Hi, Anne! This is a really interesting topic, so let me get right to it. [Clears throat, shifts into serious yet thoughtful position…] Being a novelist means writing from, or at least trying to understand and inhabit, perspectives other than your own. At the very least, it’s a different person, but it can also be a different age, gender, race, or even species (I’m looking at you, Watership Down). It is often several of those at once.
Writing from the point of view of a teen presents specific challenges, because your readers either are teens or were, so everyone sort of feels like an expert on the subject and you DO NOT want to completely drop the ball. If you’re writing from the perspective of an intrepid hobbit, actual experts are scarce and people will probably cut you some slack. If you’re writing from the point of view of a sophomore jock, on the other hand, people are going to notice if you use the word perspicacious.
I think different writers handle this challenge differently. For me, it comes fairly naturally. My memories of that age are very immediate and vivid, and I think they always will be. I am from a very small town, and I went to college in NYC and have lived there ever since. The extreme difference between the two places has very efficiently separated the experiences and feelings I had growing up from those I’ve had as an adult. When I think of being in that place—walking through the woods, driving the back roads, going to high school, or whatever—I am also thinking about what it was like to be that age. Not coincidentally, my books are set in small towns.
It’s also important to remember that teens vary tremendously in every conceivable way. Everyone develops at a different pace physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and speech patterns vary not only between groups but also from individual to individual. Some sophomore jocks do use words like perspicacious (I was one of them). So really, there’s no one right way to write a teen. You just have to be sensitive to what each character’s world is like and how, based on his or her individual personality and level of development, he or she is liable to react to a given situation.
To me, the key things are empathy, imagination, and effort. There are plenty of writers who can’t write a convincing character their own age. It’s not because they don’t know what it’s like, it’s because they don’t get inside the character and make him or her believably real.
I think those are main things. Beyond that, there are, you know, some tricks: reading level and all that. I was a senior editor at Sports Illustrated Kids for eight years, and Time Inc. spent a lot of money sending us to focus groups and things like that to help us understand and communicate with young readers. The lessons I learned from that were to try to see things from their perspective, to talk to them rather than at them, and not to eat everything on the snack trays just because it’s free.
Thanks so much, Michael! It was a pleasure reading how you succeed at writing as a teen!
About Trapped: The day the blizzard started, no one knew that it was going to keep snowing for a week. That for those in its path, it would become not just a matter of keeping warm, but of staying alive....
Scotty and his friends Pete and Jason are among the last seven kids at their high school waiting to get picked up that day, and they soon realize that no one is coming for them. Still, it doesn't seem so bad to spend the night at school, especially when distractingly hot Krista and Julie are sleeping just down the hall. But then the power goes out, then the heat. The pipes freeze, and the roof shudders. As the days add up, the snow piles higher, and the empty halls grow colder and darker, the mounting pressure forces a devastating decision....
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