One Writer's Process: Kathe Koja

The moment you open one of Kathe Koja's award-winning books, you'll find yourself racing to keep up with the words as they fly off the page.

A master of pacing, Koja's novels for young adults, which include Straydog, Buddha Boy, Blue Mirror, Talk--and her newest, Going Under--rely on a stream-of-consciousness voice to carry readers deep into the narrator's psyche.

"One of the reasons I love that stream-of-consciousness voice," Koja has written, "(not that I have any choice in using it! that's me, that's the way I write) is how you are seeing, experiencing, fearing, etc., whatever the narrator is: you get the experience just as the narrator gets it. I love that, as a writer and as a reader. When I read, I want to become someone else, live his/her life as s/he lives it in the story, so that's the experience I want my readers to have as well."

As a result of her intense focus on voice, Koja's books are marvels of interior voices, pulling readers deep inside her characters so that readers do "get the experience just as the narrator gets it."

Recently, Koja was kind enough to share her thoughts on writing with Wordswimmer.

Wordswimmer: If writing is like swimming... how do you get into the water each day?

Koja: Routine. You gotta do your laps each day, whether you feel like it or not. One of my patron saints, Flannery O'Connor, talks about making sure you're in that chair every day, whether you're able to get much down on paper or not. You don't do anything else for your allotted worktime: no phone calls, e-mail, fooling around with assorted family members (two- or four-legged), etc., etc. You just sit there and try to work. Because that's how the job gets done.

Wordswimmer: What keeps you afloat... for short work? For longer work?

Koja: Short work is easy. Long work is easy, too. What's difficult is trying to work on anything (novel, letter to the editor, e-mail, anything!) when it isn't right: the right idea, the right time, the right format, or any combination of the above. I've wasted many, many months on novels that just weren't right, no matter how hard I tried to make them be. Which taught me to let the material be my guide. If I'm feeling stressed or bored, well, there's a reason for that. Sometimes it's fixable, sometimes it's not. Which leads me to...

Wordswimmer: How do you keep swimming through dry spells?

Koja: ... creative dry spells. In my own experience, what felt most painfully like writer's block was really that inability to identify when a project wasn't working, and just back off: for now, or forever.

There are commercial dry spells, too, which can be quite debilitating, especially when you make all of your living from your writing, as I do. The only way I've ever found to weather them was just to keep going and stay true to the work, believing that it will find its way. I don't think that trying to write specifically for a perceived market is the best route to producing superior fiction. Besides, there are much, much easier ways to make a buck than by writing books.

Wordswimmer: How do you find the pace when swimming in a story?

Koja: I think it's intrinsic to whatever you're working on, a natural element of the voice within the story, the character whose viewpoint we follow, like the language or setting or anything else. I didn't deliberately choose for Buddha Boy to move at that speed--the story just went that way! And I think it's also a function of the kind of stream-of-consciousness writing that I do, one thing emerging from the next. It pulls you along, the way our real thoughts do, when you start out thinking, "Gee, where should I eat lunch today?" and end up with Buffalo Bill, or the Empire State Building or a paramecium or something.

Wordswimmer: If it's a fast, breath-taking pace, how do you keep swimming without exhausting yourself... or your readers?

Koja: I think it's exhilirating! I hope readers do, too.

Wordswimmer: How do you overcome obstacles, problems, when swimming alone?

Koja: Writing is by necessity a solitary occupation. There's a genius essay by Michael Ventura called "The Talent of the Room" (Kelley Eskridge reprinted it on her site: http://kelleyeskridge.com/Links/TalentOfTheRoom.htm) that's the best writing about writing that I've ever read, and when I say "best" I mean "most truthful." He asks the would-be writer "How many years can you spend alone in a room?" for that's what writing really comes down to, the solitude, whether it's encountered in a garret or a coffee shop or wherever.

