A Word with Doug Wilhelm

Through this blog and in school visits, I recently asked middle schoolers around the country to help me develop a followup novel to The Revealers. They could do this, I said, by giving me their own true, uncensored advice on how to survive middle school.

I said, if you were talking with a younger person, someone you knew and cared about who was starting middle school next year, what would you tell them?

This week’s post is the second in a series of three that share the most interesting and most revealing advice they gave. Last week I posted kids’ tips for dealing with teachers and other adults in school. This week, middle schoolers speak from experience about dealing with other kids, with social groups, with peer pressure. Next week’s final post will present their most personal wisdom — whether you should try to be yourself in middle school, and if so, how.

Part two, dealing with cliques, social pressures, and other kids:

If I had to give a student one piece of advice for middle school it would be don’t get involved in drama and rumors. They could get you in a lot of trouble, and also hurt someone. If you hear a rumor, ignore it or stand up for that person.

Try to find the right clique, because if you don’t then you might be left out of activities that you may like to do. Make friends with only the kids that look okay to you. Don’t just go off looking for cool kids because they might not be the kind of people you may think they are.

I would say watch out for DRAMA. Because no matter how hard you try it can get to you by rumors or secrets. Your best friend or relative could even be the start of this drama. The drama can happen outside of school or inside, but most of it will get back to school. If you’re caught up in drama let it go. Although most people don’t. They will go up to that person and confront them and it could lead to a fistfight or a yelling fight.

I have a friend in sixth grade. If it was just us two in a room and we were talking about middle school, one piece of advice I would give her is to not let bullies or anyone make you feel bad and to not take it. I would tell her that if she ever had a problem with someone from the next grade up, try to talk to me about it and don’t let stupid situations get in the way of her success.

Do not get in the wrong group of kids who do drugs. Lean towards friends who like you for the way you are not by the way you dress or the way you look. Do not do bad things to fit in.

Don’t let your guard down. Don’t let your friends go and try to find a true friend. And you can’t let people pick on you. Peer pressure and name calling are your major informers to how your life has been going.

I would tell them to study hard, keep good grades and hang out with the right people. Stay away from drugs and people you know will hurt you, even if being around them makes you popular. You want to be around people good to you. Another thing, don’t cower to people that pick on you or bully you. That shows you’re weak and they’ll keep doing it.

If you are going to try to be popular make sure you wear the expensive clothes. I think it’s easy to get popular, just hang out with the right kids, also don’t hang with kids that have white clothes, populars never wear white. Boys love to give girls hugs so if they ask go ahead.

Yes you would need to stay away from those druggie kind of people, and you should try to avoid being with the wrong crowd. I’m not made for popular people. I’m funky and different in my own way.

Avoid rumors at all costs, they spread like wildfire, nobody is safe. Even if you have nothing to do with it, it could still get you. Kids are like wolves. They have their cliques and fight, like a never-ending cycle. Everything is connected.

I recently asked middle schoolers around the country for advice on surviving middle school.

This was actually research: I was developing some ideas for the new book I’m working on, which is a followup story to The Revealers. Both on this blog and during school visits, I asked young people to give me one piece of uncensored advice — something you might tell a younger person who was about to come to your middle school, if no adult was listening.

For the next three weeks, I’m going to post some of their best responses. This week’s first selection deals with the adults in school — teachers, mainly. How do you cope with these demanding individuals?

Here are is some of the most outrageous, entertaining, and creative advice that kids gave. Next week: Dealing with cliques, groups, and social behavior.

If you’re late to class, say your locker wouldn’t open. But after the first quarter, don’t say that anymore. Use your imagination, that’s what I did.

Put a lot of candy in your backpack and secretly put it in your locker and eat some every time you get out of a class.

Always look out for teachers when you are having a conversation with a peer that is inappropriate. Many teachers say they have four eyes (one set behind their head). I would say it’s true. Even though it sounds really weird, they can see just about everything. They can also hear everything.

How to waste time in class. You have to find out what a teacher likes. Mrs. ____ likes talking about Japan and about herself. So ask her a question. After she answers, keep asking questions on that topic. Most of the time she will keep talking.

