by Roger Sutton
This technical choice — writing in first person but using direct address — replaces the usual “How does it end?” uncertainty by seizing you-the-reader by the throat and taking you along on the Walsh children’s journey through hell, not as observer but as participant.
Thus, you are Emmy Walsh. You are five years old. As the story begins, you do not even speak. But you’re smart and observant, and, most of all, you’re willful. Therefore, you don’t always listen to your much-older brother and sister when they explain to you how to maneuver around Mommy and her scary, unpredictable ways.
Now, as you read that bit of description, you-the-reader should feel a little uneasy, perhaps even a little fearful. Because as you become Emmy, you realize: who cares about the safe ending? First, you have to get there. First, you have to go through hell.
The manipulative use of tension is what makes a thriller different from any other good book. But as you will also perceive, it is not quite as simple as saying that the tension must build higher and higher and higher. The skilled writer must also know when to lessen the tension, when to give the reader a break before, very soon, tightening the screws yet again. Harder. And the skilled writer will do that tightening in as innovative a way as possible, using whichever of the many tools in her writer’s toolbox is best suited to the story at hand.
I have one more secret about writing thrillers to share. This one is not about technique, but about heart.
Fear has ruled me ever since I can remember. Not because my childhood was extraordinarily fear-filled. I think it is simply my temperament. I remember distinctly, for example, being ten years old and looking at illustrations of North America during the Ice Age. I plotted how my family would escape to Florida if the ice suddenly returned. I imagined us taking the last airplane out, fighting our way past other frantic refugees. We might have to kick, even to kill. I planned for that. Survival at all costs, I thought. For me. For those I love.
This same sentiment powers Matthew in The Rules of Survival. He says to his little sister — and to you-the-reader:
This is what I think happens when you live with fear. . . . I think the fear gets into your blood. It makes your subatomic particles twist and distort. You change, chemically. The fear changes, too. It becomes . . . your master. You are a slave to it.
In writing suspense, I draw heavily on my own fear. In The Rules of Survival, I used that fear to write about a not-uncommon nightmare situation that I myself have never experienced. In my other novels, likewise: I have never killed anyone (The Killer’s Cousin), never been kidnapped (Locked Inside), never stumbled onto a illegal drug distribution network (Black Mirror), and never found shady scientific experiments going on in the basement (Double Helix). But this is not to say that I have not experienced fear. Like Matthew and my other characters, I have lived it. And like Matthew, I work out my fears using writing. Thus I know exactly how to map my fear onto my characters, so that you-the-reader can feel its reality. You will feel it because my writing will force you, in turn, to map the characters’ fears onto your own fears. To become one with them, and with me.
We all — adult, child, and teen alike — know what it is to fear. And we all want to learn how to handle our fear. Safely. Safely, within the pages of a book.
This, to me, is the pull of the thriller.
ROGER SUTTON: You have very fervent fans.
SARAH DESSEN: They’re fantastic — they buy the book the day it’s released and read it incredibly quickly and then immediately e-mail me and ask when the next one is coming out! It’s really the highest compliment. Young adults are an amazing audience to be writing for, because you’re catching people at their most enthusiastic about reading. Adults are a little more reserved. I still get excited about good books, but I don’t get jumping-up-and-down-screaming excited. It’s such a passionate time, adolescence. I remember the feeling in high school, and even in middle school, of reading a book and really connecting with it on that elemental level of “somebody understands me.” It’s so powerful. It’s a great market to be writing for because you connect so strongly with your audience.
RS: I think part of that connection is that you create these characters that girls — and I’m assuming that most of your readers are girls — can see themselves in and relate to. Yet they are all individuals. I see a lot of common themes in your books, but each one of those girls is a different person. How do you balance making a character particular with making her universal?
SD: There are certain things about the teenage experience in our culture that are always going to be there: the issues you have with your parents; the boy you have a crush on who doesn’t know your name; the friend who isn’t nice to you, but for some reason you’re friends with her anyway. But then there’s room within those experiences to make each character unique.
The thing that all my narrators have in common is that they are girls on the verge of a big change. And how they deal with that change is where the story comes from. When I was in high school, I was never happy with myself and I always wanted to believe that there was the potential for something big to happen in my life. You know — that I was going to meet some amazing guy and come to some stunning realization about myself that was going to make my life better. I think that’s very appealing at that age, because it can happen. At that age, a girl can go away for the summer and when she comes back in the fall, she’s completely different. She’s taller, she’s blossomed. There’s so much potential. That’s why I like writing about this age, because there’s still so much room to come into one’s self, so much change happening fast and furious. There’s a wealth of material there.
RS: I notice that you often start with a precipitating offstage event. For instance, in The Truth About Forever, the death of the father happens before the book actually begins, but it sets in motion all the things that happen to the heroine.
SD: I think that’s often how you feel as a teenager, that the world is happening around you, and you’re sort of whirling and getting bounced around within it. I remember feeling that way, that I didn’t have much control over my own destiny. Everything was happening to me, and I was just trying to keep my head above water.