But when you emerge from the room... I've been very fortunate over the years to have three people who read my work before it goes to market: my husband, Rick Lieder (my first reader for almost 17 years now); my agent and accompanist, Christopher Schelling; and my dear friend, writer Carter Scholz. I know that when I offer what I've done to these three, each response will be different, but each will be filtered through formidable intelligence, and I listen very carefully when they tell me what they think of my work.

On top of that, I'm lucky enough to have Frances Foster for an editor! So once I leave the room with work in hand, I know it will get a thorough and attentive reception.

Wordswimmer: What's the part of swimming that you love the most?

Koja: The flow: when the work is going so well your hands can't move fast enough, whether it's the actual writing of the novel or the making notes or the ideas that come on the edge of sleep or in the car or, or, or. That's the best.

For more information about Kathe Koja and her work, visit her website: http://www.kathekoja.com/

Lost At Sea

You know how you can feel lost at sea when the fog rolls in and the sky is closed off and there’s no sense of water or land or distance, nothing except fog all around you--dense and gray and smothering--and you can’t tell where you’re heading?

That’s a little how it feels reading Robert Lipsyte’s newest novel, Raiders Night, a brutal, hard-hitting portrait of high school athletics and the desensitization that occurs among varsity football players in a world where victory is all that matters.

Lipsyte, the author of such classic YA novels as One Fat Summer, The Contender, The Brave, and The Chief, is a master of nuance and dramatic tension, and in Raiders Night he portrays in frank, crisp, unadorned prose the moral ambiguities of a high school football star’s life in chilling detail.

Take a look at this passage from early in the book when Matt Rydek, co-captain of Nearmont High’s football team and the focal point of the story, arrives at a party held as the season is about to begin:

Matt floated into the party a step behind Brody, who opened holes in the crowd with his smile. Brody reached out for guys to tap fists and girls to feel up. Ever since he was in PeeWee, All-Brody had acted like he was walking on a red carpet, but nobody ever seemed to mind. He could say anything to anybody. Guys trusted him in the huddle and girls couldn’t keep their hands off him. He had left the football in the car. He was looking to score tonight.

That sense of floating comes not only from Matt’s sense of himself as above the crowd--the victorious football hero carried on the shoulders of adoring fans--but from the pain pills (Vicodin) that he takes, along with steroids, to maintain his place in the stratosphere of high-school “gods.”

Here’s the next paragraph, as Matt makes his way into the party:

The beer and Vic buzz carried Matt over the upturned faces. “Yo, Matt... Lookin’ good, my man... Where’s Amanda?...Ready for hell, hoss?” He felt the words more than heard them, like hundreds of fingers plucking at him. Good thing Brody’s driving tonight. Matt grinned back at people, winked, tapped a few fists, squeezed a few soft arms that came out of the crowd to encircle him like snakes and then fell away, brushing the length of his body. He smelled perfume and armpits. He waved back at Pete, in a corner with Lisa. They talked about everything. Pathetic, Matt thought, then wondered what it would be like to have someone you could really talk to.

In these early passages Lipsyte shows readers the temptations of a world where the gods can have anything they want and raises the story's central question: will Matt ever emerge from this drug-induced haze, step off his pedestal, and actually see the corrupted world that he inhabits... and that he has taken a part in creating? In other words, will Matt come to his senses before it’s too late and someone gets hurt... or worse?

But it’s a challenge for Matt to wake up. That's because waking from this dream-like state may mean losing everything people tell him he wants in life: the adulation of the crowd; the adoration of the girls; the chance to play Division I college football at a powerhouse like Michigan; maybe even turn pro. These dreams aren't his dreams, yet Matt's not able to walk away from them to follow his own dreams. That's because he still hasn't confronted the personal--and emotional--price that he must pay to achieve such dreams.

Long ago Matt gave up his own dream of playing baseball to placate his father, whose dreams of glory as a former Ryder football player remain unfulfilled. Now Matt's not just a member of the team, he's one of the team's leaders... and he believes (or thinks he believes) that loyalty to the team is an unbreakable commandment, just as he believes it’s necessary to win in order to receive a highly touted offer from a Division I school.

