I was a child who wanted to be a writer. I was a writer, in fact. When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I created plays that the entire class performed for the school. I published my first poems when I was a teen. Back then in the day, I did it the archaic way: I mailed my poems to journals (gasp)!
These days, the internet has created new pathways for young writers. There’s blogging, of course. Your teen can even create a niche web site should he wish. He could go a la Charles Dickens and write serial fiction on a site, or he could simply blog about his day. But there’s more to the world of web writing too. Hyperfiction and publishing on demand have changed the way writers do fiction.
The allure of hyperfiction is one that is calling to me, and when my novel is done (at age 50, perhaps?) I will explore this genre a little bit more. For the children who have grown up in the internet age, the hyperfiction format should feel even more comfortable. Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books, where you’d move from one page to another, skipping chapters so that you could choose what would happen next? That’s hyperfiction, except you’re not constrained by the limits of the printed page. Take readers into a novel that jumps from one character’s mind to another, or walk into a room and peer into the conversations that are taking place. For a writer, it’s like moving from 2-D to 3-D reality.
For those who want to publish online, ebooks and print on demand technology mean that anyone can become a published writer. E-readers like the Kindle have transformed the ways that people access literature. Your teen can not only read books on a Kindle, but he can also write books that others can access. Upload e-books using venues such as Smashwords, and sell them through Amazon or a separate web site of your making. Use web sites like CreateSpace to create books that are printed on demand, eliminating the need to have a publishing company take the book and publish it for you.
Published author in the family? No problem.