Reviewing Classic Teen Literature - The Westing Game, A Wrinkle in Time, & Something Wicked This Way

HOW TO MAKE 3D CHARACTERS :

Traditionally, young adult lit involves themes like forging your own identity and building self-acceptance. Recently, however, we've seen a noticeable increase in themes of forsaking your family to become undead, changing your personality to the point of unrecognizability, and feasting on human blood to nourish a fetus that your husband will eventually have to chomp out of your womb. (No, we aren't making this up). For those of us who miss the good ol' days when reading teen lit made you feel better about life (as opposed to in need of a long shower), it might be a good investment to pick up some of the following classic reads.

Reviewing Classic Teen Literature - The Westing Game, A Wrinkle in Time, & Something Wicked This Way

Despite the countless ways in which Ray Bradbury can put us ill at ease, his 1962 coming-of-age novel Something Wicked This Way Comes actually has a wholesome message at its core. Beneath all the carnies and funhouses, that is. The story follows two thirteen-year-olds named Will and Jim, whose visit to the traveling circus gets them involved with a wicked witch, a magic carousel, and a guy who has tattooed both their faces on his hands. (Clearly, this predates the cameraphone.)

For whatever reason, Jim is drawn to all things dangerous, creepy, or both, and desperately wants to ride the carousel that can instantly turn him into an adult à la Tom Hanks in Big. Will, on the other hand, enjoys being thirteen and has absolutely no desire to pursue adulthood through unnatural means. (Clearly, this predates VH1.) With the help of Will's father, the two learn how to kill evil with a smile - literally - and laugh in the face of insecurity, even when that face is your own. Only Ray Bradbury can pull off something like that while still managing to scare the crap out of you.

Published in the same year, Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is a similarly offbeat novel that reads like something out of a David Bowie acid flashback. Our teen heroine is Meg Murray, a self-proclaimed, self-loathing freak whose face is horribly disfigured by - get this - braces. (Okay, so standards were different in 1962.) Also noteworthy is the fact that she travels to a planet called Camazotz with the help of four exploded stars and a time/space-folding procedure called a tesserract. Yeah, we've all been there.

Through her travels, Meg learns to let go of everyone's helping hands (literally - she was practically glued to the things), see her "faults" as things that could "come in very handy," and ultimately fly solo to solve her own problems. The story climaxes with Meg defeating a giant, pulsating brain through the power of love. If that ain't symbolism... well, we're actually kind of hoping the whole thing is symbolism.

Sixteen years later, Ellen Raskin published The Westing Game, challenging the then-prevalent idea that young adults couldn't follow stories with ridiculously complicated plots. (Clearly, publishers were unfamiliar with Tolkien.) Its heroine is Tabitha-Ruth Alice "Turtle" Wexler, a thirteen-year-old who is trapped in her pretty sister's shadow but nevertheless gets major kudos for being nicknamed after a lumpy reptile. Turtle and her family are involved in an elaborate inheritance puzzle that sets an entire apartment complex's worth of people against one another for 0 million in loot.

Amidst the endless characters, unexpected bombings, anonymous tips, and false leads, Turtle demonstrates business savvy, goodheartedness, and independent thinking; she invests her "incentive" funds to profit independently of the riddle, attempts to fall on the sword for her mad bomber of a sister, and solves the puzzle even though the game ends and the prize is withdrawn. By befriending and impressing the benefactor, Turtle then goes on to prove that you don't have to be a beautiful young thang to get your mitts on an old man's multi-million dollar inheritance.

Growing up is hard enough as it is without television and magazines telling kids to hurry up and buy into adult things. Admittedly, literature is as bound to market trends as anything else, but until books start selling ad space between chapters, we'd like to think of them as a refuge for the mind. And if novels about black-magic carnivals, interplanetary time warps, and pyrotechnic treasure hunts can somehow present well-balanced young adult characters, any story that doesn't is definitely not trying hard enough.

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The Real Purpose of Sex in Literature

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You know there's a difference between pornography and erotica, don't you? Think about it. We'll get to it later.

The Real Purpose of Sex in Literature

Before I get to the purpose of sex scenes in fiction I will start with the purpose of fiction. You read fiction because you enjoy it. When you read a really good book, you are off into another world. An intimate world.

Fiction provides a degree of intimacy rarely found in real life. Where else can you read another person's mind, discover his conscious and subconscious motives?

Humans are story-tellers. Everyone has a story to tell because everyone uses language to share visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and kinesthetic memories.

Everyone listens to, or reads, a well told story.

Tension makes a good story.

Now, here's the kicker: believable tension among identifiable characters in authentic situations, no matter how imaginary, creates unforgettable stories.

Think back to a favorite novel you read as a child-one that transported you and showed you new information about human nature. Mine was "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". I was ten or eleven. My mother saw me reading it and said, "Oh, you don't want to read that!" I had nearly finished reading it so continued behind her back. That book taught me about sex. No one else did. It was a gentle teaching.

Perhaps that's why I approve of sex scenes in fiction and why I write them.

Everyone has sexual feelings. How each person lives with his sexual feelings is idiosyncratic. No two people have identical attitudes toward sex, male myths to the contrary.

A sexual scene in a novel can be highly effective for characterization and theme. Memorable characters in literature, and life, for that matter, often confuse love and lust. He or she believes he is in love with someone who is ultimately all wrong for him--or her.

This confusion provides underlying tensions that enhance the plot.

Identifiable characters are created with just enough specific information such as speech inflection, body language and dialogue to make you say as you read, "I knew a guy just like that. His father was a bear."

Or, "She shouldn't be so uptight around men. But I would be, too, if I grew up with that grandmother."

Put these identifiable characters in an authentic, albeit imaginary, situation and you have an unforgettable story.

As readers glimpsing the thoughts and feelings of a well-rounded character, we learn about ourselves in the privacy of our own living room. We identify with the lead characters and say, "Oh yeah."

Shakespeare's characters are enduring because he gave them contradictions. To this day we can watch Mercutio explode and think, I've felt like that. Or Hamlet struggling with his conscience because he didn't know what to believe. Shakespeare gave his characters sexual drive as well as confusion. His sexual scenes produced on stage naturally were not as explicit as those can be in novels read in privacy

Characters make a story for me. I have fun and take great care creating my characters.

And, the difference between pornography and erotica in fiction? For pornography, I quote Lee Siegel's fascinating essay about Norman Mailer in the New York Times Book Review January 21, 2007: "In his book about Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer wrote, 'Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human communication, and the technological society is built on expanding communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater promiscuity.' If you are seeking an explanation for why pornography takes up most of the Internet, there it is."

Pornography, like lots of money every Friday, has a happy ending even if it's always the same, but erotica ends unhappily with longing. In both, the characters are indistinguishable.

Which remind me of a friend who wrote and published several historical romance novels. She didn't like to write erotic scenes but the genre required one per novel. Therefore, she cut and pasted the one scene she had written and simply changed the names for all subsequent novels. It didn't matter in that genre if the characters were indistinguishable as long as the longing came through.

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