Heroes

"Robert Cormier is the man. He was doing stuff for teenagers long before anyone else was there. And it was so brilliant. I think he is the single most important writer in this genre by a long chalk. It is still fabulous stuff. I was reading Heroes recently, but you could pick any one of a number of his books. He is a young man who has just come back from war. He signed up to fight because everyone wanted to go and fight the Nazis, but of course it did not turn out as he expected. He suffered a terrible injury – he lost his face. As a result, when he comes back, no one can recognise him. There also is a girl he loved before he left and there’s a guy who ran the local youth club who everyone adored and thought of as a big hero. But there is also a dark secret hidden in the past… Basically Francis has come back to shoot this guy. Throughout the book you discover what this chap did, how it affected Francis, what happened with his girlfriend and how this hero betrayed him. Francis has a medal for bravery – he fell on a grenade. Everyone thought it was to save his mates, but in fact, he was trying to end his own life. He was scared and he wanted to die. It is very difficult to do that, because by the time you are a teenager you are becoming an adult. I don’t think there is any very clear line, except that it does usually have a teenager in the book. But Robert Cormier did cover a lot of the things about becoming who you are. Most of his books are coming-of-age stories. Those two books in particular are areas that I was very interested in when I was that age! I felt as though there was a real lack of honesty and directness. I find that very often, when adults are thinking about some of those difficult subjects with young people, they go into educational mode. The point about those two books was to try to make them authentic and real. When I am thinking of themes for teenage books it really is a question of entering into your characters. And if you are accurately and fully getting into characters that are that age then those kinds of themes present themselves. You have to avoid trying to “get down with the kids” at all costs! It just looks so bad and pathetic. But if you are writing novels you do have to put yourself in the shoes of characters of all ages and all kinds. People often ask me, “How do you keep up with today’s kids?” But, of course, people rarely do that. You have to engage with yourself when you were that age and imagine what it would be like if you were a different person of a different age or even a different gender in other situations. There are a lot of pitfalls – things like “getting down with the kids”, trying to educate the kids, trying to think like today’s kids, trying to share your great knowledge and that kind of thing. But, at the end of the day, anyone who is older than a teenager has been a teenager at one point so we have all had that experience and it should be possible for everyone to engage with it. It varies depending on the book. But some people like the fact that someone is writing about these sorts of things in a straightforward way. I remember in the first scene of Junk a boy is trying to get his hands down a girl’s pants and a girl said to me that just having that in was refreshing because it was the sort of thing that did happen – but never in fiction. Because it is quite an accurate story of how addiction affects people and their relationships. I also got a lot of emails from people who found it really useful because their parent, sister, brother or friend had had those kinds of experiences. There are two things that make him the king of it. One is that he was doing it way before everyone else. When Junk came out a lot of the fuss and noise which surrounded it was because it was a teenage book which addressed teenagers in a fairly direct kind of way. But Cormier had been doing it decades before. He hadn’t tackled those subjects particularly because he was a thriller writer. But he did lay the groundwork for the whole genre. Not only that – he is just so good. Plot, character, and a beautiful prose style. His books work today as well as ever."