·        My name is Cheryl Klein

·        Editor at Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic

·        This talk is titled Aristotle, Austen, Plot, and Pleasure:  What a Dead Greek Philosopher and a Classic English Novelist Can Teach Us about Writing for Children

·        And I know those seem like fairly odd things to jumble together

·        So I’m going to tell you a story that’s both an explanation and a rationale

·        When I was thirteen years old, my great-aunt Dessie gave me a set of Great Books—capital G, capital B Great Books

o       A set she’d received from Reader’s Digest at some point

o       Wuthering Heights, The Red Badge of Courage, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

·        There were eight of them, I think, and I loved them for their fine leather bindings, their cloth-covered cases, their heavy paper

·        But I didn’t touch them until one night months later, when I went into my parents’ room, knelt down by the shelf where they were kept (because they were far too fine to be trusted to me), and started looking through them

·        Each one contained a pamphlet with a short synopsis and a biography of the author

·        And one of these synopses mentioned “Romance”

·        I was thirteen years old, deeply awkward, there was zero romance in my life

·        “Oh,” I thought. “I’ll read that one.”

·        So I started that one. And it was interesting. All these girls who wanted to get married. They went to balls, and the mother was kind of dumb, but the main character, Elizabeth, was funny, and there was this guy named Darcy who was awful but handsome and rich

·        Still I wasn’t hooked or anything

·        Until about a week later, when Elizabeth was stuck at her cousin’s house with the horrible Darcy. And then:

·        “After a silence of several minutes he came toward her in an agitated manner, and thus began, ‘In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.’”

·        I gasped out loud. I couldn’t believe it. Where had that come from? And Darcy and Elizabeth proceeded to have this knock-down drag-out fight about why he loved her, and everything he’d done to her and her family, and whether they deserved it

·        And I finished the entire rest of the book that night. I remember it very clearly:  Lying out on our back deck, a sofa pillow underneath my head, the sun setting, my sister watching TV inside, and oh goodness, Elizabeth was wrong about him, and oh my, she’s going to visit his estate, and oh no there he is, how embarrassing—I gasped again—and finally having to come in because I couldn’t read in the dark.

·        And oh lovely, the happy ending.

·        And after that night, when I was thirteen years old, I loved Jane Austen.

o       Three years later, when I was looking at colleges, I was flipping through course catalogs and saw one college offered a whole class in Jane Austen.

o       I went to that college.

o       Never think books can’t change lives.

o       (P.S. for Web readers:  My senior picture. It took me years to perfect those bangs, thank you very much. J )

·        So yes, I went to that college, Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota

·        And I was an English major, and my junior year, I took the course in Jane Austen.

·        It was taught using materials that had been created by a legendary crotchety old professor named Owen Jenkins

o       The kind of professor rumored to have dipped a student’s whole paper in red ink, or cutting another paper into the shape of an F

o       But he was a genius, and his students adored him.

·        And what Owen taught me about Austen, Aristotle, plot, and why we read, I’m about to tell you.

·        Before I begin, though, I want to make one thing clear: Everything I’m about to say is for your second draft.

·        If you’re writing your book, thinking “Oh boy, here’s the big Recognition scene!” or “Reversal! I need Reversal!”, you’re likely going to knock yourself out of your characters’ heads, and your story is going to feel stiff and programmatic

·        The difference between Story and Plot is that the story is what happens; plot is the structure of what happens.

·        Your job in the first draft is to write the story, get the events down, find out who these people are and what they do.

·        Your job in the second draft is to craft the plot:  to make who they are and what they do structured right, balanced right, to make it mean something

·        So while you can certainly keep a few plot principles in the back of your mind as you’re writing that first draft, you should follow your characters, not these points.

·        Jane Austen is actually the perfect example of the difference between story and plot

·        What most people know about Austen is that her stories are about women who want to find husbands. They dance pretty dances. They wear pretty dresses. They talk a lot and drink tea. And then they get married.

·        And this is all true.

·        But her plots are about something else:  They’re about women who make mistakes and take action based on those mistakes. Then they realize those mistakes, and they must come to terms with the consequences.

o       They get married in the end, but it’s more as a reward for the knowledge they gain through the mistakes than the reward in and of itself.

