Synthesisers & Billowy Drapes: Serious Academic Notes on The Hunger

Ever wondered what a Serious Academic's approach to watching a studied film is? Well wonder no more, because for some reason instead of taking Serious Academic Notes (okay fine, as well as) while watching Tony Scott's The Hunger for the section on fear of ageing in my thesis, I decided to take Actual Mental Notes instead. So this is, pretty much verbatim, what I thought of The Hunger while I was watching it.

For those who are not vampire enthusiasts & do not necessarily know these things, The Hunger (1983) tells the story of Miriam (Catherine Deneuve), an elegant vampire whose lover John (David Bowie), a younger vampire, suddenly begins to age rapidly after centuries of being thirty years old. John approaches Sarah (Susan Sarandon), a doctor & leading researcher in premature ageing, but she can do nothing to help him. When John wastes away Miriam sets her sights on Sarah & promises her eternal youth if she will be hers forever & ever. The rest of this post contains spoilers, but mostly it contains screencaps & my thoughts about this whole 80s vampires business.

The film opens with - what else - Bella Lugosi is Dead. It's ironic, you see, because Bela Lugosi played Dracula & Dracula was a vampire & vampires are dead. Undead, undead, undead.

Oh Bauhaus! Oh Bowie! Watching this movie is like being fifteen again & it's only three minutes in.

The 80s: it was all cigarettes, leather & ominous music. I know this because I was alive for half of it. I don't remember it having this much blood though... So far we know that David Bowie & Catherine Deneuve go to clubs & then kill people. Sexily. Meanwhile, Susan Sarandon researches monkeys, less sexily. We are invited, with great subtlety, to draw comparisons between the rage-filled cannibal monkeys & the classy, elegant vampires.

People can smoke through veils? That's impressive. Maybe it's just Catherine Deneuve. Although I still have trouble seeing her as anything other than Peau d'Âne...

So although he & his Donkey Skin have killed leather-clad clubbers & drank their blood, David Bowie is troubled.

I would love to see a man actually wear silk pyjamas. I should buy some for Alan.

And the soundtrack goes like this: Classical music! This is classical music because these are classy people!

Everybody loves a good flashback! In this one we learn that Catherine Deneuve & David Bowie will be together forever & ever. If it's in a flashback it has to be true. Also, David Bowie is still troubled. You can tell he's troubled because there are billowy drapes:

Miriam & John are musicians. They practice with a spunky young neighbour & maybe it's just the blue tones of the set or the classical music or the fact that ancient vampires are hanging out with a pre-pubescent kid but there's something a little bit creepy about this friendship.

At this point I took some Actual Academic Notes about ageing & thought that I'm glad this film isn't particularly subtle because that makes my job a lot easier.

Were all kids in the 80s so androgynous? I was convinced Alice was a boy until Miriam said her name.

We come back to Doctor Sarah, who is going to explain about vampirism through the metaphor of monkeys. Her monkeys are ageing at an accelerated rate. I wonder what this could possibly mean for our vampire friend John? Could that possibly be why he is troubled? Myriam goes to see Dr Sarah at her book signing, & bewitches her with her veil. Meanwhile, John's hair starts falling out.

According to Sarah, sleep affects how healthy your blood is, & your blood affects how fast or slowly you age. So the more you sleep, the less you'll age. That makes sense to me; I take a lot of naps & I look about ten years younger than I am. I suppose I must be a vampire.

John tells Miriam that he can't sleep, & that his hair is falling out. We discover that Myriam had other lovers (many other lovers, & some of them female, oh my), before John, who suffered the same fate as he is suffering now. This fate took a few days to fully manifest but when it did, the lovers allegedly aged rapidly because they couldn't sleep. (Beware, sufferers of insomnia, you too may be diseased vampires.) John doesn't know what to do.

Oh the synthesisers! I wish I could take a screencap of the sound of this film. With the synthesiser, the above screencap reads: "What am I going to do to do to do to do?" It's quite difficult to take that kind of an echo seriously. Also, drapes.

