I do a monthly blog for the Western Colorado Writers’ Forum.
This month I tackled one of the tougher topics to be specific about: theme.
It’s a long post, but I think it’s worth the journey.
Tag: writing advice Page 1 of 2
On Tuesday I will give a talk at the GJ Art Center from 6:00-7:30 on conventions, conferences and critique groups for the Western Colorado Writers Forum, so I’ve been giving some thought about what I’d like to say.
I can see structuring the presentation as more of a kaffeeklatsch than a speech: lots of room for audience-generated questions and comments.
While searching for what I’ve already written about the topic, I came upon this. In 2021, The Daily Sentinel interviewed me about our local comicon. Here’s my response. It became self-revelatory in a hurry.
A local journalist sent me some questions for an article they’re working on about our upcoming comicon. I’m not much of a comic book fan, but comicons are about more than comics. Here’s the questions and my answers.
I have a tendency to over answer things like this. 
What sparked your interest in ComiCon?
I didn’t go to conventions of any kind until I was in my early 40s. I talked to the editor of a fiction review magazine in 1996, and he asked me if I was going to the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim in a couple weeks. I laughed and said, “Science fiction conventions? Isn’t that where geeky people dress up like Klingons?” He said, “Oh, no, no . . . well, yes, but it’s also where a writer can meet other writers, editors, publishers and fans. It’s a way for you to network and be more involved.” So I went. Sure enough, there were Klingons, but also it was the first time I was able to be in a community of people who knew things about science fiction, fantasy and horror literature, films and gaming (and cosplay and filking and numerous other fannish pursuits). I didn’t even know I missed a sense of community! I remember walking from one of the convention buildings to another in the middle of a really hot day. I stopped at a park bench in the shade under a tree. A really convincing looking Klingon was sitting there too, smoking a cigarette. He said, “Nice day, isn’t it?” And I thought, “I’m home!”
Is there a particular character you resonate with?
My relationship with conventions is mostly from the literature end. When I was a kid, I liked the Daredevil quite a bit, but I wasn’t fanatic about reading comics. I idolized authors, like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Zenna Henderson (and Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc.). I also am a science fiction and fantasy film buff.
Did you collect comics back in the day? Still today?
I did not. Comicon is bigger than comics, fortunately. The World Fantasy Convention or World Science Fiction Convention, are more literary, but there’s a huge component interested in film, graphic novels and gaming. The comic universe, particularly DC and Marvel exert a large influence, even in the literary conventions. At a Comicon, the emphasis is more to the comics side, although in my experience I think that films still generate more interest. At a major comicon, like the Denver one, a ton of comics illustrators are in attendance, and each has their fan base. The illustrators for the major comics are superstars, but the smaller “indie” comic books and their writers and artists catch a lot of love from the fans. Also, budding comic book creators go to meet their idols, make connections and to learn from people farther along in their careers. The fans, of course, benefit from all of this. So a comicon will serve multiple interests too. Someone who likes to cosplay will go in costume to show off and to admire other costumes. Maybe they are deeply investing in the character they are dressed as. Someone else might go, though, because they love a particular comic or a film franchise or graphic novels. The game fans are well serviced too. A good comicon for one person might involve a completely different set of activities and attractions than someone else experienced.
If you attend in costume, what’s your character?
I’ve never gone in costume. It hasn’t been an interest of mine, although if I did, I’d probably go full steampunk. I love that 19th century, alternate universe aesthetic. Most comicons will feature a costume contest that I’ll always attend. The world of costume design and costume performances at comicons and other conventions is surprisingly deep. There are levels of expertise in costuming just for the competitions, from amateur to masterclass. Some people spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on their costumes. Throwing on a Halloween Batman costume would show very poorly at a comicon (although little kids attend dressed that way—they’re way cute).
Your SF is along the lines of Bradbury (whom I adore!) and have comics also influenced your writing?
