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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more like this, please. and thank you

Bookshelves of Doom pointed me in this direction.  Must have been in last Sunday’s NYT, because I hadn’t gotten to it yet.  Gore Vidal, his fiction never really caught me but I often enjoyed his essays and social commentary.  I might not have always agreed with him but I certainly enjoyed his style.

Read the interview.

What I love, he flat out knows he doesn’t have much time left on this planet and feels no need to be indirect.  In my salad days I dreamt of a world where people spoke what they felt, without rancor or remorse.  I think it would sound something like this.

Also, am I the only one sick of reading these short Q&A’s with people obviously written by junior staff or people who feel they are getting “great interview” by prodding or being outlandish?  The tete a tete doesn’t always have to be confrontational to be informative or entertaining… or can’t these cub reporters get the lions to roar without poking them with a stick?

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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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