If you are late to class have your favorite teacher write you a pass saying he had something for you to do that was really important. If you have a teacher that you think doesn’t like you, give her the fruit she likes best or say something nice about her clothes.

If my sister were to come through middle school I would tell her that she has to do her homework. If she does her homework she doesn’t even need to study for tests and quizzes. As long as you do your homework you will do fine.

Act like you are are listening. If you want to chew gum, don’t answer any questions or don’t talk cause you’ll blow your cover.

If you have makeup work and they ask you about it, say “I don’t think so” in a confused voice and start walking away.

Program the teacher’s number in your phone. If the teacher is suspicious, call her number to distract her and quickly put your phone away.

If you want to text, go to the bathroom and go into a stall and you can text all day. If you want to text in class, go to the back corner of the room and you will be okay. Trust me!

Slip your phone into your notebook. It would look like you’re taking notes. You won’t get caught because teachers love when their students take notes.

To text in class: It’s impossible. You get caught 97% of the time. If you get caught your teacher takes your phone and your guardians have to come in and get it. It’s not worth it.

Here is some advice on passing notes in class. Most people will tell you that you should just walk over in the middle of the class and hand the person the note. Or maybe some people have told you to throw the note across the room like a football. Well you shouldn’t do that because it will most likely catch the teacher’s eyes. Or hit someone else and they could read it or take it. You could put it in the flap of your pen and pass the person your pen.

Have a set up time to go meet up with your friends every day by the bathroom. If you every get a slip from the office saying you need to go to the dean or the counselor, that’s the perfect time to go to the bathroom or get a drink.

If you forget to do your homework, do it during another class; the teacher will not come up to you and say, “Is that your math homework?”

To survive in middle school, you’ve gotta first of all keep kind of organized. If all your stuff’s just thrown in a pile, then you’re probably not going to do well.

For gum chewing, you should try to chew red/pink gum. If the teacher wants to check if you have gum just let it blend in.

When you’re on the computer and you are playing a game, when the teacher is coming, press the minimize button. Also to get out of school is to tell the teacher that you have to help another teacher with something, then leave. It works when there are 20 minutes left.

In my opinion, there is a variety of ways to survive some boring classes in middle school. One of the things you could do is bring your iPod to class. To hide the iPod, wear your sweatshirt inside out, and put your iPod in the pocket that is now inside. Next, run one ear speaker up the sweatshirt and into your ear. Make sure to lean your hand on your ear to cover it up.

This next example has to do with more time to hang out in the hallways. Before going to your next class, put the first two numbers in your locker combination. It always works!

The last thing is setting up a time for all your friends to “use the restroom.” This way you can talk for a while and get out of class. In conclusion, there are many ways you can give school a little pop! Good luck!

Before any of these, decide how mad a teacher would get if they caught you.

Sometimes when I visit middle schools where students have been reading The Revealers or Falling, a young reader will ask, What was your message? I think this question means is, What lesson were you trying to teach? After all, these are students! They’re used to everything they’re asked to absorb in school coming down to a lesson of some kind.

But a novel is different. To me, at least, message is the death of storytelling. What makes a book a really good book, for any reader, is meaning — and that is something very, very different.

Here’s how I’ll try to show this. When I’m asked the message question, I’ll often say to the roomful of middle schoolers, “Let’s do an experiment. Raise your hand if you’ve ever started to read a book, a story — and you pretty quickly figured out that this was written by an adult who was trying to teach you a lesson.”

Usually about half the kids in the room, often more, raise their hands. They raise them instantly; this is, to them, a very familiar experience. Many will be nodding. Then I’ll say, “Okay, here’s the second question. How many of you finished reading that book?”

This time, a fraction of the first group, maybe one in ten kids, now raises their hands.

This experiment always goes this way. And it leads me to say, “See what I mean? We don’t want to be preached at in a story. Nobody does. And why should I think I, as the story writer, know the answers for your life? I want to give you an experience. What you get out of it has a lot to do with what you bring to it. What’s your life like? What’s hard for you right now? What’s important to you? You bring all that to reading my story, or any story — and the meaning you get out of a good story has as much to do with you and your life as it does with the story on the page.

