No. 45: The Witch Isn't Green!
When the Audience Ain’t Buying It
“By the end, I’d forgotten she was green,” I said, coming out of the theater. “Which is the point, of course.”
“Well, I never saw green in the first place,” said my partner.
I looked at him, puzzled, thinking this was a metaphorical point, but he is a strong, sturdy cowboy type and isn’t prone to Hallmark treacle. Then I clapped my hands to my cheeks and remembered — he’s green-pink colorblind! Green AND pink. Meaning I just took him to a 2-hour 40-minute musical whose entire ethos is Green and Pink and without them…
“So when everyone is shrieking, she’s green! she’s green!” I tiptoed. “What exactly did you think was happening??”
“I mean, I put two and two together and figured she should be green. But I just saw a beautiful, black woman.”
“So the whole time, when everyone in Oz is gasping and pointing at her… are you secretly thinking that they’re just very, very, um…”
“I just told myself: she is green. Even though she’s not green.”
“And the witch in pink??”
“She wore a lot of gray. Seemed a bit sickly. She was the one who looked weird to me.”
I clapped hands to my face again.
Now I’m thinking as an artist. What to do when the whole gimmick of your story implodes?
We’d gone to see WICKED, after overstuffing with corn casserole at Thanksgiving dinner, and I’d been buzzing for weeks in anticipation. In college, I’d studied the masterful novel by Gregory Maguire and written a portion of my thesis on it — but the novel is a sophisticated political tome, very Dickensian, and different from the musical. Elphaba and Galinda have a deeper relationship, and yet much less time together. Fans of the musical who read the book are often baffled by how dense and literary it is. It is not a comedy. And yet, the novel is what I fell in love with. (In fact, Gregory Maguire was the first author to give a blurb for THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL, which still makes me smile at the wonder of where life can take you.)
Years later, when I wrote early drafts of THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL, I still only knew the novel and had yet to see musical on Broadway. But when I did, I marveled at the kindred spirit — both stories zeroed in on the witch and princess as two sides of the same coin, the All About Eve potential of a friendship between them, the prince projected through a female gaze. Like SGE, it’s a two-hander, versus just the witch’s or princess’ story.
All of which to say, when I got several texts last week along the lines of…
Just saw WICKED and it felt like your movie’s hotter older cousin
...I took it as a compliment.
Not going to lie — I thought the same thing. The WICKED movie was gorgeous, inventive, massively-scaled, and has the luxury of time to build a world you can just sink into, like a warm, pink bubble-bath. It is the feeling I wanted the six books of THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL to achieve, the kind that makes you dissociate completely from the real world. But to watch it happen on a movie screen like this… The nearly three-hour runtime went by so fast I never touched my popcorn.
Then I look at my partner and he’s eyes closed, snoring, right before Elphaba starts flying.
System glitch!
To him, the witch everyone says is green isn’t green.
To him, the girl everyone says is beautiful and popular looks like an alien made out of oatmeal.
Of course he’s sleeping!
(“I liked the goat,” he says. “It looked like a goat.”)
This is the advantage of a novel. Something I preach dozens of times a year to students when I visit schools. When a book tells you Elphaba is green and Galinda is beautiful, you have your own visual language for these words. Your imagination produces its own colorscape that belongs to you. It’s your version of WICKED. A version no one else will ever see.
It’s the private marvel of living. That it’s your experience. Yes, you will find ways to share it with others. But not entirely. What’s in your mind, body, and soul is yours, yours, yours. You will never, ever be able to transmit or transmute or even communicate it 100%. My novels are my best attempt to try to give you the full me, but they will fail. And in that, there is joy that life is simply too big to conceive or capture.
So let’s talk about what happens when you give up reading, I tell kids.
Then you’re only fed other people’s version of the story. A version which, I guarantee you, will not look like yours. You are getting gruel/oatmeal Ariana instead of your Galinda. You are getting a green witch that is not green. It’s why the book is always better, no matter how much money or CGI or big actors you throw at the screen. Because whatever is up there, is not yours. And your story only happens when words meet brain.
