Six years ago I published my second book, a novel for adults featuring a brutalized teenager and snappy conversation on yachts. After my commercial debut, I had museum-hush hopes that this follow-up… was… Literature. But in retrospect all I’d written was a strange, unwieldy novel, which my publisher quietly escorted out back to sink into the bog. It didn’t even go paperback, and my editor was always out to lunch when I’d call to ask why. A review summed the book’s prospects up in one word: “grim.”
I was indignant, wounded, 27. Betrayed by the world, I locked the door and did what I generally do with bad news: I went online and watched plane crash re-enactments. Then I showered, sat down to a blank screen and a blinking cursor, and prudently decided it was time to change direction. The next novel was a comedic sendup of fantasy-novel conventions, in the vein of William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride.” I sent the manuscript to my agent, who decided I’d written something young adult. We sent it to a young adult editor, who decided it belonged a bracket younger. My natural book voice, apparently, is that of a 9-year-old.
As, I’d like to argue, it is for all of us.
I’ll admit that at first my new career smarted — the “young” in Y.A. felt like the “junior” in J.V. — though at the same time, I was relieved to be playing on what I imagined was an easier field. But once I was officially writing for young adults, it didn’t seem easy at all. My editor, David Levithan, had maddeningly simple advice: the only thing a Y.A. novel needs is a teenage protagonist. “But surely,” I insisted, “I should also reference how massive Myspace is becoming and that Hilary Duff is way pretty, right?” (It was 2007, remember.) Mr. Levithan shook his head, suddenly concerned about my suitability. I shook my head, suddenly concerned about my suitability.
So I stopped asking questions and started writing. And getting into the mind of a teenager changed the life of this grown-up.
If you’ll allow me: the interior life is a sphere of thoughts and implications zapping around, and it’s so chaotic in there that we learn to limit the sphere’s radius because to do otherwise is to let everything we encounter, from broken nestlings to broken dates, reach the level of “why does anything exist?” We spend years working out that perfect radius: rein it in too tightly and life is mechanical, let out too much slack and life is paralyzing. If we’re lucky, as adults we figure out how to allow thoughts to rise but yank them back before they reach the yawning, oxygen-less, existential atmosphere — in other words, we keep our musings sufferable and practicable. But writing for young adults means untethering the line, letting our thoughts again reach the vague and desolating levels that they did so insistently when we were teenagers. A first kiss has as much to do with the knee-shaking discovery that we exist in a shared universe as it does with the fear of locked braces.
When I turned in my first officially young adult novel, my editor didn’t cut for content. He didn’t strike a single moment of sexual desire or brooding or bad language. What he did was set a pretension barometer twice as strict as adult fiction’s and started deleting every time the arrow ticked over.
I’d fight for precious phrases: “A teenage reader can understand ‘the curious uplift of dashed hopes,’” I’d sputter. “Let’s not patronize!”
But David let only 1 in 10 of those expressions survive — and it was just what I needed. Under the current rules, Y.A. literature doesn’t have official limits as far as appropriateness and tone. Instead, if there is one truism of successful Y.A., it’s that the book’s unrelenting emphasis must be on character and event, and not the brilliance of the author’s viewpoint. For me it was a humbling experience, trying to shed the essential narcissism of my writer’s project because my teen readers wouldn’t tolerate it. But on crawling out on the other side, I saw that what Y.A. novels value above all else is storytelling. It took me even longer to realize that that needn’t lessen a book’s complexity — it just prioritizes the reader’s experience. Ultimately, if there’s a refrain I hear from the many adults turning to Y.A., it’s not that the books are any simpler. They’re just more pleasurable.
A reading experience I dread is to invest hours in a heralded and beautifully written book, only to have the curtain pull away and reveal that the novel’s purpose all along has been to serve as an elaborate proof of the writer’s specialness, that the pen kept writing long after the content ran dry. “I didn’t quite get the story the author was trying to tell” is the more polite reader’s version of, “Screw you, author, for making us come to a restaurant you picked, making us order what you wanted, and then not even letting us get a word in edgewise.”
The commercial versus literary debate was my fatal cramp while I was writing my adult books, and I’ve been relieved to discover how rarely the distinction comes up when writing for younger audiences. I think that’s in large part because writers of Y.A. are officially writing for someone else, teens. The essential difference between writer and imagined reader splits open the “by me, for me” feedback loop that caught me in that second novel, and instead prioritizes the reader’s experience over the author’s own nagging grandiosity. That’s not to say that literary, harder-to-access fiction isn’t pleasurable or important (though I do think that it’s all too easy to mistake obscurity for profundity), but the explosive growth of Y.A. as a genre can and should lead all authors to some soul-searching about whom they’re writing for in the first place.
from: NY Times
No comments:
Post a Comment