why i'm glad i didn't attend high school in a YA novel

You know, YA fiction has a lot of real strengths. Even though, as its name suggests, it's supposed to cater to the young adult variety of people, it really crosses age, class, and culture--as all good literature should. Narrators often have the kinds of fun, quirky voices that all but the most cynical assholes enjoy reading; the plots are fast-paced, but the characters and situations therein are also very human; usually, the writing itself is clever and just downright fun.

Yes, there are lots of reasons to love YA lit. The fantastic abundance of stereotypes (especially in realistic fiction) is not one of them. Even though this is somewhat of a ubiquitous issue with YA, we're going to zoom in on that subcategory of stories that deal with life in high school, because sometimes this really drives me bonkers.

One thing that's always startled me about YA is the treatment high school gets. Sometimes it seems like that dynamics between differing social classes or cliques were trucked in straight out of a satire or a parody. Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver, was a pretty enjoyable book by every standard--but holy jumping Jesus, the people! I swear to God, it seemed like every character got shipped in from Mean Girls (which, if you haven't seen already, you should watch right now).

I know there are fissures in every social environment. There are ravines and gaps and lines in the sand that none of us dare to traverse. I also think it's fair to say that, as far as high school life goes, deigning to speak even a single word to an underclassman as a senior is not one of these taboos.

So, to finally get to the point, here's the crux of the problem: in my experience, high schools in YA are nothing like real high schools. And if you're going for realistic fiction, that's a bit of an issue. Sure, I can suspend my disbelief. In fact, I'm happy to. I really, genuinely want your story to sweep me away into a land of great social drama so I can gasp and laugh over things I hope to God never happen to me.  

Therefore, I'll read it. I won't whine and rant and rave until the novel is done with, cover to cover. Looking back on it though, there will be too much of my face and far too little of my palm.

I know there are shitty social situations that people get into. I know bullying exists. I know that are girls who are both popular and are bitches. There are nerds who people don't want to talk to. But there's no need to exaggerate these kinds of thing to such a degree and jam it all into one high school under high heat and pressure--usually, that kind of thing results in a situation getting a little unbelievable for me.

Maybe I just went to a very accepting and normal high school so my perspective remains uncontaminated by the social pathogens of popularity and nerdiness. As it seems to me, though, popular people don't hate nerds on principle. Jocks don't regularly pound the cheese out those nerds. Those nerds don't bandage their bleeding wounds with photocopied pages of Neurophysiology Explained and pray that Stephen Hawking grants their wish for a letterman's jacket.

Okay, I'm getting just slightly hyperbolic here. But my point stands. There are plenty of standout tropes in YA lit--the perfect guy/girl, the child of prophecy, the girl who looks like a twelve-year-old but attracts sexy, brooding guys and also becomes a gunslinging Bruce Lee within the span of two weeks. (Oh, sorry, that last one is just Divergent.)

Anyway, none of these things bother me as much as the flogging that teenagers receive when they're depicted in high school. Really, it doesn't do justice to the maturity and intelligence many teenagers exhibit. Yeah, there are exceptions--there are always exceptions. But if you fill a fictional school with nothing but nerd-pounders, rich bitches, and football stars, with no one but the narrator (maybe) as a normal human being, it definitely does show. If you want a real story, you need real people to inhabit it, and that means more than a principled hatred of other social subsets.

I'm not asking for much here, people. All I want is for you to consider whether you character is, you know, a character, rather than just an archetype or an easy way out, before you plug him/her into the story.

And yes, I admit that archetypes can be good at times. Please, though, use them lightly. They're the sprinkles on the cake, not the frosting, and life in high school is muchmuchmuch more complex than the richly intellectual Us vs Them attitude of, say, Family Feud. 

Off and out.

Taylor Webb

conspiracy theories

So I had a dentist appointment yesterday and I was thinking about dentistry as a profession. Not, like, relative to myself--just dental practice as an entity that exists. During my meditations, I realized something.

Dentistry is really fucking weird.

I mean, think about it. You go in, you sit there, and somebody (always a girl, too. Maybe this is just my experience, but I've never had a male clean my teeth) scrapes and pokes and prods at you with a sharp object. It's unpleasant, sometimes painful. But it's cool, you know, because it's good for your health or something.

Yes. That's right. It's to your benefit, not theirs, for spikes to be raked across your teeth. I mean, Christ, it feels like Arnold Schwarzenegger went into archaeology and is performing an insensitive excavation on your gums. Anyway, nonsensical analogies aside, there really is something absurd and brilliant that I gleaned from this trip.

