I’m writing this in the middle of the night. Specifically, it’s just past 1 AM. Lately I’ve been going to bed earlier and earlier—10:30, 10, 9:30, occasionally even 8. Sometimes I tell myself it’s because I’m a parent now and I don’t have a choice, because my demon spawn wakes up at seven AM every morning without fail, demanding more food in a single breakfast than my adult body has ever consumed in a single sitting.
Other times I admit that maybe I’m just getting older.
When I was a child, my grandmother—in her eighties—would go to bed at five-thirty or six. I used to think, that’s when you know you’re done with life. When it’s five PM and you can’t think of any good reason to stay awake.
Six seems a lot closer now than it used to.
What does aging mean in the context of a writing career? In writing YA fiction?
The further you get from the age of your characters, the more tenuous your grasp on the lives they would live if they actually existed. So long as you’re writing in the space of contemporary fiction, you’re trying to adopt the costume of a generation’s experiences that you have little to no way of directly living. Even when you take on speculative work, you’re still writing about teens. No matter how keenly you think you remember your own teen-hood…how well do you remember it, really?
And how much does it matter? Maybe your character is a thirty-year-old soul stuck in a seveteen-year-old’s body. Why not, right? Write what you know.
Only you also know, somewhere deep in the cobwebby corners of your heart, that isn’t true. You’re playing a farce, and at some point your clock will run out.
When I was a teen we used to say never trust anyone over thirty but they don’t tell you that one day you’ll be the thirty one, untrustworthy and ignorant of everything it means to be young: not just in today’s world but ever, because as you aged you sunk further and further into the miasma of old-ness, of experience and maturity and whatever chemical bath your brain transitions into when the mess of teenage hormones levels out.
So what now?
I think about Taylor Swift, who is near to my age but still writing songs about heartbreak that tell stories both seventeen years old and thirty-something at the same time.
How did I go from growing up to breaking down?
And I wake up in the middle of the night
It's like I can feel time moving
It’s the middle of the night. I feel time moving.
The stories I wrote as a teenager all went the same way.
Girl discovers magnificent, majestic abilities. Girl tumbles into a dark web of intrigue and subterfuge. Girl is betrayed. Girl slips on the cloak of Darkness herself. Sometimes she finds her way back to the Good. Sometimes she doesn’t.
I related to that narrative a lot. Not the majestic powers, but the rest of it.
Everything at that age seems heightened: the emotions, the triumphs and the failures, the thin veins that spread through a friendship—solid rock threaded through with fluid that freezes to ice, expands, and finally cracks stone.
The pit of depression. The frenetic 3 AM panic that grips you awake in bed, sweating, limbs shaking so badly you can’t walk. The utter knowledge that everything has been consumed by an impenetrable dread and you will never be okay again.
Sometimes you emerge quickly. Sometimes you become acutely aware of the way your life will one day end: maybe not now, maybe not for years, but one day, one day, you know how it all ends.
And even now—don’t trust anyone over thirty—you still know.
Every book you’ve ever written knows. Even the ones with happy endings. They all know.
You go to bed at nine. You lie there until 1 AM and then you get up and get out your laptop and write.
Nothing changes, you think. Time is a flat circle. That’s why you know how it all ends.
It’s also why you keep writing.
I have decided that the person I am writing for is myself.
Maybe not me right now, but the person I was. The one who wrote the same book over and over trying to both chase and escape that inevitable fin, the THE END on the last page after which you finally permit yourself to shut the cover and sleep for a very long time.
Because one thing I have learned is that there are a lot of people out there, and all of them are different, and there is someone out there like me—at least a little—and why not write to them? I don’t know anything else about them. I don’t know what it’s like to be them, a teenager today, in this world with these terrors. But if they’re like me, I know what they want to hear. I know the story they want told.
So I get up at 1 AM and I write.
At five-thirty I am not already asleep in bed—not yet.
It’s a start.