"Fiction Is About Life, and Life Is Messy"

I’m new to the young adult novel. Before 2007 I wrote books of stories and prose poems for “adults.” I put “adults” in quotations because I see very little difference between writing for adults or young adults. Any kid from 14-18-years-old is smart enough to read and understand my prose poetry and “adult” short stories. To me a young adult novel is simply a good, literary novel that happens to be told from the point of view of a young adult. My books are probably most appropriate for 14-18-year-olds because, like Ron Koertge’s books, they sometimes contain what some would consider offensive language, and they often deal with subjects that some parents, teachers, and librarians would find threatening. I’m a parent so I sympathize with them, though the irony, of course, is that most teenagers are shocked by very little in young adult novels and are savvy enough to know when they are being talked down to. By the time a young adult reaches fourteen, he or she has already discovered a frightening yet exciting fact: Life is messy. To me, fiction chronicles this messiness. I am often asked what “point” I was trying to make in What Happened, and I always answer that I wasn’t trying to make a point. I wasn’t writing an essay or a sermon. I was writing a novel, and if my novel is indeed true to life, which I hope it is, then it will make people think, make them look inside and maybe change in some significant way. It may even scare them.

That’s not to say that my editor and I didn’t agonize over certain practical issues before publishing What Happened. There was very little use of the “f” word in the book, and I was very aware that including it would keep What Happened out of certain classrooms (“in the South and Midwest,” as one editor explained). And I’m not even keen on using swear words unless they are necessary, but at certain points my characters had to say what they wanted to say, and if I didn’t let them say it, they would have walked out on me, never to be seen again. There is also mild drug use in What Happened. That’s not my fault; blame the characters. And in my new novel, Loserville, which will be published in the spring of 2009, there are characters who periodically get high or drink alcohol. I’m not advocating these activities. In fact, I can give you a long list of both young adults and adults I know, some of them in my family, who graduated from pot to more serious drugs and ruined their lives. Even worse, in Loserville, my narrator accompanies his friend and his girlfriend when they go to get a morning-after-pill. I’m sure I’ll lose half the libraries in America with that scene, but, again, don’t blame me. I just followed the logic of my characters’ lives and I feel grateful they let me tell their stories. I’m certainly not encouraging teenagers to reenact my characters’ experiences. But in that scene I wanted them to think about what it means to be intimate with and love another person. When I visited a high school, I read this morning-after scene, explaining that it was destined to upset many parents. At one point in the scene, after a girl receives the pill, her boyfriend puts his arm around her and says, “It’s all over. It’s no big deal,” whereupon she punches him in the arm and screams at him. Surprisingly, many of the guys in that class sympathized with the boy in the story, and there ensued one of the most amazing conversations about sex and responsibility I have ever heard between high school boys and girls. If this scene keeps the book out of classrooms and libraries, it will be sad indeed.

Which brings me to the “gatekeepers,” the people who publish books and the people who decide whether they get into classrooms and libraries. This topic is of special interest to me because I am becoming known as a “boy’s” author in a market where most of the decisions are made by women. Most editors, most teachers, and most librarians who control young adult literature are women. I have no problem with women. In fact, I like them better than men. Men are problematic. I know this from experience because I was once a problematic young adult male who then became a problematic adult male. Nevertheless, we men can be pretty interesting at times, even caring and loving. I think I know boys and men pretty well, and have therefore often been stunned by a woman editor’s response to my boy characters. What’s to be done when editors, teachers, and librarians, who are mostly women, think they know how young adult males think and act? If I were a teenager today I’d be pretty mad at having all these gatekeepers, who are usually well-intentioned, tell me what to read, and I would wonder about all the books out there―books that exist because of the thoughtfulness of enlightened editors, teachers and librarians, both men and women―that just might challenge me, books that aren’t going to “teach” me how to become a good person but instead make me examine the ambiguities and paradoxes of life and look inside for the all those good things that make me a human being. Often these books aren’t the politically correct ones.

I’m finishing a third book, which I plan to give to my agent and publisher next month. It’s called The Amazing Adventures of Houdini Weenie, Or How I Saved the President’s Life. No kidding, that’s the title. In it, the main character, whose real name is John Smith, decides he wants to write a young adult novel and make money, so he plans to follow all the rules that a visiting writer gives to John’s class. All these rules have nothing to do with real life. They exist so that publishers can make money and other gatekeepers can assure themselves that they are teaching young adults not to make mistakes. John tries hard to follow these rules, but he’s a living, breathing, complex human being, and so he eventually follows his heart instead. Like John, I’d like to make money, and I would prefer that teenagers never mess up or have to suffer. But experience tells me otherwise, and I’m convinced that I wouldn’t have been able to write my books without participating in the chaotic, frightening yet wonderful moments that make up a real authentic life.
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