Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 3 (Yellow) & Website Updates

[greerwatson]

Pure yellow is not a favourite colour of mine. However, the English language has a term for shades that are close to yellow, i.e. "gold" (or "golden"). Actually, by contrast with the usual colours of things, the term gold can be used for shades that, in isolation, one would probably call light orange, tan, or green, e.g. golden retrievers and golden mock-orange. I like golden tones a lot, especially when the leaves turn in the fall.

One of my favourite books of all time, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, has a quotation from Robert Frost:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour,
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

At the end, the hero, Ponyboy Curtis, gets a letter from his now-dead friend, Johnny, that explains the symbolism of the colour gold in the poem: you're gold when you're a kid. "It's just when you get used to everything that it's day."

The Outsiders is set in 1965, when Hinton began writing it. It was not finished and published, however, until 1967; and I guess it was probably that fall when our local library got copies on the shelves. At any rate, I first read it when I was fourteen, the same age as Pony. It hit me like a ton of bricks. So much more real in its evocation of adolescence than A Catcher in the Rye, which we'd read at school and had bored me to bits.

I borrowed it over and over; and, when it finally came out in paperback a couple of years later, bought my own copy. In the decades since then, I've read it often. I guess over the past few years some time might pass between readings; but it's one of those books I go back to. Each time, I find more in it.

A couple of years ago, someone requested it in a gift exchange I was doing. I'm not sure I even put it down as an offer: certainly, I didn't match on it. However, it got me thinking—and taking it off the shelf once again!—and ideas came, as they tend to do. When, last year, it came up as a pinch hit in the Wayback Exchange with prompts that fit, I grabbed it fast.

Whether luciferinasundaysuit was expecting quite what they got, I don't know; but they seem to have liked it. "A Different Shade of Gold" turns the symbolism of The Outsiders on its head. It's not about Pony in his youth, but about Pony today. Still more or less the same age I am, in other words. He and his wife are turning out the attic; and he finds the old essay he once wrote for his English teacher. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then....

As with all my fanfic, it's also on my website. Of course, I gave it a gold theme. The main background is a variant of GRSites' brown128.jpg (though that's an old graphic found elsewhere, too). I've made many variants of it, using the software on GRSites and/or Microsoft Picture Manager. This one is shades of soft gold and brown; and the same tones are picked up in the broad border of nested tables surrounding the central panel with the story.

Comments

[thewriterinpink]

The Outsiders is such a good story, although it was a book I only read for school (and a movie they had us watch as well) and nothing else which is a shame because of how impactful it is. I still remember my shock when Johnny died. For some reason, I didn't think anything that terrible would happen to the characters. Speaking of the characters, all of them are just really well rounded and fun to read about, not to mention how interesting the Greaser time period was. This book was probably one of the only books we were forced to read that I actually liked and left something in me. It's true that a lot of them tend to be plain boring lol. Definitely a book I should try reading again sometime!

[greerwatson]

From comments here, quite a lot of people have fond memories of The Outsiders. Given how young Hinton was when she started writing it, I think it must have been the product of the most compelling inspiration. I mean, she apparently stopped it at one point, and then went back later and kept on writing—and, speaking as someone who's been disappointed by a lot of WIPs, I think actually getting to the end was an achievement. That compulsion to finish comes through, though, when you read it: it's not a book you easily put down.

[thewriterinpink]

Yeah, it's very impressive how young she was when she produced this story. It was clearly a passion project she wanted to complete and make it the best she possibly could. She really put her all into it and it shows.

[greerwatson]

I've read some of her later books—and they're not bad (not at all), but after The Outsiders they're a bit disappointing. Decent YA novels, nothing more.

I think she really lived with Ponyboy, his brothers, and the rest of the gang. Lived in her head, I mean. They weren't just characters in a book she was writing: they were real. I suspect she told herself that story over and over until she felt utterly compelled to write it down because it wouldn't shut up.

[thewriterinpink]

I was curious and started reading her Wikipedia article and apparently she wrote the story because of the greasers/socs at her own school—that she really wanted to empathize with the greasers through writing this story. I think that desire to breathe life into the story through that experience and make it real on the page probably led to a compelling narrative that spoke to a lot of people. It's no wonder it's so solid and people keep coming back to it.