I’ve had two concussions in the past year. By “I,” I mean “we.” By “we,” I mean two of my sons. Because when your kid has a brain injury, so do you.

If your child’s brain has somehow been slammed up against the inside of his cranium, here’s what he can’t do:

• read, watch TV, play video games, text his friends, run, turn his head fast, concentrate for more than a few minutes (so the whole education thing becomes pretty absurd), play the drums or electric guitar, ride his bike, play any kind of sports including stuff that doesn’t seem like it would hurt, like swimming or shot put, be in bright light (like sunlight), be in loud places (like anywhere there are more than a couple of kids, for instance our dinner table), be in the car for very long, because the visual of things coming at him hurts like crazy. Pretty much anything fun or educational. Or normal.

Here’s what he can do:

• bake, do art projects (but not complicated ones), sleep, have his grandfather or aunt mercifully show up and take him out for lunch, sleep some more.

Here’s what you can do:

• worry, take him to endless chiropractic and other alternative practitioner visits because western medicine’s only recommendation is physical and cognitive rest, worry some more, yell at him for sneaking video games because he’s so bored, apologize for yelling, wrack your brain for new “concussion-friendly” activities, get depressed, worry some more.

Both of my boys had prolonged post-concussive syndrome, which meant months of the above. Here’s how it happened: football. For both of them. Now, I have nothing against the sport (total lie), and I really enjoyed going to their games. Both of them were pretty good at it, as a matter of fact. And God knows you can get a head injury just walking out your door—or into it, as the case may be. Nevertheless, guess what sport we no longer play in the Fay house.

Okay, now that you think I am the most depressing person since Eyeore, here’s the funny thing: some cool and interesting stuff has happened as a result.

My older son, Liam, has never gone a season without playing a sport, but he was so desperately bored he decided to try out for a play. Unfortunately, even four months post concussion, he couldn’t memorize lines for the audition—short term memory goes haywire with a head injury. But he could ad lib, so he faked his way into a small role.

He enjoyed it so much, he tried out for the spring musical, FAME. Again, not a big part, but he’s having a blast, and has met a bunch of very fun dram-y friends, who are now in and out of our house, being dramatic and laughing a lot.

“So,” I said to him the other day. “I think you’re officially a dram-y.”

“I am,” he said, grinning.

I’m sure there are more satisfying things than watching your kid find a whole new side of himself, a whole new way to love life, but at the moment, I can’t think of any.

My younger son, Nick, has always had difficulty with reading. Not enough to bump him into the echelon of kids who get Individualized Education Plans. But enough to make reading a real chore (for both of us, if you know what I’m saying.) Our good friend Concussion has changed all that in two ways: first, Nick jumped to the front of the line in terms of school supports, teacher help, and tutoring from a young woman whom I’ve never met, but would likely kiss on the lips if I did. School is working for Nick in a whole new way.

And second, out of extreme, oceanic boredom, he started listening to audio books. I really don’t care how you take your fiction, as long as you find ways to drink deeply from the clear, cool, bottomless well of stories in this world. I’m a fiction writer. That’s how I see it.

And one last concussion-rendered gift for the Fay family: I’m now working on a story I really, really like.

I had been slaving away on a historical fiction piece, second-guessing every word. Is this how people talked to each other in 1919? Is this what they were worried about? Was this product even invented then?

Sidebar (because I ought to do something with all that information I dug up): The radio had been invented, but there were no public broadcasts until 1920. So you might have had radio, but there was nothing to listen to. You see what I’m getting at? Every flipping sentence was a quagmire of research and self-doubt. I was exhausted.

Along came the beginnings of another story in my head, and I thought, well let me just write this scene and save it for later, when I’m done with the brain-eating, confidence-snuffing historical fiction project. But, oh my gosh, it felt so good just to write, without all the angst!

