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Last summer, I was at a tough spot in my writing life. There was one question that kept pounding through my head and bothering me to no end:
"Why should I invest so much time into the lives of fictional characters when I have my own life to live? (After all...I'll only be young once.)"
I think this question is common of many young adults, not only writers, but readers. Why? We're identity-searching. We're discovering who we are and we're not very interested in who other people are. We figure that we only have so much time to create an attractive picture of ourselves to present to the world, and we don't want to waste our "wonder years." (I don't believe in the whole "wonder years" thing, but that's a bunny trail...)
I'm going to focus on how this pertains to writers first.
Anyway, so that was what I thought, and I informally took the summer off of writing. I didn't miss it as much as I thought I would, but sometime afterward, especially after I read about young adults and identity in a creative writing lecture, I was musing over the above question and I realized that my fictional characters didn't have to be so completely alien to my own life, and our worlds were not totally separate spheres.
For instance, Ren, my female protagonist in Seaspear, has a problem I have too: she puts too much weight on other people's opinions of her. When Seaspear is finished, hopefully I will care less about other people's opinions as well as Ren, because I'm working it out on paper, through a fictional person.
Sometimes, we can solve our problems by writing about them through a fictional person's point of view.
Weaving my own memories, emotions, and struggles into my stories will make my writing deeper, richer, and more special to me. And if I view a story as special when I write it, hopefully the reader will too.
Here's an example of a memory. When I was younger, some of my happiest times were spent in my grandparent's house in Pennsylvania, when my family would drive out there for Thanksgiving with my dad's side of the family. Sometimes, even after we had already eaten supper, one of my uncles would arrive with a cheery "hello" and several boxes of mouthwatering pizza from our favorite pizza parlor, Two Kings. My parents would protest that we had just eaten, but my little brothers and I would all insist that we weren't as full as we had thought before. Instead of using a pizza cutter to slice up the pizza, my granny would use a scissors.
I wrote my first 'novel' when I was around eleven years old, through a school program called "How to Write the Novel Way." At one point in the story, my female protagonist's best friend goes to her apartment for dinner, and she cuts the pizza with...guess what... a scissors. At the end, after all the conflict, the best friend brings the female protagonist a real pizza cutter as a gift.
My grandpa was so proud of this book that I had written at age 11 that he read it aloud to my granny, who was then in a nursing home. My granny was not very responsive at the time, but my grandpa told me afterward that when he read the part about the pizza and scissors, she got a big smile on her face.
The point of this rather long story is that I, as a young adult, have so many memories of my childhood that it is not possible to remember all I want to remember. Weaving these memories into stories is a way for me to preserve them, and provides a way to look back when I'm struggling with my new identity. These memories may also ring true with others, giving the story personal value for them.
Storing memories in stories is a way for us to stay rooted in who we really are.
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Point number two...readers.
So, one possible reason for a teen not wanting to read is because they want to live their own life - not read about someone else's. They think that these two are not related in any way. How do we, as writers, blast this philosophy apart and show readers that fictional characters are worth all the trouble?
We need to show them that reading about someone else's problems might help them put their own into words. Writers find it hard to believe, but not everyone has a talent for expressing thoughts and emotions on a page. These quotes express it well:
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." ~ Anaïs Nin
"The skill of a writer is to create a context in which other people can think." - Edwin Schlossberg
It helps if a main character is at the same identity-defining stage as the reader. Almost unconsciously, the reader will wonder how the character deals with his problems, and keep reading. Suddenly, the fictional character isn't just a fictional character anymore...he is a kindred spirit.
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Any questions or things to add to this post? I'd love to hear any examples of where you've found this true or false in your own history of reading and writing.
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Any questions or things to add to this post? I'd love to hear any examples of where you've found this true or false in your own history of reading and writing.