RS: Do you think of yourself as a writer for girls?
SD: I do. I don’t kid myself; I don’t think a lot of boys are reading my books. My books are so firmly fixed in the girl mindset and the girl point of view. Women tend to want to share our experiences more, to talk about what’s going on with us. Especially when things are going badly or you’re stressed out, to find some commonality or sense of recognition in a story is very comforting. Boys are different that way. They don’t want to talk about everything that’s going on with them. One comment I get again and again from girls is, “I read your book and it is my life — it’s like it’s my school and my teachers.”
RS: And that’s also the theme of your books. It’s not just that you have readers, who, because they are girls, explore their emotions through reading. Your books are about young women trying to understand themselves and their place in the world.
SD: My setup, typically, involves a character feeling disjointed and out of place — maybe because she once felt more in place and then something happened to make her lose her footing, or maybe she’s never felt that she fit anywhere and has been looking for a way to find her place. It’s a pretty universal experience: much of adolescence is just trying to figure out where you fit in, where your spot is, who your people are.
RS: Do you think that that’s something particular to girls?
SD: No, but I think the willingness to explore it is. Girls are much more willing to face the fact that they’re looking for it, and more willing to reach out for it, than boys. People have said to me many times that I should write a book from a boy’s point of view. All I can say is that I spent four years of high school sitting around with my friends analyzing what boys were thinking. That’s all we did. We would sit at lunch and be like, “He said hi to me in the hall — what did that m
ean?”
RS: Nothing!
SD: Right, completely cryptic! So I can’t even imagine saying what some boy means. Or what he’s thinking. I don’t know how boys think. I wish I did.
RS: In the 1980s, there was an earlier wave of “let’s have more books for boys” going on. A number of women writers tried their hand at a male perspective. But the characters weren’t real boys. They were male, but they would talk to each other and to other people as if they were women. It was as if the goal of these books was to take these tough characters and turn them into women. Put ’em in touch with their feelings. Make ’em cry. Make ’em talk about things. And I wasn’t convinced.
SD: Teen readers can tell if someone’s writing about them and it’s not right. One of the most important things in writing for teens is to be genuine, and not to write down to them, not to proselytize or try to force-feed them a message. My books are not about social issues. I’m just telling the kind of story that I want to hear, writing the kind of book I wanted to read when I was in high school.
RS: Do you have an opinion about the term chick lit?
SD: I’m not as offended by it as others are. But I also think it’s become too wide a term. We sort of throw anything with a pink cover into the category now. It used to be targeted very specifically, and now anything that isn’t Literature and has women in it is chick lit. It seems like you’re one or the other, you’re “literary” or you’re “chick lit.” And that’s unfortunate, because there are lots of shades in between. But I’m not offended by it, because I am writing books for girls. I like that my covers are kind of pink and cute. I’m not gonna lie. In high school that’s the kind of cover I wanted to pick up — and that’s still the kind of cover that I’m drawn to.
It was 1964 and I was fourteen when I first read The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. After considering the last bit of what Holden Caulfield had to say to me — “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” — I decided this was the second-best book I’d ever found, after Robert Ruark’s Something of Value. And found is the right word: I had picked Holden’s tale from the rather cheesy paperback rack at Packett’s Pharmacy during my endless browses there, choosing it over Leonard Wibberley’s The Mouse That Roared (not about mice) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (not about animals or farming), because Catcher seemed much stranger. Strange was good.
I felt pretty serious about bestowing my number-two all-time honor on Salinger — the man ought to feel honored. Nobody I knew took books as seriously as I did, except my dad, but he read only Harold Robbins and Erle Stanley Gardner and James Michener. Alas for Pops: I felt The Catcher in the Rye was simply too much book for him. He was better off tucking up with Perry Mason in that attorney’s predictable murder courtroom, or with Mr. Michener in Hawaii, than he would be trying to hang with old Holden in his goddamned prep school, or his dive New York City hotel, or his little sister’s room — good old Phoebe — after midnight.
So I did not recommend Catcher to my dad, though I owed him one for his urging me to read The Carpetbaggers. It would not have been fair. One could not expect adults to handle the kind of rough stuff Holden was laying down.
Ah, well. Little did I know what I would soon find out — that I was measurably something called a Young Reader, and that The Catcher in the Rye was a special-reserve official Adult Novel, technically more appropriate for my father than for little me. I had no right to possess this book, never mind how naturally me and old Holden hit it off; I had no authority to parse its distribution among grown-ups like my dad, no matter how baffled I knew they would be by its life. Not my call: The Catcher in the Rye was fully a Brilliantly Offbeat Work of Serious Literature, and one that already belonged to Them. The adults would prove their provenance with elite awards, doctoral dissertations, and critical-intellectual studies embodied in entire books! Holden Caulfield was the precious property of the grandest high-literary thinkers.
