I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.
I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.
Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels.
For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.
I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.
'The Waking Dark' is about what happens when something awakens a town's darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world.
Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers.
As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things.
Teen fiction should be about teenagers - no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.
