Posts Tagged "The Hunger Games"

• YA Takes Me Back

  YA Fiction

  I wonder how The Hobbit would have been categorized had it been written today. I recall someone saying (and I forget who) that The Hobbit is fairy tale, The Lord of the Rings is legend, and the Silmarillion is myth. The Hobbit doesn’t quite match up with what one would normally think of as young adult, but for me it has that whimsical feeling that I associate with some of those types of stories—either for young adult or middle grade.

  This touches on one of the reasons that I like reading those stories, not middle-grade so much (though I’m not opposed to them; I simply haven’t read much in that vein) but certainly young adult. They say that the psychology of young adult fiction is such that the reader wants to emulate the protagonists, and you’ll often hear “two years” for the sweet spot in age differential from reader to protagonist. Thus, is your protags are sixteen-ish, your target readers are fourteen-ish. Maybe that’s true. It seems to make some sense. But the reason I read YA fiction is kind of on the opposite side of that equation. I want to be swept back to a simpler time. And by that I mean I like the feelings of childhood that reading those stories drums up in me. I led a pretty idyllic childhood in an area that was kind of on the cusp of urban and suburban.

  My grade school (Berryville Elementary in Kenosha, WI) was one of those red brick school houses straight out of School House Rock. (That the school was torn down and apartments built on the property still saddens me.) And when I read about those young protagonists, I leap back to those days, which at the time I’m sure had normal, every-day stresses but that now looks very quaint from this forty-something’s somewhat jaded viewpoint.

  Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) it doesn’t seem to matter what type of “young fiction” I’m reading. Much of it reminds me of that time period. I could be reading Harry Potter, and the winding staircases of Hogworts reminds me of running up the three flights at Berryville. Or I could be reading The Mysterious Benedict Society, and I’m reminded of wondering what all the rooms in the school contain, the rooms I’ve never been to or the back closets in the ones I have.

  There are others that remind me more of my high school, like Holly Black’s Tithe and Valiant, or Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games or Steve Berman’s Vintage. But the effect of being transported is the same, it’s just to a slightly different time and place. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy these stories in and of themselves. It’s just that I get additional enjoyment from them that I don’t get from reading adult fiction.

  Like Courtney, I don’t care too much how something is categorized. Categories are a marketing tool. What I care about is how I enjoy the read. But I must admit that there’s something magical about reliving a bit of my youthful innocence, or sometimes the loss of that innocence, through fiction.

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• I like my heroes like I like my wine: dark and complex

  Heroes & Heroines

  

  It’s probably no secret that I like stories with dark undertones, and I’ve talked a bit about the characters I gravitate toward. I use words like serious, dark, complex. This is true of any writer, I suppose—we all want our characters to be complex—it’s just a question of degrees.

  One of the things I used to wonder about is the difference between YA fiction and adult science fiction or fantasy. I’m talking about the content of the story here, not the age of the protagonists. I used to think it was subject matter, or the (un)willingness of author or editor to put in violence or sex. But YA has gotten very dark over the last 10-15 years, and there really isn’t much of a difference in that respect. It’s more the themes that run through the book and the concerns of the characters, which tend to be more self-centered, or maybe “closer to home” is a better term here. What I mean is, the interests, and so concerns, of teens tend not to be as wide as those of adults.

  There are, of course, exceptions, but I think this is why I tend to write more epic tales with (mostly) adult characters. It’s because I like to explore wide-ranging problems. I like to make my characters make decisions that will have wide-ranging effects. And those things aren’t easy. Such decisions are never cut and dried, which is why I tend to shy away from black-hat villains and white-had protagonists and quests that aim to do away with the world’s great evil once and for all.

  (That’s not to say that I haven’t read my fair share, and enjoyed them; I just don’t choose to write about them. Then again, maybe this is something I should challenge myself with one day. I’m a fan of playing opposites just to give myself a challenge, and maybe this is one I could explore in a short story…)

  In any case, this is a roundabout way of saying that I like my heroes and heroines to be complex. They are, after all, proxies for their culture or religion or political party. I don’t think of them in this way while I’m writing, mind you, but it’s an inevitable byproduct of their formation. After all, if you want to portray opposing points of view, those view do not come to the characters fully formed. They are an amalgam of their upbringing and their environment and their personal experiences and their leaders—be they religious, political, sexual, cultural, or otherwise.

  Now, the flip side of this is that you can’t just make a character some distillation of a particular belief you’re trying to portray in your story. Characters are individuals, and they won’t simply subscribe to everything the movement (or religion or whatever) they believe in says. They will have their own take on it, based on their own lives. They will disagree in some ways, perhaps to their detriment. They will go against orthodoxy, even if it’s hidden away in the recesses of their mind, or in the trips they take to some foreign place, or in the way they act when no one they know is watching. This, to me, is how to make complex characters. You start with the cauldron of their world (however big or small that may be) and you add particular spices and herbs to alter their flavor—perhaps subtly or perhaps boldly. In this way, we might end up with an avatar of sorts, some exemplar to a particular set of beliefs. Or we might end up with a pariah, an outcast for their beliefs. Or even an anti-hero or the leader of a rebellion.

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