Aspies and school shootings. [*fiction*]

Page 4 of 4 [ 63 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4

wesmontfan
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 29 Nov 2009
Age: 68
Gender: Male
Posts: 144
Location: Near Washington DC

20 Feb 2010, 3:28 am

what exactly is the point of writing the book?

To demonize bullying?
To spot light the plight of aspie teenagers?

Would it acheive your end? Or, as many have pointed out, would it backfire and cause aspies themselves to be demonized and feared?

I, for one, dont see why the world needs a novel about a highschool shooter.
Its been done.
In fact campus shooters occured in fiction long before they started to occur in real life.

Long before anything like Columbine happened Stephen King wrote a novel about a teenager taking his teacher hostag at gun point, and going on shooting rampage. It was the one novel he regretted writing becasue it got him bad press even at the time he wrote it which years later got worse because the novel got blamed for seeming to inspire the real life shootings we have today in the age of Columbine.

Somekind of nonfiction book might be interesting-interviewing student victims of bullying to expose how well or how poorly schools deal with the problem.



pbcoll
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 14 Feb 2007
Age: 41
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,892
Location: the City of Palaces

20 Feb 2010, 8:44 pm

Is there a need to explicitly make him an aspie? That is, couldn't you write a book about exactly the same character, but without explicitly diagnosing him?

I would also question the premise of bullying, on its own, leading to the school shooting. Surely there's more to it than that? Bullying is unfortunately a widespread problem, yet school shootings are very rare. I was bullied, and I can honestly say I was never seriously tempted to do anything like that - I did end up punching a bully, but I was never physically violent to bystanders. Of course I sometimes indulged in violent, gore-filled fantasies (what boy doesn't?), but there was never any serious desire to do something like that. So my view is that there is something more in such cases.


_________________
I am the steppenwolf that never learned to dance. (Sedaka)

El hombre es una bestia famélica, envidiosa e insaciable. (Francisco Tario)

I'm male by the way (yes, I know my avatar is misleading).


passionatebach
Velociraptor
Velociraptor

User avatar

Joined: 8 Nov 2009
Age: 46
Gender: Male
Posts: 440
Location: Cedar Rapids, Iowa

23 Feb 2010, 1:48 am

I actually spent two weeks in the summer of 1999 at my brother's house in Littleton, CO. In that two weeks, I got to see the affects that the Columbine shooting had upon the community. Sadly, I didn't totally understand the emotions of people in that community until my own community suffered a natural disaster a couple of years ago.

I always thought it would be an interesting idea to write about the after effects of a school shooting on a community, through the eyes of some students. It was an eye opening and life changing experience to spend time it the Littleton/Denver community during that time. Maybe one of the main characters could be a person with autism/AS and the response that they would have to this type of event.