Commentary on "A Hole in My Jacket"
When I did this for my last Share Around, my teacher noted on my paper saying,"I am so very impressed with this first draft!" Later when I talked with her, she continued by saying, "I couldn't believe that it was only your first draft. It was very good." In all my time of knowing her, that's the best compliment I've ever gotten from her on something I've written.
Last year, I began developing a character for a project I had entitled "Finding Kevin", a story about an insecure teenager named Kevin Sanders. My friend Ben Hansen gave me permission to use his dark, childhood past in Canada for Kevin’s background, and he was very willing to be a model so to speak for Kevin. (In fact, in pure coincidence, we both separately came up with the name “Kevin”.) I only knew as far as the actual story would go that Kevin’s insecurity would be founded on Ben’s isolated childhood, that Kevin would find meaningful friendships, and then some kind of conflict would come around and threaten those new friends, possibly in the manner of a school shooting or gassing (I know about those dangers because they were threats to the school from people I knew when I went to Canyon View, Jr. High). After a while, I gave up on "Finding Kevin" because it sounded too cliché.
Two months ago, I read an autobiographical book called The Burn Journals by Brent Reynolds, which gave an account of the author’s attempt to commit suicide by lighting himself on fire, and his mental, physical, and social recovery. What struck me about this book was that it was an extremely vivid story of a teenage boy “on the emotional edge”, which made for powerful reading. Around that time, I was also toying with a concept that I got from something I was learning in my psychology class: the idea that perhaps I could create a character who was so insecure and unstable that he had gotten to a point where mentally he could only act on his impulses and rely on his first sensory details to make choices, and how he would deal with this sort of mental illness. And I knew that if I did write such a story, I wanted it to be as refreshing and as sharp as The Burn Journals.
And so when I was listening to “A Rush of Blood to the Head” by Coldplay one day, I slowly started seeing a story forming in my head of a teenage boy who has the “impulse illness”, and in a sudden rage that sparks when his girlfriend cheats on him, and he begins going on a rampage that includes threatening the school with a Columbine incident. I wanted to make it real, and the only thing I could come up with for the girlfriend situation was once again use Ben’s real life experiences…which inevitably led me back to Kevin Sanders, who by this time seemed to have developed and grown while I was away.
For the story to be as cutting edge as The Burn Journals, I wanted first person, present tense narration from Kevin, but later in the story as the police begin to investigate I would have a third person narration about a physiatrist on the scene. I also wanted to show only through Kevin’s actions just how insecure and unstable he is. So I decided to start the story with Kevin examining a hole in his jacket and relating it to his messed up life (one day while contemplating where to begin, it was as if I could keep hear Kevin begin his own story by saying “There is a hole in my jacket”), reflecting on his acute self-awareness—just like Ben. In some ways, Kevin is Ben. But then Kevin wouldn’t be as real to me, and therefore I could never work with him. So I started digging around, and slowly I began to see that the most important things about Kevin were from my own personality. So I guess you could say that Kevin has Ben’s life, but as if I was living in it.
Last year, I began developing a character for a project I had entitled "Finding Kevin", a story about an insecure teenager named Kevin Sanders. My friend Ben Hansen gave me permission to use his dark, childhood past in Canada for Kevin’s background, and he was very willing to be a model so to speak for Kevin. (In fact, in pure coincidence, we both separately came up with the name “Kevin”.) I only knew as far as the actual story would go that Kevin’s insecurity would be founded on Ben’s isolated childhood, that Kevin would find meaningful friendships, and then some kind of conflict would come around and threaten those new friends, possibly in the manner of a school shooting or gassing (I know about those dangers because they were threats to the school from people I knew when I went to Canyon View, Jr. High). After a while, I gave up on "Finding Kevin" because it sounded too cliché.
Two months ago, I read an autobiographical book called The Burn Journals by Brent Reynolds, which gave an account of the author’s attempt to commit suicide by lighting himself on fire, and his mental, physical, and social recovery. What struck me about this book was that it was an extremely vivid story of a teenage boy “on the emotional edge”, which made for powerful reading. Around that time, I was also toying with a concept that I got from something I was learning in my psychology class: the idea that perhaps I could create a character who was so insecure and unstable that he had gotten to a point where mentally he could only act on his impulses and rely on his first sensory details to make choices, and how he would deal with this sort of mental illness. And I knew that if I did write such a story, I wanted it to be as refreshing and as sharp as The Burn Journals.
And so when I was listening to “A Rush of Blood to the Head” by Coldplay one day, I slowly started seeing a story forming in my head of a teenage boy who has the “impulse illness”, and in a sudden rage that sparks when his girlfriend cheats on him, and he begins going on a rampage that includes threatening the school with a Columbine incident. I wanted to make it real, and the only thing I could come up with for the girlfriend situation was once again use Ben’s real life experiences…which inevitably led me back to Kevin Sanders, who by this time seemed to have developed and grown while I was away.
For the story to be as cutting edge as The Burn Journals, I wanted first person, present tense narration from Kevin, but later in the story as the police begin to investigate I would have a third person narration about a physiatrist on the scene. I also wanted to show only through Kevin’s actions just how insecure and unstable he is. So I decided to start the story with Kevin examining a hole in his jacket and relating it to his messed up life (one day while contemplating where to begin, it was as if I could keep hear Kevin begin his own story by saying “There is a hole in my jacket”), reflecting on his acute self-awareness—just like Ben. In some ways, Kevin is Ben. But then Kevin wouldn’t be as real to me, and therefore I could never work with him. So I started digging around, and slowly I began to see that the most important things about Kevin were from my own personality. So I guess you could say that Kevin has Ben’s life, but as if I was living in it.
posted by Alexander at 6:59 PM
1 Comments:
That commentary was so interesting. It makes sense and it's great to get into your head and the way you wrote it. Thank you so much for putting that up! It has actually helped me realize some things. Thank you! You are such an amazing writer. I really think that you should finish this.
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