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

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