My first novel takes place firmly now.
As such, protagonist Megan can text under the dinner table and show someone right away the boots she wants to buy and Tweet her thoughts fresh from her brain.
Likewise, she tends to respond pretty quickly to the texts she receives from others... and the Instagrams and the Tweets and the status updates.
My new novel, on other hand, takes place in the late 70's. Its protag, Carrie, either communicates via notes shoved through locker vents and long calls over the house phone, or has to wait to do it in 3D.
As I write from a pre-digital POV, I'm reliving the way I moved in the world back then. Thoughts could gel and become refined--or turn in on themselves, morphing into unnecessary worries or obsessions. There was this mystery about what other people did when they weren't with me, and the potential, likewise, for me to be at least temporarily unknowable. But there was also the need to tamp down enthusiasm and hold things in, and the inability to share the joyous or funny or sad until after its lustrous immediacy had worn off.
It's weird, to think some level of introspection and silence were necessary aspects of life thirty years ago (and, certainly, before that). I'm not saying this made life better or worse. I sometimes think it would've been awesome at sixteen to have Twitter for keeping tabs on my friends, or Google for researching papers or sex questions I'd never ask my mother. It would've been great to have access to online forums on Dealing with Frenemies or discussions of books I loved.
And yet...I still vividly recall writing stories in my head as I walked home from school, entertaining fantasies about various boys during long family car trips, doodling in waiting rooms, noticing stuff. I can't tell you what those stories were about or who those boys were or even, exactly, what it was I noticed. I just remember the feeling around it, the act of simply Being.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Precious Bane and Me
Precious Bane was my very favorite book as a teenager. If you read it, you will probably not understand why. When I recently reread the book, I was puzzled, too, that this obscure book resonated so clearly with me at such an age.
The novel by Mary Webb is about a girl born with a hare-lip during the middle ages, when everyone thought this sort of deformity was a sign of your innate evil. The protagonist, Prue, accepts her fate as an outcast, more or less. She's resigned to the fact that no one will marry her, and lives vicariously through the romantic exploits of the village beauty, her best friend, Jancis.
In the meantime, Prue goes about her life observing and loving and feeling and being.
When handsome, smart, funny Kester falls for her, it's because he sees her for who she is, "hare-shodden lip" be damned. He knows the way she sees things, how she thinks about things, matters.
So there I was, your typical suburban teen, with my Dr. Scholls, the stacks of Vogue and Teen Miss on my beside table, tennis lessons and college visits scheduled up the wazoo. I could tell you everything there was to know about evolution and birth control and Rowe v. Wade. I could tell you that superstitions about harelips and weird haunting spirits were poppycock. Yet I felt a deep kinship with a protagonist who thinks like this:
Like Prue, I sensed an otherness in myself that I still believe most people that age (or any age) feel, but don't admit to. Because there are so many ways of being different--whether because they are a different race from those around them or poor when the rest of the world seems to be rich or because they learn differently or look different or simply think in unorthodox ways.
Pretty much from day one, I was xx because I spoke my feelings. This was not always valued in my family, where surface I was different in the way I looked at the world, and sometimes (to this day) my family holds me apart for that. That is the kind of Being Different that can mark you internally as surely as a harelip can mark you on the outside.
To make matters more complicated, my parents were liberal (outspoken) Southerners in a northern town of buttoned-up Conservatives, so I was different in a more "meta" way. There were people who hated me the minute they heard my last name, who called us "commies," or worse. When my parents people made a public point of not joining one of the many local golf clubs because none of them accepted people of color, .
I was different because, in spite of my blond hair and blue eyes and white skin and big house and seriously-accomplished family, I knew I could not be defined by those things. My Self would come out no matter how hard I pushed it away (and believe me, I pushed it away hard at times).
Prue Sarn loved Kester, sure, but more than that, she loved herself, refusing to be defined only by what others believed she could be. I haven't always been so true to myself, but the example of her But she held up the lamp.
