Made up Stories and Young Adults

Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

                                            - John Green, The Fault in our Stars

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

                               - Stephen King, On Writing

As a teacher of both writing and literature, I often find myself telling my students that reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Writing, for me, is an act of connecting, of reaching out. It’s a way of creating relationships with people I don’t even know, and I’ve long believed that creating meaningful relationships is part of the important work of a life well lived.

I think this is what art in general is all about. Whether you’re a writer, a musician, a painter, a singer, a dancer – on some level, you’re attempting to connect with others.

Reading, then, is also an act of connecting. Instead of doing most of the talking, the reader does most of the listening. The reader is not, however, a passive participant. As John Green puts it, “Reading is always an act of empathy. It’s always an imaging of what it’s like to be someone else.”

You can live so many different lives through the act of reading stories. It’s possible to learn so much about so many different things through the living of those lives. It’s simply brilliant.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’m more of a reader at the moment than a writer. I simply haven’t had the emotional energy for creating my own art, but I’ve taken great solace in living on the other side of the equation by reading more than usual.

And what do I read? Mostly young adult fiction. After all, I do spend my days surrounded by them (young adults, I mean). But to be honest, I know that’s not the only reason I like to read what they’re reading. I love YA literature for some of the same reasons I like working with its audience: there’s just something very compelling about that time of life.

The experience of being a teenager can be exciting, confusing, provocative, scary, poignant, and incredibly vivid. That transformation from childhood to adulthood is a pivotal time in many of our lives, and one where we make a lot of choices than can affect the adult we eventually become.

The first book of assigned reading that I can remember loving is John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. I was a sophomore in high school, and I remember feeling so connected to the emotions of the characters. Not coincidentally, the essay I wrote for that book is one of the first pieces of writing I can recall really pouring my heart into. An early lesson in how good literature can inspire.

As an adult, my relationship to the genre has changed. In high school, I loved Holden Caulfield because he was so critical of adults, so full of judgment. These days, I don’t see that as such an intriguing characteristic, but his struggle to make sense of his world and growing up is one that gives me empathy for my own students. I still love Catcher in the Rye, but for much different reasons than I did as a teen.

When I first began teaching ten years ago, I did make a concerted effort to read some more current YA fiction so that I could share casual discussions with my students. I didn’t realize it would be a path to reconnecting with an entire genre of literature I’d forgotten. On one trip to the bookstore in those early years, I happened across, and purchased, John Green’s recently published, debut novel, Looking for Alaska. If you’ve talked about books with me at all, you’ll know that John Green is my favorite author, and Alaska was my first taste of brilliant YA literature since I’d been a teen myself. If I were to give you a quick summary of the book, I would say that it is strikingly similar to A Separate Peace.

Not only do I love John Green’s books (If you haven’t yet read The Fault in our Stars, go do it now! Even if you don’t think you’re a fan of YA. Just read it.), but the man himself is completely full of awesome. Through the youtube channels created by him and his brother, Hank, he has allowed his fans unprecedented access to who he is, and what he and Hank think on all kinds of topics. John Green is smart, thoughtful, hilarious, and an unabashed nerd. He and Hank have created a community of like-minded, motivated individuals who are more than just fans of the books and videos and songs the brothers create. They are participants, engaged in artistic conversations. The world needs more people like them.

One of the reasons that I am allowing myself to go all fan-girly over John here is that he is such an inspiration, and with the recent success of The Fault in our Stars, more people are starting to realize it. (John shares some interesting concerns over this phenomenon in this video.) Much of what I’ve said here are similar to things John has said in his videos over the years. It’s easy to connect with someone who verbalizes so well notions that you already hold true. He sums it all up very nicely I think in this introduction to Crash Course Literature. (What? You’ve never heard of Crash Course? You’d better go check it out! Right after you finish reading The Fault in our Stars.)

I love this video for so many reasons, but one is the topic that I last heard addressed by my own high school English teacher many years ago: authorial intent. This is completely my favorite thing about reading – it is up to YOU as the reader to interpret what happened! Can’t decide whether Pi really survived for 227 days at sea with Richard Parker? Don’t understand the ending of The Giver? Really really dying to know whether he chose the Lady or the Tiger? (Questions, by the way, that all of my students ask me.) You, as the reader, have to decide for yourself, and each person’s answer may be different.  “You decide whether the swing set is just a swing set.” Author Nathan Bransford has a great post about How Art Changes With Us, emphasizing (to me) how what we bring to the table as a reader is incredibly relevant to our understanding of a story.

