We All Have an Origin Story

My wife and I were driving home from seeing a superhero movie one night and talking about it as normal people do after a movie. I believe it was a sequel; possibly Spider-Man 3 or something like that. I mentioned that I really tend to prefer the first films in a series, not just because they are any better necessarily, but because I really love origin stories.

“That makes sense,” Joy said. “Since that’s what you write.”

And I thought–but had the common sense not to say–“Oh, no no no, sweetie love. No no no, I write contemporary young adult fiction, not superhero stories.”

What I said was, “Huh?” (Which I say a lot.)

She answered, “Well, what is being a teenager if not your origin story?”

BAM! She was absolutely right. All young adult (YA) and middle-grade (MG) fiction is, essentially, origin stories. We may not see where these characters end up as adults, but we see who they are in the process of becoming, and that process, universal certainly to Western civilization over the past 100 years or so, but possibly the world throughout, is the story we’re telling.

I’m fairly sure I’ve changed a lot since I was a teenager. At least, I hope so! But boiled down, how different am I really? How have my core beliefs and attitudes changed since then? What matters to me, what I care about, who I am attracted to romantically and otherwise? I mean, cripes, my best friends from high school are my best friends today. A lot of them still live within driving distance.

Why YA?

I don’t know why exactly I am attracted to these origin stories; maybe it’s because only recently have I become as … alive as I was back then, and so revisiting that deep well of nostalgia is somehow cathartic. Maybe there’s an ethos in being a teenager that appeals to me. (Probably that’s it.) Or maybe it’s just that things of the Adult World bore me silly. Dance clubs and alcohol and mortgages and credit cards and keeping up with the Whomevers and watching reality TV…yawn. My family is about as middle class and nuclear as they come (few and far between these days, I know), yet we don’t strive for the things others in our demographic seem to.

Or maybe I just haven’t accepted that I’m forty-something goddamn years old yet. A distinct possibility. But the best part of being older is you (usually) have money to buy all the crap you couldn’t when you were 14, so that’s a plus.

Part of my attraction to YA too I think is, frankly, the brutality of it. Not that this necessarily goes away as people age, but most of us become at least somewhat socially aware as we get older and stop making assholes of ourselves. (Some, not all!) But kids don’t have those filters in place yet, I think, as a whole. Shit just comes out of their mouths before they can stop to think about the ramifications of it, and while sometimes that’s straight up funny, other times–a lot of times–it is devastating. Even … fatal, I am sorry to say. So there is always drama to be teased out and studied, like I did with Random, a book inspired by very true and very awful circumstances. Being a teen is far too often a real-life Hunger Games.

On the flip side, though–the good side, the great side–I think it’s the bigness of everything at that age that I keep wanting to write about. Everything is new when you hit junior high and high school. You’ve learned so much about the world and yet know so little. My dad once said something like, “Tom, I’m sixty-five years old, and am just now realizing that I don’t know shit.” Teenagers, happily for us writers, don’t labor under this problem, as they have the solutions for everything. I know I did. I probably still do, actually, which is why I write YA…?

This is one reason I get so bent out of shape when teens are dismissed. Come on, man, it was mostly teens and very young adults who saved the fucking planet in the 1940s. They know the score. They have the passion to get things done, and I for one say let ’em. It’s not like adults have a great track record with human rights, amen?

But Why Else?

Maybe, too, it’s my theatre background, which is dependent on dialogue to function. I feel like my teenage years were filled with nothing but dialogue. Phone calls and hanging out, all the time. All night, all day. We didn’t have money or much else, and we were lucky if someone had a car. Three bucks, a Super Big Gulp, and a pack of smokes, we were good to go. I know this is an ancient and largely romanticized picture to paint, but it’s true. I’d say, on average, I spent five afternoons and/or evenings with one or more of my friends, away from school. After school, at night, on the weekend, whatever, we were together. For about a year, maybe two, my buddy Damon would come pick me up in his old blue Chevy pick up at least once a week, and we’d drive to some random location, pop in some Skoal, and talk for two hours or more on whatever-the-fuck.