Same drapes, different flashback. Miriam has felt this pain before, with any number of historical lovers.

Dr Sarah believes that ageing may be a disease that can be cured. John goes to see her in the hope that she will cure his accelerated ageing, but unsurprisingly she thinks he's not well in the head. Nobody's ever really crazy, Sarah, didn't you know that? Mentally ill people are really just vampires. I've learned this from so many vampire texts I'm surprised you don't know this already.

Also, this film is mostly made up of the clacking of shoes (sometimes I wish I wore heels).

Creepy decaying monkey! Because everybody needs a picture of a decaying monkey on a Wednesday morning. John, sitting for much longer than the promised fifteen minutes in Sarah's waiting room, is ageing visibly & very rapidly. Just like the monkey.

When Sarah witnesses John's extreme transformation, she says those unwise words that may just have doomed her with half the film left to go: "I'm going to find out [what's caused this] if it kills me."

A lot of the questions in this film can be answered by "because the 80s." For example: Q. Why is this five minute sequence of a person rollerblading alone to a ghettoblaster in the middle of an abandoned building in this film? A. Because the 80s.

In a spectacular display of bad timing, Alice shows up at John & Miriam's house a day before they had planned to practice together, & Miriam is away. The androgynous child wears a skirt (& legwarmers of course - Q. Why legwarmers? A. Because the 80s) yet still manages to look like one of the Hanson brothers.

And the soundtrack goes like this: CLASSICAL MUSIC, THIS IS CLASSICAL MUSIC PEOPLE!

Alice rings the doorbell & suddenly-old John, who doesn't want her to come in, tells her: "there's nobody here." I didn't know people over five ever fell for that. He lets her in anyway, & proceeds to smile sadly & knowingly whenever she asks if he is John's father (which she does about three times).

And the soundtrack goes like this: Classical mu-- SYNTHESISER!

John convinces Alice to play a piece for him while he walks around her fondling the front of his shirt. Alice has just told him that she loves Myriam ("she's my best friend") & John himself ("I love him. He's just hard to figure out.") & they have bonded over a chord & yet when you see her continue to play despite the fact that there's some serious fear growing in her eyes you know he's going to kill her. This scene would be the creepiest thing ever if it weren't for that bloody synthesiser.

Every good vampire should have a furnace in their basement.

Miriam returns & doesn't seem to mind that John has killed their young neighbour & her alleged best friend. He did a pretty good job of cleaning up after himself, in fairness. John begs Miriam to release him & let him die, but Miriam explains gently that a little side-effect of immortality is that you can't actually die. Instead, you live on in your ever-ageing, ever-deteriorating body for the rest of eternity, or until you turn to dust, whichever comes first. 

Yep, living forever sounds appropriately horrible. Do you hear that, Stephenie Meyer?

John falls down the stairs because he is too feeble to walk. Miriam gathers him into her arms & brings him up to her billowy, drapey, dove-filled attic that is also filled with coffins.

Then, Miriam introduces her decomposing - but still somehow living - lover to all her other lovers who lie rotting - but STILL ALIVE - in coffins in her attic. But hey, at least there are doves.

Meanwhile, Sarah is hallucinating Miriam while getting out of the shower. Her boyfriend is none the wiser.

I'd be scared too if I had crazy 80s lighting in my bathroom.

Sarah leaves her boyfriend & her scary bathroom & goes to visit Miriam to see if she can bring John back to her clinic to run some tests. Miriam tells her that John is in Switzerland (it's the "nice big farm in the country" of vampires), invites her into her enormous home & offers her sherry.

"Are you making a pass at me Mrs Blaylock?" asks Sarah, noticing Miriam's flirting tone. No Sarah, she just wants to keep you forever in a coffin in her attic with her other not-actually-dead-but-still-rotting lovers. But hey, there are doves!

