Have you read books by young authors?

I know this post has been flagged for the advertising aspect, but I think it also presents some interesting questions that I wanted to comment on.

I would never discriminate against reading a book due to the age of the author. In fact, I would probably be more inclined towards a book I'm interested in if I were to discover that the author were younger. This was certainly a factor when I originally bought Eragon for my son for Christmas. This was before the book became so popular and I had deliberately gone into the bookstore to pick out something for my son. When I saw the dragon on the cover, I was interested but learning the author was a teenager clinched the sale.

I've also been very impressed with Amelia Atwater-Rhodes' writing who also began at a very young age. In her first book, Forests of the Night, I think you can certainly tell she was a young writer. But the story was intriguing and I was quite willing to make allowances. It was also great to see how she progressed as a writer with her later works. It's almost like watching the Olsen twins grow up :-)

I think really good writers are certainly born with an inherant talent for whatever reason. The mechanics of proper writing are certainly a learned thing, but I think that really good writing (strictly speaking fiction) takes imagination which is certainly not something that can be taught.

Somewhat started a similar thread recently, starting w/Carson McCullers, I believe, who was only 23 when she wrote The heart was a lonely hunter ... Bret Easton Ellis was just 21 when he wrote Less than zero ... and I believe Mary Shelley was 21 (or younger) when she wrote Frankenstein.

Also, I agree with Jenson about the mechanics of writing (which can be learned) and the ability to write well stylistically (which can't).

The ability to write well is learned.

Or are you suggesting that writing is an innate human behaviour, and the English language is similarly innate?

The fact that something can't be formally taught doesn't mean it isn't learned.

I hope it can be learned.

I think the only thing that can be taught is to recognize good writing. Then you have to learn to produce that. The problem is that most of us have to earn a living while we teach ourselves, through trial and error, how to write well. We can’t all be lucky enough to inherit enough money to live on while we learn like Larry Niven, or resourceful enough to write, uhh, genera (?), like Anne Rice did before her vampire days.

I think there are a lot of young people who decide, in primary school, that they want to write and, if they work at it, they can get very good by the time they graduate. Today, with computers, spell checkers, and email that allows anyone, even kids in flyover country, to communicate with like minded people including even publishers, we could be seeing a lot more young writer than we did a few decades ago.

>5 TLCrawford:

I suspect the reason for the outbreak of teenage novelists in the last few years had more to do with publishers' desperate search for a hook to get the press interested in their authors than with email and spell-checkers. As I recall, quite a few of them turned out to be plagiarists, or not teenagers at all. Next year the fashion will probably be for illiterate novelists, or autobiographical works by toddlers.

Come to think of it, the only thing most of us can remember about Jane Austen's first novel is the egregious spelling mistake in the title - where would we be if she had had a spelling checker?

I have read and enjoyed books by young authors. I do not judge them the same way as I would an established writer, just take them for what they are.

#6

Didn't we already do illiterate novelists in the 1980s?

You could be right about the marketing ploy but I think that fewer talented people will be overlooked thanks to how easy it is for people to communicate today.

Wasn't Jane Austin writing before Webster beat the originality out of spelling? How I long for the good old days of improvisational spelling.

(of course I ran this past a spellchecker before posting)

>8 TLCrawford: (of course I ran this past a spellchecker before posting)

That would be the British motor industry spell-checker, then? :-)

I don't really believe that technology makes that much difference in allowing talented writers to be noticed. Publishers are interested in marketability. Talent is only one element in that, and I suspect that it's the hardest one to judge. The customer doesn't know whether the author is talented until it's too late (you've paid, carried it home, curled up in your armchair, and discovered that it's a load of -----), but for most people the purchasing decision will be largely determined by whatever publicity there has been about the book.

If it's technically easier to prepare a nicely formatted manuscript and send it to the publisher, they must be getting more unsolicited manuscripts coming in. The market for new books hasn't got significantly bigger, so the the number of readers they employ to look at the manuscripts won't have increased, while the rejection rate must be higher than ever.

In the good old days, publishers would reduce the size of the pile by eliminating anything written in green ink, in capital letters, or showing other signs of strangeness - nowadays everyone will be using a standard template, so I'd guess the publishers do the initial triage by looking at the writer's c.v. and synopsis and asking themselves "Would a journalist write an article about this person/book?"

The outbreak of teenaged novelists is entirely related to the publishing world's attempt to appeal to an outbreak of teenagers.

At one time, teenagers wanted to read adult fiction, because they wanted to be treated as adults. Publishers now seem to think that they're overgrown children interested only in communicating with their own kind, like some species of alien.

>9 thorold: (- nowadays everyone will be using a standard template)

You would think so but judging by the job applications I have seen, people are more likely to commit abuses like using strange ink colors / colours, wild fonts, and non-standard formatting.

Word processors, in my opinion, have made it easier for young writers to learn the craft. Cut and paste is so much easier on a computer. When I was in school you truly used scissors and paste. Revising text only means saving under a new file name and making your changes. In the past every word had to be re-typed. Today making a second draft is a mental exercise, not an exercise in tedium. The spell check helps a small subset that, like me, is terminally original.

As far as the number of young writers being published, I think that the ease of networking today will be the prime mover there. An exceptional student’s teacher mentions the student to a professor who mentions the student to a friend in publishing. Staying in touch and passing on manuscripts is so much easier today now that snail mail is not a factor.