I’m back!

Sorry I was absent for so long. As I indicated previously, I recently took a long-overdue vacation. But right before I left, I got sick, so some blogging stuff went undone. And when I returned, my internet service decided to play hide-and-seek, and it’s only been about 24 hours since I’ve had a reliable connection. Hence the absence.

But now I’m back, to thrill or bore you with more tales of the Writing Life!

Every now and then, I think about character likability. Specifically, the likability of the protagonist. I have occasionally been dinged in reviews and comments for writing protagonists who are not “likable.” In fact, the very first blog review for my very first book savaged The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl because Fanboy was unlikable. Notably, this person did not say that the book was bad, just that he/she couldn’t enjoy it because he/she didn’t like Fanboy.

Now, tastes are different and I don’t harsh on anyone if they genuinely don’t enjoy a book. This isn’t about me settling a score. Many of my fellow YA authors have lamented the same phenomenon, so I’m not just talking about myself or my work.

I am, however, talking about being puzzled.

Puzzled because… Really? Does the likability of the protagonist matter so much? I mean, yeah, I get that all things being equal, we’d generally rather read about pleasant people. But I can’t think of any time in my life when I’ve read a book and thought, “Wow, that book sucked because I didn’t like the main character.”

“That book sucked because the main character was boring?” — Sure.

“That book sucked because the writing was terrible?” — Sure.

“That book sucked because the main character was inconsistent/unconvincing/ill-suited to the tale?” — Sure and sure and sure.

But what matters to me as a reader (and as a writer) is that the main character is well-written and interesting, not that he or she is “likable.” (I vote for Presidents the same way. We had eight years to see what happens when people vote for the likable guy.)

Likability, of course, is a spectrum disorder (for lack of a better term). Fanboy to some people is a whiny, obnoxious, self-absorbed brat. To others, he’s a put-upon, wounded, insecure and tormented victim.

Kyra is a tough, take-no-prisoners empowered girl to some. To others, she’s a stone-cold bitch with no redeeming qualities.

Kyle Camden (from my upcoming Archvillain) is arrogant and cruel. Or maybe he’s just too smart for his own good, in a world where people don’t often look beyond surfaces.

As you can see, I have no problem ascribing negative traits to my own characters. I acknowledge that they’re there, and while I obviously come down on the side of “these characters are worthwhile” (else why write about them?), I can see how some people would be turned off by them.

And yet, I still wonder: If you’re turned off by a character, does that really mean the story’s bad? Maybe the author just did a really good job writing about an unpleasant person. And maybe that’s an opportunity to read about and learn about a kind of person we usually don’t usually get insight into.

Not everyone had a gooey center. Not everyone has a heart of gold. There are people in the world who are angry and defensive and arrogant; sometimes they have good reasons for it. Sometimes they don’t. But they usually believe that they do, and sometimes we can learn from their pain, even if it’s only to learn, “I don’t want to be that way.”

Sure, Kyra’s a stone-cold bitch for most of Goth Girl Rising. By the end of the book, she has matured tremendously. If she’d started out mature…there wouldn’t be a story. There’d be no point to writing it. Characters have to evolve if fiction is going to mean anything.

I don’t care if a character is likable or not. I just want to be entertained and — maybe — educated by that character.

The notion that a protagonist is unlikable and, hence, unworthy isn’t a new one. It even prompted YA rock band Tiger Beat to pen and perform an original song with the continuing refrain, “Holden Caulfield is not an asshole.”

It’s a terrific song, with an infectious beat (and spoiler-laden lyrics), but I beg to differ: Holden was an asshole. Not always, but often. And you know what? That’s OK. Because even when Holden was an asshole, I was still captivated by him and his journey.

That’s what matters: Being captivated.

Hamlet was, as the title of this blog indicates, a douchebag. There’s no two ways about it. Critics have argued for centuries over Hamlet’s state of mind — is he insane or merely too crafty for his own good? — but I think that even a charitable reading of the play shows that regardless of his mental hygiene, he’s pretty much a dick. And yet people read and perform and watch that play all the time. Why? Because Hamlet is mesmerizing. He’s fascinating to watch, even when he’s being a dick to his friends, even when he’s screwing over Ophelia, even when he’s arranging for the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (whom he could have merely exiled).

Hamlet: Unlikable. How many people say that ruined the play for them?

Similarly, let’s talk about a hero of mine from childhood: Luke Skywalker.

Thanks to Luke Skywalker, I can peg almost exactly when I began to develop my notion that likability was not necessary in a protagonist. It dates to 1980, when I was eight years old, watching The Empire Strikes Back in the movie theater with my father.