Of the comics that influenced me most, I’d say TALES FROM THE CRYPT got to me most often. They were horror stories, and for kids of a certain age (my age at the time) they were scary and entertaining. I remember one that has influenced me to this day. In it a jazz saxophone player was obsessed with playing the perfect riff. He was convinced that if he could, the heavens would open and he would ascend to the level of a god. So, one night in the rain he managed to do it. He played the perfect riff. The heavens opened, but it wasn’t angels or God looking down on him. It was some sort of Chuthlu elder god monstrosity, and it plucked him off the Earth. I’ve felt since that I’m the writerly equivalent of that guy. I’m always trying to write the perfect sentence or paragraph or story. I certainly don’t want the heavens to open if I do it, but I understand his goal. There’s something compelling about the pursuit of perfection.
Favorite comic/character of all time?
I mentioned Daredevil earlier. I liked that he wasn’t supernatural or had super powers. He was just a blind guy who developed his other senses.
What do you admire most about comic writers and/or illustrators?
I love the idea that there are people in the world who can make a living entertaining other people with their creative visions. All the creative types (artists, poets, potters, dancers, singers, film makers, etc.) who spend a part of their lives making art are admirable as far as I’m concerned. Not everyone can make money doing it. In fact, most creators don’t make their living with their art, but the impulse to create is a powerful one. I’m glad they pursued their passions.
Anything else you’d like our readers to know about ComiCon or your writing?
I go to comicon because I like to be in the presence of science fiction, fantasy and horror fans. We speak much the same language. I don’t mind that people will buy my books when I’m there, or come to panels that I speak on, but mostly what I love about comicon is it feeds my inner, imaginative self. Frankly, much of the world can be deadening, depressing or frightening—watching too much of the news can do that to a person—while a comicon is a celebration of imaginative play.
I love that comicons exist. They can be an antidote for that which ails us.
I reported a couple days ago that Asimov’s bought a story from me. If I count an early story in Analog that was reprinted in the Greek edition of Asimov’s (and I do), that’s my 20th appearance in the magazine since 1997.
I tried a different technique in composing the story. I knew my characters, and I knew what the conflict was, but I had no plot in mind. I focussed on writing fully fleshed out scenes in their lives. They’re childhood friends, so each scene is a key moment, but I didn’t have a plan where I was going.
However, I have an idea about constructing stories that I call the “ascending pearls theory.”
Because of how we read, the first scene starts the reader from scratch: all info is new. The next scene, even though it presents additional information, carries with it the info from the first scene. The knowledge accretes for the reader, just like a pearl that starts with a grain of sand and then coats it over and over until a pearl is built from the layers.
Knowing that as I write is a powerful tool. Each new scene pulls on that background to create increasing complexity and nuance. The weight of the story is carried in the accumulated mass of story material.
So I don’t have to have a plot in mind, necessarily. The information is making connections and building a path organically. Eventually a culmination of the combined dynamic of knowing what the characters want, the actions that they take or the world takes that impact their progress toward their goal, and the tension that creates, take me to a final moment.
After that, a story is like that old model of how the world balances on the back of a turtle. “Yeah, but what’s under that turtle?” a skeptical audience member asks. “It’s turtles all the way down,” is the answer.
The climax rests on the back of the second to last scene. What’s under that? It’s scenes all the way down. The advantage of writing this way for this story is I really worked on making each scene a whole and interesting moment. I didn’t have any skip-through-this-because-I-want-to-get-to-the-end writing.
The disadvantage was that I slowed down. I couldn’t write the story this way by sketching my way to an end. There were days in between scenes while I decided what would be most interesting to tackle next. Despite the slow progress, I’m very happy with the result.
I have a rough draft of a writing book I started for Fairwood Press from years ago that is tentatively titled, PLOT AS METAPHOR. You can see I’ve used some metaphors here. It’s the only way I have for talking about the inexplicable workings of creating a story for me. I suspect other teachers/writers face the same challenge when describing how story happens.
