#GdnTeenTaboo is over and out
A remarkably rational, erudite debate about boundaries and teenagers. Who’da thunk it?
The debate is still rolling and will be for some time we suspect, so head over to #GdnTeenTaboo if you want to keep reading. Otherwise, our friends over at #SundayYA are just getting started.
Here at Guardian Children’s Books it’s well past our bedtime so books, blankets and hot chocs all round! A huge thank you to all our participants – authors, teen readers and everyone else.
Here’s to more great taboo-busting stories!
Have a lovely evening. Ciao.
Twitter says stop!
Perhaps what this past hour has shown is that a little bit more laissez-faire won’t actually do anyone any harm…
We return to censorship for our final thoughts. Ultimately, should we trust teenagers to self-censor? After all, they just want books to authentically represent their lives:
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Children’s books site editor Emily Drabble takes a bullet for the team here:
Louise O’Neill is full of bombshells tonight:
Unless you justify it as character self-development?
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Fifteen minutes to go, and explicit just got specific:
If gratuitousness becomes the boundary, however, as Louise O’Neill advocates, how and where do we draw the line?
Lots of appreciation for Melvin Burgess, in particular Junk and Doing It:
Breaking news: hopes, dreams and expectations the world over are crushed.
Perhaps, contributes Non Pratt, we can’t make that distinction quite so comfortably, and that’s the scariest of all:
We’re now talking the two “c’s”: content and context. How much does one rely on the other?
Will we see Asking for It ruffling more feathers than Only Ever Yours, then? Because that’s a pretty tough act to follow. Perhaps not, opines our teen reader:
Melvin Burgess agrees with Louise O’Neill:
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This feels a little tentative from Melvin! Considering the topics under debate here, everybody is being very restrained indeed.
Excellently provocative question from Charlie on email, asking if there are any taboos these taboo-busting authors would flinch before?
Louise O’Neill has similar qualms, but is made of sterner stuff:
… with this particular example:
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Interestingly, we’re getting a burgeoning consensus on the topic of age-ranges. Non Pratt presents both sides of the issue:
You’ll be relieved to hear, however, that Melvin Burgess is dissenting, in response to Sutcliffe’s point about Junk:
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A question posed by one teenager, the perennial issue of these sorts of debates:
There often are in school libraries etc, typically 14+. Is that specific enough? Perhaps there should be clearer age ranges on books? Or is that too close to censorship? William Sutcliffe think no.
Here’s one teen voice on censorship in fiction, typically irreverant…
And another, this one downright challenging!
But what’s true is true. Human nature – anything banned is immediately intriguing.
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What about swearing - the language of the book, rather than its contents?
I suppose the basics endure through time! Interestingly different experiences here…
Oooft, journalism isn’t coming out of this very well!
It does make you wonder how much of this “controversy” is generated for its own sake, though. You don’t hear a lot of teen voices on the issue (except here, obviously).
Excellent question from a reader:
Non Pratt responds,
Louise O’Neill continues with much the same sentiments:
Melvin Burgess on what it was like to be a trailblazer: Fun!
Who knew it was so easy?
More thoughts on Louise O’Neill’s facing down with her publisher over the ending of Only Ever Yours:
Readers found its realism gripping:
We’re not completely anarchistic though, and Non Pratt sounds an eminently sensible note of caution on the gatekeeping issue:
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Lots of suggestions for greatest taboo-busting book EVER (yep we don’t do things by halves): A Clockwork Orange for Chris Vick, Louise O’Neill The Handmaid’s Tale (with Junk an honourable mention), William Sutcliffe Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, Catcher in the Rye for Raziel Reid. This is a good ‘un:
But THIS is exactly what we like to hear:
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Louise O’Neill takes on accusations of bleak-ism in Only Ever Yours:
What do we think of the role of adults (such as agents, publishers, etc) as the gatekeepers of teen fiction?
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And we’re straight in there.
Seems fair enough when you put it like that. After all, shouldn’t YA and children’s fiction have different expectations? YA readers are potentially in their early twenties…
We’re helpful like this. A glossary of key terms you’re going to need to have recourse to over the next hour:
Twitter says go!
Well, what can one do but accede? *rubs hands greedily*
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The hordes are gathering.
Here we are now. Entertain us.
(No pressure, eh?)
Remember, you can join in at any time
Pose your question on Twitter using #GdnTeenTaboo or send comments, gripes, etc our way at childrens.books@theguardian.com and we’ll feed them in for you. There’s just 15 minutes now to get the little grey cells whirring.
Woah there! Some of us aren’t settled with the compulsory gallon cup of wine tea/child-friendly soft beverage just yet… (That’s your first bit of controversy right there!)