On some level that he’s not yet aware of... but which he gradually becomes aware of over the course of the story... Matt knows that attaining and holding onto power through corrupt means may cost him and his friends their souls. But it's only after one of his teammates is abused during a team pre-season training camp ritual, and Matt does nothing to stop it before the ritual gets out of hand, that his growth as a character begins.

At this point, early on in the story, he’s still in a fog, his moral compass essentially numb. He is unable to see the truth or to stand up against the corruptness of the system, a system which he and his friends have come to enjoy because of the privileges that it entitles them to as football heroes. And the question persists as the plot unfolds: will Matt ever find the true courage to be himself and to stand up for what he knows, on the most basic human level, is right?

Here’s how Matt explains what has to happen to the player who suffered the abuse... and which the team is covering up for fear that news of it would destroy the team’s chances to finish the season and go all the way to the championship final. The boys–Matt and Chris–have been given tickets to a Yankee game and are driven in a limo to the stadium as part of an unspoken bribe to keep them quiet about the incident. On their way home after the game, they have this conversation:

Chris nodded mechanically. Matt turned on the mute until the driver pulled into the park-and-ride off the highway where Dorman had left his car. As soon as the coach was out of the limo, Chris opened the minibar and grabbed three little bottles. He flipped one to Matt.
“You buy that defense shit?” Chris cracked a bottle open and sucked it right down.
“Whatever it takes.” Matt was tired.
“What does that mean?” He cracked the second bottle.
Matt wondered if he was supposed to stop him from drinking it. “Look, Chris, you got to get past the past, pay the price. You want to play?”
“You don’t understand.”
Should I say I do, that I know about your crazy mother, that you’ve got to make a choice if you don’t want to wreck the team? Suck it up. We all do.
“We all have problems.”
“What’s yours?” said Chris. It sounded more like a question than a challenge.
“Got all night?”
That seemed to satisfy him. “You trust Koslo?”
“What’d he want?”
Chris’s face was twisted. “I can’t tell you.”
The limo pulled up in front of small house on a quiet old street. Chris drained the second bottle and dropped it on the floor. He got out without saying good night.
Matt drank his little bottle.

Here, Matt is still numbing himself, drinking to flee from his responsibility as the team's co-captain and from his growing self-awareness that the longer he remains silent about the abuse that he witnessed, the more difficult it will be for him to live with himself.

Again and again, Matt turns away from helping Chris until the plot reaches its climax, and Chris seeks revenge for the act of abuse that the team members forced upon him. No longer can Matt stand idly by, a passive observer, waiting for someone else to act. Yet even this act (which others perceive as heroic) fails to cleanse his soul... because he knows that he could--and should--have done something sooner to prevent Chris from seeking revenge.

Here’s how Lipsyte describes Matt feeling afterward:

He was a hero, and it felt bitter and wrong. Kids honked and waved on the drive to school. It took him almost fifteen minutes to make his way from the Super Senior parking lot to the big front doors, usually a two-minute walk. Kids wanted to shake his hand, talk to him, touch him; one jerk actually wanted him to autograph his photo on the front page of the local paper. It was his football picture. He pushed past the kid. In the lobby, teachers and staff applauded when they saw him. Mandy ran over and threw her arms around his neck. Cameras flashed.
You saved our lives.” She whispered into his ear, “I love you, Matt.”
It felt phony, dirty. He unpeeled her and trotted to homeroom.

How will Matt redeem his soul?

In the thirty pages remaining, the fog lifts, and the boundaries of land and water become clear again as Matt must choose between the team’s present needs and his own future.

His compass, numb for so long, begins to point north, and the reader, nearly overwhelmed with grief and sadness for all that’s happened in this story, can’t help but root for Matt, hoping he will choose to do the right thing ... and finally emerge from the fog.