And the soundtrack goes like this: CLASSICAL MUSIC!

Sarah: Oops, I just spilled blood-like sherry on my shirt! I will now have to show you that I'm not wearing a bra while wetting my tshirt unnecessarily to clean it even though you're totally going to lend me your shirt anyway so that I'll take my top off! Good thing I chose to wear nipple today. I mean white...

This film is very subtle.

And the soundtrack goes like this: OPERA! It's like classical music, but with voices!

Billowing drapes sex scene! Because whenever anyone has sex there are billowy drapes. The drape industry knows no recession!

(Slightly more seriously, I recently read a very interesting passage about this film in Nina Auerbach's Our Vampires, Ourselves that talks about the fragmentation & fetishisation of women's bodies & how clothed, Myriam & Sarah are very different, but with the broken-up images & the camera angles & those bloody billowy drapes it's difficult to distinguish one from the other when they're naked.)

Soon, however, the women are whole again & it's the morning after & Sarah is at a restaurant with her boyfriend & RARE STEAK, GUYS, LOOK, SHE'S EATING RARE STEAK! It's like bloody, lesbian sex on a plate!

Question time! Q. What's the number one way to find out that your girlfriend is a vampire? (Hint: it's not "because the 80s," although that answer works too...)

I was just about to say that I was beginning to miss the constant smoking of the first half of this film when this scene happened. Post-steak cigarette, anyone?

Boyfriend asks Sarah where she got the pretty Egyptian necklace she's wearing & is surprised to learn that it was a gift from Miriam. He also finds it a little strange that Sarah spent five hours "just talking" with a woman she'd just met. What kind of woman gives jewellery to a woman she barely knows? A "European" woman, that's who.

"She's that kind of woman. She's... European." Is that what they're calling it these days?

Sarah isn't feeling well. She can't eat even though she's ravenous, & she throws up at night. Boyfriend brings her to her own clinic where a fellow sleep disorder/ ageing specialist tells her that she has two strains of blood in her veins, both fighting for dominance... & one of those strains isn't human. Would the bloodletting sex with a vampire have anything to do with that? I think we need to see another flashback to really understand.

Sarah skips her appointment with a specialist to go to Miriam's house & shout at her for having infected her with vampire blood. Miriam thinks Sarah's ungrateful & believes she shouldn't attack her in her own stately home, which is a fair point, really. Miriam just wanted to give Sarah the gift of eternal life (most of which'll be spent rotting in a coffin). Who wouldn't be grateful for that?

You can tell she's getting angry because her hair is out of place. (Does that mean that I'm angry all the time?) Miriam tells Sarah that even if she tries to leave she'll be back, that soon The Hunger (you know, like the name of the film) will know no reason, & she'll need Miriam to show her how to feed.

Sarah storms out & tries to hail a taxi or call her doctor boyfriend but The Hunger knows no reason & she needs to feed so she returns to Miriam all shaky & weak.

Q. Why is that lady wearing a green plastic trenchcoat & granddad-waisted jeans? A. Because the 80s of course!

And the soundtrack goes like this: SYNTHESISER!

Miriam picks up a prostitute dude to feed to her new vampire. She even kills him first - like a mother bird - because Sarah is too weak.

Okay, seriously. Why are all vampires messy eaters? It can't be that hard to get blood in your mouth & not all over the rest of you. Not that I'd know...

The doorbell rings as Miriam's enjoying her messy snack & oh no, it's the Boyfriend! He's here to see if Miriam's heard from Sarah because she didn't turn up to her doctor's appointment. But Sarah has The Hunger & The Hunger knows no bounds! 

Sarah is also a messy eater.

Sarah & Miriam start to kiss - bloodily, messily - when Sarah suddenly seizes the knife-hidden-as-an-ankh necklace &... stabs herself in the neck? Sarah dies, very dramatically.

The dreaded echo is back as Miriam wails & mourns. Sadness sounds even sadder with a synthesiser!

