Self mutilation and brain plasticity: Westerfield's 'cutters'

Scott Westerfield's Specials, the third book in his Uglies series, follows the series heroine, Tally Youngblood, in her third incarnation: this time as a new breed of Special Circumstances agents known as 'cutters'.

On his website Westerfield says of the Uglies series, "I love a good action sequence, and this series is of full of hoverboard chases, escapes through ancient ruins, and leaps off tall buildings in bungee jackets. It's the sort of fast-paced book I couldn't get enough of when I was young."

I found Specials hard going: once you've read one hoverboard fight scene, you've read them all. And several times I put the book down because I was bored with it. On the surface the novel is dealing with several themes and topics that I'm interested in looking at throughout my Phd, including brain rewiring (or plasticity) and self mutilation as a form of self expression. However, Westerfield didn't explore these themes in any detail, rather using them to add a degree of surface tension and interest to the novel's action.

Unlike the protagonist in Bates' Crossing the Line, the Specials cutters cut themselves to feel 'icy', that is, to create a feeling of power and control, and the act of cutting is performed consciously, not in a dissociative state. The cutters wear their scars with pride like a tattoo or ritual scar, rather than hiding them in shame. By the novel's end, however, Tally realises that cutting herself is a form of denying her true feelings. But even though cutting isn't portrayed as a positive act, Tally's feelings about cutting - why she does it and why she stops - aren't covered in any depth.

Westerfield has made no claims about writing a psychological novel, although on his website he does lightly touch on some psychological issues when he answers questions about the US' obsession with surgically enhanced beauty. But his focus on action scenes means the novel's characters lack substance. For all their hoverboarding and bungee jumping, clambering on and off helicopters and breaking into high security buildings, they're a little boring. Of course, with a focus on action, it was probably wasn't Westerfield's intention to dig into the meat of the issues he covers. But I think if he had, it would have made for a more interesting series.

For my research needs, the Uglies series gives a general and cursory coverage of self mutilation and brain plasticity (in that the protagonist, Tally, is able to rewire her brain to overcome the 'lesions' added to her brain to make her first a Pretty then a Special Circumstances Agent). But it's probably too cursory in its treatment of these topics for my needs.

Self mutilation in YA fiction: Bates' Crossing the Line

This search for the plastic brain within YA fiction can be a pain, especially as I've been finding it a bit of a hard slog working my way through Scott Westerfield's Uglies series. But I'm trying to perservere because, although I haven't come across Westerfield using the term brain plasticity in the novels, when his characters are able to rewire their brains around the 'lesions' caused by the 'pretty operation' that's what's happening. So that's interesting to me because he's incorprating brain plasticity into the narrative of his YA novel. Unfortunately, his writing doesn't hold my interest, mainly because I simply don't care about his self-obsessed characters. Not one bit.

Luckily I've had Di Bates' Crossing the Line to keep my reading list chugging along. Bates isn't a particularly high profile name in young adult writing but she is a veteran author of more than 30 books and a skilled and empathetic storyteller. Crossing the Line deals with the difficult issue of self harm. Sophie, the narrator, is now 17 and has lived in foster homes since she was around 12. The Department has recently allowed her to try living in a share house with a couple of other young people, Amy and Matt, to try and transition into life post-foster care. But although Sophie enjoys living independently, she is too fragile to cope and deals with her pain the only way she knows how - by cutting herself.

On the surface of it, cutting as a form of self-harm would seem to be an ultimate act of self-absorption, particularly in a teenager. But Bates' skillful writing draws you into Sophie's world, allowing you as the reader to empathise with Sophie's pain while seeing how her cutting only takes her deeper into despair. Throughout her journey, which takes her into a psychiatric ward and to regular sessions with a psychologist, Sophie struggles with finding her place in a world where natural love is denied to her. In telling the story, Bates' writing is compelling and fast paced without being frantic and the climax and resolution are satisfying to the story's heart while offering hope for Sophie's future. I cared about this character and her story a lot, despite some quibbles with the long-suffering and possibly a little too-good-to-be-true Matt.

Of course, Crossing the Line and the Uglies series are two different genres. But they're both genres I enjoy, so I don't think that's the issue. For me, when examining these books as possible inclusions in my thesis, the Uglies series is on the surface more aligned with the type of manuscript I propose to write. However, it's Bates' writing I'll draw inspiration from when it comes to writing rounded characters with real heart.

How much world do you need to build?

As much as I enjoyed Dunn's Geek Love, there was one aspect that niggled: the fact that a seemingly 'normal' world accepted a circus of freaks, particularly one that displayed 'freak feotuses',without the parents being arrested & the kids being hauled off to foster care. True the outside world didn't intrude too often into the narrative but it was always there in the background, particularly when the children are attacked by a gunman and are taken to hospital. There was no reason in this normal world for the bizarre and illegal behaviour of the parents to be accepted, let alone not be prosecuted. The logic of this bugged me (although I could easily accept the crazy behaviour of the Arturian cultists in removing all their limbs one by one). And it started me thinking about world building - how much do you need, and how much should you expect a reader to accept when it comes to internal logic?

After finishing Geek Love I moved onto YA fiction with Scott Westerfield's Uglies series. (For the record, Westerfield's lifestyle as an author who splits his time between Australia & NYC has my jealousy bugs frothing at the mouth.) I'm currently about two thirds through the first book in the series, Uglies, where Westerfield has set up a future society that follows these basics: children are born & live with their parents until they're 12, they're then sent to the charmingly named Uglyville a boarding school type environment where they live until their 16th birthday and then have an operation to turn into 'pretties'; they then live in New Prettytown until they become 'middle pretties' and partner and become parents & the cycle continues. Nice and simple. Westerfield refers to the existence of other cities elsewhere in the world that operate on similar lines but the characters have little interest in these places. But of course there is an outside world that does come into conflict with the orderly existence of Uglies/Pretties, known as the smoke, an abandoned city once ruled by the Rusties whose environmental wastefulness destroyed their way of life some centuries ago.

I like Westerfield's world building. It's nice and neat and logical. You could dig deeper and nit pick if you wanted to but I think the world he's created works really well for the young adult audience and the fast-paced action distracts the reader from a desire to poke holes in the story's created world.

This is something I need to learn from. I need to build a simple yet solid world that has enough internal logic to hold it together without getting lost in a myriad of detail. I need to stop second guessing myself and trying to create a world that's bigger than Ben Hur with a lot of unnecessary detail that will only bog me down. Or even worse, stop me from writing anything at all.