So instead of writing new words today I was thinking it would be better to edit the ones I spewed onto the page yesterday.  Or maybe I should just re-read and start afresh.  

The thesis statement of the whole piece was that the reason I, an adult, finds the YA literature to be so compelling is because it is, much like fantasy, a world where the fantastical happens. Youth is a land of fantasy. The flip-side is, alas, that like Gondor or Hoth, I can never visit youth again. At its best, a work of fiction illuminates ourselves to ourselves, or perhaps more accurately reveals us to each other. 

The majority of literary fiction though falls in the realm of putting normal people in fantastical or unreasonable situations, or being about entirely abnormal people in abnormal situations.  To some degree this is about a revelation about how somebody, maybe us, will react in a situation out of the norm and challenging.  Within the realm of fantasy or science fiction this can be centered around the creation of a world or culture which, as construct, can serve as means of placing the characters into a challenging situation which feels real within that fantastical context. If the world and the characters are well developed the result will be something that people identify with and find enlightening with regards to how they think and feel, as well as how others do.  YA sometimes has this world and mythology creation integrated into it, but it doesn’t need it.

The fundamental truth of youth is that it is fantastical. All emotions and responses and situations are more real and more vital and more powerful than they might be for an adult.  Some chalk this up to hormones and growth and inexperience, but none of those things take away the fact that youth is a fantastical land that we have all lived through. So for an author who is skilled, as +John Green  and Frank Portman and Maureen Johnson and +Jackson Pearce  and so many others, if you can simply create a real set of characters to live in the world of youth you can have a fantastical element on top of that, but it isn’t what reveals the truth of the characters. The truth of the characters is revealed, as often as not, in their interactions within the world of youth, more than it is in any sort of fantastical world where they reside.  As I get further and further from it I find I appreciate, and appreciate the fantastical nature of, the reality of the world of youth.

Jackson Pearce created a fantastical version of Atlanta for Sister’s Red and pitted her heroines against werewolves, but the reality was that the heroism was less about killing Fenris and more about moving out into a larger world and into larger relationships than just their sisterhood of the traveling hatchet.  Maureen Johnson created a character in The Name of the Star that had fantastical adventures, but it wasn’t the stress of a killer that revealed as much about the character as it was the stress of relationships and the danger and rewards of curiosity followed.  John Green created a completely real world of Culver Creek and characters that lived through the danger and curiosity and adventures of the relationships that they were forming.  Frank Portman created a character who followed a mystery to its conclusion, but along the way he grew as a friend and a person through the interactions in the fantastical land of youth without any fantasy involved (aside from the musical fantasies that played out in his head).  

Each of these “YA” examples brings me to my friend Jamie Ford’s book which isn’t marketed as YA, but probably could be.  Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet has an older story surrounding the story of youthful friendship and romance, but it was the reality of how that romance blossoms and grows (and is believable in a youthful character in a way that is hard to pull off for an adult) in a stressful time that sold it. Likewise the friendship with the older musician. The book placed them in a time of great conflict, but I would posit that it may be because of the reality of how those relationships developed that the book did a good job of highlighting the situation, and not that the situation highlighted the relationships.

Traditionally fiction requires some level of conflict to tell a story. There is, sadly for most of us, little story of interest to tell or hear in the day to day monotony of life. Sadly for all of us I think is the lack of interesting story in the day to day life of everyone from the most ‘first-world’ suburbanite to that of an impoverished villager of sub-Saharan Africa.  Part of that reason that any fiction “works” is that it highlights particular events that lift a fictional life from the monotony of jobs and bills and such.  For me, as an adult, fantastical people in fantastical situations are not the norm of life as I see it lived, even average people in fantastical situations are not the norm. 

The escape into a fantastical world, be that Hogwarts or Culver Creek High-School, is so much less about the “fantastical” than it is the “world” and the people who live there. I find it difficult to believe that the millions of fans of Harry Potter are fans because of butter beer and invisibility cloaks any more than people of my generation are fans of Star Wars because of light-sabers and X-wings. At a superficial level we can certainly see those things as “cool”, but the reality is that we connect with feeling out of place and ignored, or shut in by our lives, and that can be because we’re moisture farmers on a desert planet, unknown wizards, former child prodigies, or just trying to cope with the intensity of Margo Roth Spiegelman, Alaska Young, or Will Grayson.

As I work my way through TFioS I want to say thank you John. I hope I never lose that which makes me think I understand Quentin, Colin, and Miles, and I hope you never lose that which lets you create them.