The drapes, how they billow! They billow even in flashbacks! This set is 3/4 drapes. Miriam carries Sarah's body up to the attic, where more drapes await.

But what's this? The drapes have brought the rotted lovers back from the grave! Run! Run & hide! (But hey, at least there are doves.)

The rotting lovers advance on Miriam, the bannister gives out & Miriam falls to the ground floor where she ages so rapidly that within ten seconds she is mostly skeleton. From what I can see, her death is death by drapes & doves. And synthesiser. And slow-mo. (It's what kills us all.)

One big happy family.

For the last scene, we cut to a big apartment in a big city, where Vampire Sarah (not dead, apparently, but, like dear Bela Lugosi, undead undead undead) caresses a new lover & shows off her pearl earrings & Miriam-inspired lipstick. You can tell she's Head Vampire now because she's wearing pearl earrings. It's science. 

No matter where you go - you can turn your immortal lover into a decaying corpse & seal her in a coffin for all eternity, you can sell your house, leave your boyfriend, move cities, live in a new apartment - but you will never get away from them. There will always be billowy drapes.

More Important Life Lessons with Popular Culture

As you can possibly tell from the absence of posts, I managed to stop procrastinating & write my chapter, which means I haven't been writing much else that isn't confined to 140 characters. (I like Twitter! Who knew?) Then I was sick & then I was at Electric Picnic & then I was sick again which is what happens when you go to a music festival with a high temperature. Now I am no longer procrastinating & no longer at Electric Picnic & no longer sick & I am busy with the revisions to the aforementioned chapter & catching up on the epic to-do-list that grew monstrously when I wasn't looking. I also need to clean the house. But enough about me! More about The Vampire Diaries! It's the show we all love to hate! This is me watching the entire. Second. Season. (Which was painful, hence the need for the full stops after every word.) And taking down the lessons I was learning as I went. Here are those invaluable life lessons:

Things I have learned from The Vampire Diaries Season 2:

You can't have vampires without werewolves.

You can always tell who the Good Doppleganger is: she's the one with the straight hair. Cause only good guys have straight hair. (And only bad guys dress in black.)

Rich people have swords just lying around in their gardens, true story.

People don't stay dead. Seriously. Ever.

Angry jock guys are only angry because they're werewolves, not because they're jerks.

If you are a vampire who wants to out a werewolf, you should choose the only African-American human male character in two seasons to pick a fight with him. Cause, y'know, if you picked a white guy it just wouldn't be realistic... God I hate this show.

Vampires are messy eaters. (It would probably help if they kept their mouths closed.)

Everyone in America is skinny.

Girls who are insecure are horribly annoying & should be ridiculed.

Dramatic music that goes like this: "dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-DUUUNNNN" can never be overused.

Emo rock music is never not appropriate.

Vampires all have iPhones.

Okay, seriously, all African-Americans are witches. This is a picture list of all the African-American characters in the show. It's also a picture list of all the witches.

Small towns in America hold Events every other weekend (dances, bakeoffs, barbecues, balls, fundraisers, competitions, bizarre re-enactments). Maybe this is really true - I've never been to the States but I've been re-watching Gilmore Girls in my spare time & that's pretty much the same thing, right? Can any small town USians confirm or deny this? Do I know any Americans from small towns? Is there even such a thing? I'm beginning to believe that small town America was invented by horror authors & Dawson's Creek.

If you approach a guy & he's horribly rude to you, it's not because he's a jerk, it's because he's a vampire & he wants to kill you so he's really just being caring & kind by keeping you away from him. Isn't that nice to know?

Men do evil things for power. Women only do evil things for love.

Women really love sacrificing themselves.

It's only Too Late to save someone's life with Super Healing Vampire Blood when it is narratively important. Any other time, it works like a charm.

And even then, remember point 4 above.

Crying over Skype is a perfectly normal way for vampires, witches & humans to interact. 

