Throwaways: a Young Adult Novel
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THROWAWAYS: A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL by Lauren Camille Dixon APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: _________________________________________ R. Clay Reynolds, Chair _________________________________________ Charles Hatfield _________________________________________ Theresa M. Towner _________________________________________ Frederick Turner Copyright 2017 Lauren Camille Dixon All Rights Reserved To my late grandfather Dr. James R. Dixon, whose example led me to this path and whose memory ensured I completed the journey, even if I was tortoise slow. THROWAWAYS: A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL by Lauren Camille Dixon, BS, MFA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES – STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS MAY 2017 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For keeping me focused even when I wanted to give up, I thank my dissertation advisor Clay Reynolds. His guidance and depth of fiction-writing knowledge helped this project transform from mere possibility into a living, breathing novel. My gratitude also goes to the members of my committee, Theresa M. Towner, Charles Hatfield, and Frederick Turner, for their support. I am lucky to have a life filled with supportive and talented family and friends; my love and thanks go to Mom, who has given me fiction notes since I was a teen, and to Dad, who close- reads a sentence with precision and care. I thank both for their encouragement and for giving me the space required to complete this feat. Thanks to my sister Dana Naughton for her enthusiasm over early drafts; to Neile Graham, Meredith Frazier, David Afsharirad, and Ellen McGinty for insightful comments; to Meghan Sinoff and Emily C. Skaftun for writing dates and for general coconspiring; to Leslie Howle for offering to share her forest home in Seattle; to Cassandra Rose Clarke, Tony Daniel, Tod McCoy, Erik Owomoyela, Keffy Kehrli, Stephanie Denise Brown, Andy Romine, and Vicki Saunders for early version notes. Thanks also to Ted Chiang for pointing out Annie Dillard's essay on writing to one's own astonishment. Finally, gratitude to my husband Lucas Johnson, my first reader and forever-confidant. He dedicated many long hours to get me through this project, dropped everything to talk through plot problems, and read every word I gave him, even when it was the opposite of fun. He got me through this marathon, as he has done with most things in our lives. December 2016 v THROWAWAYS: A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL Lauren Dixon, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2017 Supervising Professor: R. Clay Reynolds In this creative dissertation I present my novel Throwaways and an essay regarding the writing of Throwaways. In the essay I discuss my process in writing fiction, the techniques I relied on to create the novel, the inspiration I found in reading other writers, and the strategies and categorical contexts I studied in preparation of writing a young adult, fantasy novel. In the essay I discuss the difficulty in writing fiction as it requires the writer to inhabit multiple worlds and to understand the logical aspects regarding the operation of an imaginary world. I review how reading fantasy, horror, slip-stream, and young adult literature taught me strategies in building rounded characters and in using experimental techniques to signify shifts in character point-of-view. From a number of authors, I studied how to use object as character, twist endings, instability of the world, changing realities, disruption of traditional plot structures, as well as voice, tone, and sentence structure. To explain how I learned to reach younger readers than myself, I review the background and origin of the young adult category, the general requirements to reach those young readers, and vi survey four contemporary novels to understand how other authors successfully reach their young adult audiences. Because Throwaways is fantasy narrative in addition to a young adult novel, I explore several definitions of the fantasy category to explain how the novel works as a work of fantasy, particularly as a time fantasy and an intrusion fantasy, in which magic disturbs reality and the characters never become fully accustomed to the magic. I also explain why Throwaways needed to be a work of fantasy rather than a realistic tale, and I examine fantastic elements in four novels from which I drew inspiration. I discuss T.S. Eliot's notion of the "objective correlative" to give objects significance that becomes emotionally resonant, and I examine elements in Throwaways that utilize the objective correlative, including the protagonist's father's Medal of Honor, and the natural setting of the novel, including trees and fungi. I review scientific studies on trees, fungus, and lichen to explain how I crafted the thematic element of symbiosis in this novel. As a novel, Throwaways illustrates my execution of the techniques and strategies I examine in the essay. True to a young adult novel, Throwaways features a teenaged protagonist who must overcome the grief of her mother's death and learn to face the consequences of tumultuous, tragic events as well as her own actions. As a fantasy, the novel uses a time flux and elements that intrude on the protagonist's life in order to link human suffering to ecological suffering; through this linkage, the protagonist learns that by helping others endure and overcome their own struggles, she can overcome her own. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................................. v ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... vi PART I THROWAWAYS: A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1 "BUILDING A MYSTERY": WRITING OF THROWAWAYS AND NARRATIVE INFLUENCES .......................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER 2 WRITING FOR A YOUNG ADULT AUDIENCE ................................. 37 CHAPTER 3 FANTASY, MAGICAL REALISM, AND FAIRY TALE: CATEGORY AND CONTEXT .............................................................................................................. 60 CHAPTER 4 OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVES AND ECOLOGICAL THEMES IN THROWAWAYS ................................................................................................................ 83 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 91 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................... 94 WORKS CONSULTED ................................................................................................... 99 PART II THROWAWAYS .............................................................................................................................. 1 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...................................................................................................... 274 CURRICULUM VITAE viii PART I THROWAWAYS: A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL INTRODUCTION My novel, Throwaways, is a young adult, fantasy novel that addresses the struggles of teenage runaway Susie Hopkins, who must overcome the grief of her mother's death and learn to face the consequences of tumultuous, tragic events as well as her own actions. The bulk of the novel is written in a traditional narrative style employing third-person limited point-of-view; certain sections employ experimental narrative techniques, specifically, interstitial chapters from the combined perspectives of a castle, a forest, and a man named Thano. Susie leaves the realistic setting of her town, Garnet Falls, to follow Thano to the Moss Castle, a magical location in the woods that all but stops time and allows strange, magical occurrences to unravel that affect not only Susie's life, but the life of her cousin, Reg. When Susie finds out her mother has returned—her spirit implanted into the body of Susie's high school rival, Mary Beth—Susie must grapple with her own grief and selfish desire to keep her mother from leaving her again as well as the moral urge to return to Mary Beth rightful possession of her body. It took me three years to write Throwaways because of several issues, including the difficulties of inhabiting two realities simultaneously, the physical and mental energy the process requires, along with the fact that I refused to use an outline in favor of writing to "discover" my characters, the plot, the magical setting, and so on. I moved by intuition and feeling as opposed to logic, despite attempts at using maps, flowcharts, and other outlining tools. Because of my choice to write for "discovery," I eventually wrote two drastically different novels because of issues in the first that resulted from too many antagonists, metaphysical abstracts over concrete setting, and lack of character development. Ultimately, I persevered in the writing process by my own undying enthusiasm for writing, which the writer Samuel R. Delany refers to as 1 begeisterung, as well as a belief that stories inspire and help readers learn how to live in and negotiate their own worlds. Other writers, including Rick Bass, also share this method of writing, although my own process frustrated me. Since I wrote a young adult, fantasy novel, the magic in the text had to make some coherent