I find myself doing this occasionally; as if to provide myself with some absurd sense of validation, every once in a while I will read those things that I previously tried to pretend didn’t exist. Those bits of myself that existed when I was still a bad writer. I mean, it’s not up to me to say if I’m a really good writer, but if nothing else, I’m a much BETTER writer than I was, which has to count for something, ish, sort of. So, when I’m having a down day, I go back and read something that I used to write.

So when I stumbled onto my old (of all things) Power Rangers fanfiction, I expected to see one thing; truly bad, horrifying writing, and to be scared and to be motivated to go forward and write something much better. But the oddest thing happened.

While I was reading, I laughed outloud.

Not because something I had written was laughably horrible that I had to laugh at it. One of my characters told a joke, and I laughed at it. Me. The guy who hates pretty much everything he’s ever written. Going back and reading the things I used to write makes me cringe and chew my lips, and sometimes I feel like after I finish writing those things, the old tendancies come back and rear their ugly heads in whatever it is I’m writing nowadays. But I laughed. I laughed at it, and kept reading it, and I realized that what I had written wasn’t bad at all. It wasn’t great, but it was good. People had enjoyed it. It was like realizing that, while I have improved, I still always had a bit of potential then.

Over the last few weeks as I’ve been stalling on editing and revising one of my WIPs and upon the start of beginning to rewrite another, I find myself wanting to read all of the things I use to write. I filled entire notebooks with stories before. That’s what I would do in class when I was in high school, instead of pay attention. I would write oodles and oodles of stories, and poems, and bad rap lyrics. And I remember thinking it was so good. It probably wasn’t but I thought it was.

But that was was two computers ago. That was several spring/fall cleanings ago. I don’t have a single one of those old notebooks anymore. I can’t read any of those old stories, because a younger, less wise me looked at them and convinced himself there would be no value in ever looking at those stories.

But now I regret it. I would love to read those “bad” stories I wrote. I know how much I loved them before. But they’ve all been deleted, trashed, or boxed never to be found again. Seeing my other friends show their former worker online makes me envious. Why didn’t I keep that stuff!

I guess my point would be, if you end up finding an old notebook filled with bad, teenage, angsty poetry, think twice before throwing it away. You have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going. And sure, what I used to write could still widely be considered terrible, but hey, we’ve all been terrible at one point.

It’s nice to know that I was terrible once, so I know I can be awesome in the future.

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

As an avid reader of the YA genre, I’ve yet to find a book that I have had to put down and go “wow, this goes too far”. I’ve read bad books, I’ve read good books, I’ve read horror and contemporary and stories about drug abuse and sexual abuse and light hearted comedic romps and everything in between, and I’d be hard pressed to find a single story that horribly, terribly offends me. Some of its shocked me, some have moved me to near tears (BIG BOYS DON’T CRY!), and some has left me a bit disturbed. But none of it has offended me; that is to say, none of that has bothered and angered me because of it’s supposed “morality” or what it might do to children who read it.

I remember reading “The Bermudez Triangle” when I first began to really read YA fiction, after what seemed likes years of falling out of the genre and not writing for a variety of reasons. That book was part of the reason I begun to write YA; here was a real story with real characters that dealt with a plausible situation. And not only that, I thought it handled the subject of a teenage girls dealing with the sexuality extremely well. In a world where it’s very easy to stereotype people, even unintentionally,  Maureen Johnson writes with heart and makes everything seem real in palpable.

It’s why I get angry when I see that parents, in this case two mothers from the Leesburg, Florida area, while thumbing through a book looking for offensive content, entirely miss the point of that book. I very much doubt that the two women in this article, noble as their intentions may be, have ever seriously, honestly read that book. Like sat down, and read it from cover to cover. Because if they had they would realize that claims they make–namely that “The Bermudez Triangle” and even the book from the “Gossip Girl” series are not vulgar, are particularly offensive. They are stories, like the kind human beings have been telling for centuries.

