when the rapture came to the YA section

Looking back, the one thing everyone could agree on was how normal a day it had been.

In same way that people don’t notice their health until the get sick, no one could remember what it was like when there were shelves of Young Adult novels in the libraries and bookstores. Everyone could clearly visualize the sections as they once were – thick spines of glossy covers, tantalizing one-word titles with the promise of romance or dystopia or both! – outgrowing their allotted shelves and threatening to take over neighboring shelves. The Young Adult books even began to subdivide beneath genre headings never before seen in the world of “adult” fiction. And as they began to take over slots on the various Bestseller’s Lists, forcing the New York Times to consider a separate Book Review section devoted strictly to Young Adults books, something strange happened.

Quietly, the way the light changes when a thin cloud passes briefly, the way you suddenly notice the gradual aging in a loved one’s face, the Rapture came to Young Adult books and they simply disappeared.

Though not entirely.

As with any great societal change, the writers and artists saw it coming and prepared. Those with the most vested in the genre, the writer’s themselves, stopped identifying themselves and their writing as anything other than “fiction.” When called on the change, some even being accused of abandoning the category or of trying to distance themselves from “genre writers” in general, stood their ground with the oldest explanation in the book: they wrote what they wrote, it was up to marketing departments to determine where their books belonged. But in secret they eyed the territories of Middle Grade and Literary Fiction and pivoted their attentions.

Artists, in particular the photographers who filled countless stock photo sites with typical Young Adult images suitable for multiple use on covers, began replacing their old work with new. Topless torsos were supplanted with silhouettes free of distinct racial identifiers, or iconic images of places and things evocative of various moods, replacing figurative images altogether. Designers began cultivating styles reminiscent of eras before they were born, creating books covers with modern versions of retro graphics that lent an air of literary respectability to otherwise cringe-worthy titles. It became difficult to tell whether a book was newly published or a reprint of a contemporary of classic 20th century authors. The resulting confusion deliberately set the stage for the disappearance of Young Adult books as those that were published were confused for adult titles and “mis-shelved” accordingly.

Finally, with the price break in tablet computers making them as affordable as a cell phone, digital book sales by teen readers soared and, while reviving the few remaining old guard publishers, gutted the need for Young Adult print books altogether.

Then one day – an everyday normal day, on that everyone agrees – everyone was suddenly struck with the realization that Young Adult books had vanished overnight. They had a sudden curiosity to scan the shelves and see if there was perhaps something new to discover, only to find empty shelves and reapportioned sections where Young Adult books had been. Even the “classics” in the genre had vacated their roosts. Some were later discovered among the fiction and literature, others had gained new covers and were among those books aimed at the Middle Grade reader, and some (thankfully in far too many cases) apparently disappeared as if they had never been. Rumors that some titles were found hiding in other genres could not be verified, and in the end it was agreed, the Rapture had come to Young Adult fiction.

And the world continued on without incident. Some even said it was a better world than before.

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in children’s literature, the exceptional is the rule

I was talking to another writer a while back and he said something that’s been sticking in my craw ever since. We were talking about a recent writing project of mine and he started asking some questions, the type of questions where you can tell someone is dancing around what they really want to say. Finally I managed to get that he liked the premise of the story but that it lacked an exceptional main character.

“That’s why people read fiction, to feel like they are special and exceptional, like the main character.”

I bristled.

This notion that everyone is exceptional, I used to see this every day when I worked in retail. It’s a variant of this idea that everyone feels they are entitled to things simply by virtue of their existence. It’s a very American stance, I’ve decided, and the more I thought about it the more I realized how both right and wrong this writer friend of my is.

The problem I have with this idea of the exceptional character in fiction is that a steady diet of this brings about a sort of literary malnutrition. Yes, given the choice, we might all want to have endless days of cake (or chocolate, or whatever your particular fancy may be) at every meal, but to do so would risk your physical health. Yet when it comes to reading or movies or television it seems, according to this friend of mine, that we would desire nothing less than a main character who is exceptional, able to overcome all obstacles, save the day, and with whom we need to identify with in order to not feel cheated.

