On new technology, writing for teenagers and the death of the novel (obviously)

I think young people are perfectly placed to write about the experience of being a young person – even if their characters have lives far removed from their own, they can relate to that search for identity and sense of purpose, to negotiating independence from your family and relationships with friends. I think the core aspect of all novels, the part that makes the reader care enough to cry about made-up people, is the creation of characters with whom you can empathise. If the writer can’t empathise with the character, the reader won’t be able to either. Even though older people may ramble ad nauseam about how young people need Life Experience in order to write (what Life Experience actually entails, I continue to have no idea – are you not Experiencing Life prior to age eighteen?), I think the ability to write well comes down far more to your ability to observe, empathise, and read and write a whole lot. Being young and writing for young people puts you at an advantage because you are experiencing what your characters are experiencing right at this very moment. 

From my guest post for the Queensland Writers Centre blog! So thrilled to be teaching the Young Writers Boot Camp this week at QWC, so I wrote a piece for their blog about writing for Young Adults and being a young writer.

'Realistic' YA vs the reality of young adulthood

Remember: when they say that a book is 'realistic' young adult fiction they mean 'an absurd interpretation of our reality wherein people actually have fulfilling relationships/life experiences and don't spend their entire teenage years profoundly bored and wondering if life ever gets any better'.

If I wrote a YA novel that reflected my actual experience of young adulthood, it would be three hundred pages of naps and tomato-and-cheese toasties and waiting for life to begin, which it never, ever does, it turns out.

Fiction is lies. Never forget that. Your life will never contain a satisfying narrative, events are random, other people behave in the most bizarre of ways for no reason whatsoever. The centres of six billion different universes, all of them mad.

If you remember that stories are stories and stop expecting anything of your own life, you won't feel quite as cheated when you discover that the mediocrity never ends, and a new world is never unlocked. There is no coming-of-age, levelling-up procedure.

The amorphous blob that is real life will never shape itself into something more pleasing to the eye, and the power of stories/music/every creative product to perfectly crystallise emotions inside three minutes/two hours/an afternoon will never really be matched. Everything is formless till you're looking at it in retrospect, and you then ascribe to the events their meaning.

What's age got to do with writing?

Being a good writer has nothing to do with your age, explains author Steph Bowe. She highlights the benefits (and pitfalls) of being a young writer and explains what ingredients make up a great piece of young adult writing.

Here's an interview with me on ABC Splash! Hopefully it inspires you to write! If you're not already writing! Which you should be! I think this is my favourite line: To get dialogue right for her characters, Steph does a lot of eavesdropping on public transport and on busy streets, which she admits, with a laugh, "is mildly creepy".

Also, remember this: "Just because you're a younger person writing, it doesn't mean that your work is automatically rubbish. Anyone's first novel is obviously not going to be as good as their second novel or third novel. People grow as they write and change, and I don't think you can ever really reach a point, reach an age, reach a level of writing, where you can publish your first book and have it be this flawless masterpiece."

SLQ's 2014 Young Writers Award!

The State Library of Queensland has so many awesome events/awards/other cool things, and the Young Writers Award is one of these things! So, if you:

• are 18 to 25
• live in Queensland
• fancy writing a short story (2,500 words or less)

you really ought to enter. Top prize is two thousand dollars. Think how many books you could buy with that money! Plus other cool things, like a Brisbane Writers Festival seminar and a youth membership to Queensland Writers Centre (I'm a member of QWC too, and I am not a joiner. They are pretty cool). Entries close Friday July 18.

How to tell if you're in a Steph Bowe novel

1. Your parents are proper crazy.
2. Your mother especially so. She might coerce you into robbing banks with her, or disappear to Tonga (maybe Fiji). She's fun, though.
3. Your father is a total enabler. And just generally a terrible parent.
4. You are academically intelligent without really having to try but spend little time at school or studying. Interesting, that. It's like, the only parts of your life that really exist involve you somehow developing emotionally or the narrative of your life being progressed. Hmm.
5. Frequently you lose entire months and wake up only on the day of a significant plot point. I mean, life event.
6. You are cripplingly shy, but it's endearing.
7. Your best friend is both better looking than you are and more outgoing. They seek to help you on your path. They frequently show up at your house with fish and/or chips.
8. You live in a suburb that is vaguely near Melbourne or vaguely on the Gold Coast but doesn't have a name, because Steph doesn't want to seem like she's being defamatory towards anywhere in particular.
9. You steal things - either at the behest of your mother (e.g. cars, money from banks) or because you are endearingly mad (e.g. garden gnomes, lobsters from Chinese restaurants).
10. You know a disproportionate number of blonde people, most especially tall blonde people.
11. You know a disproportionate number of dead people, most especially dead people related to you.
12. You are either an only child or the eldest of two. Your younger sibling is slightly odd, but no odder than you are.
13. You are very introspective. You are really sad, a lot. It's a problem. Then you meet someone even sadder than you. Just a lot of sad folk, generally.
14. You are an obsessive romantic but also socially inept, and this is a disaster, at least until you are saved from drowning by a total babe. That's a disaster, too.
15. Conveniently, an attractive person shows up in your life who understands you, but who you communicate poorly with, hiding the fact that you are dying and/or a bank robber.
16. People are pretty nice to you, other than your parents, who misunderstand you terribly.
17. You are always eating something. Chips, yum cha, two-minute noodles. Just a lot of food generally.
18. You have a lot of flashbacks. It's a problem. They often have some sort of symmetry with your current life. Your life has a clear theme.
19. You find yourself in bodies of water a lot. Often during dream sequences. Always going for a swim.
20. You have a pretty name. Maybe your actual surname is Pretty.
21. You are obsessed with untranslatable words, strange ways to die and/or something suitable arty, you poor tortured little soul.
22. If you go out at night you almost always commit a crime. Or if you go out during the day. You're a criminal, but a nice criminal.
23. You never need to worry about money. Probably because you steal a great deal of it.
24. You never get any older than eighteen. I don't know whether that's a problem or not. I wouldn't enjoy that, I don't think.
25. You cannot leave your realm. No country except Australia really exists. If you wander too far from the main setting, details gradually disappear: strangers lack faces, the buildings don't have signs, there is only more of the same where things should change. Eventually you are enveloped in darkness. Don't go that far. It will swallow you whole. Don't think about the fact that you're not real. Don't think at all. Your reality is a very fragile one. Don't pull at the seams. Forget, forget. Be eighteen and melodramatic for the rest of your eternity. You are safe. Unless Steph decides your death would be good for the plot.