Tag Archives: teenager

What Would 14-Year-Old You Say?

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Since becoming instructor of writing more than ten years ago, whether that is live at a conference or convention, or virtually, or through a book, has been to tell all of my students, regardless of their age, or experience, that they have stories.

 

That those stories are valuable and worth sharing.

 

When I was 14, I borrowed a VHS video camera from a neighbor friend of mine. I did everything with that camera that one might expect, making stupid short videos starring myself—the kind of thing that would be a low-view YouTube or TikTok video today. It didn’t take long to decide I needed to make a “real movie.”

 

One of my teachers in eighth grade happened to have a beautiful VHS editing system on campus. When I asked him if I could learn to use it, he showed me how. Now all I needed was a story or a script. I remembered some notes that I’d taken a year before, when I was home alone one night during a storm.

 

Yes: it was a dark and stormy night, just accept it.

 

Strange things were happening around the house: cats getting freaked out over things that weren’t there. Huge wind jangling tree branches and rattling wind chimes like bones. Strange, inexplicable noises. Being 13 and a fan of horror. movies and already having read most of Stephen King’s oeuvre up to that point, I naturally started thinking in terms of the supernatural and macabre. I wrote all these things down, and those notes and ideas coalesced into something shaped like a story: THE MOON DAEMON! (You can watch parts of it here.)

 

I asked two friends to be in my movie, and we improvised the film over the course of about three days, dragging the VHS section of the camera around on a skateboard and using a folding card table as our tripod. I edited it at school, and then got to show the final production to one of my classes during a Friday afternoon class. (I still have the original VHS tapes. Hell, I’ve even re-edited the movie once or twice since then.)

 

I tell you all of that to emphasize one crucial thing: If 14-year-old Me knew how much technology and access to viewers I currently possess in 2020, he would be furious at me for not having made a movie every single damn week.

 

“You mean to tell me you’re carrying a video camera in your pocket every where you go?”

 

“Yes, Tom. That is true.”

 

“You mean to tell me make a movie anytime you want to put it out for the entire world to see and it will not cost you any money at all?”

 

“Yes, Tom. That’s pretty much what I’m saying.”

 

14-year-old Tom looks at me quizzically, perhaps taking a drag of a Marlboro red cigarette, and says, “What the hell is wrong with you? ”

 

14-year-old Tom is right. What the hell am I doing? All this technology, all these people, and what have I chosen to do? Watch TV; reruns I’ve already seen a million time. Read lame stuff on the Internet. Make a ton of plans, but never follow through with them. 14-year-old Me has every reason to be pissed.

 

I don’t deny that 14 can suck, depending on your family and life circumstances. It can be challenging because you’re straddling adulthood and childhood. It’s also a time of wild exploration and dare-deviltry. Of absolutely not giving one solitary f*ck about much of anything if it doesn’t interest you. If you are an American teenager, you still have access to things right now that your parents couldn’t even conceive of when they were 14. But maybe you are in your 40s, or 50s, or 80s. What is stopping you? What’s your Moon Daemon?

 

It can be a true story about you and your relationship with your parents, or your neighborhood, or your country. It could be that terrible break-up story, or the beautiful story of how you met your spouse. It could be the tear-jerking story about your children, or a laugh-out-loud story about what happened when you got the flat tire on the way to get ice cream one night. Maybe it’s a horror story, maybe to superhero comic book, or maybe it’s a romantic web series starring you and your friends from high school. Maybe it’s a poem, or a song, or a one-panel comic strip that you post every day on Instagram.

 

Start now.

 

It’s not about money, and it’s not about Likes, and it’s not about Followers. Put your stuff out there, tell your truth—whatever it is—and people will find you. I will never, ever be one of these get-rich-quick, “How to make $1 million on Kindle!” type of writing teachers. (There’s nothing wrong with making $1 million on Kindle, but I can’t. If I knew how to do that, I would be doing it.) What I can teach you, and encourage you to do, is how to tell your stories.