Dentistry as an institution doesn't actually exist. It's a large-scale hoax operated by the American Psychological Association as an attempt to further the research presented in Milgram's obedience studies: they want to see how long people will allow complete strangers to scrape around in their mouths with dangerous objects with no justification other than a lot of fishy-sounding, pseudo-scientific bullshit such as "plaque buildup" and "halitosis." We all know it's a lie--we listen, though, because we perceive the order as being issued from a position of authority.

Let's be honest, people. Who really brushes three times daily for three minutes or more each time?

Yeah, I thought so.

This shit runs deep, though. They have dentistry schools, these weird fringe organizations where they induct people into their dark order. Train them, brainwash them, whatever is necessary. I mean, who would genuinely choose to root around in other people's mouths for rotting teeth for a living? Who, except for some bizarre breed of fetishist, would choose to do that?

Answer: no one. It's a conspiracy, man, and it has infiltrated all four corners of our society.

Don't trust anybody with a dentist. That's what I say. Cut off your appointments, change your name, whatever you need to do. Because they will come for you.

They will come.

Off and out.

Taylor Webb

how to get a job

One of the most unsettling parts of trying to worm your way into the job market for the first time is this: you sit down, pen in hand, to fill out a job application, and you put down your name and address and et cetera, et cetera, and then you reach the "previous work experience" section. For those of you who haven't applied for a job before, this section takes up, like, 75% of the entire thing. If you're trying to break into that whole arcane community of people with "jobs"... well, leaving a big swath of the application untouched is, quite frankly, nerve-wracking.

I guess it goes back to an old idiom, as so many things do: Need work experience to get a job; need a job to get work experience. High-five, paradoxical capitalistic logic. High-five.

Anyway, it wasn't so bad in some instances. For a couple of days, I burned through applications like my car's V-8 engine burns through gas. I attacked battalions of restaurants, stores--whatever I passed that looked promising, really--and stopped in to pick up an application. The problem is, you usually don't get to talk to anyone, and if you can't show off your ability to not-be-an-asshole, then you've got nothing, since on paper almost everyone is going to look better than you. Plus, more and more places are transitioning to an online system of application, which is bad for us noobies, because it means that you basically become a number plugged into a database. A number with no experience at numberdom or otherwise.

So, that being said, I've composed an infallible system to get anyone their dream job in a few easy steps:

How to Get a Job:

1. Businesses want to hire people with experience. So I say to ye this, bear-market newcomers: lie. Pretend. Be lost in thy whimsy. Neil Gaiman lied about which magazines he wrote for back in the day to get his first job as a journalist, and look at him! It's not like they fact check that shit. Fact checking is for after you get hired.
2. Businesses want people who are creative. How many times have you been told in your life that a creative approach to problem-solving is da bomb? Well, as a job-seeker with no previous experience, you need to be creative and simultaneously show off your explosive amounts of personality. Here's what you do: 
1. Walk in to the restaurant. Pretend to be a customer.  
2. Rant and rave and yell and scream and throw a tantrum of behemoth proportions until you get the employee to whom you're speaking to bring out the manager.
3. Once the manager ventures forth from his secret managerial haunts, you pounce. Politely inform him that you're searching for a job and that, no, you haven't seen a disgruntled customer--they must have already taken a hike.
3. Businesses want people who can engage with customers. Show that you can engage with people: play up the pathos. This goes back to (1) really, but we're to include this subsection anyway. For example, walk with a limp, and when questioned (if not questioned, bring it up) inform the manager requisitioned in (2) that you were injured whilst saving a kitten from a burning bush, or something. Even better if you can make the incident relate to necessary job skills. Example: if applying at Subway, you risked your life fending off some pro-McDonald's gangsters who were attempting to Big Mac an attractive love interest, solely so you could show her the value of eating fresh. Be that dedicated. And if you're still having a hard time snagging the job after all this, fear not, there is an extreme solution.
4. Businesses, above all else, want people who will benefit the company. So study up on your terrorism, strategically place bombs around and within the locations of nearby competitors, and then go up to the manager of [insert desired workplace here] and tell him that hey, you really want to work for this place, and you could really blast the competition out of the water. Explain why. 
1. If he thinks you're crazy, capitalize on that. Tell him that you'll destroy the innocent if he doesn't hire you. 
2. If he thinks your plan is genius... well, sacrifices must be made. That's capitalism. 

apologies

Just thought I'd throw this out there as a rationale/excuse for not having published any new posts recently. Finals week is coming up... and by coming up, I mean starting up. I've been busy with all the end-of-semester work dump and with trying to prep for exams.

Also editing my final story for fiction. Yeah, that's not going so well.

