writerjenn

Today's post covers ground from the serious to the silly, so fasten your seatbelts.

If you're feeling activistic, here are a couple of opportunities floating around the cybersphere.

To scratch your let's-fight-book-banning itch, or to speak up for a great book:
John Green, author of LOOKING FOR ALASKA and AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES, is asking for support in fighting a challenge to the marvelous LOOKING FOR ALASKA. Click on the link to see the full info.

Laurie Halse Anderson has long been blogging about the importance of running to her writing life. Now the author of SPEAK, TWISTED, and other great books is running to fight cancer as well, by looking for half-marathon sponsors to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Follow the link if you're interested.

Switching gears from activism to writing:

There's a fascinating discussion of beginnings over at Nathan Bransford's blog. I recommend reading not only the post, but the comments that follow it, for some great perspectives on what the first page of a work should do. How much action do you need? What about introducing the characters? Is there such a thing as starting off with too much of a bang? Follow the link to read and/or chime in.

And now for some comic relief:

Toon Thursday this week at Finding Wonderland features a toon based on one of my suggestions, hilariously brought to life by a. fortis. The ferret thing all started with a plagiarism controversy in which a romance writer was alleged to have dropped whole chunks of scholarly material about ferrets into a romance novel. Specifically, the romance novel's main characters engage in a long discourse about ferrets after first engaging in an act of unbridled passion. Now, I had never thought of ferrets as suitable material for pillow talk, and I still don't know that I do, but the whole story has certainly served as fodder for some wonderful cartoons.

Finally, thanks for the supportive comments about my difficulty with my current WIP. I've been working away at it, and it's still too early and I'm too superstitious to give a final verdict on how it has gone, so I'll just say I'm proceeding on. 

This one is a real gimme, in honor of Banned Books Week.  Hands on the buzzer, please: Your answer must be phrased in the form of a question.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Kinda packed a lot in there, didn't they?

 In honor of Banned Books Week, here are some thoughts on censorship, particularly censorship of books.

I wanted to go a little deeper than "Censorship=Bad" and think about some of the whys & wherefores.  So here I address a couple of issues that may underlie the impulse to censor: CONTROL and PROTECTION.

CONTROL is the desire to regulate not only what we (or our children) read, but what everyone else is allowed to read, too.  The existence of a censor implies that the censor is somehow wiser than the rest of us.
Questions for thought:
Where does the censor's authority come from?
Who gets to be the gatekeeper?
Why should that gatekeeper's tastes, preferences, or religious beliefs trump those of everyone else?
Does it matter whether a censor has even read the book he/she is trying to ban?
If the censor has read it, why can't we?  If the censor hasn't read it, then on what basis is it being censored?

PROTECTION, especially the protection of children, is often cited in censorship cases.  I believe this is often misguided.  How can we prevent children from encountering in books the things that we can't prevent them from encountering in real life?  Through literature, we can read about the things we fear, think about them, see examples of different ways to handle them and the consequences that might result.  We can decide for ourselves which paths we want to take in our own lives.
Questions for thought:
Can censorship itself be more harmful than knowledge?
How does ignorance prepare us for life?

Final questions for thought:
Have you ever seen the title of a book you absolutely loved, a book that changed your life, on a Banned Books list, and thanked your lucky stars that you were able to read that book?