Jelly-Beanz-Rule

i've heard of 8 year olds getting published, so i'm not so sure age matters...

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Mike C

Unless one or the other is posessed of incredible talent, neither stand any chance. But to choose between one or the other, the 14 year old will lose out.

Experience of writing is important, but by the time you're 25 you'll hopefully have experienced something worth writing about. Kingsley Amis said everything you write before you're 20 is shit; He said it to his son, Martin, on publication of his first book at the age of 19. Martin now freely admits that, as KA's son, no publisher in the world would have rejected him even if only out of politeness to his father, and that the book isn't that good.

The world is flooded with 14 year olds (and every other age) with completed novels. It doesn't mean they're worth publishing. Many end up printed via PA or Lulu; confirmation, generally, that they aren't worth publishing.

Not wanting to disappoint any aspiring 14 year olds out there, but don't forget that there's more to life than writing. If you sit, hermit-like, in your bedroom, writing furiously at every opportunity, by the time you reach 25, with 21 years writing under your belt, that 25 year old with 2 or 3 years experience may still have a better chance of publication if they have, through greater life experience, something more worth writing about.

Switch the computer off for a while. Get out of the house. Do drugs, get drunk, steal a car. Have fun.

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Straylight

+1

Some of the best writing advice I've ever seen offered to our younger brethren .

~D

Verago

Hahaha!

Also, my main genre is fantasy. I'm sure your general experience in life helps, but, since it's set in your own world, hopefully it isn't influenced too badly by your experience or lack thereof.

SilkFX

Basically agreeing with mammamaia. It's all about the quality of the work. And while I don't doubt that somewhere out there is a 10-year-old homeschooled kid who's already the next [insert famous writer of your choice here], such people are extremely rare.

I tell people I've been writing since I was 9, which is true. By the time I was 16 I was writing better than a lot of my peers, mainly because almost all my free time was spent writing. To other 16-year-olds, my writing was pretty damn good. To the rest of the world...um, not so much.

It wasn't until I hit my 20s that I felt like I actually wrote something that was halfway decent and that might appeal to a broader, more adult audience.

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Mike C

I disagree. Life experience will colour what you write, no matter what your genre. Good fiction (as I'm sure plenty of people are sick of me saying) isn't about world building, or technology, or complex magical systems, or whatever the trappings of your chosen genre are. It's about people, and how they interrelate. It's about depicting lives and how they change in relation to their environment and experiences. It's about being born, falling in love, dying. Everything else is just padding.

The more life experience you amass, the more you have to write about. The more you know how diverse characters will respond when you put pressure on them.

Life is not a RPG.

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Straylight

Do people not feel in fantasy? Can you somehow learn how to write those highs and lows of emotion without feeling them? I write fantasy and sci-fi, and I draw more from my real-life experience when writing it than I do my maps and world-building information.

No matter the backdrop and props, you can't write sublime love, murderous rage, cynical apathy, without experiencing it. You can't touch on honor and courage without seeing them work and fail yourself. You can't make an ambiguous character, an interesting bad guy who we both love and hate, until you've been in that emotional ambiguity yourself, several times preferably.

Basically, everything you can personally experience will enhance your work, regardless of genre.

Best of luck!

~SL

Verago

I understand...And I have had some experience with the things you mentioned, especially the murderous rage and cynical apathy, due to some recent events that I'll not mention...

Really? I had no idea.

Mike C

Don't worry. You'll understand when you're older.

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Kelhanion

I didn't write when I was 14-16 but when I read my old school essays from that time I can just remember what kind of a person I was back then. It amazes me how much one can "evolve" in just a few years (that's what puberty is all about). My opinions on things were shallow and, well, somewhat stupid. I just went to school, played video games and got my pleasure from trivial things. I didn't really know myself, I hadn't thought of my future and I certainly hadn't gone through a lot of things that have made me to question things and develope a better understanding of who I am.

Now, I am just 20 years old and already I can see the gigantic leap my brains have taken in the few past years. If I didn't know better I would barely recognize myself from back then. I presume that as time passes the leaps will be - even though smaller - just as important and overwhelming.

