New Jersey Stage 2015 - Issue 11 | Page 82

I’ve heard other authors say the best way to write for young audiences was to treat them as a regular audience instead of talking down to them.  Is that how you feel? Absolutely. I hate books that talk down to teenagers – or to anybody, really. Not that curse words are particularly sophisticated, but I think that, when you’re a teenager, you want to be an adult, and I know for my friends and I growing up, our NewJerseyStage.com impression was that being an adult meant peppering your speech with a lot of “colorful metaphors” (as Mr. Spock would say.) Of course, then you actually grow up and realize that the adult world, linguistically speaking, is not necessarily the Reservoir Dogs scenario you’d imagined. (Unless you end up w orking in a urologists’ office, in which case it’s much, much worse.) How did you get into writ- 2015 - ISSUE 11 ARTICLES 82