Sports YA Lit

Last summer I got to meet an author of YA fiction Rich Wallace, who writes books for athletic boys. I liked his books because they were honest and relatively short, two things I thought would be appealing to the kinds of boys who would read these books. I have recommended his books to some students and they've enjoyed them.

I got the feeling from Rich that he didn't feel like he books were very important, like they didn't have much of an audience. Whereas, I was impressed with them from the start since part of my Master's degree was about finding reading for reluctant readers and his books were perfect for this. So I look at his fiction as a very important part of HS literature. Rich, though, seems to look at his fiction as being in the shadow of other writers.

I still don't agree with him completely, but I am starting to see what he means. I've been reading books by Chris Crutcher lately and he does a similar thing with his stories that Rich does. But I think Rich does it in his own unique way and with a different outcome--more appropriate for reluctant readers. Crutcher's books have sports as the backbone and then show the main character learning a life lesson to aide him in his future. Wallace's books have sports as the backbone and show the main character figuring out how he's going to put his life together when sports can no longer be the backbone.

I just finished Crutcher's Crazy Horse Electric Game, and while I enjoyed it for the most part, there were some places I really had to suspend my disbelief. Some things came together too easily and some things came back into the story that I didn't believe would have. Overall, though, I think it was a success. I don't believe that the main character could be as severely paralyzed as he was and then come back from it completely unparalyzed by the end of the story. It's a nice theory, but I don't think it's very plausible.

The last book of Rich's that I read was Restless: A Ghost's Story. It was different from his other stories, dealing more with the psychological than the physical. It had Rich's usual laconic style, his honest, to-the-point writing, which I like. And I don't remember thinking at any point that I didn't believe what was going on, even though it was about a ghost.

I think my point is that I'm like Rich quite a bit. I feel like my own writing is really no big deal and that too many other writers are already doing what I want to do. But maybe (hopefully) I'm wrong just like he is. Maybe I'm unique enough that I'll find an audience, or at least have some fans that can see what I'm really trying to do.