With all that said I think it's only natural that the older we get the better stuff we can write. Of course it is a personal thing and sure, there are styles in writing that can suite a 14-year-old just perfect. We should just remember our limits: A 14-year-old writing about the loneliness of an elderly person may succeed perfectly but s/he has to be very talented and/or use a clever, naive way to convey the point.

Living -> Suffering
Suffering -> Reflection
Reflection -> Evolution
Evolution -> Understanding
Understanding -> Ability to write kewl stuff

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CZ

It is, to some extent.

I started writing "books" at age 7. My first "book" was similar to The Black Stallion, I illustrated it and everything. Then I graduated to notebooks. Then I graduated to writing on a computer (WordStar 6.0 on an 80c88 laptop running DOS). I began a novel at age 13 and worked on it until age 16 or 17, got up to about 20k words as well as writing short stories and poems.

I got a ton of praise for what I wrote because hey, it was pretty good for my age. Got a bit of a swollen head and continued to write. Am I sorry I continued? Hell no. It was great practice. I got some good critique from a successful author of children's books, but the best critique I got was from a few people who told me to shelve the idea of "getting published" and to not think about it when I write. When I was 14 I was hung up on the idea of "getting published" and found it hard to move past, and this affected my writing.

Does experience help? Yeah, it sure does. I don't think it's strictly necessary to be a certain age to write, but let me address one more thing that bugs the hell out of me about this post.

I have a friend who I occasionally hang out with. She's a nice person, about 10 years older than me, and lives a quiet life working part time. Whenever we go out she talks about the places she'd like to live, the types of mansions she wants to buy, the cars she'd especially like, the parties she'd throw, etc. Now, this is all well and good. Dreams are a fine thing to have, but what is she doing to get from Point A to Point B? What is she doing to make these dreams come true?

I see a fair amount of posts talking about the *eventuality* of getting published. All these posts remind me of my friend who talks about these lovely cars and ideas while still holding down only a part time job.

I used to make the same mistake. At age 14 I'd go into the library and sit down with a copy of Writer's Market and pore through it looking for the publishers who might want to publish my type of book. At that point I had *maybe* 10,000 words in my novel-in-progress. My point is that me looking for publishers or even thinking about publishing at that point in time was a colossal waste of time.

In a nutshell, I think if you quit being hung up because of your age and worrying about publishers, you'd write with a clearer conscience.

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Sindy

Surely, you've got a chance and I think that you have to try. Don't give up. Indeed, there are a slew of stereotypes concerning your age. Because 14-year-old writer is considered to be too young. People of your age are not taken seriously, moreover as writers. However, you have a chance to be published. You have to prove that you are really worth it. You have to elbow your way. I wish you all the best.

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cbrmale

Unless the fiction was, literally, a childrens story, I don't think that it would be possible for a teenager to write of emotions such as love, lust, sexual desire, longing, anguish, grieving. All these things are what our characters experience in adult fiction, no matter what genre. You are not mature until you experience love, lust, loss... When that happens, you can write.

::Saint::

Experience is a tricky thing, as there are different kinds of experience. Experience as a WRITER is one thing, and is important, but much more important than that is having experience as a PERSON. Any good story that you read has to have some kind of insight built into it, otherwise you really don't end up with something worth reading.

In my estimation, LIFE experience is at least five times more important than WRITING experience, as far as experience goes. Given that, the older person definately has the edge. Then again, there are 25 year old who have spent most of their time living in their grandmother's basement playing MMORPGs, not really gaining anything in the way of useful life experience, while there are 14 years old who have been all over the world and done all kinds of interesting things. So there again, age isn't always the definitive factor in life experience either.

All I can really tell you is that I was a writer when I was 14 as well, and I also had a lot of crushes on girls at 14. My parents were always telling me to just hold on about the girls, because at my age I wasn't ready for any kind of real relationship, and anything I got involved would certainly end up in my being hurt. Of course I didn't believe them, I felt like I was emotionally more than ready for the opposite sex, as I also felt I was more than capable of writing quality stuff.

12 years later I can definitively say that I was 100% wrong on both counts, in ways that I wouldn't have been able to conceive of in any way at that age.

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dwellerofthedeep

The first sentence seems odd to me. Why couldn't a teenager have experienced such things?

While I agree with most of this sentence I think it's a little churlish of you to tell someone whether or not they can write.

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