Not an Issue? - Joan Lennon

My first YA novel is teetering on the brink of becoming A REAL BOOK, but for me, as for all writers (I'm guessing), the story and everyone in it have been real from the very beginning.  
Silver Skin is a scifi/historical fiction inspired by the Stone Age village of Skara Brae on Orkney.  There are 3 main characters: Rab, from the far future, and Cait and Voy from the Stone Age.  When it was (wisely) suggested that Rab was coming across as too young, I didn't/couldn't write a different, older character.  I just aged Rab.  I imagined what he would have experienced in the x number of years that would pass to get him to the right age.  He's still Rab, just older.  How could he be anyone else?

Why am I telling you this?  Because, as Silver Skin's publication date approaches, I'm becoming aware of "issues" ... 

For example, I'm officially white, though in reality I'm pinky-yellow with occasional unfortunate flushes of beetroot.  Does this mean I can/should/must only write about pinky-yellow people with the occasional unfortunate beetrooty sidekick?  This is a legitimate question and we won't be finding the definitive answer to it any time soon.*  But the situation I find myself in isn't one I consciously sought.  I blame my characters.  I blame the story.  

Rab is black.  (He's also male, which I'm not, but that's another hornets' nest altogether).  He could have been any colour under the sun because he is from the far future. when "human colouring and characteristics had been jumbled together for so long that any couple could produce a child of any appearance.  Nobody stuck out because everybody looked different."  But he walked into my brain black and I saw no good reason to bleach him.  

Cait is taller and paler-haired than the people she lives with.  

Voy, the Old Woman, has arthritis-crippled hands.  

The bulk of the story is set in Neolithic Orkney, at the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age, which was a time of major climate change.  Rab's future world has been shaped by climate change too.

But this is not a book about being black, or about having a tall blonde heroine, or about disability, or about climate change.  Those things are just in there, because they have to be, for this story to be this story.

Or am I being naive?  Is every book about the issues?  As writers and as readers, what do you think?  



* I've pulled up just a few of the excellent ABBA posts on the issue of issues for you to re-visit:

Black and White and Everything In Between by Savita Kalhan

Why do we believe these things? - John Dougherty

The same or different? (Anne Rooney)

Wash and Spin - Cathy Butler

BLACK, WHITE AND JUST RIGHT - Malaika Rose Stanley

(publication date 16 June 2015)

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

What's it about?

‘What are your books about?’ That’s a question I often get asked when I say I’m  a novelist writing for, or about, young adults. My first book, Vintage, is easy to describe. Vintage is about a 17 year old girl living in 2010 who swaps places with a seventeen year old living in 1962. That seems to satisfy, and interest people, including adults who were around in 1962! 

The second book, Closer, is harder to describe. In the blurb on the back we chose to focus on Mel, the main character - on who she is, her gritty and quirky take on the world, and on her finding the courage to speak out. But I was a bit naive if I thought it would stop there. As soon as the book came out, the reviews on Amazon and in magazines spelt out the story - Closer is about a girl whose stepfather gets too close. It involves sexual abuse. 

Some parents have said that they don’t think their children are ready to read it, and I can understand that. Some young people have said they don’t want to read about incest or abuse (yukk!, as one graphically put it). But the feedback I’ve had from those who read it is that they find Closer inspiring, compelling and not remotely explicit. And some of the best feedback has been from teachers and social workers who have said that it’s realistic - better than reading a case study, one said. I have to admit I'm really proud of that.

There’s something about ‘issue’ books which puts me off too. If I feel I’m being asked to think in a particular way, if I feel lectured or taught, it’s a huge turnoff. I want to be told a story. I want to find a way of getting inside someone else’s world and knowing something I’d never otherwise have known. I want to be gripped, to have to read on, and to be satisfied by the ending even if it doesn’t give me all the answers. I want to be interested in the characters and where they’re going. I want to make my own mind up.

I've learned so much from reading novels about difficult times in their characters' lives. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar comes to mind, and Roddy Doyle's The Woman who walked into Doors. Most recently, Patrick Ness wrote so movingly about grief in A Monster Calls. When something new comes up in my life, whether it's working out how to knit socks or how to find a way through grief, I'll reach for a book, or the internet, or a friend - or all three.

It’s a conundrum, how to pose questions about an issue without giving easy answers - and then how to describe the book without giving away the story. I wrote Closer partly because I’d read the YA novels I could find at that time about sexual abuse, and the outcome in the stories was often disastrous. I knew from my work as a psychotherapist that this wasn't always the case, or it didn't have to be. 

I imagined a reader, possibly young, who read these books and had gone through something like Mel’s experience - or had a friend going through it. I wanted her, or him, to have a story where there are no monsters, and where there’s a way through. I feel passionately about that. And when sexual abuse has been so much around in the news in the last few months, we need ways of making sense of it, and stories about coming through.

So that's my first blog for ABBA - phew! 

But I still don’t know how to say what Closer is about...

www.maxinelinnell.com

Bloomsbury has published my story about Facebook in their series Wired Up for reluctant readers. It's called Breaking the Rules.

 I've retold three Thomas Hardy novels for Real Reads - The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. They're read by 9-13s, and by adults learning English as a foreign language.