Back to high school

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It’s the peak of an abnormal streak of spring sun, and the Park Blocks are bustling with Portlanders excitedly coming out of hibernation. Portland State alumna and author Chelsea Pitcher has a book for lovers of young adult fiction to read as they soak up the sun.

Pitcher’s debut novel, The S-Word, will be released next Tuesday by Simon & Schuster. The book deals with teen bullying and suicide, but if the excerpt available on her website
(chelseapitcher.com) is any indication, Pitcher manages to turn the most controversial subjects into an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

Pitcher (whose mother, Sheri, works as an accounting assistant for Student Publications at PSU) shared some thoughts on her writing with the Vanguard. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Vanguard: There’s obviously a lot we can say about your novel, but first let’s get a synopsis from you.

Chelsea Pitcher: Basically, it’s a story about two girls who’ve been best friends since kindergarten and done everything together, [and] are super close. Then, prom night of their senior year, the main character, Angie, catches her boyfriend in bed with the other character, Lizzie, and their friendship ends. It’s a big blow-up, and they’re not speaking.

Everyone in the senior class gets involved and labels [Lizzie] a slut. They don’t really
say much about the guy. They’re just like “whatever,” or “good for you, you got two girls,” you know.

But everybody labels Lizzie a slut, and they write it on her locker and they write it on her car. They just sort of torment her whenever they get her alone. And they’re kind of sneaky about it: They don’t do it when the school administration is watching, so they don’t get in trouble. Angie doesn’t really know who’s doing it, either.

Then, Lizzie ends up committing suicide.

Angie is obviously devastated, and she is also very guilt-ridden because she feels like she didn’t do anything to intervene. Even though she was mad at her friend she feels like, “I should have done something when things got really bad.” She starts investigating who was behind all this bullying.

Also, after Lizzie’s funeral, the words “suicide slut” start showing up where slut once showed up on her locker, and pages from her diary start showing up at school. So it’s a mystery [that] Angie tries to solve. And says she just wants to catch who’s doing it now, but really she also wants to catch who[mever] was doing the bullying in the first place. She sort of uses that as an excuse to try and figure out who went after her friend.

VG: I read the excerpt online, and I noticed you said the word “investigation.” It’s a bit like a detective story was what I was feeling.

CP: It is, kind of. She does give off sort of an amateur detective vibe, and I had fun with that. Obviously, it’s not a light story, but I really enjoy mysteries and the detective aspect. And certainly I enjoy noir-ish things, so I wanted to play around with that.

VG: Were you influenced by any detective novels when writing The S-Word?

CP: The funny thing is that I’m sort of getting more into it now. A lot of my influences for that sort of thing have come from television—modern television, not even like film noir; Veronica Mars and modern-day takes on detective stories. That, interestingly, got me into it more than the books, and now I’m going in and looking at what I can read.

VG: You balance the humor and the heaviness well. Is there a technique you use for that?

CP: I think part of it is just my perspective. I’ve always been sort of sarcastic and had a bit of snark to me. And part of it was definitely intentional. In any kind of story that is this serious you can’t be just serious all the way through because nobody’s going to want to read it. Nobody’s going to be able to get through it. It’ll be too hard and depressing.

So I wanted to keep moments of lightness and keep moments where characters were becoming friends or were laughing about something because I think in real life, when bad things happen, people do end up laughing at weird times and at inappropriate times because they are trying to get through it.

VG: Are you writing differently for young adults than you would for, I guess, adults?

CP: There are definitely differences. People will tell you that it’s in the voice: Young adults have a younger voice. I do feel like if you try to talk down to your audience or you try to simplify it, teens are going to be like, “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not that stupid.” You want to be really mindful of not talking to them like they’re kids—just keeping a difference between the way adults talk and teens talk. So I kept that in mind.

It’s sort of a weird thing to pinpoint, the difference between “adult speak” and “teen speak,” because it’s not like completely different languages or anything, and I feel like on commercials you’ll see this really exaggerated, like, “OMG, LOL” that teens might do, but that’s not really the only way they talk—it’s just an adult interpretation of the way that they talk.

