The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": titles

Friday, January 9, 2009

Being Realistic About YA

There is a large group of people, and I would venture to say that most of them are either YA authors or editors, who keep saying that YA is real literature. I agree with them, of course, and I agree with them mightily.

But last night I went to a different "TEEN ZONE" at a new library, and I found books with titles like "Boyaholic" and "Confessions of A Teenage Stud" and "Boys Who Bite." Now, if I pretend for a minute I am not a YA author, that I don't really like a lot of the folks involved in YA publishing and say those titles to myself, I have to admit it sounds a lot like advanced comic book writing. That might make you mad, but that's what I admitted to myself last night.

One of my favorite papers to teach is the argument paper. The goal is to convince your reader of your point. Since most of the kids I teach are young adults, they have a tough time with the middle section where counter arguments are proposed. I had one girl, she was about 20, who could not write on the topic of girls not being permitted to play football because she could not think of a counter argument. When I suggested some, she got upset and asked for an alternate assignment. I tried explaining that to defend an opinion, you have to state and disprove common counter arguments.

I think that's pretty much how it is in life, too. There's a lot of cheesy writing in YA, and there's a lot of brilliant writing. But you have to at least comprehend why people might go to the YA shelf anywhere, read those titles, and move on.

In addition to the acne/angst novel, there is the vampire issue. I am not a fan of vampires, though I must admit at the age of twelve or thirteen I alternately wanted to marry either Bram Stoker or Dracula. That was kind of the pinnacle of vampire love for me, and I don't think anyone has come close to his level of writing since. I find vampires especially cheesy, and they abound in the YA genre. I'm not up on the differences between werewolves and vampires, they sort of seem like cousins, but I do remember reading really, really bad novels involving werewolves when I was in middle school. I read them because my friends did, and the writing was, unbelievably,more dreadful than the cover art. (They were the kind of books you hid inside your "Discovery Through Science" textbook during study hall)

But I accept the books that center on acne angst and blood sucking spirits; I just don't think they can be successfully defended. I have trouble accepting bad literature in general, but it exists, probably, because kids like it. It's sort of like Chucky Cheese's for the younger set -- it's a stage you can't wait to pass.

So when people say sensitive things to me like, "Have you thought of writing a real novel? You know, like for adults?" I don't get all huffy. I understand what they see on the shelves and the assumptions they make. It would be hard not to understand that.

On the other hand, I have never been aware of so many people who want to write YA, or who are reading and commenting on YA, and I think that's the key: the genre is improving. Some of the YA stuff I've read recently has been spectacular in every regard, and the title and cover art have been PBS level rather than Fox News.

Watching the genre get better is a lot like raising a teen: you have to hope for the best while you wait for a lot of stuff to fade away.

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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