Censorship, Banned Books, and Intellectual Freedom

I’ve been living in a cave regarding censorship and banned books. I’ve been operating under the assumption that in the digital age where students have unlimited access to the Internet, there would be less censorship for them than past generation. Why restrict access to library books when kids can just download them on their phone?

When I spoke to a group of high school students last month, they asked me questions that alerted me to this important issue, and now I see it everywhere. As an author of YA books on sensitive topics (suicide, depression, teen pregnancy, anorexia, drinking) that the intellectual freedom police would likely target, this is deeply concerning.

In a recent article about restricted access or removed library materials, the top 10 YA books that were challenged and banned include:

  • “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher – because it discusses suicide

  • “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie (a National Book Award Winner) – because it acknowledges issues such as poverty, alcoholism, and sexuality—as well as uses profanity

I’m doomed. Two of my books fit into these categories.

The only good thing to come from banning books is that it drives popularity. What’s better than forbidden fruit, right? If it’s banned, it must be good. If you’ll look at the Banned Books that Shaped America, you’ll see some titles that have become some of our literary staples:

  • “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury – a personal favorite of mine

  • “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck

  • “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I’m going to mark the restricted books into my 2018 reading list.

What about you? What are your thoughts on censorship, banned books, and intellectual freedom?

You might want to check out my other blog, The Best Banned YA Books and Why You Should Read Them.

Why Novels about Suicide Are Helpful

One of the big issues in the latest YA novel I’m writing is mental illness in teens. For some reason I’m especially heartbroken by the vulnerability of kids struggling with this issue today and the missed opportunities to help them. All the warnings that go dismissed, ignored, and misunderstood are leading to higher and higher rates of suicide among our youth.

More teens harm themselves than harm others. That’s depression. It's when the pain turns inward. Depression says:

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·        Everything seems hopeless. It just goes on and on.

·        Everything is falling apart.

·        I am not enough.

·        Who I am on the inside doesn’t match the outside.

·        I feel empty and alone.

·        No one can see me.

Novels about depression and anxiety can help to show teens that they're not alone. Straight A’s is about a girl who feels that everything is falling apart, and there is no way out. Stress and perfectionism push her into a corner. Her cries for help are seen by friends and recognized in time for her to be saved, but for many in our world today, this isn’t true.

When I talk about my book, it makes people squeamish. SUICIDE! Ugh. What a nasty topic. Can’t you write about something nice like romance? Why would you write about something horrible like that?

Because it’s important.

Because it’s real.

Because it hurts a lot of people. Because it’s killing them. Literally.

Talking really does help. Writing in journals helps. Sharing with friends, making art, talking to a counselor, and lots of things like that helps. Reading books about anxiety and depression helps. It’s important that feelings of hopelessness and despair do not stay bottled on the inside, alone. Terrible things grow in that darkness.

Healing happens in the light, in community.

Here's a great list of 10 Young Adult Books That Talk about Anxiety and Depression. Jennifer Niven's All the Bright Places is one of my all-time favorites.

What about you? Do you have some other recommendations to share? I'd love to hear from you.

Writeup: "How Novel! Straddling the Worlds of Technical & Creative Writing"

This week an article about me appeared in the employee newsletter. I thought it was really nice of them.  Patricia actually wrote the article back in August or September (as you can tell by the leaves on the photograph), but the magazine is quarterly.

I've included the actual text below the image for readability. The company name is redacted for privacy reasons.

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Khristina Chess lives something of a double life.

During the work day, she's a technical director at (company), busily rushing from meeting to meeting, managing the complexities of user experience, documentation and development services.

But in the wee hours of the morning, long before the sun even contemplates rising, she's seated at the corner desk in her den, with a Diet Mountain Dew in hand and her cat Minnie sitting nearby, plotting the painful effects of suicide, academic pressure, unwanted pregnancies, eating disorders and alcohol abuse on young adults.

"It's a passion and an obsession," says this author of several coming-of-age novels. "Sometimes I feel like it's the one thing I do for me. I'm a manager, so I'm always helping other people. But for that hour and a half or two hours, when it's dark and quiet, it's my time. It's just me.

"And I'm telling stories. It's a beautiful thing."

Chess successfully straddles the worlds of technical writing and creative writing, and she does both very well. She celebrated her 20th anniversary at (company) this year, and she's earned recognition for her fiction writing. Drive to June recently won first place in the Young Adult (YA) Category in the Reader Views Reviewer's Choice Awards. Last year, her novel Hollow Beauty was named a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

She's a sunny, upbeat person who is always smiling as she rapidly walks through (company) headquarters in Huntsville, AL. The heavy topics about which she writes don't seem to be part of her realm.

