input please

[fahye]

Well, that was definitely the least eventful Australia Day I've ever had. I actually forgot all about it until the Aussies on my flist started posting about it! Apparently Prince Charles did not forget, and gave some kind of speech about the floods.

~

Right! Audience participation time! In order to help me tease out some ideas for an original story, I would appreciate it if you could comment with:

1) TWO things you remember about being in your late teens (seventeen/eighteen-ish) -- what was important? What were your insecurities? What consumed your spare time and your mental fretting? If you are actually IN your late teens, you do not have to play, but you're welcome to chime in with some fresh insider knowledge!

2) TWO questions that you would ask a seventeen/eighteen-year-old girl in order to get to know them as a person.

Plot development is sort of trickling along, but I need to get to know my protagonists before I let them narrate anything. And one of my planned eyai fics is also about teenage girls, so hey, two birds, one stone.

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid.livejournal.com]

I'll give you two sets of answers, here - one for fifteen-sixteen, when I was in year eleven/twelve, and one for seventeen/eighteen, which in my case was the first two years of university. Generally I had more in common with people at the same educational level as me (a year or two older) than my age peers, so the earlier answers are probably the ones you want.

Without further ado, question one:

Set one (age fifteen/sixteen)
Things that were important: Lord of the Rings and everything associated with it, including fandom (but not fic); writing, and having ways to connect to other people who wrote; my part-time job (sense of achievement, money to buy LOTR doodads, something to do that wasn't school); schoolwork; church, especially leadership training (two forms - one with other young people, for Easter Camp; and one with my mother and her peers, for services at home).
Insecurities what I had: I was insecure in most of my friendships; I was often afraid that my RL friends from Newcastle would forget me when I wasn't around, or that I wasn't as important to them as they to me. I was afraid that I didn't know how to make, maintain or communicate with my friends at school. I was afraid of not doing well at school and letting people down (I wasn't so afraid for my own sake, I figured if I did badly it was my own fault; but I was afraid that the school had too much riding on me).
What consumed my spare time: Lord of the Rings. Other fantasy novels. Riding my bike (while thinking about fantasy novels). Writing fiction, poetry, letters. [Things which don't count as spare time: work, school, church related activities.]

Set two - at seventeen/eighteen
Important: about the most important thing in the world by this point was university, and medieval studies in particular. I had an intense, mostly-internet-based friendship and briefly romantic relationship with a guy I knew from church in Newcastle, who later moved to Canada. Uh... uni. Being around other smart, geeky people, even if none of them were bang on *my* kind of geek until you and K showed up.
Insecurities: I remained afraid that my friends at home would forget about me if they didn't see me. I felt much more secure in my college friendships than I had at school but I was still unsure a lot of the time, and kept a mental track for most of first year on how many human conversations I'd had in a day.
Consumption of spare time: I spent less and less time on ringbearer once I got to uni; I hit LJ and spent a fair bit of time there (not in fandom). I wrote a lot of emails to Lukas, hung out in T.'s room, went to the pub with church, and studied. And studied and studied and studied.

---

As to questions to ask a teenager... the same questions you'd ask anyone else? What they study, where they live, if they have part-time job, what fandom they're in... Exactly the same questions you'd ask an undergrad, certainly.

[ineptshieldmaid.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was seventeen when I started my RL LJ. Most of my posts were public at the time - if you consider me a good sample teenager, feel free to poke through 05-06. Evidence suggests that I was much the same at 17 as I am now.

[fahye.livejournal.com]

I have already done some poking around my own early LJ entries. Phew. I was very stressed! And I think the security or otherwise of friendships is a HUGE one at that age, yes.

[mkcs.livejournal.com]

In about 92, this was me.

What was important? Politics. Sexual identity.
What were my insecurities? People thinking I was unattractive. What the hell that sexual identity was anyway. What to do with the next few years.
Spare time? I don't remember having much. I was pretty busy, what with school/university, work, photography, my love life, painting pictures, and writing poetry. I remember not getting anything like enough sleep because talking with my partner was so much more interesting than sleeping.
Mental fretting? What's the point of it all and is suicide a good solution to that question.