In the reading of a story, a novel, the writer is meeting the reader — the story on the pages is meeting the story of your life. Both stories are equally important, and that’s why meaning is personal for you. You won’t picture a character in a book quite the same way that the kid next to you will — and each of you will find a different personal meaning in reading the book, if it’s a good book for you. In fact, that’s what makes it a good book for you: that you find your own personal meaning in it. And if that’s your own personal meaning, then I think no one can tell you that you’re wrong. If it’s true for you, then it’s true.

And this is the magic of a good novel, a good story — it comes to life inside the reader. The reader is the movie screen, and more. It’s in the reader’s imagination and emotions that the story comes to life.

Message is what a writer may try to put into a book — and that will always, in my opinion, be a not-very-good (I mean to say bad) book.

Meaning is something that you get out of a book. And when you do, then that, for you, is a very good book. And no one can tell you that you’re wrong.

I’ve been a freelance or self-employed writer for many years, and long ago in Montpelier, Vermont I shared an office with a close friend from college, a political cartoonist and graphic designer named Tim Newcomb. Tim always knew when I had a writing deadline — because I would suddenly start cleaning something, like the bathroom. I normally was pretty oblivious about the need to clean anything. So Tim would see me scrubbing and say, “Must be deadline day!”

I did that because I was scared. I had something to write, and I felt the fear.

I think that fear is really interesting. I’ve always thought so. What’s most interesting about it — and maybe this, like the fear itself, will sound familiar to you — is that I find I’m not so much scared to write … I’m scared to start writing. The fear for me comes before I begin. I’ve actually learned to see it as something positive, something to be moved toward rather than away from. See, the more scared I am to start on a writing project, the more challenging and risky — and therefore scary — that project feels. So the more scared I feel to start a piece of writing, the more important it is for me to start it.

This is not true of all types of fear. It wouldn’t be true, for instance, about jumping out of an airplane without a parachute — but I think it is true of writing. Our fear is our signpost: you should write this. At least, I think, you should try.

Yet how do we deal with the fear? So many of us let it stop us from writing at all. I certainly have. But once you let the fearful desire to write a particular important or challenging or creative thing go by, sometimes that chance evaporates and is lost. So we need to move through the fear. We need to write what we’re scared to write. If so, then how?

I remember once reading a very short book, one of those self-help type books whose entire theme and content was contained in the title. It was called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. And that’s it! We can feel the fear but not be stalled, or stopped, or dominated by it. We can just feel the fear of starting to write, and then we can just start.

I almost always find that once I do start, the fear goes away. Once I’m writing, I’m in it. The drafting and the rewriting are not so scary: they may go slow or they may go fast, but generally I have left the haze and weight of fear behind. For me what’s scary about writing seems to hang around that space of time before I start. So the key, I find, is to make that space small, limited, and manageable.

This really does go back to cleaning the office bathroom before I’d start on a deadline project. That was when I noticed, after Tim noticed it first, that I seem to need to let myself do something routine or basic, something unscary, before I start to write. These days generally, because I write mostly on the computer, I let myself check the news online, say for five minutes. I’ll generally be specific: “You can read the news until …” And I do, and I enjoy it. Then, when that time has past, I just take a breath and start to work.

As I say, once I start writing it’s generally okay. Sometimes it’s exciting! Sometimes it’s exhausting. Often it’s both. But one thing it almost never is, once I have taken that breath and begun, is scary any more.

This week’s posting is my second and final glimpse into Kidspeak, a collection of observations by the eighth graders of Castleton (Vt.) Village School about their lives and themselves. I promised not to interpret or “translate” in any way — so here are more selections from the kids’ own words, with questions that were posed by their teacher, Karon Perron:

What kind of groups do you see in school?
I see all different kinds … like “popular,” “kinda popular,” and “different.” … I don’t think anyone chooses which of these groups they’re in besides drugs and gangs.

There are the geeks, jocks, snobby people, smart kids, annoying kids, and the crazy kids … The kids think whatever group you’re in, you are basically good, ok, bad, or just losers.

What defines a group is how close you are as friends.

I think it is just groups of friends who get along and understand each other at a different, deeper level … Most of all, I think the people who we hang out with are people who we have known for a long time and who we trust and are comfortable around.