Still, a book can have its own problems like this.
When I wrote THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL, Sophie and Agatha were 15 years old, the classic Disney Princess age. The age at which Little Mermaid Ariel can wear a clamshell bra and still be naive. But then I was told that Sophie and Agatha couldn’t be older than 13, since the books were being shelved in 9 & up, which meant 13 was the upper limit for the main characters. Some ludicrous rule which I will continue desecrating. (Whose romantic life is every 10 year-old girl America obsessed with? 34 year-old, Taylor Swift. Thank you.)
At the time, though, I was a debut novelist and weak in the spine, so I temporarily changed the characters’ ages to 13 — which led to a violent debate amongst gatekeepers, over what constituted appropriate behavior for a 13 year-old, some thinking Sophie was a spot-on model of the age, while others thought she was acting like a 22 year-old nymphet on a beach in Biarritz. This brouhaha raged for months during editing.
So then I lost all patience and took out the ages entirely.
Now everyone reads the characters as the age they want them. The age that makes sense to your particular imaginations.
No complaints. Everyone is happy.
Meanwhile, in YOUNG WORLD, early test readers have been ultra-jazzed about the young revolution that takes over the globe. But a few older adults have grumbled: “I don’t buy teenagers could successfully do any of this.”
Aha! Come at me, bro!
Needless to say, these adults have a particular view of the new generation and find them uniquely incapable. I do not agree with them, as I’ve made clear in this diary. I think teenagers are hormonally-charged superheroes looking for a good war to fight. Then again, I can’t just dismiss the viewpoint of such grumpy elders — that would be foolishly boxing out an audience I want to reach.
So what can I do to address it?
How can I make sure my Elphaba stays green?
In this case, the key is to have characters just like my naysayers in the book. Older adults who think teenagers are vapid, phone-obsessed, whining snowflakes. But instead of me editorializing a reaction to them — I let my teenagers shoulder the burden of convincing these characters instead. It’s up to my teens to prove to these very, very skeptical elders that they can do the job. And if they don’t, well… The cycle of tension and pooh-poohing between the elders and youth will continue. But to me, that battle must be fought on the pages of YOUNG WORLD, not in my own privately held opinions. The characters have the final say. Not the author.
Ack. I hear my partner from the other room. “Are you writing your diary?”
“Yeah.”
“You better not be writing about me.”
Ah well. What’s a diary for?
Your turn. What happens if you can’t see Elphaba as green? Have you ever seen a movie or read a book where you completely didn’t get what everyone else did?
Until next week —
Dear Soman it would be great if you could make a blog post discussing how middle grade books are more deep then people give then credit for from Warrior Cat books by Erin Hunter, School for good and evil by you, Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
Putting the naysayers into your book in order to prove them wrong is absolutely brilliant advice that I will definitely be stealing!
As far as Wicked goes, I, too, was vibrating with excitement when I went to see it, and then appropriately blown away by how amazing it was. As someone who never managed to get through the book but loves and listens to the musical often, I was completely satisfied with the movie because it not only fit but enhanced the images I already had in my head. Yes, not all of it was perfect, but it was just such a spectacle that I didn't care about the tiny differences between the musical and movie. Maybe that is a lesson -- they made the movie so good and loud and over-the-top that it is able to stand on its own and be critiqued as it is rather than in comparison to its predecessors.
I suppose if I can't ever portray exactly what goes on in my mind and my soul, then I should just do the next best thing and go all out, push to the absolute extremes in my writing -- that way, it will feel real simply because it is jumping off the page. No point in doing something weakly. (which to me sounds like a Hort quote).
Do you think this is what you did for SGE? Because I would say so -- your books are so dramatic and rich and exaggerated that it's hard to believe we don't get at least a tiny portion of your real soul in there :)