Inside The Mind Of A teenage Girl

During July and August I teach Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Students come from all over the world and they’re mostly pretty wealthy. Last week in a tutorial we were looking at a short story one of my students had written. In places her English was a bit shaky.

‘I didn’t know what word to use here,’ she said. ‘What do you call the person who is responsible for looking after the children and does some of the cleaning in the house?’ She didn’t mean the mother.

One of the things that I like about being a writer is that it’s a very democratic business. Being rich and powerful doesn’t necessarily help. My first published stories were based on my own life. One of them was about working in a pie factory. Another was about labourers on a construction site. I didn’t need to do any research because I’d done it already in real life.

In the middle part of my career I wrote a series of novels with teenage girls as the protagonists. People were always saying to me, ‘Mr Keaney, how do you, a man, manage to get inside the mind of a teenage girl so successfully?’

The answer was simple. As the father of two teenage girls I was exactly the person my wealthy student was trying to describe. I cooked for them, cleaned up after them and ferried them around. I was effectively their servant. And the servant always knows exactly what’s happening in the house.

The One Thing You Really Need To Become A Successful Author

Pundits always tell aspiring authors that that the qualities you need to get published include great storytelling, great characters, a terrific plot and fine writing. I don’t think this is true for the reasons that I will elaborate below.

You certainly don’t need fine writing. Many of the really successful authors, the ones you see in airport bookshops across the world, don’t pay an awful lot of attention to style at all. They concentrate on storytelling because that is why most readers turn to fiction: they like a good story.

It’s the authors of literary fiction who focus on style. Unfortunately, literary fiction, while it happens to be my cup of tea, is for the most part a minority niche in the book trade; the sad truth is that most of its exponents have to do another job to support themselves.

So what about the other factors: great storytelling, a terrific plot and powerful characters? Am I really suggesting that they can be left out of the mix altogether? Well, not most of the time admittedly, but there are always exceptional cases. And exceptions are worth studying because they often point to an important truth.

Take, for example, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer which, as most people know, has sold in container loads all over the world. To be fair, Stephenie Meyer can write well when she wants to. Indeed at the beginning of Twilight she adroitly employs a deceptively simple style to get the reader hooked. But once she’s got your attention she really takes her foot off the gas. The writing becomes repetitive, the descriptions formulaic. The male lead, Edward, is endlessly described as angelic, or godlike; the female lead, Bella, is constantly on the point of fainting away at his mere proximity.

Characters are given one or two signature attributes. Bella is clumsy, her father is easy-going, her friend Jessica is talkative, her unwelcome male suitor Mike is determined. There is no character development beyond this. People stay what they were at the beginning of the book.

Without fine writing or strong characterisation you would expect to find the strong motor of a plot to keep the reader moving through the story. But there isn’t one. Most of it is just girl meets vampire, followed by girl falls in love with vampire. Right near the end the girl gets threatened by another (bad) vampire but that’s not what the book is really about.

No, what the book is about is teenage sexuality and this is where Stephenie Meyer hits all the right buttons. As it happens, I find the messages that her book sends out about gender roles very unattractive. But, hey, it’s not aimed at me. It’s aimed at teenage girls and they have voted with their credit cards, or those of their parents.

The point of this post is not to trash Twilight. It’s not a book I could ever have written, or even one I would want to have written, but it’s a fine example of the one thing you really need in order to be successful: an understanding of your audience. If you don’t have that, all the rest doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. And if you do have that, you can get away with murder.

Boys Will Be Boys

People often ask me how come I became a teenage writer. Why not write for adults? That’s so much more glamorous. There’s the Booker prize, the Hay Festival, all those programmes on the BBC. 'You’re good at talking, Brian,’ they say. ‘You could become a celebrity.’

When I look unconvinced, they try another tack. What about books for little children? The kind that concerned parents read to their kids at bedtime. That’s nice to think about. After all, little kids look so cute in their pyjamas. Not like teenagers – always chewing gum, worrying about their spots and wearing weird clothes.

With a sigh I tell them about a friend of mine called Laura, who is one of the nicest and politest people I know. Recently, she had to go to the doctor’s surgery with her two teenage sons. Like their father, they are big with long legs and as they sprawled uncomfortably in the waiting room for ages on end, they grew restless and started making up stories to amuse themselves. The stories were about people with ridiculous illnesses and they laughed as they tried to outdo each other with absurd caricatures.

Unfortunately, their sheer physicality made some of the more uptight people in the waiting room uncomfortable. They decided that the boys were really making jokes about them, mocking them for their medical problems. Indignantly, they complained to the receptionist and Laura and her two sons were thrown out of the surgery.

Of course Laura tried to point out that her sons were only playing a kind of game, that their comments weren’t aimed at the people in the waiting room at all, but the receptionist wasn’t prepared to listen. Afterwards, Laura tried phoning the Practice Manager, only to be cut off twice in mid sentence. They weren’t having young people bullying the other patients in the surgery and that was that.

Why is everyone so terrified of teenagers? You’d think they were terrorists. A few years back, before my daughters reached adulthood, I can remember colleagues at publishing parties asking me how old they were. When I replied that they were in their teens, I’d get a sympathetic smile. ‘You’re going through the difficult years, then?’ my colleagues would say.

When I tried to explain that I liked teenagers, they would nod encouragingly as you might do to someone who was putting on a brave face. You’ve got to admire this fellow’s spirit, their expressions seemed to say, he’s going through hell but he’s determined not to let it show.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not naïve or sentimental. I realise there are horrible teenagers who mug people, or stab them, or worse. But don’t tell me there are no adults who do such things. And at least teenagers don’t spend all their time talking about how much the value of their house has risen in the last six months.

It’s the attitude teenagers possess, isn’t it? That’s what people object to, whether they realise it or not. They look into the teenager’s eyes and they immediately see hostility. But so often it’s just awkwardness they’re witnessing – the awkwardness of young people who are trying to work out who they are and how they should behave in different situations. Can’t you remember that? I certainly can. In fact, I’ll let you into a secret: I still feel like that a lot of the time.