Anyway, just popping in a bit late in order to abdicate responsibility for my laziness. I'll be back to doing at least a weekly post once all this nonsense is cleared up.

Off and out.

Taylor Webb

metaphorical resonance

No, we're not talking about Augustus Waters from John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. Well, maybe we are, albeit in a roundabout sort of way. We're talking about writing with style. How metaphors are constructed and what makes them tick--what makes a metaphor genuinely effective or, conversely, what makes one a flop like a wet noodle?

See? In a minute, you'll understand why that particular metaphor sucked.

Just for the sake of clarity, we'll step back into Writing 101 for a moment. For us writer types, a metaphor (n.) is a comparison between two unlike things (yes, thing does convey that authorial sense of elocution and specificity, doesn't it?) which, theoretically, should elucidate and reveal an image or idea.

Example: "I fell in love like you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once." (Yes, I did pull this particular quote out of a possibly aforementioned John Green novel.)

So the comparison drawn here is between falling in love and falling sleep. Two things that are unlike for some pretty obvious reasons, not the least of which is that if I fell in love every time I fell asleep, I'd have quite the harem. Or my heart would be held together by nothing more than Scotch tape and sheer desperation. One or the other.

But allow me to put my love life--which is doing fine, thanks for asking--aside. Let's take a look at what makes metaphors, both Mr. Green's and otherwise, effective. This shall be accomplished via my most despised of mediums: a list.

The Hated, Abhorrent, and Reviled List of Things That Will Make Your Metaphors Not Suck:
(THARLTTWMYMNS for short.)

1. Clarity. Metaphors substitute in for or enhance adjectival descriptions on the page. (Huh. Adjectival just seems redundant somehow, the adjective form of the word adjective. Anyway, back to the matters at hand.) The two are both supposed to convey the same basic thing, but in different formats--and ideally, the metaphor should be more effective at conveying the desired image. Metaphors are prime real estate on the page. They don't reel in quite as much attention as italics do, but they still stand out, so their existence must be worthwhile. A failed adjectival description might make the reader go meh, but a failed metaphor will just leave them puzzling over whether or not they're missing something.

2. Context. Like I said before, metaphors stand out. If you fill the page from head to toe with figurative language, the figurative language becomes weaker. It's oversaturation. Metaphors are the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. For the most part, metaphors should enhance the imagery, not wholly constitute it.

Part of what this boils down to is overdescription. Burying the narrative in explaining life since the beginning of the universe everything. Writing isn't like statistics, where you have to account for every minor detail.You want to give the reader a clear picture, but you also don't want to give them a liturgy or an elegantly phrased stock list.

3. Avoid cliches. The whole point of a metaphor is, as we've said, to reveal an image. Cliches don't really do that: they're so trite and overused that they cease to really give the kind of imagery you want. They're unconverted currency, empty calories.

Now, I don't think I need to rail on about this. Pretty much everyone understands that having the rough-and-tough character archetype swagger over and show off his bullet wound whilst announcing, "That one sucked like a cheap whore!" is probably a little overboard, so...

Here's the long and short of it: Try to say things in new and creative ways. They stick better that way. I'm not saying you should never ever ever say "bite the bullet" or "turned a blind eye", especially in dialogue where people speak in colloquialisms, but if you're trying to be prosaic... well, it'll always fall short of something like this, an example from Lauren Oliver's Delirium, where the protagonist is venturing through the woods at night when suddenly some bats are like, "Sup, girl?"

"... a black scythe of bats cutting suddenly across the sky."

A black scythe of bats. It's specific, it creates a vivid image, and it's a new way to say it. A+.

4. Create a disconnect. I know it sounds weird, but the best metaphors aren't the ones you expect, because if you expect the metaphor then it has inherently failed to deliver an image or idea in a unique way. And hey, uniqueness can snag people's attention more than conformity... just look at your hipster friends.

An (approximate) example, from (again) Delirium: "The air outside is thick and moist as a tongue."

Well, you may haughtily inject, adjusting your beret and tugging at your pencil 'stache, air is nothing like a tongue--one can be used to sample such exquisite articles as French baguettes, while the other is being expelled hot and wasted from my lungs!

You're not actually saying that, of course. (At least I hope not.) But that moment after you read it where the metaphor jars you (the disconnect) preceding the next moment (the... reconnect?) where you realize how fitting it is... well, that's part of what makes it so great. These sorts of metaphors capture things so accurately that they actually give you pause while your mind connects the dots. If the author had chosen to say, "It is as humid as a humidifier outside," well, the novel probably wouldn't have gotten published for starters.

