Like So Totally, Like, Annoying!

[mrissa]

I am not a fan of censorship. You all probably know this by now. But if no one ever in the world ever ever ever wrote another story in cutesy ditzy teenage girl voice, I swear we would still have at least enough of those stories. At least.

Take Mike Resnick's story in Janis Ian's Stars anthology. (Do I have to say "please" here, or will you take the pleading for granted?) It starts out, "He's GORGEOUS! I mean, it's as if Morvich and Casabella and that old guy, Michael something, you know, the one who painted some big ceiling, as if they all got together and said, what's the most beautiful thing we can paint, the most beautiful thing in all the galaxy?"

If you read that and thought, "I hate the narrator and find her unbelievable and could not possibly care about anything she does ever," you are not alone. Later, the reader who is unwary enough to continue is treated to the gem, "He wasn't there today. I came home and cried and counted 51 ways to kill myself, but then I cracked a nail and had to go to the beautician to get the acrylic fixed." Oh, HA! Ha HA! Mike Resnick, you are so much with the funny!

Teenage dialect is hard to get right. You can't just decide to be optimally shallow and edit out a random half of your own knowledge and have a believable teenage narrator. Doesn't work that way. Go back and try again.

GRRRRR.

I am also probably being cranky to feel that there are far fewer "thick-headed shallow male teenager" stereotype POVs, and that people who write dizzy, shallow teenage girl narrators are likely to overlap significantly with the people who assumed I was dizzy and shallow for seven years just because I was a teenage girl. That is probably not fair of me.

GRRRRRRR.

Comments

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

But if no one ever in the world ever ever ever wrote another story in cutesy ditzy teenage girl voice, I swear we would still have at least enough of those stories. At least.

At the very least, I think that anyone who wasn't a teenage girl (ditzy or not) at some point in their life should probably think very very carefully about why they think this voice is necessary, particularly those people seperated by more than a couple of decade from the teenage girls they're trying to write about. At the most, I'd like a taser for reprogramming purposes. (I'm a strong believer in aversion therapy through shock treatments. :)

It's that whole 'write what you know' bit--I don't object to people trying to write things they don't know on the level that others do(such as about being a teenage girl), but I do require that they actually seem to have tried to learn about it, in this case by doing more than watching Clueless a couple of times. Mike Resnick can never be a cutesy teenage girl, but he could actually pay attention to real life, and not just stereotypes, and I bet he could find ways to write teenage girls that let him get the same idea across with making us want to get our football player boyfriends to beat him up. ;)

At least this is the same Antho with "Come Dance With me" by Bisson isn't it? I liked that story, as I remember (he read it at Clarion) and that was a teenage girl written by a middle aged man who apparently paid attention to details in his life and noticed that even when teenagers are acting cutesy and ditzy and shallow, they're not automatically idiots.

And I think I lost track of my point in there, which was to say that even if you accept that he was writing an intentionally cutesy teenage girl, there are still good and bad ways to do it, and it sure sounds like there's nothing good about that way. :) Did you ever happen to read "Why I'm not Gorilla Girl," which was up on SH about a year ago? Given this post, I'd be interested to know if you'd recommend forcible deprogramming for that author as well, or if he suceeded at what he was trying to do.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Since "that author" is Daniel, I don't think forcible deprogramming would be necessary even if he'd written a story I found wretched. He responds well to direct-but-kind.

Also since "that author" is Daniel, I "heard" it in my head as Daniel telling me the story, so I can't really be unbiased on how it worked. But it didn't annoy me as much as similar voices of that type have. (Still, if Daniel decides not to write novels in that voice, I think I'll be fine.)

And yes, I thought the Bisson narrator was much, much better. But I didn't think that character was aiming at cutesy, at the very least, nor did Bisson seem to find her so.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

No, definately not cutesy. And I can't remember it well enough to guess at ditzy, though given Bisson I would guess not.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Nope. Kind of Gothy, but I don't really have a problem with that.