So talking, dialogue, is very much a part of our teen lives, and since dialogue is what I was trained in, so to speak, maybe it’s only natural that I gravitated to YA.

Or maybe it’s simply that the first full-length novel I really completed was written at age 19, about 19-year-olds. That’s outer limit for YA these days, yes, but certainly its topics, tone, and ideas were squarely in the YA genre. (This book later became Zero.)

This Is Why:

My latest book, Mercy Rule, is definitely a YA novel, but the thing about that genre and most of the books in it — particularly the realistic contemporary stuff — is that it speaks not just to teens, but to a large swath of adults who remember those years vividly but who made it out the other side. Mercy Rule is a tough book, I’m not gonna lie, and it’s definitely an origin story for several of its characters. But it’s also about the origin stories that never got to be told to completion. (You’ll understand when you read it.) And to me, the most important part of all this is that someone who needs to read it gets ahold of it and says, “Yeah, this guy gets me.” It’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever been paid with my novels. I need these readers to Stay Here and help get the rest of the world out of the goddamn dark ages.

Teenagers are superheros, if we let them. Superman was not born Superman; he was Clark Kent long before he put on the cape. He’s a hero not for his powers, but for the way his family raised him to care about others. He could have just as easily been found by Lex Luthor’s family. “Kansas farm boy makes good” isn’t much of an origin story, but it turned out one hell of a super man.

I hope I do the same.

 

Questions about RANDOM taken from German students 2 years ago.

Top questions asked by students while in Germany. Enjoy!

You are a male author, so why did you choose to write the story from a female point of view?

Excellent question. First let me point out that writing from a female perspective is not new for me; I did it in Party, Zero, Shackled, Hellworld, and Violent Ends as well. My adult horror novella Those We Bury Back is not, nor is manicpixiedreamgirl; Sex, Death, God; or Sick. So I’m just about 50/50 in terms of which gender I choose to write from.

I’m going to use a broad generalization here, so please don’t flip out on me: Broadly speaking, boys tend to be physically aggressive in their bullying behavior, and girls tend to be verbal. This makes sense because, broadly speaking, girls have a better vocabulary and speak more frequently than boys do. That’s not a values judgement in either direction, it’s just an American cultural phenomenon. Since the plot of the novel was primarily about words and how they are used to hurt people, it seemed to make more sense to have a female playing the role of the bully (or villain, which Tori is).

Interestingly, in the first draft, the Tori character was male and the Andy character female. So the story did not start out the way it ended up. That happens a lot!

Right away, Andy asks Tori if she believes in God, and Tori says no. Do you believe in God?

Yes, someone actually asked me this. First time ever.

While I don’t think anyone truly cares–except maybe my mother-in-law, oh snap!–I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: That I do not know if God exists, that no one knows for certain whether God exists, but that I hope–deeply, truly hope to the core of my being–that God does exist in some way. I really do hope so.

I stopped there because otherwise we would have been there all night listening to me go on and on about matter spiritual, scientific, and religious. I’ll save it for a nonfiction book. But I am so proud of that kid for having the courage to ask the question!

Who is your favorite character in the novel?

I get asked variations on this question a lot, and I always qualify it by saying, “This is my answer today. Ask me tomorrow, it might be different.” Today, my answer is Andy. He holds all the cards, he has all the inside information, and he has reason enough to really attack Tori, but he doesn’t. I admire that about him. I also enjoyed writing him because, unlike in real life, since he knows the entire story and is leading the conversation, he can say clever or funny things that I could never have come up with on the spur of the moment. He has an agenda, so he gets to choose his words more carefully than we usually get to.

Would you have been friends with Tori in high school?

Probably not. She’s an athlete and I . . . wasn’t. We just would not have run in the same circles. I very well might have been friends with Kevin, though, or Jack. In fact, Jack and I would have had a lot in common. The cystic acne part of his story is something I know a lot about!

Do you like Tori?

