Smoking/Drugs/Alcohol

Little old ladies hide their stash in your products, Miss Kelly.

 

This is so true it's actually painful.

 

Smoking is, in my writing, an incidental; it's the lazy writer's way of showing character or mood (and yes, I'm that lazy writer). I've never had drug use crop up in any of my writing, which is odd because in my youth I experimented with most street drugs you could get in America in the 80s. In my coming-of-age novel, smoking is shot throughout it as, again, an incidental, and there is one chapter based on my first time getting drunk (at the ripe old age of twelve), played more for humor than anything else -- and certainly not sanctimony.

If your story is about how addiction affects lives, you'd probably ought to know what it is you're writing. If not, then leave that stuff to the side and maybe allude to it in order to flesh out a character.

And for God's sake do not ever try to capture the experience of a high in prose.

 

This goes right back to the point I was trying to make a few days ago; it's so common. The point of including them isn't to be edgy. It's to reflect reality. There are other options than "making a point about smoking/alcohol/drugs" and "making a point about how cool smoking/drugs/alcohol is"; the middle ground here is that these things are around in teen circles, they are in the set dressing and you can bring them into the plot if they matter but if they don't they are still in the background. Not because they make your character look super cool. But because they are normal. Which is just passe by another name. They are just part of the set dressing of what a teenager looks like.

Tom Brown's School Days was published in 1857. How does the bully in that book finally get expelled? Because he was caught being drunk, after drinking beer off his own back and (if I recall correctly) sharing brandy with a prefect. This was written a hundred and fifty years ago. In the Harry Potter books when they first visit the bad pub in Hogsmede Ron asks if they think the shady barman will sell them fire whisky underage. Yes, these things have become cliched in writing. But only because teenagers, who all think they are so unique, are a bit cliched. They still play their damn music too loud, they still stay up too late and don't do their homework. And some things never go out of style.

And that's why I think if you are writing teens excluding these elements unless you're doing so with specific purpose will make it stand out. No, that doesn't mean every teen book is a hedonistic orgy of drugs and sex, my books most certainly are not. But they are there in the story. Because they are teenagers. And no matter how cliched it's a part of being a teenager, it's something that the audience will recognize and will strike a chord with them. You could write a book where none of the girls think for a second about any hunky boys. I'm sure some girls never daydreamed about anyone. But you're supposed to be showing the reader that the characters are like them; they live the same kind of lives, think the same kind of thoughts and they can relate to this person. That doesn't mean you have to write a whole book just about hunky boys. But most girls do think about finding a boyfriend, or indeed girlfriend. And they do think about going to parties and drinking and smoking and even doing drugs, no matter how cliched that might be.

Once when I was about 21 I gave a smoke to a kid who was definitely under 18 and I thought was probably about 15, but he had the balls to ask me for one and I figured what the hey. So I gave him one and bid him good day. When I looked around and saw him looking really smug with his friends I changed my mind; I think he was probably about 13. When I was about 18 I followed along with some kids who were about 14 as they went to meet some dealer to buy a 20 bag. I didn't even know them, but they'd been sitting in the circle with me and my friends and I figured I'd go watch their backs. I was pretty sure they were going to get ripped off, but at least they wouldn't get beaten up too. They did get ripped off. But they didn't get mugged. I made some calls and found them a decent dealer, and all was well. Sometime that same summer I literally carried my ex-girlfriends little sisters friend almost two miles back to her parents house because she was throwing up red wine and using any form of transport would have involved difficult questions. I bought booze and drugs and cigarettes for more kids than I can remember the faces of, I shared mine with just as many.

This isn't to brag or boast; this is just what being a teenager looks like to a very large number of teenagers. Not all the time. But sometimes. Sometimes you do just ask this dude waiting for a train if you can bum a smoke off him because a guy like him won't even care how old we are. And writing those stories trying to make them sound so rebellious certainly would be a bit cliche, they are non-stories. But to have a book with a cast of teens where none of them have a story like this? Where no-one has been to a party? Where no-one is even thinking if they can smuggle booze into prom or how they can get cigarettes? That strains credibility to me.

The book I'm working on right now is about a beauty pageant; these girls with hyper-pushy mothers who are shepherded between shows and have no lives outside the shows. But they do get to be normal sometimes, when the shows over and their mothers have fucked off, they get together and you know what they do? They drink. And smoke. And share out their valium. And have fun. And why is it written like that? Because to most readers this looks like them being normal.

That's exactly how you should use smoking; that's how people really smoke after all. Especially for teens who likely don't have a ready supply and can't do it whenever they want then just having them do it whenever you want or need them to be distracted or take them away from the group or whatever is just fine. It's a thing there in their hand when that is useful to you in the plot.

I would disagree about capturing a high in prose, you can do that fine although you should know that high well enough to do it well. But yes, you are exactly right. If you are making a point about drugs one way or another then you should be clear about what you're writing. That's a whole other kind of fiction. Aside from anything else; there isn't a big market for teen books about how you should be a good little girl and look how awful those drugs are. And if you aren't writing that then just sprinkle a bit of it into the background to for verisimilitude. Not a lot. Just a little. And yes, you absolutely can play this stuff for laughs. These are teenagers making poor life choices, sometimes it's going to be funny. And sometimes it's just going to be cute kids being a bit silly together. That's all the drinking in my first book; the girls boyfriend swipes a little bit of SoCo when they go to prom and they drink together as they walk home and giggle and fool around together. Not a big deal. Hardly an orgy of hedonism, you know? But it's fun and it's what most teenagers will immediately recognize as fun. What's better after prom than the boy you fancy giving you his jacket and getting a bit tipsy having a snog and a fumble?

