Basically what it says in the title. I need a refresher on teen stuff. Besides not having been one in a while, I wasn't one to too terribly often hang out with these things called "friends" (I think that's how you spell it). Essentially, tell me some stories you don't mind sharing of times you hung out with friends, or were just in situations where you did teenaged things. I'll start for some examples. In school, I was a part of ROTC, or the military-like class meant to push kids into the military. It didn't work in my case, but all the same, it was a good part of the school to be involved in, as it put me in a sub-culture of people. We would have these thing called "military balls", which was sort of like prom except the guys got to wear their uniforms instead of renting tuxes. Since it was smaller than the prom and with people in ROTC, it was actually better than prom because we all either knew or heard of everyone else, and the music was better. Another time I was riding in a car with some people, and someone else would be chasing us in their car. My brother didn't approve of the driver, and tried to get me out of the car. The driver gave him a spork to make him go away. It worked...until my brother told Mom. So yeah, stuff like that. Anything where you spent some time with friends.
We used to do a lot of stuff that invloved walking through the woods a good ways, like hang out at an old abandoned railroad trestle, or walk through the graveyard in the middle of the night. Usually these would involve drinking or getting high (if we had the money for it). We also made stuff. I remember cutting up the covers of notebooks (often ones we needed for classes) to make little cars, only instead of wheels they had hover-jets. I wish I had pictures of some of those. Oh, we also used our cardboard technology (that we got pretty good at) to make X-wing fighters, Tie fighters, I made a Millennium Falcon using paper plates for the top and bottom, and we even made a Death Star that came apart and had individual floors inside, where we drew little controls all over the walls in ballpoint pen. My friend's mom suggested we take those to the local theater, which was still showing Star Wars in its first run (it went for several years I think) and ask if they'd display them for us. To our extreme surprise, they did, hung from the ceiling in the lobby on threads. The local newspaper did a writeup with pics. We also, on one of the nights we were working on the Death Star, snuck out of his house late at night (where I was spending the night) with fireworks and lit them off in a parking lot and got chased by the police into the woods (most of my stories involve the woods). They drove us to our parent's houses and we had to tell them what we had done. It was not a pleasant experience. But we never tried that again. The worst part was when we first tried to get into the woods to escape, we ran right over a big ravine filled with brush—somebody must have trimmed a lot of trees and bushes and thrown the waste in there. It looked like solid ground but we fell right through it and got all stuck in between branches and had to struggle our way out slowly, trying to be quiet.
I was a relatively solitary teen. I rode my bike for miles to get to my favorite orchards, streams, hillsides, and pastures where I could just groove with the universe in my own way, without anyone bugging me. I wrote books and short stories. I taught myself to play guitar and collected Civil War Era music. Taught myself to sew. Sometimes hung out with friends who also played guitar and sang, as well as friends who just like to while away a hot day listening to music and reading. No drugs, sex, or rock n roll. That all came in my twenties. My dad was law enforcement, and I was cautious. Eyes were upon my behavior even when my folks were safely at home.
Drugs, sex, and rock and roll are all boring to me. I'm more interested in teenaged weirdness. Teens have a level of weird that doesn't exist outside that populace.
I grew up on a farm with only a few good friends. I have always been very much into history so, with access to a full workshop I learned how to blacksmith, weld, wood work and more, and I made my own re-creations of historical weapons from knives and swords to matchlock guns and a trebuchet. I also built a homemade scuba diving system which failed miserably and nearly drowned my best friend, who was my very willing go-to guinea pig. But by far my most dangerous build was when I found the design schematics for a wooden bodied soviet anti-personnel mine and proceeded to build it and successfully detonate it with a cinderblock on a rope and pulley. Looking back on it, I really wonder how I survived my teenage years...I would just be banging and sawing things and testing explosives right next to myself...as an adult if I were ever to recreate any of my contraptions I would be so careful and clean about everything.
So you were the cool kid. My oldest sibling only went as far as slingshot rifles, potato cannons. He also raided the dump for bike parts, made a few frankenbikes. No landmines: what a sissy. I distinctly recall him getting us to run as fast as we could away from him so he could test his twine bola. It worked well! More generally there's carving sticks and wacking bracken with them, aimlessly biking around, building up the fort, searching for and stockpiling good slingshot stones, escape-the-room-but-it's-not-a-puzzle-you're-just-locked-in-the-outhouse. I wonder if OP is meaning older or younger teens? 16 onwards it gets lame: work, school, videogames, and pellet rifle practise for me. At that age you're counting the days to get your D license, dumbass mini-adult.
