I’ve been writing a middle grade book lately and I’ve happily noticed a difference between my middle grade protagonist and the YA protagonists I normally write. She’s fearless. She talks back to adults, sneaks out of the house, and goes toe-to-toe with dangerous magical creatures. Older protagonists do that, too, but middle grade girls have a pluckiness that older characters don’t always have.
When I was a little girl, I loved to climb things. I climbed the lamp post in front of my house so many times that it now leans crooked to this day. When I was twelve, I went on a hike with my church youth group. We reached a waterfall at the top and stopped to rest for a while. I noticed a craggy outcropping to the side of the trail and thought it would be fun to climb, so I scrambled up it by myself. One of the leaders saw me, called my name and waved at me, so I figured she was telling me it was time to go home and I came down.
Once I was back on the ground, she said, “You could’ve gotten hurt, Erica!”
I was surprised. I hadn’t thought that the climb was dangerous. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I should be sneaky and try to hide it from adults to avoid getting in trouble. I was a fearless girl.
A few years later, my mom took my little brothers and I to a ski resort in the summer, when the snow was gone. The ski lift poles looked a lot taller than usual without several feet of snow at their bases. I wanted to try climbing one. Lift poles have rungs built into them, so they’re actually a lot safer than free climbing a cliff face or a lamp post. I got partway up before I got too scared and had to climb down. What changed? Where did that brave twelve-year-old girl go when I was seventeen? Even more concerning to me was that my brothers (aged fourteen, twelve, and eleven at the time) were unafraid to climb.
One of my high school teachers told my class, while we were preparing to take the ACT, that high school girls are more cautious than middle school girls when it comes to test taking. A high school boy will take risks with difficult exam questions while girls play it safe, leading to higher scores for the boys even when girls normally perform well on non-test assignments. As girls become women, they learn to be careful with everything from their physical bodies to their test scores to their reputations. High school Erica was outspoken in her government class senior year. College Erica wouldn’t wear a shirt with a political slogan on campus.
I don’t know whether creating fearless girls in fiction can help real little girls stay fearless as they age. I certainly read my fair share of fearless girl books when I was young, and yet here I am. Part of the fun of fiction is being able to see characters be more bold, more reckless, and more daring than you would in real life. I’m always skeptical when other authors say that books have the power to sway young readers; most kids just read for fun, not to be taught life lessons. It is a delight to create characters as spunky and adventurous as middle-grade kids are in real life, or as bold as those kids dream they could be.
Long live the fearless girls of middle grade.
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