Tropes, dopes, formulae: The "love triangle" part II

Last week's post dealt with the disturbing trend to force a love triangle into every new YA novel or series of novels. I stated there that readers deserve better than to have their emotions manipulated, and that often these storylines distract readers from the main plot. It's a cheap, easy way to ramp up the drama or conflict, but it's quickly becoming formulaic. Don't be "that writer."


****Spoiler Alert for Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games****


Back to The Hunger Games and why the "love triangle" in the series actually isn't. 


Katniss and Gale have a best-friends-and-hunting-buddies relationship.  Gale may or may not be in love with her, but we do know for certain that Katniss isn’t at all sure how she feels about Gale.  Her main concern is that Gale will marry one of the other girls in town and she’ll lose her best friend. Nor is she interested in exploring her feelings. She doesn’t want to be seen as somebody who “needs” a love interest. This is one of the few areas in her life where she has control.  If you choose not to marry and have children, it’s for damn certain that you won’t have to watch any of them fight to the death on national television.  It’s all she can do at age sixteen to keep food on the table and help raise her younger sister while her mother tries to manage depression and put her life back together after the death of her husband.  

Katniss hardly noticed Peeta until they were both sent to The Capitol and Peeta announces his unrequited love for Katniss on live television, knowing one or both of them were going to die and it would come to naught anyway, so, why not declare it. Readers and critics have called this move “manipulative.”  If they weren’t about to enter a battle to the death, I’d agree, but the circumstances change everything.

Peeta and Gale never confront each other. Neither of them ever confronts Katniss, nor does either one of them try to coerce her into choosing between them.  Katniss is left to make her own choice, a healthy beginning for a relationship. The reader is left to speculate that, if the situation had been different, would Katniss have chosen Gale?  Or, even if the Games and the revolution had not occurred, would Gale and Katniss still be too much alike to be able to achieve a relationship that has balance and staying power?  In Mockingjay, Katniss herself concludes: “On the night I feel that thing again, the hunger that overtook me on the beach, I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.”

Maybe Gale would have come back from District #2 at the end of Mockingjay if Katniss had asked him to. Maybe they simply missed their moment, both having been too altered by their experiences to get back that innocent camaraderie they experienced before the Games and the revolution turned their world upside down. But Peeta, even after all they went through together, is “the dandelion in the spring,” the boy who loved her from afar and sneaked bread to her at the risk of his mother’s harsh punishment when he knew her family was starving. He gives her hope and represents rebirth rather than destruction. We are left with the impression from Katniss’s internal monologue that she would have chosen Peeta anyway. No phony destiny or soul-matedness, just a calm assurance that Peeta is what she wants and needs.

So, readers, please stop putting this book series on your YA Romance shelf, and stop referring to the Katniss-Peeta-Gale subplot  as a “love triangle.”

And authors and prospective authors, please think twice about forcing yet another formulaic, predictable “love triangle” upon your characters and readers.

Tropes, dopes, formulae: The "love triangle" part I

 ****Spoiler Alert:  If you haven’t read The Hunger Games series, proceed at your own risk.****

I love it when kids get engaged with books, when they relate to the characters, dress as them for Hallowe’en, all that. My school must have had a dozen or more Katniss Everdeens walking the halls last October 31; some in Arena gear, some in dresses with sewn-on “flames” of gossamer material. Students are still showing up in Hogwarts gear as well. I'm delighted that such deserving stories as Harry Potter or The Hunger Games are such big hits with my students. Both series contain engaging plots and multidimensional characters, any of whom would be worthy of fandoms and the accompanying T-shirts.

Some of these T-shirts read “I Only Date Bakers,” “I Only Date Hunters,” or, borrowing from the recent blockbuster popularity of a certain vampire romance series, “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale.” It makes the fandom fun. However, to reduce The Hunger Games, a book series which depicts a future North America as a dystopian society with huge disparities between rich and poor, to a story of “a girl who has to choose between two hot guys” is like saying Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a kid and an escaped slave who bond over their favorite sport of river rafting.

Unfortunately for the world of YA literature, too many authors are now resorting to adding a “love triangle” to their book because it’s a fairly easy way to ramp up the drama, the emotion, and the conflict.  It worked extremely well for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.  Unfortunately, too many readers lack the sophistry to realize they’re being played. Twilight could best be categorized as paranormal romance, completely different in tone and intent from the dystopian Hunger Games, a story that makes statements about war, violence, the media.  And therein lies the problem. A forced love triangle may be completely irrelevant in certain genres, distracting from the original story rather than enhancing it. Instead of a developed or developing character working through an internal struggle or questing for the Magic Thingie, our hero/heroine is reduced to a character who is validated or invalidated by how attractive they are to potential love interests. Readers deserve better.


Next week: some characteristics of "love triangles" and why The Hunger Games's "love triangle" isn't.

Collaborating across timezones: Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan on their new novel

Team Human is a new novel, a collaboration by Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan.  At this link you can read a live chat, moderated by Justine's husband Scott Westerfeld, about the book and what it was like to collaborate by e-mail from time zones several hours apart.

Among the highlights:

Justine believes outlines are EEEvil; Sarah makes outlines of her outlines.  The two were able to find a middle ground as they worked together.  It may have helped that there was no disagreement between them on how the book would end; therefore most of the major plot points must have been agreed on as well.