"I work really hard on plotting," says Chess, who holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in creative and technical writing. "I try to write really good plot-driven novels to make them have a fast pace and great character arc. I don't want to have a soap box or be polarizing."

Chess wrote for her middle school paper and was in the high school writing club. She began writing novels in her 20s, though she came to the YA genre just a couple of years ago.

"It's a good fit for me," she says. "I had written a lot of different books before I settled on YA. I'd written literary novels and I'd written a memoir. But in some of my critique groups, people told me that this (book) would really work better as a YA novel than the approach I had taken.

At the time, I wasn't even reading YA. I had a misconception about that genre. I picked up The Hunger Games, and I read Twilight, both of which had already created in popularity. I thought, 'Wow, this is a really popular genre,' and I understood how I could fit into that genre. I haven't looked back."

Her other YA novels are Straight A's and The Future Unborn, and the book she's currently writing is about a teen runaway who meets an unsavory character online. To learn more about Chess and her world of fiction, visit khristinachess.com.

Patricia McCarter is Senior Content Marketing Manager with (company)

Khristina Chess is the award-winning author of several YA novels about troubled teens turning corners. You can find her on Amazon, Goodreads, and Twitter as an active daily contributor in the #5amwritersclub.

Community and Craft

Yesterday I met with the Murphy Writer's Group to talk about my journey as a writer, my experience with indie publishing, and my process.

What a joy to spend time with like-minded people who love talking about point of view and plot!

It's nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), and one of the writers is going to participate for the first time. I've never done that. In preparing for the talk, I realized that over an 18-year period I've written at least 12 novels. It's hard to identify an exact count because I've rewritten a few so drastically that you might "count" them as new novels. Some of these early books have been terrible and will never see the light of day.

Getting started or staying committed to writing hasn't been a problem for me.

But writing can be a lonely business. Non-writing people don't always understand the compulsion or the passion. Writers can also be a peculiar bunch. We like grammar and the beautiful turn of a phrase. Or at least I do. Going to a writer's group like Murphy reminds me that there are others right here in town who are like me.

I shared a resource list with them of some of my favorite books on craft or that inspire.

Writing Craft

Bickham, Jack – “Scene and Structure”, “Setting”, and “Writing Novels That Sell”

Browne, Renni and King, Dave – “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers”

Frey, James – “How to Write a Damn Good Novel”

King, Stephen – “On Writing”

Kress, Nancy – “Beginnings, Middles, and Endings”

Lukeman, Noah – “The First Five Pages,” “The Plot Thickens,” and “A Dash of Style”

Maas, Donald – “The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface”

Maas, Donald – “Writing the Breakout Novel”

Schmidt, Victoria – “45 Master Characters”

Scott Card, Orson – “Characters and Viewpoint”

Stein, Sol – “How to Grow a Novel”

Wood, Monica – “Description”

Writing Motivation

Cameron, Julia – “The Artist’s Way”

Keys, Ralph – “The Courage to Write” and “The Writer’s Book of Hope”

Lamott, Anne – “Bird by Bird”

“Writers [on Writing]” - Collected Essays from NY Times

Conrad & Schultz – “Snoopy’s Guide to the Writer’s Life”

Snoopy has much to say about the writing life. :)

Khristina Chess is the award-winning author of several YA novels about troubled teens turning corners. You can find her on Amazon, Goodreads, and Twitter as an active daily contributor in the #5amwritersclub.

My Own Set of Keys

Everything changed for my family during the terrible recession years in the 1980s, when Dad and thousands of other workers in the coal mining and steel industries of the rust belt received pink slips. Every night my parents watched the evening news with grim faces; American unemployment rates were always the top story. Many local plants closed their doors forever. Families lost their homes and migrated to other parts of the country in search of jobs.

One of my best memories happened during that time. Very early on Christmas morning, I woke my younger sister. She tried to muffle her coughing as we snuck downstairs. She took lots of expensive asthma and allergy pills.

Mom had warned us ahead of time that there wouldn’t be many presents because of Dad’s layoff, but my sister and I found several wrapped boxes under the tree. I plugged in the twinkling lights. The rule was that we had to wait until six o’clock to wake our parents but were allowed into our stockings. Mom stuffed them with chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, crispy Santa Claus chocolates, Hershey’s kisses, and books of Lifesaver candies. She also put in small gifts like pink nail polish for me and Matchbox cars for my sister. There was a plastic square box that you had to tilt in order to roll a tiny ball through the maze and into the hole. We whispered and played together under the colored lights of the Christmas tree.

