Before the Split Blog Tour: Guest Post by Swati Avasthi - A Place Called Character

I'm thrilled to have author Swati Avasthi stop by today as part of her Before the Split Blog Tour. Please read her guest post about writing an issue driven novel and take the time to leave a comment. Swati will be donating $1 for every comment on the tour up to $250.00 to the Family Violence Prevention Fund. If she reaches her cap of $250.00, she will double that donation to a total of $500.00!!

To help Swati  reach her goal, I will match her donation up to $50.00 for comments left on this post. So please help spread the word and get as many comments as possible to raise money for this worthy cause.

Each comment also enters you for a chance to win a copy of Split. I will announce the winner at the end of the tour November 2nd! **International Entries OK**

A Place Called Character

by Swati Avasthi

See, there are these things called issues and there are these things called novels and, according to

plenty of people, the two should never go together. Otherwise you are treading into after-school-

special zone. No one wants preaching disguised as fiction.

That was drilled into me. If not through conversations and lessons, then through my own

experiences while I winced, embarrassed for writers who would blatantly hammer in the moral

of the story. And the morals were always so self-evident: If Ugh hit wife, then Ugh baaad. No

hit wife, Ugh.

And yet, both as a writer and as a reader, I found myself drawn to issue narratives, pulled to the

serious and heavy one-word title books: Speak, Godless, Twisted. They would jump out at me

and I’d devour them. Plenty, plenty, plenty of writers have written great issue novels. Look at

Chris Crutcher or Jay Asher or Laurie Halse Anderson.

But I was still afraid to write them, especially afraid because I came to Split with a history of

working with survivors of domestic violence. (I coordinated a domestic violence legal clinic for

three years and spoke to thousands of survivors.) I came to Split after giving lectures about the

cycle of abuse; I came to Split with statistics that clattered around in my head, and stories that I

couldn’t shake loose from my brain. So, I was worried that if I wrote about domestic violence, I

would pull out the soapbox that kills a good story.

But, to get onto a soapbox, you must have answers. And I only had questions: what would it

be like to grow up watching your dad hit your mom? What if you loved your dad anyway and

looked up to him the way that every kid does?

I had left the clinic almost ten years before I sat down with a cup of coffee and my computer and

a 16-year-old boy in my head. The deeper I dug the more muddled I became, uncovering more

questions. But somehow, I didn’t feel like I was the one asking the questions anymore. My

narrator, Jace, was. And the nature of the questions were slightly altered and the stakes much

higher. Instead of “What would happen if you loved your dad anyway?” my questions became

more specific and were asked in Jace’s voice: “Why, in the name of all that is holy, do I still

admire my creep-of-a-father? WTF is wrong with me?”

I had no more worries about my soapbox. All I worried about was whether I could get my story

right and what would happen to Jace. The challenge became not to flinch when the story got

hard, how to be honest now matter what. The story stole the soapbox’s spot.

Much later, after the ARC came out but before the novel was printed and we were deep into

copyedits, a friend read the book and commented that she was upset with something I’d written

– something minor, but valid – about culture. And I suddenly was so tempted to use Jace as a

mouthpiece. I struggled for two days, trying to find a way to make the idea work. My friend

was astonished and wondered why I could “make Jace” argue with Mirriam about issues, but

couldn’t find a way to “make him say this.” I told her I could never “make Jace say” anything.

About a year after I wrote Split, a colleague of mine was working on an issue novel. In her fear

that she would preach, her novel ended up saying nothing and she asked, “how do you write an

issue novel without preaching?”

So, I could tell her: See, there are things called issues and these things called novels. And they

should go together right through the juncture of a place called character.

Thank you Swati! Split is proof that you can write a novel that is both about an important issue and still be interesting. I will be re-posting my review for Split tomorrow HERE


Two other book I've reviewed that are "issue" oriented and have meant a lot to me are Speak by
Laurie Halse Anderson and Willow by Julia Hoban. Click on the titles to read my reviews.

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HOW YOU CAN HELP

*Follow the Before the Split Blog Tour*
 To honor National Domestic Violence Awareness month, author Swati Avasthi is combining a blog tour for her debut novel, Split, with a fundraiser for Family Violence Prevention Fund.  She’ll be on twenty-six blogs with contests, cut scenes, and guest posts about Split and will donate $1/comment with a goal and cap of $250.  If she receives 250 comments, she’ll double her donation.  She has a lot of fund raising help from more than 40 agents, editors and authors who have donated personalized books, memberships, and critiques for an online auction.  Follow the tour, get stuff you want, and help out a great cause all at once. 

Go to The Teen {Book} Scene for complete details.

Swati is hosting an auction at:

idonatetocharity.org

Please visit to bid on items ranging from critiques, to signed books, ARC's and more.

All proceeds got to  the the Family Violence Prevention Fund

 Featured items: 

Janet Fox, author of Faithful and the upcoming sequel Forgiven, donated a critique of 10 pages of your YA or MG novel. Additionally, she's going to throw some swag for her novels in your envelope!

Janet S. Fox is a writer, mom, and former high school English teacher. Janet became a children's author in the mid-90s. Her son's learning differences led her to develop ideas described in her book for Free Spirit Publishing, GET ORGANIZED WITHOUT LOSING IT (2006). Her other published work for children includes fiction (Spider Magazine) and science non-fiction (Highlights for Children). Her young adult novel FAITHFUL (Speak/Penguin), debuts in spring 2010, followed by a companion novel, FORGIVEN, in 2011. She is a 2010 graduate of the MFA/Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been a Regional Advisor for the SCBWI. Janet lives with her husband and their college-age son in the mountains of Montana. The family loves dogs and currently is ruled by an elderly Basset hound.

Start bidding on a critique by author Janet Fox HERE!





Author Nancy Werlin donated a signed, personalized Extraordinary.

Extraordinary: Phoebe finds herself drawn to Mallory, the strange and secretive new kid in school, and the two girls become as close as sisters . . . until Mallory's magnetic older brother, Ryland, shows up during their junior year. Ryland has an immediate, exciting hold on Phoebe, but a dangerous hold, for she begins to question her feelings about her best friend and, worse, about herself. Soon she'll discover the shocking truth about Ryland and Mallory: that these two are visitors from the faerie realm who have come to collect on an age-old debt. Generations ago, the faerie queen promised Pheobe's ancestor five extraordinary sons in exchange for the sacrifice of one ordinary female heir. But in hundreds of years there hasn't been a single ordinary girl in the family, and now the faeries are dying. Could Phoebe be the first ordinary one? Could she save the faeries, or is she special enough to save herself?
To learn more about Nancy, visit her at http://www.nancywerlin.com/

Start bidding on Extraordinary HERE!