Notes from the Slushpile

Saturday, 1 February 2014

The Invention of the Teenager

By Candy Gourlay

Apparently, teenagers were invented by Americans in the 1940s.

Trailer for Matt Wolf's documentary Teenagers (2014): "A lot of people try tlevio shape the future. But it's the young ones who live in it."

I learned this nugget while trawling through podcasts the other day. This was from a fantastic Film Programme tracing the rise (and fall) of teenagers in film.

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.)

The book business acknowledging youth culture followed in cinema's wake. By the Sixties, the teenager became a literary demographic when the Young Adult Library Services Association coined the term 'Young Adult' to represent the 12 to 18 age range - representing "mature contemporary realism directed at adolescents" like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.

GOLDEN AGE

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!"

I suppose book publishers, like movie companies, also have to follow the money. Hey, have you heard of the new book category "New Adult"? A New Adult book is basically a Young Adult book with sex and cursing thrown in, writes Lauren Sarner. And don't forget lucrative.

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.

My new teen novel, Shine, was published in September. Read this wonderful Guardian review.

You might also want to read:
The Writer is You
Multicultural is Not About Difference But Inclusion

Sunday, 26 January 2014

Social Media: Eight Things We Can Learn from Old Style Journalism

By Candy Gourlay

Well I say 'old-style' because I was a journalist in the eighties and the nineties. This post is about how journalism has taught me stuff I now apply to Social Media.

Learning to Write - my journey in How To books

IKEA manuals. Mmm.

By Candy Gourlay

My husband often makes fun of me because I like reading instruction manuals. Before I can even begin to take the packaging off a new kitchen appliance or family widget, I'll be poring over the instructions.

I can't help myself. There's something gripping about a good step by step.

So when I became serious about writing novels, I set out to read all the How to Write books I could get my hands on.

In the beginning, I obsessed about the parts that made the whole. Setting, Characterisation, Dialogue, Viewpoint - with viewpoint perhaps the trickiest thing to master.

Viewpoint was chapter two in The Craft of Writing a Novel by Dianne Doubtfire, my first writing bible. No matter how many books you've read, viewpoint (as in first person, third person, omnisicient, etc. - not to be confused with Voice) can be bewildering.

'If this isn't properly understood, the whole edifice of your novel will disintegrate,' Dianne Doubtfire writes. 'Ask yourself whose story it is. The answer to this question is vital to the planning of your book.'

Doubtfire suggests you experiment before deciding what your approach to viewpoint will be. 'Your choice will depend on the kind of novelist you are and on the demands of your story.'

Doubtfire's book had chapters on Planning, Plot, Mechanics of Improvement, Theme ... but as a beginner novelist I remember being entirely focused on isolated components of the novel like character and setting.

Perhaps I wasn't ready to think about my story as a whole yet.

Writing a successful novel demands not only talent and determination but also a high degree of craftsmanship. No textbook can supply talent or determination, but craftsmanship is another matter. The Craft of Novel-Writing by Dianne Doubtfire

The first time I heard of the 'inciting event' was when I read How to Write a Damn Good Novel II by James N. Frey (for some reason, I never did read Part One).

Frey starts by exhorting the writer to transport his or her reader into the 'fictive dream'.

'As a fiction writer, you're expected to transport a reader. Readers are said to be transported when, while they are reading, they feel that they are actually living in the story world and the real world around them evaporates.'

Before this book I often read interviews with authors claiming that they 'wrote for themselves'. Frey made me realize that a novel was a two way thing, a relationship between the author and her reader.

It was also the first time I realised that a novel had to be a chain of cause and effect. It was the first time I read the words 'the inciting incident', that initial event that sets the story into motion.

So how do you get the reader from sympathy, identification and empathy to being totally absorbed? The answer: inner conflict ... Inner conflict is the storm raging inside the characters: doubts, misgivings, guilts, remorse, indecision ... It is this participation in the decision-making process, when the reader is feeling the character's guilt, doubts, misgivings, and remorse, and is pulling the character to make one decision over another, that transports the reader. How to Write a Damn Good Novel II by James N. Frey

Skimming through it now, I realize that a lot of this book went over my head. Why? Because at the time, I was doing more reading than writing. It was only when I was immersed in writing that I began to understand what the hell all these How To books were talking about.

It was at about this stage that I bought Story by Robert McKee - a fat book if there ever was one. The introduction was fantastic, with statements in boldface like:

Story is about mastering the art, not second-guessing the marketplace.

Or:

Story is about respect, not disdain, for the audience.

Or:

Story is about archetypes, not stereotypes.

Brilliant! But the rest of it ... well, I found it hard to read. It dazzled me with jargon - the Structure Spectrum, Character Revelation, Ironic Ascension ... and I'm ashamed to say I gave up and put it aside for a year or three.

