Teenagers and even younger people have been published, but it's more usual for writers to be a little older. If it doesn't happen as soon as you'd like don't despair.
Like most professional skills, writing takes practice, and most people need years of practice before they become so good that other people will pay to read what they have written. That goes for all age groups, but the younger you are, the more practise you can fit in and the sooner you are likely to see your name in print.
Our family and friends are not always the best judges of our work - and that goes for older writers as well as young ones. They may love your work because they love you, or they may try to help without knowing how, and sometimes they can be over-critical.
Teachers may be a bit more useful, but even they sometimes don't know much about what makes writing publishable. The only way to find out is to set out your work as professionally as you can, write a short, very professional query letter, and send the work out to a real publisher. This may be a local newspaper or a small, regional or specialist magazine, or it could be a New York publisher. It's up to you whether you want to take the big risks, or start small and build your career gradually.
The good news is that publishers seldom discriminate on the basis of age. And the other good news is they don't expect you to state your age when you query them. They are interested in the quality of the writing rather than the writer's personal details.
And most publishers will be delighted to discover a new young writer who has many years of work ahead of them.
Young writers have a freshness and vigour and originality that sometimes older ones don't have. And right now writers in their twenties are being published at a phenomenal rate. Rejections are the mark of a real professional writer. Be proud of your first one! Most people collect lots before they ever get published, so if you are collecting those little slips of paper you're way ahead already. And if you get a real letter or even an encouraging scribbled note on a rejection slip, be cheered that the editor thought enough of your work to make a personal comment.
Most writers don't sell their first book. It's not unheard of for teenagers to have books published - just extremely unusual. Don't tell any publisher your age until you've sold. They don't need to know.
Keep a strong belief in yourself while not allowing it to blind you to what you can learn from others. You can copy techniques, but don't try to write like anyone else. It's best to strive for clear writing above all, so that your reader is never confused and the story flows.
Clear writing means knowing how sentences are put together - in other words, learning some boring old grammar so you don't write things like "Throwing up her head, she tossed it into the river and watched it float downstream". You don't need to know about gerunds and pluperfects and what all the parts of speech are called - although it can certainly be helpful - but you should know the difference between a noun, an adjective and a verb, what's meant by the "subject" of a sentence, and what past and present tenses mean, and where to put a full stop. Basic stuff. And the more grammar rules you know, the more tools you have to choose from - not to mention the fact that if sometime you want to break the rules, you'll be able to explain to a picky editor why you did so.
Keep learning, keep reading and writing - and living! Writers tend to like their private dream world, but if we don't go out and about, meet people, interact with family, friends, teachers, enjoy other interests and do things in the real world, in the end we don't have anything real to write about. Some novelists end up writing books about writers writing books, and no one wants to read them except other writers!
So spend lots of time with other people, do other things, learn as much as you can both from school and life - though that doesn't mean you need to experiment with drugs, booze, precocious sex, or crime, which are more likely to screw you up as a person and a writer than lead to great literature. What you write comes out of your own mind, and if you need to keep your brain in top condition, better not wreck it. You don't have to experience everything in order to write about it. There's such a thing as research, and that's what writers do all the time - whatever they are doing, whether working reading, watching or taking part in some activity, we're storing it all away for future use.
Writers are inveterate people-watchers and voraciously curious about how things work. You never know when something you've learned will be useful to a story. Everything is grist for the writers' mill - food for thought and for writing.
And if getting published doesn't happen as soon as you'd like, or never happens at all, don't despair. You will have learned a lot. Writers learn much about themselves and about the world around them, because they think about everything.
The only failure is not trying. And if after trying your best you decide you are not after all a writer, you'll have learned a lot of stuff that will help make you a successful person - being a decent, honest worthwhile person is worth more than fame or money or having your name on a book jacket, or a hundred book jackets. Whatever other people think about you, real success is inside yourself. It's called self-respect.
Go to my Writing Class for hints about writing, and edaphne at daphneclair dot com with any questions not answered there.Daphne
