teens

The Undefinable, Undeniable Teen

What are teenagers like?

Don’t answer that. No matter what you say, you’re wrong. Unless you say something like, “Depends on the teen,” or, “As varied as adults, toddlers, senior citizens, or anything else.” Those are cop-outs anyway.

Teens (like so many other groups) get a lot of generalizations applied to them. Like every other generalization or stereotype, you can point to textbook cases where they’re true, and often just as many where they’re utterly false.

Example: Teens are irresponsible.

If we’re judging based on how some of them drive, then absolutely. On the other hand, I know teens who budget their money, make sure to take their car in for regular oil changes, and warn me two weeks in advance that they’ll be missing school and need their homework.

The whole essence of “teenager” is that it’s this amorphous time between childhood and adulthood where they have several traits of both stages at the same time … and those traits are often in flux from one moment to the next.

This is on my mind today because of a particular pet peeve of mine—talking to teens like they’re little kids.

I can’t fathom how common this is in schools. Not like all teachers do it, or even most, but enough to puzzle me. I’ve often wondered—but have never had the guts to ask one of the perpetrators—why they talk to students as they do. They’re not rude or anything. It’s just this tone and approach to interacting with students that I know would drive me bonkers if I were a teen.

Do they really regard teenagers as roughly the same as elementary students? I don’t know.

I can’t say I treat students exactly the same as I treat adults, or even talk to them exactly the same way. But it’s close. I try to acknowledge that they’re in that transition, which means they’re partway adult, but still in flux.

Maybe this attitude in teaching has informed my writing, because I try really hard to never talk down (write down?) to my audience.

And maybe that consciousness is why that “I’m talking like you’re nine years old” tone drives me nuts.

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Maturity is Eating Your Vegetables

** This presumes you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like vegetables. I’m not that kind of person. I rather like most vegetables. But it’s a metaphor. Just go with it. **

When you’re a little kid (who doesn’t like vegetables), your parents know you should eat veggies, but you don’t care. You don’t care that they’re good for you. You don’t care about those wonderful vitamins and all they can do for you. You don’t care about the nasty things that can happen if you have a deficiency of those vitamins. You only care about how marshmallows and popsicles are better than asparagus and broccoli, just because they are.

Our parents bribe, cajole, and threaten us so we eat our carrots and Brussels sprouts. At some point, though, we accept that we really can’t live on Pop Rocks and root beer. We really ought to eat those things that came out of dirt. Once we open our minds to them, we may even find they’re not so bad.

This is one of many cool things about teaching teenagers—and no, I’m not really talking about diet and nutrition.

With the ages I teach—and particularly because I’ve stuck with many students over several years—I get to see a lot of them making transitions to self-aware maturity. The kid who used to blow off everything academic starting to take things more seriously, even looking back and saying he wished he’d buckled down earlier so he could’ve learned more. The girl who voluntarily comes in during lunch for extra help, even though we both know she’d rather be chatting with friends than torturing herself with math.

I don’t get to see the transition for all of them. Some come to me with a very grounded worldview already in place. Some leave my class still thinking life will be a party—they’ll put it together later … or maybe not. (I’m pretty sure some on-paper adults are still patently immature.) But when I do see it, it’s very cool.

A current example: If you recall, I teach deaf kids. That means they all have IEPs (Individualized Education Plans, required for any kid with special ed services). This month has been IEP season at my school, so we sit down for a meeting with each kid (and a parent or two) and discuss where they’re at, where they want to go, and what they need to do to get there.

Most teenagers are counting down the days to graduation. “Come June of (name-the-year), I’m outta here!” My students are generally no different. Technically, though, they can stay with us until the year they turn twenty-two. Most shudder at the thought.

But then some of them take a realistic look at their goals. Maybe they want to go to college, and they look at their reading and writing levels. Not good enough … but right in a range where an extra year of high school, really working on it, could make the difference. And they say, “Yeah, I think I should learn more so I’m ready, because college is hard.”

That’s not just going for the carrots—that’s reaching for a big scoop of the whole vegetable medley.

I love that moment.

And I’ll keep trying my best to make those veggies tasty.