And because I was feeling sorry for myself about the concussions and everything, I let myself  off the hook with the historical fiction. I said to myself, “Hey, you’ve got a lot of balls in the air. Setting this piece aside for later (and so help me, I will get back to it) is not the worst, most irresponsible thing in the world. It’s not even the worst, most irresponsible thing you personally have ever done. (Let’s face it, not even close.) So, poof, here’s the hook—you’re off it.”

The moral of the story is not Get a Concussion, Good Things Might Happen. In fact I’m not sure if there is a moral, or even a point, except maybe that life is funny. And wonderfully unpredictable sometimes. Worthy of fiction.

“Sitting alone in a room, being forced to write about people who don’t even exist—that’s the definition of hell for me.”

I’ve heard variations on that comment ever since I became a fiction writer, someone for whom spending time with people who don’t exist is heaven. When I can’t get to it for one reason or another, after a while I get a little depressed. We’ve all heard those tales about the hard-drinking writer “opening a vein” to get the words on the page. Not me. It’s not writing that makes me feel that a trip to the liquor cabinet is in order.

I have no idea why that is. Why fiction writing and not, say, clog dancing or totem pole carving? Does anyone really know why certain activities blow their hair back and others leave them flat?

I have four children and each of them is passionate about something that has nothing to do with how they were raised. My oldest son, for instance, would live in a tent in the woods if he had his way. His father and I never took him camping. In fact we hate camping—we like beds. But when he joined the Boy Scouts, it was like he’d located his mother ship. If some sort of cataclysmic disaster occurs and we all end up living in the wild, he’s your man, because at 16 he has more wilderness skills than most of us accrue in a lifetime.

I like to live in a story the way my son likes to live in the woods. And yes, that’s how it feels, like I’m living there. If that sounds mildly psychotic … well, it is, in a pleasant, controlled sort of way. I think about my characters all the time. Rather than creating them, it feels like I’m discovering them. “Oh,” I’ll realize in the middle of driving someone to sports practice, “that’s why she’s so angry. It’s because …”

For me, “discovering” a story involves four completely different activities:

• Information gathering: standard research (e.g. what’s the flight route from Nairobi to Boston?) and general noticing of things (e.g. the way a girl walks backwards to talk to her friends as they cross a parking lot at the mall).
• Planning the characters, plot and setting: Who are these people, what’s their problem, and where are they having it?
• Generating the story: Getting the words onto the page, cranking up that word count. (I love word count! 1,000 words a day is really satisfying. Any more and I start to feel like a superstar—in my own head, anyway. I still get up and do the laundry.)
• Editing: It’s great to reel off a bunch of words, but let’s be honest—they aren’t always pretty. Sometimes they don’t even make sense. Molding the rough draft it into something meaningful and artful is just as important as creating it in the first place.

These four activities are happening in various rotations almost daily. The most inherently creative is generating the first draft. And strangely it’s the one that feels the least like “doing” and the most like “discovering.”

My mind drops below the normal level of consciousness, almost into a trance-like state. I’m in control of the story, and yet it feels like I’m watching it, too—not quite as a passive observer, but not as the man behind the curtain pulling all the levers, either. It’s a little like watching a YouTube video where your semi-conscious mind is buffering the file, and your conscious mind is taking in the show.

It’s also a bit like dreaming. Most people believe that our brains create our dreams, choosing the subject matter, scenery, characters and action. But when you’re slogging through a leach-infested swamp, trying desperately to hide from a guy with a crossbow who is alternately your high school trigonometry teacher, your college boyfriend, and your great uncle Frank … it sure doesn’t feel that way, does it? It feels real.

Neuroscientists are now finding that reading fiction is also experienced as real. A recent piece in the New York Times titled Your Brain on Fiction states, “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”

Further, “just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.” Reading fiction, it’s now being proven, helps us learn more about the complexities of relationships and hone our own interpersonal skills. And it only works because it feels real.

