Secret Lives of the American Teenager

After and during a Thanksgiving meal at my uncle's house, I was embroiled in discussion with a group of not-so-young teenagers. My cousin, now nineteen and a sophomore at Berkeley, had two of her childhood friends over. One was a year older, the other two years younger. They represented a perfect focus group for me. After giving them a thorough interview about the things they read as a young adult, scrolling through their iPod Nanos, and asking them about their obsessions, I got onto the topic of how they perceived their social status in high school. That somehow led to this gem:

"So when you did stop being shy?" I asked.
Sarah, the oldest one and seemingly very outgoing and probably the most comfortable with who she currently was, reminisced for me. "Like maybe sophomore year of high school."
"Oh yeah? Why?"
"I got my braces off." That answer, cliche because it's absolutely true, dissolved us all into laughter. It was the perfect response and her charming smile afterwards drove home the point.

For most of the evening, I'd been intently studying Ashley and her friends, watching them and more importantly, listening. What I realized is that I hadn't really captured the way real teenagers act/talk like very well in the Chloe book. I wrote teenagers as I've read them before -- it was a rendition based on a rendition. Even though I've been told that my dialogue represents female teens well, I noticed that I really did a piss poor job of capturing the little details that really highlight the way lines are spoken and a conversation is exchanged.

For example, the contrast between the hyper kinetic way one of the girls talked versus the slowly measured way my cousin chose her words and how that difference in energy changes the way you listen and react. And how talking really really fast tends to make a girl seem younger, even if her words are wise beyond her ears.

Plus I didn't put in enough physical cues, the sort that really capture a person. I stuck in some "beats" of course, but they were generic and not so much revealing as functional. The hardest thing I had to learn writing this book was working with dialogue. My first drafts read like screen plays and I found it an entirely new experience to have to vary the visual space of having people talk on a page. I kind of wish I had recorded parts of yesterday's conversation so I could practice recapping it in book fashion.

I've been trying to listen more to the world around me, in an attempt to become a more observant and better writer. It's difficult for me because my memory is terrible nowadays. I purchased a beautiful perfectly sized orange notebook a few weeks ago to carry with me, mainly to write down bits of conversation that I hear. It's not easy though, because people talk faster than I write. And I'm not in the habit of jotting things down quite yet. But I can work at it. For now, I'll just keep my eyes and ears open and find some more teenagers to study.

It's crazy to me how with it teenagers are. From re-meeting and interacting with my sixteen year old cousin this past fall, and exchanging weekly emails with her, I've realized that there really is no intelligence gap. There's an experience gap, a maturity gap (arguably), but there is no intelligence or worldliness gap at all. If anything, teenagers tend to have more stimulating conversations than the ones I'm typically engaged in with my peers, maybe because they (still) possess nimble curious minds and seem to have opinions about everything. Given a choice, I might very well prefer to hang out with the teenage crowd than the post-collegiate crowd. They seem to be more full of life, excitement, and possess this boundless optimism mixed with a wariness that's studied but not yet experienced. It's certainly a more invigorating combination than alcohol and banalness.