Guest post written by author Amanda Sellet
Amanda Sellet has strong opinions about books, movies, and baked goods, which led to a previous career as a professional critic. Now she channels that saltiness into YA novels about smart girls who still have a lot to learn. On the comedy/tragedy question, she is team comedy all the way. Her debut novel, By The Book, is out now. It’s a clever YA rom-com debut perfect for fans of Kasie West and Ashley Poston. It follows a teen obsessed with nineteenth-century literature tries to cull advice on life and love from her favorite classic heroines to disastrous results—especially when she falls for the school’s resident Lothario.
As a seventh grader, my daughter is being taught (against her will) to write according to a rubric. Take three sentences from Category A and one supporting fact from Column B and tada! You have a paragraph. It’s like following a recipe, except the results are less delicious.
In the real world of fiction-writing, the process is less formulaic. A scene pops into your head, or you dream up a reason to get Character A to Point B, and somehow it all gets patched together into a plot. Often it’s only in hindsight that you realize how very on-brand the finished product has become. Borrow a little from life, add a pinch of inspiration from beloved stories, and suddenly there’s your subconscious, splayed across the page.
Case in point: my debut is packed with enough of my favorite things that I could warble about it with the von Trapps some stormy night. To spare everyone’s ears, I wrote it down instead. Here’s a list of tropes for which I am trash, and some classic examples thereof.
Big families: The number one reason I’ve always had a fondness for stories with lots of siblings is that I grew up in a larger-than-average family myself. The dinner scenes in BY THE BOOK are definitely inspired by the bickering, inside jokes, and camaraderie that characterized my own childhood meals.
Some of my favorite fictional sibling include the Murrys in Madeleine L’Engle’s WRINKLE IN TIME series (and later the O’Keefes); the Narnia-bound Pevensies; and Jane, Katherine, Mark, and Martha from Edward Eager’s HALF MAGIC.
Banter (with a side of slapstick): My mom introduced me to old movies at a young age, which explains both why I wanted a bias-cut satin dress for my wedding as well as my love of rat-a-tat comedic dialogue that occasionally veers into full-on absurdity. From THE THIN MAN series to screwball comedies like YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU and HIS GIRL FRIDAY, I adore the clever scripts from Hollywood’s Golden Age. On the book side, Terry Pratchett excels at a similar variety of sly humor. Kristan Higgins’ romances, particularly the Blue Heron series, are also hysterically funny.
Quirky settings: There are so many fictional towns I would love to visit, despite the high body count in places like Three Pines (from Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mysteries). But for sheer charm, few made-up places compare to Stars Hollow, home of The Gilmore Girls. I wanted the world of BY THE BOOK to feel similarly magical and slightly off-kilter, with lots of quippy secondary characters and a more erudite-than-is-strictly-realistic style of conversation.
Slow-burn romance: I’m like the Terminator when it comes to sniffing out the merest hint of romantic attraction in a story. (Speaking of which, I think we can all agree that The Terminator is a love story for the ages.) I read a lot of romance, in the genre sense, but am also a sucker for falling-in-love as a supposed side plot in fantasy and urban fantasy. From HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE to anything by Robin McKinley to Toby and [redacted] in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, I adore a story that makes you work for it, dropping a series of tantalizing hints that sloooooowly add up to the shippiest, swooniest of romances. A huge fave from recent years is the Hidden Legacy series by Ilona Andrews—which also features a big family prone to sassy one-liners.
Food, glorious food: I once wrote a portal fantasy in which cheese served as a major subplot. BY THE BOOK isn’t quite that food-centric, but I did spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about which flavors of kidlit-inspired scones should be served at Tome Raider. This is probably because I tend to fixate on fictional meals, like the maple sugar candy in UNDERSTOOD BETSY, or Elnora’s fabulous lunches in A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST.
Arcane cultural references: Part of the reason I’ve always aspired to be well read is that I hate missing out on a joke—and it’s hard to enjoy a parody if you don’t have at least a passing acquaintance with the source material. I tried to write the punchlines in BY THE BOOK so they make sense with even a vague awareness of the type of stories Mary likes, but hopefully it’s extra funny if you get the specific references to JANE EYRE and so forth.
Some of my favorite comedic riffs on highbrow sources are COLD COMFORT FARM (the book and the movie); Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series; Kate Beaton’s comics about the classics, including Nancy Drew; the brilliant essays in The Toast; NORTHANGER ABBEY; Monty Python sketches like “The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights”; the entire Mel Brooks oeuvre; and THIS IS SPINAL TAP.
Crumpet movies: Why do I love period pieces (a.k.a. costume dramas) so much? Anglophilia? A reserved and slightly uptight nature that would have been more at home in the era of calling cards and choreographed dances? Maybe it’s because my mother once told me I would have been considered better looking a century ago? Or it might simply be the result of early exposure to the classics, which I suspect re-wired my brain to respond to long sentences, understated emotion, and questions of morality and honor (or lack thereof).
To find out which classic novels captured my youthful imagination, you could always read my book. Or check out the list above for clues, because the author I’m thinking of excels at family dynamics, witty dialogue, slow-blooming romance, and skillfully sending up the absurdities of human behavior.
(Spoiler alert: Yes, I am one-thousand-percent talking about Jane Austen.)