The novel by Mary Webb is about a girl born with a hare-lip during the middle ages, when everyone thought this sort of deformity was a sign of your innate evil. The protagonist, Prue, accepts her fate as an outcast, more or less. She's resigned to the fact that no one will marry her, and lives vicariously through the romantic exploits of the village beauty, her best friend, Jancis.
In the meantime, Prue goes about her life observing and loving and feeling and being.
When handsome, smart, funny Kester falls for her, it's because he sees her for who she is, "hare-shodden lip" be damned. He knows the way she sees things, how she thinks about things, matters.
So there I was, your typical suburban teen, with my Dr. Scholls, the stacks of Vogue and Teen Miss on my beside table, tennis lessons and college visits scheduled up the wazoo. I could tell you everything there was to know about evolution and birth control and Rowe v. Wade. I could tell you that superstitions about harelips and weird haunting spirits were poppycock. Yet I felt a deep kinship with a protagonist who thinks like this:
...if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path. So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself, Who was stinted of joy for his glory? How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over? What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tears, that he found time to climb so high?
Like Prue, I sensed an otherness in myself that I still believe most people that age (or any age) feel, but don't admit to. Because there are so many ways of being different--whether because they are a different race from those around them or poor when the rest of the world seems to be rich or because they learn differently or look different or simply think in unorthodox ways.
Pretty much from day one, I was xx because I spoke my feelings. This was not always valued in my family, where surface I was different in the way I looked at the world, and sometimes (to this day) my family holds me apart for that. That is the kind of Being Different that can mark you internally as surely as a harelip can mark you on the outside.
To make matters more complicated, my parents were liberal (outspoken) Southerners in a northern town of buttoned-up Conservatives, so I was different in a more "meta" way. There were people who hated me the minute they heard my last name, who called us "commies," or worse. When my parents people made a public point of not joining one of the many local golf clubs because none of them accepted people of color, .
I was different because, in spite of my blond hair and blue eyes and white skin and big house and seriously-accomplished family, I knew I could not be defined by those things. My Self would come out no matter how hard I pushed it away (and believe me, I pushed it away hard at times).
Prue Sarn loved Kester, sure, but more than that, she loved herself, refusing to be defined only by what others believed she could be. I haven't always been so true to myself, but the example of her But she held up the lamp.
Monday, May 13, 2013
I Curse and I Vote!
Cursing. In YA.
Can I even comment on this? I have a truck driver mouth.
But I didn't always.
One day, I realized that being blonde (dark, dark blonde) and blue-eyed and spacey and...materially "privileged"* was causing serious problems for my image, so I started to curse. Not too much, but enough.
It worked. People stopped thinking they knew who I was based entirely outward appearances--on who they THOUGHT I was/should be--and started thinking of me in new and creative ways. Like: She's alive in there! Or: She's really pissed! Or: She's rude!
There are different kinds of cursing. The kind that hurts (You are a fucking bitch!) and the kind said as a general reflection on the state of the world/self (That is some heavy shit!) or (What the fuck!? I put the milk carton in the broom closet, again?).
Kids who curse relentlessly are either trying to throw you off their trail (because they don't want you to think you know them so well, when you don't) or are really upset about things. Even kids who haven't had a lot of healthy adult guidance KNOW cursing is making a statement.
Whether or not to curse in YA is, yawn, another controversy that has more to do with adults' inability to understand their kids than it does with anything else. Like, kids do it and we wish the world was a nice place where they didn't feel like cursing, but it isn't.
Here's the way my main character thinks at the lowest point of her life in all her sixteen years:
*more about the quotes in another post
Can I even comment on this? I have a truck driver mouth.
But I didn't always.
One day, I realized that being blonde (dark, dark blonde) and blue-eyed and spacey and...materially "privileged"* was causing serious problems for my image, so I started to curse. Not too much, but enough.
It worked. People stopped thinking they knew who I was based entirely outward appearances--on who they THOUGHT I was/should be--and started thinking of me in new and creative ways. Like: She's alive in there! Or: She's really pissed! Or: She's rude!
