Caulfield and Continuity
I’m doing a lot of bulleted lists lately, for which I beg your indulgence. All my connect-the-dots is going into the writing. I just found out we need another revision on Redemption Alley. It’s not a HUGE one, it’s just one of those workmanlike things that’s got to happen once a story’s been pruned so an editor can see the nasty bits underneath. Heh.
* Gin, Television, And Social Surplus. This was AWESOME. I hope he’s right, but one of the things I’m struggling with lately is a bit of depression over humans as a species. We just seem so in love with destroying. Not even clean destruction, like a wildfire that clears everything out–but destruction for its own sake, from a dictator destroying lives and culture and social networks to wars destroying everyone who touches them in an ever-expanding ring, to gallons of poison pissed into our own life-support system. It’d be nice to find some evidence of people creating even half as much as they destroy, and just as reflexively.
You see? I’m on a real kick here. And most of it is…
* Holden Caulfield. I bought Catcher in the Rye for the Teen, since he said he’d never read it and I thought it was a) one of those books he should read, and b) that he’s old enough now he won’t go into a huge honking depression over it and end up making some silly gesture that will land him in the newspapers. Then I got to thinking, it’s been a while since I read it, too. So when he was done he put it in my TBR pile, and I read half of it last night.
The Teen says, “It’s scary. I had to put it down and give it a rest before going back to finish it because that kid? He’s me. It’s like the author KNEW me or something. When I was fourteen to sixteen, that kid was me.”
Then I started reading it, and I remember my own painful uncertainty during those years. It’s achingly depressing that Salinger remembered so much of the absolute agony of being a teenager to be able to write it down. Or, more precisely, what is depressing is that I can see the difference between that uncertainty and my adult self, I can see how that uncertainty fed into my adult self, and my heart aches for every kid who has to go through that. You couldn’t PAY me to go back to those years between thirteen and twenty. They sucked bigtime, and I never want to be that lonely and uncertain again. I never want to be that hungry for approval and affection again.
I’ve been talking to the Teen off and on about that hunger, and about the fact that he doesn’t have to have his life all mapped out at 18. I didn’t figure out who I was or what I wanted until I was about 23-25. Now I had Issues, so I was probably happening a little later in that process than I like, and it’s only now at 32 that I’ve grown (by dint of hard work) into someone I like. Nobody tells kids that they don’t have to have it figured out by 18, that it will take them a while to figure things out, and that’s okay. Well, on the one hand it can be a prolonging of adolescence, but on the other it’s necessary to build someone who isn’t a jackass stuck in high school popularity contests.
It’s funny, (she says, fully conscious it’s funny-strange, not funny-haha) but all the adults I like and get on with were outcasts, nerds, etc., in high school. Those were the kids forced to develop things outside the hothouse jungle of school to keep their souls intact. Kids that were popular in high school kind of forget there’s a world outside those glass walls. They learn to game that system so thoroughly, so young, that when they reach the Real World outside they have no fricking idea and end up settling rigidly into what they know–the reflexes that did them good in high school.
By no means is this a hard and fast universal rule, (I AM fully aware that there are decent adults who were popular in high school out there) but all my close friends had trouble/were unpopular/were outcasts/were braniacs/were nerds in school. We sometimes talk about this dynamic–the people who don’t find some way of interacting with the world that’s outside halls and lockers and taunting. And (bringing it full circle) Holden Caulfield is reminding me of that. When I read Catcher for the first time I was nine and had no idea, I just liked that the voice seemed true–not like an adult trying to impress or Teach Me A Lesson. When I read it again at fourteen it really spoke to me on some levels, and on others I thought Holden was such a privileged jerkwad; oh noes he had money and freedom and was So! Upset! And then at nineteen I read it again and thought, Jesus, I have so much else to worry about with the rent I don’t need to be reading this, but still did finish the damn thing.
Now I’m reading it as the mother-figure/friend of a teenager, the mother of a preteen girl, and seeing the painful self-doubt and uncertainties from a whole new perspective. I don’t know if this whole long ramble has a point, but I do know that Salinger did what he set out to do, if what he set out to do was write a book that people can read from several different angles. Truth–telling the truth, a writer’s truth–is like that; it’s got so many different angles. And who was it that said a good book grows with you?
* This upcoming Saturday, May 2, I’m going to be the featured speaker at the monthly Writer’s Mixer at Cover to Cover Books. I’ll be talking about continuity and characterization over the course of a multi-book series. If you have any questions etc. about writing series, why not comment or drop me a line? It will help me gauge the types of things to talk about, and if I talk about it all week I might sound halfway coherent when I do my half-hour thang.
At least, one can hope.
Happy Monday, all. I’m about to go back to the YA (it’s rested for a week) and start weaving in things I missed the first go-round because I was going so fast. Oh, and I’m making chicken tikka masala for dinner. Wish me luck.
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