Teenagers deserve a GOOD book.

Remember when I said I was going to write poetry? Don't count on that any time soon. I've little patience to write that sort of thing aside from the songs/poetry that I'll keep very personal for some time. So let's go on a different path.

I hate The Catcher in the Rye. It is a terribly pretentious book. I dislike the stream-of-consciousness style it uses. It revolves around a boy who finds everything around him "phony," yet its style feels forced and fake.

But I will give the late JD Salinger credit for having the literary balls to take on the tremendously complicated task of writing a book about teenage life in a way that doesn't insult the intelligence of teenagers or the reader.

Teenage life is a topic most often left to Young Adult Fiction shelves in public libraries, filled with series most often read by adolescent girls who get addicted to them for a few months and them forget them entirely (at least, that's how my sister does it). The books are cheesy, heavy-handed sermons preaching truths that have been drilled into our heads since the dawn of time, and the plots are simplistic and predictable (as Stephanie Meyers has proven, not even vampires and werewolves can keep a teenage romance from a ridiculously cliched ending).

Yet teenage life, as I can attest, is an absurdly complicated stage of life. So much hides beneath the stereotypes. Nobody falls under one label perfectly. Nobody is an archetype. We are weird, emotionally charged, complex individuals facing the greatest questions of life with are shining paragons of a hopeful future; at our worst we find all manner of ways to mutilate and destroy ourselves. We live the life of the old Romantics, only somewhat hindered by our relative youth. We're ambitious but forced to serve beneath those we find incompetent, yet, to quote an excellent song, "With answers for the world, the ambiguity shows." (100 points to whomever identifies the song.) We're scatterbrained (as that last parenthetical shows), witty, progressive, technophilic, satiric, perspicacious (this is easily my new favorite word) revolutionaries lost in a world that's as confused by us as we are confused by it.

So why the heck doesn't anyone try to write any "capital-l Literature," as Mr. McLaughlin calls it, about adolescence? I know we have our own stories of ideal teenage literature, but let's be honest--we weren't trying to write anything artistically huge. And adults really can't write about this experience after having gone through it; Salinger tried, and I think he oversimplified.

No, I think the teenage years are a topic best left to those in the middle of them. To that end, I'm very strongly considering carving time out of the summer/free time (whenever I end up getting it) to write a novel that does justice to the teenage experience. I know nothing of plot; I only know that it would have to be first-person, but from several different perspectives.

Here I pose a question to you, all three of you that read this.

If one was to write such a novel, what would have to be a part of it? What are the essential parts of teenager-dom that would NEED to be mentioned? What makes the 21st-century teenager who he/she is, as opposed to Salinger's 1950s teen?