And now I finally understand what bothers me most about a lot of middle grade books and a great deal of genre fiction in general I’ve read lately. I realize that’s a fairly wide brush I’m wielding, and it includes a lot of sacred cows for some people, but on the whole there are way more books out there that are feeding young readers with the literary equivalent of chocolate cake for no other reason than the fact that it sells. Well, naturally, if you asked your average teen or tween if they wanted broccoli or ice cream for every meal how many would and how often would they choose the broccoli?

It’s no surprise that superhero movies are the mainstay of the industry right now because we have grown culturally inured to this idea that unless our main character has superhuman strength or intellect then we are somehow being given an inferior product. Even in “realistic” stories where an amnesic spy is on the run for his or her life they must be able to perform at a punishing level of abuse no human could endure. And so it is with books for children and young adults, where the hope of the world rests on a group of teens (exceptional wizards at that) to battle the ultimate evil in order to save mankind. Or it becomes the tale of adolescence viewed through the skewered lens of a bunch of teens who discover they are the offspring of Greek gods. Or that the ultimate sign of devotion is the one that waits hundreds of years and uses their vampiric strength to fight for your love.

Gone are the stories of kids behaving like kids. These are the “quiet” stories agents and editors reject because they know it is an uphill battle against a marketing department charged with finding the next flavor of excitement that generates quick sales. Like an addiction where the pain of withdrawal can only be erased with greater and greater doses of the chemical of choice, any fiction now requires heroes of increasing peril and impossibly raised stakes. Zuckerman’s Famous Pig would require more than a trio of words gingerly woven into a web to save his bacon today, he’d need to be saved from the sluices of the meat-packing plant with a last-minute rescue and a Rube Goldberg series of actions orchestrated by a spider in order to survive publishing today.

Perhaps this is why adults have been drawn to YA literature lately. Regular fiction, with stories about people (and animals) dealing with the heroic struggles of everyday life, pales in comparison alongside glittery vampires and futuristic games where children battle each other to the death. But what of the generation of young adults coming up? Having been feed a steady diet of action adventure and having their every literary whim filled will they continue to expect that of their adult reading? Will we see an ever-increasing level of fantasy infused in every successful fiction that is published?

Personally, I reject this idea that a main character must be exceptional to be accepted. This same writer friend, when I offered this counter-statement, warned me I might have a difficult time getting published if I didn’t acquiesce in some way.

I hope in the end I’m right and he’s wrong.

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the quintessential boy book

I got asked “What’s a quintessential boy book?’ yesterday from someone.  Quintessential, meaning he perfect example, the pure embodiment of something or someone.  It’s almost like asking “Who invented jazz” because everyone has that point on the groove that they mark with a big letter A and it might not be where everyone else drops the needle.

But in attempting to untangle what I thought were the typical elements that made one book be a “boy” book as opposed to a “girl” book (and if we have “chick lit” for girls does that mean we have “dick lit” for boys?), and in searching for authors who I think cut close to the bone of what boys like to read, I finally had to conclude that it came down to one thing.

Every boy book is another attempt to rewrite The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry FInn. If I’m late to the party on this observation, please forgive me, and if you would be so kind as to cite some sources so that I may continue my education I’d be most grateful.

I went on (and oh how I can go on) that Harry Potter is another version of Twain’s adolescent trio (Tom, Huck and Becky = Harry, Ron and Hermione), and how boys prefer action to exposition, and how every book we tend to think of as being for boys pits its main character against a stream of events to which they must react.  That great divide in movie dates is the boy movie versus the girl movie, the movie where things happen versus the movie where people talk.  It isn’t that boys don’t like dialog, because they do, but what they don’t tend to like is dialog about emotions.  Thinking, logic, reasoning, facts, analysis… these are topics for discussion.

