loving the alien

I often get asked how it's possible for a 52-year-old author to write with any real insight or accuracy about teenagers: how do you know what they think, what they do, what they like or don't like, what they really feel about things? In essence, how do you, as a relatively old man, know anything about the world of teenagers today?

And, in one sense, the straightforward answer is – I don't. No one who isn't a teenager knows anything about today's teenage world. Parents, teachers, academics, writers ... some of us might like to think we know what's going on, but one of the defining characteristics of any teenage world is that isn't known to those outside. So how does a middle-aged author even begin to write realistically about teenagers?

Well, for a start, the one thing you don't do is try to "research". The biggest mistake you can make in writing about teenagers is to attempt to give the impression that you're "down with the kids", that you're one of them, that you alone are privy to their secrets, their language, their hidden life. If you try to do this, the end result will be as embarrassing as a 52-year-old man who wears baggy jeans halfway down his backside and insists on saying "Wicked!" and "Yo!" all the time.

Secondly, you don't have to personally immerse yourself in a world in order to know something about it. You can use your imagination, you can watch, observe, listen ... you can sit on a bus, absorb what you see on the street. If all else fails, you can even trying talking to people.

In the end, though, the key thing for me, the reason it is possible for me to write about teenagers, is that I'm not writing about them from an anthropological point of view. I'm not studying them. I'm not analysing their lives, their artefacts, their tools, their culture. I'm writing about them as people. And people, regardless of their age, are all about the same basic feelings, emotions, desires and needs – and this doesn't change.

The physical stuff we surround ourselves with, the stuff that's sometimes used to define us – our technology, our art, our material world – it's not very important. It's just stuff. It changes all the time, and on a superficial level it can have a seemingly enormous effect on our lives. But in terms of life and death – and everything in between – which surely is what stories are about, stuff doesn't really come into it.

Back in time

This was my view before I started writing Naked – which tells the story of three young people who play in a punk band in 1976 – and as I began working on the book I wondered if I'd still have the same view when I finished it. Would the process of travelling back to the mid-1970s, to the time when I was teenager myself, make me realise that I was wrong, and that the teenage world of today is in fact very different to the teenage world of 1976? And the answer was - no, of course not.

There's no denying that in many ways the world was a very different place in 1976. Thirty-five years ago, for example, there were no mobile phones, and it wasn't even that unusual for a home to have no phone at all. There were no personal computers, only wardrobe-sized monsters that worked on punch cards and took three days to work out the square root of 16. Recorded music was only available on vinyl or cassette. There were only three TV channels. There was no rolling news, no cable or satellite TV, no 24-hour programming, no games consoles, no MTV, no videos, no DVDs...  

But, again, it's all just stuff. And although, on the face of it, the stuff that's around now is light years away from the stuff that was around in the 1970s, it's really not that different at all. Music is music, whether you listen to it on an iPod or a record player. Information is information, whether you get it from the internet or an encyclopedia. A phone call is a phone call, whether you're using a smartphone or a phone box.

Of course, there's a lot more to life than just stuff, and when I was writing Naked I also had to bear in mind any cultural/social changes that might – or might not – have taken place over the last 35 years. One of the most intriguing aspects of this was the extent to which gang/group culture has changed. Again, on the surface, it's easy to assume that things are very different today – ie, that there weren't really any street gangs in the 1970s, life was a lot less violent, society wasn't so broken. But the truth, as I see it, lies just below the surface.

There were street gangs in the 1970s. Superficially they bore little resemblance to the street gangs that we (think we) know today, but they were there – the bikers, the skinheads, punks, suedeheads, casuals, football hooligans, teddy boys – and they did exactly the same things that gangs have always done, and always will. They beat each other up. A lot.

The world back then was just as violent as it is today, if not more so. Admittedly, there weren't so many guns on the street in 1976, but there were plenty of knives, bottles, and glasses, and – in my world, at least – there was always the promise of trouble wherever you went. Whether this truth has simply been forgotten, lost in the blur of nostalgia, or whether today's world just seems more violent because the media of today shows us so much more ... who knows?

But I'm fairly sure that the things that really matter – the life and death things, the things that makes us what we are – they never really change. You can go back in time as far as you like, back into the depths of human history, and no matter how different things look on the surface, the basic stuff will always be the same.
 

Naked by Kevin Brooks is published by Puffin on 6th October.