Day 30

1,096 words.

Yesterday it finally hit me that writing middle grade means, at least sometimes, writing about middle school. I hated middle school. I'm not going to say it was traumatic, but it was not fun in a major way. I also work with youth that age in my church, and furthermore the library I work at is right across the street from a wrong-side-of-the-tracks-type middle school. 

Every day at 3:30 we are inundated with some of the worst 11-14 year olds this world has to offer, and we have to spend the next few hours, sometimes all the way until we close, trying to keep them from fighting, yelling, bumping uglies, playing tag, leaving food everywhere, you get the picture. They are as immature as small children but old enough to start getting into some really awful mischief. There are probably worse (I know for a fact there are worse) groups of young people out there in this world, but they aren't who I have to deal with every day at 3:30.

The kids at my church are, in general, much better behaved, but the stories they tell me about what they have to go through at school are a bit hair curling — and my hair's pretty curly already. My own middle school experience was unpleasant, but it was nothing compared to what kids these days have to go through. I was pretty sheltered, and I think a lot of people my age were, at least relatively. Nobody shelters these kids. They can't. Ubiquitous internet kind of makes that impossible.

So when I realized yesterday I was going to be sending my 11 or 12 year old FMC to school, my first reaction was one of horror, terror, and desperation. I've calmed down a bit since then, especially when I realized that not only can I send her to a pleasant magnet school, but this is fiction! It only has to feel real. It doesn't have to actually be realistic. There is certainly a place for the kind of fiction that explores the almost war-zone-like school experience of the modern tweenager, but my fiction is not going to be that place. You can get away with a level of optimism in middle grade fiction that you really can't in most other categories. That's the reason I want to write in this age range. The kids I'm writing for are old enough to understand that the world is complex and not always pleasant, but life hasn't had time to make them jaded or cynical. 

It also means I don't have to write about romance. Thank goodness.