 

Try multiple formats. I’ve tried most of them. Some come naturally, like novels. Others I have to work on, like comic books and screenplays. I like all of them in some way, shape, or form. Instead of consuming, take your stories out there. Have a sit down with 14-year-old You and explain to them why you are not doing that. This isn’t about being a published author, or a box office hit producer or actor in Hollywood. If that’s what happens, great. But that is not the measure of success. At least, it shouldn’t be. Trust me, I still struggle with those hopes and dreams and desires, too. I do not dismiss those goals. However, the only way to get there in my experience is to authentically tell those stories that burn deep inside you. Don’t think about the outcome, think about the process.

 

The Moon Daemon hasn’t exactly won any film festival awards, or landed me a Hollywood talent manager, or made any money whatsoever. But by God, we had an absolute blast. About two weeks before the pandemic really got underway here in Phoenix, I led a group of about 20  people in making an eight-minute short film based on a chapter of one of my recent novels. It was February, it was freezing cold by Phoenix standards; it was the one day we had rain in months. My wife and I were up and out of the house before dawn, driving across the city, to get set up before anybody else got there. I’ll never forget how cold my feet were, standing in puddles all day while my actors were nice and toasty inside my car as I filmed them.

 

It could have been miserable. It was exhausting, it cost me nearly a thousand bucks, but it got me into a film festival . . . and it was the most fun I’ve had in a while. Not only would I do it all over again, I’m going to do it all over again. We’re already in talks with some of the cast and crew to start a little production company so we can keep shooting films. Because we had a ball. The last time I had conversations like that, two different theater companies formed and ran for 16 years. That’s magic. You don’t dismiss that.

 

I have two children, and they run me ragged, especially during the pandemic. I have a part-time job. All kinds of other responsibilities to attend to. Just like you. But I love telling stories and I’m not going to let anything stop me. You make adjustments, sure. Maybe your life is such that you get one free hour a week. Great; use that hour. Protect that hour. That is your hour. One thing I can guarantee you: someone out there needs and wants your story. Maybe it’s 10 people, or ten thousand, maybe it’s 10 million. That number doesn’t matter. What matters is they need it.

 

You know right now about which stories touched you in the deepest part of your humanity. Probably it was a movie or a book, but maybe it was a comic book. Certainly we all have songs that touch us, and songs or nothing but poems set to music. Someone needs your story to have that impact on them.

 

So write songs, or scripts, or prose. Or just riff online; do a live stream on some topic close to you and share with the entire planet. There is absolutely no reason not to do that.

 

I don’t mean that you should be stubborn about your story. Absolutely learn to take criticism. Absolutely study your craft and practice it and get better and better and better. I have published nine novels with New York publishers and still consider myself an apprentice at this gig. But I’ve learned a lot, and I keep learning, and I hope to improve each time out. I also have started writing in new areas, like video games and comic books and television pilots; formats I am not schooled in, but that I enjoy learning about. I one-hundred-percent take comments and critiques on those formats, because I don’t yet know what I’m doing. So be open to that, but keep going.

 

Ask 14-year-old you, “What do you think I should be doing right now? Where am I falling short? How can I be doing things differently?”

 

I bet 14-year-old you will have some very pointed answers.

We All Have an Origin Story

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My wife and I were driving home from seeing a superhero movie one night and talking about it as normal people do after a movie. I believe it was a sequel; possibly Spider-Man 3 or something like that. I mentioned that I really tend to prefer the first films in a series, not just because they are any better necessarily, but because I really love origin stories.

“That makes sense,” Joy said. “Since that’s what you write.”

And I thought–but had the common sense not to say–“Oh, no no no, sweetie love. No no no, I write contemporary young adult fiction, not superhero stories.”

What I said was, “Huh?” (Which I say a lot.)

She answered, “Well, what is being a teenager if not your origin story?”

BAM! She was absolutely right. All young adult (YA) and middle-grade (MG) fiction is, essentially, origin stories. We may not see where these characters end up as adults, but we see who they are in the process of becoming, and that process, universal certainly to Western civilization over the past 100 years or so, but possibly the world throughout, is the story we’re telling.

I’m fairly sure I’ve changed a lot since I was a teenager. At least, I hope so! But boiled down, how different am I really? How have my core beliefs and attitudes changed since then? What matters to me, what I care about, who I am attracted to romantically and otherwise? I mean, cripes, my best friends from high school are my best friends today. A lot of them still live within driving distance.

Why YA?