·        And this plot structure, it turns out, is straight out of Aristotle.

·        In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle created a treatise called the Poetics, or On Poetry. about the structure and practice of Greek drama

o       One of the first major works of literary criticism in world history that we know of

·        And when I studied it as a junior in college, I was bowled over by the fact that two thousand, four hundred years ago, someone had identified all the major principles of drama that we still use today.

·        Aristotle focuses on stage tragedy in the Poetics, but the principles can be applied to almost any form of narrative art

o       Including middle-grade and YA novels and picture books

·        And he offers a definition of tragedy that I’m going to use here to discuss the qualities of good narrative art in general:

·        “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude; in embellished speech, with each of its elements used separately in the various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.”

·        I will come back to this definition throughout the talk; I’m also going to skip around in it for my own purposes.

·        And right now I want to think about what Aristotle says is the purpose of tragedy, at the very end of the definition:

o       “Accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions”

·        “Catharsis” is a Greek term that means “purgation or purification of the emotions through art”

·        And according to Aristotle, it was meant to lead to renewal and restoration

o       You’d identify so closely with the main character, all the terror she was experiencing in her situation, all the pity you had for him

o       That when the drama was over, those feelings were purged right out of you

o       Leading to a renewed sense of appreciation for living and for the possibilities of the world

·        But catharsis can be achieved through emotions other than pity and terror

o       Wonder, admiration, a good hard laugh

·        When I was thirteen years old, reading Pride and Prejudice, I laughed, I gasped, I adored Mr. Darcy. And I was so happy when at last Elizabeth agreed to marry him.

o       I gained a new appreciation of the way people could make mistakes, and change and grow from them

o       So I changed and grew from reading Jane Austen;

·        And this, Aristotle says, is exactly what drama should accomplish.

·        So what makes good narrative art, according to Aristotle?

·        First, he says, it’s written well:  “In embellished speech, with each of its elements used separately in the various parts of the play”

·        Greek drama alternated spoken verse by actors with songs sung by a chorus

o       The speeches by the characters advanced the action; the songs commented on it.

·        And I’m going to interpret this “each of its elements” as saying your artistic form should follow your function: You shouldn’t use the chorus where speeches would be more appropriate, or vice versa

·        For children’s books—suppose you want to write a touching story about a child who has lost his beloved grandfather

·        The function of this—your intended catharsis, or what I call your “emotional point”—is to make the reader feel first sad and then comforted, yes? To achieve a catharsis of grief and relief.

·        So if you decided to put this story in bouncy rhyming text, you’re probably going to undercut that emotion:

So then, you see, my dear old Pops,

He closed his eyes and died,

I felt his crumpled hand grow cold

And I cried and cried and cried.

·        Do you feel appropriately saddened by this? Not so much.

·        Or perhaps you’re writing a novel where your main character is a class-A snob and you intend to take her down a peg. You don’t want to write that novel in first person from the snob’s point of view, because that makes the reader identify with her because she’s the narrator, our entrée into this fictional world;

o       and if that happens, nine times out of ten*, the reader will not take pleasure in having their viewpoint character humiliated.

o       [* But that tenth time can be really interesting if you do it right—if you play the audience’s sympathy with the first-person narrator off against the unlikeability, even reprehensibility, of that narrator’s actions. Think Lolita, where Nabokov forces the reader to identify with a pedophile, or Millicent Min, where Millicent means well but has the social skills of a baby rhino, or Inexcusable by Chris Lynch, where the narrator is a date rapist . . . ]

·        So if you’re on your second draft and you have your story, take a step back and think about the feeling you’re going for here. Then make sure your artistic form is serving it, not hampering it.

·        The next part of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy:  “Represented by people acting and not by narration”

·        There are two principles here that can be applied to your plot.

