I’m not a grandmother or anything, but I’m just about as far away from a young adult as you can get. I’m a mom with more than a few artfully hidden gray hairs and I remember what it was like to use a rotary phone, buy a record and change the television with a dial. So how was I able to create my character Dani Truehart and navigate her fifteen-year-old world?
I think I’m lucky in the sense that I have never forgotten how to be optimistic and that has played a large hand in my being able to write a character pursuing an impossible dream. I think it’s fair to say life can be pretty brutal at times. While some might classify my optimism as sheer naivete, I think that to be able to see the glass half-full again and again each day is a testament not to my lack of worldliness, but to my faith in life despite all the negativity around me. And I think that optimism, that belief that things can’t be all that bad, is what helped me connect with my teenage character.
If you’re an adult trying to start an international singing career at the age of forty, I can pretty much guarantee most people you know would laugh, roll their eyes and some might even suggest a short stay at a care facility so your mental state could be assessed. By our forties, if not much earlier, life has already imposed many restrictions on an adult’s ability to pursue their dreams – jobs, family, debts, obligations – all taking precedence over our big, impossible dreams. And for the most part rightfully so because let’s face it, not paying your medical insurance so you can pay for singing lessons to launch a singing career would not be the best decision.
But when you’re a teenager, you have the freedom to choose, the luxury of time to explore your options. If you’re an adult reading this, think back to what you wanted to be when you were fifteen. I wanted to be a marine biologist, a police detective and a writer. I didn’t feel pressure to choose just one thing, but I often imagined myself doing all of those careers, though I’m not quite sure what kind of deep sea crimes I would have been solving as a detective marine biologist. But that’s the point – it didn’t really matter how all of those careers would work together. I didn’t get bogged down in the details. I just dreamed.
I remember everything seemed so huge when I was younger. Every party, every test, every argument was so major, so epic, so gnarly. So much was on the line with so many of my experiences because I was still figuring everything out – who I was, where I was going, what I stood for. With Dani, I tapped into remembering what it was like to have parents to deal with, the drag of school work, the anxiety of trying to figure out how I felt about things and worrying about what people would think if I said this or did that. The anger at not having my voice being heard or not being taken seriously by adults and then the dizzying freedom I felt when I finally was.
I know being a teen has changed dramatically since I was one, but some aspects of being a teen stay universally the same despite the passage of time. Anyone can write about young adults. Anyone willing to take the journey back to that uncomfortable and thrilling time where your mind and body are developing in amazing and uncontrollable ways and you’re not quite a child but not yet an adult. Endings and beginnings, finding your voice, building a family of friends and the gaining of wisdom at the loss of innocence. It’s a once in a lifetime journey that I feel lucky to relive through my writing.