There are different kinds of cursing. The kind that hurts (You are a fucking bitch!) and the kind said as a general reflection on the state of the world/self (That is some heavy shit!) or (What the fuck!? I put the milk carton in the broom closet, again?).
Kids who curse relentlessly are either trying to throw you off their trail (because they don't want you to think you know them so well, when you don't) or are really upset about things. Even kids who haven't had a lot of healthy adult guidance KNOW cursing is making a statement.
Whether or not to curse in YA is, yawn, another controversy that has more to do with adults' inability to understand their kids than it does with anything else. Like, kids do it and we wish the world was a nice place where they didn't feel like cursing, but it isn't.
Here's the way my main character thinks at the lowest point of her life in all her sixteen years:
“Just so you know,” I said, very slowly, “I just became the fucking funniest new joke at school.”I had never before said fucking in front of my parents, but now seemed like the perfect time to start. My truck-driver mouth was the least of our worries.
*more about the quotes in another post
Friday, May 10, 2013
Sixteen-Year-Old Self Cures Midlife Sex Problems!
Having problems feeling sexy?
Lacking desire because your brain is too busy worrying about your mother and your kid's allergies and also because you've slept with the same guy for five-thousand days in row and you're in perimenopause?
Well, have I got a cure for you!
Write about sex from the point of view of the teenager you once were. You know, the first time you kissed someone really cute. The first time your boyfriend touched you just so, and your insides felt like you were jumping off a cliff even as you knew you would fly.
When I first wrote about my protagonist finally making out with the boy she'd had a crush on for years...Dudes! The husband was like, "What the--???" (In a good way.) It was the frickin' middle of the day.
When I mentioned to some friends that my book for/about teens contains sex, a few of them grimaced. To which I silently thought: Uh-oh. Not uh-oh for me, but for those friends. Peeps, your kids will soon be thinking about sex. If not doing it. A lot. (If they haven't started already.)
Like you did.
Here's a great quote from an article on Atlantic Wire:
In my own novel, the sex is, to borrow from the above article, "nuanced," more about the connection between two people, and the pleasures that connection can bring on many different levels. And that is-ta dum!-what makes it so damn titillating. We are not talking Shades of Grey here, people.
Anyway, my main character, Megan, eventually decides not to lose her virginity. But she's thinking she will soon, and she's looking forward to it.
Didn't we all?
Lacking desire because your brain is too busy worrying about your mother and your kid's allergies and also because you've slept with the same guy for five-thousand days in row and you're in perimenopause?
Well, have I got a cure for you!
Write about sex from the point of view of the teenager you once were. You know, the first time you kissed someone really cute. The first time your boyfriend touched you just so, and your insides felt like you were jumping off a cliff even as you knew you would fly.
When I first wrote about my protagonist finally making out with the boy she'd had a crush on for years...Dudes! The husband was like, "What the--???" (In a good way.) It was the frickin' middle of the day.
When I mentioned to some friends that my book for/about teens contains sex, a few of them grimaced. To which I silently thought: Uh-oh. Not uh-oh for me, but for those friends. Peeps, your kids will soon be thinking about sex. If not doing it. A lot. (If they haven't started already.)
Like you did.
Here's a great quote from an article on Atlantic Wire:
To think that this whole major portion of life could be ignored by those who write for teens is silly and small-minded; part of the benefit and power of Y.A. fiction after all, along with sheer entertainment value, is to give teens the opportunity to consider and confront things happening in their own lives in the best way they can, and sexuality is one of those things.
In my own novel, the sex is, to borrow from the above article, "nuanced," more about the connection between two people, and the pleasures that connection can bring on many different levels. And that is-ta dum!-what makes it so damn titillating. We are not talking Shades of Grey here, people.
Anyway, my main character, Megan, eventually decides not to lose her virginity. But she's thinking she will soon, and she's looking forward to it.
Didn't we all?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)