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Creative Writing, fiction, literary genres, literary hybrids, literary novel, synopsis, WIP, would you read this book?, writing, YA novel
Welcome to the Cauldron, @YourChessCoach ! I’m glad you’ve found something here to spark your interest. Or, at least, I’m assuming you did. If I’m wrong, please don’t correct me, I’m feeling a bit delicate at the moment and the criticism might e in…
In My Head: It’s amazing how something you think is very straightforward can suddenly careen into a mass of chaos that leaves you reaching for the nearest beer…
In the Cup: See previous comment.
Currently Playing: Norah and Katie are still getting their groove on..
Daily Run: 2 miles. I’ll do better….
On the Desk: Arthur’s, Morgan’s, Lance’s, and Mark’s college applications, rewriting of the Mighty knights synopsis, and treatment for a new high concept idea, take 10 or so.
On the Nightstand: Meg Cabot’s Avalon High and The Encyclopedia of Alchemy
Papers Graded: 5.
Hi, guys! Sorry I’ve been derelict, I’m swamped. It’s not you, it’s me…
I spent today having a wonderful time filling out college application forms and writing recommendations from the perspective of three different teachers. I have learned a LOT about my seniors today! But I’ve also reached an existential crisis. Well, let’s rephrase: my WIP reached an existential crisis, and that in turn threw me into one.
Essentially, Mighty Knights and I have come to an agreement: It’s not really a YA novel. it’s actually a sort of literary/YA hybrid. I believe the combination we have agreed on is, it’s Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur meets James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and the Epistolary Novel (Dracula, if you will, or Carrie, or the Unauthorized Autobiography of Lemony Snicket), filtered through a realistic, non-magical contemporary American high school setting.
This sudden self-awareness moment came about when a critical reader from the writer’s website I am a member of said that the novel was a problem because a.) there are too many characters to keep track of, b.) the storyline is too complicated and has too many branches and c.) the point of view should be one character’s, first person. Her recommendations were to strip away everyone except Arthur, Lance and Gwyn, focus on the football, and tell the story from one character’s point of view. And also, to include some of the magic elements, like Excalibur and Avalon.
Or, to write Meg Cabot’s Avalon High.
And that is when I realized that what I am doing doesn’t make sense for YA. Here’s the post I wrote in response to the critique:
This is edited and cross-posted, because it occurred to me I might not be the only one trying something that doesn’t fit in the box, and also because I think I really want feedback on it….
So – protagonist-antagonist – plotline. The traditional novel setup.
This is tricky for me in terms of The Mighty Knights, the WIP I have going right now. And to some degree, in revisions I can and will rewrite Mighty Knights to at least fit this more clearly in terms of the central storyline of the football team and the sub storylines of the Arthur-Gwen-Lance and Bella-Mark-Tristan love triangles.
HOWEVER.
This book is experimental. It’s a modern re-casting of the traditional medieval Arthurian romances (think Chretien de Troyes and Thomas Malory) filtered through a realistic high school setting. The medieval works on which my book is based had the central idea that there was Camelot, and Arthur’s court, and a basic storyline that centers around Arthur’s rise to power and then his fall and the fall of Camelot, due to human flaws. And everything else in that tradition is a loosely inter-connected series of individual stories, about individual knights and their adventures.
That’s essentially what I am seeking to do. There’s a Camelot (the county where the book takes place). There’s a football team (roughly correspondent to the Knights of the Round Table). They have a leader named Arthur. Arthur has a lady named Gwen. The knights have modern versions of the traditional names. And they have a central purpose (“holy grail”, AKA football championship). And from there, the story has multiple points of view and multiple scenes featuring the various members of the team involved in mini-stories. That’s NOT because I don’t know how to write a centrally focused plot, it’s because this work isn’t about a centrally focused plot, it’s an experiment in bringing a traditional literary form (the medieval prose romance collection) into the 21st century. This works because of the setting – high schools are teeming with individuals, each with their own goals and interests and problems and conflicts, yet all interconnected in their common goal of trying to get from freshman to senior year and graduated. Within that are the different groups – the drama students, the football team, the 4-H crowd, the ROTC, the Chess club, the however-many-organizations there are to join. Some of these overlap, some don’t. My work is complicated and messy because that’s real, and because that’s what the works it is based on are. My job as the writer in this project is to present the mess in such a way that it is compelling and interesting enough to keep the readers going – so I have the central storyline, and everything else is psychologically conceived, very character-driven. If I’ve done my job properly, the readers will care about one or more of the people in this book, and read to find out how they turn out. There isn’t one, central protagonist figure. The book is about the Knights. They are all the protagonists, and they are also one another’s antagonists, and Arthur is at the center of the group as a linchpin. This works with the quest holding everyone together loosely as a communal goal, with communal antagonists (the other football teams) and also pulling everyone apart because of the individual aspect of Knight against Knight. The Mighty Knights is a return to a literary style that did NOT follow the traditional protagonist-antagonist form, because at the time the earlier Arthurian romances were being crafted that really didn’t exist. Antagonist-Protagonist-central story is a classical theater trope that became a self-consciously present literary trope sometime in the 18th or 19th century with the rise of the novel. My book is an experiment in filtering the medieval romance tradition into a modern setting.
