In a children's literature class I took once, when I was working in a bookstore and trying to get up the nerve to look for a job in publishing, the professor read a scene from a novel where an ordinary teen girl looks at an ordinary shampoo bottle and sees extraordinary, even magical, possibilities. When I read, I find that no matter how original a story is, it won't convince me unless the ordinary details—the shampoo bottles—are believable. In the first chapter of Garth Nix's Sabriel, a teenager brings a rabbit back to life so a little girl won't be faced with the tragedy of losing her pet. We see the blood on the rabbit fur, the running child, the iron gates of the school; we feel Sabriel's urgent need to set things right—even as we also get a taste of her supernatural power over death.
Since you're asking the reader to suspend belief about some elements of your story, the rest of it needs to be completely crdible. In Susan Juby's new novel, Another Kind of Cowboy (December 2007), she makes me see, smell, and touch the world of competitive horseback riding, even though I haven't been on a horse since I was twelve. Those powers of observation about the world around you—don't lay them aside just because you're setting your story in France or in a boarding school, or just because your main character is like nobody you've ever met except in dreams. Instead, sharpen them up and use them to make the physical details of your story believable to your readers—down to the last shampoo bottle!
How do you use physical details to keep your story real?
Ruth Katcher,
Executive Editor, HarperCollins Publishers
No comments:
Post a Comment