“The Bermudez Triangle” is a book about friendship, not a book about sex. It’s a book about what happens when, in a group of friends, those two friends begin to date, and someone is the odd person out, while also dealing with the issue of young girls discovering their sexuality. And while yes, I know that parents hate the fact that teenagers have sex drives, and they are uncomfortable with the fact that sometimes those kids may turn out of be gay, there is nothing vulgar and offensive about self discover and friendship. Two girls kissing is not, in fact, a reason for a book to put a label on something.

It is easy to find the vulgarity in anything if you look harder, but sometimes it’s easier to find the vulgarity in something when you’re not looking hard at all. Paging through your daughter’s books to find the naughty bits is a poor substitute to actually sitting down and reading it, or sitting down and discussing things. After all, teenagers aren’t the easily influenced, sex crazed, reeady made alcoholics and/or druggies parents think they are. While those things make for good headlines in newspaper and on TV, they don’t make for good, you know…REALITY. To err is to be human, and it is far better to err when you’re a teenager and can learn from your mistakes than when you’re in your thirties and are too stubborn to change yourself. And it is far better for your teenage daughter or son to read something in a book and say “I would never do that” and then have them not do that than to try mainlining Jack Daniels and realizing that it was a bad idea when they have to jump start your heart. (Sorry, been listening to a lot of Motley Crue lately…)

But the sillier idea I find about the newest thing proposed by the two mothers–who, again, I’m sure have the best of intentions, or at least a strong desire to get featured on Fox News again–is that these books should be labeled. Which, honestly, I’m in favor of. Because in all my years in retail, the one thing I’ve learned is that kids love things with mature content labels. R-rated horror movie? Bag it up, sir! CD with a Parental Advisory Sticker? I’m listening to it the second I get in the car!  M-rated game? I can’t wait to get home and play this! If the publishing industry in in trouble, labels could be a huge economic boon. Mature Content labels are essentially little flashing stickers that shout “BUY ME, I’M NAUGHTY!” at kids everywhere.

In all seriousness though, the simple fact of the matter that no adult seems to want–and maybe this just because I’m 23 and I don’t have kids and I’m still naive–is that teenagers are going to find these things. And when you make them something bad or naughty, you only make the more desirable. But at least if you’re going to make something bad and naughty, have the decency to read it and be ready to explain fully what exactly makes something bad, or harmful, or detrimental to children. Because unfortunately, we do not live in a world where reporters do research and actually read before they write these things. And the one thing I fail to see in this article is a defense. There is no one saying “this book isn’t vulgar and sexual”, only these two women and their attorney and other adults talking about what they think is right for teens.

Teens, whether we like it or we don’t, are a lot smarter than we like to give them credit for. In fact, they’re actually a lot more mature than most adults. And rather than baby them and try and protect them from the made-for-TV harsh realities–or in the case of “The Bermudez Triangle”, the not harsh at all, real-life realites–we should feel free to put a book in their hands, or play a video game, or listen to a song, and not want to do everything that comes flying off the page at them.

KC

“Am I Evil” by Metallica (Originally Performed by Diamond Head)

“Brain Stew” by Green Day

“Runnin’ With The Devil” by Van Halen

“Cherry Bomb” by The Runaways

“Bad Reputation” by Thin Lizzy

“Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen

“Dyers Eve” by Metallica

“Ride Like The Wind” by Christopher Cross

“Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” by TLC

“The Sleep” by Pantera

“Youth Gone Wild” by Skid Row

“You’re My Best Friend” by Queen

“Is This Love?” by Whitesnake

“Our Lips Are Sealed” by The Go-Gos

“Kiss Me Deadly” by Lita Ford

“Sideways” by Citizen Cope

“Friends, Lovers, or Nothing” by John Mayer

“Fade to Black” by Metallica

“Edge Of A Broken Heart” by Vixen

My WIP “Social Disease” has been my baby since I wrote it in November of 2008. I have loved it more than I have loved anything I have written, and more than anything else, it’s kept my attention. Story ideas come and go–I can pour 30,000 words into a story and then decide it’s assy–but Social Disease is my one constant. I leave it alone, give it time to rest, but I will never truly be rid of it. I am it and it is me, the one and only novel that I have truly loved that is finished.