When I write a story—or when you read a story—we know it’s not real. The book is in your hands. The keyboard is under my fingers, the words are new, the characters are completely … sorry guys, but it’s true—you’re fictional. But the false realness of it is what makes my brain crackle and zing and spin around in dizzy joy like a two-year-old. And my greatest hope as I’m writing is that it will do the very same thing for your brain, too.

If the thread of romance were to be pulled from the storyline of every book ever written, what a bleak and boring catalogue we’d be left with. I’m not just talking about genre romance or chick lit or even its more literary sister, women’s fiction.

I’m saying let’s imagine David McCullough’s John Adams without his passion for his wife Abigail, or Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses without John Grady Cole’s fateful affair with Alejandra, or Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity without the quirky yet lovable Marie.

Nevertheless stories with a romantic subplot are often considered to have less literary value, especially if the lovers are allowed to be happy in the end. I really don’t know what to make of that. Who gets to love whom can be a very important question, sociologically, politically, historically.

I love love. I like to read about it and I like to write about it, following unlikely pairs through discovery and infatuation, over the obstacles of social pressure, internal turmoil or misunderstanding, toward the bliss of connection.

One of my very favorite literary romantic couples is Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth of Persuasion by Jane Austen. There is something electric about reunions—people who have a past together, separated by choice or the vagaries of life, thrown into each other’s path years later to see if the spark of former passion might once again ignite.

I like the fact that they are both older—at the advanced age of 27, Anne has been relegated to spinsterhood. Eight years before, she’d been engaged to Captain Wentworth, but was persuaded by her family that he was not distinguished enough to marry into her high-ranking family. Austen was a master of satirizing the entrenched social strata of early 1800s England.

By happenstance the two once again travel in the same social circle, and the reader doesn’t know if Captain Wentworth still shares Anne’s feelings until he writes her a note, telling her: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.”

In my humble opinion, “You pierce my soul” has to be one of the best lines of tortured passion ever written. I, like Anne, would have fallen for it in … well, in a heartbeat.

I just did something a little strange: I ordered a circa 1919 Montgomery Ward catalog on eBay.

It’s particularly unusual for me since I often take a free moment to call catalog companies and tell them not to send me their glossy pages of wares. I am the opposite of a shopper. I am a chucker. I like less stuff, not more.

(When my teenage daughter and I were helping my mother pack up for a move to a smaller place, I whispered to her, “Don’t worry, when my time comes, I won’t have this much stuff.”

“Oh, Mom,” she said shaking her head, “by then you’ll be living out of a backpack.”)

But I need this particular catalog because I just started a new novel. It’s historical fiction, set  in 1919, and I need to know about the stuff.

So far, all my novels have taken place squarely in the present. But when I finished my most recent novel last spring, and began to think about the next project, I didn’t have a clear idea of the story I wanted to tell. So I started taking a look at stories that have spoken to me, were memorable, entertaining, inspiring, edifying in some way.

One night my family decided to watch the movie A League of Their Own, which is based on our country’s brief but fascinating experiment with women’s major league baseball. I got to thinking how it’s not only a good story with memorable characters, but it also has that added nutritional value of teaching us about a mostly-forgotten, but intriguing piece of history.

And it got me wondering about a related historical issue: women’s suffrage. What was it like to live in a time when intelligent people debated whether it might be dangerous to let women to vote? In my own state of Massachusetts there was a law passed in 1915 specifically denying women the right to “enfranchisement” as they called it. What would it have been like to live in a family where people had differing opinions about it—to be a girl coming into adulthood, thinking about her future, with all this furor about what women should and shouldn’t do flying around?

As much as we feel our own times are bristling with rapid change, people in 1919 felt the same. A war of unprecedented scope had just ended, the Spanish Influenza epidemic had killed half a million Americans in a matter of months, Prohibition had just been signed into law, and yet at the same time social mores were becoming much looser.