I’ve always liked this quote from Joseph Conrad. I think he was talking about writing. It’s from HEART OF DARKNESS:
“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence–that which makes its truth, its meaning–its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream–alone.”
Fairly frequently someone will ask where I get my ideas, and like most authors I am at a bit of a loss for a good answer. However, a couple days ago, an FB writer friend asked for reasons a teenager might be laid up for weeks but not cause long term damage.
Their question question made me think this at first:”Not totally related, but an anecdote about how medical research can be fraught. For story purposes, I wanted to know if a teenager with bone cancer might have to have both legs amputated. I called my doctor, and he immediately went into a diagnostic mode. “What symptoms do you have? When did you start experiencing discomfort? How long have you been ignoring this condition?” It took quite a bit of talking to convince him that I wasn’t sick myself. I’m pretty sure he worried about me for years after.”
I added, “I have written three stories with bed-ridden young people: “The Radio Magician,” about a boy with polio in the 30s, also the story about a boy who had his legs amputated because of bone cancer, “Roller Derby Dan'” and the piece I’m working on now with a boy in the 60s who has both legs in external fixators after surgery to correct severe bow leggedness. I think the antecedent to my interest in this trope is Ray Bradbury’s “The Emissary” from THE OCTOBER COUNTRY.”
The FB friend asked why that situation interested me, and I realized I had a partial answer to where I get ideas, at least this idea.”Besides the awesomeness of the Bradbury story, a friend of mine when I was 12 had both legs broken to correct for extreme pigeon toed alignment of his feet. His legs were casted from ankle to hip. He was miserable but suffered gamely. We pushed him in his wheelchair everywhere we went that summer. I’ve often thought since what his experience must have been like. Also, of interest in this situation, H.G. Wells broke his leg when he was eight. He was bedridden while it healed (they were much less into getting patients on their feet at that time). He spent his convalescence reading. He said that’s what made him H.G. Wells. He became devoted to books and writing.”
That’s where the idea came from.
Most stories start small for me and then accrete, like a pearl in a clam. The story I’m working on now has grown to 8,000 words, and I’m still writing the last scene. My challenge is that it’s a teaching story with a large cast: the teacher, a student teacher, a janitor and twenty-four students. I’m working at portraying a class environment. As the story stands now, I’ve named ten of the twenty-four students (and a couple parents).That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air!
The problem is the impact of those names. At what point would readers toss up their hands and say, “I can’t keep the characters straight,” or would readers realize there are quite a few names, but only the characters who keep popping up rise to importance while the others settle into the background?Either reaction is possible. I believe any writing challenge can be overcome with the right collaboration between a careful writer and competent reader. That’s one of writing’s joys: anything is possible.
As I write the last scene, though, I’m deciding which characters to use. Not all of them will appear, and I realized over the course of the couple weeks I’ve been working on this piece that I’ve lost touch myself of everyone in the story, so I inventoried them. Here’s the list I created with the first page the character appears and then how many times total I mentioned the name:
Ms. Milspaugh pg.1—73 mentions
Andrew Tyndale pg. 1—53 mentions
Jed Rote pg.2—40 mentions
Dove Klein pg. 2—38 mentions
Dennis Cho pg. 12—6 mentions
Cassie-Lasila Arms pg. 13—8 mentions
Paisley Lopez-Sang pg. 14—7 mentions
Len and Amelia Tyndale pg. 14—1 mention
Lisa Fromme pg. 15—1 mention
Toby Gwinn pg. 17—1 mention
Harmony Dlamini pg. 19—5 mentions
Jim John pg. 22—3 mentions
Sharon Hann pg. 23—4 mentions
Ryan Bigelow pg. 24—3 mentions
Hot damn! That’s a big list.
A closer look at number of mentions reveals my cast centers on the top four characters: the teacher who is my protagonist, Ms. Milspaugh, her student teacher, Jed Rote, and two students, Andrew Tyndale and Dove Klein.The rest are supporting cast.
