Notes from the Slushpile is a team blog maintained by eight friends who also happen to be children's authors at different stages of the publishing journey.
Have you seen this banner here, there and everywhere today? It is the UKYA Easter Egg Hunt: and this is what it is, how it came about, who is involved, and what we hope to achieve.
A few months ago I was reading an article published in the UK about YA books that seemed to focus rather hard on books published in other countries.Well...one other country in particular: the US. There are SO many amazing authors in the UK, and one thing I hear over and over again from readers at events is how much it means to them to read a book that is actually set here, in a place that they recognise as their own.
There have been some efforts lately to promote what is on offer here in the UK: like the UK Extravaganza, a huge author event at Waterstones in Birmingham; regular UKYA twitter chats, tagged #UKYAchat; the Bookseller's first YA book prize;and back at the first YALC in London last July, a fringe event with bloggers and authors (this and much more on Tumblr, here):
I was thinking, wouldn't it be great to run an online event to raise the profile of UKYA - both here, and internationally? But I needed an angle.
Then my muse, Banrock, looked up from working hard on editing my next novel:
He pointed out that his favourite time of year was approaching! You know, when some other bunny - the Easter bunny - gets credit for leaving chocolate eggs lying about the place. Of course, we all know that Banrock is really responsible, just like he writes my books, but he is a generous bunny. Long ago he decided it was ok, so long as he got his cut of chocolate eggs and wine from my book launches.
That Banrock has some great ideas. But what to do to make it happen?
First up, I contacted the amazing-but-busily-finishing-a-book Candy Gourlay, and managed to distract her into the happy procrastination of designing a UKYA egg hunt banner, plus some lovely UKYA branded chocolate eggs, like this one:
Do not count this egg in the blog hop! it is merely an example egg, so you know what you are looking for on all the blogs. Doesn't it look yummy?
Then we contacted author friends and said wouldn't it be fun to have an egg hunt? And before long we had a lovely group of awesome enthusiastic authors.
So here's the deal:
every author is putting up a prize - signed books or whatever they like - as part of an Awesome Grand Prize
we're all writing blogs, with not-very-subtly-hidden Read UKYA chocolate eggs scattered here and there
the blogs are linked in a circle for a chocolate-UKYA-themed blog hop
readers count the eggs and email the number to a specially set up email address
one Awesome Grand Prize winner will be chosen at random from correct entries
open until Easter sunday!
open INTERNATIONALLY
you can start it on the blog of any of the authors taking part (mine is here)
*this was a typo, but seemed to fit so I left it there.
Thanks so much to everyone who have been jumping in and sorting things out while Candy and I have been vanishing to do school events and being vanquished by the dreaded lurgy.
Apologies to any lovely authors who missed out taking part this time: this has been a bit ad hoc and last minute. If we do it again next year, we'll do it with more lead time!
Now, please spread the word: UKYA is awesome; there is an Awesome Grand Prize; and everyone should follow the blog hop*, both for a chance to win, and to find some new authors and books to read!
*bunny gifs or dancing like a hopping bunny yourself are optional, but always appreciated.
And here I was thinking that teenagers have existed since the beginning of time.
Joan Crawford's teenage character in the silent film Our Dancing Daughters (1928) goes to a wild party, dances in her underwear and knocks back alcohol ... but the film is clearly a warning from a moralising older generation.
The Andy Hardy series with Micky Rooney and Judy Garland (1937) were family films, not specifically targeted at teen viewers
The explanation is interesting: until the 1940s, teenagers didn't have any money and therefore no power. But post war, they became a consumer demographic, with money to spend.
The Film Programme played a clip of Samuel Z. Arkoff, co-founder of American International Pictures, who spotted the gap in the market.
I saw an opportunity that nobody else seemed to have seen ... that was the people who were going to the movies were young people. We started to make pictures for teeneagers, by teenagers, about teenagers, and starring teenagers.
Arkoff, says film critic Kim Newman in the podcast, "invented the future of the film industry". Researching teen tastes, the film makers discovered that teenagers liked monsters and drag-racing. Suddenly Hollywood was churning out teen movies in their hundreds.
POPULAR CULTURE
Says Newman, the teenager "(was) a figure that spread American popular culture all around the world."
"Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?" "Whaddaya got?" - Marlon Brando goes all cool and dangerous in The Wild One (1953). Films like these attempted to describe young people from an adult sensibility.
Though Fifties film featured characters who walked and talked like real teenagers, young people were still portrayed as dangerous and in need of control. In Blackboard Jungle (1955) Glenn Ford plays a teacher who must contend with the anti-social behaviour of hunky teenagers like switchblade-weilding Vic Morrow (People my age will be excited to see the star of the TV series Combat).
I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) - the title, in first person, is a far cry from the patronising adult point of view in Our Dancing Daughters. Here are scenes from the film mashed to the soundtrack of Michael Jackson's Thriller (People my age will be excited to recognise Michael Landon who played the dad in the TV series Little House on the Prairie)
James Dean at his most delicious in the iconic Rebel Without a Cause (1955). He doesn't look too rebellious in that tie.
Did this heightened awareness of teenage culture feed literary sensibilities, giving rise to the rebel-without-a-cause characters of The Catcher in the Rye (1951)? (Seriously, I don't know the answer.)
