Rules Are Made to Be Broken (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, we're supposed to talk about a memorable time we broke a rule ... and, related to that, how we write about rebellion in our YA (young adult) novels.

With rare exception, I don't break rules. So this is similar to being asked to blog about times I've lied. I don't lie. There's a reason I became a lawyer: I believe in the rule of law.

But I scrounged around in my memory for ANYTHING to write about. Truly, there's not much. I've always looked so clean cut and younger than my age that in college, on the extremely rare occasions when I smoked a cigarette (which always involved either final exams or alcohol), at least one complete stranger would come up to me and say, "But you don't smoke."

Dude. Don't tell me what I don't do.

But if I do break a rule, it's for a good reason. And that reason usually has to do with fairness.

A few of my basketball teammates of 10 years ago occasionally called me The Enforcer, because I can't stand dirty players, and I will rain down retribution on them with the fire of a thousand suns. Once, a player on the other team landed a dirty hit on my teammate, right in the chest. My teammate dropped to her knees from the blow, and she later went to the hospital. My self-appointed mission at that point was to take that player out. So I ran her off the court — as in, WAY off the court, shoving her hard the whole way, not even pretending to go after the ball. I was ejected from the game, for the first and only time in my life. (SHE should've been ejected, but wasn't.) When I got home that night and told my husband what had happened, he said he'd never been prouder of me.

Even when I was practicing law, I got up to hijinks (which is unusual for lawyers) on a few occasions when I thought something was unfair. Once in particular, it was a matter of gender discrimination. I can't go into detail, because the Other Side got REALLY upset about my revenge (which was hilarious, my usual tactic), and a few firm leaders were determined to find out and punish the culprit. (All these years later, they're probably still looking.) One very senior partner grilled me, CERTAIN that I'd done it. (Of course I did it. Who else? heh heh.) When the possible consequences to the culprit (er, me) started to look ugly, I sneaked down the hall to one of the most senior partners in the firm, Tom King, someone NO ONE would mess with. I walked into his office, shut the door, and said, "I need you to protect me." He grinned and said, "Absolutely. But what have you done this time?"

I don't have many examples from my teen years. Once, a star of our boys' basketball team was unfairly suspended from a tournament game for partying. In truth, he probably did some partying, but the administration happened to be wrong about the PARTICULAR party they accused him of drinking at. So most of our class walked out of class, and we also pulled a prank of checking out most of the books in the school library, then returning them all on the same day. I have no idea why that would be appropriate vengeance, since the only one who suffered was the librarian, but I did it, too. Ever since, I've made sure that only the people who deserve to suffer get nailed.

Because you've gotta be fair.

Really, that's about it. But writing about rebellion? Hoo boy, I've been working for quite some time now on a YA series about a group of teens who are renowned in their school for breaking school rules. Like they always say, "But we had a good reason!"

Write what you know!

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her books and music at marystrand.com.