Except that after it was finished, I started rewriting it. And when I got 3/4 of the way done rewriting it, I decided I didn’t like where the story was going, and started rewriting it again. In that time I have started a lot of things that I felt were good ideas, only to not finish them. And now that I find myself unemployed with no real job prospects (and honestly, no desire to work, seeing as though I’ve pretty much been working ever day since I started college, which, coincidentally, I also didn’t finish), more than ever I want to finish. I don’t want to open my WIP in a year and see that is still there, the story all in my head, but not on the page. It might not ever get published, but I want it to be finished.

But I suppose that’s part of the writer’s problem, isn’t it–the novel is never finished. Even as I finished it the first time, the ideas where already turning on how to make it better. Even now, I fear that I will finish, then decide it’s all for naught and start redrafting again. Even Maureen freakin’ Johnson says that her novels are never finished. How am I supposed to finished if Maureen Johnson says that her novels are never finished!?

This was the brave woman who finished "The Lost Symbol", but says that her novels are never finished. I'm so confused right now.

In an odd way, I feel guilty. I hear my characters talk to me sometimes (I try to convince myself this is less lunacy and more something that ever writer goes through–don’t try to prove me wrong), screaming “finish me, finish me”. I yell back that I’m trying, but they never seem to understand why I can’t get up and go.

I love my main character Fiona. She is the best character I have ever written. Every day there’s a new layer to her, and I have to pause and ask myself “holy crap, did I write that?”. She, like Shrek, is an onion. That is she has a lot of layers, not that she’s a giant green ogre. Not that there’s anything wrong with green ogres. Okay, let me start again.

This is not my main character. I just needed another picture to post.

My main character is deep on many levels that I can’t seem to comprehend fully. She’s the most fleshed out, awesome thing I have ever written. She’s incredible. And I feel horribly, terribly guilty that her story may never be heard. That I may never finish. At least if I could finish and I got rejected by every agent, or I found an agent and never got published, or I got published by no one bought me book, I could say that I finished. I could say that maybe someone else read her story in full. I am more a wreck than when I found out Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez weren’t talking anymore.

THIS FRIENDSHIP WAS SUPPOSED TO LAST FOREVER!

I also feel guilty that the stories I’ve started with characters I’m also proud of often get shoved by the way side for Fiona. Another story I did come awfully close to finishing was pushed aside for Social Disease, and in a fit of “I NEED TO DO SOMETHING” I scrapped that whole story, started again, and then stopped it cold…to work on Social Disease. Because I can’t finish it, and I’ll be damned if I leave this story untold.

Sometimes I treat it like it’s some kind of twisted relationship, where if I go away and write something else, when I come back it will have written itself and worked out it’s problems. But it never works like that. It’s in a perpetual state of undoneness, always moving forward, always get mostly done and then…it stops. The words stop coming and I stare at the page, and in a fit of rage I say “FUCK IT, I’LL START IT ALL OVER AND THIS TIME IT’LL WORK!”. I can’t tell if this is just part of the writing process or if there’s something profoundly wrong with me.

I’ve written this wonderful character with this awesome story, AND I. CAN’T. FINISH. Is there a word for that? I’m going to make up one. Creatively Impotent. Why don’t they make a pill for this?

Cialis For Writers: For The Creatively Impotent. Has a nice ring, yeah?

Someone help me, oh please God help me. I want to write forever. I want to do this for a living. But how the hell can I do that if I can’t finish this? Is it always this hard, or am I making a big issue out of nothing? And no, this isn’t an issue of the story not being write–I love this story, and the characters. I’ve come up with an entire different story for on of the characters in the novel. I have written Fiona and found my Anti-Bella (again, why don’t they make a pill for that?). I can’t turn away.

Help. S.O.S. PPLLEEEAAAASE GIVE ME SOME ADVICE.

