I AM CHICK LIT

[Note: I originally posted this when I was guest blogging at Insideadog on February 6th, 2008. I'm so hopping mad* about something I read today that I am reposting it. It will be new to a lot of people, I think.]

Today’s post was inspired by the lovely ladies at Trashonista, who quoted my beloved agent, Daphne. Let’s talk Chick Lit. Why not? Everyone else has done it!

The first and most important thing about this blog post is the TOTAL LACK OF RESEARCH that went into it. I have worked hard on not researching this entry, so don’t go spoiling it for me by sending me links to intelligent articles and posts. My hands are unsullied by the virtual ink of information, and I plan to keep them that way.

When I was both a tiny and a medium-sized mj making my way through writing school, I had two handy categories:

1. Things I thought were useful for writing
2. Things I did not find useful for writing

My two category system has worked like a charm in my professional life.

I like books by writers that are written well and say interesting things about writing. I like books that point out, in lovely, concrete ways, why other books are good and how to make your writing strong. I tremble in awe before essays like “Politics and the English Language”by George Orwell. I enjoy Edmund Wilson explaining his thoughts on why people read detective stories. Vladmir Nabokov’s essays on Russian and English literature will cause your brain to melt in delight.** These things are useful.

Generally, as soon as I see an “ism,”I go and curl up on the carpet for a nice nap. “Ism’s” are not useful to me. I write every single day, and never once has an “ism” helped me to put together a better sentence. “Ism’s” seem useful only to people who like to talk to other people about “ism’s,” which I don’t, so it all kind of works out.

And same goes for labels. I pay zero attention to labels for books. I prefer not to know how a book is classed. I had no idea what Urban Fantasy was when I read an Urban Fantasy that I thought was terrible. Luckily, I had no idea what I’d done . . . because I might not have read more! I might not have known that I love Urban Fantasy! I might not have read Holly Black, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalstier, or Cassie Clare (to name just a few).

So when everyone was debating about “Chick Lit,” I was probably off eating a sandwich somewhere and missed the whole thing. Which was fine by me. Except that I kept getting these interview questions over and over again, people asking me about my favorite “fellow Chick Lit writers” or how I felt about something “as a Chick Lit writer.”

And I was all . . . “I’m a Chick Lit writer? What the @&#$^ is that?” I am always the last to know.

My true confession is . . . I was kind of insulted. I mean, I went to a Fancy Ivy League University Writing Program and everything. I have shelves full of Serious Books. I had only a vague idea what Chick Lit was, but as far as I could tell, it dealt with three things: marriage, romance, and shoes. And I had a strike against each.

Romance: When my first boyfriend showed up at my door with flowers, my first response wasn’t to swoon. I believe what I said was, “What are these for?” He said our one month anniversary. And I just started laughing at him . . . because, one month anniversary? What? ***

Shoes: As I have revealed in the past . . . I kind of hate shoes. I pointedly look forward to the day when we can get rid of feet entirely and just have cool hoverboard-like things welded to our ankles.

Marriage: I have only ever owned one book on marriage. It was called Loving: Marriage and Family Lifestyles and it was one of my required textbooks for senior year religion, and all I did all year long in senior year religion was deface my copy of Loving: Marriage and Family Lifestyles.



Evidence: a page from the Loving book belonging to Maureen Johnson, classroom 2A. I was not being particularly subtle on this occasion. Some of my graffiti over the pictures is highly nuanced.

The only thing I really did know was that a lot of people spoke derisively of Chick Lit, basically using it as a synonym for trash and often connecting it to the word “mindless.” I heard there was a whole book dedicated to NOT being Chick Lit, and that Gloria Steinem was quoted on the cover and everything.

Why was everyone lumping me in with this? What a conundrum! I figured I’d better ask around and get more information.

“It’s your covers,” someone told me. “It’s because the girls have no heads. Well, they have heads, but they don’t have tops of heads.”

I wrote this down.

“It’s the romance,” someone else said.

I wrote this down.

“It’s the light, breezy tone you adopt,” said someone else. “Humor."

I wrote this down.