So, I’m delving into history books, newspapers, fiction from that time, everything I can find that will give me the facts and the flavor. It’s pretty intimidating to think about tossing all this new knowledge into the usual juggling act of plot, characters, setting, relationships, etc. But little by little I’m starting to get a sense of how to integrate it with the story I want to tell.

At the moment, what really intimidates me are the clothes. I barely notice the fashions in my own time, how am I going to properly convey what women were wearing almost a hundred years ago? Apparently there were corsets for some, girdles for the more modern, and for the truly avant guard … no hardware whatsoever! No wonder so many people thought the world was going to hell in a hand basket.

I’m learning that people are worried about that hand basket trip in every age. And as soon as my catalog comes, I’ll know just what they were wearing in 1919 as they prepared for whatever surprising thing might happen next.

I had been “visiting” book groups by phone for years. I’m always happy to do this—it never gets old hearing that people who are unrelated to me and don’t owe me favors chose one of my books over millions of others to read and discuss.

Also, it’s usually really fun. It’s interesting to hear different takes on something you poured your heart and years of your life into, there are always questions you haven’t heard before, and let’s face it—book group people are generally down for a good time. It’s pretty easy to make them laugh.

Last spring a book group wanted to “visit” using Skype, a video-conferencing software program.

“Sure!” I said. “I’d love to!” Then I turned to one of my in-house computer experts—also known as teenagers—to set it up for me.

Everything seemed to be going well, and it was so much nicer to chat face-to-face rather than respond to disembodied voices over a speakerphone. Then my 11-year-old burst into the room.

“Mom,” he said. “Can we get a trampoline?”

I did what I usually do when one of my four cherubs interrupts me on a work call: I gave him the mean-mom-don’t-bother-me-now face and waved him out of the room.

Then I turned back to the computer screen, ready to continue. That’s when I truly got the downside of Skype: when you’re making the mean-mom face … THEY CAN SEE YOU.

Here are some tips on Skyping for both authors and groups:

• Confirm the meeting time, time zone and Skype account name the day before. Schedule your session at least 15 minutes after the group is planning to gather, so they have time to arrive, catch up with each other and settle in before starting.
• Set the expectations: will the author give a talk, or is it just questions and answers? I tell people to expect me to be with them for 30-45 minutes, but I’ll stay longer if they still  have burning questions.
• Do a sound/video check just before the meeting. There’s nothing worse than working out tech issues while people are waiting.
• Adjust the height of your camera so it’s level with your eyes, not sitting on your desk and pointing upward. No one wants to look up your nose! For book groups, position the camera and the group so everyone can be seen.
• Position lights so you look lit, but natural. Make sure the background is pleasant—not the open door to a closet full of old sports equipment or stacks of haphazard files.
• In case the Skype connection gets lost or frozen, authors should get the phone number of the house where the group will be meeting, and groups can set up a speakerphone as back up.

I asked some of my author pals for their Skype-related stories:

Randy Susan Meyers: “Before doing my first Skype I practiced by having Skype conversations with my sister, daughter, husband … anyone who’d sit still for it. Of course, even with that I made a total fool of myself by craning my neck to see members who were out of screen view.”

Julie Buxbaum: “When I used to Skype with book clubs from London, it was almost always in the middle of the night my time. So I would get up, put on a nice shirt and some lipstick, and pretend like I wasn’t actually wearing hot pink pajama pants. Actually, those were some of the most fun meetings I’ve had, because I was always just a tiny bit delirious. On at least one occasion, I had my baby asleep in my lap.”

Melanie Benjamin: “I once had my picture taken in a Skype session—the book club all gathered behind the laptop they were using, so that my face was on the screen in the middle of them, and they took my picture! I felt a bit like Max Headroom.”

Heidi Durrow: “I tell them in advance that I’ll likely wear pajamas or a hat if I’m coming from the gym. I also like to show them stuff on my desk, like the blue bottle I found in a thrift store the day after writing that image into the book.”

Cathy Buchanan: “Sometimes I feel so much a part of the book club that I need a glass of wine. So here’s another tip: have wine on hand.”

