Quality Youth Counselling by Teen Guru, Pastor Tony Brindell

It’s a challenging time for parents. How do they face modern obstacles and raise resilient, confident teenagers without overstepping their teens’ boundaries? How do they keep the lines of communication open so their youngsters can make it to adulthood safe and healthy?

Tony Brindell specialises in teenage psychology, and he’s exceptionally good at it. He addresses these kinds of questions during his live talkback broadcast on his extremely popular radio show Teen Talk, every Thursday night at seven-thirty. Parents call the station for advice on sex, drugs, alcohol, school, Church, social media, peer pressure, and family.

According to his audience, Tony has the right answers. His easy-going, commonsense, down-to-earth style of counsel is appealing. Tony’s silky smooth, empathetic tone helps, too.

You wouldn’t know, but that smooth voice also conceals some good lies.

Forget Tony’s vocal appeal. When I first wrote Tony Brindell into my book, he wasn’t any of those things. He wasn’t much at all. His character’s purpose was to listen to a story being told so the reader could hear it too. I plonked his nose, mouth, and ears on him, called him “counsellor,” and left it at that. He wasn’t meant to occupy much space in the text. Tony Brindell wasn’t the story. He was a potato.

Those little plastic ears were made to listen to some deadly secrets and then a threat. If he were to go to the police with what he knew, death would come to visit his home and his family. I wrapped up the story and gave it to a test reader for a once-over.

She replied with one small concern. “Umm, if it were me, I’d go to the police. Once the villain was locked up, how could he make good on his threat?”

Good point.

My protagonist isn’t a gangster. There was no way his arms could reach beyond prison walls. I didn’t set him up to be well-connected like that. I was simply expecting the reader to make a giant leap and accept it. (Yes, I included a client/patient privilege subplot, but my beta reader wasn’t buying that angle either.)

When writing novels, rewrites are common.

The first draft of any story is rough. It often has deep holes. A writer doesn’t see them because their eyes and mind are immersed in the story. It’s not until he or she steps back and has another look at it from a distance that they realise just how deep those holes can go.

I agreed with my test reader. I needed to fill in those enormous voids with sense so that my readers could cross the pages without falling into them. Tony Brindell was a hole that needed filling. The potato man needed substance.

Enter Tony Brindell, version two.

He was a former high school teacher who left the profession to pursue a different career path. He became a Pastor of a working-class Church, established a youth camp and then he counselled adults after hours. The counselling component grew, and he turned it into a business, working from a private office in his home. His open-collared shirt and upward-facing handshake approach to counselling were disarming, and his compassionate, empathetic voice charmed everyone. He was well on his way to succeeding as a life coach for everyday people.

The Education Department invited him to serve as a guest speaker for its teachers during some professional development days. Due to his popularity, he was called back to provide seminars to school Principals. Word got out. Local radio executives heard about his successes, and they contacted Tony’s office. They wanted to offer Tony a late-night spot on their 4XWS talkback radio programme. He came up with the title Teen Talk, and that’s about where we were when I started writing this post.

My Mr Potato Head wasn’t a vegetable anymore. He got some flesh and bone legs, some feet, arms, a life and a complex personality all of his own!

Backstory much? Sheesh! That hole got filled!

Tony always believed that the strength and stability of a civil, Christian society depend solely on the quality of its upcoming youth. Children are the key, but guiding them into adulthood is a complex and stressful task. Getting them to transition from dependents into responsible young adults in these modern times requires hard work. When done right, juvenile crime drops, education improves, and families become happier; therefore, they remain together.

He sees it as a win-win situation for society and families alike.

Teen Talk was aimed at troubled teens, but its first incarnation aired late at night. Few teens listened then. He had to settle for taking calls from distressed parents instead. It made sense. They were the ones up late, worrying about their kids’ futures. The show became a hit and was then moved to an earlier, more accessible timeslot.

Let’s stop the post again to see how far one character can come in a single rewrite of a story.

Tony appears to have succeeded in every way. His counselling and ministering have grown in leaps and bounds. He’s a leader among his peers and has risen to the top of his profession in a relatively short time. Unfortunately, he also fails at something he’s been trying to achieve: Accessing troubled youth.

There are clues left as to why that’s the case (detailed in the book): each time Tony makes some ground, he loses it. He starts as a high school graduate teacher, believing he can make a difference there. That doesn’t work out, so he becomes a youth worker. That ends, and he becomes a Pastor. He misses his mark again and again but eventually finds his groove.

Thank God for those youth camps, the support of his radio programme, and the seminars he runs for teachers and school Principals.

His ultimate goal is to help troubled teenagers and parents at their wits’ end — to give the latter respite and the former love and kindness — through mentorship during the school breaks. Special attention is awarded to young females.

And now we’re heading into darker territory, right?

Remember, my writing is dark, adult fiction. I’m drawn to it.

I’m forced to drag Mr Potato Head down into my pit of evil happenstance and call him out. I’m destined to expose these filthy ways. I’ll take his kind, outstretched hand of fake hope and encouragement and break it off his arm. We’ll see just how empathetic he sounds once the truth is revealed and others learn about his dirty little secrets.

This brings me back to enhancing that threat to keep Tony Brindell silent. “Tell the police what I’ve told you, and I’ll expose you. Your followers at Church, on the radio and in the Education Department will know what you are.”

The protagonist walks away and doesn’t look back.

Instead of restructuring my protagonist, I spent time raising my antagonist’s life to a point where he must fall from a higher place. The reader now shares in Tony’s struggle. It’s uncomfortable and morally unsatisfying.

I printed out the new manuscript and handed it to my beta reader, and asked her to read it again.

“Oh wow. Oh my. That’s not what I expected at all. That’s so creepy. Where do you get this stuff?”

“Don’t worry about that. Do you think Tony will keep quiet now?” I asked

“I don’t know, yes. How could he not? This is — what — where does this come from?”

Finding ways to destroy hope my thing. It reminds us that good intentions can make us blind to pure evil.

Good men like Tony are found everywhere. Priests, Ministers, Pastors, teachers, coaches — each caught with their hands dipping in the cookie jar. Every day, a new story breaks about a person in authority having an inappropriate relationship with a young person. Mostly, it’s men who can’t keep away from that which isn’t theirs to take.

Tony says he’s different and not like that. He’s respectful. He provides respectful intimacy. The girls are shown how to be confident and develop self-respect, in and out of the bedroom. He believes he’s preparing them for Adulthood. To him, he is doing God’s work.

You get the picture.

By lifting his profile, I’m raising the stakes. He has more to lose. Does he report the murder and risk giving up on his youth-fixing quest, his Church, his radio show, marriage and family? Or does he let it slide so he can continue doing what he says God wants him to do?

And that, my dear reader, is the challenge of writing. Does a writer go for an easy happy-ever-after ending to wrap it up quickly, or expose a deeper rabbit hole?

I hope the reader is as conflicted as I am.

SEETHINGS (the first book) is written mostly in the first-person perspective (which is a challenge in itself), so when news like this is delivered to a character like Tony Brindell, it is as though you are delivering it to him yourself. He looks at you and dips his head in shame. You caught him out, and he knows you know. You get to see the moment his penny drops. The atmosphere crackles. You’re in a position of superiority. He’s been a naughty boy, and everyone knows it.

What about the rest of the SEETHINGS’ story?

Tony Brindell started as a potato, but in the first draft, I also had bean sprouts, some cauliflower, a pasta dish and something fishy on the side. All had makeovers to improve their standings in the story. The counsellor had a minor role compared to that of the main character. Tony is just a puppet. Our protagonist has a journey of their own to explore. That’s the one to watch!

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)