Okay, seriously, does anybody stay dead in this series?

Century old vampire Originals are totally hip with the cool kids & say things like OMG.

Everyone is originally from Eastern Europe. Except African-Americans. They're from Salem.

Everybody loves a good flashback.

Oh all right, men like to sacrifice themselves too... but only to save their families.

Okay seriously, the number one lesson I've learned from The Vampire Diaries is this: if anyone around you dies - a friend, a loved one, an enemy - don't sweat it (unless it's your enemy). They will come back to life within a few episodes, a season at most. Don't believe me? Just watch The Vampire Diaries.

Deadline-Dreaders

So. I'm submitting the first chapter of my thesis soon, very soon, too soon, & I have Thinker's Block. It's more than Writer's Block (I'm writing heaps, just nothing that makes much sense or is any good), it's not quite a mental block (there's some stuff going on in my head still, but this stuff isn't necessarily thoughts, & certainly not Thesis Thoughts) & as a result, for one of the first times in my life, I'm spending my days procrastinating. I don't usually have a problem with procrastination, but something about this deadline is giving me the psychological heebeejeebees & I just can't seem to face my chapter for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

It doesn't help that (for those few people reading this who aren't my friend in real life & so therefore haven't heard & read about this all over the place & constantly for the last two weeks) I'm recently engaged, & if there's one thing that makes for excellent time-wasting, it's wedding blogs. Also, I recently got an iPhone, & if there's another thing that makes for excellent time-wasting, it's Angry Birds (isn't Angry Birds the silliest, most mindless thing ever? & for that reason isn't it wonderful?).

I think place is pretty important for any kind of writing. Here is where I can work well: on the train from Dublin to Mayo, on the train from Mayo to Dublin, in the veranda of the house in Mayo until it gets too hot, on the apple-green couch in the house in Mayo with a cup of earl grey until I get too cold, sitting on the kitchen step in the back garden in the sunlight with a glass of lemonade, squinting at the laptop screen & shooing the cat away from the keyboard.

The problem is that I can't always be on a train, & when I'm in Dublin I can't be in the house in Mayo (for obvious reasons), & when it rains I can't sit on the kitchen step in the back garden in the sunshine (sitting on the kitchen step in the back garden in the rain just doesn't have the same appeal). I've tried turning off the internet to get away from wedding blogs but I still have my iPhone. I've tried hiding my phone but I don't have any secret hiding places from myself, & even with no phone & no internet I find the cat gets quite distracting when I tempt him to chase a ribbon.

Help me, fellow deadline-dreaders! How do you cope with the psychological heebeejeebees? How do you even spell heebeejeebees? Do you have any tried & tested anti-procrastination techniques? Or would you rather I posted a picture of my cat? (He's a very lovely cat. He has a heart on his nose.) Do you think I'll get this chapter in on time? I'll match any bet against. Oh dear. Even this post is a type of procrastination. Pity me, dear reader, it looks like I'm doomed.

Harry Potter, Male Protagonists & Strong Female Characters

Hello! I'm posting again! It's quite shocking, even to me! I have some links for you! And then I'm going to talk about Harry Potter for a bit! And now I'm going to stop with the exclamation marks.

The first link is to a post by Alyssa Rosenberg about Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen & Movement Mascots, because it's pretty interesting, & the second is to a piece by Sady Doyle that the first link refers to: In Praise of Joanne Rowling's Hermione Granger Series

(ETA: Also, because I'm a few days late with this, here's the link to Sady Doyle's response to the feedback on her first post, where she makes a lot of good points. )

I have two problems with the the "In Praise of the Hermione Granger Series" post. The first problem is the issue that it takes with Joanne Rowling using her initials as her pen name. When JK Rowling approached publishers with Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone she was an unemployed single mother with a very young child who wanted to sell her novel. I think it's unfortunate that we live in a society where young boys are taught - usually completely unconsciously - to avoid reading books by female authors, even those with male protagonists, for fear of them being too girly. I think it's unfortunate that we live in a society where "girly" means "unsuitable for boys." However, I really don't think anyone can blame an unpublished writer for trying to attract a wider readership.

