SURVIVAL, COMING OF AGE AND YA

For me, coming of age YA fiction is all about survival (think Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Golden Compass). How do I survive life? What do I need to do to get through this? These questions are relevant to children and adults alike - even 'normal' life can be difficult, especially for teenagers who may feel disempowered, confused, pressured. All things that adults must cope with too, but have more experience of. Modern life seems to be tipping more and more of us over the edge into mental health problems.

In theory young people have parents who can protect them, support them and help them to learn how to build resilience. But what if this doesn’t happen? What if they are exposed, made vulnerable, not mature enough to understand when they are being exploited. There are sadly many extreme examples of this in real life, eg grooming. Or worse, what if, as in the best fairy tales, Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty etc, the parents themselves are the ones putting the children at risk?

I’ve read and fallen in love with so many coming of age stories - Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Jane Eyre, Walkabout, A Swift Pure Cry, Purple Hibiscus, Kes, The Island, Winter’s Bone, Revolver - to name a few favourites. Each in their own way a survival story in which the protagonist, often on the threshold of adulthood, must navigate dangerous waters, struggle to make sense of and survive their experiences of the world. Here is a link to a short extract from the film of William Golding's extraordinary survival novel, Lord of the Flies.

 In my own stories I look at the question of survival through the metaphor of scarcity of food. I like to think of it as exploring both ‘emotional and physical hunger’ (as someone once wrote about Vilette, a novel by Charlotte Bronte).

In White Night the two protagonists, Jack and Kiki are hurled into a wilderness environment which tests them to the extreme both physically - hunger, cold, wild animals, and emotionally –they both have difficult family lives and secrets to hide. Confronted by each other and the possibility of love, they are tested by their feelings of vulnerability.

In my new story, fourteen year old protagonist Esther learns to survive her emotional turbulence – mum disengaged, dad gone, her mum’s boyfriend a physical threat – by nourishing herself emotionally via her positive memories of her childhood, and physically by finding food in whatever way she can, scavenging, foraging, stealing.

So I was very interested when I discovered Megan Hine – in one of those odd coincidences, I picked up a discarded magazine on the tube and began to read an article on her book Mind of a survivor: what the wild has taught me about survival and success. Megan draws parallels between modern urban survival and wilderness survival – her speciality - arguing that you need a survival mindset for both, ie many of the instincts needed for urban survival are the same as those required for wilderness survival. She’s been called a female Bear Grylls, and perhaps you could call her skillset feminine intuition.

Here is a link to an article on Megan Hine in the Bath Magazine.

http://thebathmagazine.co.uk/survivor-megan-hine/

So what are the main things in Megan Hine’s survival toolkit?

INTUITION

She argues that the biggest threat to us in the wilderness isn’t the weather or the wild animals, it’s other people. Learn to recognise warning signs, develop your intuition. Lack of awareness makes you vulnerable, you become prey. When he first meets her, Jack notices things about Chloe, her extreme behaviour, her dirty fingernails, ie he is picking up warning signals about her. But as his initial empathy for her quickly turns into sympathy, he tunes out of his intuition and the danger signals, and puts himself at risk. Jack is a rescuer, allowing his own needs to be over ridden by his need to help her.

EMPATHY

In contrast, initially Chloe has very little empathy for Jack, she simply wants to survive. But as the novel unfolds, she becomes more empathetic, and then sympathetic, which leaves her more vulnerable and in turn endangers them both.

CREATIVITY

Megan Hine argues that brain is more important than brawn when it comes to survival. Jack provides the brawn, but it is Chloe who provides the answer to their most basic need, fire.

RESILIENCE ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’

Jack is exposed to an environment which challenges him physically and makes him fearful – this forces him to build the resilience to survive. His relationship with Chloe challenges him emotionally. Ultimately, these two things help him to build strength, to face his dark past and unhappy family life and to fight back, even as Chloe gives up.

If you had to write a checklist of attributes for your protagonist, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start, whoever they are. In the end great stories are universal, there for all of us, passing on vicarious experience, testing out theories and scenarios, and perhaps offering solutions. Our job as readers is to find the stories that resonate for us.