You know where there are a lot of these quintessential boy books?  In genre fiction.  Mysteries and Sci-fi and Westerns, all about heroes (and they can be female) who have to reason and puzzle their way through their environment.  This is what the boys do, they tear apart their world the same way they tear apart a toaster to see what’s inside, then put it all back together until it makes some sort of sense.  But then why do we place these books in the ghetto of a thematic genre instead if with what is otherwise known as Fiction and Literature, as the chains tend to break things out?  Is there really a difference in quality between these books?

Yes, but the difference is that the genre books are often better written than some of what gets shelved alongside what we consider classics.  Seriously, is there a reason Dutch Leonard can’t be on the same shelf as Harper Lee?  Is Philip Pullman somehow less of a literary artist than Mario Puzo that they must be kept segregated?  I know this is getting away from the boy book idea, but the fact is that a lot of what would appeal to a boy is often at odds with what society (marketing? the publishing world in general?) considers “good”

So then that’s it, the essence of all YA for boys boils down to some variation of Tom Sawyer and Huch Finn. Boy on an adventure, figuring out their world, battling bad guys and hunting treasue, spelunking and prankstering, all in that unique first person voice full of character but ultimately not saying anything too deep.

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in praise of the big dumb book

I finished a book today that I initially hated when I picked it up.  Review books, they’re hit or miss, with the ratio being ten-to-one in favor of the miss factor.  Some just don’t speak to me, some are atrocious, and others rub me the wrong way for whatever reason.  But there was this one title — which I think I’m going to write up early in June — that caught me in my blind spot and then had me strap in for the rest of the ride.

Back in my film review days we used to call movies like this Big Dumb Movies.  Some call them popcorn movies, other give them less flattering names, but they’re all the same thing.  You don’t have to have them explained to you, you know them the minute you catch a preview.  Plot and character are going to take a back seat to action.  Budgets and special effects will be huge.  Things get blowed up real good.  You can study all the cinema you want, sample all the art house fare your delicate palate can consume, but every once in a while you want a movie that tells your brain to shut the hell up, and while you’re at it, make it a pair of hotdogs and some double-buttered popcorn with that trough of soda.

Books are more genteel.  Hollywood may call them blockbusters but the equivalent in books is called genre, and usually spat out in a way to indicate it is somehow less a “real” book.  You know how it is, there’s literature and then there’s Westerns, or Thrillers, or something else that somehow gets placed in its own ghetto away from the other fiction titles that hold their head high as “pure” fiction.

Bah.

So what happened with this one book was that it started off preposterously and only got weirder.  Something in the tone and pacing didn’t really catch me.  I found myself studying the cover of the galley for clues.  It wasn’t necessarily badly written, it just seemed to be failing me on some level.  Then it hit me that I had gone into it with the wrong perspective.   If I had gone into Jaws thinking it was like a Jacques Cousteau documentary, well, obviously I’d be disoriented.  What had happened was I entered into the book thinking it was out to deliver me into something with a slightly higher brow than its intention.  Once I’d grasped that it was a Big Dumb Book I was able to hop on board, hands and arms inside the vehicle, the smell of churro carts somewhere nearby.  It wasn’t a book, it was an invitation to a theme park ride.

Big and Dumb isn’t Trashy.  Trashy revels in the mud, and winks a casual eye at the reader who is savvy enough to know better and goads on the reader who doesn’t.  Trashy has it’s place as well, but requires a different level of sophistication to appreciate.  In high school cliques, Trashy books may be the cool kids but they also tend to be snobs; the Big Dumb Books are the freaks and geeks who are the socially functional misfits that everyone gets along with.

The problem, the danger of the Big Dumb Book is that it isn’t meant to be part of a steady diet.  Same with Big Dumb Movies.  People who consume a mono-cultural pop diet of any kind suffer from intellectual rickets, they honestly think calf-length denim shorts hanging off their ass and a backward ball cap is getting dressed up for a night on the town (I couldn’t give you the equivalent for the ladies, though pegged capris with scabby shins and a sleeveless blouse tied in front comes to mind).