I do understand that readers are looking for a comfortable model. I provide that with the basic storyline and central love conflicts. But beyond that, I’m not writing the traditional YA novel – I’m really doing something that isn’t being done by anyone else. I believe it is working. I believe it needs a lot of work. I believe that with a lot of revision, this book will be a great read as it was conceived, without resorting to the traditional novel plotline, and I also believe — nay, I KNOW – that if I rewrote this book following the traditional plotline, it would more or less be a worthless knock-off of the modern YA Arthurian literary tradition, and I wouldn’t submit it because there wouldn’t be any point – it has already been done traditionally. My work is important and fresh because I DON’T follow that plotline, because I AM writing a central plot with a messy labyrinth of overplots featuring compelling characters that are psychologically resonant with readers on a variety of levels. That’s realistic, because that’s what life is, especially when you’re a teenager — you know what’s supposed to be going on, you know what you’re trying to do, and then things get in the way, and people get involved, and other people are involved, and you might or might not know what’s going on, or who’s involved — and in the end, things work out one way or the other, and you learn what was going on and usually, it’s nothing like what you expected. That’s how the medieval stories worked. That’s how this story will (hopefully) work. Hopefully, when it’s done and ready to be looked at, there will be an agent or publisher out there who believes that it does. If not, I’ll self-publish this one. There will be many, many works in my future written along more traditional lines – this is just not that book.
And, in considering all of this, now I’m wondering if this book even IS YA…? It’s set in high school. It features high school students and high school student concerns. The adults are incidental. Those are all YA tropes. But it also features philosophical passages, deeply psychologically crafted characters, and as I have said, a very non-traditional plotline. It’s a book I would have loved as a teen, but I wasn’t actually a typical teen reader. I dunno. Maybe it’s not YA, maybe it belongs in high concept/literary. I know it’s shaping up to be what I want it to be, but now, I’m hearing “One of these things is not like the other” over and over in my head, and I am questioning the choice to place it in YA, young protagonist(s) or no young protagonist(s)….
Thoughts?
SO, with that in mind, here’s my re-written synopsis for this book:
The Camelot County Knights are poised to make history with four consecutive state championships at the Triple-A level. It’s the Holy Grail of high school football, and as the season opens the Knights are the team to beat. The primary obstacle standing in their way… is one another. It’s going to take focused leadership to keep this team together.
Unfortunately, team captain Arthur Draggon finds keeping his head in the game tough thanks to the arrival of Welsh exchange student Gwyneth Greidal. Until now Arthur’s defining passion has been football; but Gwyn’s glowing blue eyes and easy smile, her curvy figure and lilting accent, awaken this late-bloomer’s sexuality: for the first time, he’s starting to understand what all the fuss is about, and football might just be relegated to second place in his heart. His lack of focus enables upheaval among the Knights both on and off the field.
Summer practices brought confidence and solidarity to the team, but when school started so did the chaos. Arthur’s best friend Lance finds the girl of his dreams in Gwyn; shy receiver Mark Howell loves Bella Fayre and learns betrayal from his best friend, the hotshot young wide-receiver Tristan Linness; and rash linebacker Bret Anderson, proudly carrying his first hunting license, chooses his desire to bag a ten-pointer over his duty to the team with tragic results. As if all that weren’t enough to pull the team apart, Arthur’s siblings Morgan and K don’t want him to succeed if they can’t have their own glory: their actions constitute sabotage, but if that means the team doesn’t win the championship, it’s not their problem.
Personal betrayals polarize teammates, tragedy strikes when the stakes are highest, and human concerns trump the drive for greatness. Arthur must regain their confidence in his leadership, and each of the Knights must set aside his personal grievances, if they are to win and remain THE MIGHTY KNIGHTS. Told from shifting points of view and featuring a teeming cast of characters engaged in interwoven storylines, here are Arthur and his knights as modern readers have never experienced them before.
And my question to you Cauldronites is… would you want to read that book?
mkay. Here’s my thoughts. Do you remember actually -being- in highschool?
we didn’t all of a sudden become deep thinkers, and writers, and what have you.
I don’t know about you, but High school was when I actually did a lot of the thinking and being that I am able to expound on now.
So, if you remember in highschool thinking like something, then your characters can do it.
And I would be willing to bet you $10 or a Cotehardie (either way not fussy lol) that young adults would like to be taken seriously, and not dumbed down by an author for a change.
I think that’s why Stephanie Myers is so popular, her books aren’t “Hey you’re in high school so i’ma gonna dumb it down for U”
which, frankly a lot of the YA fiction does.
Harry Potter is another example of it not being dumbed down.
those worked
Don’t underestimate your audience. Just because one person is an asshat and can’t keep up with your writing, doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t.
Yes, I would read it, Mel. I love the concept, and I agree with you…High School is complicated. I also believe both of my teenagers would read it and love it. Have you ever read Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth? I really liked that book because of all of the characters and all of the different plots and sub plots. I am sure it is probably not as much of a literary masterpiece as what you are proposing. However, I do believe that this would be a great book and a challenging read. I don’t need authors to dumb down books for me to be able to read them. I guess I am complicated and I like it that way.
Go forth! Write!