Today's Guest Post comes to us courtesy of Hilde Hooper.
All’s Fair in
Rain/Drizzle/Hurricane: or how I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cliché.
Recently I have been writing a Young Adult novel, which is distinctly different to
writing because it’s in bold. Sometimes I even write and tell people I write
and that’s much worse because then they want to read and I have to produce
words.
And I have a confession to make:
My YA has clichés.
But you know what? Sorry. Not Sorry.
Because lately I’ve found myself thinking -
clichés can be great! In fact, not only are they great but they are TRUE and
they are INTERESTING and they are IMPORTANT.
Particularly in Young Adult Fiction.
So here are my Top 5 YA Cliches and why we
should show them a little love.
Number
One: THE ABSENT PARENTS
The
Cliché: YA novels marginalize the role of parents
in teenagers lives. If they do feature parents they are either evil, stupid or
don’t care.
The first time I encountered the ‘Absent
Parent’ cliché was with good old Dick and Fanny (and the other ones) in The
Magic Faraway Tree series.
Damn did they have an absent Mum. I don’t
even know if they had a Dad.
Every day these kids would run off down to
the woods to do God knows what, only to return covered in bruises, with a
series of strange friends and the odd case of PTSD.
Did their mother care?
Fuck no!
All she did was give them a plate of
bananas and milk and pray they fell asleep as soon as their heads hit the
pillow.
But despite their loving relationship with
their mother (I assume she loved them, she certainly made them a lot of
Victoria sponge) the parent plays a minor-at-best role in the story.
Why
we should embrace it:
Parents (often) play a minor role in YA fiction
because teenagers (often) want them to play a minor role in their lives.
The whole point of being a teenager is to
strive for the illusive INDEPENDENCE which your parents will never understand
because parents are boring and lame and sure, perhaps they were kids once but
that was, like, when dinosaurs were around or at least certainly before
instagramming pictures of your lunch became a social advent.
So teenagers avoid their parents, they hide
things from their parents and they lie to their parents. Even if it’s something
as simple as what they learnt at school, they LIE ABOUT IT because they’re
STRONG INDEPENDENT TEENAGERS AND YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT’S LIKE.
Number
Two: THE ‘ALWAYS ATTRACTIVE’ LOVE INTEREST
The
Cliché: The love interest in YA is always super
attractive. They normally have very long eyelashes.
Why
we should embrace it:
I’m just going to throw this one out there
–
Perhaps the reason why the love interest is
always attractive is because they’re the love interest - therefore the
protagonist is sexually attracted to them regardless of what they look like?
And perhaps the reader thinks the love
interest is always attractive because the writer has set them up to empathise
with the protagonist… because that’s kinda the goal for most writers.
Number
Three: LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
The
Cliché: People are always falling in ‘love at first
sight’ in YA novels. And the love is just too damn strong.
Why
we should embrace it:
People fall in ‘Love At First Sight’ all
the time.
I distinctly remember the first time I fell
in love.
I was about 11 and I was watching ‘A Night
in Terror Tower’ which was an amazing movie that came out as part of the
Goosebumps franchise. It was set in Tudor England and there was this boy.
He was so dreamy. He had hair. And eyes.
And sometimes he would say words. Oh. The Words.
Throughout my teens I fell in love at first
sight a number of times.
Once I fell in love with this man:
And this man:
Once my friends and I fell in love with
this guy in the grade above us. We called him ‘Whale’. We used to go ‘Whale Watching’
which was just code for us being massive creepers.
Recently I have fallen in love with these
two men:
My point here is – we fall in ‘love at
first sight’ all the time.
Particularly when we are teenagers. It’s
the hormones and the trying-to-be-an-adult and the… sex.
Sure, the love might not be the ‘love of
your life’.
But answer me this:
If that love is the best love you have yet
to experience – doesn’t that make it your great love?
Your great-love-to-date?
Come on, you’ve been there. We’ve all been
there.
Let’s not deny our characters the chance to
go there too.
(For the record: While my love for that
actor with the hair and the eyes and the words did fade, my love for Tudor
history beats forever strong in my heart. So who says 11 year olds can’t fall
in love?)
 |
| Oh Henry, you sexy mass murdering megalomaniac. |
Number
Four: THE UNSTABLE MAIN CHARACTER
The
Cliché: The Main Character always has issues OR
isssssewwwss. And lots of them.
Why
we should embrace it:
My Kingdom for a stable teenager.
Seriously?
No teenager is stable.
Also, from an author/reader point of view.
Who wants to write/read about a stable MC? Who wants to read about the teenager
from the loving family who went to the nice school, had a B+ average, played
netball, had a great circle of friends, fell in perfect love with the perfect
man and was never misunderstood EVER!
Ironically, that would probably be the most
unrealistic YA ever written.
Number
Five: BEST FRIENDS WITH RED HAIR
The
Cliché: The best friend/significant other/wise one
always has red hair.
Why
we should embrace it:
Look.
I have red hair.
My best friend (often) has red hair. We are
best friends with best friends with red hair.
Embrace that.
So next time you find yourself hunched over
your computer, crying the salty wet tears of the writer trying to write
and drowning in a sea of clichés –
Step back and ask yourself why you’re
encountering the cliché in the first place. It is because you’re walking
through the valley of the shadow of writers block?
Or is it because in those clichés you have
found something new and interesting?
A story you want to write and write and WRITE.
Hilde works in a museum and writes lots of words. One day she hopes to finish her YA novel. It features 3 of the above clichés.