“You should just put zombies in your books,” Justine Larbalestier said. “I don’t care about your question. Just put in zombies. Zombies make everything better.”****

Someone else told me that Chick Lit is about shopping, but I don’t write about shopping. And yet . . . I am Chick Lit. Yet another person told me it was about sassy young women in the city, which I never wrote about until Suite Scarlett. And yet, I am Chick Lit. Person number fifty-seven told me it was something about women who work for magazines, which I have never written about. And yet, I am Chick Lit.

“Oh, most important,” said the last person. “You’re female. Guys don’t write Chick Lit. They tried to make up a male equivalent term, but it never really took off.”

The only real defining characteristic is that it means books written by women.

Literary terms and theories are pretty jelloid at the best of times. Unlike scientific theories, they can’t be tested or proven—not in any cool ways. You can’t, for example, “prove” new historicism by putting it in a hyperbolic chamber with a weasel. (I assume that this must be the scientific test for something. It sounds very scientific.)



Where is our science when we need it?

When you write about books, you can talk about of your butt a lot and no one can do anything about it. If you’re wrong, no one will die. Nothing will explode. Being busy/lazy, I am generally all for this kind of thing.

If established literary terms are stable as jello molds, then Chick Lit is a soufflé sitting on a fault line. It only means whatever the latest and most effective argument says it means. Or whatever you guess it means. Or whatever Wikipedia says it means. Whether the books under the banner are in any way similar (except for the sex of their authors) . . . well, that’s another question. I’ve seen all kinds of weird and wonderful books that have gotten stuck with the label. It’s very arbitrary.

Normally, this issue would instantly fail my “is it useful?” test. By rights, I should be curled up in my favorite spot, ignoring it. I do, after all, have many fears to cultivate and shiny things to covet. My time on this earth is not infinite, you know. Besides, I don’t mind being classified with other Chick Lit writers. Meg Cabot, for instance, is the queen of YA Chick Lit (or so I hear). And if you want to lump me in with Meg, GO RIGHT AHEAD.

Some people are adamant that I am not Chick Lit, which is fine too. The only problem I see is . . . there is so much negativity around a term that can really only be pinpointed as meaning female-centered. The rest is just waffle. And that does bug me.

You know, there was a very good reason that Dorothy Parker wrote (or at least was rumored to have written) “Please God, let me write like a man.” She was a great writer, but as long as she wrote about women as a woman, as long as she cracked her jokes, as long as she made her sly observations about female society . . . she wasn’t creating literature. Or so it was often perceived. Many of her male friends thought she was and promoted her relentlessly. Dorothy Parker was one of her own harshest critics.

And so it seems to be with Chick Lit. The harshest words about this term seem to be coming from other women, often under the guise of promoting the work of women. *****

Ladies, why the loathing? Do we really have nothing better to do than slap each other around over some bogus umbrella term?

Anyway, if you want to call me Chick Lit, that’s fine. I’ll just take it to mean that I write like a woman. And there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

It’s when you start calling me “Jellyfish Lit” that we’re going to have a problem.



* and lazy

** I put in these fancy names to make it sound like I know what I am talking about. This is a sure sign I have been to graduate school.

*** If any of you have read The Key to the Golden Firebird, I basically give May my response when Pete shows up at the door with flowers. Poor Pete.

**** She is right.

***** Make sure to reread that first paragraph about not doing any research. It is really quite critical to my argument.

HOW TO GIVE A GRADUATION SPEECH

Ravenclawgirl asks: Maureen! I’m the valedictorian of my class and I have to give a speech! I don’t know what to talk about! HELP!

Ravenclawgirl, I am glad you came to me with this. I hope you know that I am always honest with you. So today I must lay some heavy truths on you in order to assist you. Here is what you must know: Graduation speeches are boring. They’re pointless. This is ESPECIALLY true of high school valedictory speeches, which are sort of just a setup for disaster and misery.

The valedictorian, for those of outside of North America, is student who gives the farewell speech at graduation. The word comes from the Latin vale dicere, “to say farewell.” However . . . and this may just be me . . . I have always said it (and if I comb through my mind, I feel like everyone says) valevictorian, which would mean something like “a farewell win.” Which is much closer to the reality.