I had written three novels before I picked it up again. I'd done some time at the coalface - walked into all the blind alleys, took all the wrong turns, wrote and rewrote the words that refused to come to life. And reading Story again, things that confused me before began to make sense. It turned out that practical experience was necessary to really get the most out of the book. I had found another bible but I had needed to live my craft before I could make use of it.

'Show don't tell' is a call for artistry and discipline, a warning to us not to give in to laziness but to set creative limitations that demand the fullest use of imagination and sweat. Dramatizing every turn into a natural, seamless flow of scenes is hard work, but when we allow ourselves the comfort of 'on the nose' narration we gut our creativity, eliminate the audience's curiosity, and destroy narrative drive. Story by Robert McKee

Even though I wasn't ready to read McKee, I was learning a hell of a lot from other books.

I had a major eureka moment while reading Solutions for Novelists by Sol Stein. It might seem obvious to some of you but it wasn't obvious to me then that a novel is an unfolding. What you don't reveal will drive the reader to keep reading.

As a journalist, I had been trained that it was imperative to state the 'So What' of a news story within the first paragraphs. I had to forget all that.

'The engine of fiction is somebody wanting something and going out to get it,' says Stein. 'And if you let him get it right away, you're killing the story.'

If you build a scene, don't let the reader's emotions rest. Salt your buildup with ominous detail. At the end of each chapter, be sure you are thrusting the reader forward to the next chapter, then don't take the reader where the reader wants to go. Solutions for Novelists by Sol Stein

I am embarrassed to admit that it took me a long, long time to face the fact that I needed to learn how to plot. How I wish I'd started thinking about plot earlier. It would have saved me a lot of years of aimless writing.

I thought I understood plotting. I thought my years as a reader had taught me all I knew. Plotting was story wasn't it?

But there was more to plotting than I thought and I only really focused on figuring it out when I attended a workshop taught by Lee Weatherly on writing synopses.

Lee was trying to show us how easy it was to write a synopsis if we simply built the synopsis on the framework of the three acts of our story.

Lee showed us a graph that looked something like this one I found on Sara Wilson Etienne's website.

What's missing in this diagram is somewhere near the peak should be labelled 'the rug-pulling moment'

Three acts? What three acts? If I had read Story by Robert McKee, I would have known by then that novels and screenplays were built in acts. And I would have know about rising tension, that the stakes had to become higher with every scene. That at some point, the character reaches a crisis - Lee called it a 'rug-pulling moment' - when everything seems lost.

It took Lee Weatherly's diagram to tell me that I needed to get on top of plotting.

I bought Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell.

Bell starts the book with his own journey story. He was a lawyer with an itch to write novels. But he decided he couldn't write because he was told 'Writing cannot be taught'.

But the itch wouldn't go away so he set out systematically to learn the craft. And discovered that 'Writing cannot be taught' was a big lie. Because he was learning.

It was through Bell's brilliant book that I learned about the three act structure, about how you move from one act to another the way you move through doors - doors of no return. And I learned that if a reader is to read on, stakes must rise, things must get worse.

Fiction is forward moving. If you frontload with backstory - those events that happened to the characters before the main plot - it feels like stalling. Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell

Thinking about plot led me to 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald B. Tobias. There are lots of books that try to reduce plots to the lowest common denominators - they say all the stories in the world can be reduced to seven basic plots, or ten, or 12 ...

'The trick for any author is to find out what works for him and then do it. The same is true when it comes to plot,' Tobias says. 'How many plots are there? The real question is, "Does it really matter how many plots there are?" Not really. What matters is your understanding of the story and how to create a pattern of plot that works for it.'

I was after a quick fix when I was looking at books about plot. I chose Tobias' book because of the simplicity of his structure. He would outline the basics of a particular plot structure and then provide a checklist on how to develop the story. The checklist for the maturation (coming of age) plot for example includes the following:

1. Create a protagonist who is on the cusp of adulthood, whose goals are either confused or not yet clarified.
2. Make sure the audience understands who the character is ... before an event occurs that begins the process of change.
3. Contrast your protagonist's naive life (childhood) against the reality of an unprotected life (adulthood)

... and so on.

It sounds stupid and obvious, reading it like this. But when you're immersed in creating a story, you are easily overwhelmed by the world of your imagination.

These books have transformed me as a writer and yet I haven't been a loyal friend to them, hiding their covers when I'm reading them in public places - because it's embarrassing isn't it, to be seen with a How To book in public. It's an admission of ignorance - you're no author, you're a learner.

Ah, but allow me to quote Neil Gaiman quoting his friend Gene Wolfe for the nth time on the subject: 'You never learn to write a novel. You only learn to write the novel you're on.'

Anyone who is setting out to write a book asks herself, 'What is my story?'

We could always use a little help finding the answer to that question.

Visit my author blog on www.candygourlay.com - in my latest post, The Writer is You, I ask why it's so hard to give others permission to pursue their passions.

@candygourlay Thank you for the kind mention of Plot & Structure in your post. http://t.co/g68Ms9fGp7
— James Scott Bell (@jamesscottbell) January 24, 2014