Where are all the weirdos in Young Adult fiction?

The wonderful weirdness of Ghost World

When I was a teenager I was a weirdo. I had a crush on Jack Nicholson. I sun bathed naked on the patio because I liked the feeling of the warm wood against my skin. I was in love with a guitar player who wore a cowl to school that made him look like a Satanist. I cried in the shower most mornings thinking about death.

Being a teenager is a supremely weird time. The only weirdness in young adult fiction these days is the kind that turns teens into werewolves and causes misogynistic male suitors to sprout fangs and glow in the dark. This all has its place metaphorically speaking (who hasn’t as a teen experienced hair growing in all the wrong places?) but even with all this paranormal strangeness going on, the YA world seems conventional, antiseptic, and most disappointingly, boringly predictable these days.

I don’t know if this is indicative of the perennial appeal of romance in all its beguiling forms to teen readers, or whether it has more to do with the young adult genre now being so insanely popular with adults. Perhaps as adults we read young adult books to be transported back to a time when life (in hindsight) felt simpler, and even when it got complicated, it was nowhere near as complicated and painful as, say, divorcing your husband of five years and raising children on your own. Maybe we are looking for a world where the weirdness is erased. Sure, things can get complicated, messy even, but in the brave new world of contemporary YA, it would appear that things can never become unattractive.

The king of my weird YA world is Paul Zindel. Now sadly passed, Zindel was the king of the kinky, ruler of the rejected, master of the misfits (you get the picture). Zindel’s protagonists were decidedly strange, and I love them all the more because of it. We have:

• John and Lorraine, best friends who like nothing more than to sit in graveyards and visit a man who collects pig ornaments (The Pigman);
• Marsh, who has a pet raccoon and keeps his Dad’s ashes in a box under the bed (Pardon Me, You’re Stepping On My Eyeball!)
• Sybilla, a lonely girl who carries around a toolbox, and falls so hard for a young race car driver that she quickly crosses the line from admirer to stalker (The Girl Who Wanted A Boy).

Zindel’s characters have life because they are real. They are messy, strange, troubled and alienated by the world around them, like most of us are. So where is today’s Zindel equivalent? Where have all the weirdos gone? There is room for everything: we can have our Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and dystopian societies, but can we also please have our teens who wear capes to school, race guinea pigs and argue about the merits of Ingmar Bergman versus Woody Allen? Trust me, those teens are out there. I saw them all lined up for tonight’s Amanda Palmer concert in Melbourne, and I’m telling you, these kids are friggin’ awesome.

This is a plea for insanity. Please. Let’s see some weirdos out there in the YA world. Trust me – there’s an audience for them.

Or maybe I’m just the weird one here.

Author’s note: If you know of any YA reads that feature misfits, dorks, geeks or losers, please post below.  All these ethereal looking girls on YA covers are making me feel like a freak.

5 reasons why every writer should watch ‘World’s Greatest Dad’

OK. I’m aware that I’m ridiculously late to the ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ bandwagon. This movie came out in 2009. It disappeared just as quickly. The casting coup of Robin Williams probably actually worked against it, as the marketing made it look like another lame-ass family comedy more on a par with dreck like ‘R.V’ (check out the trailer below to see what I mean). If you’ve seen the film you know that it’s anything but. Boy, is it ever.

So, it’s now the day after I watched it and I’m still thinking about it, so I’ve decided to compose a little list of five reasons every writer, whether you trade in screenplays, short stories, novels or haiku’s, should watch ‘World’s Greatest Dad.’ And please, if you have a problem with expletives, you may want to skip this post as I NEED to use them. I also need to use words in ALL CAPS. I feel this strongly about this movie. Trust me on this.

Let us begin.

1. It is about a struggling writer. That one is kind of obvious. It also features great true-to-life snatches of what being a struggling writer really means, like when Williams’ character uses the mail outbox at the school where he teaches to post manuscripts, and gets busted by the principal, only to protest that it’s okay because he used his own postage stamps. I used to do this at my last job, only sometimes if I didn’t have time to get to the post office, which was often, I’d use the office postage stamps too. Desperate times.

2. It has one of the most perfectly executed and harrowing reveals in any movie I’ve ever watched. This is the point when all you haters will say: ‘It wasn’t THAT shocking. You’re so LAME. I saw it coming a mile off.’ Well, I didn’t. And even if you did, that moment, which we will refer to as THAT SCENE, is enough to make you pause your DVD player and head to the kitchen for a swift shot of vodka before heading on. Trust me. It’s damn nasty.