Another reason I’ve been thinking about these things lately is that, back in September, my students and I celebrated Banned Books Week. It blows my mind that people want to prevent teens from reading about the ugly and difficult things in this world. How else to allow them to learn about, and then hopefully avoid experiencing, those ugly things themselves? How else to keep them from being lost if they already have?

Again, literature is such an incredible tool for learning. This is Speak author Lauire Halse Anderson’s take on censorship.

Reluctant readers make me sad, but at the same time, I consider them a great challenge.  I know there are books out there for everyone. One of my biggest jobs as a teacher of reading is to help kids find books that they love. I can say that I have definitely gotten a lot better at that part of the job. How? Simply by loving reading the same books they love reading and then sharing them.

Today in class, one of my students interrupted a lesson to declare, “I finished Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children!”

I asked him if he liked it, and he was like, “Yeah, but it was such a cliffhanger!”

And I was all, “I know! He’d better be writing a sequel!”

Important conversations to have with kids, right?

(Incidentally, yes, many of my students have figured out they can derail a boring-as-hell grammar lesson by throwing out a comment about a book. I kind of consider that on-topic, really.)

Anyway, my point is, read good books. Good fiction matters because it connect us. It teaches us about each other and about ourselves, and often we don’t even realize we’re learning at all. We’re just being swept away in the power of a good story. Stories help to make the world a little bit smaller, in a very good way.

What do you think? What was the first story that swept you away? What are your favorite titles now?

Tomorrow We Will Run Faster

 

 

"Tomorrow we will run faster -- stretch out our arms farther ..."  

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It was sometime last winter on a backcountry ski day with Andrew – one of those days with clear blue skies, chest-deep powder, and no one around but my favorite adventuring partner. In other words: perfect.

I recognized this perfection, this utter happiness, and breathed it in. Held on to its every passing moment. Not just because it was glorious, but because I knew it wouldn’t last.

“When do think was the best time in your life – when you were happiest for the longest amount of time?” I asked suddenly.

We’d just spent 30 minutes laboriously breaking a fresh skin track and now stood at the top of a ridge, looking out over a wide, white landscape of mountains, preparing for the reward of a beautiful float down through the powder.

“I mean,” I felt the need to explain, “it’s just so hard for me to feel content. Satisfied. It’s not that I’m unhappy a lot, it’s just that I always have this feeling of anxiety that there’s something more I need to do, to achieve.”

I find such beautiful locations, ones that require such effort to find, to be the perfect settings for these kinds of soul-digging conversations.

Not long after, I read this post by Nathan Bransford which struck such a chord with me that thoughts of it have been marinating in my brain since reading it seven months ago. Mr. Bransford proposes that writers, by their very nature, are strivers – those not content to simply live, but to always reach for something more. His writes what has become my favorite recent quote about writing:

“Writing is an act of getting down on your hands and knees and pushing on the ground and hoping the world spins on a slightly different axis. It’s the art of not taking life for granted and trying to make something, anything change.”

This feels so exactly, completely true.

I began to wonder about myself not just as a writer, but as a runner, too. Even after a nearly perfect race, (which is rare) the sense of satisfaction never lasts. Always, there is something new to accomplish, some new goal to occupy ones attention. And this is good because if there wasn’t, we would never get better. Never run faster, never go farther. This is what moves us forward as runners – this inner need for something more. It’s what makes us improve.

When the mind dwells on a certain topic, it finds that everything relates. So, it was not surprising that while reading John Steinbeck’s The Pearl that same week, this quote jumped out at me:

“For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”

And I began to wonder – is it not just writers, not just runners? Is it all of us?

I was especially intrigued by the assertion that our inability to be satisfied is a talent. Again, this is what moves us forward. Think about the great achievers of the world, whomever you see as having accomplished big things. They were people who were not content to rest on the glory of their early successes. They always strove for something more.

So perhaps dissatisfaction is a talent. Still, I have to think it’s one best tempered with an attempt at balance and an appreciation for one’s blessings.

Because Mr. Bransford’s post related the idea of striving to The Great Gatsby, and to F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, it came to mind while recently watching John Green’s video on Gatsby. If you’re familiar with the book, his is an excellent, and concise, interpretation that is fun to watch.

As I followed the links on the serpentine path of the internet chain, I eventually watched the American Masters episode on Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams.” It was fascinating! I learned what Mr. Bransford had already asserted – that Fitzgerald himself was a striver, like the characters of his stories, someone always reaching for more. And in spite of all this striving, Fitzgerald felt that the golden moment – what we think we want – can never live up to our dreams. The important thing is the dreaming.

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” –This Side of Paradise

To some extent I think the “becoming” holds more appeal than the “being” because real life is much more challenging than our dreams. It’s messier, sometimes uglier, and often more mundane.