The job of valedictorian is normally given to the person with the highest grades. Sometimes, this goes to a really nice, hardworking person who quite frankly deserves the title. Quite often though, the battle for valedictorian is a combination of outright tooth-and-claw viciousness and cold, calculated schemes right out of old KGB manuals. Phones are tapped. People are stuffed into trunks of cars. Or, at the very least, school rules are scrutinized to figure out the exact calculus needed to be named The Best Student—some arcane mix of classes and ancient rules written on parchment and stored in the school basement. It’s ugly.

Now, don’t think I am making light of your achievement, Ravenclaw. I’m not. Had I not been so very lazy and otherwise preoccupied in high school, I would have entered the ring and fought for my chance. And I wouldn’t have made it. If you’ve been asked to give this speech, you have probably worked very, very hard. And if you’re calling yourself Ravenclawgirl, you are an awesome Harry Potter nerd, and obviously one of the good people. You have earned that time at the podium.

But what is that prize, exactly? It’s the chance to make everyone in the room suffer for ten to fifteen minutes. That, I will admit, is a pretty sweet privilege. But that precious opportunity is too often frittered away in a boring speech. And I don’t blame the boring speech givers for this. Not really. A boring speech is expected. At my high school, I think the administration DEMANDED it. You’re supposed to go up there and drone on about how much you’ve learned and how much you’ll miss everyone but you’ve all grown and must move on, and you have to make a lot of analogies to long roads, paths, and journeys. This is how it must be.

But to what end? Who is this canned speech for? Not you. You lost sleep over it. Not your classmates—they just want to get out and go to the party. Not your parents—they’re too busy messing with the video camera. Not your teachers—they’ve listened to dozens of these.

So why do they make people do it? Why do they sometimes demand to see them in advance to make sure they are BORING ENOUGH?

This is why I’m so glad you’ve come to me.

Whatever you do . . . WHATEVER you do . . . do not read any books on speechmaking by people who consider themselves good speechmakers. Self-styled speech coaches give BAD ADVICE.

They typically follow a pattern. First, they want you to say something that expresses that you are looking back on your four years of school. Believe me when I say that the second you utter the words, “As I look back on my high school years . . .” everyone in the entire room goes into a coma. Unless your very next words are: “ . . . I most remember the day that velociraptor attacked the school and we were all killed and then reanimated a week later using that highly experimental serum . . .” you are done.

Then, they usually suggest that you throw in a few random memories. You know . . . the time so-and-so had a pizza delivered to class, or that time all those people got together and sold all those baked goods to raise money for the local hamster home, or the time the basketball team won the championship. What this REALLY is is a cheap ploy to say people’s names into a microphone. So maybe the popular people get one last taste of microfame. Like they haven’t gotten enough attention in the last few years. Maybe you can work in the names of your friends, but you’re going to leave some people out, and that will make them hate you. You can’t win.



The public is fickle

THEN, they usually advise that maybe you should use examples from your own life where you have overcome something or learned something. This invariability turns into a litany of your own accomplishments and has you saying things like, “When I was captain of the swim team, I learned about the value of teamwork. Even though when I was out there in the pool it was really just me winning all those races by myself, I knew I was a part of a team, even when the other team members really did nothing. That’s what teamwork is. Me being the best, and other people sharing the credit. And that’s something I will take with me as I go on in life.”




I have achieved many things . . .

FINALLY, they always want you to close with a quote. Don’t get me wrong, I like a nice quote. I wrote papers in college that were almost entirely comprised of them. But this step is a cop-out. The implication is that you can’t come up with anything good to say on your own, so you should just scout around online to find someone else’s words—someone you’ve probably never heard of, from something you’ve never read. You can go to sites that have large collections of quotes just for this occasion, so you can REALLY make the speech as generic and typical as possible!

Now that I’ve pointed out the problems, Ravenclawgirl, I want to get to the solutions. Because I have them. I have created some frameworks to make your speech AWESOME and give people what they really want!

THE “INSPIRATIONAL WORDS” SPEECH

Read your boring speech as normal. When you get to the end, to the part with the quote, say, “I would like to conclude with a few words by William Shakespeare.” Start reading from the beginning of Henry V. Keep reading from the entire play, including all stage directions, until they shut off your microphone.