3. But THAT SCENE is not gratuitous. It’s brave. Damn is it brave.I have always wanted my writing to exhibit that same bravery. It’s what I struggle to achieve: putting REAL people on paper, in all their freakish, fucked-up glory. I’m not saying every writer has to write something like THAT SCENE, but every scene should be written with that same regard for absolute truth, no matter how ugly. That is why I write.

4. Many of the characters in this movie have NO SYMPATHETIC FEATURES WHATSOEVER. This is especially true for the character who is the centerpiece for THAT SCENE. The screenwriter gives this character NOTHING for you to connect with. No fleeting kindness, no deeply hidden redeeming features, NOTHING. And I loved it. If I hear once more that a character needs to be more ‘likable’ or ‘sympathetic’ I’m going to, in the words of Williams’ character, stab somebody in the face. You don’t need to like a character to go on a journey with him. You don’t even need to have a shred of sympathy for them. Some characters are just fun to follow because they are FUCKED.

5. The ending is an absolute COP-OUT. After all the beautiful bravery that has come before, the film gives the hero the redemption that conventional narrative demands he have, and ties everything up in a nice ‘let’s all sit on the sofa and think about what we’ve learned’ bow. And you know what, I understand why they did it. And it DOES work. I just wish Williams’ character had continued on with his charade rather than falling on his sword. I didn’t want him to learn anything. I wanted him to continue on, miserable in his success, because that’s what would have happened in reality. There is much to learn from endings. It makes you think about your own work more thoughtfully, how it should evolve and how it should resolve. The failure of the ending for ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ doesn’t undo the good that has come before. It just highlights how uniquely brave the rest of the film was up until that point.

So frankly, this movie has me excited about writing in a way I haven’t been for a long time. It reminded me more than anything that writing doesn’t need to be polite, or complete, or fit into a neat little box. It just has to be a story that makes you care, and it has to be real. Story and character are everything. Write with bravery. Write what’s real, even the ugliness. ESPECIALLY the ugliness.

And it also taught me there’s more to Bobcat Goldthwait than Police Academy, as hard as that is to believe. Because Police Academy, you know, kinda rules.

Want to win a signed copy of ‘John Belushi is Dead’?

Happy new year! Did you party like an animal? I took in an advance screening of Black Swan then chilled with friends. It was super nice.

And I thought a super nice way to start the year would be to hold a competition. I have a few signed copies of ‘John Belushi is Dead’ to giveaway. All you have to do is ‘Like’ the John Belushi is Dead page over at good ol’ Facebook. This gives you one shot at winning. Then, if you’re awesome enough to recommend the page to your Facebook friends, that gives you TWO shots at winning! Names will then be written down and drawn out of a black fedora (of course!). Competition will run until January 10, so better shake your tail feather.

Two Amazing Things Together

Spike Jonze. Arcade Fire. Enjoy.

Producers option ‘John Belushi is Dead’

So Hilda and Benji are going to hit the big screen. I am so excited to be working with Joan and Ralph Singleton, who have worked on some of my favorite films of all time (Ralph produced three Stephen King movies, including my favorite ‘Pet Sematary.’ Kinda feels like fate!). Enormous thanks to everyone who made this happen. And here’s the announcement in Variety.

April Henry’s Mysterious Places

April Henry is a mystery writer to be reckoned with, and her latest, ‘Girl, Stolen’, is a nail-biting thriller about a kidnapping with a twist. April is a New York Times bestselling author and blogs regularly about writing at www.aprilhenrymysteries.com. I spoke with April about what makes a great mystery novel, and some of the writers that have influenced her. If you haven’t read ‘Girl, Stolen’ yet, do yourself a favour and go get it now!

1. Girl, Stolen is a riveting kidnap story that is fresh and unique. Were you conscious of not falling into any of the ‘kidnap scenario’ cliches?

Girl, Stolen was inspired by something that really happened – a blind girl whose mother’s car with stolen with her in the backseat. Just given that victim was blind, I knew it would be a different kind of story, kind of an updated version of Wait Until Dark. 

2. There are many scenes in the novel that are very shocking. There was one that literally had me spitting out my cup of tea. Were these hard scenes to write?

There were a few scenes that even scared me – and I wrote them! But those scenes weren’t hard to write. It was mostly a matter of putting myself in my character’s shoes and deciding what she would do – and putting myself in the bad guy’s shoes and deciding what he would do.

3. What qualities do you think a mystery writer has to have?

I think a mystery writer should like to do research. I see so many sloppily written books and movies where cops do things against the law (and they aren’t rogue cops) or evidence doesn’t work the way it really does. It’s one thing to compress time frames (it often takes forever to get DNA evidence, for example), it’s another to completely get the facts wrong.