For more information about Robert Lipsyte, check out his website at http://www.robertlipsyte.com/

Deep Diving

Some authors are blessed with a gift for characterization. They dive so deeply into the lives (and hearts) of their characters that you feel as if you're diving with them, slipping inside the character’s skin so deeply that you can feel the character’s pulse beating beside your own.

In her newest book, All of the Above, Shelley Pearsall, the award-winning author of Trouble Don’t Last and Crooked River, dives into the lives of a handful of teens in an inner city neighborhood in Cleveland OH.

The story begins with a tour of the neighborhood along Washington Boulevard: “...past the smoky good smells of Willy Q’s Barbecue, past the Style R Us hair salon, where they do nails like nobody’s business, past the eye-popping red doors of the Sanctuary Baptist Church, you’ll finally come to a dead end.”

At the dead end is a school, and within this school are a handful of students in a Math Club folding small pieces of paper into the world’s largest tetrahedron.

Tetrahedrons are “geometric solids with four faces,” according to Mr. Collins, the math teacher in whose math class readers first meet the story’s four main characters–James Harris III, Rhondell, Sharice, and Marcel.

Listen to each character's voice in these early introductions:

James Harris III: I don’t listen to nothing in Collins’ math class. Only thing I listen for is the bell. That bell at the end of class is just about the sweetest sound in the world. The whole class, I sit there waiting on that bell and watching the hands of the clock jump from one little black mark to the next. You ever notice how school clocks do that? How they don’t move like other clocks do; they jump ahead like bugs?

Rhondell: All the way home on the bus in the rain, I roll the word tetrahedron around in my mouth. I keep my face turned toward the steamed-up bus windows, and I let my lips try the word over and over without using my voice. Tetrahedron.

I wonder if this is one of those words that might get me into college someday. It sounds as if it could. Inside my mind, I keep a whole collection of college words for someday. Words like epiphany, quiescent, metamorphosis...

Sharice: Six people are already in the math room when I get there on Monday. This kinda surprises me a little. I take a look around the doorway first ‘cause if it’s only me and Mr. Collins, I don’t plan on sticking around. But then I see Ashlee and Deandra from math class. They are hanging all over Terrell (how desperate can you be?) And passing a bag of chips back and forth.

Marcel: Marcel the Magnificent, that’s me. After our math club meeting, I head on over to the Barbecue. Slap a big slab of ribs on a plate. Take fifteen orders at the same time.

“How you want your ribs done, ma’am, heat or no heat? Hot sauce or mild?”

“We got Blast off to Outer Space Hot, Melt the Roof of Your Mouth Hot, Tar in the Summertime Hot, Red Heels Hot, Mama Thornton Sings the Blues Hot, and Just Plain Ol’ Hot. Which you want? Yes, ma’am. Two Singing the Blues coming up. Napkins and forks on the right side. Fire hose on the left. We aim to please at Willy Q’s Barbecue. You have a good day, too, ma’am.” I slam the order window shut.

Ahhh. Feet up. Butt down.

In these initial glimpses, you can feel the pulse of each character immediately. You know who these characters are... and who they’re not. They’re not what you might have expected: dead-end kids attending a dead-end school in a dead-end part of Cleveland. No, they’re kids with attitude and personality, with hopes and dreams.

What comes through in each of these excerpts, aside from each character's unique personality, is the depth of love that Pearsall feels for each of them. She cares deeply about her characters, and in caring... manages to show us why we should care about them, too.

Look at James, for instance. Gruff, impatient, almost defiant, wanting to be anywhere else but in school. Yet he’s observant, he notices things, small things, like the way the clock hand advances ... and the need to be doing something else besides spending time in Collins’ math class.

This combination–defiant, yet sensitive–makes for an interesting mixture, a way of shaping our feelings about him, so that we expect James to stand up for what he wants, even if it’s dangerous to stand up, and yet we understand that he has a sensitive side, too, a side that makes him vulnerable, hence exposed to danger. That means that we fear him... and fear for him... at the same time.