Apparently there was a golden age of young adult literature in the Seventies, the era of Judy Blume and Robert Cormier.
I was surprised to discover this. The first time I heard the term 'Young Adult' was in the 2000s, when I became serious about writing for children and began reading books like How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff and Junk by Melvin Burgess.
Perhaps I was not aware of the category because I wasn't a young adult at the time. Or maybe I never read a Judy Blume because I was living in a country where nice girls didn't read books that started with the sentence:
Sybil Davison has a genius I.Q. and has been laid by at least six different guys. From Forever by Judy Blume
Today, we are apparently living in another golden age of YA - but the difference between the Judy Blume golden age and the Twilight/Hunger Games golden age can be measured in dollar signs.
The book world began marketing directly to teens for the first time at the turn of the millennium. Expansive young adult sections appeared in bookstores, targeting and welcoming teens to discover their very own genre. J.K. Rowling's well-timed Harry Potter series exploded the category and inspired a whole generation of fantasy series novelists, Cart said. The shift led to success for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight vampire saga and Suzanne Collins' futuristic The Hunger Games. From A Brief History of Young Adult Fiction by Ashley Strickland
American Graffiti (1973) - by the Seventies teen culture had been around long enough for films to be nostalgic about it.
More nostalgia in Grease (1978) - featuring some of the oldest teenagers in the world
EASILY BORED
The teenager as consumer is an interesting proposition, given their famously short attention spans. That first Judy Blume golden age created a rash of "single problem novels" but teens quickly tired of the formulaic stories. Which led to the rise of genre fiction of the Eighties, such as R. L. Stine's Fear Street and adolescent high drama of Sweet Valley High.
In cinema, teen movies of the Eighties were liberal in a way that would be unacceptable in the 2000s with underage sex and abortion, according to journalist Hadley Freeman, who was featured on the podcast because she's writing a book about film in the 1980s.
Porky's (1982) - one of a rash of films in which directors waxed lyrical about losing their viriginity. The losing of virginity still makes pots of money.
The Breakfast Club (1985) - brought together five of the 'Brat Pack' - Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall.
Heathers (1988) - teen films had been around so long, here was a film that tried to subvert the genre (it's Mean Girls with a body count!)
In the Nineties, teenagers became The Audience. If you wanted to make a film, says Kim Newman, you made it as a teenage movie. So genres - cop films, horror, sci fi - and even classics were remade as teen films.
Heath Ledger and Joseph Gordon Levitt in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) - a take on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew
Cruel Intentions (1999) starring Buffy, was a take on Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Sex, drugs and excess.
Romeo and Juliet (1996) starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Claire Danes (Claire Danes!) gives the bard a hip, modern reboot
NEW ECONOMICS
But at the turn of this century film economics changed. Hollywood now makes what they call 'tent-pole' films - blockbusters that have to hold up the finances of the parent network. Which means, says Freeman, "Teen films now are really superhero films. Studios aren't making films just for teenagers, they want films for twenty-something guys!"
Recently, I met up with a young writers group. They were prolific writers and readers. Published writers - they published fan fiction via Wattpad.
'I read hundreds of books a month,' one girl told me. She didn't read books like you buy from a bookshop, or even on an ereader. She read free books on Wattpad written by young people like her.
She is one of 18 million readers and writers who use the publishing platform dubbed 'the most active social site you never heard of'. Wattpad's creator is Allen Lau whose profile says 'don't be surprised if I am reading one of your stories'.
"Storytelling has been a social experience from the get go," he says. "Think of a town square where everyone would congregate to share ideas and news, or even stories told around the campfire. Look at Charles Dickens and the way he hooked people by serializing his stories, a trend that’s re-emerging on Wattpad today. Great stories bring people together." Read the article
Wattpad is an amazing advocate for reading, as long as you don't mind giving your writing away for free.
EVOLUTION
Looking back, it is fascinating to see our evolution as storytellers for teenagers.
We started out with the desire to control them, to tell them what was good for them, we saw them as misguided delinquents who needed a firm hand.
Then we empathised with youth culture and tried to represent their issues as problems.
Later we fell in love with the Teenage Voice, adopted Coming of Age as a highly evocative story arc.
Right now perhaps with our dystopias and fantasies we are re-imagining the world through the prism of youth.
Today, teenagers have surpassed their storytellers.
They are the masters of new media that many of us are struggling to understand. The nature of the internet means they are not only consumers of stories created for them but through social media and platforms like Wattpad they tell their own stories, have their own voice.
Nobody has to invent them anymore. Perhaps it's us -- we who want to write teen fiction -- who need to reinvent ourselves.
In Project X (2012) teenagers trash a house with an over the top party. The future of teen cinema? Only if they can watch it. Project X was rated R.
@HotKeyBooks@candygourlay Where do teenagers come from? Well, when a daddy and a mummy love each other very, very much......
— Gary Chalk (@garychalkpics) February 3, 2014
@candygourlay Excellent hour spent on your post. Loving the 80s stuff! Thought provoking. Dare we offer 'no apology'?
— Emma Greenwood (@emmajgreenwood) February 2, 2014