KC

To think, I was actually going to query my first draft of the WIP I’m working at some point. I told myself  ”self, this is good stuff! This is stuff that could get published today! And then, after like two months, we’d get a movie deal! Oh, Demi Lovato could star! And It could totally be her first ‘quasi-adult’ role, and I could launch her into the stratusphere of superstardom, and then I’d get like JK Rowling famous…”

…As you can see, this train of thought only had one stop; Delusion.

Seriously, Demi's my homegirl. Honest. Mostly.

This WIP started life as a NaNoWriMo novel–I gave it one pass through, a quick edit (which consisted mainly of finding all the -ly and “justs” and hitting delete), then started amassing my lists of potential agents. I would get accepted, and people would bid over my work, and agents would be setting up cage matches to get a piece of action. You know why? Because I’m that awesome. That’s right, I was officially Kanye Westing it. My huge ass ego took over and I figured–

I'm sorry KC, you're writing a good blog, imma let you finish, BUT CARA DELIZIA IS THE BEST DISNEY CHANNEL STAR OF ALL TIME! ALL TIME!

Uh…okay then Kanye…so…where was I again?

Oh, right. My expectations of my novel far exceeded what was actually within the realm of possibility of it. If I had queried that “second draft” of my novel, I would’ve gotten more rejections than I could handle. It would’ve made me quit and I would’ve stopped writing, possibly forever. It would’ve been pretty well devastating for me.

Drafting, for some reason, is an oddly new concept for me. I’ve been writing since I was old enough to know how to load WordPerfect…in MS-DOS. Yes, MS-DOS. I had to know how to do MS-DOS to write when I was like, five. I don’t miss those times. But in all that time, writing new drafts of something I knew was not something that happened very often. Most of this had a lot to do with the fact that I never finished anything. But the few things I did finish, I never thought about redrafting.

Which is one of the many reasons I cringe when I read anything pre-NaNoWriMo “I need to get my shit together, I want to do this for a living” revelation. Those stories are hard to look at sometime–it’s all about the potential and the disappointment. “Wow, when I first wrote this, I thought it was awesome. But really, this is just shit!”

This isn’t quite the case I’ve found with my current WIP. But after putting it away for a little while and tinkering with other things and coming back to it, my shiny golden ticket to the big time looked more like a bronze, slightly tarnished bus token. I still loved it, but it seemed to be missing something.

At first, I thought it was just the beginning. As long as I fixed my hook and first chapter at the beginning, then the rest of the story would just work. And then I woke up again, and realized that there were bigger things to do, and a way to make the story even better than before.

So I broke down, and started rewriting the whole damn thing. This is my official second draft, and now, I’m even more in love with my little novel that could. And I’m looking forward to starting the draft after this, when everything is nice and in place and I can start polishing.

I still get that nagging feeling that my first drafts will end up unpolishable turds–I’ve been trying to not get that nagging feeling, because usually that means I don’t finish. The first drafts are always the hardest; not because they’re not easy to write, and not because  they’re not good. Mainly because they force us to look at the objectively once we’re done with them and realize that they may not be as awesome as we originally thought, which is always, like, the worse thought. We want to think that everything we’ve ever written has been sunshine and rainbows.

Those first drafts are there to humble us and make us better. Also, to shatter the dreams that we will ever co-star in a movie based on our novel with Shadia Simmons and then go on to have a storybook romance with her.

Le sigh...

KC

On paper it sounds like a great idea; a young, unsuspecting girl unwitting stumbling upon the knowledge that vampires existing? Finding her true love despite said true loves desire to devour her? Vampires and werewolves and secret organizations, love triangles, family tension–all these things could’ve and should have ended up something so much better. So where did everything go wrong?

We already talked about Edward and Bella, but they’re only small parts of bigger overall problems with Twilight. Most of what’s wrong with Twilight has less to do with the numerous, somewhat big flaws of the two MC’s, and more to do with the overall badness of the writing itself.

One of the main reasons I’m so put off of most adult contemporary fiction is because it’s overly wordy and too pretentious. In an vain effort to appear more adult worthy and more intelligent, it seems like a lot of authors pull up the Thesaurus app on their iPhones and start looking for fancy words. They’re more concerned about the words than they are on crafting the actual story.

