Pitch a classic, part 2: would you read this novel?

I’m still hard at work, practicing the query pitch techniques Annie Neugebauer brought to this spring’s Writers Guild of Texas workshop. Practice on multiple books to sharpen those skills, Neugebauer urged her audience, even on books by other authors. So, after trying my hand earlier this week at fitting the classic adventure tale, Tarzan of the Apes, into Neugebauer’s pitch format, I’m pitching a classic of a different sort, Anne of Green Gables. If you haven’t already read and loved it, would you read it based on this query?

Query pitch for Anne of Green Gables

Attention-grabber: An orphanage sends an adoptive family the wrong child. 

Essential premise: In 19^th century Canada, adopted children serve as unpaid farm or household workers, less family members than indentured servants, with no emotional ties expected or wanted.

Protagonist: Anne Shirley

image: pixabay

Goal/motivation/obstacle/stakes: She longs for a stable home. Now 11-years-old, she was orphaned too young to remember her parents and has ping-ponged between orphanages and a series of uncaring, even abusive, foster parents. Elderly Matthew Cuthbert brings her home, lacking the heart to tell her that he and his spinster sister had actually requested a boy to help with their farm work. But Matthew’s sister, Marilla, is determined to send Anne back to the orphanage, a move that breaks Anne’s heart.

Antagonist: Marilla Cuthbert

Goal/motivation/obstacle/stakes: Marilla is determined to return Anne to the orphanage and secure the desired boy who will be able to spare her bachelor brother Matthew from the worst of their farm’s backbreaking labor. Although Matthew has opened his heart to Anne, he fears thwarting his overbearing sister's decisions openly. And despite her outward crustiness, Marilla fears keeping Anne will not only endanger her brother’s health but force her to recognize the emptiness of her own life.

Supporting character: Matthew Cuthbert

Motivation: Matthew’s severe shyness and social awkwardness have deprived him of much human interaction. Anne’s nonjudgmental acceptance offers him a last chance at surrogate fatherhood and selfless love.

Closing hook: Will Anne push Marilla to open her heart, even if it means risking her brother’s health and her own long-standing habits?

(Note: I was surprised to learn that this quintessentially Canadian novel was first published in 1908 by an American publisher, L.C. Page of Boston. Since I was unable to determine when the manuscript first reached them, I’ve picked an arbitrary date for author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s imaginary query letter. Also notice that Montgomery’s book was published using her initials, L.M. Montgomery, instead of her full name.)

***

2 January 1908

L. C. Page & Company
Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Dear Sir,

It is a day 11-year-old Anne Shirley has waited for her entire life, the day she finds a real home instead of the series of orphanages and uncaring foster homes that have been her lot since the early death of her parents. Dropped off at a railway station like a piece of luggage, she occupies herself with daydreams about the place where her new family awaits. The shy, elderly farmer who met her seems sympathetic, and the name of his house, Green Gables, sets her imagination soaring.

Soaring, that is, until she enters the house, to be met by the farmer’s spinster sister with the inquiry, “Where is the boy?” To which the farmer can only answer, “There wasn’t any boy. There was only her.”

Anne Shirley stands aghast as her dreams fall apart at the realization. They do not want her. They want a boy to help with the farm work. Now she is about the lose her longed-for home because the orphanage has sent the wrong child. It is the most tragical thing that had ever happened to her. If only there were some way Marilla Cuthbert, the spinster sister who rules the house for her bachelor brother, can be persuaded to let Anne stay on trial, she will do anything in her power to make Green Gables her home. Anything, that is, except renounce her daydreaming habit.

Anne has immersed herself in daydreams to escape the bitter realities of her life. But will her imagination be up to the challenge of Marilla Cuthbert’s no-nonsense, workaday attitude, world of Marilla Cuthbert? And will the Cuthberts, brother and sister, be able to open their long-closed hearts to a child’s winsomeness?

During my long career as a schoolteacher in rural Canadian towns, Mr. Page, I have met many Annes. As a variation on the traditional of orphan stories, I believe Anne of Green Gables, a novel firmly based on people and situations I have encountered, will appeal to all ages. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely yours,

L.M. Montgomery

Adventure classics – The 19th century’s childhood romance

Heidi

by Johanna Spyri

***

How could a woman so unhappy write about as much joy as Johanna Spyri put into her 1880 story of Heidi, the orphan who made everyone – well, almost everyone – around her so happy?

