THE CHALLENGE: Piper has one month to get a paying gig for Dumb-the hottest new rock band in school.
Keywords: Music, Friendship, Relationships, Hearing Impairments And a lot like living high school all over again. So what was it like writing from a girl’s perspective? Fun, interesting, educational. Thankfully, I get to channel that into writing now, which is perfect. Seriously, I over-thought everything, and had enough hang-ups for entire class of students. And, like Piper, I felt everything intensely as a teen. I also know as well as Piper what it feels like to be an outsider at school, to crush on someone without them feeling the same way about me, to want to excel academically without having friends think I’m a geek/nerd/dork/loser (choose your noun). I completely understand Piper’s feelings of resentment toward her parents at the beginning of the book, because anyone would feel that way. And the reason, I think, is that most of the challenges teens face are universal: they affect boys and girls equally.
And again the answers were really illuminating, so I kept them in mind as I was writing the scene.īut you know what? As much as I had to ask for help for some parts of DUMB, I actually wrote 99 percent of it without asking for any advice at all.
Then there’s the moment where Piper makes out with someone-who-shall-remain-nameless. And so both of them dutifully gave me a list of things that they would have found attractive in Piper’s situation. So I asked my wife and sister-in-law: “What makes a boy attractive to a girl?” Now, as someone who has been happily married for a decade, I probably ought to have had some idea of this already, but I didn’t. To be honest, I wasn’t completely convinced why she would like him all that much. Ĭonfession time: In order to get fully inside Piper’s head, I had to get help every now and again. Whereas a LOT of my readers are female, which is why your question is so interesting. But most of my readers aren’t deaf either, and probably don’t know much about deafness. In Piper’s case-she’s the narrator of FIVE FLAVORS OF DUMB, by the way-I had to do a lot of research: I mean, she doesn’t know anything about music, whereas I have a Ph.D.
0 kommentar(er)
