Ponyboy.
Yeah, he's not real.
By Sean Tuohy
We know. You don't have to say, "Hey, Writer's Bone, Ponyboy is not a real person!" Duh. He's a beloved fictional character from The Outsiders, a book most of us had to read in school and a movie that features the Karate Kid getting burnt to a crisp. When we started Badass Writer of the Week, we never said that the writer we choose had to be, you know, an actual person.
So...
Now that we got that our of the way, we can get back to Ponyboy. The well-meaning young greaser who reads Gone With The Wind to his buddy Johnny, and gets in rumbles with the Socs is a badass writer in our book.
How is he a writer? In the book, Ponyboy talks about doing well in English class and talks about how he likes to write. Also, in the movie, he is shown writing "The Outsiders" story down. Ponyboy is a natural storyteller and it shows throughout the book and movie.
We believe in what Ponyboy Curtis believes in here at the Bone. We believe that good things come out of bad things. We believe that teenagers need to go through a lot of shit to mold them into valuable adults. We believe that Pony left his poor Midwestern town for the East Coast and became a brooding, dark writer like Cormac McCarthy.
Oh, you need more reasons for his badassey, Judgy McJudgerson? How about the fact that he always sticks by his friends and family no matter what? Or that he loves his brothers more than anything else? Or that he runs into a burning school to save children? He put himself in danger to rescue his best friend and a group of scared kids he didn't even know.
And again, he's a teenager. Fictional or not, that's an impressive badass resume.
We should note that S.E. Hinton struggled so much with the fame and pressure from the success of The Outsiders that she lapsed into a three-year writer's block. Ponyboy's awesomeness was too much for even his creator to handle (According to her website, Hinton eventually started writing again after her husband got sick of her being depressed. He demanded she write two pages a day).
What other fictional characters would you add to our Badass Writers of the Week? Let us know in the comments section or tweet us @WritersBone.