Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "bullying"

When I first started scribbling for real, when I was in my early twenties, I wanted to write a novel about how wretchedly I had been tormented in the New Jersey public schools. I had never spoken more than two sentences about this misery before being dismissively interrupted, whether by parents, siblings, or college friends. This was long before anyone took bullying seriousIy; they said it was just life. I quite desperately wanted to tell my story and be heard.

So I scribbled. (Back then, it was for-real scribbling, with a Bic pen in a spiral-bound notebook.) But I hadn’t written more than a few pages before I realized how profoundly depressing, boring, and whiney was my plaint, all mimsy like a borogove (“Jabberwocky” jargon). Nobody would ever want to read what the mome rath outgrabe. Not even me.

So instead of that, I wrote –

No, actually, it wasn’t that simple. An unconscious, daydreaming process intervened for several months, maybe even a year. But eventually I wrote a fantasy novel about an evil king and his cruel minions and how two princes became blood brothers, endured tortures, rallied followers, and defeated the bad guys. Both of my heroes were me, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The golden one was my public, steady self and the dark, scarred one was my hidden, moody, messed-up self. It was about time we got acquainted, if only on paper.

The next novel was the same, except different. Indeed, I wrote fantasy novels of paired heroes for a decade before I put myself together as one person able to be, get this, female. But all that time I had written about being bullied and I was read and heard. I had done it. So I wrote fantasy instead of strict fact; so what?
And then I went on to write many more different sorts of novels. . . .

Caveat: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes – actually, most of the time after that first spate of fantasies – sometimes my novels are just novels, period. But occasionally they’re more. At least four of my YA novels were written in order to exorcise from my heart the horror of murder – various different real-life murders. And one of my children’s books was written in a three-week rage after I’d heard a racist comment from a neighbor. And then there were my problems with my mother, never resolved because she became dotty in her final decades, so they ended up in several novels, including the Enola Holmes mystery series.

But perhaps the freakiest book I’ve ever written “instead of” strict fact was FAIR PERIL, magical realism that many readers find hilarious. I began writing it when my husband fell in love with another woman, although he so earnestly denied having an affair that I believed him – consciously. But the smarter part of me prepared for divorce by creating a wacked-out narrative that starts like this:

“Once upon a time there was a middle-aged woman,” storyteller Buffy Murphy declaimed to the trees, “whose bung hole of a husband dumped her the month after their twentieth wedding anniversary. After she skipped having a life to raise three kids with him, he gives her the old heave-ho and off he goes with his bimbo.”

There’s much more, of course, concerning Buffy’s adventures with a talking frog in the Mall Tifarious, but what’s freaky is this: FAIR PERIL was written so far ahead of time that it was actually published the same month my marriage hit the fan, and my first copy arrived shortly before the splat. My then-husband picked up my brand-new book and carried it into the bathroom with him. When he came out a few minutes later, his face had gone frog-belly white. He said, “I can’t read this.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer me at that time, but before that October was over he finally told me the truth and moved out. “I hadn’t intended to leave you until spring,” he said. (!?!**#!)

I suppose I ought to thank myself for writing FAIR PERIL. It ends with my protagonist talking to the trees again, but making a new story. In writing my dress rehearsal for divorce, although I had thoroughly disguised the material with a wicked queen and a magical librarian, I had included my own healing process.

Whoa.

Instances like that make me look back and shake my head. I write books for a living; I write them one after another because otherwise I don’t know what to do with myself; but sometimes a book is more than just a book. It’s instead of. It’s a way to turn suffering into the write stuff. Luckily for me.

Oyez, oyez, a bunch of novels of mine are back digitally! Open Road Media recently went live with them, half YA, half mass market fantasy. And regarding the YA novels, they requested the usual information: describe the book, the characters, how you got the idea, any backstory behind the title of the book or why it was written – aaaaak, for so many books? As the task was so daunting, I cheated. I tried to group the books. At first I just wrote about the horse books. But then this came up:

When my kids were in high school, one of their classmates was riding a four-wheeler along a trail when he hit a cable strung at neck height; it crushed his windpipe and killed him instantly. The cruel person who hung the cable was never caught. This incident traumatized me to my core and haunted me so much that it took two books, years apart, to exorcise it.

One was SKY RIDER, in which the dead boy reappears as an angry ghost to care for a horse that is about to be euthanized. Dusty, the girl who owns the horse,can no longer ride because of a painful back injury she sustained when her alcoholic father was driving drunk. She, her father, and the boy Skye all require healing.

The other book is TOUGHING IT. In the first draft, Tuff and his brother Dillon are riding their dirt bike up a mountain trail; Dillon is killed by the cable. For plot reasons, I later changed the cable to a gun trap. This book, again, is about grief and the healing process. And a river. The river goes on flowing.

So I ended up grouping by trauma. Another mystery book of mine, BLOOD TRAIL, is based on a truly horrific murder that stunned my community. A teen boy killed his brother with a knife, as was made all too evident by the blood trail throughout the house. I needed to exorcise the crime from my mind, and also to address the small-town reactions of denial, disbelief and incomprehension. The story is told from the point of view of Jeremy, the murdered teen’s best friend. The mystery is not who did it, but why, and it is a question without any satisfactory answer. Again, there is a river, and it goes on flowing.

And yet another trauma: SEPARATE SISTERS was written as my way of dealing with the problems of a messed up family I knew. One girl lived with her father and was a total rebel. I met her through horseback riding. She wore black skinny jeans, black paddock boots, a black Desperado hat and an austere long-sleeved shirt, sometimes with a tie, all year long, no matter how hot the weather got. I would give her rides home when she ran away from school, and she became just about the only groupie I’ve ever had. Her father would bring her to my book signings, and she would sit with me behind the table to keep me company. For hours. Her sister and mother I met at musical events at the high school; the other sister took singing lessons, wore dresses, was popular and lived with her mom. My groupie, the rebel girl who lived with her father, despised both her sister and her mother. I liked everyone in the divided family, and I wanted so badly for this family to heal that I wrote a book about an artistic sister and a brainy sister, similarly divided, who finally bridge the gap.

But the most influential trauma started way back when I was an intelligent, obedient kid who was bullied. Ever since then I have been daydreaming about a dark hero who is a poet, a musician, a visionary, and who is terribly wronged. This figure appears repeatedly in my fantasy novels for adults, but also he is Nico, the rock star betrayed by his fellow lead singer and best friend, in THE FRIENDSHIP SONG, a contemporary fantasy novel for middle-grade children. And he is Kamo in SECRET STAR, a YA novel I can’t quite call realistic because there’s so much mysticism, music and heart in it. SECRET STAR is told from the viewpoint of Tess, a teen girl who live in rural poverty, wears old jeans and Red Wing work boots, and is such a misfit she is physically endangered. This is a gritty, tough, yet lyrical book. THE FRIENDSHIP SONG's protagonist is Harper, a girl whose dad is about to marry a weird woman named Gus, who does folk art and plays a twelve-string guitar with magical qualities. Harper and her friend Rawnie worship the group Neon Shadow, and when dark, handsome Nico falls ill to the point of death, the girls venture down a twelve-string tunnel to rock&roll hades in order to save him.

Whew.

I discovered that, out of all the YA books just published, there were only a few that didn’t evolve out of some sort of personal trauma in my life. Those few include DUSSSIE, my pubescent-Medusa fantasy, and POSSESSING JESSIE, horror, and LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER, Edgar-winning mystery.

Open Road Media also released about an equal number of my fantasy titles for adults. I wonder: might they, also, sort themselves into groups by trauma? Stay tuned.