My Experiences Writing and Publishing as a Teen
For me, the biggest difference between writing as a teen and as an adult is being able to write how teenagers think, what it’s like to be in school, because you’re not looking at it through rose-tinted glasses, looking back on it with nostalgia; you don’t have to remember what it was like, you’re still there. Even just after having been out of school for a few years, I read my work and think the choices of my characters are somewhat idiotic. But I wrote it when I was their age. When it seemed reasonable. And I’m aware that I have to hold on to that as I get older if I want to keep writing about teenage characters.
I can see the differences in my writing from when I was teenager, both in that my writing ability has improved, and that my ability to plan and plot has improved. I’ve also moved past the fear that people are only telling me my writing is good because I’m a kid and they want to be encouraging.
I’ve been writing since I was twelve. I started with fanfiction of whatever was my favourite book, movie, or video game at the time. Eventually, I started introducing my own characters into these worlds and stories, and then I moved on to creating my own world for my characters to live in. I quickly realised that I wanted to be a writer, to publish books, to share my stories.
The only reason I was able to publish at my age was because of my parents. They saw that I had a passion for writing and were willing to indulge me for at least one book, to pay to have it self-published so that I could have that achievement under my belt. It was their idea that I would write more as a hobby, a side career, but would do something else as a main job. Then my mum, whose favourite author is Tom Clancy, read my young adult fantasy book, and said it was good. Amazing. Better than she had been expecting.
It was a surreal experience. Not in the way that I didn’t believe I could have succeeded in publishing a book at my age, but for the opposite. I knew it was something I wanted to achieve, and so when boxes of books arrived at my house, I wasn’t shocked or disbelieving, but comfortable. It felt like this was exactly the direction my life was supposed to take, and I had reached a milestone that I always knew was coming, the same way we always know what age we are turning on our next birthday.
The hardest thing about publishing as a teenager was that I couldn’t work full time. I was trying to finish my manuscript to submit while in the last years of high school. I never had time to work on it because I either had school work to do, or I was too stressed out to have any good ideas.
However, when it wasn’t so stressful, school was the source of my inspiration. I would sit in class and daydream about what my characters running across the rooftops of the other buildings and what adventures they might be off on; what evil they could be fighting while everyone else in the school was none the wiser.
I also came up with ideas as a result of being bullied. I would imagine what it would be like to be the characters in my favourite books; to have problems that didn’t revolve around who I was going to sit with at lunch, and if I could take the constant jibes from a certain girl, always delivered under her breath so no one else would hear. What if I could be Valkyrie in Skulduggery Pleasant, going on grand adventures and saving the world? What would I have to save the world from? Who would my villain be? Certainly, someone I would stand up to for taunting me.
Because of these thoughts I decided that I wanted my main characters to be from different walks of life – at least school life. I wanted to make a scenario where it wasn’t just the quirky kid that gets bullied who goes on a magical adventure, because as much as I wanted to escape some of the people I went to school with, I couldn’t. I wanted to bring the social environment of school into a different situation, and try to experiment with how this would make the characters interact.
I wanted the main characters to feel like real people in the way that they have a history with each other, they have reasons to not get along, to not trust each other, to be wary of each other, and yet are in situations where they have to work together.
I hope that I have done a decent job of portraying these dynamics, of making characters that feel authentic to my audience, and have given them characters and situations that they can relate to in some way. And as much as my writing has improved since I started, I hope that the essence of what it is like to be a teenager, and the escapism that fuelled my beginnings, is an element that my work never loses.
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Lauren Trickey is an author living in Sydney, Australia. She was inspired to write her first novel, “Jack of all Trades,” at the age of 13 and published it at age 20. When she is not writing, she loves to dance and listen to music.
When five girls suddenly find themselves immersed in near-death experiences, they wake up in a hospital, where they are greeted by a mysterious woman, Shadow. She confronts them with a truth: magic is real. It exists in another world, a different dimension. On a planet where magic thrives, where it is a part of daily life, where Elves, Vampires, and Fairies live side by side.
Shadow leads them from their ordinary lives into a strange world where they begin training to help her stop a powerful witch planning to terrorize Earth. But why does Shadow want to teach them? How can they help her stop a powerful Witch? And what about her assistant, Mercury? Neither of them seems trustworthy, but what other choice do they have. Shadow is their only contact with this other world, so they have no choice but to trust her. Or never see the world that is supposed to be their home. In this fantasy tale for teens, seemingly normal girls discover magic and adventure in an alternate reality where Earth is home to magical creatures.
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