[I was dreaming when I wrote this ... again, another case of when I wrote this in my head last night, it made sense, but now...eh...]
Judy Blume turns 70 next week.
Yeah, wow, mull that one over.
Anyway, in a recent interview, she says she wrote Forever (one of the few Blume books I didn't read…I was probably too hung up in the Babysitters Club) because her teenage daughter asked her to do "a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die."
And it is so true. Especially the young adult/teen fiction of my generation, if the girl had sex, she was a slut and/or it resulted in pregnancy, a disease or death. Same for drugs/alcohol/smoking cigarettes or anything "bad" (fighting with your parents resulted in your running away and becoming a hooker that landed a mean pimp and got you strung out on drugs).
And I think it's true of most current fiction aimed at women, when not hung up in consumer trappings (see my last blog entry rant). The main character (sometimes an accessory character if we don't want to ugly up the heroine) will learn a lesson and have an epiphany and change her whole life. That's fine. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to wake a person up. But why does a person (in fiction) always have to have something major and bad happen? That's not reality.
Case in point: I've written (and rewritten, but that's another entry) two "novels." Written about five or so years apart.
In one, the main character is male and possibly crazy. He kills people (possibly). Yet, he has no real epiphany. Nothing bad really ever happens.
In the second one, the main character is female and, for all intents and purposes, "normal." She is a very, very loose interpretation of me (mostly, I took stuff that happened to me and stretched it extremely far, for story purposes). The girl drinks and has sex. No big deal. But I have worked on and off on this story for years and over time, over many edits, in several failed attempts to move the story along, the heroine has been through everything (dying estranged father, dead sibling, mentally ill sibling, drug habit, rape, abortion, DUI and resulting detox treatment, I can't even remember what else). I thought that was a necessary plot device, action to move the story along. My intentions were that she needed to have something "major" happen in order to change her life.
But, why should she?
Why can't my girl be happy drinking and liking boys? I'm not saying that the heroine should magically find herself in a fairytale setting, but, hell, she's been through the fictional wringer, while the male character in the other novel kills people and has no real aftermath. Yes, a person can make bad choices and yes, sometimes things occur because of it, but it doesn't mean that the worst possible scenario will automatically happen (i.e. the kids having sex resulting in disease, pregnancy and death).
So, yeah, I gotta go do some editing…
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