Happy Birthday to Harriet

Last week marked the 50^th year since the release of Harriet the Spy, the groundbreaking novel by Louise Fitzhugh.

Here’s an article about it in Publisher’s Weekly: http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-book-news/article/61119-harriet-the-spy-celebrates-50-years-of-sleuthing.html

When I first read Harriet the Spy, I was about nine.  For the first time, I recognized myself in print.  I didn’t look like Harriet (although I appreciated that she chose to wear glasses, a condition foisted on me by virtue of bad eyes), and I lived not in Manhattan but in Berkeley, California, which struck me at the time as woefully pedestrian.    I went to a rather large public school, my father was a surgeon, and no one in my neck of the woods had either nannies or cooks.  I did not have a Sport or a Janie in my life: my best friend was Susan, who I think wanted to be a cartoonist.  (Now I see this as admirable, but at the time, I desperately wanted a friend who planned on blowing up the world.)

Nothing about me looked like Harriet.  And yet, I saw myself in her.  What I saw was a girl who understood what writing was, what it meant, why it mattered.  A girl who valued her interior life more than her social life and had to struggle to make room for the friends she loved a lot.   Someone who thought she didn’t care what other people thought about her but, in fact, did.  Someone who genuinely liked herself, even as she was able to take meticulous note of her flaws.

 

Of course, I tried to spy.  I couldn’t.  Houses in Berkeley were too exposed, and there were no dumbwaiters.  Also, I was shy and terrified of being caught.  In that, I was not like Harriet.  It was a source of profound disappointment.

I tried to like tomato sandwiches.  Ultimately, I had to admit that I liked pizza more.

But I did write everything down.  I looked at people wherever I was, and I wrote about them.  And that was how I found myself, how I finally realized who I was.

I strongly urge everyone who hasn’t already done so to read the book.  It is still wonderful, and you will be a better person for having met Harriet.  She remains a treasure.

You're Not the Boss of Me

One of the things I love about being a writer is the fact that I make major work decisions alone.  I decide what I am going to write about.  I don’t have a boss sending me memos with subject lines like “Suggestions for Next Project.”

Given this, it’s easy to forget that other people besides me are involved in the production of books.

For the past few months, I’ve been writing a middle-grade fantasy novel.  This is something entirely new for me, a self-imposed challenge I was anxious to take up.  I found myself uninspired by the things that usually interest me: contemporary kids, real-life problems, small lives examined and laid bare.  Fantasy—a genre I enjoyed as a kid—beckoned.

So far, I’ve been enjoying the work.  I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary fantasy and writing every day.

Recently I learned that the story I’m writing belongs to a sub-genre of fiction called “portal fantasy,” which means that characters are able to pass from the real world into the fantasy world.  Think Narnia.  Think Oz.  As a child, I was enchanted with the notion that there were secret doorways allowing entry to a hidden world.

I also learned that publishers aren’t buying portal fantasy.  I learned this from a post called “Portal Fantasies and Cycles of Desire,” featured on the weblog MAKING LIGHT, written by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, both editors of fantasy and science fiction at Tor Books.  Here’s the post:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/014433.html

This makes me fucking bananas.  (Sorry.  I try not to swear on this blog, because I know sometimes children read it.  But come on.  I mean, come on.)

Never mind the fact that so many of the best fantasy novels of all time involve passage into another world.  (ALICE IN WONDERLAND?  Hello-o-o?)  Never mind that the most transformative children’s book of the last several decades focuses on a character who learns that he is a wizard living in a muggle world.  Never mind that, as my friend Molly Joss, publishing industry analyst and author of several non-fiction books (www.thejossgroup.com) asks rhetorically, “In fact, isn't reading fiction, all fiction, falling through a portal into another world?”

I think the Nielsen Haydens have it right, and in time, the tides will shift, and publishers will want to buy portal fiction again.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep writing. And not because my fabulous agent, Jennifer Laughran, read forty pages and said she liked it and to keep going.

I’m going to soldier on because if I were to give up, then I’d be allowing somebody else to tell me what I can and cannot write.  I’d be trying to write to the market, which I think doesn’t make for very good books, and which I also think is odious on principle.

I write what interests me, what excites me, what makes for the kind of story I like to read.   I think that means I suck at marketing myself.  (And as an aside, if I hear one more writer talk about “branding” herself, I’m going to gouge out my eyes with a fork.)    But I’m okay with that.

I’d love to hear from other writers, editors, people who buy books, and children who read them.  What do you think about all this?