Writing With Heart is Why I Write for Boys

Tags

Boy lit, J.D Salinger, James Dashner, kidlit, Rick Riordan, S.E. Hinton, Stephen King, Teen fiction, Teen lit

Hey everyone so I was at the SCBWI winter conference this past weekend in New York-oh New York, I love New York-but I digress. I was at the conference and talked to so many people about my writing, goals, stories, etc.

People kept asking me why I write books about boys (teens) instead of girls-in fact I get asked this ALL the time. I am sorry if this makes me a traitor to my gender, but I am writing what I LOVE to read, and I LOVE, what I am now (coining the phrase) calling, “boy lit” because I LOVE stories with boy/male leads the most. I always have. This is probably why my chick lit novels weren’t a huge success, my heart wasn’t there in the same way and I was writing to trend. Writing is just like anything else, when it comes from the heart it is always going to be better.

Here is a quote from one of my all time favorite Cameron Crowe films-Jerry Maguire_ “All right, I’ll tell you why you don’t have your ten million dollars. Right now, you are a paycheck player. You play with your head, not your heart. In your personal life, heart. But when you get on the field it’s all about what you didn’t get. Who’s to blame. Who won through the pass. Who’s got the contract you don’t. Who’s not giving you your love. You know what, that is not what inspires people. That is not what inspires people! Shut up! Play the game, play it from your heart. And you know what, I’ll show you the kwan. And that’s the truth, man! That’s the truth.”

My favorite writers are: (in no particular order)

S.E. Hinton, J.D. Salinger, Paul Auster, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, James Dashner, Rick Riordan, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain… and the list could go on forever. Of course I think that Harry Potter is one of the most brilliant works of fiction in the history of writing-Boy lead-even in the 3rd person, still boy lead. That is why I picked it up. (Written by a woman, yay J.K. Rowling)

My screenplays and tv pilots have also all had male leads, except one.

It pisses my girlfriends off and I have gotten pushback from the female community, but I can’t entirely help what pops into my head.

I draw a lot of little girls and dogs and most of the picture books I have been hired to draw have little girl leads-but for writing I am all about a strong male lead, strong voice and point of view in a strong story. I love comics, action, superheroes, sci-fi and spies, but I also like a great contemporary story with a male lead. My dream and goal is to have my teen fiction published and have both boys and girls reading them and loving them. While I don’t see teenage boys putting down one of my novels and crying over a pint of ice cream, I like to imagine they would be like, “fuck that was intense” or whatever they say. I am not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but rather I am writing what my heart is demanding I write.

I hope that if you are a writer, you are writing what YOU love and what inspires you, not what you think that you are supposed to be writing.

The Two Books That Made Me Want to Become A Writer

Tags

boy leads, Harry Potter, J.D Salinger, S.E. Hinton, Teen fiction, The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, Writer, YA, YA fiction

When I was about 13 years old, I read two books that I fell in love with and since then have read them both many, many, many times. Because of these two books specifically I decided that I needed to be a writer and so at 13, I sat in my home and typed, on a typewriter, yes it was the early 80s, I typed my first novel about a boy named, Larry Winston. Larry was snarky, sarcastic, and fully flawed with many problems.

Have any guesses which books I am talking about?

Let me tell you more about Larry. He felt like his parents didn’t love him and while I am sure they did in the backstory, in the novel itself, he was on his own, much like I was at that age. He didn’t have a lot of money and he shoplifted his clothes and scrounged up pennies to get lunch at the local taco stand next to his junior high. (Back then we called it junior high not middle grade). Larry was 13. Larry got into fights, got picked up by the cops and wanted to die. It was an intense novel to say the least.

I never attempted to get it published. It’s somewhere in my parent’s-well my stepfather’s house as my mother has since passed away from lung cancer-the disease I had given Larry’s mom too in the story.

*Did I see that coming? Not sure, but both my parents smoked.

Hey maybe someday I’ll revisit Larry and his story. I have most of it still in my head.

Do you know these books? At the time I had no idea they were either ground breaking or popular, I just knew that I LOVED them and I loved the main characters. They are:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and to this day I still believe it has one of the strongest openings in any novel ever written by anyone in the history of writing.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all – I’m not saying that – but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was «‘The Secret Goldfish.’ It was about this little kid that wouldn’t  let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”

I read that and I was hooked. I went to mom “Do you know about this book? It’s goddamn amazing listen to this.” Of course she did but she listened to me go on and on about it and how I had great plans to name my first child Holden.

You can read the whole first chapter if you haven’t here-but go pick up a copy, it’s really a GREAT book. http://chabrieres.pagesperso-orange.fr/texts/salinger_catcher.html

Then there was this book which deals with the social bullshit that I was dealing with at the time. It wasn’t the 50s and I wasn’t a “greaser” but that was how things were at my school. Since we left my father and our secure life and we all of a sudden didn’t have money, I was thrust into this life. Also I had (fake) red hair so everyone called me “Cherry” for Cherry Valance. You got it! The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

Here is how this book hooked me in the first paragraph.

“WHEN I STEPPED OUT into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman— he looks tough and I don’t— but I guess my own looks aren’t so bad. I have light-brown, almost-red hair and greenish-gray eyes. I wish they were more gray, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have. My hair is longer than a lot of boys wear theirs, squared off in back and long at the front and sides, but I am a greaser and most of my neighborhood rarely bothers to get a haircut. Besides, I look better with long hair.”

You can read more here http://theoutsidersbook.blogspot.com/2005/09/whole-book.html

I must have read that book 15 times in a row. I liked the other books she wrote as well, but this was my favorite.

I now have completed two TEEN FICTION books. One is older MG/YA and the other is definitely YA. I am actually doing a final revision on the second one. Both have male leads, both are told in the first person. I have always been drawn to books that have both. Sure I enjoy chick lit (heck, I have two chick lit novels published under a pen name), but I love my boy stories so much. I highly recommend that you read them both.

Since these, of course I LOVE LOVE LOVE the Harry Potter series (also written by a woman) and anything by Dickens-most are boy leads as well.