 

I really don't think teenagers are any more monolithic than adults. So just as there are some adults who drink too much, struggle with drug addiction, smoke, etc, there are some kids who do. And just as there are some adults who don't drink at all, would never touch drugs and hate cigarettes, there are some kids who are the same. And there are lots of adults and kids who fit somewhere in the middle.

As always - don't write an "average" teen. Write your teen(s). If it makes sense for your characters to engage in certain self-destructive behaviours, have your characters engage in those behaviours. If your characters aren't the sort who would, then don't make them.

If you're writing an autobiography, then write your own teen experiences. But if you're writing fiction, make your characters make sense for who they are, not for who you were.

 

That's a fair point and in the abstract I agree that characters should just be themselves, but there's a line where a character stops being a character and you need to look at you and why you are writing them a certain way. What are you trying to do by making them have this part of their character? And, for things where it doesn't matter to the book or the character either way, you almost always should look towards reflecting what the audience would expect for that character. With something like cigarettes and alcohol and drugs, that are almost certainly not going to be a big deal to the character or the book either way, then you should just think for two seconds about how the average teen thinks about those things and have your characters be average in the case of drugs and cigarettes and alcohol. And average means, as I've been saying all along, is that they know about these things, they've maybe tried these things, they probably don't do them all that often if they've even done them at all but they see these things with a sense of mystique.

The notion of the average matters. The notion of normality matters. Think about Clarke Kent and Peter Parker; people who despite being literal superheros still cluster to the average in the rest of their lives. They aren't alphamale he-men, even though by all rights they could be. They could be wealthy and famous and you absolutely do not want to get into a bar fight with Superman. But they aren't like that. They cluster to the average. And when they aren't doing hero stuff they don't seek conflict, they work jobs that they have no specific need to do, they aren't great with women but when women get to know them they see they are good guys and kinda want to be with them; not because they are heroes but because they have good hearts. How long do you want me to keep going here? This stuff is just normal guy stuff. Why? There is no reason in the whole world why they should be like this, they have amazing abilities that could make them wealthy and powerful, but they stay humble and live in crappy apartments. Why? Because they are reflecting what the audience sees as normal, they are being someone that the audience can see themselves in and in doing so can imagine themselves also being heros coming from that kind of life.

Not to get on too much of a super hero digression here but what would these characters be if they didn't reflect the audience's perception of normality here? Well, in a sense it wouldn't make that much difference, would it? Because really it's the heroing that matters. But would we like these characters? Would we care? If Superman just lived out of the fortress of solitude and did nothing but save the world then he just stops being sympathetic. He becomes a god not a person. And he is a person because he reflects the average of humanity, the perceived normal of humanity. And no, he doesn't reflect everyone's idea of normality. Because lots of comic book readers still live with their parents, they aren't adults yet. And some comic book readers live in basements, and some live in awesome mansions. But the audience recognizes Superman's life as being, broadly, average for a guy. No, he's not exactly like them. But then no-one is exactly like you. And this broad brush painting of 'about average' is something that everyone, or at least a very large number of fans, can see their lives in. It doesn't make any real difference to the plot that Superman has this slightly banal alter ego. And yet it matters hugely to how he is drawn as a character. It makes him someone that his audience can see themselves in. Not because he's exactly like them, but because he is what they see as being normal, as similar enough to them be one of their friends, to be a guy in their office, to be someone that they know. That makes it feel real.

There is a danger looking at characters with hyper-tight granularity, with the sense that every character is a unique individual and you can make all their characteristics anything you want no matter how far outside the norm and have that read as being a real person. That's how you end up making characters who the audience can't sympathize with. It's also how you end up making Mary Sues. Most people aren't all that unique, in the grand scheme of things. They fall within one delta of the mean in the literal mathematical sense and they recognize normal when they see it, they recognize someone who has lived a broadly similar life to themselves.

The character is one person, but the audience is lots and lots of people. All of whom are slightly different, all of whom have their own troubles and their own challenges and you can't hope to reflect them all. So you need to back off and become less granular, more fuzzy, less specific and more general. And that's the realm that these generalizations about alcohol and drugs and cigarettes live out in. These things are normal things for a majority of teens. The majority of teens will see themselves in it. And even those who don't see themselves will see their school friends in it; you characters will look like the kids they know, just like real people.

I am not saying that characters should only be average by the way, and any claims that I am saying that will be laughed at. I'm not saying that at all. But characters can't be unique and special and different in every aspect of their lives. Not even Superman can do that. And when we are talking about parts of characters that are peripheral to the story, that don't make a difference to the story then you need to err towards making those parts of the character normal, within the bounds of what most of the audience will identify with.

It feels like writing a book and a character who is deliberately against smoking and drinking and drugs in a book that has nothing to do with those things is being deliberately contrary. It's making a character trait that should be pretty normal (and you don't get much more normal than 70% of people admitting they do it) and making it into something outside the norm, outside the mean, outside what the audience perceives as normal.

 

Does Superman drink, smoke and/or do drugs? I'm far from an expert, but I don't think he does. Yet he still somehow manages to be "normal".

I think you're underestimating the variation possible within that word.