Both writers were able to keep the book a secret from their public and from their agents.  No mean feat, considering the lack of privacy in the era of Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere.

Being in time zones so far apart -- Justine in Australia, Sarah in Ireland -- actually worked well in some ways. When one was asleep, the other was working.  Thanks to technology, they could be sort of a tag team. Sarah got to write the first make-out scene.  If that sort if thing is important to you, make sure you pace the writing with your partner so it's your turn when that chapter comes up.

Sarah gave the following advice to writers who want to co-write a book:  Be considerate of each other, be determined to compromise and (I'm sure she was tongue-in-cheek wen she wrote this) draw up an agreement.  Justine's contribution was, of course, be willing to compromise and remember it's not YOUR book, it's a SHARED book. My suggestion:  have an idea where you want to take your story, make sure you agree on the big stuff, and just be a grownup about the rest.

After some discussion, the "floor" was opened to fans with questions. One was about handling criticism. Justine's advice was handle it OFFLINE and IN PRIVATE.  This makes her a class act. See this post and this post if you want my opinion on that.

It's a fun read.  Go and check it out.  And maybe buy the book.

Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

Yet another tribute, but he deserves it.

The past couple of months have been sad ones for readers; first Maurice Sendak, now Bradbury.  We kept seeing him on PBS, kept reading new, insightful articles from him in newspapers and magazines, and somehow began to wonder if he'd found some magic elixir that would help him live forever. It would seem perfect for a writer of speculative fiction to somehow magically become a character in one of his own stories.  

But Bradbury was indeed mortal, but unlike most of us, he left so much insight on beauty and creativity that his words and the images they created will live forever.

First, there's Neil Gaiman's tribute. Imagine reading an author, idolizing him or her, and then becoming an author yourself and ending up not just meeting your idol, but actually becoming friends. Hanging-out, going-for-coffee friends.  

Bradbury had wide-ranging influences.  Something Wicked This Way Comes is dedicated to actor/dancer/director Gene Kelly. An entire treatise on writing was influenced by the character of Snoopy in Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip.

So, in an attempt to cobble together some cool stuff without this post turning into a 50,000-word tome, here's just a small sampling. From a program that aired on PBS in 2008:

Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

On reading as a prerequisite for democracy:

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country — we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Sadly, this isn't as true as it should be.  Because people a) don't read or b) don't think about what they read, there are all kinds of misconceptions about history and science being perpetuated on social media and in viral e-mails.In the interest of keeping this blog as apolitical as possible, I'll say no more.

On creativity and the myth of the muse, in Zen in the Art of Writing:

That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

 I understand that creating is often an organic process, that sometimes our creation takes on a life of its own or goes in a completely unexpected direction, but I also believe the creative person should always remain in control of his or her creation. To use the excuse "[fictitious character's name] wouldn't let me change [whatever it was about him or her]" is, in my not-so-humble opinion, too often used as a copout or an excuse for sloppiness on the part of the writer.

 The best  conclusion to a Bradbury tribute would be these words from Fahrenheit 451:

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

Thanks, Ray, for leaving us so many pieces of your soul.

New addition to Characterizations tab

My take, part the second, on creating strong female characters. There are four articles; scroll down for the more recent  ones.

Not dead yet. Also: Middle readers deserve better

I'm still in school, attending workshops to prepare for the new Core curriculum, and I have been working on two editing jobs, so, apologies again for my inconsistency.

I've recently discovered websites where I can go to get free books for my Kindle e-reader, so I'm trying to broaden my horizons with more middle-grade books as well as some mystery-suspense and women's fiction. The middle-grade books are in anticipation of my new responsibility teaching 7th and 8th-grade reading next year.  I would love to find some good stuff to recommend to my students.  Unfortunately, that's turning out much more difficult than I'd anticipated.

The last two middle-level books I read were shockingly bad.  Great story ideas that completely fell apart in their execution. Somebody explain to me how this crap gets past editors and publishers.  The books I've read so far have been published hardcover at a couple of major big-box publishers.

Is it because authors, editors, and publishers all perceive 9-12-year-olds as being completely indiscriminate as to prose, pacing, and character development?  Are they thinking that, as long as they're entertained, kids don't care about quality writing?

To which I reply:  How are young people to appreciate or even demand quality writing when they haven't been exposed to enough of it to tell the difference?  If anything, they are the group of readers that are the most deserving of quality, as they are forming their own tastes and exploring a wider world.

*steps off soapbox*

I leave you with a quote from Madeleine L'Engle, one children's writer who respected her young audience:

"You have to write the book that wants to be written.  And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

Thanks for stopping by.  See you next week.

Inspiration and the best explanation of "show don't tell" ever

Still sounding the drumbeat of "show don't tell" and "trust your readers," I give you this, one of the best and most concise explanations I've ever read:

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."  ~Anton Chekhov


Or the glint of light in a puddle, or or through the leaves of a tree, or even, less romantically, off the roof of a car or the blade of a knife in the hand of a character.



I have editing and grading to do, so over the next two weeks, I'll be posting shorties shamelessly borrowed from great writers.


Thanks for stopping by.