I do notice two types of people: followers and individuals. The followers are like girls who spend all their money on sweatpants and Uggs, and individuals tend to do some following but do what they want.

In school I sometimes see groups that are unpopular groups, and I see popular groups. Sometimes the two groups would be mad at each other and pick on each other.

Then there are the backstabbers, the ones who are always going between sides.

What do you know about yourself? Do you set goals? Are you afraid of failure? Do you worry about succeeding?
I like to be different and have stuff that stands out. For example, I like an offbeat basketball team, I prefer Nike to other brands like American Eagle … I don’t set goals because I think it’s pointless.

If I don’t reach a goal I feel like a failure. I hate failure. I am so afraid of doing something wrong … I have to succeed at something or I don’t like it. I don’t know why exactly but I just can’t take it when I don’t do well in something.

I am afraid of failure because if I fail, I can’t really feel good about myself.

I know that sometimes, I can get really mean and say stuff to people without thinking first.

If I continue down this track that I’m going on now, I am going to fail … unless I change my life around.

I like setting goals for myself, each slightly higher than the other. I like to push myself to do better.

What do you want adults in your life to know about you and kids your age?
I want kids to see things from my point of view, and that just because there is a law about bullying doesn’t mean it’s going to stop. It doesn’t stop. There needs to be action taken, and soon. Learning is fun, but bullying is more complicated than what they make it out to be …

I want adults to know that kids my age are still trying to figure out what it is that we do best. None of us are really, really that great at anything yet … Even if it doesn’t seem like it at times, we are trying our hardest. Sometimes, adults expect too much from kids our age.

We have ideas, insights, and don’t want to be treated like babies anymore. Whether we let it show or not, as eighth graders, we should be able to take responsibility for our actions and problems … Middle school is hard and you learn more than just math and reading. You learn things about yourself and your friends.

Me personally, I think it is easier for a person to learn something when it is presented in a unique way like a project or game. It is hard for some people, especially me, to sit in a classroom and read out of a textbook … It has to be more interactive.

My peers and I are only 14 years old, so we can’t do everything right; we do make mistakes.

We don’t like to stop having fun … I don’t really like to relax because it’s boring.

Parents overthink and run to conclusions without asking or stopping themselves to truly understand what really is going on and why.

Kids don’t always have a great life at home they could be right in the middle of their parents’ divorce or abuse. Sometimes, kids are put in bad places because of a stupid choice the parents made.

I want adults to know that we’re only kids living our lives, not theirs. And we have about five times harder schoolwork on top of staying connected with our friends … Someone made a universal law that if you’re not texting friends or talking online, it’s a minute wasted.

It annoys me when someone is all like “I get you,” and I’m all like, “No way!” Few people even truly get themselves, so why should they learn about me when they should know themselves.

I want adults to know that kids just want to have fun, and that they want adults to be more open to ideas.

Last Halloween I got an intriguing and mysterious email from my friend Karon Perron. Karon is a creative, high-energy teacher of language arts at the shoebox-sized middle school in Castleton, Vermont. Her eighth graders, Karon said, had been reading my book Falling —and “We have something ‘big’ cooking for the final project. It is pretty big.” The project would, she said, share her students’ “take on what issue is really getting in the way of their education (as opposed to what adults think is the problem).”

Soon, Karon promised, I would hear more. Then, just after New Year’s, Karon wrote again, this time offering to email me Kidspeak.

“I just can’t begin to tell you how much work and conversation has erupted out of Falling,” she said. When their conversation conveyed that many of her students didn’t often feel listened to or heard, Karon gave them a platform: she asked her students a series of probing questions, then collected and exactly recorded their responses. Many came in by email, others written painstakingly by hand. Kidspeak, the 15-chapter compilation of everything the students shared, is a deep look — a look from the inside — at middle schoolers’ minds, struggles, and lives, both in and outside of school.

I was so impressed that I asked Karon and her students for permission to share some of Kidspeak in this blog. The answer came back: Yes, you can — but only if you share what we wrote verbatim, as we wrote it. The kids were already frustrated with adults’ layering of adult viewpoints on top of theirs.