This is ultimately how Stephanie Meyer writes Bella–Bella speaks like no teenager that I’ve ever heard. No teenager uses the word iridescent. No teenager describes anyone as having liquid topaz eyes, nor do I think anyone would want to kiss anyone’s lips who felt like marble. Half of the problems in Twilight could’ve been fixed if Bella had been written like she was sixteen, and not a 35-year-old woman projecting her thoughts on said sixteen year old girl.

Good stories can always be ruined by bad dialogue, and by bad prose. The Twilight Saga is a prime example of taking a good thing and bogging it down in unnecessary bits of fluff. Why does Edward need “liquid topaz” eyes? Why not just say “his light brown eyes”? The greatest thing about YA and those who write it is that they realize the immediacy of adolescence. There isn’t a lot of YA where the MC’s fuck about or go into near soliloquies–there’s no time for that. Teenagers in real life and in YA talk the way the do not because they’re dumb or because they have a lack of language skills, they talk the way they do because saying “Oh-em=gee, I love my boyfriend,” is way quicker and much less ridiculous than “About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him-and I didn’t know how potent that part might be-that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”

Also, irrevocably is totally a thesaurus word. Just saying.

And what’s more frustrating is that Bella is surrounded by people who actually do speak like they’re supposed to, and in dialogue Bella speaks as a teenager should. But her narration is very clearly written from the viewpoint of someone much older than Bella. No teenager talks the way Bella does, and the only time I spoke the way Edward does is when I wrote my girlfriends in high school really bad poetry that they were supposed to swoon over.

And not only does no one talk that way, but having Bella narrate the way she does makes the story dry and dull and otherwise uninteresting. It’s possibly the most boring, sanatized romance novel ever in the history of ever. Nothing happens. In Breaking Dawn, the big battle that’s supposed to end the entire series doesn’t even happen–Bella Mary-Sue’s herself a giant brain bubble that she projects to protect everyone. So now Bella is supposed to be Jean Grey? When does the Dark Phoenix storyline start?

No, I have no idea how I managed to work that reference in.

Plotting in Twilight is pretty much absent, because the story itself doesn’t move anywhere unless Bella and Edward are together. All four books have the same problem–there’s lots of Bella kvetching about not being with Edward, or being with Edward and Edward not paying her any mind either way. Bella continues to complain and moan and groan about Edward. Jacob shows up, but Bella rather be with Edward. Then there’s more complaining/worrying/loving Edward…and then there’s so more of that.

Then near the end of the book, someone realizes something has to happen for the story to technically be a story. The bad guys show up, then Edward defeats them in an anticlimatic battle, and it’s all about how Bella loves Edward again. This is the plot to every book in the series, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. It’s all the same book, kind of, only the last two have a love triangle. None of this is done in a dynamic, new, interesting way–it’s like watching Degrassi, if Degrassi were half as interesting and the actors are worse, and the two leasts interesting people on the show get all the screen time.

It’s deriative plotting at it’s worse. We’re told there’s forces that more or less don’t want Bella to exist, but each time those forces are beaten back with little effort. The whole gang gets almost entire army thrown at them, but Bella “Brain Bubble” Swan is able to thwart them. The rest of the time is spent meandering around, with Bella saying and doing the same ol’ things, waiting around for Edward to come to his senses and love her the same way.

There is so much potential–SO MUCH POTENTIAL–for Twilight to be good. I think that’s why writers who don’t like the books react the way they do; there’s so much lying there, right on the surface, so much that could’ve been explored and it wasn’t, so many exciting things that could’ve happened but didn’t. Me and E.Lynn talk about that being the biggest disappointment at all.

It’s like going into a 3D movie and wearing the goofy glasses the whole time, but the only part of the movie that’s in 3D is the end, and all that happens is that a hand sort of awkwardly reaches out of he screen. You leave the theater disappointed, not because everything about the movie was bad (though there were probably some bad parts), but because you’re left unsatisfied. You were promised an epic, grand adventure–you ended up with something that ended up being kind of boring, and maybe even a parody of itself.