THE “I HAVE SUFFERED A TERRIBLE HEAD WOUND” SPEECH

What you will need: a blood pack (corn syrup, water, and red food coloring in a plastic bag with a zipper seal)

As you go up to the podium, pretend to fall and smack your head hard. Quickly dip your hand in your blood pack, then slap the fake blood to your head. Close the bag and conceal it back under your robe. (Don’t use TOO much blood or you will be immediately taken away in an ambulance. Unless that’s your goal. It’s a viable option and highly satisfying to the audience.)

Insist that you are fine and demand to be allowed to give your speech, because this is your big day. And since you’re supposed to be up there to show how you’ve grown and overcome, people will cheer for you. When you get up there, struggle with the pages of your speech. Keep the first page on top, but give the rest a good shuffle. Start reading unsteadily. It will sound all right for about a minute, but then you will get to the shuffled pages. Just keep reading. Do the whole speech this way, until you nearly reach the end, then realize your mistake and request to start over. Reshuffle the pages and repeat. Do this until the school nurse comes and/or they shut your microphone off.

THE SUSPENSEFUL SPEECH

What you will need: a friend in the AV department

For this speech, you have to start off really boring. Go up to the podium and start reading the usual, “When I look back on my four years of high school, I realize how much I have grown and changed. But the road of life is long and winding. We have come this far together, but today we are at a crossroads. And though we may all be going in different directions, we can look back and see where we’ve come from. We have all gathered here today to mark this event, but since I have you all here, I can now reveal that one of you in this very room . . . IS MY MURDERER!”



WHO IS THE MURDERER?

On that, your friends in the AV department will cut all the lights and play a loud sound effect of a gunshot and some screaming. When the lights come back up, you will be gone. If you want, you can have a friend from the theater department come running in, claiming to be a police detective and demand that everyone remain where they are. You, of course, will have run out a back entrance into a waiting car.

Need more help? LET ME KNOW!

MAY DAY

GOOD MORNING! It is time to give out some prizes from last night.

First, for a random question in the comments:

Lily asks: Hey Maureen, I have a question for you… If you had a choice between blogging everyday for the next ten years (including your birthday, Christmas, talk-like-a-pirate-day and times of all other celebratory events) OR blogging about twice a month from a platform SUSPENDED 100 FEET IN THE AIR… which would you choose?? Loves xxxxx

Lily, I think I will find out that answer in a few weeks when I am on a platform hundreds of feet in the air trapezing myself to death.

Second, for a surprise! There were many, and I loved them all. FOR INSTANCE, there is now a BEDA BUDDIES Youtube channel. There was this video, and this one, and this poem. There were photos and letters and stories, and I loved THEM ALL. It took me ALL MORNING to go through them and APPRECIATE them.

However, I think I was MOST surprised by this. Neil has created something truly special here.



(In case you are wondering, he is referencing this video I made with Libba Bray. Also, I think Neil may be very, very tired, and this exhaustion has brought out his GENIUS.)

Third, the review. Thank you to EVERYONE who posted one! I had to pick randomly. Lauren, who posted one in Amazon, came out the winner!

So Lily, Neil, and Lauren . . . please e-mail me all RELEVANT INFORMATION so that I can send you your books!

I want to thank everyone who joined BEDA, or read, or left comments . . . basically, everyone reading this now. Because there is no way I would have made it through without you.

Also, for those of you who have written in and seem sad that my BEDA is over . . . DON'T WORRY. My blog is NOT OVER. This was just something to KICK START a whole new era of LOTS Of blogging and the new Ning. And I am RIGHT NOW working on something new for the SUMMER.* So I'm still here, things are still rolling, and YOU should keep blogging and buddying. This was only the start!

For EXAMPLE. Kasey is looking to start a group blog with people, with each person taking one day of the week. WHY NOT JOIN?

Do YOU have other BEDA-related projects you are starting with other people? Let me know!

So, I'm just going to take a day or two off IS ALL. I have to go do some Scarlett-related things, as today is her OFFICIAL paperback release. Since it is also Buy Indy Day (in support of independent bookstores), perhaps you would consider getting a copy at YOUR LOCAL STORE? Perhaps? It is up to you.

I will see you guys on MONDAY.



* Hints coming soon.