I tried to pick names that reflected different origins to show Ms. Milspaugh’s class, like many real-world classes, comes from diverse backgrounds (my default when I don’t think about it is almost always north-western European). I also didn’t want the names to be visually similar. Different first letters help with this, as do names with different shapes. At first glance, Dennis Cho doesn’t look like Ryan Bigelow, so the eye cues help to differentiate them. I notice I have two names that are hyphenated, which might make them hard to distinguish. I’ll give that more thought.
I did choose a few names from my life. “Milspaugh” was the name of one of my junior high teachers who was memorable. I knew a pair of sisters in high school named “Klein.” One of my sisters is a “Sharon.”“Jed Rote” was chosen because of the meaning of his last name in the same spirit as the naming of Han Solo, Truman Burbank, and Willy Loman.
I love how Charles Dickens created characters. Part of his genius was in giving them cool names: Seth Pecksniff, Mrs. Jellyby, Samuel Pickwick, Uriah Heep and many others. I’m not doing cool naming the same way he did in my story, although I do like the names I’ve chosen. A classroom of characters all named the way Dickens named characters would be awesome, though. What I do want to borrow from him, is his really well-done pocket characterizations. He could create a character in just a sentence or two.
Mr. Ayresleigh (Pickwick Papers) “A middle aged man in a very old suit of black, who looked pale and haggard, and paced up and down the room incessantly: stopping now and then to look with great anxiety out of the window as if he expected somebody, and then resuming his walk.”
Miss Barbary (Bleak House) “She was a good, good woman! She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morning prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever there were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel–but she never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her frown all her life.”
Ned Beadwood (David Copperfield) “It won’t do to be like long Ned Beadwood, when they took him to church “to marry him to somebody”, as he says, and left the bride behind. Ha! ha! ha! A wicked rascal, Ned, but droll!”
At any rate, this longish post came from me pausing to create the list of characters in my current project and got me thinking about names and characters. I’m not looking for advice about this ill-advised story problem I’ve written myself into. Writing into story problems is half the fun of creating fiction.
I lead a prompt night for the Western Colorado Writers Forum this Thursday. It was a unique event for me on a couple levels. First, I haven’t been to any kind of public gathering since March. Non-family members in the same room with me, even masked, felt odd. Second, the presentation was a hybrid of Zoom meeting and live audience. The whole time I didn’t know if I should pay attention to the computer screen or to the people in the room.
Overall, though, it went well. They asked me for prompts bent toward science fiction, but most of them don’t write in the genre, so I felt like I was breaking in novices, even though most of them have been long-time writers.
I over-prepared, writing out the complete script of what I would say. A detailed script encourages me to read instead of teach, so I worked hard not to keep looking at this.
Here is the entire script. With 20-minute writing sessions and discussion after, this took exactly two hours:
Intro:
Zach Berkson said, “Science fiction, perhaps more than any other modern genre of fiction, is often written with a social purpose or a goal.
“Reading science fiction enables us to reflect on the ways people interact with each other, with technology, with our environment. A good science fiction work posits one vision for the future, among countless possibilities, that is built on a foundation of realism. In creating a link between the present and the future, science fiction invites us to consider the complex ways our choices and interactions contribute to generating the future.
“Why do we read science fiction? The immediate answer for some is escapism: to enter into fantastic worlds that are more exciting than mundane reality. But that’s a simplistic answer that fails to explain why we’re drawn to science fiction, which, while speculative, often nods to realism and presents a thoughtful perspective on the future – frequently one that’s informed by scientific and technological reality. The draw of science fiction is more nuanced than a desire to escape the mundane.
“Science Fiction expands the mind, considering ideas and possibilities outside our normal experience. It explores not only what is, but what might be, or could be.”
Ray Bradbury said, “”Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”
One way to think of what makes a science fiction different from non-science fiction is the setting. A science fiction story has something in the setting that does not exist today or in history, but is scientifically possible. The change in the setting is what the story is about, really, in the end. How does that difference in the setting reveal the human condition, or comment on today’s conditions, or warn us about the future?
