my cart |

(To view entire post, click on the "Read more" link under each post)

Mon, 01/12/2009

Writing for Young People, by Sasha Watson:

(View entire post here)

As the release date of my first novel for teens approached last fall, what I looked forward to the most was meeting teenagers. I couldn’t wait to talk with them and hear their responses, not only to my book, but also to their lives.

Mainstream media has a strange relationship with teenagers, obsessing and freaking out over them in equal measure. If you believe what you read in magazines, you might well come to the conclusion that your average teenager is a prescription drug-addicted sexual deviant who’s never read a book in his/her life and who communicates exclusively via eccentrically spelled text messages.

Well, I’ve never been one to heed warnings about “kids these days”. After all, haven’t people been saying this kind of thing for as long as teenagers have been around? But, as I started writing for young people, I found myself a little more susceptible to the word on the street about teens and books. Before Vidalia in Paris came out, I was told that teenagers read fewer books, play more video games, care less about reading than “we” did as kids. I also heard that boys barely read at all, aren’t interested in writing, and definitely won’t care about a female character.

With all these rumors and statistics floating around, I started to think that maybe things really had changed for the worse since I was a teenager and that maybe that change would be evident in the classrooms I was about to start visiting.

Once I started visiting classes, though, I saw something very different than what I’d been warned about.

During one of my first school visits in Alpine, Texas, I noticed a boy dressed in shin guards and shoulder pads, ready for a football game that would take place later that day. He sat at a table in the library, his head bent over a copy of The Hunger Games. This was before I’d read that wonderful book and I stopped and asked him how it was. “It’s so good!” he told me. At the end of my presentation, he approached me to ask about my book and how long it had taken me to write it, nodding seriously as I told him. Well, that boy likes to read, and there were lots of others like him.

Just before Thanksgiving, I helped to lead a workshop for a class of pregnant and parenting teenagers in Compton. The girls were asked to write a letter of thanks to someone in their lives. Toward the end of the session, a tough-talking girl with a high ponytail, heavy eye shadow, and a six-month belly volunteered to read aloud. As she read a letter thanking her best friend for standing by her when others hadn’t, she choked up and then started to cry. She had everyone in tears as she finished reading. The simple power of writing as a means of articulating our own experience was alive and well in that room.

And just this week, at a small girls’ school in Providence, Rhode Island, I sat with classes of seventh-graders, who listened, rapt, as I read to them from my book, and then, when I led them in a writing exercise, bent over their notebooks and wrote furiously. When I asked who wanted to read their work aloud, hands shot up around the room. These girls were anything but lackadaisical about reading and writing.

Whatever the statistics, whatever the sales numbers and the school scores, whatever the new technology, my experience tells me that there are passionate readers and writers growing up all around us, and that young people, wherever and whoever they are, are just as moved by literature as I was at their age.