YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE IS LIT

The best way to get started writing your young adult character is to stretch your memory way back to your own childhood. If you can get yourself thinking like you did when you were a teenager, it will help you write your character all the more realistically. Here are some tips to help you out:

​

• Practice "deep thinking": Eyerly and Irwin recommend starting with an early memory you have and recalling the essence of the experience. You can use the feeling or emotion you remember from that memory to help you write your character into a scene. Did you feel scared your first day at a new school? Remember how happy you were when you got the perfect birthday gift? Use those emotions you had when your were a child or teenager and apply them to your character for realistic emotions.

• Rita Williams-Garcia, author of One Crazy Summer, says, "the newspapers are filled with the senseless or miraculous things that everyday people do and say. A good exercise would be to take an article and imagine who that person was in childhood or through their teen years. Then add pivotal events to their back story." Before you write your character, it can be helpful to practice on other people first, like Williams-Garcia says. Find an adult in the newspaper or a magazine and write a childhood for them. Come up with a backstory and write a scene with them as they were when they were younger. 

• Recall your attitude to reading when you were a teenager: The Guardian article you read contains a quote from author Benjamin Zephaniah, who says, "When I start thinking about writing a novel I simply go back to my youth and remember how I spoke. More importantly I remember my attitude to reading. I hated it. So then I create the kind of stories, and use the kind of language that would have engaged me." What did you like to read when you were younger? What made you laugh? What made you want to stop reading a book? What caught your attention? What bored you? Once you think about these, apply them to your own novel and characters. 

• Realize you might not be as different from children and teenagers as you think: In the C.S. Lewis essay, he brings up the idea that we need to "meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals." Lewis recalls an instance where he stated loudly at a hotel that he hated prunes, and that a six-year-old responded in agreement. "Sympathy was instantaneous," Lewis says, "Neither of us thought it was funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny." You don't need to think of children as some mystical creatures with whom you have nothing common; there are commonalities, you just have to find them, even if it's as little as agreeing that prunes are gross.