Here’s a list of Great Book Club Suggestions by the Fiction Writers Co-op, an author’s group I belong to. All of these authors are happy to phone or Skype with book groups … but now you know—they might be wearing their pajamas.

In 2005 I wrote the last lines of my very first novel.

“I finished,” I told my husband.

“Honey, that’s great!”

“Yeah … But what am I supposed to do now?”

Honestly, I’d had doubts as to whether I could even complete the thing, so I was unprepared for taking the next steps. Of course there had been days when I’d fantasized about seeing my novel on a bookstore shelf, but I’d rightly expected that to be a long shot.

“Call Brian,” said my husband. Our friend Brian Kiley writes for The Conan O’Brien Show. He lived in New York. He would know people.

He put me in touch with a neighbor of his in the publishing industry, and she connected me with others. That first novel never did get published, but at least I had an idea of what doors I needed to pry open somehow.

Fairly often, people write to me for advice on what to do once they’ve written a book. Here’s what I tell them:

Congratulations! Please take a moment to bask in the warm glow of this momentous accomplishment. Have a beverage of your choice, no matter what hour of the day it is. Go out to a fancy dinner, or at least take the kids to Dairy Queen for a celebratory Blizzard. Many, many people start novels. You are among the happily obsessed few who’ve actually finished one!

Ahem … that word “finished” … it’s a strangely elusive concept when it refers to manuscripts. And it’s really important that you’ve got the thing in pristine shape before you send it out. My friend Randy Susan Myers, a talented and successful novelist, wrote this invaluable post on polishing up your future bestseller.

Next you need to do some research about which agents to send it to. Randy also wrote a helpful piece on preparing to find an agent and selling your book once you do. I used a book called Putting Your Passion Into Print, but there are many others.

There are also seminars you can take on revising your manuscript and finding an agent. If you’re in Boston, peruse the course offerings at Grub Street, a wonderful center for creative writing.  If not, check out Writers’ Conferences & Centers, a comprehensive listing of writing centers all over the country.

Here are some other good resources:

• Queryshark
• AgentQuery
• GalleyCat
• BlogHer: Recommended Online Resources for Writers

A word on rejection (actually four words): IT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE. Much like death, taxes, and the effect of gravity on middle-aged skin, rejection is a certainty in the publishing biz. I would say brace yourself, but it’s hard to prepare to hear someone say your literary newborn is ugly. Hopefully knowing that you’re in excellent company will soothe the pain a little.

With every rejection I received I reminded myself of something I’d once heard: JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was turned down twelve times (which is relatively few, as it turns out) before she got a contract. Just think how wrong those twelve people were, and how many times they must have kicked themselves since.

If you have advice or suggestions for aspiring writers, I’d love to hear about it. Please share in the comments below.

Ever read a book and wonder what you’re NOT seeing—what additional scenes might have ended up on the author’s “cutting room floor”? In the service of pacing, plot, character development or just getting the word count down, every author cuts. And those cuts can hurt! Passages that seemed so critical when they were first written can swiftly become collateral damage in the struggle to revise.

DEEP DOWN TRUE went through a wonderful, necessary and, at times, painful editing process in the quest to reveal the best parts of the story. I learned so much about how to chip away at the extraneous parts, and I’ve been able to bring those skills forward into the next project.

However, writing is art, and art is nothing if not subjective. What my editor and I might decide the story can live without, some readers might have found illuminating or at least entertaining. We all have our opinions on the best passages of any given novel, and we certainly don’t always agree.

The next time you read a book and feel there were aspects that weren’t completely explored or questions that weren’t fully answered—and you will, because no story can possibly answer every question—ask yourself: “Is this the part that ended up in the author’s recycle bin?”