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Imperfection vs. Idiocy

Here’s another case where something I noticed as a reader has carried over to my writing. Flawed characters are a good thing. Perfect characters are boring, not to mention severely unrealistic. If characters are perfect and always do the right thing, there’s no interest and frequently no story.

Like everything else, though, flawed characters can go to an extreme that doesn’t work any better. A student of mine (now graduated) probably shouldn’t ever get an e-reader, because judging by our conversations, I think she may tend toward throwing books across the room. Or at least slamming them down on a desk.

The reason? Idiotic protagonists.

This is particularly prevalent in certain YA novels (or at least, that’s where I notice it, since it’s the world I know). Teenagers are in a stage of life that’s naturally more self-centered, and maybe that leads to the idea of making dumb decisions.

Okay, we all make bad decisions. That’s normal. But a character’s bad decision should be something that a real person would really do under those circumstances. More particularly, the bad decision should be consistent with what’s known about the character … not just something that’s convenient for the plot. (Hmm, I think that goes back to my post on front-end/back-end motivation, too.)

Here’s the thing. I’ve only known one teen in my whole life (including when I was a teen) who seemed to be 100% self-interested in their actions. And in that case, a personality disorder was likely. I also have a hard time thinking of any teens who act outright stupid in the way some novel characters do.

A cohort of the super-self-interested character is the one with false selflessness. The one who supposedly does what she does because she loves the boy, or wants to keep her friends safe. But when you look at it, the actions don’t match the supposed motivation. The character is just being stupid … because it’s convenient.

So where’s the line and the balance? How do we instill our characters with realistic, interesting flaws (and appropriately get them in trouble) without our teen readers thinking we’re insulting the intelligence of their species?

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What Writing YA is Really Like

Oh, my. It’s the summer of Let’s Insult YA Authors, Readers, and Teenagers in General.

First, there was this now-infamous article in the Wall Street Journal. It could have had some valid points, but if so, they got obscured in sweeping generalizations. (BTW, I shop at Barnes & Noble all the time, I live in the YA section, and I find all kinds of books that aren’t dark or about “vampires and suicide and self-mutilation.” In fact, I regularly walk out with books that just about any parent would find appropriate for a 13-year-old.)

Then there was this rather odd article titled “Writing Young-Adult Fiction” by Katie Crouch and Grady Hendrix (co-authors of The Magnolia League). Their backgrounds are in literary fiction and journalism, respectively, and they got tagged to write their YA novel. The article seems like it should be about what it says—writing YA fiction. By the end, I wasn’t sure what it was about, other than their book.

I began to feel like something strange was going on with this line:

It would be creepy if we included explicit sex scenes with glistening young skin and heaving young bosoms, but we keep it on the clean side. This isn’t Twilight. No slutty werewolves here.

Um, I’ve read Twilight—the whole series, in fact. As I recall, there’s one off-page sex scene in the fourth book. So I began to suspect that these authors haven’t read the books. If they haven’t read those, do they know anything about the YA market, really?

Then they mention how odd it is that they’re “being paid good money to be literary predators and come for people’s children.” Now I get the feeling they don’t know many (any?) teenagers in real life, either.

Overall, it seems their experience of writing a YA novel was a lot of giggling and silliness and hurry-up-and-get-it-done-ness. Writing their own wish-fulfillment fantasy, the “high-school experience we never had.”

Okay, that’s their experience. Good for them.

I haven’t gotten paid for my YA writing yet, but I think I’ve done enough now to speak to my own experience. Here’s what YA writing is like for me.

I live in fear of letting my students down. My students range from 14 to 21, and they read almost exclusively YA (aside from what their English teachers assign them). They are my little microcosm of the YA market, from voracious to reluctant readers, straight-A students to strugglers, jocks to theater geeks—with a ton of overlap within and between categories.

I’ve had students literally slam a book down during silent reading time. They hate it when characters do stupid things just for the sake of the plot—and yes, they do notice. They hate feeling talked-down to. They loathe dialogue that feels like a trying-too-hard adult wrote it.

You know what they like? Some actually like a clever turn of phrase, a well-crafted description. One girl asked me to recommend a book that would help push her vocabulary and comprehension. (I recommended The Monstrumologist.) Some want to be writers themselves. They like characters that are complex and twist stereotypes. They like stories that feel real, even (or especially) when they involve fantastic elements.