My second problem with the piece is this: it is entirely possible for a male character to represent gender equality. In a perfect society girls & boys would be represented equally in children's books and on television, but unfortunately we don't live in that society, & in order to raise these issues with children of all genders it seems to often be necessary to speak through a male character's mouth. The Harry Potter series is hardly a beacon of anti-feminism, but my thoughts on gender roles in the series are multiple & variant (& often contradictory) & could take up an entire thesis let alone a blog post, so I'll let them be for now.

I think that there might be a difference between feminist texts & texts with Strong Female Characters. Not all feminist texts have strong female characters & not all strong female characters live in feminist texts. Hermione Granger is a Strong Female Character. However, if she were the protagonist of Hermione Granger & the Philosopher's Stone the book, unfortunately, would never have been published. Harry Potter's opinion & treatment of women, however, is not unlike Hermione's. He accepts that women can be as intelligent & adventurous as men (he respects Professor McGonagall as much as he does Professor Dumbledore & trusts & relies on Hermione as much as he does Ron) & also that they can be as powerful & evil (he hesitates no more in fighting Bellatrix than he does Voldemort). Gender roles in the series aside, that's a pretty big feminist step.

So while, yes, we should certainly be angry & disappointed that the popular culture we've grown up with over-sexualises, underestimates & under-represents women & girls, & we should what we can to raise awareness about these inequalities in order to change them, let's also celebrate the small victories, the Strong Female Characters, the Hermione Grangers, Lyra Belacquas & Katniss Everdeens of the world.

I'm writing a book at the moment (at the same time as a PhD thesis, because I'm just that much of a masochist compulsive writer). It's a young adult book, it's got werewolves & vampires in it, & it has a male main character. In its first draft it was a sort-of-ghost-story with a female protagonist but when I sat down to rewrite the second draft the first sentence that went down on paper was "Dylan's mam always said he could lie for Ireland" & Dylan just sort of took the story from there. The reason I kept him as my main character is the same reason I decided to make the sort-of-ghosts werewolves & in a later draft added some vampires. I enjoy reading young adult fiction & mostly I enjoy researching it. I know quite a lot about it at this point, which means that I know what works (&, presumably, what doesn't work) & also what sells. Male main characters sell. Vampires & werewolves sell. If I want any chance of somebody publishing this book if I ever when I finally finish it, I want it to be as sellable as possible. However, this book will still have feminist leanings. It'll still have Strong Female Characters. And hopefully the boys who read it (my teenage brother'll be the first, as Representative of my Intended Readership) will pick up on the idea that girls & boys deserve to be treated equally & will apply that to their own lives. What about you, Writing Readers? What gender are your protagonists? (What gender are you?) Why?

And, in the same vein, who were your #childhoodfeministheroes? Who are your favourite Strong Female Characters?

Things I Have Learned from the Vampire Diaries Season One

Important Life Lessons with Popular Culture
This week: The Vampire Diaries Season 1

If you name a town Mystic Falls, you've got what's coming to you
(What's coming to you is usually vampires)
Vampires always go back to highschool
Vampires like American football
Vampires have been playing American football since 1864
Vervaine is the new garlic
Stalking the human girl who looks exactly like your evil vampire ex-girlfriend & then going out with her is really not creepy at all
It's especially not creepy when your bad boy brother - who was also involved with said evil vampire ex-girlfriend - falls in love with her human lookalike too
Girls who ask boys out are pathetic & will be manipulated by all of said boys
Alternatively, they're vampires
If the boy you're seeing stands you up, is rude to you or doesn't text you back, it's not because he doesn't like you/ is a jerk, it's because he's a vampire & has more important things to do & you just wouldn't understand
All African-American women are witches
(There is no such thing as African-American men)
(Post episode 15: okay fine, there is no such thing as human African-American men)
Never invite teachers, aunts' ex-lovers or pizza delivery boys into your home because they're all vampires
Actually, anyone who asks to come into your home is probably a vampire
Having lived through the 50s automatically means you can dance
You can tell your boyfriend is/is turning into a Bad Boy if he wears a leather jacket & drives a fancy car
Bad Boys drink human blood
Also, their hair gets more vertical
The Bad Boy is always secretly good
Cheating is totally fine once both boys are brothers
Killing yourself to become a vampire is a totally acceptable way of dealing with your problems
Nobody actually ever stays dead

