Thoughts on point of view and being - Day 17
In my fevered state Wednesday I snagged a few Young Adult novels out of the teen section at our new library. Of course, I didn’t have my list of suggestions from all of you helpful readers, so I had to wing it. Yesterday I read Saint Iggy by K. L. Going. I don’t know why I was worried about writing for teens about subjects like sex, drugs, crime and finding one’s way. I loved the fast pace of this story, and the huge challenges this 16 year-old boy has to face in his day to day life. Born addicted to drugs, father always drunk and high, mother often drunk and high and also often “gone visiting” for long weeks with no contact. Slow learner–especially in terms of common sense and how to play the game at school and how to stay under the radar. But he makes the most of what’s put in front of him when he gets it that he’s hit rock bottom.
The one thing that I kept getting hung up on was the use of the verb to be in the narrative. The story’s told in the first person, by Iggy.
I think, Oh, so terminated means over. And it is not like I didn’t see this coming, but this time I can tell it is real so my mind wanders and I start thinking how the girl wasn’t even that hot and my parents will never show up to a hearing and what will I amount to anyway?
We know Iggy struggles, that he comes from the projects in New York City, but he narrates without very many contractions. About three pages in I started to get annoyed that the kid is thinking in such perfect English, that it sounds stilted, an extra syllable where it should just spill out onto the page smoothly. Or ride across my brain seamlessly. I know, it’s a small nit, but it popped up on just about every page. I loved the story enough to make myself ignore it. I’m glad I did, it was a fulfilling read. But it’s something to think about in my own writing, in trying to make Henry’s voice believable, because really, I have no idea what I’m doing.
I’ve put K. L. Going’s other books on my TBR list.
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
