Me, here, now!

My name is Keren and I am a First Person Present Tense Addict.

 I know, I know.   I’m a shallow action junkie, a trendy poser who wants to be down with the kids. I peddle cheap thrills to vulnerable reluctant readers.  I wouldn’t know a proper metaphor if it hit me on the nose.

I even use dangerously short paragraphs.

 I didn’t have the self-control to keep my FPPT experiments to the odd  recreational use (a party scene maybe, or a druggie flashback). No, it grew and grew…from a sentence, to a chapter, to a book, to a trilogy. Approximately 240,000 words, all about the me, the here, the now. Except the me isn't me, the here isn't here and the now jumps around all over the place.

My next book (still to be inflicted on the world) has two FPPT narrators, and there are no labels to tell readers which boy is speaking, apart from context, syntax and vocabulary. Yes, I am actually trying to confuse my readers. I like to think it’s the written equivalent of a film, shot with a handheld camera. I realise that's trendy too, but it can feel fresh, intimate and exciting. Of course some movie-goers (hello Mum) complain that it makes them feel as though they’re on a flimsy boat on the high ocean in a Force Ten gale. On the other hand, the long-shot, fixed-camera approach can feel tedious, detached and soporific. It rests on the skill of the director and editor, as well as the viewer's taste and resistance to nausea and sleep.

I was virginal (fiction writing-wise) and innocent, if not actually young when I started writing FPPT.  I had no idea that I was tinkering with something so controversial. I didn’t even realise that FPPT was considered trendy. Please don’t snort!  And I had no idea that First Person was considered easier to write, until I read Lily Hyde's thought-provoking post yesterday. I actually thought it was more of a challenge to write in someone else’s voice, particularly when I tried to overcome the handicaps of a narrator’s limited POV and vocabulary to present rounded characters.  I so agree with Lily when she says that every story finds its voice. The wrong form can be as damaging as dull characters or a plot full of holes.

 So, yes, I'm open to writing third or even second person. I have no objections to the past tense. I'm trying to break free of my addiction.

It’s just that I enjoy FPPT so much! I love the feeling of that someone else is inside my head. I like thinking of ways in which a limited  viewpoint can show more than it comprehends. I like the way FPPT sounds too. So clean, without those messy hads that litter the past perfect.  

 I especially like the feeling that anything could happen. There’s no safety net. No feeling that someone’s sitting in a rocking chair telling you a story where all the threads have been neatly tied up.

Oh, and there are all the clever things that other writers do with FPPT. Patrick Ness, magnificently creating an illiterate boy with a voice and a world of his own. HM Castor, persuading me that she knows how Henry VIII thought, lived, loved and hated. How can something that feels so right be wrong?

I am mastering my addiction. All three projects that I am working on at the moment are safely in the past tense (although two of them are showing signs of…but no, no, I must resist!). I draw the line at re-drafting them into the third person, but I truly have no objection at all to reading books in the third person and I find, oooh, far more than 5% of them really excellent.  

 So, thank you for your support. Thank you for helping me break this terrible habit and thank you -  oh my God! Mr Pullman! Put down that knife! Aaaarggggggggh…..

Y.A. at Hay - Celia Rees

I was recently at the Hay Festival, in conversation with Melvin Burgess and Daniel Hahn, talking about Young Adult fiction and our novels, This is Not Forgiveness and Kill All Enemies.

Daniel Hahn, Melvin Burgess, Celia Rees 

The discussion was interesting (I hope for the audience, too) and wide ranging. At one point, Daniel asked us if there was anything that we thought we could not write about, any taboo subjects, any darkness too impenetrable? I found myself giving the stock Y.A. writer's answer about leaving the reader with hope, etc., etc.. Melvin disagreed. This livened the discussion considerably, and his response gave me cause to pause and food for thought. He outlined a thesis which took me right back to where I began as a YA writer and also made me think about how far we have travelled since then but how little ground we had gained. 

It is an accepted shibboleth ( like the one about 'hope') that ‘at one time’ there ‘wasn’t much written for teenagers’, ‘nothing available for them’.Of course, this is not true. Teenagers have always found things to read, books and authors they felt comfortable with, even if those books were not written specifically with them in mind. Books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery. And then there are the sic-fi/dystopian fiction writers: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, John Wyndam’s The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and Empire of the Sun, John Christopher’s The Trouble with Grass.

Quite a considerable canon. I read a lot of these books when I was a teenager, back in a time when novels for teens were not supposed to exist. I don’t remember feeling deprived, or thinking I’d have to stop reading because there was ‘nothing for me’. I thoroughly enjoyed the books I discovered on the adult shelves of the library, finding them myself, or being directed to them by friends who liked the same books I did. Reading these books was a rite of passage. I found my mind stretched, my understanding deepened, my assumptions questioned and challenged, my imagination

 fired. They weren’t writing for me particularly, but that didn’t matter, they were connecting with me on all sorts of different levels.

Melvin’s argument was that because these writers recognised no limits, there are no limits. I found myself agreeing with him and thinking that these books and these writers should be our benchmark. Perhaps we have compromised too far. In creating a specific Teen/Y.A. Lit. (although I still think that is important) we’ve wandered away from these writers who had the power to appeal to adults and teenagers alike. We have compromised, we’ve bowdlerised. We’ve listened to outside voices: gatekeepers telling us what is acceptable and unacceptable; Focus Groups and Target Readers; Publishers who tell us what the market wants, what it will tolerate.

Compare some of the books and authors I’ve cited, especially in Gothic, Dystopian and Science Fiction, with what is on offer at the moment in these genre, and you will see exactly what I mean. Where is the depth and breadth of the vision, the resonance and relevance, the imaginative reach, the complexity of the realised worlds, the quality and power of the writing? It is a salutary lesson. Of course, teen readers can go and read these books, and they should, but that is not the point. It is not good enough to mine them, to take from them, we should be producing books that bear comparison.

Creativity is a strange thing. Those books that I read when I was a teenager challenged me to think, fired my imagination, introduced me to ideas, and opened me up to possibilities. Maybe that experience is what led me to want to write for teenagers. True, or not, I’m thinking about going back. At least I’ll be guaranteed a damn good read!

I’m taking a break from blogging for ABBA but I’ve been proud to be part of the blog and to have seen it go from strength to strength. I’ll certainly be visiting regularly in the future to read and to comment.

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