Actual Writing! Now With 50% More Exclamation Marks!

Told you I was bad with blogs. I've been meaning to write about various different things for a while but this article in the Wall Street Journal makes my blood boil so much that I seem to have broken out of my blogging stupor. Maybe I'm only good at blogs when I'm angry...

(Also, I really hate the word blog.)

But there's so much to be angry about! As someone who writes & reads young adult literature & studies teenage vampires for a living I think I can safely say that I know a little bit about adolescent fiction. Also I was a teenager myself, not so very long ago. Which I think might be something that the author of the Wall Street Journal article might have forgotten. (That she was once a teenager, I mean, not that I was. I'm sure she's entirely unaware that I was ever a teenager.)

The article, in case you don't want to read it, is about how bad young adult fiction is for teenagers because it's all vampires & suicide & self mutilation, because it deals with dark subjects like drug addiction, rape & murder, & because it can be "like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is."

On the one hand I'd like to point out that actually, some vampire texts for young adults are much more tame & conservative than their black-white-&-red covers suggest, & are mostly interested in lustful tension, romance & not having sex before marriage (*cough*Twilight*cough*) but without being facetious, there are a lot of things that life is for teenagers. Sometimes life is boring & unfulfilling & feels like it hasn't started properly yet, it's all about school & family & not enough happens so teenagers read books about lives where a lot happens, & these books take them outside of their own lives. Sometimes life is exciting & fast-paced & there's so much happening, & a lot of happiness, & kisses & parties & new experiences & teenagers read books that reflect these experiences but also books that reinforce the knowledge they already have that not everybody's life is so lucky. And sometimes, a lot of times when you're a teenager & a lot of times when you're not a teenager too, life is hard. It may not be hard in the same way as it is for certain characters in certain books, but the feelings & thoughts might be the same. Sometimes life is just as hard as it is for characters in books; sometimes it's even harder.

Maybe there's a reason that teenagers are reading grittier fiction; maybe there's a reason writers are writing it. Maybe, before assuming that writing about difficult realities in life can corrupt a young person's innocence, moral development & tenderness of heart, some statistics about the percentage of Western teenagers who experience things like alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual violence, homophobia & self harm should be taken into account.

Picking one of the themes the article found too upsetting for teenagers' delicate sensibilities as an example, if we take into account the fact that one in six American women has been the victim of rape or sexual assault in her lifetime, that 44% of rape victims are under eighteen & 80% under thirty, that young people aged twelve to thirty-four are most at risk of sexual violence & that girls aged sixteen to nineteen are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault (source), that unfortunately means that a pretty high percentage of readers of young adult fiction will have firsthand experience of these themes, & a wider percentage still will know a friend, classmate or family member who has. So how exactly is reading a novel about these kinds of experiences going to corrupt a teenager's innocence?

Another example: although the All-Knowing Internet can't give me exact statistics because of the secretive nature of the problem, it's been estimated that one in fifteen young people deliberately harm themselves. Other studies suggest that up to 33% of teenagers self harm. (Small aside: it's so refreshing to be able to use Wikipedia as a source! It feels kind of naughty! Clearly I need a break from academia... Maybe I'm not just good at blogging when I'm angry. Maybe I need to be procrastinating too.) So saying that books focusing on pathologies help to normalise them only really works when said pathologies aren't already normal. A healthy, happy adolescent will not hurt themselves simply because they read it in a book. This underestimation of teenage readers' intelligence & capacity for critical thinking really enrages me, & unfortunately it comes up a lot. It's really just too easy to cry out "won't somebody please think of the children!" The children can think for themselves!