VG: Also, it’s probably going to be a heavier situation in a story.

CP: Yeah, they’re not going to be using text-speak all the time. Exactly. I just tried to think about what I felt back then—like, it was a while ago, but not a long, long time ago—but it takes some getting into the head space of what it’s like to be a teenager and, just, what you wouldn’t say—I think it’s more what you wouldn’t say.

I had times where my editor would be like, “This is a little bit too serious or too adult. Can we make this a little bit more realistic for teens?” And was like, “OK, this is the college me coming out.”

VG: Did you write when you were [high school] age?

CP: I’ve always been writing. Even when I was little, I would write little silly poems or stories and stuff like that. I attempted to write my first novel when I was 16 and I got about 100 pages in and just never finished it.

So I’ve always been writing, but it took a while before I got to the point where I could write that kind of length. And also have it not be horrible, like not make any sense to anyone but me.

VG: How did you get to that point? I know you have a blog. Did you also publish short stories?

CP: I actually went from poems to short stories to novels in this weird linear progression, shorter to longer. It was definitely a weird shift because with poetry you can kind of do anything, it’s free-form and you can just stream of consciousness, you can do whatever. And with stories it obviously has to be regimented and you want a beginning, middle and end most of the time.

I guess I just started getting bigger ideas, things that wouldn’t really fit in a short story. I would try to tell something in a short story and it would end up being 40 pages, and I’d be like, “OK, this isn’t short anymore.”

VG: How did the idea start for this story?

CP: I started thinking about this story, like, three years ago, I think. Lets see, I got the deal a year and a half ago and it’s just coming out now, so I think it was three years. And it was just when the It Gets Better Project was being started, and there was all this stuff in the news about kids being bullied and kids killing themselves for being gay, for slut-shaming, for any reason people could find, pretty much.

And I started thinking about that, not on a case-by-case basis, [but] rather what our entire culture was doing to contribute to that sort of bullying, what adults were doing to contribute to that bullying. I started to think it was everywhere and that everybody had to be responsible in some way for teaching kids that this person’s better or has more rights than another person.

I started to write about different characters who were dealing with sexism or racism or homophobia in different ways in their school as this collection of stories, and [thought about] what that would look like if it was happening in one place. And it just sort of grew from that.

VG: With bullying and prejudices, it’s one of those things that seems very tangible—but when you get to an individual basis, you find that people don’t have the same definitions. Do you take into consideration different perspectives on these issues?

CP: Yeah, I think that bullying means so many things now and people almost use it as an umbrella term for any type of harassment.And some people think of bullying as little kids being pushed around on the playground. And some people think of it as getting into literal fights and violence. There are so many things that can be bullying now, which is sad—to think that it’s just growing and growing.

I definitely wanted to show how bullying can be racism, can be sexism, can be, you know—obviously, you hear on the news [about] gay kids being bullied. I wanted to show that it could be all these different things. You can be bullied by your parents if they’re abusive, so I definitely tried to include a composite of different stories about bullying within one novel.

VG: Portland is seen as a “writers’ city.” Is there a lot of support for you around town?

CP: Interestingly, I think that the largest amount of support I’ve found through other writers has been online. And maybe I’m just a hermit and don’t go out enough. I know a few writers in town, too, but there’s this sort of influx of support that [I] have now from other people who have debuts coming out this year, and just other writers I’ve met on critique sites.

VG: Is it a weird shift from [the] web, where you can instantly see feedback, to books where it’s just out there?

CP: It’s weird. We sent out advance copies to reviewers the past few months, and it’s a weird feeling: This total stranger is reading my book. Are they going to hate it? Are they going to love it? Are they going to interpret it totally different than I do?

But it’s been cool, because I’ve seen people who love the story or have started conversations because of the story and got what I felt like I was trying to do.

The S-Word comes out Tuesday, May 7. Pitcher will also be reading at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 16, at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s Books located at 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd. in Beaverton.