I don’t know why exactly I am attracted to these origin stories; maybe it’s because only recently have I become as … alive as I was back then, and so revisiting that deep well of nostalgia is somehow cathartic. Maybe there’s an ethos in being a teenager that appeals to me. (Probably that’s it.) Or maybe it’s just that things of the Adult World bore me silly. Dance clubs and alcohol and mortgages and credit cards and keeping up with the Whomevers and watching reality TV…yawn. My family is about as middle class and nuclear as they come (few and far between these days, I know), yet we don’t strive for the things others in our demographic seem to.

Or maybe I just haven’t accepted that I’m forty-something goddamn years old yet. A distinct possibility. But the best part of being older is you (usually) have money to buy all the crap you couldn’t when you were 14, so that’s a plus.

Part of my attraction to YA too I think is, frankly, the brutality of it. Not that this necessarily goes away as people age, but most of us become at least somewhat socially aware as we get older and stop making assholes of ourselves. (Some, not all!) But kids don’t have those filters in place yet, I think, as a whole. Shit just comes out of their mouths before they can stop to think about the ramifications of it, and while sometimes that’s straight up funny, other times–a lot of times–it is devastating. Even … fatal, I am sorry to say. So there is always drama to be teased out and studied, like I did with Random, a book inspired by very true and very awful circumstances. Being a teen is far too often a real-life Hunger Games.

On the flip side, though–the good side, the great side–I think it’s the bigness of everything at that age that I keep wanting to write about. Everything is new when you hit junior high and high school. You’ve learned so much about the world and yet know so little. My dad once said something like, “Tom, I’m sixty-five years old, and am just now realizing that I don’t know shit.” Teenagers, happily for us writers, don’t labor under this problem, as they have the solutions for everything. I know I did. I probably still do, actually, which is why I write YA…?

This is one reason I get so bent out of shape when teens are dismissed. Come on, man, it was mostly teens and very young adults who saved the fucking planet in the 1940s. They know the score. They have the passion to get things done, and I for one say let ’em. It’s not like adults have a great track record with human rights, amen?

But Why Else?

Maybe, too, it’s my theatre background, which is dependent on dialogue to function. I feel like my teenage years were filled with nothing but dialogue. Phone calls and hanging out, all the time. All night, all day. We didn’t have money or much else, and we were lucky if someone had a car. Three bucks, a Super Big Gulp, and a pack of smokes, we were good to go. I know this is an ancient and largely romanticized picture to paint, but it’s true. I’d say, on average, I spent five afternoons and/or evenings with one or more of my friends, away from school. After school, at night, on the weekend, whatever, we were together. For about a year, maybe two, my buddy Damon would come pick me up in his old blue Chevy pick up at least once a week, and we’d drive to some random location, pop in some Skoal, and talk for two hours or more on whatever-the-fuck.

So talking, dialogue, is very much a part of our teen lives, and since dialogue is what I was trained in, so to speak, maybe it’s only natural that I gravitated to YA.

Or maybe it’s simply that the first full-length novel I really completed was written at age 19, about 19-year-olds. That’s outer limit for YA these days, yes, but certainly its topics, tone, and ideas were squarely in the YA genre. (This book later became Zero.)

This Is Why:

My latest book, Mercy Rule, is definitely a YA novel, but the thing about that genre and most of the books in it — particularly the realistic contemporary stuff — is that it speaks not just to teens, but to a large swath of adults who remember those years vividly but who made it out the other side. Mercy Rule is a tough book, I’m not gonna lie, and it’s definitely an origin story for several of its characters. But it’s also about the origin stories that never got to be told to completion. (You’ll understand when you read it.) And to me, the most important part of all this is that someone who needs to read it gets ahold of it and says, “Yeah, this guy gets me.” It’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever been paid with my novels. I need these readers to Stay Here and help get the rest of the world out of the goddamn dark ages.

Teenagers are superheros, if we let them. Superman was not born Superman; he was Clark Kent long before he put on the cape. He’s a hero not for his powers, but for the way his family raised him to care about others. He could have just as easily been found by Lex Luthor’s family. “Kansas farm boy makes good” isn’t much of an origin story, but it turned out one hell of a super man.

I hope I do the same.