Stupidity as a Character Flaw
When I was seventeen, I hit a guy in the nuts with a yo-yo.
(I will now pause while you totally readjust your perception of me. There. More in focus now? Good.)
Why did I do it? Well, I could say that the guy had been going out of his way to aggravate me that day; but looking back, as a teenager I got mad about someone breathing funny. Didn’t take much to aggravate me. So I can’t really claim that as a reason. No, the real reason was as simple and as stupid as it gets: he dared me to. Challenged me. Said I’d never do it. Even stood there legs aspraddle and called me a chicken.
Hmmm. Looking back, that wasn’t particularly bright on his part–but never mind. The point I’m making is that I was seventeen, and I was stupid. I did stuff back then just to make the point that I could. That I would. To show off. To answer a dare. To look cool. To impress a guy. To piss off a teacher or my parents or any authority figure.
If you, as a writer, are writing about teenagers of any culture or time period, they’re going to have gigantically stupid moments that make adults cringe. They’re going to have egos the size of King Kong’s big sister, and they’ll be just about as subtle when they want something. They’ll lie to get what they want. They might even steal of break something. They’ll manipulate everyone around them as fiercely as possible and laugh all the way out the door.
Hang on to the rotten tomatoes, folks, and let me add in a caveat for the easily offended here: in the real world, not all teenagers are like this. Of course not. Some of them are raised right; they have manners and say thank you and please and may I, they don’t break curfew, they don’t stay on the phone all night with their friends, and they check with their parents before doing anything the least bit questionable.
But as characters in a story, those are incredibly boring characteristics. Of course in the real world there are very well behaved teenagers, and even quirky, fun, rebellious-within-limits teenagers who don’t do the Really Stupid Stuff; those characters belong in chick lit books and YA novels. If you’re writing a story that goes for the gut, that you want people to laugh and cry and remember for a while, you’ve got to push your characters into extremes of behavior now and again. Have them do something Monumentally Stupid, the equivalent of hitting a guy in the nuts with a yo-yo on a dare.
(By the way, I got lucky in two ways regarding that incident: One, I aimed to just miss–I honestly just wanted to scare him–and I almost succeeded. I still wake up at night sometimes, my adult side throttling me over the mature realization of what would have happened had I stepped another inch forward…. Two, this was before Zero Tolerance–in modern times I would have been suspended if not expelled for that little stunt. And several other dumb teenager tricks, come to that. Like the day I was smoking a cigarette–in front of teachers–on school grounds–when I was fifteen. Yes, the smoking age was eighteen at that point–I’m not that old! But that’s a story for another day. Maybe.)
I’ve done some thinking back over my own writing, and on people’s reactions to it, and I see a pattern: some people start out disliking my main characters but wind up rooting for them by the end of the novel. That’s actually more or less deliberate, I think, on my part. In my first book, Secrets of the Sands, I was dealing with two teenaged characters: Alyea and Idisio. While neither of them were exactly stupid, spoiled, goofball American teenagers, they did have a definite dumbass ego to their early actions. As the story progresses, they grow up rapidly. By the end of Guardians of the Desert, Alyea faces down the king–and wins!–and by the end of the fourth book, she’s standing up to someone a lot more powerful than that.
Is she still going to have stupid moments? Absolutely. She’s still only around eighteen or nineteen when this first series closes. But she’s come a loooooong way, and now probably thinks on the level of someone ten years older most of the time. Writing that maturation arc is a trick I don’t think I could have pulled off in earlier years, because it’s impossible to understand the difference between the thoughts of a teenager and an adult until you’re actually an adult and have started to face your childhood stupidities. Which brings us back to “write what you know”…all those things you cringe over, looking back, are hidden gold for a writer. Use them well.
One final “by the way”–Some years back, I tracked down the guy I’d hit–and a few others I’d been unpleasant to in various ways–and apologized profusely for being such a bitch in high school. That’s the only reason I feel safe talking about this now, because I’ve made my amends on that point. There are still a few incidents I’m so horribly ashamed of that I won’t ever air them in public, because I really doubt I’ll ever have the chance to offer a mature apology to the people involved; life’s like that. But more than likely I will showcase characters that carry that sort of guilt with them over past actions…because, well, gold is gold, dude. Use it or lose it. ;p
