The lads have written two great posts this week, and both expound the virtues of breaking molds, ignoring naysayers, and being a generally brave person with our fiction. These are ideals I support wholly. But, since (as we’ve discussed before) I’m an insufferable blowhard and a contrarian, I’m going to focus on another aspect of good fiction that both those bits take for granted: commitment to language, prose, form, and the art itself.

I’m not saying there are no YA writers who valiantly craft their prose and obsess over form. I’m certain there are. I know of one YA writer, anecdotally, who is so committed to establishing the right rhythm with her writing that she will sometimes write a beat, so to speak, before she writes the words—“Dun dun DUN dundun DUN dun,” or something, like a songwriter probably does.

What I am saying is this: especially in light of nonsense like this piece by Crouch and Hendrix, and the spreading opinion that writing in general—mostly, I think, thanks to the digital revolution and the very recent Kindle and advertising debacle—is suffering and will continue to suffer a drastic reduction in quality, now is a good time to up our game. Do we need to sit down with our quill pens and craft canto after canto of Spenserian stanzas, with the ultimate goal being the first-ever YA epic poem in strict verse? It might be neat; in fact I’d love to see that. But no. I don’t mean that.

I mean—well, like Peter Parker’s uncle Ben, or maybe it was Voltaire, once said: “With great power comes great responsibility,” and with the power we claim by offering stories to the world, maybe especially the youth in the world, comes a responsibility to make those stories the best they can be. Be brave. Break rules. Ignore the variant conceptions of what YA fiction—for boys or girls or either or neither—is supposed to be. But make it great.

Edmund Spenser respected his readers. He knew there was beauty in the form he developed. He knew his readers would see it, and would revel in it. Similarly, our readers—and they’re young readers, yes, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care; I’d argue they still care, whereas older readers probably gave up caring long ago and never will again—will appreciate a commitment to quality, a commitment just for them. Just for silly old YA.

I love Hunter S. Thompson because he really didn’t give a shit. About deadlines, the law – common decency. Here was a man who drove big cars and shot bigger guns. A man who smoked, snorted, or imbibed any substance put in front of him. And, in case you didn’t know, he happened to be a brilliant writer.

Maybe your only exposure to HST comes via Johnny Depp. And as fine of a portayal as he gives, you really don’t know HST until you’ve read HST. Read the opening chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Those pages are a clinic in voice, not to mention a near-perfect piece of writing.

Let’s get down to brass tacks – yes, I’d love to be the Hunter S. Thompson of YA. I’d love for me and the Boys to show up at SCBWI in some Big Red Shark, screeching into the parking lot like a pack of lunatics. Jeff would be dumping beer onto his chest as Steve harrassed some noob middle grade writer we picked up at some gas station, dreams of six-figure advances in the kid’s eyes. We’d fall out of the car and head for the hotel bar as the kid ran off behind us, yelling and screaming about cutlery and Mean Steve.

Trust me, I’d love being the YA writer known for trashing hotel rooms, for skipping out on bills – for spending ridiculous advances on even more ridiculous things. I’d love to walk into a room and make everybody in the place say: “Oh, shit.”

Sadly, I just… don’t. I mean, let’s get real – I work at a church. I’ve never smoked, snorted, or swallowed anything, ever. Hell, it’s all Jeff and Steve can do to get me to drink a beer. But like many things, this isn’t about the specifics. YA doesn’t needs some whacked-out author trolling the conference floors. It doesn’t need degenerates.

Well, any other degenerates.

We need somebody who isn’t safe. Somebody who’s willing to look at what’s happening and, with as much force as she can muster, say: “Enough, you filthy savages… let’s go hump the literary dream.”

Yes, hump.

But they can’t do it because they’re trying to establish a brand. Jesus Christ, no. It needs to be somebody who’s truly willing take a chance – to really be dangerous with their stories, with their writing. A person who’s willing to risk never getting published if it means being able to write with integrity. Somebody who knows it’s about more than simply shouldering a sleeve of tattoos, wearing Chuck Taylors (white, of course), and pretending like you don’t give a damn at kidlit drink nights.

