Today I have with me Justin Ordoñez author of Sykosa. Take it away Mr.
Cross-Gender
Writing Sucks; Now Let’s All Do It Anyway
Writing teenage girls sucks, and it sucks because it’s
difficult. We all know the over worn clichés about women’s emotions,
menstruation, driving, and rabid shopping. I’m not here to relive those. I’m
here to state a truth about writing characters. It’s that while, in general,
women are hard to fully form in the written word, the hardest subgroup is
teenage girls. Nothing’s harder to get right, and—this is a big “and”—nothing’s
easier to bomb. Alicia Silverstone described this dilemma better than I ever
could, when she surmised the best teenage girl move ever Clueless.
“I think that Clueless was very
deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness
has to come from a very deep place if it is true lightness."
Silverstone was
chastised for this statement, attacked for being an airhead and awarded the
“Foot in the Mouth Award” for “Most Baffling Statement” in 2000. Here’s the
thing, though. If you can’t understand Alicia’s words, and not only understand
her, but live it, think it, philosophize it, and build a lifestyle around it,
you have no business writing teenage girls. Because here’s what you probably
won’t believe, Alicia’s statement is 100% correct, and it’s not only 100%
correct, it makes 100% perfect sense, and no one will ever speak on this
subject more clairvoyantly or poignantly than Alicia did.
So what did
Alicia mean?
Let me do a
little trick us writers like to refer to as “storytelling.”
Being 29, I
don’t spend time with teenage girls, as doing so would be disturbing. Not all
writers feel this way. In order to properly understand the motivations of his
heroes and heroines, author Tom Wolfe went deep undercover for his book I Am Charlotte Simmons, making his way
across college campuses to familiarize himself with the modern flavor of youth.
I suppose you can admire this dedication, but only if you can somehow overlook
how, between finding sixty different ways to modify your name so the word
“Viagra” is in it, you’re gonna get nicknames like, “Old Dumb Short Bald Dude”
and, “The Pervert Grandpa,” assigned to you, and the best joke everyone’s gonna
retell for decades is the time when, [enter name here], the sweet, innocent,
gullible girl of the group broke into hysterical crying after being asked to
envision your old, droopy balls.
I don’t know
about you, but there’s no way I could do it.
Look, I believe
in authentic writing, I do, and think it is important to do some character
study. I also like having my pride, so I know, being not entirely old myself,
to stay away from these kids at all costs. They’re young, they’re good looking
(even the bad looking ones), they think they’re never going to die, and years
of education across a multitude of subjects has made them moderately proficient
at most topics, so they can embarrass you academically even though, in reality,
they don’t know anything and would crawl up into the corner, crying and sucking
their thumb at their first encounter with one of life’s big, adult challenges!
(Or so I tell
myself desperately every night before I go to sleep).
You need to get
inspiration another way.
And by “you,” I
mean, “me.”
Sometimes, life
just obliges.
It’s May 2011.
Sykosa—my forthcoming YA novel—isn’t
finished. In fact, I’m a bit lost. I know I’m close to finishing it, but how
long it will take to finish “close” could be three weeks or three years. I need
a holiday badly. I’m about to get one. My sister lives in New York,
specifically in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which is a happening place
since Lady Gaga lived there before going megastar. It’s a little neighborhood
neighboring the more well known Greenwich Village, and it’s full of old
buildings and young, spirited, unconsciously sexy people. My sister shares an apartment,
which probably violates every zoning code in any city of America but New York,
and being the size of a 1 bedroom apartment, and once again it being the city
of New York, she shares it with a friend from her college days. Being the room
mate introduction, it’s nothing fancy. I meet her after she comes from work, my
sister and I relaxing after touring Grand Central Station. Being a writer, I
can tell instantly I’ve changed their dynamic. While my sister and her friend
want to make me feel welcome, it’s clear their routine after work is to drink
wine and banter about who’s hooking up with whom, who wants to get married, who
is scared to get married, who just needs to get their stuff together, and while
they try to include me, the more time passes, the more they divulge into side
conversations about their lives and circumstances.
This might be
boring for me, but something keeps coming up.
Let’s see if
you can identify it.
“Did you hear
that so and so… Awkward turtle!” – “Oh, my God, I heard that! That was so
Awkward Turtle!” – “Was it like the time…? You remember when…? Awkward Turtle!”
– “That’s so crazy. It’s so Awkward Turtle whenever they’re around.”
Awkward Turtle.
Now, I’ve
listened to this conversation patiently, expecting that, given a certain number
of examples, its definition will become contextually obvious. It doesn’t
happen. Eventually, I have to stop them, and I do. At the edge of the couch, I
say, “I have to know, what exactly is…” And in the most serious, least
humiliating way I can think to do it, and this is difficult considering I’m
6’4”, 230lbs, and I have the frame and a look that once inspired a random
stranger to spontaneously shout, “You look like one of those assholes who rows
crew at Harvard,” I put my thumbs at my forehead, extending my fingers like
they were antlers, but bent so my fingertips touch fingertips, making a
somewhat lazy triangle, and say, “Awkward Turtle?”
What results is
the kind of laughing that almost lacks reason. Like spectacle laughing—what
happened isn’t even funny, it’s just laughing because that’s what you do when
you see the asshole who rows crew at Harvard being an asshole or something. You
laugh. The problem is its become contagious between my sister and her friend,
as they croak and spit, each failing to reenact my too serious impersonation
while assuring me, “I swear,” LOL LOL LOL HAHAHAHAHAHA! “We’re not laughing”
LMAO! LMAO! LOL! HAHAHAHAHA!!! “At you—I swear, I swear!” Which becomes ever
less likely as their faces turn ghostly white, and their eyes go empty, having
laughed so hard they’ve dislodged their aortas, turning their insides into
spinning lawn sprinklers of internal hemorrhaging and poetic justice!
