CYD 2012 : Author Advice with Brenna Yovanoff : In Defense of Really Bad Outfits
I'm a big fan of merry_fates and I'm thrilled today to have Brenna Yovanoff here today to talk about um, clothes.
It's no great secret that I am obsessed with clothes.
I collect them, covet them, study them in their natural habit.
However, more than clothes, I am obsessed with outfits! I love outfits. Sometimes I take all my outfits, spread them around on the carpet, and arrange them into new outfits.
Bear with me-I'm flailing toward an analogy here.
“We wore some bad clothes in high school,” Little Sister Yovanoff said the other day.
And I agreed, with the caveat, “I think mine were worse than yours.” (Little Sister Yovanoff has always been far more reserved, and when it comes to clothes, this can prevent some grievous errors.)
“Well, sometimes,” she said. “Some of your fashion choices were pretty awful.”
“About seventy percent awful.”
“Yes,” she said. “But the other thirty percent were kind of awesome.”
And this is where I tie my clothing analogy to writing. I'll be honest: when I first started writing, I had a pretty big percentage of awful. I didn't want to be writing awful, but I was new to the process
and to the tools, and I couldn't help it. And this is okay, because it is absolutely how writing works.
Awful is a rite of passage. Awful is necessary.
Or, to put it another way, it would probably be pretty easy to copy an outfit out of a magazine. Maybe the fabric wouldn't be as nice and you might not be able afford the really expensive shoes so you'd have to find some kind of approximate knock-off, but the general concept is there. It's serviceable.
You wind up with an outfit that's pretty close, even if it's not exact. You avoid looking like your closet exploded on you.
But let's be honest. Where's the fun in that?
Don't get me wrong-copying other people's styles is a wonderful exercise. It can teach you about structure and language far more effectively than reading someone else's theories on them. However, while the story you wind up with might be serviceable, chances are, it will still sound less like you and more like an approximate knock-off.
And this is why I advocate embracing the awful. Bad ideas are necessary, because sometimes a bad idea is the only thing that can show you the right way to tell your story. Bad your way is still a billion times better than adequate someone else's way, because when the thirty-percent-awesome kicks in, it's magical and exhilarating, and it's all you. You don't have to share it with anyone else, no one did it first, and it is definitely not you trying to make your story look like someone else. For instance, Paris Hilton.
(And anyway, if the bad stuff really is that bad-well, that's what we have revisions for. It's not like you have to wear those bad ideas in public.)
Brenna Yovanoff once thought she wanted to grow up to become an editor. Although it turns out she was mistaken, she doesn't regret her days as a slush-pile reader or the fact that she's memorized large stretches of The Chicago Manual of Style. Her novels include THE REPLACEMENT and THE SPACE BETWEEN from Razorbill. You can find out more about her on her website
Drop by annemariewrites's blog tomorrow for another gem then come back on Saturday when we'll have Stephanie Kuehnert author of I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE and BALLADS OF SUBURBIA as she talks about writing lockdowns.