Unhappily married to a workaholic husband, suffering from long-term depression after the birth of her only son, and seeing that son edging ever closer to death from the 19^th century’s curse of tuberculosis, Spyri poured memories of her golden childhood in the Swiss mountains into one of the world’s most beloved children’s stories, the epitome of the late 19^th century’s neo-Romantic vision of the child as “no commonplace soul”, to quote a slightly later writer of the genre, L.M. Montgomery.

A bringer of emotional and physical health to those around her, Heidi would become the forerunner of such other child heroines as Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Mary Lennox of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911).

The Canadian Montgomery may well have been aware of and influenced by the work of Anglo-American Burnett -- already famous for her 1886 novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy -- and Burnett surely must have known about Montgomery’s book.

It's possible that both of them also owe an unacknowledged debt to Spyri’s work, which appeared in English at least as early as an 1885 American translation by Louise Brooks. (Although I’ll refer in this a subsequent post to the 1925 translation by Helen B. Dole from the Dallas Public Library.)

Like her spiritual sisters Anne Shirley and Mary Lennox, Heidi has been orphaned soon after her birth. Her dying widowed mother, Adeleide, entrusted the namesake baby to an aunt, but by the time Heidi is 5-years-old, her flighty Aunt Dete is eager to palm the child off on her only other living relative, her reclusive paternal grandfather.

Heidi & her grandfather

Even before the death of his only son, Heidi’s father, the old man had become bitter and estranged from the society of the tiny fictional village of Dörfli.

“He used to have the finest farm (around),” Dete gossips to an inquisitive neighbor. “But (he) would do nothing but . . . travel about the country, mixing with bad people that nobody knew about. He drank and gambled away the whole property. . . and disappeared. . . it was said that he had got into trouble, that he had killed someone.”

When the old man at last returns with his son, Tobias, he finds all doors closed to him. And although his son is well thought of and marries a local girl, bad luck dogs the family. When Tobias dies in an accident and his wife of a fever brought on by grief, neighbors call it a judgment on the old man, who abandons the village to live a hermit’s life on the mountain called Alm, high above the village.

“And now are you going to give the child to the old man up there?” the neighbor asks Dete. “I’m surprised that you should think of such a thing.”

But despite their shock and indignation, no one in the village is willing to take care of little Heidi. Turning the child over to the old man, Dete says insinuatingly, “You will have to answer for her, if she comes to any harm. You don’t want to have anything more laid to your charge.”

At those words, the old man angrily runs Dete away from his mountain hut. Heidi, meanwhile, has been exploring the area and is apparently unaware of the argument between her aunt and grandfather. Childlike, she finds the perfect place for a bed – the hayloft in the upper story of her grandfather’s hut. And after making a delighted acquaintance with her grandfather’s milch goats, and a meal of bread and cheese and goat’s milk, she climbs into her new bed, sleeping “as soundly and well as if she had been in the loveliest bed of some royal princess.”

And the old man, watching her innocent sleep, feels the first thawing of his heart begin.

Now if only other people would stop pestering him about how to bring up a little girl. . .

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. Want to read ahead? Get this copyright-expired work free at Project Gutenberg.

Wordcraft – Don’t be afraid to make a scene

A fellow critique partner writing a novel asked, why do we have to write in scenes? After all, as long as the information is on the page, why does it matter whether it’s in a “scene”, with characters thinking, speaking, acting in a particular place and time, or in paragraphs of straight prose. Taken aback, I gave her a short and truthful, if silly answer: because it’s a convention of English language fiction.

A short and truthful answer, because writing in scenes has been a convention of English language fiction, actually, almost any long-form prose such as novels, memoirs and creative nonfiction, for at least the past couple of centuries. But a silly answer because it didn’t address why the convention arose in the first place. Or why it really matters, whether it results in publication or not.

A story written in scenes is the closest we can humanly get to being inside the mind of another person. And longing to know how others, other human beings, feel and think and why they do the things they do, goes to the core of being human. Living as a human being means living in a particular place, with particular people, particular actions, particular thoughts, in real time. We don’t live in, can’t live in, whether we’d like to or not, an exposition-only world.

Given the importance of scenes, I was surprised when I reviewed my bookshelves without finding any books dedicated to writing scenes. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of discussion about scenes deep inside books about writing the things scenes comprise – novels and screenplays.