What follows is my original beginning to DEEP DOWN TRUE. It was abandoned in the interest of getting to the action a little faster. It was a change I agreed with … and yet, I still miss it a little. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Dana had been pretty in high school. “Not cover-of-Seventeen-magazine pretty,” her girlfriends had determined, but attractive enough to enjoy a sufficient quantity of boy attention. The girls all agreed that Dana’s lips were her best asset. Full but not too full, they had an inviting quality, the kind of lips that drew boys she barely knew to appear beside her at parties and, emboldened by cheap beer, say, “I have always wanted to kiss you.”

And if they weren’t too unappealing, Dana often would oblige. It was a sort of friendly service she provided, and the boys, having been kissed, would often murmur their thanks and wander away; she drew the line at kissing.

Those lips had lost their luster over the years. They had shriveled slightly, and now had fine lines striping up and down. Like wood grain, she now thought glancing in the mirror. Lipstick only seemed to highlight their waning allure.

It was disappointing, when she thought of it, which wasn’t too often these days. Dana knew nothing stayed the same. Her figure, for instance, had been perfectly acceptable—preferable to boys who liked curves. But it had expanded slightly with each child who’d engaged her body as a jumping off point into the world. She was Ellis Island, made of flesh, to two such beings. There had been one more which she, and only she, seemed to remember hadn’t had its papers or chromosomes in order to pass through, and so had returned to whatever point of origin its tiny, half-formed body had traveled from.

“I wanted you,” she’d imagine telling this never-born baby if they met one day in some unearthly place, “but I understand. I know how things don’t always work out.”

Yellowstone National Park really knocked me out. I just got back from a trip with my husband and kids, and it’s got to be about the strangest place in the country. The geysers, multi-colored pools, mud pots, hot springs and steam vents all seem like something from another planet.

And there’s beauty at every turn—rivers and waterfalls, canyons and mountains, grassy fields and volcanic rock slides. We swam in a river that was the perfect temperature because boiling runoff from hot springs combines with frigid ice melt from the mountain tops.

Back in the mid-1800s, before it was protected as a park, people who’d been there recognized the value of preserving it. But they had a hard time convincing the general population, the vast majority of whom had never—and would never—see it.

They knew that once people saw it, they would understand. And they were right. Thomas Moran and William Henry Jackson, a painter and photographer, respectively, went along on the Hayden Expedition in 1871, and are credited with the groundswell of popular support for protecting Yellowstone. Their pictures told the story of why this amazing place needed to be saved.

Readers often ask me about the future of the publishing business. (I know this seems like a very strange non sequitur, but hang in there and you’ll get the connection.) The world of books is definitely undergoing massive changes, many of which aren’t terribly comfortable for publishers, agents, booksellers, authors and even, at times, readers.

But our brains are wired for stories. And whether they’re made of words, pictures, music, dance or drama, storytelling will always serve a critical function in the human experience. Stories make us feel something that bulleted facts, financial data and logical arguments do not. Which is why the idea of a national park didn’t catch on until people’s imaginations were engaged with a visual story.

I’m not sure how we’ll be getting our stories in the future. Electronic devices are on the rise, and who knows what might come after that. But stories will always be told because people will always want to hear, see or read them—whether on paper, onstage, on canvas on a screen.

Moran’s actual field sketches and Jackson’s original photos are on display in the Mammoth Hot Springs Visitor Center in northern Yellowstone. They are beautiful, and it’s easy to see why Americans were finally persuaded to protect this wonderful place. The nation owes a debt of gratitude to these two men for telling such a compelling “story.”

It’s that last glimpse back as he runs for the train, or the sigh as the hot sun sets into the water with an all-but-audible sizzle, or the relief of confirming the killer.

Or not.

The closing words of any novel will either satisfy or they won’t. They’ll leave the reader thinking about the story and the characters, drifting in a semi-trance of remembrance … or making a grocery list and wondering if it’s time for a haircut.

The pressure is intense. For me it’s the part I worry about the most, because when I begin a story I never have a clear sense of the final page. I have a general idea of where the characters could end up, but not exactly how they’ll get there, and certainly not that all-important last paragraph.