And look at Rhondell. Dreaming of college on the bus ride home, dreaming of college words all the time, but saying them to herself, not wanting anyone to know her dreams, scared of what might happen if anyone finds out about them... or, worse, scared of what might happen if they don’t come true.

Notice how Rhondell collects college-level words, and plays with them in her mind as if they were precious stones, the key to her future, which is just a dream now. And the one word-- "someday"--letting us feel her longing for a future that’s better than the present she’s in now.

Rhondell's dreams are what help us understand and sympathize with her, just as her fear of dreams not coming true helps us understand what’s important to her... what she wants more than anything yet can't tell anyone for fear the dream might be lost once it's exposed to the light.

And then there’s Sharice who will have to learn how to stand on her own feet... or drop into the abyss and be forgotten. What will she choose? Does she have the courage to make friends, to share her heart and dreams with others?

And Marcel, sweet-talking, full-of-himself, oozing confidence, ready to sell customers his daddy’s barbecue ribs and sauce, a hard worker, but not so hard that he can’t let himself take a break when the line of customers slackens.

But is he all show? What’s he really made of? That’s what the reader wants to know. When the test of his character comes, it comes straight at him. What will Marcel do?

At the core of each character is a pulsing, beating heart, and each heartbeat breathes life into this story about what people are truly made of and how courage and perseverance can be found on Cleveland's inner-city streets.

In diving deeply into each character’s inner world, Pearsall tells a story that’s true to life. Some characters reach for dreams and get them, while others never get the chance to reach... yet remain standing, nonetheless. Together, their voices serve as a rich tapestry of lives linked in mysterious ways.

In the end, it's hard to leave Washington Boulevard. That’s because Pearsall has taken us deep-diving into the hearts of characters who we end up loving as much as our own friends and neighbors, their hopes and dreams mingling with our own.

For more information about Shelley Pearsall and her work, visit her website at
http://www.shelleypearsall.com/

And for a librarian's review of All of The Above, take a look at A Fuse #8 Production at http://fusenumber8.blogspot.com/2006/07/review-of-day-all-of-above.html

One Writer's Process: Graham Salisbury

Compassion, sensitivity, and grace are words that reviewers have used to describe Graham Salisbury's work, and many of Salisbury's friends might use the same words to describe the man himself.

A master craftsman, Salisbury has earned a place for his award-winning historical fiction, contemporary novels, and short story collections--Blue Skin of the Sea, Under the Blood-Red Sun, Shark Bait, Jungle Dogs, Lord of the Deep, Island Boyz, and Eyes of the Emperor--on the shelf alongside the work of legendary writers like Scott O'Dell . (Indeed, Under the Blood-Red Sun won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction in 1995.)

Ever since his first book, Blue Skin of the Sea, was released in 1992, Salisbury has made a name for himself writing about boys and their adventures with a deep understanding of their lives and the emotional currents buffeting them as they make their way toward adulthood.

Much of his work, which is set in Hawaii where Salisbury grew up, addresses the challenging issues of what it means to be an American. But he explores with equal fervor themes of justice and racism, as well as what is required to live a life with integrity and honor.

For Salisbury, the answer to that question appears to be the same as years ago when he quoted La Rouchefoucauld in an epigraph to Blue Skin of the Sea: "When you cannot find peace in yourself, it is useless to look for it elsewhere."

Salisbury, whose newest book, House of the Red Fish, is a sequel to Under the Blood-Red Sun, was kind enough to take a few minutes from a busy schedule to share his thoughts on writing with Wordswimmer.

