There are days when I sit down to write a blog post and I know exactly what I want to write about and, indeed, exactly what I want to write. Then there are days when I sit staring at a blank screen with a blank mind and have no clue how to even start.
Today is one of those second types of days. There’s nothing I need to write about. A few things I’d like to write about. But nothing that really leaps out at me. So sometimes you just have to start writing and see which path your ever-elusive muse leads you down.
For example, there’s a post on the StoriesOnline forums that’s been hanging around for about a month, which crept back to the top of the feed this week when some people replied to it about “Coming of Age” stories. The Paul Robertson Saga is very much a “Coming of Age” tale, so maybe a response to that post in a bit more detail than the forum allows might be something to tackle. Right now, as I start to write, I have nothing planned. No particular insight I feel the need to impart. So I’m just going to write and see where this post takes me.
The OP in the thread says…
However, I almost always give up on the longer stories around here because they get too over the top with the conscience of the teens actions. It gets too polite and thoughtful, it eliminates the whole trial and error thing of being a teenager.
I could go on regarding many stories like this, they have great ideas but they feel so out of touch of how real teenagers act, EVEN the most polite ones.
So, I guess what I want to discuss here is, “Does this apply to Paul?” Is he too polite? Does he seem out of touch with “real” teenagers?
Reading through the thread, the overarching theme seems to be that middle-aged authors find it difficult to write teenage characters because they’ve forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. It’s not just the language they use when speaking that people see as unrealistic; it’s the attitudes and even the skills they have.
“No teenager speaks like this; he sounds like he’s in his forties” is a valid criticism. But if you wrote the dialogue in the way that teenagers actually speak, it would be rightly criticised as bad dialogue because the reader would struggle to understand it. You can get away with the odd “Erm…” or “Well, it, like, so…” but fill all your characters’ mouths with it for a whole book, and it would very quickly become annoying and unreadable.
I have a character who first appeared in “Eternally & Evermore” whose “teenage speak” I exaggerated to make her stand out from the adults in the story. She’s making a reappearance in “A Healing Love” and still speaks noticeably differently from Paul and his peers despite the age difference being about five years or so. It’s a deliberate choice to make her stand out, and she’s a lot of fun to write. But she’s also exhausting to write and to read back. There’s simply no way you could fill a whole book with people speaking like that.
The same applies to slang. Actually, slang is worse because it changes so quickly. Writing a book in 2024 that’s set in 2014? Any idea what words the kids were using ten years ago to describe something they like? Or dislike?
No, me neither. And trust me on this, the internet is not all that helpful in this regard either.
The same goes for skills. How many teenagers are fabulous cooks? Not many. Some will be, and if you’ve got a character who is a good (not great) cook and, crucially, can explain why they are in the story’s context, that one thing. But if all your teenage cast are whipping up culinary delights all the time, that’s unrealistic.
The same goes for sex. How many teenage boys are good at sex? Hell, how many teenage boys don’t come in their kegs when a pretty girl even looks at them the wrong way? (Or the right way.)
But if you are writing an erotic Coming of Age story, then having your main character be a bumbling, sexually incompetent nerd, the like of which we saw in the wonderful The Inbetweeners, wouldn’t make for a great story. It was hilarious to see Will attempting to have sex with Charlotte, but it wasn’t the least bit “sexy”.
Yes, teenagers are dumb and incompetent and make one mistake after the other. But unless you’re writing a comedy, no one wants to read about a character like that. One respondent in the thread on SOL even comments that he gets more comments from readers asking how his character can be so dumb after he’s done something dumb that a teenager might do, than he does after his teenager pulls off some middle-age wonder skill that he really shouldn’t be capable of.
Teenagers are a breed unto themselves, and writing teenagers is to walk a fine line between realism that’s either unreadable or just not enjoyable to read and making your character talk and behave in a way that is beyond their years.
Which brings me back to Paul.
The first thing to remember here is that Paul is narrating this story from his memories in future. 2048, to be exact. And the story he’s telling you starts in 2010. That’s 38 years earlier. Yes, the narration seems to be in “the present”, but the truth is Paul isn’t a reliable narrator. He’s not exactly unreliable in the strict literary sense, but he’s certainly offering you his version of events, and doing so from the distant future. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the middle-aged narrator is going to be economical with his interpretation of what happened, what was said and how it was said?
That said, Paul does narrate some of the dumb things he does. He questions his choices, but, remember, he’s doing so of the position of an old man describing his younger self. He knows, for example, that getting in his car angry and drunk and driving away was a dumb thing to do, and he doesn’t shy away from that. But he also doesn’t think he flashes his cash around when it’s clear from what some of his friends say, that he does.
The big one here though is Paul’s skills in the bedroom. In A Tortured Soul, he depicts himself as something of a sex god. But is he? Could he be? After all, at this point, he’s only nineteen at the start of the book and twenty by the end. Could he really be that good at sex?
Well, you need to remember that by this point he’s had a lot of experience. He travelled around America sleeping with women in every town he visited. Or, at least, he tells us he did. The only actual evidence is his dairy, since Paul chooses to skip over the whole trip in his narration. So I think it is believable that Paul’s sex skills are going to be a cut above his university peers—which ultimately is all that matters when it comes to his campus reputation.
As I said, I think writing teenage characters is a delicate balance. You want them to be believable as teenagers, but you also need them to be interesting and not act the way typical teenagers act because, frankly, it would be annoying and not that interesting. And with Paul, I’d like to think that I’ve pulled it off.
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This post was originally published on my Ream Stories page on 25/10 and on my website the next day.