A love story during a trip to Mars isn’t much of a science fiction if the trip doesn’t impact the love story in some way. If the love story is no different than the same story told on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, for example, where every place in the story where you could have said “Jamaica” you replaced it with “Mars,” you haven’t done much with the setting. Putting a ray gun into the holster and making no other changes doesn’t turn a Western into a Science Fiction.
So one technique to create a science fiction story is to incorporate the change or changes in the setting that make it a science fiction, and then write your path into it.
Dialogue Prompt:
One strategy is to just have a pair of characters talking. This is a dialogue prompt. Dialogues that are good reading often have a tension in them, otherwise they’re just two people who aren’t really talking or who are just agreeing with each other. To make the dialogue pop, start with some kind of tension. Maybe the two characters are fighting. They have a disagreement that displays itself in the dialogue. Maybe one character is trying to convince another character of something. Maybe one character knows something that they want the other character to understand. Maybe the two characters are talking about a subject that is so sensitive to them that neither one is willing to name the real subject of the discussion. Maybe one character is trying to sell something to the other, or convince them to change a political position. Maybe the discussion is a disagreement in parenting styles.
Whatever. For this prompt, write a dialogue between two characters that takes place in a science fictional setting. Their discussion needs to either be about the science fictional element, or be impacted by the science fictional element. In other words, this dialogue could not exist without the science fiction in it. You can show the science fiction within the quotes, or in your description of the characters’ thoughts and actions outside of the quotes. Don’t agonize over anything! Close your eyes. Let them talk. Don’t worry about where the discussion will end up. You have fifteen minutes.
Go.
Setting Prompt:
Setting, of course, is where your story takes place, and we’ve already said that what makes science fiction what it is is setting, so clearly you’ll need to give it some thought. Also, there’s a convincing argument that one reason we read is to be taken out of our reality and into another. Most writers know this, so they spend considerable amount of time describing setting, some of them to the detriment of story. Just like when we wrote dialogue with tension, setting should be a part of the action in the story. Description of setting should be tied to what your characters are doing. People hardly ever just stop and inventory the world around them, and reading about people who do that can create a boring story (unless you are just brilliant in writing descriptions that are worthy all by themselves—Tolkien seemed to be able to do it).
For this prompt, give your character, maybe you could use one from the dialogue you’ve already written, something to do. Maybe your character is doing their job. Maybe they are trying to hide. Maybe they are looking for something. Maybe they are discovering a place that is new to them. Maybe they have a plan to change the setting they are in, drastically, and they are thinking of the contrast.
Remember two constraints:
- This is a science fiction setting. Make sure you included details that make it one.
- The setting shouldn’t be static. Your description should include your character’s actions and reactions. The story shouldn’t stop because you are describing. You can include dialogue.
Set yourself some goals while writing this:
- Use at least three of your senses more than once (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell)
- Include some ferociously specific details. It shouldn’t just be the forest; it should also be a single leaf, brown and dying, stuck to the porch rail from the last rain.
- Make sure the reader knows through the description what mood your character is in. Do they like being there? Are they afraid? Are they mad? Are they tense? Don’t forget emotion.
Go.
Character Prompt:
For the third prompt we will focus on character. Character comes out in a variety of ways. Here are the nine most common:
- Appearance
- Mannerisms
- Actions
- Speech
- Thought
- Contemplation of their past
- How they control their own environment
- How others react
- What the narrator tells the reader directly (avoid using this one unsupported from the others)
My guess is that if you used the same character in the dialogue and setting prompts that you already have done some work toward creating a character. Write a scene with that character or start a new one, where your character has a moral quandary. This is a situation where the character has to take an action that no one else will see or know about. How the scene plays out will reveal to the reader a world about your character.
