I love YA. I read YA almost exclusively, have read YA since before I was technically supposed to be “allowed” to YA, and don’t plan on writing anything except YA. It’s the most fun, diverse, incredible genre of books on the market, because you can do anything and everything you want with it. In YA, you can make the rules, bend them and mold them. The great parter about writing for a younger audience is that they aren’t as jaded as adults, and don’t need every little detail to be absolutely real. Their suspension of disbelief is a little bit greater.

But for all that, it seems sometimes that, for all the great power that writing this genre gives us, a lot of YA (including my own) tends to fall back onto the old set of rules. A set of rules that were drilled into our heads way back in middle school, when we watched TV shows about high school and read about them, that filled us with great expectations about what high school could be. Then we got to high school and those dreams are completely shattered. Thoughts about cliques, how to dress, how to talk, what being in high school means, all gone, poof, caputsky the second we walk through our high school’s doors. We all have the same pre-conceived notions about high school.

And yet, even after high school, even after actually experiencing how frakkin’ boring high school can be at times unless you go out of your way to make it exciting, even in our adulthood, we cling to those same ideas, those cliches that we thought were real before high school, realized were false, and yet still, they linger in our minds and hearts, and eventually make their way into our writing.

As much as I love my beloved YA books, I must say that cliches are alive in well in the little genre that could.

Every high school, no matter how big, no matter how small, all seem to have the same social hierarchy, the same kinds of people, the same situations and dating rules and the same…sameness. It’s as thought they all follow the same basic template; even if the stories are wildly different, the same basic, core elements remain the same.

Main characters are hardly ever popular. If they are popular, they are still less popular than their more popular friends, and are one potential screw up for being completely unpopular.

People in YA can only ever like one person at a time. In high school, there were no limits to the amount of girls I had a crush on; I had so many unrequited loves they could form a very impressive Facebook group. But not in YA; if you like someone, you like that ONE person, and harp obsessively compulsively on that one person, until either that one person is either yours or until it’s well, WELL past the point of ever being available to date you.

Social status is everything. While in my school there were a fair amount of cliques, all the cliques seem to intermingle. I had preppy friends and popular friends and outcast friends and goth friends, football players and band geeks hung out together, girls dated in different social structure…in popular culture, all this is forgotten. You hang out with your friends. You do only the things that your friends in your specific group do. God forbid the dumpy girl who reads Jane Austen want to date the all-star quarterback. Only through some sort of magical shift in the cosmos can these two people fall for one another.

Everyone falls in love in biology class. Apparently the smell of formaldehyde is an aphrodisiac.

It’s weird how every book has the same set of circumstances, the same general princess, and the same general type of high school, when most everyone I talk to thinks that their high school experiences had very little if anything in common with the high schools seen on TV or we read in books.

NOTHING IN THIS SHOW IS REAL.

Do cliques exist? Yes, of course they do, but cliques exist in adult life. Of course you want to hang out with like minded people who have the same interest as you do, people you have things in common with and can be comfortable with. But cliques aren’t these ridgid social castes that are impossible to circumvent.

Do mean people exist in high school? Yeah. Really mean. Are they always popular people who are rich and have the best cars? No. Are the quarterbacks always assholes and the head cheerleaders all insane, vapid bitches? No. One of my coolest friends in high school was a cheerleader, and even if we weren’t as close as we had been in middle school (it’s bound to happen–friends drift apart, and she was another unrequited love, which makes things awkward when I confessed my undying affection for her), we were still friendly, still told each other inside jokes.

It seems like high school has become distilled to it’s most basic elements. Part of this is understandable; in contemporary fiction, you want to have a character battling back against some sort of adversity, and high school, when you’re actually IN high school, is full of adversity. It is also fairly easy to hate the person who seemingly has everything; the popular girls who seem to get all the boys and attention are a lot easier to despise than the more geeky, normal girls who can be even meaner. Way, way meaner than any popular girl can ever be.

In high school, most people fall in the middle of the spectrum. You’re not popular, you’re not a total outcast. This is where most of us existed in high school. And this isn’t meant to downplay the very real issue of bullying in high school; we just need to get out of the habit of thinking it’s ALWAYS got something to do with popularity.

There’s so many more cliches about high school. Prom is ALWAYS the most important day of a girl’s life. Homecoming hardly ever gets the same kind of love, and apparently no school has any kind of dances aside from those two. All a girl needs to go from nottie to hottie is one mall trip with a popular girl, a lot of make up and some new outfits and suddenly she’s ready for the popular guy.

The kind of car you drive is directly proportional to your social status; people with Beamers are rich assholes, but that Pacer your Dad handed down to you makes you special and unique. All teenagers drive, but few of them have jobs, or seem to pay for gas, or car insurance, or even bought their own cars. The kind of music you listen to also is reflective of the person you are.

Not that all the cliches are bad. After all, every story written is just a take off of another story someone else told, either yesterday or 100 years ago.  It makes things a bit easier to craft if you’ve got the standard, cookie-cutter high school ideal in stories. But, I would ask, if you find yourself using things cliches, then you do what all authors do and tweak them a tiny bit. Nothing major that would affect your story, but how about allowing your nerdy, bookworm girlfriend to listen to Slayer instead of…I don’t know, Mandy Moore or Christopher Cross. Have the kid who’s parents bought him a convertible actually have to work to pay for us own gas. Make up a dance or something, instead of having the prom be the best one, and for frak’s sake, I don’t know if any proms actually serve punch anymore, but if they do, then don’t have someone spike it.

Even the most cliche of cliches can be original with some tweaking.

How about you? What are some of your favorite cliches in either YA or teen movies? Either post them in the comments, or post them on Twitter with the hashtag “#highschoolcliches”.

KC