Even if this isn’t you, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It doesn’t mean you can’t take a chance and really write something that’s different. It doesn’t mean you can’t actually follow all of those agent and editor blogs that always tell you not to write for the trend (while simultaneously representing and buying books that, you know, follow the trend.) It doesn’t mean that you have to follow the rules.

It means only one thing: write like a crazy bastard. Write twisted characters. Write hilarious and blistering dialogue. Just write – everyday, despite what anybody says. Or, as Hunter put it, Buy the ticket, Take the ride.

And hold on.

We all have a textbook we need to rip apart.

Maybe your textbook is HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL or HOW TO BEHAVE IN PUBLIC or WHAT GUYS ARE SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT.

These books are anthologies. You’ve written some of the stories, but not all of them. And somewhere in that book – perhaps in the preface or “about the author” page – is text that doesn’t belong. By way of bribery, nepotism, or peer pressure, some unworthy material has wormed its way into your book, and is shaping the way you live every day.

RIP IT OUT.

A few years ago I was road tripping with some buddies I’d known since high school. We were on our way to a hotel for the night, killing time by slinging hypothetical questions. It was a tradition for us, and we quickly fell into our old rhythm: If you had 24 hours left on earth, who is the one person you would spend it with? Is it better to fly or teleport? Would you relive the worst day of your life to relive the best one?

The answers sparked intense conversation, then more questions.We’d just wrapped up our first round and were moving into the next when a voice piped up from one of the guys in the back seat:

“Jesus Christ, seriously? More questions? This isn’t what guys talk about.”

And just like that, the questions stopped. Eventually, silence gave way to a muted conversation about sports. What our friend had meant, of course, was this wasn’t what guys were supposed to talk about, and he’d said it with the authority of a teacher. The authority of fact.

Years later, I was sitting around a campfire with a crew of friends I’d met at work. Small talk had trailed into the spit and crackle of the wood. Reflexively, I started into a “Would you rather,” then stopped short.

My hesitation disturbed me. In silence, I rifled through the library in my mind for the proper textbook. Ah, there it was: WHAT GUYS ARE SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT. I turned to Chapter VII: “Thought-Provoking Hypothetical Scenarios” (right between Chapter VI: “Girls We Used to Go to School With” and Chapter VIII: “Star Wars.”)

And there was my reason for hesitation. In the van that afternoon, that son of a bitch had filched my book and scribbled in the margins. I paged through and realized he’d gone further – crossing out entire rows of printed text with the sloppy penmanship of a vandal: “Fact,” it said in red: “This is NOT what guys talk about.”

RIP IT OUT.

Sometimes that’s what it takes. And what we rip out is just as important as what we write down. As teachers and authors, we are always on submission to our audience, vying for the hard-won space in their mental anthologies. We hope our words and lessons find a permanent home somewhere on their shelves, to be preserved and reflected upon. A noble goal, but not enough.

We need to be John Keating. And I don’t mean Robin Williams. I don’t mean tell them to stand on their desks and get expelled from prep school. Not necessarily. But we need to teach them to examine their textbooks, even if it means some of our favorite stories don’t make it in. We need to do it before their erasers get worn down. Before the pencil marks turn to ink. Before their pages harden into stone and can only be carved with hammers and chisels. These will become their commandments — the ideas that shape how we all think and feel and talk and love.

Fiction succeeds when it makes us blow off the dust and see those commandments for what they are. Teachers succeed when they give us the courage to edit them. Sometimes with an eraser. Sometimes with scissors. Or hammers.

It’s why we need John Keating in the classroom and John Keating on the page. Books that make you want to stand on your desk and question authority and talk about things guys aren’t supposed to talk about and RIP IT OUT, RIP IT OUT, RIP IT OUT.

Don’t agree? Good. Then I suggest you print out this post and tear it to pieces — an excellent start.

