I got the opportunity to go to China because one of my professors nominated me. I won English department awards for papers that had been assigned to me. Alex de Campi did me an awesome turn and introduced me to agents and editors she’s worked with.

There was a lot of direction in my life, a lot of me being rewarded because I did what I was asked to do and did it well. But there was little of me making leaps into situations where I might fail. Facing the possibility of rejection is a lot less attractive than taking the acceptance that’s offered. But the thing is, if you stop throwing yourself in the path of potential rejection, the successes that put you out there for offered acceptance won’t happen, either. You’ll use up your stock without without replenishing it. You’ll stagnate and then dry up.

So that’s what is underlying the self-doubt — a failure to learn the right lessons from past success. I didn’t mean to make a New Year’s resolution, but it seems I have. I will risk failing more in 2010.