In spite of all of this, I think it’s far too easy to glorify the tortured artist, and I don’t think a person has to be unhappy in order to feel driven. I hope not anyway. Jay Gatsby himself was described as having an “extraordinary gift for hope.” Maybe that’s the flipside of dissatisfaction, the positive spin. From our discontent, hope is born.

I know happiness comes from within. I know this. It comes from living deliberately, appreciating the small moments, doing meaningful work, and developing strong relationships with other people. This is why I could stand at the top of that mountain with Andrew and live that happiness so fully, even while accepting that it may be short-lived. 

I also know that this inner feeling of need, the desire for something more, to do something more, can drive a girl nuts if she lets it.

I have a recording of a live U2 concert. At one point in the show, in order to introduce the next song, Bono declares to the crowd, “I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty good about the fact that I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

Honestly, I don’t know if I feel good about it. I do know that I have an extraordinary hope that I won’t leave this earth without having affected, just the tiniest bit, the tilt of its axis.

~

What do you think? Are humans by their very nature dissatisfied? Could this be a good thing?

Giving (Cows)

When we last left our heroine, she was pondering giving. Emotional giving, to be specific. And yes, I’m still pondering.

Meanwhile, however, I’ve been noticing instances of more tangible giving, which, let’s face it, does offer some emotional rewards.

For example, yesterday I was out in my driveway at 7:00 A.M. facing the most monstrously ugly of all gigantic snow berms. The wet, mucky feet of snow from the road, which had been packed down and driven on by cars all day, was finally scraped up by the plow in the middle of the night and deposited … where? In my driveway. Of course. The subsequent drop in temperature meant that I had large boulders of ice cemented together in a mountain whose summit reached just over the hood of my car. Clearly I had done something to offend the county plow driver.

But, alas. This is life. If only I had gotten up 45 minutes earlier, I might not have been there, huffing and puffing with my shovel, red-faced and sweaty in my desperation to dislodge recalcitrant icebergs. But it was extremely important that I get my car out of the driveway immediately.

IT WAS A POWDER DAY!

And suddenly, there was my neighbor, Bill. Bill runs a plow service, and is contracted by various other neighbors to plow their driveways. And while he was on his way to one of those houses, he paused, put his plow in reverse, and scooped away my entire berm. Now that is giving, people! It took him 30 seconds, and he saved me a morning full of frustration. (A morning of good cross-training, too, I know. But powder skiing is much better cross-training!) Needless to say, I’ll be checking to find out Bill’s favorite brand of bourbon.

Another revelation about giving came from John and Hank Green’s Project for Awesome. In addition to being the author of two of my favorite YA books of all time, (Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns), John has a massive presence on the internet, along with his brother Hank. Specifically, they have a mighty popular youtube channel. Every year they utilize this presence to raise money for charity in their Project for Awesome. I'll refrain from explaining all the details of how it works, but their basic idea is that by working together, we (as in, all of us) can do amazing things. This year, they raised $100,000 for charity, all from small donations. Yup. That’s awesome all right.

Just to repeat: If we all work together, we can do amazing things.

And finally, in my observations of giving, I saw that my favorite author-blogger is running his own blog-fundraiser for Heifer International.

First of all, what a great name, right? I love Heifers.

Second, here’s what they’re all about (from the HI website): “Heifer International is a global nonprofit with a proven solution to ending hunger and poverty in a sustainable way. Heifer helps empower millions of families to lift them out of poverty and hunger to self-reliance through gifts of livestock, seeds and trees and extensive training, which provide a multiplying source of food and income.”

They give cows to needy people! And llamas! Llamas are very popular right now.

(Photo courtesy of Heifer International / Darcy Kiefel)

Also, they give goats.

It’s an excellent organization, and I’m excited to be a tiny little part of the fundraising. You can be a part of it, too! Following Nathan’s example, I (along with my awesome, agreeable husband) pledge to donate $1 to Heifer International for every comment you leave on this post between now and midnight on Christmas Eve. So, comment away!

Of course, I do have a financial ceiling for this donation, (which I won’t share with you, so as not to discourage comments) but let’s see if we can reach it. If you’re a lurker around these parts, now’s the time to come out of the woodwork.

You can only comment once, but if you make a comment worthy of a response, I’ll also donate a dollar for my response comment. (Hint: Ask me questions!)

In your comment, please tell me:

a) Your name
b) The corner of the planet in which you reside
c) (optional) A goal or wish for 2011


Remember Anne’s comment from my last post? Let’s see if she’s right.


And finally, my own wish for 2011 is that we all work together.