On Writing for Teenagers and Forgiving Your Teenage Self

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I'm not speaking as a writer, because I feel that as an unpublished one I don't have much credibility in terms of marketing.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. I'm also speaking as a person who's visited quite a few young adult authors' social media profiles over the past year.

There are two ways to go wrong when you're remembering your teenage years. One is to canonize yourself. Ugh, all those other teenagers at your school were such jerks. They said mean things for no reason and they were into ridiculously superficial stuff while you and your friends were way nicer and also into things that mattered.

To be clear, I'm not trying to minimize major things, like being subject to homophobia or racism or other forms of trauma. Most of us exist in some form of social middle ground for the largest part of our teenage lives, but the social slights feel major, even if they'd be easily shrugged off by an adult, which means the hurt they leave behind is major. Even if you were one of the truly rejected, I can guarantee that hurt and anger inspired you to say and do some cruel things. That's not an accusation, by the way, just an acknowledgement of how we react to pain at that age. It's what humans without fully developed prefrontal cortexes do. We're better at saying mean things than thinking through how we affect others, or caring about it.

Casting your memory of yourself in this light leads to main characters who are:

• Not like other girls
• Antagonistic to every other person their age with maybe one or two exceptions
• Obvious wish fulfillment for you (not that wish fulfillment is bad! But nattering on about things that concern middle-aged women is usually a bad fit for a teenage character, and tends to snap the willing suspension of disbelief)
• Consistently underappreciated by everyone or consistently loved by everyone, for no good reason.

The other error is to hate yourself as a teenager. As someone who tends to err in that direction herself, I can definitely identify with this one. As you get older, you look back at the messed-up things you did that hurt others, and you want to dig a hole in the ground for yourself. Racist things you said, homophobic jokes, slut shaming, speaking slightingly of someone being cheap when probably they just didn't have any money? The shame of it's enough to keep you up at night. I literally did all those things and probably more that I don't remember, because they didn't even register as important to me. I didn't know any of the things I was doing were wrong at the time. But the fact that I know better now doesn't remedy the pain I passed on to the people around me.

Here's the thing about that: it is important to forgive yourself for being an ignorant teenager, while still refusing to absolve yourself of the wrong you did, and the hurt you caused. Failing to do so leads to main characters who:

• React to stress and pain in a way teenagers rarely do, i.e. maturely
• Communicate in relationships in ways teenagers rarely do, i.e. maturely
• Are shining examples of morality and justice and never mindlessly parrot what they've been told by adults they trust or friends
• Always make rational decisions (an impossible feat, again, for anyone without a fully mature prefrontal cortex)
• Or, more rarely, are punished by the narrative for any mistakes they've made on a level that approaches sadism.

If you as an author fail to work through these issues in yourself, it's going to show up in your writing. And it won't be pretty—in fact, it can actively harm the people who are the intended audience for your books. Teenagers need to read books that tell them, both directly and indirectly, that they are important, worthy of love, and capable of making choices that make sense to them even if they're not always going to make the rational ones by adult standards. They need books that tell them that their peer group as a whole are all those things, too. They need books that affirm the emotions they experience are real and normal and justified, even if their responses to them aren't always. They need books written for them by people who appreciate them.