 Drama: November 13, 2019 Issue [#9835] |
This week: Writing for Teens Edited by: Joy  
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“Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.“
G. Stanley Hall
"People love teen movies because everyone can relate."
Zoe Kravitz
“The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.”
Neil Gaiman, author of The Sleeper and the Spindle
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about writing for the teenage crowd.
Please, note that there are no rules in writing, but there are methods that work for most of us most of the time.
The ideas and suggestions in my articles and editorials have to do with those methods. You are always free to find your own way and alter the methods to your liking.
Note: In the editorial, when I refer to the third-person singular as he or she, it means either gender.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Having read quite a few middle-grade and teen books while I was growing up and then reading them with my children later on, I concluded that good writers of such books really do care about their readers. If an author cannot get in touch emotionally and culturally with her target audience, she’ll lose that audience.
In the same vein, meeting the accepted norms of general fiction is easier than writing for young adults because to sound like them and attract their attention, the author needs to become a teen again. This means you become a teen not of your time but that of the present time with its special vocabulary, feeling, and understanding. Although the teen slang becomes stale too quickly, the feeling and understanding will be close enough.
This is because young people usually value characters they can identify with. Even if there may be young adults out there somewhere who can empathize with the sad or serious life of an 80-year-old, that is more of an anomaly. This doesn’t mean you cannot use older characters here and there, but if you make your main character an 80-year-old, that oldster better act and think much younger than his age or, at least, he better be funny.
Then, you’ll need to come up with a realistic teenage voice. Thinking back to your day may help with the emotional part of the equation, but always keep in mind that culture always changes, and teen culture is not an exception to the rule. I think it rather makes the rules.
As an example, here is a short excerpt from Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger, which has been a classic for several decades and is considered the most pivotal and inspiring young-adult text. The first publishing date of this book is July 16, 1951.
“Boy, I rang that doorbell fast when I got to old Spencer's house. I was really frozen. My ears were hurting and I could hardly move my fingers at all. "C'mon, c'mon," I said right out loud, almost, "somebody open the door." Finally old Mrs. Spencer opened it. They didn't have a maid or anything, and they always opened the door themselves. They didn't have too much dough.”
Here is another example from a young adult book by Rachel Hartman titled Seraphina, first published by Random House on July 10, 2012, 61 years after Salinger’s book.
Guntard snorted. “Pygegyria literally translated as ‘bum-waggling’!” He glanced nervously at the Saints in their alcoves, noticed several of them frowning, and kissed his knuckle piously. “Anyway, his troupe’s in the cloister, befuddling the monks.”
My head was beginning to hurt. I handed Guntard the flute. “Return this to its owner. And send away this dance troupe—politely, please.”
“You’re going back already?” asked Guntard. “A bunch of us are going to the Sunny Monkey.” He laid a hand upon my left forearm.~
If you have noticed, in both of these examples, the authors did not change or minimize in any way the voice of the teen narrator and neither did they revert to a vocabulary that omits difficult words. This is because a teen can be as intelligent and knowledgeable as any adult. The difference is in the fact that the teens are experiencing most anything in a tangle of emotions and possibly for the first time. In addition, a writer cannot make up a voice for a teen. First, the character needs to come to life to find his own unique voice that coincides with the culture he is in; plus, your teen readers have to trust and accept the ways and actions of your teenage protagonist.
In addition, there is that believability factor as teens can be a tough audience who over-analyze the world around them, and especially the world and personalities of their parents and guardians. In addition, teens do not shy away from darker themes such as relationships, death, rape, drugs, etc. Such difficult topics can be handled by distancing the main character from the issues, but then, there are some very good authors who tackle those issues head-on. The trick is, if you are uncomfortable with those issues, you’ll make your readers uncomfortable, too. It is better, therefore, that the writer is comfortable with an issue like that before he puts his pen on paper.
Teens also appreciate animated dialogue and action, unique ideas, wide-ranging characters, diverse settings, imaginary worlds, and beings--human or otherwise--that move the readers as well as entertain them. This means if you can unite well-formed genuine teen characters with a dynamic plot, this crowd will appreciate and enjoy your writing greatly.
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 This Issue's Tip: Most editors say that the commonest problems in young adult writing that they have noticed are: data dump, incorrect voice, uneven dialogue, tired clichés, opening chapters where everything is crammed in, too kind treatment of the protagonist, and stale ideas that already abound in the marketplace.
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