The armour and the crack in it

When I was sixteen I had a jacket that was completely wrong for the weather in every season, and I wore it anyway, all year, because it was the jacket and taking it off would have meant something I could not have explained to you at knifepoint. That is the first thing to understand about the people I write for and about. Almost nothing they do is about the thing it appears to be about. The jacket is never about being warm.

The armour comes first

If you want to write a teenager and get it wrong, make them earnest. Make them say what they feel, clearly, in the moment they feel it. Real ones would rather walk into the sea. At that age the feelings are enormous, far too big for the room, and the entire daily project is keeping them from showing, because showing them to the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong moment, is a catastrophe you can still feel the shape of twenty years later.

So the armour goes on first. The joke that arrives half a second before the silence gets dangerous. The eye roll that means I am terrified. The elaborate not caring, which takes more energy than caring ever would, and which fools no adult and every peer. I spend a lot of my writing time on that armour, because if I get the armour right, the reader trusts me, and then I am allowed to do the only thing that matters, which is to show the crack in it.

What they actually say

Teenagers do not speak in speeches. They speak in fragments, in references only four people alive would understand, in a language built specifically so that adults will bounce off it. When I write dialogue I read it out loud, and if any line sounds like something a person would put on a poster, I cut it. Nobody that age says the true thing on purpose. They say six untrue things around it, quickly and funnily, and the true thing leaks out in the gap between two of them, usually by accident, usually to the wrong person.

The joke arrives half a second before the silence gets dangerous. That half second is the whole character.

Found families

Here is the part I care about most. The friends you make at that age, in that particular airless summer where nothing is happening and everything is, are not like other friends. You are all building the same raft at the same time out of whatever is lying around, and you cling to it, and to each other, with a fierceness that later friendships rarely ask of you. Some of those people you keep. Some you lose completely and think about at odd hours for the rest of your life. Either way they were, for one summer, your whole world, chosen and not given, and choosing your own people for the first time is one of the great human events, and it almost always happens to someone far too young to know that is what is going on.

That is what I am really writing, every time. Not the first kiss, though there is usually a first kiss. The raft. The people on it. The moment the armour cracks just enough for one of them to see you, and the terrifying, enormous relief of being seen, and not, for once, running.

Sixteen is the age of The Night Frequency, in which Frankie Mercer cannot sleep and goes down to her father's ham radio at night, not to use it, just to be near it.