Book review: Minders of Make-Believe

Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature, by Leonard S. Marcus.

This was the most fun I've had reading a book chosen for professional development in a long time.  The author clearly has some favorite and less-favorite personalities (he LOVES Ursula Nordstrom, and it shows in every adjective, while Ms. Moore of the NYPL does not come across as the most charming individual), but overall this is a tremendously fun book.

It might not be as much fun for those who haven't read a substantial portion of the books discussed here.  I'm not sure.  For me it was especially entertaining because I'd read most of the books he discussed, and loved hearing about the histories of various houses, imprints, authors, and book-world personalities.

Since I work as a librarian the off-hand bits about the founding of the Horn Book and Kirkus were especially amusing.  So were the parts about publishing-house supported magazines that served as sites to serialize upcoming books and promote various products while also offering readers general information on the field (this was, umm, in the early-mid 1800s sections?).  These segments reminded me of stuff like Tor.com now - in a way, that website is actually very like the publishing house magazines of the 1800s, providing useful general info on a subfield and original fiction while promoting house authors and the reputation of the house as a whole - I LOVE it when historical things mirror each other like that.

It was amusing but not surprising to see how far back the library-world antipathy to series fiction and comics goes, but it did go a long way to explaining why library cataloging is so singularly inept at dealing with series fiction - why develop cataloging systems that make finding and retrieving particular series volumes easy when the plan is not to collect series fiction at all?

Not sure how strong the appeal of the book would be to those outside of the profession, but I feel much more educated and aware about my own profession now.  And found the book enjoyable, fast-reading, and chatty.  I wish it had a bibliography though - it's got an index, and I suspect a lot of the material is of the journalist-sourced type rather than the published-books type, but I'm still curious.

Synopsis hacking

Oh, and I'm happy to say that I finally have something that reads like a workable draft of a synopsis.  Ugly and graceless, but a synopsis rather than a series of actions.

Now that I've written it, it's making me itch to go do a 3rd rewrite on the novel to draw out some of the character conflicts and arcs more clearly, which I think is a sign that it worked.

Basically, I finally stopped thinking of a synopsis as describing a series of events and started thinking of it as describing a series of escalating conflicts.

Thanks to the many agent and publishing blogs whose generous writing made that insight possible.

Cause, y'know, it turns out the story had lots of character conflict that built towards a resolution in escalating stages.  Three of 'em, just like a three act play and all.  Who knew?  Characters had initial conflicts, escalating conflicts, and final conflicts.  At least, the characters who you would identify as "important" had all three.  And then it was easy to see who wasn't so central to the story (even though their actions might be central to plot scenes) because they had, at most, one or two such conflicts, which didn't really build over the course of the story.  While the main 3 characters had 3 sets of conflicts to deal with, and the main 5 had two, and the two main sub-plot-groups of characters had three conflict stages as a group.