Tuesday News: Female road novels, the problem of ‘reliability,’ editors speak, and Tinder’s experiment

JanetPublishing Newschildren's fiction / diversity / editors / gender / general fiction / heroines / publishing / road novels4 Comments

Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters – Although this essay by Vanessa Veselka is a couple of years old, with all of the focus on Gamergate and systematized violence against women, I think it’s more relevant now than ever. Viselka talks about her own experiences as a teenage hitchhiker and the extreme danger that girls and women faced alone on the road. Instead of taking this story into the familiar terrain of ‘being safe,’ the author instead focuses on the ‘social invisibility” of women, and on the way in which our own cultural narratives about women do not, by and large, figure them as powerful and thriving. As Veselka notes, “Whereas a man on the road might be seen as potentially dangerous, potentially adventurous, or potentially hapless, in all cases the discourse is one of potential. When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.”

A really powerful piece that has a great deal to say about how narratives featuring women construct heroism and empowerment.

But there is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it’s not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable.

True quest is about agency, and the capacity to be driven past one’s limits in pursuit of something greater. It’s about desire that extends beyond what we may know about who we are. It’s a test of mettle, a destiny. A man with a quest, internal or external, makes the choice at every stage about whether to endure the consequences or turn back, and that choice is imbued with heroism. Women, however, are restricted to a single tragic or fatal choice. We trace all of their failures, as well as the dangers that befall them, back to this foundational moment of sin or tragedy, instead of linking these encounters and moments in a narrative of exploration that allows for an outcome which can unite these individual choices in any heroic way. I will also admit that I think fixed narratives can be pretty dangerous. As vessels that shape our sense of self, they can be narcotic, limiting, and boring, and our development as humans is directly tied to our ability to cut across these simplistic story lines rather than be enslaved by them. Keystones in the arch under which we pass into a landscape of adolescent narcissism—that is what I think of fixed narratives. But they also keep us safe. They mark our place in society and make sure we’re seen. Therefore, the only thing more dangerous than having simplistic narratives is having no narrative at all, which is deadly. –The American Reader

On “Relatable Characters” – A really insightful and powerful indictment of the concept of “reliability” in fiction, which is commonly and problematically invoked when readers talk about diversity in Romance. Although Nancy is not talking specifically about romantic fiction, her analysis is still extremely relevant and I particularly admire the way she manages to talk about this extremely complex and difficult issue without reader shaming. –YouTube (Nancy’s Reads)

The Accidental Bestseller – I’ve been hoping that PW would run a version of this piece with other genres, but since they haven’t, I’m posting the link to this survey of editorial commentary on unexpected successes in children’s fiction. For readers or authors who wonder how editors acquire books, their process and what they look for, this piece might give you some insight. Abigail McAden, for example, recounts the experience of her very first acquisition, The Princess Diaries:

In 1998, my boss forwarded me a voicemail from an agent we didn’t know and asked me to follow up on it. Which is what assistant editors do, of course. I read the manuscript immediately. I loved it. Here was a girl who felt real and relatable and insecure, surrounded by a cast of hilarious, fully realized characters. The writing was perfect. With all my vast 20 months of publishing experience, I knew it was special. It wasn’t a quiet book or a book that would easily take awards. There were no sympathetic librarians depicted or heroism in the face of cruel circumstances. There was a dramatic ice cream cone spill and a makeover, though.

We published it a year and a half later, with little else but an iconic, hot­­-pink jacket, and it became the little book that could. –Publishers Weekly

Tinder Press to accept unagented manuscripts in March – Hachette imprint, Tinder Press, is opening up its submission process to unaccented manuscripts for the first two weeks of March. Given the current polarization between traditional publishing’s reliance on agented manuscripts and self-publishing’s virtual lack of gatekeepers, Tinder’s experiment seems like a natural middle ground for those authors who want to contract with a traditional publisher but may not have the stamp of a literary agent’s approval.

“At Tinder Press we are committed to finding the freshest literary voices, and the time seems right for us to reach out directly to authors at an early stage in their careers. This business is all about discovering new talent, so we’re hoping to be surprised and delighted, and that at the end of the day we’ll find an author we can go on to work with in the future.” –The Bookseller

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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