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.
