I feel more pressure when I'm writing for teens. I'm very aware that my audience is impressionable. Therefore, I'm far more careful about what I say and the language I use.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I know I'm writing better now than I ever did for adults because I'm writing for an audience who know that they don't know everything.
I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.
My audience has really become a very diverse group of people. It's not just 15-year-old girls. That's kind of what allows me to write from all the different places I want to write from.
I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.
I don't feel real confident expressing myself except when I'm writing. I feel kind of scatterbrained. I can see everything from both sides and that makes it hard to reach conclusions. Writing enables me to clarify things.
Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially.
I write with teenagers in mind.
I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.
Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions.