ABSTRACT
From the writer's point of view serious teenage fiction presents an interesting problem. Notoriously, one of the worst mistakes you can make as a children's writer is to 'talk down' to the reader: the best and most successful writer addresses an 8 year old as one human being to another. T o rc-enter the subjective world of the adolescent is much more difficult (to be compared perhaps with trying to project yourself into a constant state of having just walkcd into a chair in the dark; a world of convinced and continually outraged solipsism; of persecution, helplessnes and smouldering despair). Although the average 15 year old will not spend all of her or his time being an adolescent - like the rest of us she may experience a whole range of ages in a day: feeling quite childish at breakfast, at lunch rather world-weary and middle-aged - at the same time she or he is undergoing an uniquely painful and absorbing experience which has its own language, its own preoccupations, its own heightened range of emotions.
