Tag Archives: Young Adult

Fifteen Years Young

My son turned fifteen this weekend. Fifteen. That’s five-and-half thousand days he’s walked this earth (well, walked and crawled), and with a few small exceptions I’ve been there with him for every single one of them. This doesn’t by necessity make us close, but it makes us … well, something.

There’s no connection in my mind between the helpless, crying, infantile baby that came into the world fifteen years ago and the moody, sarcastic, increasingly self-aware teenager that thinks swearing is cool but doesn’t quite know when it’s appropriate. These are two different entities, and frankly I’m not sure I really know either.

My memory of his life is sporadic – fleeting moments in time, stuck in my mind like a photograph without context. I know he was once six – and twelve, and many other ages – but I don’t seem to be able to draw a line connecting these moments to each other. Like each memory is of a different person, one who no longer quite exists.

At the risk of being a cliché, it makes me wonder what I was like when I was fifteen. Where was I? What was I doing? What did I think? Fifteen was my sophomore year of high school; it was a summer of forgetful abandon. It was a year of adventure, of climbing and mountaineering, of school and exams and friends and excitement.

It was also my last year of happiness.

The following year, my junior year of high school, was the first year I learned depression, and I’ve never forgotten it since. By the summer of sixteen, I was catatonic in my room, drinking with my goth friends, staying up all night with candles, and cutting my arms. And it only got worse from there.

To some extent, I wonder what fate awaits my son. Will this be his last year of happiness? Will he succumb to the deep, numb despair of depression? I really can’t say, of course – the future is the future, and I’ve never really been good at predicting it. But I can see that he is, in many ways, a stronger person than I was at his age. He cooks, he cleans, he reminds me to take my meds, and he can’t stand how dirty I let my car get. He’s responsible, has a girlfriend, and frankly doesn’t get into much trouble at all. These are all things that were not true of me.

In fact, reflecting on that past fifteen years of my own life, he’s more of an adult now than I ever was – and more so than I am today. While I mope in bed and struggle to get through each and every day, leaving dishes and laundry to pile up, he actually takes care of things around the house. He doesn’t enjoy it, but it does it nonetheless.

Fifteen years ago, I was a scared, naive, miserably depressed kid who didn’t see a path forward in the world. Not that many young adults do, but for me, the end was visibly near. I was on a speeding train of mental turmoil, rushing headlong toward the abyss with no bridge and no brakes. What I’m trying to say is that without my son, I may well have tried to kill myself.

But I didn’t. And whilst I’m certainly not ‘better’, I survived. I mean, that’s probably as much as I can say for myself, really – I survived. It’s up for debate if that was worth it or not, but the point is, I’m likely alive because of my son. So there’s something.

We share interests – a love of movies, Lord of the Rings and heavy metal music, for starters – and we talk. I’ve never been secretive about my mental health with him, and I hope he doesn’t resent me for it; he talks to me (on occasion) about the things that trouble him, and I hope he continues to.

What I see when I look at him is no longer my child. He is no longer helpless. I mean, I may never have really come to terms with a person in the world being my descendant, but the point is that he is a young man, whole and independent, with thoughts and opinions that are not mine. He is a good person, and whether through my actions – or lack thereof – or not, I believe he will become a good adult. I have faith he will become a hard-working, functional member of society. And I guess I really couldn’t ask for more.

What I see is simple: my son is a better person than I am.

I couldn’t be more proud.

When Characters Derail the Plot

My characters have a pesky habit of doing things I didn’t expect them to – especially when they’re talking to each other. Frankly, it’s kind of annoying and I wish they’d quit it, but they never listen to me any more than they listen to each other. It makes it very difficult to plan a conversation that advances the plot, because they don’t care which way the story goes, especially if they haven’t said their piece yet.

When I’m writing more plot-driven fantasy, like The Redemption of Erâth, it’s mildly infuriating because there are plenty of dialogue scenes that are required to explain a plot point or give some back story. It’s fine when it’s mostly one character relating events that happened to them, but when I need characters to come to a realization or change the nature of their relationship (fight, fall in love, etc.), they just don’t do what I want or expect.

When I’m writing heavily character-driven fiction, such as my YA novel 22 Scars (as C.M. North), it becomes a major pain in the ass, because the entire story hinges on people in the book saying the things that they need to say to get to the next plot point … and sometimes, they just don’t.

The problem is in keeping the back and forth of the dialogue realistic. It just doesn’t work out to have conversations like this:

Character A: “Relinquish her, you fiend!”
Character B: “Never, sir! Prepare to die!”
Character A: “Prepare thyself!”
*Fight begins because really that’s what this was all getting at in the first place*

My dialogue tends to go more like this:

Character A: “Relinquish her, you fiend!”
Character B: “Never, sir! Prepare to die!”
Character A: “Oh. That’s a rather intense threat. Maybe we should talk about this.”
Character B: “Speak what thou wilst.”
Character A: “Well you see, it looks like you aren’t treating my friend here with all that much respect, and I think you’d find yourself in a significantly happier relationship if you took a moment to listen to what she has to say.”
Character C: “I’ve been telling you all along, I’m not unhappy, I just want to be heard! You come home every day from pillaging and burning villages and you track mud all over my tapestries, and I just want you to appreciate what I do for you!”
Character B: “Hm. I think I could do that.”
Character A: “Now, isn’t that better?”

Okay, so this isn’t a great example, but it serves to illustrate how my characters, especially in dialogue, tend to take on a life of their own and drive the direction of the story in ways I never anticipated.

