On Making Excuses

Hey, yeah, hi.
So, I'm totally still alive.

When I first started working on this post, I said that school was eating ALL my spare time. Don't get me wrong, I have been busy. But I've still been managing to find time to tumbl and watch at least an hour of TV every night, so I must still have SOME free time, amiright?

So let's talk about what this post is really about. It's something I've been thinking about and wanting to talk for a while, and now seems like the perfect time.

Basically, saying that school was eating all my spare time was an excuse. An excuse for not blogging and for being hit-and-miss on Twitter. An excuse for not reading and writing as much as I'd like to.

Making excuses was something I first thought about a while ago while talking with my sister. I have a short story that I've been sending out to a few literary mags and haven't gotten any bites. I have another short story that I've been planning to send out to mags and haven't submitted once yet. I'd told my sister that I thought the stories weren't strong enough and that I should go back and fix them before submitting.

So I'd said I was going to work on them. I pulled them out and read through them. And had zero ideas for how to actually improve them. I'm not saying they're perfect, because they're not. I'm just saying that what I've got is what I've got.

The thing is, as artists, we're always going to believe and know that a piece of work can be better. It can be easy to fall into the trap of tweaking something to death without ever actually changing it, improving it. I've always been fearful of falling into this trap. That's why I tend to write something, edit it as best I can, and stop. Move on to a new story. And what I've got is what I've got.

I realized that I was sticking my toe closer and closer to that trap to see how close I could get without actually falling in. I was actually pushing myself closer to the trap that I was so fearful of just so I had an excuse to not send my work out. Because if you don't put your work out there, you won't be rejected.

So now I'm trying to work up the nerve to put my work out there by starting little. Send out just one thing at a time. When a rejection rolls in, send it (or something else) right back out. I'm not sure if it's a good approach, but it's what I've got right now. In the meantime, I'll work on other stories. That's the best way to deal with the stress of putting your work out there. Keep writing. Keep working.

Do you ever find yourself making excuses? How do you break out of it? ♥

HOLD STILL

You guys have probably realized by now that I only review books that I totally fall in love with, and it's usually more gushing than reviewing, right? Well, HOLD STILL by Nina LaCour is another one that I absolutely adored.

The blurb from Barnes and Noble:

In the wake of her best friend Ingrid's suicide, Caitlin is left alone, struggling to find hope and answers. When she finds the journal Ingrid left behind for her, she begins a journey of understanding and broadening her horizons that leads her to new friendships and first love.

I love LaCour's writing. She doesn't overload it with a ton of details, but gets more to the emotion of the moment. At any given moment, you know exactly how Caitlin is feeling, how hard she's struggling to come to terms with her life without Ingrid, how she feels guilty for not being able to help her friend.

There are a lot of things that people hide beneath the surface and keep to themselves, and HOLD STILL really explores that. Ingrid had all these fears and emotions that she hid from Caitlin, and because she hid these things, Caitlin couldn't understand certain aspects of Ingrid's personality.

What I really love about this book, and what I think makes it unique, is the fact the Caitlin finds Ingrid's journal in her room. She reads it slowly, because it's the last piece of her friend that she has. Once she's read the journal, she will have nothing new to discover about Ingrid. Through the journal, Caitlin learns about all the things that Ingrid kept hidden from her, and through it, maybe understands her friend better than she had before.

Photography plays a huge role in this book. I'm a firm believer that there is healing in art, and that art is a great way to express things in life. LaCour does a fantastic job illustrating this throughout the book. And maybe I also love the use of photography since that's a hobby of mine that I'm pretty passionate about. :]

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Cursing In Books

More specifically, cursing in YA books. It's a common debate, and a conversation on Twitter got me thinking about it again when author Sara Zarr tweeted about an email she received about "the vile language" used in her book, HOW TO SAVE A LIFE. She then tweeted: "I disagree w/the basic premise that swearing is vile. It's very effective in the expression of human emotion, especially the painful present."

This is something I thought about while drafting my first YA WIP, and something I'm thinking about now as I revise. My male MC, Garrett, curses. Not excessively, but enough that it gets me thinking. I've been making an effort to remove all unnecessary cursing, but some of it I honestly feel needs to stay. One such use I felt needed to stay involved Garrett using the f-word—the only time that word appears in the entire novel. It was difficult for me to write it and difficult for me to leave it, but I felt taking it away would diminish Garrett's emotions. Also, I felt removing it wouldn't be true to his character.

@theames said it best in her response to Zarr's tweet: "Also even if you agreed it was vile, it's not as if all characters you write will agree."

I think we need to be conscious of our characters. We need to allow them to act and talk they way they would act and talk and not the way they would act and talk with us censoring them. We shouldn't censor our characters. Yeah, Garrett curses. You know why? Because he is hurt and he is angry. And to censor his language would take away from those emotions and, I think, would make him feel false as a character.

As with so much in writing, it's subjective. It depends on the writer and the character and the people who pick up the book. Not everyone is going to like it, not everyone is going to agree. It's the nature of all art. All we can do as writers is what we feel is right for our characters and their story.

Do you think it's acceptable to swear in YA books? How much is too much?