So let’s sing the praises of the Big Dumb Book, the kind of book that if made into a good movie would be number one at the box office… for at least a week.  Once in a while you just don’t want bran, you want Frosted Flakes.  With sugar added.  In chocolate milk.  You don’t always want a fancy sit-down meal, occasionally some scary looking stuff from a cart on the sidewalk actually becomes your new cuisine du jour.  Big Dumb Book, though you may be nutritionally void you are still full of calories and can please the palate.

Hail to thee, Big Dumb Book, you make us appreciate the good, the bad, and the ugly by providing us with a holiday from reason and the tyranny of good taste.

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the artifice of YA: a crisis of faith

Semesters are like manuscripts for me: the middle is the toughest part to get through. Up to my eyeballs in reading, writing, and revision, I haven’t had as much time as I would like to actually enjoy any of it.

Earlier this week I read two books for review, back to back, that sent crazy tingles up and down my spine. In both, teens were using digital cameras to make movies as projects for school; both projects were subjective documentaries; both projects were hailed by adults and peers as wildly successful, amazing accomplishments for first-time filmmakers. It speaks to the availability (the democracy, as some would have it) of the medium that teens can just jump in the fray with a vague idea and come out with a perfectly edited work that impresses adult mentors. Then again, it also speaks to a society (and especially a youth culture) brought up and weened on cheap reality program that has brought down standards of quality and diminished expectations.

What initially struck hard was the fact that my as-yet-finish YA novel, on hold until I can sort out some plotting issues, featured teens who also make films. They do this out of a twisted love of silent movies, but that isn’t what bothered me. What bothers me is the casual use of filmed media as a story telling device for YA titles, a camouflaged gimmick used to tell without telling. These “scenes” add a false sense of drama — as anything worth filming is automatically dramatic, if not documentary — where if the camera was removed the story would collapse. Indeed, the idea of “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” is about as old as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney back in the 30s and 40s, the show being nothing more than a gimmick used to allow the characters to sing and dance.

More cliches appear: The younger sibling who takes care of the older screw-up sibling, the good brother versus the bad brother; The girl who eventually realizes she’s with the bad boyfriend and takes up with the good one (usually the main character) when she realizes his heart of gold; The guy who can’t confess his feelings to the girl he likes, but eventually they hook up so it’s okay; Teens rallying against The Man, against society, against corporate greed, against artificial additives in food, against their meds, or, as Brando once said “What’ve you got?” The gym coaches are bad; The gifted kids are always more interesting than any other students; It isn’t impossible — in fact it’s almost required — that there be at least one sensitive jock who also has some hidden talent like art or music (or maybe all three!); All adults are dolts, except for the cool ones whose behavior is more adolescent than the teens, which makes them palatable; Parents are dysfunctional, or clueless, or both.

Yeah, all of those from two books.

Crap, I thought, what if YA if nothing more than the marketing of successful cliches? What if everything I thought would be good and fun and original in my stories were nothing more than the artful accumulation of genre specific cliches? All of a sudden I don’t know who I am.

You see, whenever people would ask me what I wrote I would say “young adult fiction” because that’s where I felt my heart was. True, my interests are all over the place and I have ideas that span picture book to YA with a smatering of poetry and non-fiction in the mix. My interests are varied, so the things that I write will probably be as varied. But overall I always associated with YA because… well, because of what?

Have I bought into the marketing so much that I cannot see the difference between a story featuring teens and a product pushing all the right buttons? YA has this problem of not being able to define itself because there are so many definitions floating around out there. Is it a book whose main character is a teen, or a book whose story or topic is of particular interest to a teen? By creating a separate market of books for teens are we saying “These are designed with your tastes in mind” or are we attempting to retard their jump into adult books because, as a society, we no longer hold a collective consensus on what we consider to be good national literature? Is YA little more than the PG-13 rating for books, another way for parents to relinquish their duties to monitor what kids read by creating a safe haven until they’re out of the house?

So many questions. I look at the books on the shelves that are called YA and wonder where they would have been shelved 30 years ago, before there was a YA section. Would they have even been published? Wouldn’t The Clique books or the Traveling Pants series have been mass market paperback in the grocery store back then?