It makes overall plotting difficult, and I’m not a pantser. I structure my stories meticulously before beginning to write, and when I’m writing narrative passages, action sequences or even just single-character scenes, things tend to flow pretty smoothly. As soon as these characters have to interact with each other, though, things go bat-shit crazy. I have a scene I’m working on at the moment where a young man confronts his abusive father, and it’s ended up at a point where the young man is threatening the father with the broken neck of a bottle. I didn’t think that was going to happen, and I can’t see a way out of it without sending the father to the hospital, which is really going to derail the plot, because it’s going to require a police report, possibly a trial, and a whole lot of nonsense that isn’t relevant to the story. I just needed them to have a fight – the bottle was never supposed to be part of the scene, but I’ll be damned if the kid didn’t just up and snatch it.

Anyway, the point is that I find writing dialogue difficult, but perhaps not for the reason most people do. I don’t have too much difficulty writing believable dialogue, but rather the opposite: in making it too realistic, I can’t control its direction very well.

For those of you who write, what’s your experience in writing dialogue? Can you manage to convey the points necessary within your control, or do you find that, like me, the characters tend to do what they want?

How Should Death Be Treated in Fiction?

As someone who suffers from bipolar depression and has often been suicidal, I think about death possibly more frequently than most. And when I say think about it, I mean really ponder it – what it must feel like to breathe a last breath, to beat a last heartbeat, and then the moments of fading consciousness as the body fights its hardest to prevent a total shutdown on a cellular level. After all, dying is a process – it isn’t instant.

To quote Depeche Mode, death is everywhere; we see it daily on the news, and in real life with the crushed squirrels and battered deer on the side of the road. We cause it – deliberately and inadvertently – when we swat at a mosquito, or a wasp. But we only ever experience it once, which is why it remains such a mystery; no one can really tell what it’s like to die, because – to quote The Crow – there ain’t no coming back.

And as art is a reflection of life, and death is a part of life, death finds its way into the stories we tell with an almost inescapable certainty. Whether the story is The Lion King or Pulp Fiction, there is hardly a tale in the world that doesn’t deal with death in some way – whether explicitly, implicitly, or at least by threatening characters with death as a kind of ultimate stake.

In most stories where death is a central plot point, the deaths in question are typically premature – the result of violence or illness. These deaths, of course, carry the heaviest emotional weight – at least, when the character is some form of protagonist. These deaths are usually treated with a measure of respect, dignity and gravitas.

When the character is a villain, however, things become different. Low-level goons are often offed with a kind of casual indifference, whilst end-bosses are treated to a typically spectacular death, glorifying their demise as something to be celebrated in all its gore. The 2012 film Dredd is a picture-perfect epitome of this: throughout the movie quite literally hundreds of people are killed in a variety of inventive and bloody ways, but nothing tops the two-minute slow-motion swan-dive from a 200-story window that demolishes – in exceptionally graphic detail – the movie’s head honcho, Ma-Ma.

Evidently, there are a lot of ways to treat a character’s death, from understated and emotional to disbelievingly violent and visually spectacular, and some of this depends on the nature of the character and the nature of the story. But what defines the appropriateness of the realism, so to speak, of a character’s demise? And how is realism defined, when – as noted above – no one really knows what it’s like to die in the first place?

To this end, I think the intended audience is an important consideration in the description, detail and realism of the death in question. If you’re writing for six-year-olds, it’s entirely appropriate to deal with the topic, but perhaps in a softer way than if you’re writing for sixteen-year-olds.

But even for an older audience, it’s important to understand the living experiences that the majority of them have gone through. Very few six-year-olds will have experienced death first-hand. Sixteen-year-olds, on the other hand, may well of witnessed the passing of a grandparent, or a beloved family pet. And a sixty-year-old will have likely experienced numerous deaths in their lifetime. And the method of describing a fictional death depends on the sensibility and general understanding of the target audience.

When I started writing The Redemption of Erâth, I knew there were going to be deaths of important characters. Being that the story is intended as a kind of suitable-for-all-ages tale, I wanted to treat these deaths as truly meaningful, impactful and important, without glorifying the detail of the characters’ passing. The first major death, a teenage girl, is described in passing as an arrow piercing her heart. The second, an invented fantasy being, is described in more detail with gashes to her throat and sliver blood spattered about. But in both of these cases, the focus was not on the detail of the death, but the emotional impact on the remaining characters.

In my alter-ego’s young adult novel, 22 Scars, there are only two character deaths; a young girl who dies from leukemia, described from afar through the journal entries of her friend, and a teenager who dies in a car crash – only the aftermath of which is shown. There are a number of other ‘violent’ instances – self-harm, rape and abuse – but the detail of these scenes was again written with a young adult audience in mind: I don’t shy away, but nor do I try to glorify either the abuse or the suffering. My goal was simply to describe the reality of these terrible ordeals; I wouldn’t anticipate a ten-year-old reading it.

It’s a fine line to toe; passing death off as both easy to deal and easy to experience is in some ways an injustice to the reality of dying. To see waves of bad guys mown down with machine guns makes it seem like death is a quick pop and then you fall down and go to sleep. To watch a teenage girl slit her wrists and bleed out in a bathtub (reference: Thirteen Reasons Why) is gory and off-putting, but also belies the difficulty of such a scenario – it is not easy to cut that deep, nor does it typically result in a quick and quiet death.

The advent of cellphones and live-streaming has made it unfortunately easy to watch a real person die, and anyone whose stood by and watched will tell you: death is not easy. The body will fight to the last cell to remain alive, even as shock sets in and the victim loses consciousness. People don’t just fall down when shot; they remain alive for minutes afterward. They move around. They try desperately to stay alive.

To what extent should the realities of death be described in fiction? Is there a line between realistic sensitivity and glorification? Death will always be around, but how should it be treated in fiction?

There may be no easy answer – but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. How do you think death should be treated in fiction?