TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Youthful writing: precocious or premature?

By Robert Nagle

Quick: when you are a teenager, how fantastically awesome was your writing?

Imogene Russell Williams cautions young writers who wish to get started too early:

In your early teens, you’re not necessarily aware of how derivative your literary outpourings are, and the extent to which your reading shapes your writing; and you may not yet be sufficiently master of your own voice to take on high-falutin’ genres like fantasy and romance. (I speak from experience. At 13, I was passionately devoted to a high-fantasy epic featuring Dallien the dark prince, a charger called Bayard whom I’d pinched from Prince Caspian without realising it, and a large, coniferous forest – Mirkwood after the emigration of the spiders.)

(BTW, despite the boring name, the Guardian’s Book Blog  is easily one of the best group litblogs on the Internet).

Williams mentions several recent teen works and even a work written by a 9 year old. She cites Diary of Anne Frank as the model, although that case was clearly extraordinary . (See also: Zlata Filipovic’s  excellent Zlata’s Diary).

Now with printing/publishing costs becoming  more affordable, lots of young kids have self-published interesting things as part of school projects. We can mock, but I would have loved to have a published book  to keep in my scrapbook  of memories. Instead I spent my creative efforts writing  original Dungeon and Dragons adventure   modules. 

One obvious source of youthful creativity is blogging/journaling, but practically speaking, U.S. schools can’t sanction them or use them for class unless blogging sites are COPA-compliant. (I’ve been told that content filters on some school networks block blogging networks altogether). I suspect school districts subscribe to  walled-off COPA-compliant  student communities for students to share their writings.  That shouldn’t discourage young people from journaling in the wild, but they have to do it on their own time. Schools and teachers can prep students for potential problems of online writing and help them to  take reasonable precautions. But only the teen can take the important next step of actually  starting an online journal.  

It takes a few decades for a young person’s writing skills to develop. That’s not a reason for a student to put off writing.  Far from it.  Writing improves  with  practice. Even bad writing can record thoughts and feelings  of a time period.  (And if you don’t record them, these thoughts are gone forever).  Perhaps people’s verbal skills before 20 aren’t optimal, but they are more than adequate to present facts and daily events. Sometimes in fact, inner city youth may have lots to write about but little motivation.  (Projects like the Freedom Writers’ diary have tried to rectify this by encouraging students to write down their anxieties).

Short story writer Jack Matthews, talking about a 19th century diary written by a 16 year old, mentions how a dull style cannot diminish the events described:

…even the most prosaic of entries is possessed of the simply majesty of recorded fact. When 16-year old Charles Allen Smith from Pomeroy, Ohio, signed on the Kate Timmons as a deck hand in 1885, he was ill prepared to rhapsodize over the “beauteous sights afforded by Nature,” as the high style of the times required. Instead, when confronted by the ineffable, as on his first visit to New Orleans (on December 18, with the weather warm and clear), he states simply:  “The City is a fine one, it beats all my expectation. I cannot described it. I spent almost a day in the City, came to the boat tired slept all night.”

Probably most readers would prefer a style not quite so laconic, we wish Charley Smith (he had to be “Charley”) had given a shot at describing the city, and it might be interesting to have more details about what he did that day and maybe know why he was tired. Sustained excitement inspired by the exotic surroundings and constant walking could tire out anybody, even a sixteen-year old boy; but it would nevertheless be good to know exactly what happened to Charley – what he saw and what he did and, maybe, what was done to him that day. Evidently nothing too dramatic, or it probably would have gotten into his diary. Unless it was too dramatic, in the sense of too much; in which case, Charley – like a good Victorian youth – would have kept quiet about the whole business and not written a word. After all, his mother and father might be reading these entries. Or his sisters. Or future wife and children. (from Booking in the Heartland).

Even teenage overwriting can be endearing. Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse  and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein both strike me as more interesting for plot than style or language – at times, the style  and  emotional turbulence in both works strike me as insufferable – but sometimes the unintentional pomposity of their writing is consistent with the story itself.

Part of the fun of being a young literary type comes from  not knowing or caring whether famous writer X has already tried Y and trying it  anyway.   You never really can know for sure until you’ve  tried. And if later you learn  that someone else already wrote   about wacky bureaucracies (Kafka), moral indifference (Camus) or crazy Southerners (O’Connor, Faulkner, take your pick), chances are that your treatment of the subject is still going to be unique.  Even a badly written version of Romeo & Juliet can be a way for a young writer   to appreciate how a more accomplished writer handles the same subject.

Finally, we should fault the Disney/MTV empire for pitching youthful crap to youth. Naturally, people  prefer works of their own generation.  That’s fine. But isn’t it  a little insulting to think that young people can only enjoy YA fiction or books having pictures of teens on the cover?  Must every single thing pitched to the under 20 crowd contain a tie-in to some multimillion dollar TV show/hit album/comic-turned-movie? High School Musical this, Star Wars that … who cares!  What’s so bad about  going to the library and grabbing a random book off the shelf? The less known about it, the better.  (At the same time, the easy availability of wikipedia and online book lists makes it easier for discriminating readers to discover the classics).  Teenagers sometimes are in a better position to appreciate works without preconceived idea. Conversely, they are more likely to be impressed by works which only seem radical (Ayn Rand comes to mind) without recognizing true radicalism in art or thought.  Literature classes don’t necessarily spoil a person’s appreciation of literature.  But it’s tempting for a college student to start valuing  a book mainly   for  its ideas and not   for its characters or lyricism.  Sometimes reading with your heart can be more valuable than reading with your mind.   That’s something  teenage readers  do extraordinarily well.

Related: Nick Kristof’s discussion of the best children’s books (2800+ comments!)  and What Vanessa Reads (a literary review blog by a 16 year old Florida teen). Also, an amazing SXSW mp3 of a panel  about teenagers growing up online. (read a description of the panel).