Mrs. Harshaw was a large woman who assigned big books she’d never read and spent most of our English class talking about her stories. And after her grade book suspiciously disappeared a week into the semester, the class really began to degenerate. She’d walk in to class every morning and ask someone if they’d seen her grade book. Of course nobody knew a thing. She’d let out a defeated sigh and cast a conspiratorial look into the hallway. Then the VCR would come out.

Mrs. Harshaw’s daughter was a burgeoning soap opera star. Instead of talking about those big books she assigned, we’d watch her daughter get killed off in a variety of ways. Sometimes she’d be in a coma for an entire episode. Other times she’d merely stroll across the background of a scene. It didn’t matter. Every time her face would come on screen, Mrs. Harshaw would yell out, “That’s my girl!”

I ended up getting a B in English that semester. I guess I could be indignant, seeing as we had no tests or homework. But I could just as easily blame it on never telling her where the grade book was hidden (in the ceiling, in case there are any Fred T. Foard High School readers out there…) Plus, I never read Anna Karenina, the book she assigned me. And, truth be told, I never really gave a shit about her daughter’s acting career either.

So I’ll take the B.

Same year, Ms. Huffman for Journalism. This lady was old and convinced I was drunk with the power of my journalism hall pass. And she was right. I walked the halls like I was raising money. And whenever anybody questioned me, I’d pull out the pass. I’d ask them their opinion about whatever story I was working on. And if it happened to be a girl, I’d even quote her. Sometimes at length.

Well, this didn’t really hold water with the high editorial policies of the Foardonian. Soon I found myself being tailed. Yes, like some kind of B-rate cop movie. Huffman put the spies on me – namely, the Editor in Chief. Now, this was a girl who took her job way too seriously. She was New York Times while the rest of us were just looking for ways to slip in bits of copy that, if you were so inclined, might have read as inappropriate. (The best ever: Coach Marlin won’t rest until he’s handled every ball at Foard. Yes, I wrote that.) And for the rest of the year, she followed me everywhere I went.

Grade: C- (and a discussion of my commitment to high school journalism.)

Finally, the Coach. Heathcliff Marlin. The man was born to wear coaching shorts. A prototype for every 80′s movie that featured the coach who hated wimps. He once told us he studied Chicks and Shit in college – and I wish I was kidding. To say that he was a complete douche bag would be an insult to feminine irrigation. But I’m not sure there is a better word to describe him. Because this is the genius who came up with another winner – Sacrifice Your Body for the Team! He yelled it at practice, and even had it printed on t-shirts. And then, when I got hurt and couldn’t play, he wouldn’t let me stand on the sidelines anymore. He actually made me give back my t-shirt.

Oh, he also taught algebra. Grade: D. (Not to mention a lifetime of aching knees. Thanks, Coach. And Go Tigers!)

The point I’m trying to make: there will always be shitty people who decide to become teachers. (I really don’t understand it. It’s like they got lost their first day of college and, upon finding themselves at the college of education, said Oh, screw it… and got certified to teach.) And they will most certainly attempt to suck the life out of you. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing anymore. Okay, I’m totally lying –  it’s a terrible thing. Because some people will watch their muse be destroyed. Others will spend years thinking they’re not smart. And some will always regret losing the freedom of a journalism hall pass.

Still.

The muse never stays dead for long. It’s innate to being human, I think. We are programmed to create, to be playful and imaginative. And like a phoenix (yeah, I just went there), it will rise up. It will catch fire in your belly when you least expect it to, telling you to turn all of those teachers into characters. It will give you power. It will make you smile. It will force you to write your story. And, above all, it will make you think about getting your own teaching certificate, because obviously it can’t be that difficult.

Perhaps you’ve read my post on heroes. Perhaps you’ve read my post on the moment from my life that could be a YA plot point. Probably you haven’t read either of them because you have better things to do and I’m an insufferable blowhard. Whatever, dick. If you don’t have anything nice to say, shut up.

The point is, if you have read those posts, or if you know me to be an insufferable blowhard, then you’re probably going to see this one coming from around the corner and four blocks away. What I’m trying to say is: Villains, schmillains.