I agreed! It’s too rare that we just invite young people to speak, and then really listen. So here, in the first of two weekly excerptings, is a quoted sampling of what the eighth graders of Castleton Village School had to say. This week, it’s about expectations:

What do you feel is expected of you?
As kids, we need to be able to do things and learn. Not stay at home because our parents are worried … Everything we do is so strict and quiet. Learning would be so much easier if it had a fun project or something to go with it.

My parents expect a lot from me in my schoolwork. My dad threatens all the time that if I don’t do well, he’s going to take everything I own away, keep me in my room, and force me to study.

I think my parents, teachers, and principal expect me to give 100% each time I do something. They expect me to do my best and try my hardest.

I’ve lost track of what people want from me … I’m doing the best I can.

Pretty much, you just want to be a good role model.

What do you expect of yourself?
I expect a lot, sometimes too much, of myself … that I will be the best at things, which is not necessarily healthy because I’m not always the best.

One thing I really expect from myself is to get all As … I also expect myself to be a good person, and not crack when the peer pressure gets too much. This is a very hard thing to do especially in middle school where the peer pressure is bigger than ever.

I want to do well in school but I don’t want to look like a dork … I do not want to be smart and dorky or cool but stupid.

It gets so hard when I know I can do better and don’t try. Besides the fact that I’m juggling everything extracurricular. That also adds pressure and makes life more complicated. But I know I can handle it.

When it is freezing cold, raining, and muddy on the soccer field, I will play until the final whistle blows. I don’t care if I am covered in mud, walking off the field, and there is a group of hot guys, as long as I know that I played my hardest. I also expect to get good grades and do my best in school.

I expect for myself to think positive all the time, like those monks in India. I think it’s the most important thing to be positive, it’s like the best kind of armor. … “Expect” is a negative word in itself for me, because expectations are so fragile and strange, and when you don’t meet them, people get mad at you. So besides my affinity for positivity, I don’t expect much from myself.

Everyone is telling me that I expect a lot of myself. When they say that, I am usually in a state of frustration. I get really nervous about grades and about all of my sports. I know I expect a lot of myself, but I try to handle everything.

What pressure comes from these expectations? How do you deal with it?
I see pressure of all sorts. My pressure is not as bad; I just pressure myself to try. That is all anyone has asked for. I see others turning to bullying or becoming depressed from pressure.

When I am pressured, upset, or stressed, I run. It gives me time to think and let my mind wander. … Sometimes, if I’m really upset, I will go to my “secret spot.” It’s really peaceful and lets me relax.

Another pressure is to join the group of people and pick on someone instead of standing your own ground and choose to not pick on that person … I try to stand my ground, but sometimes it’s hard to do so I crash and join in.

Some take it out on others — for example, at lunch they’ll just completely dump all of the stress and pressure on us and we listen and help. Others keep it balled up inside and you know something is wrong, then all of a sudden, they burst and get angry over nothing.

I know some kids who make themselves sick if they don’t do good.

How do I deal with it? I deal with it just the opposite — if the work is too hard, I just don’t do it, and I know I have to change, but … I just give up, and in the end, I’m the one who has to pay for that decision.

I think that the pressure from parents is the hardest to deal with. This is because they are so fond of you …

Some people that I know resort to things like drugs and alcohol, but other people just do healthy things that make them feel better. Me, I dance and listen to music. Also, hanging out with friends always makes me feel better.

All of these expectations are so incredibly hard to accomplish, and you keep pushing yourself and others are pushing you to do better, and it is all so complicated.

Next week: The eighth graders on social groups, goals, and who they really are.

My young-adult novel The Revealers was published on October 7, 2003. That’s also the date that Ryan Halligan took his own life. In the months and years to come, these two events would remain connected: Ryan’s memory would play a key role in starting the national movement to confront bullying, and schools’ use of The Revealers would become more and more a part of that movement.

Ryan was a warm, sweet, funny boy, an eighth grader in Essex Junction, Vermont. He had friends and people who loved him, but he also struggled with some physical awkwardness, with some learning challenges, and with depression. In fifth grade, some boys began to bully him verbally. At middle school, this bullying — as it often does — grew much worse. In seventh grade, Ryan learned kick-boxing and stood up to his main tormentor … and things seemed to get better. But in summer after seventh grade, Ryan became more and more engrossed with instant messaging. He spent hours online, and appears to have grown depressed at what kids were saying and sending to him.