At the right time, I started Mr. Coffee. We waited while the machine hissed and burped and dripped steaming brown coffee into the carafe. The smell was delicious.

“Get the milk,” I said.

I grabbed two mugs out of the drying rack beside the sink. My sister lugged the plastic gallon jug from the refrigerator and lifted it over her head to place it on the counter.

“Sugar,” I said.

She retrieved the glass bowl from the table. I measured two teaspoons into one of the mugs and added some milk. As soon as Mr. Coffee stopped gurgling, I poured both cups. Black for Dad, milk and sugar for Mom.

As we climbed the stairs, I walked as if balancing a book on top of my head. Our parents’ bedroom was at the top of the stairs. Mom’s side was closest to the door. We held the cup near her face on the pillow so the smell would wake her up. “What time is it?” she mumbled.

“Six.”

She groaned. I blew across the surface of the coffee so that the steam went toward her nose.

“There’s a heavy one under the tree with my name on the tag,” I said as if she didn’t know. I was twelve and knew all about Santa Claus but was supposed to be keeping the secret.

She smiled then, sat up, and took the mug from my hand. I went around and put Dad’s coffee on the night stand beside his pillow. “Dad!  Get up, it’s Christmas.”

Mom stood and pulled her terry-cloth robe over her tee-shirt. My sister and I dashed down the stairs again. We’d already decided which presents we wanted to open first and pulled them into the center of the floor. Our parents shuffled into the living room and sat at opposite ends of the couch. The scant hair on Dad’s balding head stood up every which way. Both of them lit cigarettes and squinted at the lights. An ash tray occupied the center cushion between them.

“Can we start, Mom?  Can we?”

“Go ahead.”

Mom wore a big smile on her face as I tore into the silver and blue wrapping paper. It was an electric typewriter! A Smith-Corona with black keys and a beige case. All the letters of the alphabet fanned out in a semi-circle of long metal arms just waiting for a surge of electricity to make them strike the ribbon with high force. Such a grown-up present. The weight of it. Something so expensive I never even thought to ask for one, especially this year. I stared open-mouthed.

Dad sipped his black coffee and smoked and stared at the carpet, but Mom looked right at me. She looked and really saw me and understood. This surprise gift made me feel special and deeply loved. Known. I understood how much she sacrificed to buy this typewriter: an even higher balance on those high-interest credit cards, dozens of extra double shifts at her job, peace of mind.

Smiling, she crawled down on the floor beside me and helped take the heavy machine out of its box. Together we removed the plastic packing that protected various moving parts, and then we plugged the cord into the wall. The typewriter began to hum. My heart began to hum, too, with the idea of all the new stories I’d create. I’d just started a new one called An Orphan’s Terror, in which Ginny and her brother are runaways from an orphanage. Then one day, Ginny returned from picking berries and her brother is missing. She realizes that she too is being followed and it all might end in bloody terror!!!

Today, all these years later, I can still think of that electric typewriter and the joy it gave me. What a wonderful gift. It has taken me far.

 Khristina Chess is the award-winning author of several YA novels about troubled teens turning corners. You can find her on Amazon, Goodreads, and Twitter as an active daily contributor in the #5amwritersclub.

Don't Stop Believing

I notice that one of the recurring themes in my novels is this idea that if you have a dream and if you keep working toward it, you will eventually succeed. It's a belief I've carried through my own life, particularly as it relates to my writing.

In a recent interview, I was asked when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I've known my whole life. I've been writing since I was a little kid.

My early work was heavily influenced by my favorite authors at the time. I read a lot of scary stuff and tended to write about it, too. Zombies, vampires, and monsters are still thrilling to me, though I don't write about them anymore.

Along the way, people told me how hard it would be to publish books. People told me that a writer's life was difficult and poor and not worth pursuing. I should give up. Some people gave me good advice about the writing craft; other people gave me bad advice.

The best advice was to keep writing. 

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut."― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I try to follow that advice and keep believing that I can get a little better at my craft each day. "Bird by Bird," as Anne Lamott says. 

If you're a writer, or just a dreamer, don't stop believing. Keep going. You can do it.

Khristina Chess is the award-winning author of several YA novels about troubled teens turning corners. You can find her on Amazon, Goodreads, and Twitter as an active daily contributor in the #5amwritersclub.