No. 24: Pink Pony Club Reject

How to Find Your Inner Cool Kid

I am not cool.

Let’s face it: most YA writers aren’t.

In my experience, we are a generally introspective, anxious, addled group, who live out dreams and longings on the page, fashioning epic romances and swashbuckling adventures and building kingdoms of heavens and stars — and off the page, we’re usually clumping around in pajamas, wishing we didn’t have to go outside.

This un-coolness usually starts early on.

We are the Good Kids. The gentle, timid innocents. The ones with no edge.

The ones who did the reading just in case of a pop quiz.

The ones who liked having our restricted drivers’ license more than our regular one.

The ones who never get that tattoo we say we want.

The ones whose first kisses were a mess.

I think it’s why so many of us YA authors are Swifties — in Taylor, we recognize a fellow Good Kid, who tries very very hard to make up for a childhood of uncoolness by convincing us no, she was cool all along. Yes, 50% book-loving, bread-baking cat girl, but also 50% sexy vamp pop goddess. 100% That Girl.

It’s math we all want to believe in.

Math I want to believe in!

But no, we were never cool, we will not be cool, and I know this because I watched Chappell Roan perform for the first time last night.

Our brilliant young intern, Elle, has been telling me for months that Chappell Roan is the next big thing. And boy is she right. If the name Chappell Roan means nothing to you, here’s required viewing:

Watching this, I turned to my friends, Michael and Alex — who’ve known about Chappell forever and are much cooler than me — and I said: “She’s got it.”

It meaning inborn swagger like you’ve come from another planet to conquer this one.

It meaning absolute ease with the essence of her skin, so much so that she can just layer other ones on and be even more herself.

It meaning the thing that we YA writers must summon in our writing and yet do not usually have in ourselves.

It meaning cool.

I still remember the cool kids in school.

Jennie Albano, who put glitter in her hair and dyed her hair half-pink and carried around a Barbie phone walkie-talkie that she used to talk to her best friend, ignoring all the boys slobbering after her.

Noah Rothman, who invented ‘sup’ before it was a thing.

Somehow I became lasting friends with both, more through will than anything else, the dutiful Agatha to their Sophies. But that’s the thing about Agatha in The School for Good and Evil — she needs Sophie as much as Sophie needs her. To be in the glow of a star just to know what the light feels like.

Now, decades later, I somehow have both kinds of characters rooted inside me. The nerdy try-hard that I always was. And the cool cats that I orbited and wanted to be.

And it was only after I finished my Fairy Tale Era, that I realized how often I create characters as twins and pairs in order to reflect this dynamic — the cool one and the bottled-up one, one fearless and bold, the other dutiful and diligent, a contrast between free and held-back. 

Sophie and Agatha.

Tedros and Hort.

Rhian and Rafal.

Rhian and Rafal, 2.0

Lancelot and Guinevere.

Hester/Anadil and Dot.

Prince and Thief (Beasts and Beauty)

Wendy and the Pirate (also Beasts and Beauty)

…and of course: Castor & Pollux. Art by Michael Blank.

It’s relentless, isn’t it, and I’m surprised no one’s noticed, except for the fact that I didn’t figure it out myself until I wrote these very words.

What does it mean, exactly?

My best guess is that when I sit down to write, all the unconscious constraints I put on myself in real life vanish and I become Cool Kid on the page. Only problem is, deep down I know that Cool Kid isn’t the real me, so I tether them to Good Kid, with a pure heart and innocent soul and no game, until inevitably the two come into conflict — the person I am and the fantasy of what I wish I could be, with the fantasy inevitably revealing itself as flawed and insensible, and the person I am winning the psychic war, which I suppose in the end, lets me sleep better at night, having no regrets about how I lived.

In music, it’s known as the idee fixe — the recurring theme — and in my favorite authors, I recognize it so clearly, their principal fixation that resurfaces again and again. Anne Rice: the synthesis of pain and pleasure. Sally Rooney: the intellectualization of vulnerability. Hanya Yanagihara: love as trauma. Honestly, in my case, I didn’t think I had an idee fixe, but now it’s so obvious — namely, that I would have loved to be Cool Kid in another life and so I live out that life on the page.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. New Novel is about a Good Kid who becomes Cool Kid. No polarity in a pair of characters, this time. Instead, it’s two polar experiences in one body. Clearly, my soul is bending towards unity, reconciliation between a life lived and life imagined, and we’ll have to see if this reconciliation succeeds, because I still don’t know how this book will end. So stay tuned…

Update on said book — I’m officially at the midpoint of the story, which means I’m more than halfway through. You would think that the midpoint should happen exactly in the middle of a book, but not in my novels. As I mentioned two weeks ago in Diary 22, I prefer a slightly longer build-up, so my books hit peak at about the 60-65% mark, before they race downhill towards denouement. I’m in the fun part now, where everything is paying off, and it feels like the end of a firework show where it’s all sparkling choreographed combustion.

Fun fact: I know I’m in a good place with the book, because when I’m on this kind of downhill roll towards the end, I start to think about what my next novel will be — as if the inner elves have worked out all the hard stuff and are looking for a new assignment.

Less fun fact: Once I get halfway through a book, there is another challenge that arises. A physical one. Your body and mind just starts to get tired, as if you’re 13 miles into a marathon and you’re like, I have to do that whole thing I just did again!? (I do not run marathons or this reason.) This is where a vacation is important. I’m allergic to vacations, generally, because if I go somewhere nice, I just want to write in that nice place –- but at the halfway point, I force myself to take a break. I never know how long it’ll be exactly. Just long enough to feel the absence of writing and fall in love with it again. (Also long enough to get Chappell Roan songs out of my head.)

Another funny story. I played a bunch of Chappel Roan interviews and videos for my Missouri cowboy partner, who just blinked at the screen, completely baffled. “It’s art,” I said. “It’s subversion. It’s alchemy, bravura, incandescence. It’s cool!”

He shook his head. “I want my money back.”

Not all of us want to be in the Pink Pony Club, I suppose.

Have you ever locked onto someone you thought was Cool? Did they influence your way of looking at the world? And how you behaved yourself? I’m so curious…

Until next week —