So I work my butt off. I draft, revise, run it by readers (both students and adult YA readers/writers), and revise again. Whatever I can do to make it real. If you didn’t figure it out already, I talk to teens (students, cousins, whatever) about books. I talk to them about life.

I talk to them like they’re people … because they are.

There’s the key, I think. I’ve known some (well-meaning) teachers who talk to teens like they’re still in elementary school. Teens aren’t adults yet, but they also aren’t children. I’ve found they’ll usually live up to high expectations … or down to low ones.

The best YA authors (and I’m certainly not placing myself among them) have high expectations for their readers. The read can be light or dark, funny or intense, about mermaids or cutting.

Just respect your readers. They’re pretty smart cookies … even the ones who don’t like math class. 😉

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How Hard Do You Push?

People who say teenagers are lazy, don’t care whether something’s good for them, don’t know the value of hard work, etc. don’t know what they’re talking about.

Okay, I know there are teens who fit that description.

So do some adults. (That’s beside the point.)

Here’s my evidence: Despite the fact that they want to have fun and don’t really like homework (except for Student X, who asks for extra work just because she gets bored at home), I’ve had a surprising number of students complain about teachers not challenging them enough.

Some teens out there who have nearly a full load of AP classes will wonder what planet I’m living on where such a complaint could be voiced. It’s a very small one, where “on grade-level” is pretty much the top of the food chain. But maybe we could push them higher.

After slogging it out for nine months, they want to feel like they’ve accomplished something—like they’ve completed their first marathon … not like they’ve been doing daily jogs around the local park. They may complain about how hard it is while they’re running, but deep-down, many of them seem to want that push.

I have a point, I promise.

I think our characters want to be pushed, too. And they want to push back. Throw a tough situation at them, and get them to slog through it. There’s a balance to maintain with believability, but don’t make it easy on the little dears. Let their reactions happen in vivid high-def with surround-sound. Challenge the characters. Challenge your readers.

Problems shouldn’t be solved too easily. The path of the plot shouldn’t be laid out neatly with big, bright roadsigns posted every mile. Emotions shouldn’t be consistently lukewarm, only half-felt. Sometimes, a character needs to have a solid freak-out.

And yes, most of this post is directed at myself.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to brainstorm some ways to torture challenge both my characters and my students.

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You Think You Know Me?

No, I’m not talking about you knowing me. The title above is a question asked by our characters. But I also don’t exactly mean knowing our characters on an individual level—their likes and dislikes, personality quirks, deeper values, etc. (Incidentally, though, From the Write Angle recently had a couple of great posts on that. Here’s one. And here’s the other.)

My question is related, yet different. A more global perspective—more demographic, maybe—where knowing our characters and knowing our audience overlap.

When you write about teenagers, and teenagers are your target audience, this is kind of important.

Everyone knows generalizations are ridiculous. You can’t say, “All teenagers are like this.” You can’t even say ‘most’ are. The opposite, though—where you’re pretty sure no teenager would say or do something, or act a particular way—that can happen. When teens read the story, they don’t have to think, “Every character’s just like me,” but they should identify the characters as real … like some teenagers somewhere.

How do you make that happen?

I consider myself lucky. I’m surrounded by the target audience throughout the workweek. A pretty good cross-section of personalities and backgrounds, too. That definitely helps. Not a possibility for everyone, though. And not a necessity.

What are the other options? Believe what TV and movies would have us believe about teenagers?

I grew up with the running joke of actors pushing (and pulling) thirty playing teenagers on 90210. So, um, no.

Better option for those who don’t have a lot of teens in their everyday lives (or even those who do): READ.

Unlike when I was a teen, there are a ton of great YA books out there. Even better is the wide variety of character types you can find. They’re not all perfect—some Mary-Sues, some clichés and stereotypes—but if you look carefully and read (a LOT), you can get a feel for the modern teen character.

Personally, I can’t imagine trying to write a YA novel without reading stacks of them first.

And if you can find some brutally honest teens willing to beta-read for you and call you out when the adult-writer is overpowering the teen-character … so much the better.

Any other ideas about getting that reader-character synergy? Experiences where you got it right on … or way wrong?

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