KC

There was never a time when a book me or my sister wanted to read was kept from us. Oh sure, she was more strict about music (I’m twenty-two and I still get nagged about buying music with a parental advisory sticker), movies (she’s made me return inappropriate things to the store) and games (we she was probably the most strict about). But books? Oh no, my mother would never make me put down a book I didn’t want to read. The reason for this is something that I believe more parents should take into consideration.

Namely, if your child is reading A BOOK, why take it away? Why make book reading a chore an ordeal?

While I’ve always enjoyed reading and loved it (and as a proud graduate of the “Hooked On Phonics School Of Learning”), I always liked reading on my own. I absolutely despised reading in school, hated being force to read books I didn’t like, and hated looking for the “hidden meaning” or subtext of all these people’s books. In school, reading went from being something I loved doing to something that was like pulling teeth.

“No,I don’t know what the subtext behind Hamlet is! Isn’t this a play? Isn’t this just supposed to be a story!? WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO HAVE A SECRET MEANING!”

It’s always said that teenagers don’t read, but I think the issue is more complex than that. Teenagers do read, and I think they like to read. But when you ake something that’s supposed to be for leisure and entertainment and turn it into dissecting the vast mysterious of the literary universe, it’s no wonder people get frustrated. It’s no surprise that reading books in high school could turn people off of books when you consider that most high school English classes make reading into a big “THING”, something your parents force you to do so you can finish your homework.

Which is more disheartening when you read things like people wanting to ban something as innocuous as The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson being attacked, or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie getting banned because it mentions masurbation or Looking for Alaska getting challenged because of “graphic language and sexual content” (and there is no truly explicit sexual content, as someone who read and loved Looking for Alaska can attest to), or even a classic book like To Kill a Mockingbird being threatened be banned for silly reasons.

I understand the need for parents to not want to expose their children tocertain things, but they must also understand that my mother never stopped be from reading a book that I wanted to read. Reading books, more than watching movies/TV or listening to music, is supposed to be about broading your horizons. It’s supposed to be about living vicariously through someone else and hopefully taking the lessons they learn for yourself.

Sheltering kids from things you may find “unsavory” doesn’t really protect them fro those things, at some point and sometime those people will be forced to confront them. Trying to ban the sexually explicit content doesn’t stop the fact that we as humans are bombarded with sex pretty much every we go and with everything we do, somehow, some way. Just go look at a magazine rack and your seemingly innocent grocery store. Nor will hiding dirty language hide the fact that most people fuckin’ curse, they just have the good sense to not curse around people who might be offended by said fucking cursing, nor does hiding books about racism, sexism, ism-isms, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy and uterus biting hide kids from the fact that these things occur.

…Okay, not that last thing.

When we treat books like they’re a taboo thing, we hurt their intergrity, and make reading books an inherently bad thing. When we do that on top of forcing children and teens to read books they may or may not like, we send the message that the books that were banned are bad, but the crud we’re forced to read in school is supposed to be the good stuff.

We also teach that reading books is a much more complicated process than it is. How many people have struggled to find out what the subtext is behind a book, what the plot behind the plot is supposed to be? Is there really some meaning behind The Great Gatsby? Why can’t Catcher In The Rye just be a story about adolescene (and not even a really great one at that)? I can’t even understand what’s being said in Their Eyes Were Watching God, now you expecting me to write at length about it?

What ends up happening isn’t so much that people are deeply affected by those books (thought they can be), as they reguritate whatever their teacher’s tell them is important, or the sputter on and on in essays about something that doesn’t make much sense to them or their teachers. I never did really well in school, but one of the good things I always could do is mimic the tone of my teachers, because in general teachers like hearing what they said regurtitated back at them.

The aspect of “reading is done as entertainment” is lost in school–instead it’s “reading is done to make you a more worldly, deeper thinking person”, which isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, until you consider that a lot of these great authors weren’t planning on having teenagers plumb the debts. Most writers will tell you that their intention isn’t to add symbolism and metaphors that you can’t see unless you squint really really hard. Most authors would tell you they were more concerned with writing a story that lots and lots of people liked.

