Notes from the back of a school hall

I read to a hall full of teenagers this week, which is the most honest audience on earth and the most terrifying, and I came away with a notebook full of things I had half forgotten. Here they are, roughly in the order the afternoon handed them to me.

A room of teenagers is not quiet and not loud. It is watchful. They arrive having already decided, collectively and without a word, whether this is going to be worth their attention, and you have about ninety seconds to change the verdict. I have given talks to adults who were far ruder and far less present.

The funny line lands twice. Once when you say it, and once, three seconds later, when the one person who really got it laughs too loud and then goes scarlet. That second laugh is the one I write for.

Nobody wants to ask the first question. The silence after "any questions" is a physical thing, a held breath, everyone waiting for someone braver. And then a hand goes up, always at the back, always about the thing you thought you had hidden most carefully, and the whole room exhales, because now it is allowed.

The questions are never the ones adults ask. Adults ask where you get your ideas. Teenagers ask whether the sad character was based on a real person, and how long it takes, and whether you cried when you wrote the ending, and, once, memorably, whether writing books makes you feel less alone or more. I did not have a good answer to the last one. I still do not.

They can tell instantly when you are being careful with them, and they hate it. The moment I stopped softening the hard parts and just told them how it actually goes, the whole temperature of the room changed. They do not want the protected version. They get the protected version all day. They want one adult in the building willing to say the true thing plainly.

Someone always stays behind. When the hall empties there is nearly always one person who lingers by the door, pretending to read a poster, working up to saying something small and enormous. I have learned to be slow packing up my bag. The bag does not need packing that slowly. The lingering is the whole reason I go.

And one last thing, which I scribbled in the car park afterwards and have been turning over since. Every person in that hall was certain they were the only one in it who felt like a fraud, and every one of them was wrong in exactly the same way, and none of them could see that the person two seats along was running the identical private terror behind an identical calm face. If the books do anything at all, it is only to pass one note over that wall. You are not the only one. You never were. It just looks that way from inside your own head, because everyone else's head is a room you are not allowed into.

That is the whole afternoon. I taught them nothing. They reminded me what the job is for.

A hall of fifteen year olds is exactly the audience I had in mind for The Comet Year, about a girl who arrives in Fenwick with one suitcase and a firm policy of not unpacking.