People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I like writing about teenagers because it's a time of great change and conflict. Up to then, you accept what your parents tell you.
I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.
I write with teenagers in mind.
These days young kids don't have any place to form an epic adventure. It's more often in front of the TV screen or a laptop. That's very hard on them. They're being taught daily unsocial skills. Facebook is an unsocial skill. It's so sad.
I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.
Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.
The real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.' And then there are the letters from adults who say, 'This is such a good book; why did you write it for teens?'
I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.