It’s OK if your gay character has a lisp. Really.

So, I read (and write) a lot of YA starring LGBTQ characters. It’s my thing, as it were.

Lately, because of several factors but especially the hoopla over the now-canceled Wicked Pretty Things anthology, people have been talking a lot in the blogosphere about LGBTQ YA. Which is fabulous. More dialogue translates into more book buyers, which, hopefully, translates into more LGBTQ YA being published, which translates into more LGBTQ YA for teen readers to choose from, and everybody wins.

So I feel bad for even thinking the way I am in this post. Shouldn’t I just be thrilled these conversations are happening in the first place, and not let myself get bothered by the odd detail?

Ah, but writers spend our whole lives noticing and being bothered by the odd detail. It’s why we scream when we pick up our book in Barnes & Noble and spot a glaring typo on page 64. (Or, in the case of us not-yet-pubbed authors, it’s why we dream about doing so.)

So in that light, I’ll just list a couple of my personal pet peeves when I see people talking about LGBT YA.

Pet peeve #1: “Coming out stories are overdone.”

I’ve never once heard anyone argue that coming-of-age stories are overdone in YA. That’s because YA is ABOUT coming of age. Well, for LGBTQ kids, coming of age IS often coming out. See where I’m going with this?

Coming out tends to be part of books with LGBTQ characters in some way or another, whether it’s considered a “coming out” story or not. Hero by Perry Moore? The book about the gay superhero? Is about him coming out. And saving the world, but guess which storyline resonated with me more. Will Grayson, Will Grayson, the bestselling LGBTQ YA of all time, is about lots of things, but I would argue the most powerful scene in it is Will coming out to his friends in the cafeteria.

Not to mention that nothing in LGBTQ YA can possibly be overdone. There have been too few YA books with openly LGBTQ main characters for that to have been the case yet. If you’re tired of reading about kids coming out, well, I’m tired of reading about heterosexual girls falling in love with sketchy paranormal beings, and look where that’s gotten me.

Look, kids will always be coming out. Unless the book is set in an Ash-like alternate universe, coming out is something every single LGBTQ character will have to deal with at some point. And usually it’s a pretty big deal for them. It’s usually a pretty big deal for LGBTQ teen readers, too. If an LGBTQ teen character is narrating the story of their life, odds are, coming out will be a part of it, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s a realistic thing.

Pet Peeve #2: “Avoid stereotypes.”

I would scream this from the rooftops if I could figure out how to get up there. This is how strongly I feel about it:

It is totally OK if your gay male character is a lipsing cheerleader who wears nothing but pink and loves Barbra Streisand.

It is also totally OK if your lesbian character has a crew cut and rides a motorcycle. It is totally OK if your bisexual character sleeps around a lot.

What matters, the only thing that matters when you’re writing ANY character AT ALL, is that all those people are REAL.

So often I see people in Twitter chats asking which LGBTQ stereotypes they should avoid. As if they’re making a checklist so they can feel satisfied that they’ve written a strong gay character, just because he doesn’t have a lisp.

WHETHER OR NOT YOUR CHARACTER HAS A LISP HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHETHER HE’S THREE-DIMENSIONAL. HE’S ONLY THREE-DIMENSIONAL IF YOU’VE GIVEN HIM OTHER CHARACTERISTICS TOO. IF YOU WANT TO WRITE A THREE-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER, YOU NEED TO WRITE A THREE-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER.

I’m not going to bring up Glee as an example here, since we could be here all night arguing about that, so instead I’ll use Scott Pilgrim v. the World. Awesome teen movie. It includes a gay-male-best-friend character who exhibits just about every stereotype every gay-male-best-friend character has ever exhibited since the beginning of time. He sits around in the background of every other shot, a martini glass permanently in hand, stepping in to offer sassy commentary on the action and offer insightful heterosexual love advice. And yet he’s as three-dimensional as every other character in that movie. Because the writers made an effort to make him so.

Pet Peeve #3: “More YA authors should write about characters who ‘just happen’ to be gay.”

I wrote a whole post about this a while back, so all I’ll say here is:

No good book is only about any one aspect of a character’s life. I have never read a single YA novel that I would describe as being only “about” a character’s sexual orientation or gender identity or, for that matter, their race, gender, disability, socioeconomic status, etc.

But it’s impossible to write a fully developed character who “just happens” to be any one attribute, and have that attribute be otherwise irrelevant to the book. Every attribute of a character dictates other things about that character. Every aspect of a character’s identity is part of their story. Whether the A-plot of your book is a girl coming out to her parents or a girl colonizing the planet Xenu, if she likes other girls, that’s going to affect her life sooner or later.

Pet Peeve #4: “There are more books about gay boys than gay girls because no one is writing gay books about girls, and/or because most readers are straight girls and straight girls don’t want to read about lesbians.”

That’s not why. There are lots and lots of writers writing books about gay girls. And plenty of straight (and “straight”) teen girls are interested in reading about characters who are different from themselves.

But for whatever reason, books about LGBTQ girls don’t get published as often as books about LGBTQ boys. As for why that’s the case, I don’t know, but I’m sure there are a million contributing factors (and I have lots of theories, but I won’t go into that without a few glasses of wine first).

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All right, that’s enough ranting for seven in the morning. I should note that this isn’t targeted at any one person or site in particular; this is all stuff I’ve been thinking over for years as I’ve read discussions about LGBTQ YA on the Internet (which I’ve been doing since 2007 or thereabouts).

And as I’m still actively thinking all this through, I could very well be wrong about any of the above. So if you disagree with me, please let me know! I am totally up for having my mind changed.

Except about the lisping.

#morelispinginYAnow!

Life in Revision Land

So, at the moment, I am deep in revision land. And when I say “at the moment” I mean “for the foreseeable future, possibly up to and including the next three presidential elections, if not the birth of my first grandchild.”

Part of the challenge of writing my current work in progress has been accepting the fact that it isn’t exactly the same process I used on my last book. Which basically consisted of metaphorically skipping through a metaphorical field of daisies, writing words and characters that just popped into my brain without my having to do much of anything, until the next thing I knew, I had a first draft. Then I revised said draft via a series of revelations that popped into my head with equal straightforwardness. “I should move her nervous breakdown to chapter 14!” “Ooh, I should add a new scene where they almost come to blows with a sales associate at Target!” “A new fade-to-black sex scene in the backseat of an SUV would totally dial up the emotional intensity of act 2!” Etc. Then I line-edited it over a weeked to cut the “reallys” and “justs” down by 90% or so. And then boom. Book, done. Agent, acquired. (Book deal, not so much. But details, details.)

My new book is not like that. I have a completed first draft now, yet I’m still a long way from knowing whether I want to move the nervous breakdown to chapter 14. In fact, I am debating whether to include a nervous breakdown in the first place, because maybe my protagonist is more the panic-attack type. (Not that there actually are any nervous breakdowns or panic attacks in this book. Or in the last book for that matter. But, you get what I’m saying.)

With my last book, I was doing minor surgery. Fix a gall bladder here. Take out the tonsils, get rid of that mole, maybe throw in a little liposuction. Whereas my new book needs its heart ripped open before I can even start thinking about the cosmetic stuff.

And that’s OK. It will be a better book in the end. But first I have to figure out how to perform open-heart surgery. Which is hard. I didn’t pay much attention in Bio. I was busy drawing hearts around torn-out magazine photos of Alicia Silverstone. (Whatever, don’t judge, it was the 90s.)

And I need to accept that some books will take longer to write than others. I wrote the first draft of this one in three months, which is the fastest I’ve ever written a first draft. Of course, that doesn’t count the two months before that I spent researching and outlining. Or the weeks since then I’ve spent playing with other ideas and staring at the first draft in bewilderment over how to fix it. This revision might take six weeks, or it might take six months. It will take as long as it takes for the book to get good. Or at least good enough.

But the problem is, now that I’m finally getting used to this being-a-writer thing, now that I have an agent, now that I have writer friends who seem to churn out drafts and revisions at the same rate I churn out theories about Brittany and Santana (I have now officially moved into the Santana-is-a-lesbian camp, in case you’re keeping track), I feel like I should be writing faster than I used to. Like it should come more easily. Like my first drafts shouldn’t need their hearts ripped out to function.

And it’s hard to remind myself that every book needs what it needs. That I’m writing something different than anything I’ve written before. That, unlike with my last book, I haven’t already spent three years getting to know these characters before I sat down to write about them (that’s a story for another post). That with this book, I’m writing about a world I’ve never lived in, one I have to fight my way through nostalgic clichés to understand, one where people have thoughts and expectations that are totally beyond my own personal experience, and that all that is going to add up to a book that is harder to write than what I’ve tried before. I took on a really ambitious project, and I can’t expect to just glide through it like Mercedes doing an Aretha number.

So that’s where I am these days. Staring at my computer screen, mumbling to myself. Composing long entries in my writing journal analyzing the motivations of various characters and puzzling out how it all fits together. Then trying to figure out how to take those insights and apply them to the words I already typed. Some of which sort of come close to what I want to say but aren’t really there yet, and some of which say things that are absolutely not what I want to say at all, and that have to go far away into the pit of my hard drive, where there’s a nice farm with lots of space to run around in and other words to play with.

And now I think I’ve exhausted the total number of bad metaphors one can use in a blog post about the writing process, which means my procrastination for tonight is sadly over. If you need me, I’ll be staring at my computer screen, mumbling.

The Smartest Fortune Cookie Ever

I got this in a fortune cookie last year. It has been taped to a prominent shelf in my writing space ever since.

These days, as I make my way through the agony of revision-land, I need this fortune cookie wisdom more than ever.

Shiny New Ideas

I finished the first draft of my WIP on Sunday. This was cause for much celebration and making of chocolate-chip muffins.

It also launched me into that weird in-between stage of writing, when I’m actually not supposed to be working on, or even thinking about, the book that is currently my focus. This is because I have put that completed first draft away for a two-week period to let it fade ever so slightly from my mind so that I can dive back into it and read it through with semi-fresh eyes before launching my revision. (Not all writers do this cooling-off period, but I always try to.)

And right now, I am quite enjoying this in-between stage. Because it means I get to play with my Shiny New Idea, with which I am currently in mad passionate love.

My Shiny New Idea is a concept for what my next novel could be. Maybe. Theoretically. If I can get the character arc to work. If I can come up with a voice I like. If I can wrap my brain around the tricky parts of the plot and genre, the ones that usually throw me off.

Now, Shiny New Ideas for me are a dime a dozen. Past experience has shown that I tend to go through about six of them before I pick one to actually write an entire book on. And that’s only for the ideas I seriously explore. I have an Ideas File on Google Docs that has literally hundreds of ideas and pieces of ideas that have crossed my mind at some point and seemed worth at least jotting down.

But this particular Shiny New Idea is somehow… I don’t know… shinier than usual.

I’m trying to remember now if they all feel this way at first. Maybe they do. And then the shiny wears off when I realize I have to use words to represent the pretty pictures in my brain, and then I write a chapter’s worth of words and I think, “Oh… Wait… I have no idea what she’s supposed to do after this… And I kind of don’t care… Hmm.” And then another Shiny New Idea shows up and I run off chasing that one and all that research I just did on, like, the most popular names for Christian day camps in South Carolina (yes, I really did research that for a Shiny New Idea once upon a time) was for naught.

And if all this particularly shiny Shiny New Idea turns out to have been good for was providing a fun way to spend my two weeks between drafts of my real book, then so be it. Glee’s on hiatus. How else am I supposed to use up my creative energy?

But … I kind of think this Shiny New Idea might be The One. You know how it is. Sometimes, you lock eyes across a crowded room, and something just clicks. But nevertheless, I’m trying to be mature about this. I’m trying to take it slow. Not rush into things. I’ve been burned in the past. I’ll reassess after I see how the first date goes.

And with that, I’m off to brainstorm character backstories and research Ouija board best practices. (Which, obviously, everyone should know in any case. You never know when it will come in handy!)