Wordswimmer: How do you get into the water each day

Salisbury: Well, the first thing I do is put my feet in the water … or on the floor. I do this at 4:45 a.m. Once my feet touch the carpet I know I can take it from there. I am an early bird. I do my best work in the morning and I know that. Plus, I love being out in the community before everyone else. I like the peace of it, especially in the winter when the mornings are tar black. I can’t work at home. I need to be out there among the working stiffs. I admire them and try to be a hard worker, too. I know myself and know what I have to do to get going, and one of those things is to have some “place,” some “ritualistic spot” to work. For me it’s a busy coffee shop, any one of several Starbucks locations in Lake Oswego, Oregon, where I live (I actually live in Portland, but work in Lake Oswego, a mile or so from my house). I park, get out and breathe a huge gulp of clean Oregon air, and go inside. By now it’s around six o’clock. I grab a 16-ounce Americano (fancy costly coffee) and set myself down with either a pad and pen, or my laptop. From that point I vanish into my project, which means that I essentially go to Hawaii (how cool is that?). I do first drafts in longhand and revisions on my Mac. For the next three hours I am totally focused on whatever book project I am working on. I’m in the water. Wordswimming.

Wordswimmer: What keeps you afloat … for short work? For longer work?

Salisbury: The same thing for both: honest interest, passion, and commitment to the project. If my concept doesn’t thrill me I bail and go on to something else. I do far more long work (novels) than I do short work. I like to dig deep and explore and see what I can come up with. I like to get to know my characters. I have long believed in the magic of writing. Something special happens when you sit down and start to work – I call that something magic – things come out that you never expect, and often those things surprise and delight me. That’s what keeps me afloat. The magic.

Wordswimmer: How do you keep swimming through dry spells?

Salisbury: I keep kicking, and I do that by not allowing dry spells, also known as “writer’s block.” I don’t get writer’s block. Actually, to me, it’s not a block at all, it’s procrastination, pure and simple. Anyone who really wants to work just plows right on through the problems that inevitably arise when writing. When I think I have “nothing” in me, then I just write garbage until is smells better. I can fix it later. Or dump it. I believe – no, I know from experience – that if I HAVE something on paper I can fix it. If I have nothing on paper, I have nothing to fix. So garbage can look pretty good when you think of it that way. This is one of the best writing lessons I’ve picked up over the years. I keep swimming by clinging to the knowledge that I can transform pig slop into diamonds. I can fix whatever crummy purple prose I write. Keep water in the pool – forbid dry spells.

Wordswimmer: What’s the hardest part of swimming?

Salisbury: For me, it’s swimming in a straight line. My right arm is stronger than my left, so I’m constantly drifting out of the lane. Translated into the writing process, this means I sometimes lose focus. It’s easy to go off on tangents, so I try to give myself the barest of outlines before I start. I don’t want anything close to a detailed outline, but I do want to know where I’m going. It’s important for me to know the ending early on. The ending is probably what I want to know most. Sometimes, after I have finished a book I look at it and frown. What the spit is this thing about? I did that with LORD OF THE DEEP. I just didn’t capture the story I’d imagined. So I did a really smart thing: I asked a particularly bright seventh-grade girl in my neighborhood to read the manuscript and tell me what it was about. “This is about integrity,” was her answer, essentially. With that in mind I went back and rewrote (fixed) the manuscript, tightening down the focus, and -- boing! -- LORD OF THE DEEP began to take shape. It ultimately won the Boston Globe/ Horn Book Award, and it only had a shot at that lofty accolade because I had the smarts to ask a pro to make sense of the mess I had made. The hardest part of swimming is staying in the dang lane.

Wordswimmer: How do you overcome obstacles, problems, when swimming alone?

Salisbury: I swim through them any way I can. Often, the key to swimming (writing) alone is more solitude. I have written passages on the treadmill, taking the dogs for a walk, in bed half-awake, and in the car while driving long distances. Take your problems with you. Plant them in your brain and forget about them. Your conscious mind will zone out and have a rest. But your subconscious mind can’t stand not knowing the solution to a problem, so it keeps on working until something comes up. When it finds a solution it might even let you know what it is. This is called an epiphany. Don’t underestimate the POWER of your quiet mind. Sometimes it may even help to go swimming with another writer and toss ideas about. But mostly, I deal with obstacles alone.

Wordswimmer: What’s the part of swimming you love the most?