There’s a moment where Luke is training with Yoda on Dagobah. He attempts to use the Force to levitate his downed X-Wing fighter from the muck of a Dagobah swamp, but fails, claiming the fighter is too large. When Yoda chides him for lack of faith, Luke snarls, “You want the impossible” and stomps off into the swamps to sulk.

I was enrapt by this scene, and then my father interrupted, murmuring as though to himself, “Luke has a lousy attitude.”

I was shocked! How on earth could my father say such a thing? Luke was the hero! And since he was the hero, that meant he was always right…right?

Moments later, Yoda levitated the X-Wing with minimal effort, to the amazement of Luke Skywalker and eight-year-old Barry Lyga, and I began to realize: Just because Luke was the hero, didn’t mean he was always right.

Furthermore, just because Luke was the hero didn’t mean he always had to be pleasant. He could have — in my dad’s words — a lousy attitude.

This realization led me to a new appreciation of the movies and the character. When I re-watched Star Wars, I saw Luke’s dangerously callow attitude early on. His whining about not being hang out with his friends. His fruitless daydreaming. Even his self-centered complaint in Return of the Jedi, as Shuttle Tydirium closes on the Death Star: “I shouldn’t have come; I’m endangering the mission.” Delivered in a plaintive, annoying tone by Mark Hamill, and immediately shut down by a snarl from Han Solo.

All of which made Luke’s eventual maturation — throwing away his lightsaber rather than raising it against  his father — more powerful.

But what I also realized was that Luke was still the hero. I didn’t like him quite as much as I once had, in the days when I’d thought him perfect and infallible, but I still enjoyed his story and his journey.

So, how about it, readers? Do you have to like a character in order to enjoy his or her story? Where is the line crossed for you? Best of all: Who’s your favorite character that the rest of the world just doesn’t seem to “get?”

Still incredibly super-duper busy these days, trying to brain out some last minute revision issues before I go on vacation. Plus, I just agreed to moderate a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival in two weeks, meaning I have some reading/re-reading/question-development to do!

But I just had to share this.

Last week, I showed you the first look at the finished Archvillain cover.

Well, today the UPS man dropped off a couple of boxes of the finished book! Sweet!

Check it out:

Of course, a contest will be imminent. As soon as I figure out how best to give some of these suckers away, I’ll do it.

See you next week!

I have been super-busy today, hence the lateness of this post.

I spent most of the day doing some final tweaks to I Hunt Killers before sending it off to my second round of betas. Now, usually I send a manuscript to all of my betas at once, but the way schedules worked out this time, I ended up doing two rounds. Which is actually good for me right now because it means that I got to implement some changes to fix that problem I mentioned before these new people could see it. Now I can get their reactions to the fix without them having been biased the earlier version. Score!

The fix for that problem, by the way, necessitated adding a few thousand words to the book. Can I just say that I hate adding text to a book? It feels somehow artificial to me. But I know that readers won’t be able to tell: “Hey, this part was missing originally! He added it in later!” If I do my job right, it will be seamless.

And I guess that’s the problem: It’ll be seamless to the reader, but it’ll never be seamless to me. Every time I look at a book I wrote, I can always tell what got added in, and it bugs me. I feel like everyone can tell.

Some good news to report: I’ve received my very first finished copy of Archvillain! This means that I finally got to see the cover treatment my editor has been trying to describe to me for months now. It’s really cool! He rattled off a list of processes that were involved, but I don’t remember any of them because I was distracted by shinypretty.

I took a picture:

And I shot some video, just to see the effects “in action.” Unfortunately, the picture and the video still don’t really do the cover justice. I think this is one of those things you just have to see in person. So, come October, everyone head to your local bookstore and check out the cover!

Should you feel compelled to buy the book, too, well, that’s OK.

See you next week!

Oh, man. The Writing Life is killing me right now!

I have self-imposed a deadline: By September 1, I have to finish new drafts of both I Hunt Killers and The Book That Will Kill Me. The reason for this is that as of September 1, I’ll be taking a vacation (my first in years) and I don’t want either book hanging over my head while I’m gone. I’m not trying to rush or anything — I fully plan on going through them again when I get back. I just want both books in a good place before I leave.

But this is proving more difficult that it might have seemed at first.

The Book That Will Kill Me is, of course, monstrous. You saw the picture last week. I’ve managed to read through it since then and the news is…mixed.

See, when I was writing the book, it felt very, very…complicated. Difficult. But when I read it this past week, it was a breeze. It wasn’t difficult to read at all.