That’s right. Freddy Kruger, critters, Dr. No, Voldemort (yeah, I said it, bitch!), and the freaking Lich King can all go take a flying leap. They don’t scare me. In fact, there’s only one villain that scares me.

Me.

(Yeah, you saw it coming, I know.)

Obv: loads of stories need a good heavy. From Gutman to the Joker to Darth Vader, a good heavy is molto importanto. We know this. But (and maybe I chose those three randomly, or maybe they suit my point; you’ll never know) each of those heavies is faced by a hero—namely Sam Spade, Batman, and Luke Skywalker—and each of those heroes has a much greater foe inside himself. For Spade and Batman, it’s the tiniest bit subtle, but for Luke it’s right there in the open: the dark side. The emperor won’t shut up about it.

What is this beast inside the heart of every good protagonist? It’s probably not something as hokey as a dark side of the Force (sorry; big fan, save your letters). But in a way, that’s exactly what it is. It’s an impulse to shoot first and ask questions later, literally or figuratively. It’s a weakness for fast food or alcohol or heroin. It’s paralyzing anxiety, crossing the threshold into a parents-away kegger. It’s our sinister tendencies, our vices, and our weaknesses. In a word, it’s about fear.

The best villains (the literal ones; see several named above) are about stimulating fear. There are loads of different ways to do this, but if there’s no fear, the villain has failed. The villain should consider other lines of work. If the protagonist’s fears aren’t awakened, they’ve already won, and that’s boring.

But did you see that? Villains needn’t “instill” fear, as the old line would normally go. That’s because fear is already there, in everyone’s heart. Instilling it would be redundant. Villains need merely to activate it. Wake it up. Bring it to the surface, so hearts pound and palms sweat.

So who does Luke defeat, for example? Does he defeat Darth Vader? No, not really. He’s his (spoiler alert!) dad, for crying out loud. They have a touching moment and everything. Does he defeat the emperor? Nope. Dear old Dad Darth tosses the wrinkly despot to his death. Luke defeats his own weaknesses, his own violent tendencies, his own vices. Those are his real foe, the real villain: his own heart.

Also he kisses his sister, like, really inappropriately. What’s that about?

Rewind back to April of 1986. Maybe you were too young to remember. I was nine years old and pretty excited to be going to the movie theater. That meant popcorn. It meant my mom smuggling cans of Jewel soda into the theater. Maybe something from Cub Foods (Dominick’s?) Anyway, a party was about to happen.

And think about it for a second: in the past two years I had seen Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, TopGun – you know. So I was psyched about going to the movies.

It was me, my sister, and my mom. We found a seat in the theater. We watched the previews. And then the lights dimmed and the movie started. And this is what we saw:

Critters. CRITTERS. And because Jeff stole (used? No, stole) the only other movie that scarred me (scared? No, scarred) for life, we’re going to talk about Critters. Now, as villains go, Critters really aren’t the Big-Bad. All they can really do is hide under your bed. Behind your refrigerator. In your toilet. And then they pop up and shoot you in your neck with one of those poisonous quill things and what the hell are they even doing on earth?

Okay, maybe they are scary villains.

And to this day, I have no idea why my Mom took us to this movie. Maybe she thought Gremlins and made the (pretty reasonable, pre-internet) deduction that this was a kid’s movie.

This was not a kid’s movie.

For the next, oh, year, I was terrified to step off my bed (wait – maybe this is the reason we saw this movie?) I was unable to walk the halls of our house without casting fearful glances at each shadowed corner. I was afraid to do anything, because the damn Critters were everywhere.

Critters held the top spot (with Freddy) for Things that Scared the Shit Out of Me for about three years. Then IT came out and, yeah, we watched that as a family, too. And so goes my tenuous relationship with horror movies.

Because I’m fragile.

Hey, I love a good comedy. I love a smart drama. But you start putting little porcupine bastards with poisonous quills that shoot – and teeth, TEETH! – and, well, I’m just not going to be all that interested. Or I’ll be under the covers.

Maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when, a year ago, I realized something very profound about my own stories: I never have a villain. There are no moustache twirlers. No all-black wearing psyschos. And definitely no dream stalkers sporting a hand-full of death. Nope, my characters all fight inner-demons. They struggle with existential problems. Sometimes there was a typical jerk football player, but my stories generally center around a clueless guy who likes a girl and they all say funny shit.

But if you must have a villain – no matter the type – please give me one that makes me feel something. Maybe a villains that, like it or not, reminds me of myself. A villain that has a reason for being the Big Bad. And, god, please don’t make it be that he’s intrinsically Evil. Because every neolithic bully, every bitchy prom queen I’ve ever met has a story. Something happened and it made them… mean. Writing an effective villain means taking those moments and, even if you never put them on the page, making them a part of the character.

Lord. Even though I don’t want to admit it, maybe we do need scary ass clowns that climb out of sewers.

Because sometimes fear leads us to truth. Sometimes villains help our heroes learn who they really are. And sometimes these characters, these stories, helps us function and grow in our own lives.

But don’t expect any clowns or space hedgehogs from me. I’ll leave that up to the guys who aren’t hiding in the back of the theater.

A good villain should scare you. So what are you afraid of?

Teeth, claws, and glowing red eyes, or credit scores, mortgage payments, and whether or not your child’s behavior is developmentally appropriate? Your answer probably depends a little on personality, a little on what time of day you happen to be reading this, and a lot on how old you are.

After a certain age, I believe we all develop two Fear Axes (as in plural of “axis” not actual “FEAR AXES“.) There’s the Adult Axis around which spins social embarrassment and financial security and other worries that annoy the shit out of me on a daily basis, and the Kid Axis. More primal. Afraid of snakes and teeth and under-the-bed things we don’t see so much as feel. Especially at night when the campfire is smoldering and twigs are snapping.

A good villain plays both sides. First and foremost, the successful villain must sneak past the adult, hunt down the kid inside us, and scare the bejesus out of him. If the villain then has enough energy to go back and terrorize the adult, so much the better. Which brings me to my favorite villain of all time: Freddy Krueger.

With Freddy, Wes Craven capitalized on both adult and childhood fears with an unstoppable two-pronged attack. For the kid: a horribly disfigured child molester with razor-fingered gloves. BAM! Then Wes Craven hits the grown-ups twice, because we deserve it. He does this by 1) creating a villain who goes after the children of guilty parents (which all parents are), and 2) creating a villain whose power is to GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES. Ingenious, because that’s the real, neurotic, irritatingly practical adult fear of watching horror movies, isn’t it? It’s not that Freddy is actually going to be hiding in your car or under your bed.

It’s: “I’m afraid this movie will give me nightmares.”

“Yeah?” Wes Craven says. “And guess what – those nightmares will kill you.”

As a kid in middle school, this absolutely captivated me. I was already a fear junkie, creeping out of my room to watch USA’s Saturday Nightmares and Tales From the Darkside behind my parents’ backs and arranging sleepovers with kids who had the most extensive R-Rated VHS collections. They knew me by name at the local video store, Movies by the Mile, and my horror fixation was so obvious the owner rigged a contest so I could win a Friday the 13^th mask – THAT GLOWED BLOOD RED. (Writing this, I just realized you must’ve rigged that contest, Diana from Movies by the Mile. God bless you, wherever you are.)

Yeah, I still own this. And yeah, those are baby bottle nipples in the background. That's because I'm now over 30.

But Freddy Krueger was the standout. I drew Freddy comics. I wrote Freddy stories. I disturbed more than my fair share of middle school language arts teachers. Freddy was also my gateway villain. He paved the way to Tales From the Crypt and Hellraiser comics, then Christopher Pike, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and more horror movies than most people have the energy to heckle in a lifetime. Somewhere along the line I became a writer. I published stories in magazines with covers like this.

So here’s my point — if there must be one: Freddy Krueger made my life better. And a lot of people (including some of my writing contemporaries) dismiss movies and books like Nightmare on Elm Street as juvenile depravity. Slasher pics with no moral or societal value, gratuitous sex and violence – and I call bullshit.

