Writing for Teens – Finding Humor Between the Melodrama
It seems that when children turn 13, one word sums up their lives: melodrama. Emotions float to the surface; each event is huge. Adults are idiots who don’t understand them, and their classmates are constantly watching them to make sure they don’t do anything stupid (including wearing the wrong clothes, saying the wrong things, or listening to the wrong music). Oh. Me. God. As adults on the receiving end of this hysteria, we may roll our eyes or deliberately show up at Back-to-School Night with wet hair, just to see our child’s response. But as authors, we can extract the drama from its other face: humor.
Many teen books feature characters who are on the brink and face life-or-death situations, extreme moral choices, or have had to face a heavy hand and somehow have to live with it. His drama is painfully real. However, a protagonist may be self-confident enough to overcome the sniper trials of his companions. Both characters are admirable, but often not funny. The humor comes from a flawed character that the reader genuinely likes, who finds himself in a sticky situation that the reader can easily imagine. Then the author turns it up a notch. The reader laughs at someone who is like her, but from the security of not having to suffer the humiliation personally.
In Denise Vega Click here (to find out how I survived 7th grade)Erin Swift isn’t having the best start to high school. Her big feet are the butt of jokes, she lands the role of Corn Cob in the school play, and the cute boy she has a crush on falls for her best friend Jilly. But Erin is a whiz with computers and joins the Intranet Club to become the lead designer of the school’s website. She also maintains a secret blog where she spills all of her innermost thoughts and true feelings on everyone at her school. When her blog is accidentally posted on the school website, Erin is convinced that she is going to die. Vega took the traditional high school dynamic and filtered it through Erin’s self-deprecating lens, which eases the angst of genuinely heartbreaking scenes (Cute Boy’s attraction to Jilly, Erin listening to the girls criticizing her in the bathroom). Vega then casts the worst fear of all high school students: that they will be metaphorically stripped naked in front of their peers and revealed for who they really are. If Erin’s public blog were the only drama in the book, we would sympathize with Erin but not really identify with her. But because of the melodrama in the earlier scenes, we know that Erin is learning to laugh at herself and she will find a way to survive this very real problem.
Parents offer endless inspiration for melodrama. If you’re looking for a good teen plot twist, just ask yourself, “What’s the most embarrassing thing a parent could do to this character?” Your answer could give you an entire book. Shelley Pearsall’s first line All Shook Up says it all: “Looking back, I’d say everything in my life changed the summer I turned thirteen and my dad became Elvis.”
Like Vega, Pearsall stays close to comforting upper-middle-grade territory, but then turns up the embarrassment. Josh is sent to live with his father in Chicago one summer when his mother has to care for his sick grandmother. Josh hasn’t seen his father in a while and assumes he’s still the giddy shoe salesman he remembered. But Dad has a new job as an Elvis impersonator. What’s more, when Josh’s visit extends into the fall and he starts school in Chicago, one of Josh’s classmates leaves him anonymous notes about Elvis. Josh’s diminishing ability to keep his father’s identity a secret is shattered completely when his father is invited to perform at the 1950s school concert, and Josh must take drastic measures that threaten to ruin his life. his relationship with his father forever. Readers will no doubt emphasize Josh, but they will also watch as he and his father learn to compromise and respect the person they each have become. Josh is forced to think about someone other than himself, which (along with the fact that Dad is a great artist) helps deflate the social suicide of having Elvis as a father.
For my money, one of the best young adult beach reads you’ll find is Two parties, a tuxedo and a short film about the Grapes of Wrath by Steve Goldman. Mitchell, 17, is a slightly scrawny, socially inept average student whose best (and only true) friend tells Mitchell that he’s gay one day at lunch. Mitchell’s high school year is marked by trying to talk to girls (do her sister and best friend count?), navigating the school hierarchy, reevaluating her friendship with David, and turning a mildly pornographic claymation movie into a English newspaper. in a book he hasn’t read. Much of the humor comes from Mitchell’s dry and somewhat clueless first-person voice. He is floating out of the whirlwind of popularity, so he can comment on high school without having much to lose. school library diary entitled the book “A harrowing slice of male adolescence, [that] shines a spotlight on the ridiculousness that is the average contemporary American high school experience.”
When I asked Goldman how he writes humor, he said, “I was just trying to capture some of the feelings that I could remember from high school, and really see the world through the eyes and continuous storytelling of a character with a particular vision.” of the world and a particular way of expressing their feelings. One of the things I really enjoy about writing YA is that I find high school students funny. Frankly, I think they have a better sense of humor than adults. They’re willing to put them themselves in situations that no one with a brain would do, and yet they have the intelligence to realize they’re doing it.” This brutal honesty, both with each other and with themselves, creates those situations that border on melodrama. One of my favorite scenes from Two Parties is at the prom, when Mitchell is in the bathroom thinking about his date who dumped him, and he accidentally urinates on his white tuxedo pants. As I laughed at Mitchell’s description of himself, I couldn’t help but wince at the sight of him walking through the school gym in wet pants. Even as an adult, I still feel like I share Mitchell’s experience. That’s why writing teen humor may be easier than you think. As Goldman put it, “We never really recover from our adolescence; those years beginning in middle school and continuing through high school are so formative that we can still find them in many of the ways we feel about things as adults.” . I may be 45, but when I walk into a party I’m like I’m still 17 and have no idea what to do next. We may drop out of high school, but we never really escape it.”
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