Now, you may be thinking, “Isn’t that a good thing, Barry? Don’t you want people not to have to struggle to read your work?” And, yeah, that’s fine, but it’s just that… I’ve never been in this position before, where in the writing of something, it felt so firmly and assuredly X, only to discover that it’s really Y. It means I’m taking extra care in the revision process, trying to make sure my revisions fit in with what the book actually is, not what I think it is.

Does that make any sense? Probably not to anyone but me.

As to Killers. Well. Two beta readers had time to take a look at it last week and — horror of horrors — they both pointed out the same thing. The sort of thing where, as a writer, you think someone might notice it, but you figure 99% of readers aren’t going to, so you convince yourself to let it slide.

And my first two readers pointed it out.

That’s the sort of news that really makes me want to head to the liquor cabinet, folks. One person noticing? Hell, that’s just a perceptive and/or lucky reader. But two people?

That means one thing, and one thing only: Author error. In technical terms, I fucked up.

I know exactly what I did wrong. I know exactly how to fix it.

Well, that’s not precisely true. There are actually two ways to fix it. One is easy.

One is hard.

The easy one, sad to say, feels like a bit of a cheat. I could probably do it, but… I wouldn’t feel right about it.

So I think I’m going to take the hard way out. Which means re-thinking a chunk of the book, making room for some new material, and just generally opening up the guts of it and poking around to see what I can see. Not my idea of a fun time.

But you know what? It’s OK. Ultimately, this is going to make for a stronger book.

A while back, I blogged about how I don’t revise a lot, how what ends up being published is very close to my first drafts. And how I suspected that this year I would end up having to do a lot of revising. An oracle I’m not, but I nailed that particular prediction.

The reason, of course, is because I’m trying new things as a writer. New kinds of stories for new audiences (and, hopefully, for the old audience, too!). This means taking some chances, taking some risks. Tripping over my own feet. Falling down. Getting back up. Tending to the occasional skinned knee. I could keep extending this metaphor, but I’m afraid I’d strain something.

In short, while it’s a definite annoyance to see that I have a little more work cut out for myself than I’d intended or hoped, it’s a good thing in the long run. I have many, many kinds of stories I want to tell in this Writing Life. That means I’ll always be making mistakes, figuring out new things, and learning as I write.

I can think of a lot worse things.

See you next week!

Hey, it’s the thirteenth post in Writing Life! Here’s a black cat for you…

And here’s a ladder…

And last but not least, here’s a black cat…walking under a ladder!

All right! That ought to take care of plenty of bad luck for us all. Let’s move on.

So, what’s going on in the Writing Life this week? Well, lemme tell ya…

I have officially shipped off the first draft of the first book of I Hunt Killers to a couple of my beta readers. The rest of them aren’t quite ready for it yet, so I’m not deluging them with paper until they give the go-sign. But in the meantime, I get that wonderful, stomach-churning feeling of knowing that People Are Reading My Words. Will they love Killers? Hate it? Worse yet, will they just shrug their shoulders and say, “Meh?”

This can be a tough time for me; Tom Petty was a wise, wise man when he said, “The waiting is the hardest part.” It’s not that I feel that if my betas don’t like the draft that it reflects poorly on me — hey, it’s an early draft, right? It’s more that my whoel reason for writing is so that other people will read – and enjoy reading – my work. If my betas don’t enjoy what I give them, then I feel bad. I mean, it’s great that I get some feedback and can think about my next step (Revise? Rewrite? Or maybe the betas are just wrong…) but in the meantime, there are some folks who read my work and didn’t have fun. Boo.

Fortunately, one of the benefits to writing a million books at once is that there’s always work to do, so I don’t have much time to stress about that! Right now, I’m getting back into The Book That Will Kill Me. I read the first hundred or so pages yesterday and was pleased with them. No mean trick when you realize I wrote those words more than a year ago and haven’t looked at them since. I was surprised at how well they seemed to integrate with what I wrote a month or so ago at the end of the book. So, that’s a bit of good news. I’ll be reading through the entire manuscript over the next week or so, making corrections and adding in bits and pieces that are missing. The whole thing clocked in at 803 pages when I printed it, and I don’t think it’s going to get any shorter. In fact, it may even get a little longer. (Sorry, future editor!)

If you’re curious, here’s what an 803-page manuscript looks like:

I’ve conveniently provided a ruler for scale. (The little stack of 20 or so pages next to the main stack is a set of notes for me to consult while working my way through the manuscript.)

So, between waiting for Killers feedback and working on The Monster (and, of course, noodling around with art for the graphic novel as Colleen sends it), I’m pretty busy right now. I guess I better get back to work…

See you next week!