For books four and five, I’m writing a YA heroine. But do I know how? How do I write a teenager who thinks, speaks and acts her age?
Jo, my protagonist for the first three books, falls into the YA camp; but she’s nineteen, going on thirty-five. When we meet her, she has layers of complex PTSD and a disturbing ability to see the future. She’s a bad-ass fighter who’s already killed an unknown number of assailants. All that kind of takes her out of the YA pool.
But four and five center on Yari Tamm. She’s fifteen. In classic YA-mode, she is without parents or blood-family, fending for herself in the capitol that is my City of Vipers. Smart and determined, she has a mission; to find her father after the fall of the Empire. She also has a magical talent that lifts her out of the ordinary. It’s an advantage and a liability that gets her into trouble.
She is my sole point-of-view character. And the question is, can I write a teenager? Can I write a child with a dark and complex backstory that changes her outlook, but who remains a child?
Base Camp
There is a common problem with adults writing YA fiction, the complaint that teenage characters act like adults. It’s enough to take readers out of the story, or show the author’s age.
How much does it matter? Think of all the unrealistic tropes in romances, adventure, crime. People read them because they want to buy in to the story-world, not because they crave a faithful rendering of reality. You don’t watch Mission: Impossible just to mutter “well that wouldn’t happen.”
So where do we pitch YA protagonists?
Growing Pains
Children and teenagers do not all mature at the same rate. Exactly what do we expect of a child character when it comes to ‘acting their age?’ By upbringing, circumstance and education, some children are genuinely more mature than others. A street-child in Sao Paulo will have a dramatically different outlook to a home-educated child in Portland. Money and privilege may grant vastly different opportunities to a wealthy heiress than to the child of an addict in an inner city slum. Their life experiences will be incomparable. But which will ‘act their age’ the most?
Young carers with responsibility for siblings or their own parents have a markedly more mature outlook than many of their peers. Disability, physical and mental health issues among family members affects young carers in many different ways. An early, enforced ‘growing up’ is common.
Character and Disposition
Patience is a virtue. Judgement is a skill. Children supposedly have neither.
Children are supposed to be impulsive, tactless, needy, lacking in self-restraint. But early life experiences in a adult world might teach a child to hunker down, stay quiet, plan ahead. Those who suffer domestic abuse, bullying or poverty develop coping mechanisms way beyond their years; sometimes better than adults with years more lived experience than theirs.
Children can be insightful, insatiably curious, constantly demanding to know ‘why’ about everything; less likely to accept the status quo or flimsy reasons why they aren’t allowed to act or behave as they want.
The Inner and Outer Mask
A child placed in difficult surroundings quickly learns self-preservation. They become suspicious of strangers. They adopt different behaviours to placate demanding adults. Masking is often a more effective remedy than rebellion.
Work with children and teenagers, and you soon learn their public face can be very different from their presentation to their peer group. And their peers may see a different self-portrayal than their inner self.
Some may be in denial of that inner self. Identity is a strange and fragile thing.
Nature and Nurture
Here’s the age-old debate; what shapes our character, the nature of our genetics heritage, or the nurture of our surroundings; family, education, friends.
It takes time for children to develop personalities of their own. Through their upbringing, they may mimic the behaviour of one or both parents, grandparents or other relatives. They will make role-models of other influential adults.
Surprisingly or not, adopted children frequently display traits from their birth parents that have no basis in their adopted family. It seems nurture can only penetrate so far.
Rebels without a clue
What are teenagers renowned for? Rebellion. Those teenage years arrive with a rush of new ideas, growing self-awareness, and hormones. Suddenly, there’s a Jekyl and Hyde personality change. Often for no good reason, other than the need to strike out on their own, to reject their surroundings and received wisdom.
Suddenly, they’re not a child anymore. It looks like there’s a cuckoo in the nest. Sometimes it lasts a week, a day, or an hour, then we’re back to a lost child begging for cookies and ice cream.
The Great pretenders
A cynic might say we’re all perpetual children who never grow up and just pretend to be adults. I write adult characters who frequently behave like children because of past traumas.
So where does that leave me in writing teenage characters?
Practical effects
Somewhere in the craft box, there’s a character-building list that includes five key aspects:
- Voice
- Perspective
- World-building
- Relationships
- Responsibility
I could use this for any character, not just young adults, but this gives me particular focus.
Voice
In a ‘normal’ range of development, a teenager stops sounding like a child, but also doesn’t sound like a middle-aged novelist, college professor or philosophy major.
They should have different registers depending on who they speak to; strangers, peers, friends, family, authority figures. Their vocabulary might change with each register.
Perspective
Does our teenage character know who they are yet? Are they still figuring it out? Many adults are, decades beyond childhood. Do they know where they fit? Their place in the world? Do they accept or reject authority? The future society maps out for them? Do they accept or defy the expectations placed on them? Are they fixed in their opinions or working things through?
More importantly, are they at ease with themselves? Do they like the person they see in the mirror? Do they believe other people like them?
World-building
What expectations and roles does the world place on someone their age? Career or early marriage? Stay at home, or go explore the world? Are they constrained or elevated by class, wealth, gender, orientation, religion?
Relationships
Teen relationships can be intense fires that burn themselves out, be it friendship or romance. The more intense the relationship, the bigger the drama when it hits bumps along the way. And as for break-ups, these become operatic tragedies.
Teens can also struggle to form relationships after the simple, heady, uncomplicated days of childhood. Now they have cliques and peer-groups to navigate. A big part of teen life is longing for the people and connections you can’t have.
Responsibility
What responsibility is placed on them? Too much? Too little? Fairly or unfairly?
Consistency
Young adults have layers; strengths, flaws, dreams, fears. They aren’t always consistent; sometimes up, sometimes down. More emotionally changeable than the weather, you sometimes get all four seasons in one day, sometimes multiple times a day. But there is a core truth to who they are; it will always come back to this core.
Yari’s Truth
What about my teen-age protagonist?
She’s driven, determined; on a mission, with mono-focused, teenage purpose. Her talent lets her see the truth and call out lies. She will also speak the truth, intentionally or not.
She has a rebellious streak and rejects authority. She’s prepared to skewer the adults who won’t take responsibility. But she also feels helpless in the greater machine of state. She may doubt in her own abilities, but doesn’t stop.
But does she think, sound, act like a teenager? In a society that doesn’t have the concept of a teenager? Where she’s expected to go from child to adult without that transitional stage?
Back to the draft…