Those movies inspired me to read more, write more, draw more, and think more. And that’s what a good villain should ultimately do: be interesting enough to stop us from thinking about our social standing and family issues and money, money, money and instead reflect on the ultimate human question:

What if?

And  . . . what if? What if someone could find you in your dreams and kill you in real life? What if someone dressed up in a purple suit to terrorize your fair city? What if Cthulu is really sleeping? And what if there really is just one ring to rule them all? Sometimes these questions keep me up at night, but I’m okay with that.

There’s nothing I’d rather lose sleep over.

The move from elementary school to junior high was a very big deal. Seventh grade—this is before our junior highs became middle schools and included sixth grade, too—was an important grade: It’s the year most of us turned thirteen—that is, became teenagers. In a Jewish area like my hometown, that meant it was also the year of the most important social event of a young person’s life: the bar and bas mitzvah. If you weren’t invited to at least three per month, your social ranking probably wasn’t so high. As one of the few Jews who didn’t go to Hebrew school, and who was not bar mitzvahed, I was quite the pariah in that department. I was left with no big event to invite people to (which, to be honest, was okay with me, since inviting people can only lead to rejection, right?), and only my closest friends invited me to theirs.

But I’m getting off track. The point is, seventh grade is kind of a big deal. But you know that, because you went through seventh grade too, and you probably don’t remember any of it because your brain is protecting your fragile psychology by blocking any related memories. Or maybe that’s just me.

Well, Steve’s Brain, there are a few memories that have managed to sneak through anyway. One of them comes from the first day of seventh grade—the very first day of junior high, in that big new school, where I’d have to change rooms eight times, instead of staying in one room all day, like I had since kindergarten. In fact, it was before the day had even started, and the new seventh graders were milling around the front hallway, finding their lockers, finding their friends, finding their homerooms. The girls were hugging and screaming. The boys were grunting and punching.

I was waving a spiral notebook full of new comic book heroes—ones I’d created over the summer, or at least in the precious days between the end of sleepaway camp (that’s another show) and the start of school—and looking for a friend. We’ll call him Benedict Arnold.

Benny and I started our comic book in sixth grade. As far as I can recall, it was most of all we did in sixth grade, as a matter of fact, though I suppose there probably was some math and history and the like happening as well. We’d created loads of characters, and we’d come up with a decent story, too, for the first issue. So in that week or so between camp and school, I’d made up a draft: panels in pencil on paper, with the whole story mapped out. It took lots of hard work and several erasers. I wasn’t any better at drawing hands then than I am now, and you can’t have an action-filled premier issue without lots and lots of hands. The point is I was proud of it, and I was excited to get started writing and drawing more issues. But where was Benny?

Ah, there he is. He’s wearing slacks. He’s standing with two girls. My, they’re tall. (At this point, if any of your memories of seventh grade are remotely intact, you know where we’re headed.)

I approached, knowing with the utmost certainty that a boy approaching with a full spiral notebook of comic book adventures is far more important than any girls who are a foot too tall and covered in Benetton.

“Hey, Benny,” I called out, and I shoved my way into the circle. Rude, sure. But this was important. I held out the spiral notebook and he took it.

He shot me a glance, flipped through the pages, and laughed. Then he held up the comic book, pages out, to the girls. He laughed some more. “A comic book?” he said, looking for approval at the girls.

I recognized one of them at this point, I think, but she didn’t seem to recognize me back. They probably both laughed, mouths wide, tossing their shampoo-commercial hair in every direction, so it caught the sunlight streaming in through the double glass doors at the front of the hall. It probably made me feel funny.

Benny shoved the notebook back into my hands. “I don’t really care,” he said, looking in my face.

And he wasn’t even lying. He didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.

Pardon me for dancing on the line between reading books and reading comics, and between writing the two. I think the line is wiggly and fine, and dancing on it is the only way I can get across. But while I didn’t quite stop reading, I’d certainly never read or write certain material again without giving it a good long thought: What’s it mean about me? What do others understand about me based on what I’m reading? In short, would Benny mock me in front of gorgeous giantesses for this interest?