And I thought he was just a kid like me, running through a cool and shuddering story. But I was wrong, or at least only partially perceptive. Holden stood adamantine as some kind of icon, voice, symbol, avatar, age-displaced induction of pan-generational mimesis, etc. Holden, and Salinger, were highly Major. Whereas I and my teen buddies, along with our descendants for the next fifty years, were measurably Minor.
In 1998, my son Alex, then age fourteen, wrote me a letter that began:
Dear Bruce,
Hey, Happy Birthday, 48, hard to believe. Hope you had a great day. Listen, I have to tell you about a book I just read. You need to check it out, I know you will get it all. It’s called “Catcher in the Rye,” the author is JD Salinger. You know how much I hate the idea that there is something general that adults try to call “teen experience” (like there’s “adult experience” right?). Well, as much as I hate the idea and those words, I have to say Salinger got teen experience just right, at least for ONE teen, a kid named Holden. Read this book, and we can talk about it!
Alex’s letter was still fresh in my mind when I opened a New Yorker in 2001 and found a long article titled “Holden at Fifty” by one of our leading intellects of high culture, Louis Menand.
Menand said essentially this: The Catcher in the Rye is a great book, but really it has nothing to do with young people. Holden Caulfield is nothing like a young person. He is too astute, too precise with language, and too sensitive to be so young; Salinger was playing around, trying to pass this wonderful character off as a kid. Furthermore, Catcher itself is not really a book that should be read by young people — they are insufficiently astute, precise with language, and sensitive to appreciate the book. In fact, young readers don’t even truly like the novel: they read it only because adults say they should, and they pretend to enjoy it for the same reason. According to Menand, no young reader ever discovered The Catcher in the Rye on his or her own; a sophisticated but misguided adult must have been involved.
But what did I expect from a piece called “Holden at Fifty”? Holden was not fifty in 2001. Holden will never be fifty. Holden was sixteen in 1951, and he is sixteen today. That will not change, whether the novel is fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred. It may take the sixteen-year-olds of those times to tell, though.
It is a truism among people in the young adult field that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye would likely be published today as YAs. Or, at least, they could be, successfully — and not just because they are narrated by young people. The reason they make the grade as YA novels is simple: Huck, Scout, and Holden act their ages. These three characters look like kids, walk like kids, and quack like kids. Not because they are exactly like existing kids, or because they may be deemed “accurate” by the critics who use that chilly word as a virtue and count accuracy as “truth.” Rather, these three narrators tell us unique stories, in unique voices, which allow us to believe that their lives fit.
Ultimately, the fact that The Catcher in the Rye is not designated an official Young Adult Book hasn’t limited its availability to young readers, much less its appeal to them. (The novel is frequently challenged or banned for kids, but so are many YA books.) Holden Caulfield’s tale is probably the book most widely read by teenagers, generation after generation, and perhaps most widely enjoyed. The Catcher in the Rye is windy and stony and hot and cool, brilliantly subtle and disarmingly overt, straightforward, manipulative, sentimental, pragmatic, crazy, controlled, always precise. But perhaps most important, to adult readers in ignorance, and to young readers in wisdom, The Catcher in the Rye is ineffably young.
I didn’t even ask why I was turning into Holden Caulfield. I was fifteen, a brochure girl for postwar innocence. And I was a farm kid, three thousand miles away from Holden’s Manhattan; I took violin lessons, rode my bike through orchards, memorized social-studies facts, picked strawberries to make money, earned Camp Fire Girl honor beads. I also sought the right bras, the right pimple medicine, the boys most likely to alarm my family.
The Catcher in the Rye came into my life at a rummage sale, and I read it in one evening. Within the next few days, I heard myself reciting whole paragraphs from memory, and in doing so I began to notice that I was driving nearly everyone away. My usually affectionate family loathed Holden and me enough to shoot scornful looks over to our side of the dinner table and forget to pass us the potatoes. It went on for months.
The gender difference didn’t occur to me.
Why not? I now ask myself. Didn’t it seem really, really, really odd that I was this boy who was hanging Sunny’s sad green dress on a hanger in a New York hotel room? I don’t think I gave it a thought.
I look back on whom I was choosing to be: an academic failure who had done nearly everything wrong that he’d been asked to do right; a boy who was making his own journey into the underworld and taking meticulous note of its sinister mien; a narrator whose flair for vulgarity was almost choral and who was intimately attuned to the sanctity of life; a solitary wanderer who, like many teenagers, was just learning how to take the full measure of his undisciplined temperament; a protagonist who wanted to save falling children and who was saved by his little sister; a borrower and a lender who was teaching me about responses to defilement, a lesson I would continue to need as the beleaguered twentieth century stumbled forward.
Somehow I’ve gotten through the intervening years without ever examining whether or not I was unconsciously seeking a gender change (no, I was not), whether or not I had penis envy, whether or not I wanted to try on boyhood. But as I ask these questions even now, it seems that it was a literary identification of convenience. Getting to be Holden let me use his brain, which was so much more interesting than mine. When I was Holden, I had form, shape, demeanor. He gave me someone to be.