Teens Can Be Writers, Too
Recently, I was looking up information for a school paper and stumbled on a Yahoo! Questions post that really annoyed me. A sixteen year old girl said she was writing a book and wanted to know how many other teens were. Two answers caught my attention, whose writers I will not name: 1. I'd say about half the teens in the U.S. are writing a novel, many of them vampire stories influenced by the Twilight books. Otherwise they are soppy romantic tales. I would imagine, based on the email I get, that 100% of those writing believe that their first drafts are worthy to be published by a major hour next week. If you do just a tiny bit of research, you will find that this is not going to happen. Publishing is a brutal business that has time only for the rare, rare few. 2. Far too many teenagers are writing books. Teens would be much better served by *reading* a lot more literature than by making amateurish attempts at becoming novelists. The vast majority of them don'...