If I’m writing stories intended for YA, is YA even a legitimate audience? And if so, how, what makes it different that writing literature that happens to have teens as main characters.

After all, there isn’t a “Middle Age” fiction section in the book stores and libraries, no “Elderly Fiction,” no “Fiction for Adolescent 30-Somethings.”

I understand the need for middle grade books, for the progression in language and as an introduction to literary themes and concepts. But once a kid hits 12 or 13 why aren’t they looking for stories that take them beyond their limited world of high school and navel gazing social drama? Why don’t they want to jump into books about the world beyond themselves, beyond characters they recognize, into stories about the non-teen world? Are they really not ready to accept that there’s a life beyond high school. Indeed, so many of them are clamoring to get out of school, why do they want to read about it?

I look at the “classics” that end up in YA sections, that get assigned as class reading in high school: Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, As I Lay Dying, Animal Farm, Heart of Darkness, Sister Carrie, The Trial, The Stranger, Siddhartha… not a one of these traditional YA books, nor would they be marketed as YA had they been written today. Are we selling YA readers short by not giving them future classics? I’m not saying one or two here and there might not slip into the canon of classic literature, but…

I guess that’s the ultimate question: Why aren’t we, as writers, as people who care about YA fiction, not more concerned with making sure that YA is more a literary genre and less a marketing gimmick?

It’s on us, I guess.

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in a world…

I’m up to my eyeballs in review books this past week and, well, there’s no way to soften this: I’m cramming. Actually, I put off a trio of books to the very end because I couldn’t dredge up any real interest without a looming deadline. That fact alone has nothing to do with the quality of the books, only my lack of interest.

Funny thing, though, when your mindset is already dreading a task at hand the brain seems anxious to verify your mood. For two of these books the only thing that keeps me from hating every word on the page is the constant reminder I am giving myself: It isn’t the book, David, it’s your attitude. The downside is that all that extraneous thinking tends to put me to sleep, which slows down my reading even further.

But one book did a funny thing to me. The more I tried to convince myself that the perceived flaws in the book were actually my own, the more the book grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shook me to rights. How old are these kids? I wondered as they tackled an entire city government with the ease and elan of a seasoned war reporter. How are these subplots going to tie together without appearing deus ex machina? I pondered as every new layer of story stretched credulity to the point snapping like a crazed sniper in a bell tower. And then right on cue, in case I was unable to nail the point that had been nagging at me from the start, the author has a main character come right out and say it:

“Are there any normal grown-ups?”

Often you hear people in charge of presenting content to mass audiences that they are merely giving the people what they want. So just exactly how and when did non-adult readers signal to the publishing world that the only adults allowed in a piece of fiction are either stereotypical exaggerations, hysterical power mongers, ineffectual obliviods, subversive allies or just plain all-around wallpaper? Where exactly are the normal grown-up characters who are as honest and confused as their child protagonists? Why are these books populated with adults whose villainy can only be seen and corrected by children, whose sole purpose is embarrassment, or whose wayward attempts at connecting with children sounds like Michael Jackson as a guidance counselor?

I get that kids like to feel empowered, that they like reading books about characters like themselves achieving great things that feel obtainable if only for a certain application of extra effort. I understand that it resonates with younger readers to have adult behavior seem at odds with their reality, and to have their explanation of that foreignness play off as humor to lighten the proceedings.

But does it have to be? Do we, as adults, believe that young readers don’t deserve solid adult characters to balance out a narrative? Do we believe the only adult they can accept in their fiction are the buffoons that make them feel better about themselves? Young readers look to books for many things, not the least of which is to better understand the world around them. If we are filling their heads with book after book of adults who are neither sympathetic nor realistic, do we expect that they’ll be able to make those adjustments in real life and not assume that all adults are abnormal?

I’ve got my eyes wide open now, a theory formulating in my head. My hypothesis comes down to a very simple question: Is the difference between a young adult or middle grade book (as a genre) and a book dealing with tween- and teen-age characters (as “serious” fiction or literature) simply a question of whether or not the author portrays adults as human beings?

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