4. Which writers have been your biggest influences?

Writers who have been the biggest influence? Back when I was a kid, it was people like Robert C. O’Brien – I still love The Silver Crown. As an adult, I’ve gotten a lot pickier. I think that’s one of the strange down sides of being a writer. I can usually see the bones beneath the flesh, see how the author is structuring the plot, so it takes a lot to surprise me. There’s a novel-novel by James Hynes called Next that had a twist 2/3 through that I did NOT see coming – yet it made perfect sense. I love being surprised.

5. What tips would you give to aspiring crime/ mystery writers?

I think the most important tip for aspiring mystery writers is to ask yourself: “How can I make it worse?” Not only does the FBI think you’re a serial killer, but the real serial killer is targeting you, AND you’re trapped in a basement with him standing at the top of the stairs. Or – not only will a child die, but so will a whole kindergarten. Or the entire world.

It’s here!

Now available online and from all good booksellers!

BEE leaves me buzzing

So, last week I spent time with Bret Easton Ellis on his Australian tour. Rather than recounting how amazing this meeting was, I’ll let the articles speak for themselves:

- ‘Kathy Charles on the first time she read Less Than Zero’, The Wheeler Centre
- ‘Like, embrace the pain: the Bret Easton Ellis interview (part 1)’, Literary Minded
- ‘Kathy Charles meets one of her literary heroes, Bret Easton Ellis’, The Wheeler Centre
- ‘Video: Bret Easton Ellis live in Melbourne’, The Wheeler Centre

Imagining LA # 9 – Greenberg

Usually I’m a very impatient filmgoer. I have no tolerance for long-winded, meandering narratives, which is why I despise Wim Wenders, barely tolerate Michael Haneke, and skipped almost every single screening in my unit on French Cinema at University (this makes me a philistine, I know. I’m not proud). But for some reason the films of Noah Baumbach, rather than reducing me to a snoring mess, embrace me like a snug blanket. Baumbach is a filmmaker who likes to take his time. There are no major melodramatic confrontations, no epiphanies for any of his characters, no satisfying resolutions. His camera follows his characters around as they try to sort through their awkward, neurotic lives, and most of the time fare very badly at it. This is what makes Baumbach so fresh and wonderful. His characters are weird. They’re not ‘Hollywood’ weird or ‘indie quirky’ weird, they are the people who we meet in real life and try our very best to stay away from, only to be sucked back in time and again by their strange gravitational pull. Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is probably the most immensely fucked up of all Baumbach creations. He’s suffered a nervous breakdown and chooses Los Angeles of all places to recover. While staying at his brother’s home he meets Florence, his brother’s personal assistant, and the two begin a very tortured, awkward love affair (if you can even call it that). Stiller is stunning as the intense, brooding Greenberg, but the real discovery here is Greta Gerwig, who is the most startling screen revelation since Amy Adams in Junebug. Her kind, confused Florence is the perfect antidote to Greenberg’s narcissism, and is the hope that Greenberg needs to imagine he can create a better world for himself.

There’s a lot of cinema set in Los Angeles, but rarely does any of it show the real act of living in Los Angeles, or the true extent of how damaged many of the people are who try to create a life there. Even though Greenberg ventures into some well-worn Hollywood territory (“We should have signed that record contract Greenberg! We could have been huge!”), it is at heart a love story about two very strange people who are struggling to find some kind of equilibrium in one of the most challenging cities in the world. If this film had been released during the height of the 70s American Film Revolution, it would have ben praised for its intelligence and style. But that time sadly has passed. But there is one consolation: Hal Ashby is alive and well, and his name is Noah Baumbach.

Melbourne Writers Festival 2010 – Come see me get branded

 

Okay, that post title may be a little misleading, but we are talking branding here. Come see me at Melbourne Writers Festival 2010 where I’ll be talking about the pro’s and con’s of branding yourself as an author as well as dispensing marketing tips from my time as a publicist for such high profile brands as Disney, Disney Pixar and Nickelodeon. In a world where Harry Potter is as easily recognisable as Coca Cola, authors are expected more than ever before to drive their own publicity and harness control of their public personas. I’ll be talking about how I became ‘the writer who knows everything about dead celebrities’, and whether this is a good or bad thing (hint: it’s a bit of both). Details below, and if you come to the session be sure to say hi to me!

The Author as Brand
August 29
ACMI 1
11.30am-12.30pm

Are authors too concerned with marketing themselves? Has online life replaced writing time?

James P. Othmer (Adland), Karen Andrews (Surprise!) and Kathy Charles (Hollywood Ending) update their status and wonder when they became a brand.