And if you think that doesn’t stop a huge number of boys from picking up just about every book out there that isn’t a periodical with a glossy photo of a football player or a Dodge Viper on the cover, you’ve got another think coming.

I got back into reading and writing, obviously, but only if the material was explicitly not for little kids. I also got back into drawing, for a short time. I gave it up about a year later, essentially for good, but that’s another show too.

The reason I stopped reading probably can’t be pinned down, because one day it just wasn’t a part of my life anymore. I remember going to the library – grabbing a copy of Indian in the Cupboard- and completely devouring it. It was an experience that will live with me forever, because I got lost in that world. For those few days, I would’ve killed for a cupboard that could animate my He-Man figures.

After that, there were others. Where the Red Fern Grows, The Xanth series, To Kill A Mockingbird. But to say I was a reader was similar to saying I was a swimmer – I could do it, and did so occasionally. But I’d rather just play Nintendo.

However, the reason I stopped writing? The reason I stopped thinking it was okay to be creative, to try in school – to be anything other than a dude who could run fast?

Oh, I remember that clearly.

Picture this: I’m sitting in freshman English class, some bullshit assignment on my desk – use the vocabulary words in a paragraph. Write a story!! And I’m probably over-dramatizing the situation at this point, but it felt like I was standing at a cross-roads. I could head to the left, write a story that was fun. Maybe even funny. Or I could go to the right and bust out a little bit of this:

We meandered through the incessant cloud of insects. It was vexatious.

But I didn’t. I wrote a story. No, check that – I had fun writing the story. I put everything I had into it. I wrote about this alien who came to earth and wanted to know why in the hell people used words like vexatious. And then, as I remember, it spiraled into a kind of spaghetti western-inspired drama. Lots of guns and cowboys who didn’t know why these aliens kept meandering around – because, of course, they all moseyed, right? Anyway, this thing wasn’t perfect – it may not have even been good. But damn it, it was mine. And you know I used the vocabulary words like they were going out of style.

Okay, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t think about it much after I turned it in. I started worrying about which of the Cerven twins was better looking (Emily.) And more importantly, which one I had a shot with (Amanda.) A few days passed – it might have been a week – and I found that story sitting back on my desk.

It had a big fat F on it.

What? This isn’t some YA novel. There was no slow clap, no moment where the teacher called me to the front of the class and told my peers how astounding my writing was. No, I got an F. Because, while I used the words correctly, I didn’t take the assignment seriously. And thanks for that, because I spent the next four years thinking I was stupid – thinking it wasn’t worth the effort to give a shit.

And you might think this has nothing to do with reading, but it does. This moment colored the rest of my schooling. It made me ignore the books other teachers suggested. Good teachers. Hell, it even factored into why I pay for Hippie Private School for my own kids to school 20 years later. Right or wrong – sensationalized or not – there is always a reason why kids stop reading. Why they stop caring. And this was mine.

And so people might think that boys have enough to read. They might think that comics and movies and adult fiction and fantasy – whatever else you might want to trot out – are all pointed at guys. They might think it doesn’t matter that covers are often pinker than they should be. They might think guys only want to read about sports and war and video games. They might think we’re just having a laugh around here at Boys Don’t Read.

And we do. We’re a damn funny bunch.

But forget that for a moment, and remember that YA fiction is meant to address the problems teens face. Not girls. Not boys. Teens. It’s not adult for a reason. It tells the story of shitty teachers and reminds you that those teachers never really win. It tells you that you’re only stupid if you give up. If you let their doltishness define you. It tells you that one day (true story) you’ll get into a big ass school – hell, I’ll just say it; you’ll get into Harvard – and walking back into that high school with that letter is better than almost anything, ever.

And maybe these boys will start reading again on their own. Maybe they’ll even start to write. But maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll let video games or reality television fill that hole. And maybe we’ll all miss out on somebody who really had something to say.

I’m handing out A’s to anybody who uses the vocabulary words in the comments.