I feel for her. I wish other people would, too. She’s very young and very inexperienced, and makes bad choices like all of us do when we’re that age. But she has potential, and the people who love her see that in her. I think she will make better choices after the story ends, and will learn from her bad ones, and will make a positive difference in the world as she gets older. It sometimes feels like a few readers have never committed a “sin of commission or omission” in their lives, the way they talk about her. That hurts, I’ll be honest.

Why not show the trial itself?

There’s a reason the book ends the way it does. It’s because I am not and never was interested in the legal aspects of Tori’s case; I was interested in the social and personal aspects, namely: How does a person who has done what Tori has done justify it? How can a person convince herself she need not take any responsibility for what has happened? The result of asking that question was Random, which is why the protagonist is also the villain.

Sometimes I regret that choice because apparently, for some people, there needed to be a big-ass red warning label on the cover.

 

ICYMI, here’s a short video of one of my readings at the English Theater in Berlin. It was such a cool night!

 

 

 

 

How To Write Awesome Dialogue!

dialogue front cover

Available now from Amazon on Kindle or paperback!

You’ve taken (or wanted to take) Tom’s energetic, unforgettable class on dialogue; now for the first time, here’s one place where all the collected advice, tips, and tricks is found! Bringing 22 years of experience as an actor and director in live theatre to the table, How To Write Awesome Dialogue! walks you through plot, conflict, and character notes to give you a firm foundation upon which to build better and best dialogue for your fiction or scripts. Don’t miss it!

Violent Ends

violentends

Coming September 1, 2015. Pre-order on Amazon now!

In a one-of-a-kind collaboration, seventeen of the most recognizable YA writers — including Tom Leveen, Shaun David Hutchinson, Neal and Brendan Shusterman, and Beth Revis — come together to share the viewpoints of a group of students affected by a school shooting.

It took only twenty-two minutes for Kirby Matheson to exit his car, march onto the school grounds, enter the gymnasium, and open fire, killing six and injuring five others. But this isn’t a story about the shooting itself. This isn’t about recounting that one unforgettable day.

This is about Kirby and how one boy—who had friends, enjoyed reading, playing saxophone in the band, and had never been in trouble before—became a monster capable of entering his school with a loaded gun and firing on his classmates.

Each chapter is told from a different victim’s viewpoint, giving insight into who Kirby was and who he’d become. Some are sweet, some are dark; some are seemingly unrelated, about fights or first kisses or late-night parties. This is a book of perspectives—with one character and one event drawing them all together—from the minds of some of YA’s most recognizable names.

 

 

Z Resurrected

11304536_710698029057817_1650159678_nZ Resurrected is a unique anthology featuring characters from previously published zombie novels, including Sick.

Trapped for hours away from Brian, Kenzie, and the rest of her friends, Laura Fitzgerald struggles to control her panic while still evading – or defeating – the monstrous infected students outside. But her lone ally in this fight for her life doesn’t have much time left…

Coming in October 2015!

 

 

Tuesday, November 12
Phoenix Metro High School
Phoenix, Arizona
5:04 p.m.

Um—

My name is Laura Fitzgerald, I’m seventeen . . . and I really, really want to be eighteen someday.

I don’t know what’s going on, exactly. It feels like the world is ending out there. I’m scared, and there’s no one else in here but me. This is Cody’s phone, not mine. I guess you know that. Whoever you are. Whoever finds this, I mean.

If Cody’s mom or dad hears this, I’m sorry about Cody, I did everything I could. I swear.

God . . .

I don’t know . . . I don’t know how long I can stay in here. I don’t have any food or water. But they’re still out there, I can hear them. Sometimes I hear someone scream out there.

Um . . .

Honestly? I’m kind of surprised I can even talk right now, usually I’d be curled up in a little ball somewhere. That’s what I really want to do. But I can’t. They’ll get me if I do.

Oh, God. God.

No. Okay. Stop. Breathe. I can do this. I can do it.

Uh—

I just, I thought I should explain everything, because maybe it will help? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone will ever find this . . . but, um . . .

Okay.

This is what happened.