To get to know a seventeen/eighteen-year-old girl, I'd ask them what public issues they thought people were wrong about. You can learn a lot about a teenager's attitudes by hearing their opinions on public events, often. Or I'd ask where they got their makeup and how they planned their look. (If they wore makeup, of course.) Finding out how someone's trying to present themselves can be good too.

[fahye.livejournal.com]

Those are good questions! I will fire them at my characters. And both of them have sexual identity issues, too.

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

1/4: "Who is your best friend?" (Describe and explain.)

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I was an intense diary-writer at 17/18 so I'd probably just demand to read my diary. :)

[weatherfront.livejournal.com]

I think for anyone at any age, maybe, What are you the most afraid of and What do you want to change the most about yourself are really revealing questions to ask...!

[buhfly.livejournal.com]

1) What was important? Friends. Parties. Money. I had a weird late-teenager-hood because I had my own apartment that I did not pay rent on, but I still had to make the utilities and food and stuff. And I was still in high school, so. It was a weird mix of remarkable responsibility and stunning immaturity. :p Hence the juxtaposition of parties and money.

What were your insecurities? I have core insecurities about nobody REALLY liking me and just using me for my shiny, shiny toys and I have ALWAYS had these insecurities. 17/18ish would have been worrying that people only wanted to hang with me because I had a car and and apartment and no parental supervision.

2) Do you read/what books do you like? (I think this gives you a decent baseline for certain personality traits.)

What's up? (Give most teenage girls a chance to talk out what's happening in their life and they'll run with it.)

[nextian.livejournal.com]

1. Most of what consumed my free time in my late teens was the discovery of Having A Relationship What The Fuck, which I considered like getting some rare but magical medical condition that allowed everyone around me to forgive the fact that I was distracted by it about 75% of the time. The other thing was becoming an atheist (starting about sixteen, climaxing at seventeen and a half) and being so angry about it.

I also discovered physics, playwriting, the travails of actually keeping friends, figure drawing, dailyKos, political rage, class issues, and a burning and constant desire for independence, but you asked for two :)

2. "What kind of music do you listen to" and "So, where'd you grow up?"

SO BORING

[inknose.livejournal.com]

- I'm 19, so... let's see. Things that are important: my friends. my friends, my family... my friends. xD My ambitions. My biggest insecurities are about the future and my own talents. Sometimes I feel like I'll just die if I don't succeed on a huge scale at what I want to do, other times I wonder why I even bother and think I could be perfectly content just chilling out amusing myself and my close friends with my creations in obscurity. I worry about the Fate Of The World sometimes, but I'm too overwhelmed by all the problems, so try to concentrate on doing my best at what I'm best at and hope that will be enough. I feel like at this point in my life I'm in kind of a nice position where I've already gotten the tough and hormonal years of confusion and turmoil out of the way, so I'm finally confident about knowing who I am and what I believe, and now I'm able to concentrate on learning new things and maybe leaving my comfort zone, because I GOT THIS.

I think something really essential to people/characters who are in their teens is how FAST their own minds are changing. I can look back at journal entries I wrote just two or three years ago (hell, even last year) and it's like "who wrote that? wtf was I even talking about?"

2) - I'd ask the adult equivalent of "what do you want to be when you grow up?" :P I feel like people around this age are split into people who ABSOLUTELY KNOW WHAT THEY WANT TO DO (whether or not that changes is a different story) and people who have no idea and are trying to figure it out.
- and I'd ask... "what was the most awesome thing you ever did/that ever happened to you?"

[inknose.livejournal.com]

lolll that was not the icon I meant to use but... that's another important facet I suppose. my slash goggles are on at all times.

[whatimages.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh. I was a weird teenager. For my entire teens, I had this really intense weird relationship with my best friend. We were inseperable but we would pick at each other all the time. We made up amazing, fantastic stories together but never wrote any of them down. Our imaginations and insecurities fed into one another. I loved her intensely; she had an almost-pathological fear of emotional closeness. I learned to read between the lines. The creativity and the longing and the insecurity. That's what I remember. It wasn't all that long ago, but it feels like a distinct place and time.

To get to know bb-me better? "Tell me a story," I guess. You can learn a lot about people from the way they tell stories and so much of my teens was about stories and needed stories to work.