Salisbury: Revision. Oh, man, do I love revision. Polishing. Deepening. Fine tuning. The equivalent in the swimming world would be body surfing a clean, glassy wave at White Sands Beach in Kailua-Kona about 30 years ago when the Kona Coast was still pristine (it was so stunningly beautiful that I wrote BLUE SKIN OF THE SEA, just so I would never forget it – that was the energy behind that book). I haven’t seen such beauty since. When you revise you can find beauty in your work. It’s possible.

Wordswimmer: Any other advice to share with writers?

Salisbury: My advice? Swim with delight and thank the universe for all the water (magic). Keep going, keep going, keep going. It is surely worth the effort. Oh, yeah.

For more information about Graham Salisbury and his work, check out his website:
http://www.grahamsalisbury.com/

Also, take a look at an interview that appears on The Alan Review: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/winter97/w97-03-Benton.html

Keep Swimming

I apologize in advance to Wordswimmer readers for not posting on Sunday (October 8th) due to a family emergency.

Perhaps these three quotes--which I've kept on my desk over the past few days, always within sight, as encouragement to stay in the water--may serve as inspiration for your own writing:

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."
--Loren Eisley, American naturalist, essayist, and anthropologist

"It is important to remember that we all have magic inside us."
-- J.K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter

"When you come to the edge of all the light you have and must take a step into the darkness of the unknown, believe that one of two things will happen: either there will be something solid for you to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly."
-- Patrick Overton, poet and playwright

With any luck, I'll have another post up by early next week.

In the meantime, keep swimming, and thanks for taking a moment to stop by.

Pacing Yourself

When you're writing, do you start off at a sprint after diving into the water?

Or do you wade in slowly, letting the water reach your hips before leaning into a steady stroke?

Or, perhaps, you prefer to combine different speeds, sprinting until you’re out of breath, then slowing to a crawl before regaining your strength and sprinting again?

And when you’re reading... are you conscious of the pace of the story? Are you aware when the pace picks up... or slows down? And do you notice how the author sustains the pace?

Kathe Koja, the author of Straydog, Buddha Boy, Blue Mirror, Talk, and Going Under, is a master of pacing.

In Buddha Boy, she not only draws the reader into the story by raising the stakes for the main character in chapter after chapter, but she uses a kind of breathless narrator to increase the pace when necessary.

How does Koja construct such a fast-moving pace?

Take a look at this example from a particularly gripping passage in Buddha Boy, which I finished earlier this week feeling as if I'd just come sprinting to the finish line:

I heard about it before I saw it, from John Kindel in Algebra, It was in the bathroom, man: stuck like trash in a urinal, wet and filthy and spoiled and “If I find out who’s responsible,” said Snell--standing arms crossed at the front of the room, his voice shaking, he was so mad--“when I find out, that person is going to be in trouble. And if you,” his hard gaze like a laser, moving one by one around the Art room, “if any of you know who did this, know and don’t tell, then you’re just as guilty as that person. And just as cruel.”

Amazing, right? And how did Koja do it... keep the pace sustained so that we had to keep reading that passage? (If you didn’t feel that you had to keep reading, please explain what didn’t work for you, ok?)

Here’s what I think. First off, a minimum number of periods. Look at the passage: not one until the fifth line. And then again at the end. Two periods for, what, maybe 120 words? You keep reading so that you can finally take a breath... but, no, you cannot take a breath until that period appears.

Of course, it’s a sustained, controlled breath, not a breath that’s out of control, because Koja mixes in different perspectives... the narrator’s; John Kindel’s (with the italicized comment: It was in the bathroom, man); and Snell’s (the art teacher’s) voice, with his rhythmic vocal pattern emphasized with italics, and pauses between the quotes that offer descriptions of how he looks as he’s speaking.

And then, of course, there’s the dramatic content of the scene itself. Something has been ruined, desecrated, to create such a disturbance. Something valuable, as it turns out, a work of art by one of the story’s main characters, and we don’t even get the artist’s reaction here... just the reaction of his teacher and the other students in the class... as reported by Justin, the narrator, who happens to be the artist’s friend... or, rather, is struggling to decide if he wants to be his friend.