“A good plot is about disturbance to characters’ inner and outer lives. Scenes are what we use to illustrate and dramatize those disturbances,” novelist/writing instructor James Scott Bell writes in his Plot & Fiction. “Scenes are the essential building blocks of plot.”

Like the plot that they’re a subunit of, scenes need at least one character, a setting (time and place), and a disturbance. To paraphrase Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, scenes as well as novels have a protagonist, an ordinary world, and an inciting incident. What they lack, at least until the novel nears its conclusion is, well, a conclusion. And very often, the disturbance or inciting incident of one scene will have occurred in the previous scene, so that scene after scene links together, each depending on, but deepening what has gone before.

I’ve found that I learn as much from reading books I love – and looking more closely at why I love them – than from reading about them. So I looked at an early scene from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, with neighborhood gossip Rachel Lynde at her window, spying reclusive neighbor Matthew Cuthbert, who had earlier expressed his intention of planning his turnip seed that afternoon, instead “placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill. . . . Now where was Matthew Cuthbert going and why was he going there?”

Mrs. Lynde devotes the remainder of the scene (indeed, the entire chapter) to solving the riddle of Matthew’s strange behavior, only to learn things that will astonish her still further, continuing until the book’s end.

That opening scene ends with Rachel Lynde, having teased out the reason for Matthew’s journey, to bring home an orphan to help with his farm work, and asserting “I wouldn’t be in that orphan’s shoes for anything.” And so the story goes.

For more suggestions about scenes and their structure, I like “How to Write a Scene” by John August, posted September 21, 2015, on The Writer’s Circle magazine’s Facebook page, and “Make Your Scenes Earn Their Way” by Brooke Warner on SheWrites. I’ve posted both of these on my own Facebook page as well as Writer’s Circle’s September 15, 2015, Facebook post entitled, “Chapter Breaks,” for suggestions on scene endings.

Adventure classics -- When you feel like an orphan

Anne of Green Gables

by L.M Montgomery

#

When children’s author Grace Lin visited the Allen, Texas, library earlier this year, her young fans demanded to know what her favorite book had been as a girl. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants said, “Anne of Green Gables.” Out in the audience, I did a double take. Lucy Maude Montgomery’s 1908 story of a Canadian orphan the favorite book of a modern Chinese-American girl?

Then I realized it was the perfect choice for Lin. Growing up in the only Asian family in her upstate New York town, she must have felt as out of place as Montgomery’s red-haired orphan Anne Shirley. Fashions and mores have changed since Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert (two of the most repressed characters ever penned) received Anne instead of the boy they had intended to adopt in the small Prince Edward Island town of Avonlea. But the universal feeling of being the outsider has made Anne’s story a perennial favorite.

The story is grittier than the likes of its spin-off movies, trivia games, even cookbooks, might imply. Anne’s parents died when she was an infant and she suffered episodes of abusive foster care before being placed for adoption. At the time, the status of adopted children was closer to that of indentured servants than family members, as Montgomery indicates by the casual way in which the Cuthberts place their order for a boy to help aging Matthew with his farm work.

Anne welcomes even the prospect of such an “adoption,” but the Cuthberts nearly return her when they find their message garbled and the boy they expected has turned out to be a girl. Only the tiniest chink in the emotional armor of Matthew and Marilla saves Anne from a return to the life she had hoped to escape. (Matthew and Marilla are unmarried brother and sister, not having had even the courage to marry or leave the family homestead.)

Montgomery was already a prolific short story author when Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, was published. I haven’t found any indication that Montgomery had red hair, but the novel revisits some of her history in deeper ways. Like Anne’s, Montgomery’s mother died before she was old enough to remember her. Montgomery’s father transferred custody to his wife’s parents in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island.  Although Montgomery dedicated Anne of Green Gables “to the memory of my father and mother,” she and her father never fully reconciled.

Anne, in fact, never appears to grieve for the loss of parents she never knew. But her adventures as she rises to the status of cherished family member and eventually savior has made her story a perennial favorite. And it’s not just a Canadian and American phenomenon. Australian professor Akiko Uchiyama’s comparison of Montgomery and her first Japanese translator Muraoka Hanako, cites Anne of Green Gables as “arguably the most popular translated girls’ book in Japan.” (Also see Dr. Uchiyama’s discussion in Girl Reading Girl in Japan, available at
www.amazon.com/.)

The adventures of Anne are, of course, widely available at Amazon. Way to go, red-haired orphan!