Led by the same bully, middle schoolers were instant-messaging taunts to Ryan, and spreading the rumor that he was gay. A girl who had made friends with him online told him in person, in front of her friends, that she’d only been toying with him. “I believe there are few of us that that would have had the resiliency and stamina to sustain such a nuclear level attack on our feelings and reputation as a young teen in the midst of rapid physical and emotional changes and raging hormones,” Ryan’s father wrote after his son committed suicide.

Soon after Ryan’s death, his dad logged onto the boy’s AOL account and found the instant messages. In their son’s memory, John and Kelly Halligan responded to his death by leading the campaign in the Vermont Legislature, that winter, to win passage of the nation’s first anti-bullying law. Enacted in July 2004, that law requires all Vermont schools to have a bullying prevention strategy and response procedure, and to take seriously all bullying complaints.

I also live in Vermont — and dozens of middle schools in his state were soon using my novel as the focus of reading and discussion projects aimed at bullying awareness and prevention. One of the first schools to do so was the one Ryan Halligan had attended. Before long I was joining a teacher and guidance counselor from that school to make a presentation at the annual conference of the New England League of Middle Schools — and soon after that, The Revealers began to be used in other states as well.

Today, according to the National Council of State Legislatures [www.ncsl.org/magazine/articles/2008/08sloctnov08_bullying.htm], “39 states have laws aimed at reducing harassment, intimidation and bullying at school.” Hundreds of schools across the country have now worked with The Revealers. John Halligan travels the country working to prevent teen suicide in the age of cyberbullying, and telling his son’s story [www.ryanhalligan.com/].

As the movement to confront bullying grows, the story goes on. So do the impacts of Ryan Halligan’s heartbreaking struggle with bullying online.

After her middle school had worked with The Revealers, I got a letter from an art teacher. I don’t usually hear from art teachers — more often from English teachers, school librarians, and kids themselves — but this one said: “It was quite an experience reading this book to my homeroom. There were kids speaking out who I would not have guessed would be willing to share their experiences,” wrote Mary Lou Massucco of the Bellows Falls, Vt., Middle School.

“The Revealers,” she told me, “touched a nerve.”

The extent to which my book has touched a nerve has astonished me. The Revealers has been the focus of reading and discussion projects, often all-school reads, in hundreds of middle schools across the U.S. and internationally. This is my 10th novel for young adults, and I was just trying write a strong, realistic story that would reach into kids’ lives and struggles, and might also have some funny parts. But over and over since its publication in 2003, I’ve seen my book galvanize young people and those who work with them. It has given kids in grades 5-8 a new platform for openness, awareness, and positive action on the problem of bullying — and this problem, I have come to believe after visiting dozens of schools and talking with many thousands of kids, is the central moral struggle of early adolescence today.

That’s because, whether they’re bullies, targets or bystanders on any given day, virtually every young teen has to decide for him or herself how to deal with bullying. At this intense and formative time of life, the choices kids make about whether to bully, to join in groups that bully, to ignore or encourage or stand up to bullying, and how to deal with being bullied are testing experiences that will critically influence how these people go on to treat others, and to feel about themselves, all their adult lives.

I know that’s saying a lot! And when The Revealers first came out, I wouldn’t have said any of it. I had started this project with my own memories; I had gone through bullying as an awkward middle schooler, and it had been hard and lonely. To help me build the story I had in mind, I asked students at six middle schools to share their experiences of bullying, or to critique a working draft of my book. Still, by the time The Revealers was published, I had no idea how many millions of kids actually deal with bullying, how deep this struggle is, or how powerful and long-term its impacts can be.

Six in ten American teenagers witness bullying at least once a day. About the same portion say they’ve been directly involved at one time or another — about half as targets, the other half as bullies. One in ten teens who drops out of high school does so because of repeated bullying. Kids who are bullied are five times more likely to be depressed, and are more likely to consider suicide. Severe school bullying has been linked to seven in ten incidents of school shootings in the past decade. (For more research-based data, see the Useful Links section of this site.)