Here’s another example of pacing in Buddha Boy, when Justin is confronted by bullies who are upset that he’s hanging around with the artist, Jinsen, and warn him not to spread rumors about what they might have done:

In the hall, digging in my locker, a minute or two before the bell and “Hey,” from right behind me: McManus, hands in his pockets, head cocked to one side. “Hey, Justin.”
Lots of people, passing by; but no one saw, no one stopped. The rest of the crew--Magnur, Hooks, Winston--stood a few paces back, like dogs on a leash, a pack of dogs. Waiting.
McManus stepped closer, closing in on me. “You’re not spreading any rumors,” he said, “are you? Because I’ve been hearing some. About me. So if you have anything you want to say to me, you better say it right now.”
I could hear the blood in my ears, my heartbeat, rising; I stood silent in that sound, wondering what they were going to do, if they were going to do it now or wait for later. Finally, when I didn’t--wouldn’t--speak, McManus said, “I hear you’re hanging out with that freak Buddha Boy. I don’t think that’s such a good idea either.”
My own voice then, low and dry, as if it came from someone else: “You hear a lot of things, don’t you.”
And he reached out, fast, so fast past me to slam my locker door, slam it with all his force, if I hadn’t jumped it would have caught my fingers, crushed my fingers and “I hear everything,” he said, and walked away.

Again, Koja creates tension with dramatic content and pacing.

Notice how she gets the reader breathing fast, starting off the scene with the unconventional punctuation and phrasing... eliminating the subject, using action words--digging, cocked--and a kind of machine-gun-like blast of images: hall, locker, bell, “Hey,” hands, pockets, head, “Hey, Justin.” Fast-paced, using commas, and “and,” and colons to create an almost MTV effect with language.

Then, bringing in the drama: McManus “stepping closer”... “closing in on me.” You feel the tension building... and then the question, about spreading rumors, which raises the tension yet again (because we know the answer)... and, again, the unconventional beats of the sentence. “Because I’ve been hearing some. About me.” Getting the pace again to move quickly, almost at breakneck speed, because we want the narrator to get out of the situation unharmed, and we don’t yet know if he will.

Then, the narrator’s response... which takes us inside the voice speaking, lets us see the world from inside the narrator’s skin, and to feel his fear, too frightened to utter a word ... until he somehow finds the courage (as if it came from someone else) to reply to McManus.

And then the moment the scene’s been building toward, like a rubber band snapping, McManus whipping past the narrator to slam his locker door on his hand... and would have if Justin hadn’t pulled back in time, not because he was so quick to see the danger, but because he jumped back out of fear.

Again, in that last paragraph, Koja has used to great effect commas, short and crisp phrases, and words like “fast,” “slam,” “jump,” and “crush”... to move the reader forward at a heart-racing pace.

Anyway, Koja’s someone to study if you want to learn about pacing... and how to construct dramatic tension in your story.

Take a look at Buddha Boy, especially the last few chapters, which were almost blurry because I had to read them so fast.

By then, I knew Jinsen’s work of art had to play a role in the ending, but, even knowing that, it didn't matter because it was Jinsen's response that was at stake... whether he'd lose the poise and determination and resolve that he'd shown throughout the book.

For more on Kathe Koja and her work, visit her website at: http://www.kathekoja.com/

And for more on pacing in fiction, take a look at these resources:

“Techniques to establish Pacing” by Gerry Visco at Writer’s Store: http://www.writersstore.com/article.php?articles_id=7

“Pacing and Narrative in Fiction” in Fanfiction:
http://fanfic.theforce.net/articles.asp?action=view&ID=34

“Pacing” by Dan Gleason on WritingClasses.com:
http://www.writingclasses.com/FacultyBios/facultyArticleByInstructor.php/ArticleID/11

“Pacing” by Vicki Hinze in Fiction Factor: http://www.fictionfactor.com/guests/pacing.html