A good situation might be to make a science fictional version of an old favorite: your character is walking down the street alone. On the sidewalk in front of them is a wallet. What does your character do? Write the scene. Use all of your writerly tricks. This is an introductory scene. Your narrator can describe the character if you want to (self-descriptions are tough in first person!). Use at least five of the techniques listed above to write the scene.
Go
LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS: THE USE OF “I” IN FIRST PERSON NARRATION: About every third story of mine is in first person. It’s good for voice pieces, and sometimes making the character the narrator feels like the best choice, but when revision comes around, my manuscripts are flooded with “I”s. Ton of them, which bothers me, so the first revision step is to cut them down. Really, five “I” uses in a single paragraph is amateurish. So, tonight, while preparing for tomorrow’s 9th grade class, I reread Truman Capote’s beautiful “A Christmas Memory,” which is 4,800 words long and written in first person. In all those words, the narrator only refers to himself with “I” about twenty-five times. He’s 163 words into the story before it appears the first time. Some student papers will have twenty-five “I”s in the first 250 words, and my own first drafts are hardly better.
The pronoun shows up more often than that in Capote’s piece, but the other uses are in dialogue from the character’s “friend,” his elderly cousin. It’s admirable restraint, and a true lesson in handling first person narration.
One of the many fascinating aspects of English and writing is that anything that sounds like a rule has exceptions. The only real rule in writing is this: IT HAS TO WORK. If it works, it’s good.  I’ve written stories in the past just to show that a “rule” can be broken.  My latest story at Daily Science Fiction does exactly that.  It’s called “Writing Advice.”
So, a lot of the standard wisdom writing teachers hand out is challengable, if you know what you are doing.
–   Write what you know. This is intuitively wrong, or at least poorly stated. I prefer “Don’t write what you don’t know,” because that implies you can find out stuff (and should). Too vigorously applied, “write what you know,” produces a lot of belly button gazing. At the college that means I get a ton of dorm stories, filled with drinking and teen angst. Maybe an even better way to phrase this might be, “Write what you can imagine, and imagine with gusto (and detail).” At least for science fiction and fantasy writers.
–  Don’t shift point of view.  In general, this is good advice. A writer who slips around willy nilly with point of view just confuses the heck out of the reader. I responded to a story the other day that dipped into the cat’s point of view for a sentence, and then, catastrophically, into a house plant on the fireplace mantle for another sentence. The better advice, at least to stronger writers, is Control point of view. If you know what you are doing, a story that shifts point of view can be the only way to tell the story, if it works.
–  Show, don’t tell. This rule is what I had in mind when I started this post because yesterday I said the weakest way to reveal character is by the narrator directly telling the readers what the character is. What I had in mind was the writer who puts something like this down on the page: “Leslie was witty and clever,” and then Leslie never does a single witty or clever thing. That’s telling without confirming showing. But some of the most memorable characters in fiction are revealed partly through the narrator directly telling the readers what the character is like.
For example, here is one of the most famous character introductions in all of English literature:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
I think that nice bit of telling works, don’t you? All right, it’s a bit of a cheat as an example, because there is some effective showing in there too, but the mode is mostly telling. Look at how much milage Dickens gets out of mixing showing and telling. Remember, too, that the very first time we see Scrooge in the story, his character is revealed through dialogue:
“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
So, for me, the better advice is “Show, don’t tell, unless you earn the right to tell by doing a lot of showing.” It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily as the first piece of advice, but it seems closer to the truth.
The FMHS class of 1986 held their 30th reunion this weekend. Â That’s my wife’s graduating class. Â We perused the photos and videos that the class posted on their FB website. Â The don’t look that old. Â I can still see the teenagers in them.
Almost ten years ago, I wrote this article about characterization using the high school classes I was teaching as my examples. Â Since I’ll be starting a new school year in another month, I think I’ll do the exercise again. Â Has anything changed that I can notice? Â How different are they from the class of ’86?
