By Gavin Lindahl
Sports Assignment Editor
I hate fads. Generally speaking, if everyone wants something, I usually want nothing to do with it.
It’s not because I want to paint myself as some kind of hipster who’s so much cooler than you – I hate that too. I just find that, in most cases, if something is popular, it’s because people want what’s in style rather than something of quality – unless, of course, we’re talking about antibiotics or indoor plumbing.
For example, I don’t get the country music fad that’s been sweeping the country for the past few years.
I’ll never understand how someone born and raised in an urban suburb of Buffalo and knows nothing about rural life can slap a “country girl” bumper sticker on her Honda Civic because she has a Jason Aldean album.
I’m not slamming country music. I’ve never had a problem with it. I just have a problem with how people will change everything and fully immerse themselves in something because it’s “cool.”
Everyone knows John Green, the author of the popular novel “Looking for Alaska” and the novel turned movie “The Fault in Our Stars,” and everyone who knows me knows that I can’t stand him.
Green, apparently, found out the secret every 15-year-old boy finds out and made a bunch of novels.
The secret? That you can say any garbage to a teenage girl, and she’ll eat it up – just as long as you make it sound nice.
And that’s what you find in Green’s work. Paragraph after paragraph of unbelievable characters muttering longwinded metaphors in which every sentence says the same exact thing the prior sentence said except dressed differently. John Green can take “I like ice cream” and turn it into a three page long lesson in rhetoric like no other.
Don’t get me wrong. Experiment with your language. Dress it up. Use metaphors, use similes and make it poetry.
If that’s your thing, go for it. But don’t be repetitive and put your reader on a hamster wheel. Unfortunately, I find more and more of this with young writers; they find the need to write in 100 words what they should say in 50 and only really need to say in 25.
I was the same way when I got to college. I rambled on. I used tools, but I overdid it. Why? I learned it in “Looking for Alaska.”
Then, I had an epiphany. I learned that writing like that wasn’t going to work, and I started looking at other writers. I learned one thing from that: write like no one else but yourself.
Frankly, whether you think John Green is an idiot or a genius, don’t try to imitate him – unless you’re mocking him, of course.
In a world where people anxiously await the annual Call of Duty and iPhone release, more post-apocalyptic future teen movies and another parody account on Twitter; we need people to be as original as they can get.So say “no” to drugs, stay in school and avoid fads like the plague.