Now, obviously not all metaphors should generate a disconnect. If a reader pauses at every instance of figurative language in your work, it will probably get tiring after a while. But that momentary disruption of conventional language and logic can go a long way.


Now, probably I didn't communicate my ramblings the best. Probably you disagree with me on some basic tenet of my ramblings (which are by no means comprehensive, by the way). But regardless, I hope you were able to take something away from this, either knowing something that works or something that doesn't.

Oh, and take this list of metaphors with you. They're like Lord Voldemort: terrible, but great.

http://writingenglish.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/the-25-funniest-analogies-collected-by-high-school-english-teachers/

Off and out.

Taylor Webb

knowing everything

Being a young adult, there's a certain phrase that can sometimes get tossed around a lot when I try to talk about more intellectual things than video games, dating, school, that one party, etc. with an adult. It hasn't cropped up as much lately, since I'm in college now, but I heard the phrase in passing the other day and it got me thinking.

What is this esoteric phrase, you might wonder. Simple: know-it-all.

I absolutely hate this idiom, especially when it's used in conjunction with younger people. Maybe it's just the fact that I write YA, but implying that someone is lesser or incapable of understanding something just because they haven't yet spent enough time revolving around the sun? That's stupidity at worst and egocentrism at best. Stupid because one of the greatest powers of the human imagination is sympathy, egocentric because placing yourself on a pedestal made up solely of years spent living is like saying, "Well, I've been alive longer, therefore clearly you can say nothing I don't already know."

Gee, it's not like everyone has an individual experience and perspective or anything like that. It's a good thing having an opinion is like going on a carnival ride: you must have to be this tall to enter.

Now, granted, I understand that there is a phase that most kids will go through where they really do think they know everything. But that happens around, what, age seven? So in terms of this rant, it's irrelevant. I actually think teenagers get pigeonholed into the know-it-all category more often than little kids do, because adults have this perception about teenagers. It's like they should "know better" than to offer their mundane insights into this world they cannot possibly understand. Going through high school, you're supposed to be quick and sharp and competitive and original, the Renaissance Man's bigger and sexier sibling, but just don't try to tell the big dogs how to roll, huh? You should "know better."

Know better. Do you feel that uptick of temperature in the room? That's the steam coming out of my ears. However, "know better" is a rant for another time.

If you're seventeen or so, it's true you may not know the intricacies of financial enterprise; maybe you don't know how to file a tax return; perhaps you've not been hardened against this tragedy of living. That's good. That's how it should be. In a way, not knowing means you not only know it all, but know more than anyone could ever guess.

Call me hopeless, a romantic, unintelligent, whatever. But I think that the minute you accept the world for what it is and let the future cease to be something terrifyingly fantastic, the second you think you've seen it all, or the moment you believe you can't be surprised or amazed, then you're the one who should know better.

Off and out.

Taylor Webb

an introduction of sorts

Greetings, reader. No, wait, that didn't sound right. Way too formal. Ahem. What's up? No, that's too casual. Howdy, partner!

Oh God, this is deteriorating quickly. 

Okay, well, let's just leave it at hello. I promise to quit testing the water and jump right into the important stuff. My name's Taylor Webb. This blog is basically an outlet for me to develop my opinions on different things (something I do best when writing them down) and to talk about writing (yes, I am one of Those People who creates a blog about writing, like I have something New and Ingenious to say). Also I just want to generally go on tangents about whatever comes to mind. Oh, and also I'll be doing book reviews of stuff I read.

You're riveted already, I know.

So, anyway,  just to clear up a few things:

• Yes, the title of this blog does stem from an episode of Doctor Who. If you knew that, you're a pretty cool fellow. Or, umm, fellowess? Fellowatrix? For some reason, the word "fellow" just seems male-centric to me. Anyway, back on-step...
• Yes, this blog will rant and rage about subjects that may offend some people (read: the Republican party). This will not prevent me from ranting and/or raging about them (read: the aforementioned political entity). 
• Yes, I will probably use a lot of parentheses. (Bet you haven't noticed.) Theoretically speaking, this could also offend you--if so, refer to bullet point #2 for relevant information.

And I think that's it. I don't actually have all that much to say for this first post. I just wanted to fill the vacuous "There are no posts yet" box on the home page, and thus I have schemed to whittle away your precious free time by distracting you with this crenelated wall of text! Haha! 

I won't apologize. It was mocking me.

So, my first blog post now fulfilled, I shall retire. Good night, reader. Good night, blog. (Is it weird to discourse with my blog? It probably is. It also probably won't stop me.)

Off and out.

Taylor Webb