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It prompted an uproar on publication exactly 20 years ago now, but Junk has gone on to win multiple awards (including the prestigious Carnegie Medal) and achieve cult status. This year its author Melvin Burgess will receive a special achievement award at the YA Book Prize.
Here are ten of the best quotes from the book, and Melvin Burgess’s reflections on the controversy: ‘Junk marks not so much a line in the sand, but the rubbing out of a line. Since then, the rules have changed utterly’. That’s precisely what we’ll be discussing here, a mere 40 minutes from now…
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A wild and dangerous ride.
That’s a quotation from a blogger’s review of my book, Kook. A response to the risky, and sometimes illegal, activities the characters get up to. Set in a world of die-hard Cornish surfers, Kook is about a young guy (Sam) falling for a girl who is, in every way, trouble. Jade is obsessed with riding the biggest wave she can find, as soon as she can find it. Whether she’s ready to or not. And that’s only part of what Jade and her crew get up to. It’s not just the surfing. It’s fighting, raves, drinking, getting into trouble with the police.
All of which raises a question around showing such things in YA fiction. How do you write about that? More to the point – should you?
In my view, yes. These things are a part of the teen experience. That makes them not only valid to write about, but actually things that need to be explored. Because this stuff happens. These are things young people will experience and have to form views about, whether they are active participants or not.
Chris Vick on the perils of writing explicitly (in every sense of the word) for teenagers. Read more here.
To join in this afternoon all you need to do is…
Make sure you’re following us (@GdnChildrensBks), get settled in a nice comfy chair, and just start posing questions from 5pm using #GdnTeenTaboo.
You don’t even need to be on twitter to take part – search #GdnTeenTaboo in Twitter to read the conversation, then send any comments or questions to us at childrens.books@theguardian.com and we’ll feed them in for you.
Or you can sit back, relax and follow the whole thing with lots of extra larks right here.
Dramatis Personae
Melvin Burgess, @MelvinBurgess, marker of this fascinating meditation on dangerous books and how they just don’t exist.
Louise O’Neill, @oneilllo, who says (slightly gleefully) that her latest book, Asking For It, ‘will infuriate a lot of people’.
Raziel Reid, @razielreid, who professes so poetically in this podcast that ‘if you want to reach someone’s heart, you have to get under their skin’. Let’s get that printed on some t-shirts!
Non Pratt, @NonPratt, who thinks that no taboo should be off limits when writing for teenagers.
Chris Vick, @chrisvickwriter, who says teen writing has to be ‘all killer, no filler’.
Katie Everson, @ksleverson, who says some teens do drugs and feel good – we need honest stories not judgement.
William Sutcliffe, @Will_Sutcliffe8, whose latest book was a gritty contemporary realist-dystopia inspired by the 2011 riots.
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Prelude
Children’s fiction has always come with a healthy dose of morality. Witches, wizards, dragons and fairies might (like a spoonful of sugar) help the medicine go down, but fantasy, dystopia, adventure, you name it, almost always construct worlds whose ethical and civic codes are etched in black and white; some even blatantly allegorical or didactic (here’s looking at you C.S. Lewis). The good are invariably rewarded, the bad get their comeuppance (even if it takes a trilogy or so of books to get there) and, most crucially of all, you can always tell the two apart so you know who to root for.
So what happens when fiction for young people muddies the waters?
Sex, drugs, swearing, alcohol, the rock & roll of modern life – YA certainly shook things up a bit. There are exceptions to prove the rule, of course, (here’s looking at you Stephenie Meyer) but much YA fiction reflects a world that is increasingly about the grey areas, less concerned with modelling good vs evil than confronting the complicated, confusing and often downright contradictory realities of growing up in the twenty-first century.
It has demolished many taboos along the way: gritty realism, sexuality, gender stereotyping, diversity, class… There’s plenty more still to do, though, and every so often you get a book so unprecedentedly in-your-face it pulls you up short: Louise O’Neill on rape; Judy Blume on sex; Melvin Burgess on pretty much anything.
Ay but there’s the rub. We often talk about censorship – what books should and shouldn’t include, how dark is too dark – but does a book bust taboos simply by writing about a topic, or must it do something more? Is Junk radical for writing a brutal, no-holds-barred description of drug addiction, or just an old-fashioned morality tale (take drugs and it won’t end well)?
It all comes down to what we think fiction is for – and whether that changes depending on who’s reading it.
We’ll be discussing all this and more with a host of authors and teenagers from 5pm this Sunday evening. Join us. (And maybe delay your dinner – this could get contentious!)
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