In fact, the children are thinking for themselves! They're the ones reading these books! They're the ones buying these books, they're the ones influencing the market! If teenagers didn't read these kinds of books, these kinds of books wouldn't be published! That's how the book market works!

ALSO! Putting recommended reading under the headings "books for young men" & "books for young women" is restrictive & insulting. Do young women not enjoy war fiction? Do they not understand or care about censorship, cowboys or autism? Do young men not enjoy Shakespearean retellings? Do they not understand or care about sexual awakenings, family sagas or Frankenstein? Please, oh please, won't somebody think of the children!

Planning to write

Here are some good places for writing:
On a train.
At the beach.
On a wall (no wall in particular, any wall will do).
Up a tree.
Up a ladder if you're in the city and there aren't any immediately available climbable trees.
On grass, provided the grass is not inside a house.
On a bench (same rule applies).
Beside the water (same rule doesn't apply; baths, showers & even the kitchen sink are all good for this one).

This is how I write: longhand, in almost indecipherable handwriting, with 'x's dotting the 'i's. I write with black ballpoint pens that I buy in Paperchase because they're pretty & colourful on the outside & have floral or butterfly patterns on them, & I can't (or perhaps won't, I'm not sure, I've never tested the theory) write with anything else. I write my thesis notes on a narrow-ruled A4 pad & everything else on a variety of pretty narrow-ruled notebooks. The lines have to be thin & not too dark; grey or blue are best. When it comes to fiction, I write poetry anywhere (on any number of notebooks, alongside my college notes, in my phone, on my skin) & I type stories or novel-bits on Word documents. Until now.

I've been having Writer's Angst about my werewolf book for a while now, so I recently saved everything I had in a folder called "[Instert Name of Novel Here] Draft 10 - Early 2011," (yes, draft ten, I had a hard time believing it myself) & I started the whole thing from the beginning, & I made one of my main characters a girl instead of a boy, & that felt right, so I made her a vampire instead of a werewolf without really realising it & that felt right too, unfortunately, so now it seems I'm doomed to write about vampires in fiction as well as study. Le sigh.

My problem is that I like to plan things. I like to plan & plot & chart & I swear this makes me sound a lot more organised than I am in real life. So when I hit a rut with my werewolf book I continue the plotting of another book I'm working on that's still in the planning stage, & when you stack that up with my thesis whose first chapter is only now nearing the end of the planning stage you're left with a lot of planning.

So last week I turned off my laptop & took a new notebook (from Paperchase, narrow ruled with nice thin lines) & began to write a story with only two settings, four characters & minimal descriptive passages. I haven't & amn't planning ahead other than knowing in the back of my mind more or less where I want the story to go, & I'm not typing a single word of it out on the computer until it's finished. And I have the funny feeling that it'll get finished before any of the others.

What about you, how do you write? Are you a planner or a jumper-into-the-deep-end? What works best for you? Do you type or handwrite? Are you as obsessive as I am about how you write? Please tell me you are, so I don't feel so alone!

Speaking of planning, I think that's why I'm always so bad with blogs. I feel the need to plot & plan everything (seriously, you should see my shopping lists; the one that comes with me to the shop is usually the second or third draft) to the detriment of actually writing it. And I much prefer writing to planning. It's a strange predicament. Anyway, I didn't plot or plan this post at all, which is possibly why it's here. I actually set out to write about Sucker Punch & Buffy the Vampire Slayer but in order to do that I have to plan out what I want to say so I'm just going to go away quietly & compose my thoughts & I'll be back in a couple of days (I get distracted easily, okay?) to write them.