To my mind, there are two ways to go after it. The first is organized and rational. Here are some of the I questions ask myself:

• How much do I want the reader to actually know about how it ended? Should the reader be left with things to guess about? Which things?
• How neatly do I want it all tied up? Which aspects of the story should reach a full conclusion and which should be left as an ongoing issue?
• Where will each of the characters end up geographically? Emotionally? Professionally? Who will be happy and who will be unfulfilled?
• What’s the theme of this story? What’s the last thing I want the reader to consider about this theme?
• Do I want a dramatic trumpet blare of an ending or a quiet sigh?

The second way is not to go after it at all—to let it come after you. I’m a firm believer that our subconscious minds are doing an enormous amount of work, picking up details, making connections, squirreling away information that our conscious minds are barely aware of. Who hasn’t had the experience of trying desperately to remember something, only to have the answer come when we stop thinking about it?

I try to think about the story with only the lightest touch, usually while doing something else, like taking a walk or a drive or a shower. Definitely not at my desk! I get a lot of ideas just as I’m waking up in the morning, when my mind is still in that dreamy state of receptivity.

I remember the moments when I figured out endings for Shelter Me and Deep Down True very well. Each time the anxiety had been building, and I’d been starting to think I just might come up empty. And each time I eventually realized I’d been carrying the ideas around in my head almost from the beginning, but hadn’t seen them as endings. Suddenly the puzzle pieces shifted, and it all came together. The relief was enormous.

Telling the story I want to tell makes me feel like a gymnast attempting a difficult routine. I love the challenge of it; I love leaping into the empty page and hoping I can get my words to spin and turn so that it all looks graceful and effortless. And the biggest challenge is knowing that even if I get all the moves right, if I don’t “stick the landing,” as they say, I’ll lose important points. It’s the last thing you’ll see me do, and if I do it well, you won’t even know I’m there. Hopefully you’ll be carried off by those last lines as if they created themselves.

My seventeen-year-old daughter was assigned to read The Great Gatsby. “How do you like it?” I asked. “Hate it,” she said. I nodded. I remembered hating it in high school, too.

But when she asked me to look at the paper she’d written on this hateful book, she included the following passage describing a party at Gatsby’s house:

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.”

“Wow,” I said, as she looked over my shoulder. “That’s some pretty fantastic writing.”

“Yeah, it is,” she said. “But I still hated the book.”

I had to laugh, because it reminded me of reading The Catcher in The Rye in high school. It’s about a teenager, after all—we were expected to relate, even though it had been written several decades before, and the lingo sounded like a joke. I hated it. I thought Holden Caulfield was whiny!

A couple of years ago, I read The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them. At least five of these great authors listed The Catcher in The Rye.

“Okay,” I thought. “It’s short, it’s sitting on my living room bookshelf, let me take another crack at it.”

I was blown away. I was crying at the end. I wanted to take Holden home and give him a good lunch and the compassion he so desperately needed.

So here’s my question: Why are we ruining perfectly good books—classics, no less—by requiring teenagers to read them, analyze them to shreds and stay up late writing papers on them? Isn’t that the perfect way to make someone hate something—by forcing it down their throats and making them cough up an assignment they’ll forget as soon as they hand it in?

Here’s an idea—let’s make them read current books. I’m not talking about bodice-rippers or whodunits. There’s great stuff out there written in ways that teens can connect with, possibly relate to and maybe even … like.

Here are some ideas, just off the top of my head:

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
Empire Falls, by Richard Russo
The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kid
Outliers, The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

These are all interesting, well-written books with a strong young character or two. Teenagers would have a lot to say about these books, and plenty to ponder beyond the inevitable paper they’d have to write. They can read the classics later, when they’re a little more classic-friendly. Maybe in college, or even when they’re “classics” themselves.

If you had to choose a book that was written in the last ten years to assign to a high school English class, what would it be?