On alternative writing

You might know the familiar lamentation that there’s never any books about the people you more readily identify with. There’s an obvious answer to people who say it: if you want to see books with your kinds of characters, you’d best start writing them yourself.

When I was a kid, I loved to read, but I often felt frustrated by how unrealistic the kids were. They didn’t feel like people to me, just caricatures of how adults thought kids should behave. Madeleine L’Engle changed my opinion with Meg Murray, and with her brother Charles. Here was a story where I at last felt that someone was “real” even if they were characters in a sci-fi/fantasy story. Along the way, there were other stories that also felt real to me, (Like from Ray Bradbury, who writes GREAT child characters) but the vast majority of the books I read left me wanting.

And yet, no one was touching the topics that I had to deal with in my private life. To be fair, the topics I dealt with were white elephants of massive proportions, and I felt it would take a writer with huge balls to tackle them.