Terrifying. ( source ) Apparently it needs to be said: if you're going to write about teenagers and from the teenaged point of view, you should like them. And I'm not just talking about the ones who are like you were, or like the conception of yourself at that age you've carried all these years. You should like them as a group . You should enjoy their conversation and their ways of relating to the world. You should be interested in their points of view. You should allow them to enjoy the things they enjoy without mocking them for enjoying them. (You should also not approach them from the perspective of a peer. You're not.) I'm not speaking as a writer, because I feel that as an unpublished one I don't have much credibility in terms of marketing. But I am going to speak as a reader, and as a librarian who's been working her way through a whole lot of Young Adult series and standalone books over the past semester, so that I can do reader advisory.
Throes of Creation by Leonid Pasternak ( source ) If you're a researcher, like me (I would call it a librarian failing, but honestly I was like this long before I signed up for my first LIS class), you'll approach every new step in the writing process with hours of reading under your belt. Before I started querying, I read every single post on Query Shark . I mean, every post. I read and watched everything I could find on how to write a query letter . That isn't even taking into account how to write a synopsis . And because I read all of those articles and blog posts, and watched the videos, I knew that rejection is part of the process. Seriously, Google "rejection is part of the process fiction writing" and this is a sample of what you'll get: How To Survive Rejection (sample quote: " they are proof that you are trying, that you are taking part in the process ") How to Handle Rejection of Your Writing, Without Becoming a Baske