In contrast, the things I’ve seen and heard in schools and communities that have worked with The Revealers have been so positive, so inspiring. These projects have sparked discussion, stimulated kids’ honesty and creativity, and built new understanding of what bullying is and how it can feel. I don’t like preachy YA novels, and neither do young readers. The Revealers is, instead, about all sorts of kids who struggle with the pressures, confusion and intensity of middle-school life — and because of this it offers young readers multiple entry points, many characters and situations with which they can relate.

I hear from kids a lot. “I had been having trouble fitting in,” wrote Hannah, 12, of Greenwood, Maine. “The Revealers allowed me to see that it was okay to be myself.”

I couldn’t have dreamed of a better outcome than that.

If you’d like to learn more about how The Revealers has been used in schools, please visit my website at www.the-revealers.com.

“What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while.”

That’s Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. I like J.D. Salinger’s books of stories much better than Catcher — Holden drives me nuts, and I can’t stay with him for long — but I’m with him on this. I also like a book that’s funny at least once in a while. I’m not sure why, but in the world of YA fiction today, real humor seems not to be so easy to find.

Over the holidays I read Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here, which a school librarian in Florida gave to me, and I enjoyed it. There is some humor in Hope: when the hero, a teenage girl who waits tables in diners, is about to move from Brooklyn to Wisconsin, her friend Miriam gives her a t-shirt that says “New York Forever” as a goodbye gift and tells her, “There’s a lot of cheese where you’re going, Hope. I’m not sure how this affects people long term. Wear this shirt and remember who you are.”

I like that! Humor, when it is good, somehow does help us remember who we are. It’s humanizing and it shifts us, if only for a moment, out of our boxes and off our defensive protective stances. Good humor finds what is laughable in us as human beings, and what’s ridiculous or absurd in our world — and adolescence today is as besieged by absurdity as it ever was, if not more so. So why isn’t there more laughter in YA fiction? Louis Sachar’s Holes, which is a wonderful book, has a scourgingly comical setup, that delinquent boys are sent to a camp called Green Lake that’s neither green nor a lake, and are made to dig holes all day in the broiling sun and then fill them in again; but Holes doesn’t have many actual laughs. Sachar’s earlier novels, Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes and Someday Angeline, are truly funny, in the gently, warmly, and also puncturingly humanistic way that I really enjoy.

What YA fiction have you found funny? On my table here is a 2008 novel called The Big Game of Everything, by Chris Lynch, and a bookstore manager tells me this is hilarious. I hope so. If you like funny books, what have you found? Is there anything out there that makes us laugh the way Tom Sawyer did when he showed off in front of Becky Thatcher’s house?

Not much, in writing, is harder to do than this. And not much is more worth trying.

This week as the holidays draw near, I’d like to try to do something really unusual — maybe, in fact, completely new — with a blog for young readers and writers.

I’d like to ask you to help me brainstorm my new book.

I’m working right now to develop an idea I have for a followup story to The Revealers. Because I write for young adults, most of my book ideas come from young adults — from listening to them, talking with them, observing them. As I’ve been visiting middle schools this year, this new idea has grown out of a number of conversations and encounters with kids. To help me develop it further, I’ve been asking young people to give me their responses to one simple question:

If you knew a kid who was just about to start middle school, what honest, kid-to-kid advice would you give him or her? You could call this “My advice on surviving middle school.”

I don’t want the advice you’d generally let a grownup hear! I want the stuff you’d only normally share with a kid.

Part of my idea for a new book is that a group of kids at Parkland Middle School, home of The Revealers, decide do a prank. They want to create a multimedia guide to surviving their school that they’ll call “Welcome to Darkland.” Or something like that.

I plan to start writing the first draft of this book right after Christmas. I’m not sure if the project will work or not — when I start a first draft, I never know for sure — but the writing process is always an adventure. When I was developing my last two books, The Revealers and Falling, I asked kids in schools for ideas and information. This time, the only difference is that I’m asking online.

This is real! I want your advice. What would you put in a prank project like “Welcome to Darkland”?