(I may have
imagined that last part).
Once the
hilarity settles, an explanation comes. Apparently, “Awkward Turtle” is only
one designation of what is a multi-leveled, hierarchically ordered
classification system built to assign value to the severity of life’s awkward
moments.
That’s not a
joke. That’s what it is.
The dorks have
a methodology to the whole thing.
(I have to call
them dorks. They laughed at me for, like, five minutes).
Basically, a
level of awkwardness is given an animal designation that’s paired with a hand
signal at your forehead. If you’re awkwardness wasn’t too weird, it’s “Awkward
Kitty.” A little worse? You get the most commonly designated one. “Awkward
Turtle.” Something extremely awkward? “Awkward Shark.” Something even worse?
“Awkward Hippopotamus.” What’s the top level? What’s reserved only for the type
of awkwardness so bad that all social graces fail and you’ve frozen everyone in
your immediate vicinity in such shock they may be contemplating whether or not
spontaneous combustion is the best option for you? “Awkward Hippopotamus Out of
the Water.” None of this makes sense, but my sister, who cannot stop laughing,
looks at me like, what’s the matter with
you, don’t you get it? and says,
“Have you ever seen a hippopotamus out of the water? It’s looks so awkward and
uncomfortable!”
What’s my point
of this story?
I’m glad you
asked.
My sister works
for one of the largest consulting firms in the world. Her friend works for a
major pharmaceutical company. Sure, they’re acting girlish, but it’s temporary,
and when the time comes, they’ve got serious jobs and serious responsibilities—things
giving them depth, character, arches, and these things make women like my
sister and her friend easier to write than five years before, when they were
making these stupid jokes, but had no jobs, no steady boyfriends, no place of
their own or even cars. Yet, at the time five years ago, my sister and her
friend were full of as much depth, as much character, and as many arches.
Without the easy to navigate, agreed upon identities of the adult world, how
would someone know how to draw those out? How would you construct metaphors,
analogies, and have them be ones that weren’t condescending and pretentious?
To this we turn
to Alicia Silverstone.
“I think that Clueless was very
deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness
has to come from a very deep place if it is true lightness."
In order to
draw meaning from young female protagonists, we need to look to their lightness
to understand their depth, and if we do this, the depth we will discover will
feel genuine to both the writer and reader. You need to ignore the fact that my
sister and her friend were laughing at me and focus on the joyfulness of the
laughter itself, then focus not on my sister’s explanation of, “Have you ever
seen a hippopotamus out of the water?” and pay attention to the look she gave
me, the, what’s the matter with you,
don’t you get it? glare. In this lies the soul, purpose and heart of young
women, especially teenage women, and this lives in us all from time to time,
place to place, and it does not in anyway require—to the disappointment of male
writers the world over—hanging out with, getting to know, or secretly hoping
you score nineteen year old coeds.
The older we
get, the more we become “adults,” “professionals,” “men and women,” “husband
and wives,” “fathers and mothers.” We accept these labels and wear them like
badges of honor. They become a mantra we bring into our work places, our social
circles, and the voting booth. Unfortunately, with each passing day, we forget,
and we lose, part of that lightness—that place where identity is
self-determined, and drawn from the metaphysical thing which happens when
you’re around people you really love, like all-out love. Some of us hang onto
some of it, many of us vaguely recall it, lots of us surrender totally and
pathetically to what can easily and ironically be described as the child-like,
vapid pool of adult decision making. Of this we must all be careful, and if
you’re a writer even moreso, because before you realize it, you’re not only not understanding what Awkward Turtle
is, but you’re so embarrassed you’re not even bothering to ask, and instead of
engaging and learning about the world, you’re smugly handing out an award about
how it’s the Most Baffling Statement of 2012, all so you can, in the most vain
of vain attempts, feel better about yourself—and it’ll work, you will feel
better about yourself, and you’ll feel certain of your place in this world, but
go back and look at your writing, really look at it and dissect it and question
it…
What do you
feel now?
Justin
Ordoñez is author of “Sykosa.” It’s a YA novel about a sixteen year old girl
who’s trying to reclaim her identity after an act of violence shatters her life
and the life of her friends. Intense as that sounds, it’s actually a fun read,
and it’s hilarious at many points. It comes out on April 2nd, 2012,
and you can read an excerpt here: Also, to be notified when Justin releases
more blog posts in the future, please “like” Sykosa’s facebook page here
Don’t have Sykosa get it on amazon.com for a great price. Click Here
I want to say thank you to Mr. Ordoñez it was great to have you
with us.
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Sykosa (that's
"sy"-as-in-"my" ko-sa) is a junior in high school. She
belongs to an exclusive clique of girls called the "Queens." The
leader is her best friend Niko. Their friendship has been strained lately
because Tom—Sykosa's first boyfriend boyfriend—has gotten all serious about
making her his pretty Prom princess. That is if he ever gets around to asking
her. Before Prom, there's a party at Niko's cottage where parental supervision
will be nil. He wants to have sex. She doesn't. He sometimes acts like that
doesn't matter.
It matters.
Sykosa has a secret she has never told anyone about. Although, some people—Tom included—know anyway. It happened last year and it was big and she'll cry if she talks about it so she's done talking about it, okay? Never mind, it's nobody's business. Except it keeps happening, and it never stops. She doesn't want to deal with it. He does. She sometimes acts like that doesn't matter.
It matters.
