Trevor Lloyd of West Seattle High suggests that most teen fiction isn’t enough of a challenge to smart readers. He makes very good points (and in a solid writing style), but he only encourages me to up my game in creating high quality fiction that teens will love. Here are a few thoughts from his article News From the Chinook: Tired of young adult reading?:

These days, the teen fiction market enjoys an enormous audience. It seems some girls around school are never seen without a copy of “Twilight” clasped underneath their arm. And while teen fiction rakes in its share of revenue for the publishing houses, when compared to good adult fiction, the majority of teen fiction is often clichéd.

“If a student is capable of reading and comprehending adult fiction… (Read More at the West Seattle Herald).

Hi All!  This weeks teen’s name really is AMBER! Doing my research two teens at at time got me in trouble last post, so I double checked. By the way, this leads to an important “life as a story’ hint… don’t be afraid to make mistakes.  Just own up and move on! If you don’t make mistakes, you can’t write stories. 

Okay, so Amber is a very savvy writer, and I really like her latest post on education (see her blog link below).  For now, I’ll let her “about me” link tell you more… Read the rest of this entry

Emma,  who writes at http://forever-thinking.net/ is our teen writer of the week. I found her just surfing the net, and loved her blog tag line “becasue I have a brain.” I especially loved that she gave up writing fiction because she didn’t want to give her characters flaws. Not that she gave up (oh no!) but that she cared so much!

From Emma’s About Me blog page:  Who am I? My name is Emma, I’m seventeen years old, and currently what Americans would call a senior in highschool. A Dutch Grammar School to be precise, and although I am a huge procrastinator, I pride myself in my education. Read the rest of this entry

Oh Clemintine, AKA CLEM, is trying to write a novel.  She describes herself as follows: “You know the kind of person who talks just to fill up the silence and can’t stop talking even when her throat is red, dry, and extremely sore, even when the talking will logically make said throat even more red, dry, and sore? Well, that’s me. I talk when others are talking, I talk when others are quiet, and I listen when someone needs my ears. Read the rest of this entry

An 18-year-old bloggernamed Bambee de la Paz has caused cyber-space to crackle in the Philippines. Normally, Ms. De la Paz doesn’t blog very much. Mostly she posts about her golf scholarship at the University of Cincinnati or being pestered by boys for a date. She likes rock bands Incubus and Dashboard Confessional and lists “The Da Vinci Code” and “Lord of the Rings” among her favorite reads. But on the day after Christmas, back home with her family in Manila for the holidays and a few rounds of golf, Ms. De la Paz started tapping out something different.

Read more in this article on Bambee by James Hookway in the Wall Street Journal.

This weeks teen of the week is a group of 58 teen writers who penned “RED: The Next Generation of American Writers—Teenage Girls—On What Fires Up Their Lives Today” (edited by Amy Goldwasser). This  collection
of personal essays, on everything from politics to pop culture and body image, is written by girls age 13 to 19. Every one of the authors has her own blog at redthebook.com.

Vanity Fair calls RED “unsparingly frank and perceptive,” and Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert says of the book, “It’s high time people stopped writing, talking, and worrying about teenage girls and let these girls speak for themselves.”  Click here to read about these gals who appear on the coveted blog Huffinton Post.

Scholastic Children’s Books recently published Star-Crossed, a book for teenage girls written by a teenage girl.

Rachael Alice Wing started writing Star-Crossed when she was 14 years old. As she wrote each chapter Rachael posted it on to an Internet writing website called Quizilla. It wasn’t long before Star-Crossed had a cult following of over a thousand online readers and shot to Quizilla’s number one spot of highest rated entries. Buoyed by her online popularity and pleas from her friends, Rachael juggled schoolwork, sitting her SATs and writing to finish the story. Click Here to read more about Rachael at Scholastic.co.uk.

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) – Most Australian teenagers spend their summer holidays on the beach or playing sport but Alexandra Adornetto used one vacation to write a novel, and she hasn’t looked back with three books published and she’s only 16.

Adornetto, who is just about to start her final year of high school in Melbourne, Australia, wrote her first novel, “The Shadow Thief,” at the age of 13 after shutting herself away one summer. It was published in 2007 when she was 15 to high acclaim.

A year later, “The Lampo Circus” confirmed her talent as a writer and this month the third and final installment in the series hits the stories with the title “Von Gobstopper’s Arcade.”  She spoke to Reuters about writing while trying to maintain the life of a typical teenager, with her fourth book underway:  Click Here To Read The Full Article On Reuters

As her tag lines says, you’ll find Cassandra, the dark-hearted-rose, where reality meets fiction! She is a college student in California who is “in a near-constant state of flux.  Sounds like the writer’s life to me!  Check her out.  And thanks, Cassandra, for offering the world your writing. 

NOTE: We will feature a teen writer post each week.  Know one?  Are you one?  Let me know in the comments section and maybe you or your friend will be next!