And I could add another thousand words talking about how much summer reading sucks. Just what kids want, to be studying all summer for a test! That’ll get ‘em reading!

The best thing we could do would be not to ban certain books in schools but to allow students to read whatever books they want, as long as their age appropriate. Making kids read something they want to read would go a long way towards encouraging long term readership and a thriving book industry. The people that read today will probably read tomorrow. Well, they will until they realize how silly and pretensious a lot of contemporary adult fiction is, and then they’ll keep on reading YA, which is where the action is out anyway.

But bannings books and then forcing kids to read could very well contribute to decreasing readership and people stop buying books AND THE FALL OF PUBLISHING AS WE KNOW IT! And that’s no good for me, because I hope to have a very long career in writing novels. And even if I don’t, I will instill the same “read whatever you want” thought process in my children that my mother did in me.

KC

When I started to write YA again, it was hard getting out of that mindset–toning down the raunch, paring down the dialogue and trying to get to the heart of the story. The thing about writing screenplays as opposed to novels is that there’s a little bit more  room for ambiguoity–you can leave a lot of stuff out, and there’s a LOT more room for pouring on the raunch and hoping it works.

In YA? Not so much.

My main character Fiona is something of a tomboy, and she certainly has a potty mouth. This is part of her character, and in general I feel like language in YA isn’t a that big a deal. Not to mention that her best friend is constantly scolding her for her bad language. But once again, I find myself struggling to find the line between “this is how teenagers talk and act” and “this belongs in a Judd Apatow movie”. It’s so akward for me to be writing a teenage, female, sexually active person and not feel as though I’m being slightly creepy while doing so, or feeling like people will think that.

In general, YA treats sex fairly well. There’s books like Twilight, which are nothing but huge, long allegories about not fucking and starting to pump out babies the second you get married. (Not that I’m biased or anything.) There’s books like Kendra by Coe Booth, or Lost It by Kristin Tracy or The Virginity Club, which handle it extremely well, leaving just enough there to get the idea, but not crossing the line on top of it. Even the much maligned Gossip Girl isn’t super descriptive about sex.

It’s the constant question of where the line is, between mature and appropriate for teenagers, and dipping over into adult content. For example, after being involved in some backseat shennigans with a boy, my MC Fiona shouted out “Ewww, you came all over my stomach!”

And suddenly, in my flurry of writing instead of working, I had to stop. Suddenly I asked “okay, is this over the line?”.  It’s not like I haven’t heard teenage girls use that terminology before. The argument that girls are pretty little angels who only giggle and talk innocently about sex is GREATLY exaggerated. As someone who sat with four VERY sexually active teenage girls in high school, I could tell you some stories that would make your brains ooze from you ear.

But I would never write those things down in a book. They’re way too much. I try to be aware of what will and won’t sell, and while this is probably a Bad Thing for upcoming author, I’m not sure I could put what those girls said in this novel, even in the context of it being somewhat centered around sex.

I try my best to find the line, and maybe walk a little left of center of it, but I never think I cross it. Until I got to that sentence. And that word, “came”, used in that context…for some reason, it stopped me cold. It was totally within the realm of something Fiona would say; she’s nothing if not blunt to a fault. But still, it felt a bit…whoa.

I had to step away from it and think, not would “adults be offended by this” (because let’s face it, adults are predisposed to be offended by EVERYTHING), but would potential readers be offended by it. The answer came back most of them wouldn’t but some would. Still, it worked, but something about the phrasing bugged me.

It’s that damned line. That line that I’ve been treading, ever since the idea “Girl who once had STI returns to school and tries to start sex-education club in her fundementally Christian town”. The line that I think most people that write what might be considered “edgy YA” walk and try desperately not to cross.

Or, maybe I just stress about it. As Coe Booth herself once told me, it’s probably me procrastinating–I just need to finish.

*sigh* I hate it when published authors are right.

