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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31979
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31979
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The overwhelming concern of the child is to be noticed by adults. It is a constant stream of "look at me, daddy", "look at me, mommy", "look at me, grandpa". Kids act out in school, in public, at the dinner table because they want to be noticed. Even being scolded is, apparently, preferable, for the child, than simply being overlooked.

The difficulty for the child is that they are seldom capable of doing something that is worthy of notice in its own right. They simply don't have the skills and experience to do good work that is deserving of recognition for its own quality. However, parents stop giving the kind of exaggerated artificial praise they instinctively give to babies long before kids -- teens in particular -- are capable of doing work that deserves attention and praise on its own merits. To fill the attention gap, kids act out.

A juvenile tone in writing is simply that acting out in written form. The writer is not good enough yet to produce work that is worthy of praise in its own right, and it is intolerable to them to simply go unnoticed. So they do something we see all over the Web, where publishing is free and the barriers to participation are almost nil. They act out in writing. They shout. They use fractured sentence structure and multiple fonts. They insult people. The include lurid and irrelevant gifs. It is all just that childhood cry for attention.

It is a tough slog being a juvenile writer. You don't have enough practice and experience to produce publishable work yet and it can be a very lonely road to get there. It can be very bruising to the ego to have your work essentially ignored for months or years before you get good enough to deserve genuine praise and attention. The temptation to call attention to yourself by juvenile acting out can be strong. But it will do nothing to improve your chances of having your work taken seriously. The only way to make real progress is to accept with humility that you have a lot to learn and a long way to go, and try to be as adult as your experience allows you to be in all you write and in all your interactions with adults. (Alas, a lot of children's entertainment today encourages the idea that children can be brilliant at whatever they decide to do with minimal effort. This is a lie. Excellence takes time and work.)

Mature work tries to call attention to its subject matter. Juvenile work tries to call attention to its author. That is really the whole of the distinction. But the attention that you actually want, that is actually worth having, is the attention that comes from having created genuinely good work, not the attention that you get for being a brat.

Original score: 18