Days 1 & 2 of Youth Authors Week
Our first picks are oldies, but goodies.
Welcome to Youth Authors Week! As part of our campaign, we’re calling for readers of all ages to read at least one piece of youth writing this week. Over the next seven days, we’ll be sending you our reading recommendations and our picks for Day One and Day Two might surprise you. They’re books you’ve most likely already read, maybe even discussed in class or wrote essays on.
Frankenstein, and The Outsiders, both written when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and S.E. Hinton, respectively, were teenagers, are great reminders that young writers have long been transforming us with the power of their words and their stories. When asked why The Outsiders remains popular almost 60 years after it was published, S.E. Hinton shared, "Every teenager feels that adults have no idea what's going on. That's exactly the way I felt when I wrote The Outsiders. Even today, the concept of the in-group and the out-group remains the same.”
The theme for today’s picks are the powerful images, themes, and emotions driving young writers: dreams and nightmares, in the case of Frankenstein, and intolerance and violence, in the case of The Outsiders.
“As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to “write stories.” Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air — the indulging in waking dreams — the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.”
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein
Famously, the idea behind Frankenstein came to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in her dreams, or perhaps more accurately, her nightmares: “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion."
Writing or Reflection Prompt: What stories are calling to you in your sleep, asking to be written?
“One day a friend of mine was walking home from school and these "nice" kids jumped out of a car and beat him up because they didn't like his being a greaser. This made me mad and I just went home and started pounding out a story about this boy who was beaten up while he was walking home from the movies--the beginning of The Outsiders. I was just something to let off steam. I didn't have any grand design. I just sat down and started writing it. I look back and I think it was totally written in my subconscious or something.”
- S.E. Hinton, in an interview with The Outsiders Fan Club
Writing or Reflection Prompt: What do you see happening around you that angers you, and how would you remake your corner of the world in a story?
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