·        First, people acting

o       Plot, or rather story, always begins with character

o       Who these people are, what they need and what they want

o       Now, when you’re creating a main character, Aristotle laid forth four qualities of a dramatic protagonist that I think hold true for children’s books:

§        Good

·        By this he meant morally good:  Given a choice between, say, feeding themselves and feeding their families, they will always feed their families, because that’s the right moral choice

·        What this does is establish sympathy:  You want to be on the right side with him, so you take an interest in him—and that’s the really important thing here, capturing the reader’s interest in this person

·        But I think a good protagonist in modern fiction is one who’s interesting, likeable, even if they do morally evil things. Think Humbert Humbert, or Artemis Fowl.

·        In fact, then, the conflict between their likeability and their repugnant deeds makes them more interesting to read about

·        So your main character doesn’t have to be morally good, but s/he does have to be interest-worthy

§        Aristotle said a main character should be “Appropriate”

·        By this he meant realistic:  Believable according to the bounds of the psychology and world the author has established.

·        Suppose you’ve created a character who’s a financial genius:  Nine years old, but she’s already amassed $500,000 playing the stock market.

·        Is this realistic? Not on the surface. But I will believe it if you give me the right background:

o       Her parents or guardians taught her mathematical and financial principles at an early age

o       They’re a family that values money and achievement more than, say, the arts or nature or athletics, and would thus allow a young girl to spend her time on NASDAQ and sponsor her pursuits

o       She was raised to be confident and unafraid to take risks, or she’s preternaturally lucky and everything she touches turns to gold.

o       If any one of those traits were missing, she would be a much harder character to believe.

§        Aristotle’s third trait:  Life-like

·        Imperfect; flawed. Aristotle says “Fear is aroused by the misfortune of a man like ourselves . . . a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.”

·        We will come back to this principle later.

§        Consistent

·        The character will not change in the middle of the novel from a shrinking violet to a know-it-all queen bee

o       Unless, of course, that change is your plot.

o       So how do we see these traits displayed in your characters?

o       Aristotle says “Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids”

o       Behavior can reveal this kind of moral purpose

§        In Pride and Prejudice, the story begins when Darcy insults Elizabeth at a ball, calling her “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.”

·        He, apparently, chooses to avoid women who aren’t perfectly gorgeous—his moral purpose of associating only with the best

·        Elizabeth chooses to respond by making fun of him—her moral purpose of always enjoying a good joke, even if it’s at her own expense.

·        And this is so different from Darcy it intrigues him, and they’re off to the races

o       Character can also be shown through voice

I have been accused of being anal retentive, an overachiever, and a compulsive perfectionist, like those are bad things. My disposition probably has a lot to do with the fact that I am technically a genius. Unfortunately, this label seems to precede me wherever I go.

·        This is from Millicent Min, Girl Genius, by Lisa Yee—one of my favorite voices ever. Millicent uses these long, complex sentences and an excessively formal tone, but she isn’t being pretentious; she genuinely means every word she says. You get her whole character, her moral purpose, from those few short lines, and even though Millicent tells us she’s a genius, the way she tells us actually shows us it’s true.

·        So coming back to the definition of tragedy, we’ve covered “represented by people acting.” Part Two of that: “and not by narration”

o       This would be that same “show not tell” principle writ 2400 years ago

o       Aristotle believed firmly, and Jane Austen did too, that the characters’ actions should move the plot forward

§        Not the writer telling us what the characters were thinking and feeling, and not the writer inventing incidents or disasters to spur the action

§        But rather an unbroken chain of the characters’ actions and reactions following to their logical emotional conclusions

·        Thanks to Darcy’s insult, Elizabeth interprets every one of his words and actions in the worst possible light

·        And of course that means she turns him down when he proposes—that gasp moment for me.

·        But she has been blinded to his very real good qualities by her prejudice against him

·        And when she learns of her error, she regrets it. We’ll come back to this moment too.

o       Aristotle says “As far as possible, the poet should bring his plots to completion with gestures”—that is, external action

§        In fact, he could be speaking to you picture-book writers out there, as gestures can be illustrated far more easily than any internal pondering

·        So you have your characters established, and they’re doing all the acting—you’re not contriving any of it.

·        Now you have a story, and with that, a plot.

·        You remember the definition of tragedy we used earlier:  “A representation of a serious, complete action”

·        Aristotle goes on to define this kind of action, in the absolute broadest terms possible, as the “Change from good fortune to bad, or bad fortune to good”