*slinks off the keep writing*

Of course, since lately I’ve been doing more writing than working lately (don’t chastise me, if you worked where I did you’d find whatever you could to avoid working too), my co-workers have started asking me what I’m writing. I should’ve expected it, but it’s always awkward talking about it. I hardly ever show my writing with people who aren’t other writers or friends of mine who are writers. So I’ve found it strange that probably for the first time ever, I’ve had to actually explain outloud what my novel is about.

Co-Worker #1: So what’s your novel about?

Me: Ummmmm…well…it’s kind of about what happens when a “normal” guy (yes, I did the stupid quote fingers) goes on a cross country road trip with a sort of “Heidi Montag” type of girl.

Co-Worker #1: …So it’s a horror novel then?

That was a joke, of course. Still it was weird saying it outloud. I could go on for pages when I’m riting about what my novel is about, but saying it OUT LOUD? To other people? For a long time I didn’t tell people I wrote at all; writing is such an intensly personal thing that I didn’t want someone to ridicule me for having a bad idea. I can take written critism, but people telling me to my face that something I wrote sucks, or that an idea I have is bad? FOR SHAME! THE HORROR, THE HORROR!

Luckily, the few people I’ve told the idea to outloud have told me that they actually like the idea. And my description of it has gotten better as well.

The other question I get asked is what kind of writing I do, which still makes me a bit uneasy. I love writing YA, but I always feel like there’s this unfair stigma attached to it. Authors like Justine Larabalstier have talked about it before; she writes YA and will always write YA. But despite the fact that she’s successful, people still ask her when she’ll write “real” novels for adults.

Allow me to explain why I write YA, and while I’ll always write YA.

Because adults are fucking boring.

Now, hear me out. I’ve tried reading a lot of adult books. As an aspiring author, it wouldn’t hurt for me to read things outside of my pre-defined genre. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have much patience for a story that dilly-dallies a lot before getting to the good stuff.

Contemporary literature tends to dilly-dally a lot. They can be overly wordy, dreadfully boring affairs, where a lot of stuff doesn’t happen. Recently I tried reading a book called “I Just Want My Pants Back” (which in itself is full of win for the title alone), but the first chapter is just some kind sitting around his apartment, getting ready to go out.

Why not start me off when he’s already out? We came from the lack of pantsness, thank you very much! I don’t need to read about the takeout he ordered or the pot he smoked or the time he wasted sitting around doing nothing. While I understand the need to immerse oneself in the world of a book, I feel like in a lot of cases there’s too much telling people about the world, and not enough showing.

Since a lot of YA revolves around teens, there’s a greater sense of urgency, a greater since of NOW OR NEVER. And since most people who read YA are impatient bratlings like me who are probably juggling numerous tasks, a lot of YA comes right out of the gate. When you’re a teenager, every little thing can become something BIG. Their characters who are dealing with big first–first loves, first times, first encounters with vampires or the undeead. Everything is heightened; the drama is more tense, the feeling are deeper. Writing and reading YA is just more fun than reading literature, at least to me.

When my characters hit a point where they are only talking and are doing anything worthwhile, I start to get bored. And if I start to get bored, I can’t imagine someone else wouldn’t get bored as well. There’s so much to explore and such more to say in YA. I could write an ‘adult’ book, I suppose, but I’m not sure how I’d make it exciting or tense without avoiding it become some sort of Lifetime movie. There aren’t many lessons you can teach in comtemporary literature, to your readers or yourself.

YA allows a lot more exploration of how the world works, how people can change, and a lot more lessons about ourselves. I mean, every book doesn’t have a moral so to speak, but whenever I’m done reading a YA book, I feel a little better off for doing so. I think that’s ultimately the affect I want to have on my reader’s–I never want them to end a story going “well, that’s several hours of my life I’ll never get back in which boring people did boring things and nothing ever changed or really happened.”

On that note, if you have any suggestions for “adult” books I should read (ROMANCE NEED NOT APPLY, thank you), leave them in the comments and I’ll check them out.

Until next time

KC