Creating characters must be hard because I read so many unconvincing, thin or cliched characters in fiction. How high school characters are portrayed often bothers me because so many people default to a handful of stereotypes. Since I teach high school and really, really, really respect high schoolers as people, it’s particularly upsetting to see them boiled down into predetermined niches.
We administered the ACT test to all of our juniors today. Â I proctored for two hours, which involved walking back and forth among the desks for the whole time, I took notes on what I saw.
If you’re interested, here’s raw data from Fruita Monument High School in western Colorado, a predominantly white student body that draws about 2/3 of the kids from upper-middle class suburban neighborhoods and 1/3 from rural ranches and farms. We have 1,200 students in three grades.
Twenty-one students took the test in the room I proctored, 17 girls and 4 boys, an imbalance caused by the randomness of assigning kids to rooms alphabetically.
–  14 carried cell phones (they couldn’t have cell phones on them during the test, so we had to collect them. Some of the kids remembered this and didn’t bring a cell phone–clearly I have to buy a cell phone for my 11th grade son!)
–Â Â 3 wore hats
–Â Â 1 wore a school sweatshirt
–Â Â 1 wore a university sweatshirt
–Â Â 1 wore a Tigger sweatshirt
–Â Â 9 sweatshirts total–none of them were dressed in a style we normally call “preppy”
–Â Â 2 Hispanic students, no Black or Asian ones
–Â Â 1 facial piercing (a small diamond stud on the side of a nose)
–Â Â 2 unnatural hair colors
–Â Â 2 wore glasses (lots of contacts?)
–Â Â 1 male with an earring
–Â Â 6 females with hair below their shoulder blades
–  4 in shorts. The rest in long pants, mostly jeans. It’s been a cold spring.
They were all cooperative, quiet and industrious. Once again, the luck of the draw. I taught a sophomore class here a couple of years ago that was phenomenally bad. I took three of the worst out to work on a paper with them alone while my student teacher tried to handle the rest. The three I had were supposed to be working on a paper about influential people in their lives. They all wanted to write about their probation officers.
The teacher who teaches in the room I was proctoring in today had the kids do an “I” poster for an assignment. The kids are supposed to make a collage of who they are. It reminded me a little of the writing assignment in The Breakfast Club, where the kids who were serving a Saturday detention were supposed to do an essay on who they thought they were. I broke the posters down into categories:
–Â Â 2 pictured guns, one in a hunting context, and the other in a redneck context (to use a stereotype; the poster was hunting rifles and pickups)
–Â Â 4 agriculturally centered (livestock, John Deere machinery, etc.)
–Â Â 6 sports
–Â Â 10 fashion
–Â Â 7 music
–Â Â 1 overtly religious
–Â Â 5 travel
–Â Â 6 hunting
–Â Â 3 environmental
–Â Â 1 sort of disturbing one, that included the phrase, “Every killer lives next door to someone”
So, where am I going with this? First, when a writer wants to write about high school, he/she has to decide first which high school. FMHS is like the proverbial elephant being described by a bunch of blind men. Who your character is determines the high school in the story. For some individuals, high school is scary. For others it is fun. For many, they don’t have much of an opinion about it one way or another.
Here’s something to think about: the very best high schools in America have some kids who are deeply disturbed, lost to drugs, victims (or dealers) of violence, potential psychopaths or profoundly unhappy. The very worst high schools in America have some kids who are academically excellent, love their classes, are kind to their friends, have good relationships with their parents, and are moving forward into fulfilling and happy lives.
I guess what I’m arguing against here is simplification and stereotypes. High school students are not simplified versions of adults. They are not driven by only a single motivation (any more than some adults are driven by a single motivation). They are complicated, contradictory, fully faceted human beings, capable of cruelty, tenderness, cowardice, bravery and every other emotion you can think of. They can be clear visioned or confused (sometimes several times in the same day, just like you or me). Their hurts and their passions are as deep and profound to them as they are to people in their thirties.
If you want to be honest in your portrayal of them, keep in mind that every individual is . . . well . . . individual.