Nah...I was always kind of a dork that mostly preferred the company of my own imagination to people. My church youth group voted me "most likely to be a serial killer". Fortunately that never came true But your mention of forts does remind me...after watching the Robin Williams movie Hook I built a fort in the woods near my house like the one the Lost Boys have. Complete with hanging platforms and zip lines. When my cousins would all come up for the summer we used to use it to have some crazy wars with pinecones, green crab apples, and pucker pears for ammunition, or use the millions of wooden weapons I created for sword fights.
13-19? i wasnt a very interesting teen. I was just starting at a high school i didnt want to be at, knowing no one except my cousin (who was in a grade above me) who, as soon as we got out of the car, ignored my existence, all of my previous friends were all at a different school that i should have gone to (it was a neighborhood school... we all went to elementary school.... then migrated to the middle school up the street, then for high school, they went across the street to the big public high school campus..... i went across the city to a Catholic School). I wore an earpiece to help manage my stutter. it looked like a hearing aid. no one spoke to me because they thought i was deaf. and then they would say things about be BECAUSE they thought I was deaf. braces and glasses too. and I argued A LOT with the priest and other religion teachers and basically got labeled a blasphemous atheist. I lived outside of the city so, in order to get places you either needed to drive (which i didnt get my license until 18), or have your parent drop you off and pick you up from the metro station. so school was my life all through my teens. So, straight off the bat, i had no friends. But i was really smart. I tested into the IB Program and applied for the National Honor Society. At the end of each quarter there was an awards assembly and i seemed to collect all the awards. So, the upper classmen knew me and i had a few allies among them. But i was pretty much a loner. I did meet my (now) husband 9th grade, though (who was in the ROTC). He didnt think i was a dork, at least. To add insult to injury.... i was on crutches essentially my whole 1rst year of high school, before, during, and after surgery on my knee. and then again my senior year. Socially, i kept to myself. I had a few people i talked to during school. but outside of school? I never "hung out" anywhere. my boyfriend and i would go to the mall and the movies if our parents could drive us. Or catch the train into the city and go to the museums. Never drank or did rec. drugs because i was an athlete. never stayed out late because a) i wouldnt have a ride and b) if my grades dropped, i'd lose privilege's, like dating. The most exciting thing about high school was my extra curricular activities: I was on the track team, so we had meets in New York (National Armory)and in Philly (Penn Relays). Service Hours (it was fun walking with my classmates either putting out bags for canned goods donations or picking up donation to bring to the food kitchen) being a student ambassador because of the National Honor Society. I got to present one of my research papers at a city wide symposium, got to volunteer at the city's regional Special Olympics qualifier meet, and and give tours to incoming freshmen and their families during my senior year. 18-19, i was a freshmen in college. slightly better.... i did get drunk at a campus party (the christmas ball). and my first adventure going to a club in the city resulted in an misadventure of being stranded on the side of turnpike, being offered weed in a party bus, and nearly being taken to Detroit to be "dancers" before being ditched at a gas station in a different city...... we never made it to the club
Lol, okay, we're running into the problem I very much expected. Everyone here is as introverted as I am, it would seem. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just that I was hoping for a few more experiences that I don't find relatable. (Though to be fair to JT, drinking and clubs aren't relatable). My issue is that I'm having my ~16 year old female characters hang out in an old factory in the woods, and I'm trying to figure out how realistic that would be for roughly normal teens. That, and what the teens who have no desire to be in a factory in the woods would choose to hang out. If Joe is to be believed, then an old wheel factory is a popular hangout, lol.
just gunna add... the club misadventure was a 1-off lol. it was my teammates idea, the club was in a city 45 minutes away, and the one with the car forgot to put gas in the tank... hence getting stranded and hitchhiking in on a party bus heading for Detroit
My husband was more interesting than some. He and a friend made nitrocellulose in high school. The friend later went on to get in double dutch for building a radio transmitter in his college dorm and going on air as station KUNT. Is that more what you had in mind?
As an undiagnosed and completely unsuspecting autistic teen at the time, my teens were "boring". Society and people in general made zero sense to me so I spent most of them in front of a computer because computers were basically the only thing that did make sense to me. I had about three friends but I rarely saw them due to a variety of circumstances. It sounds boring and problematic and sad, but actually, I had a lot of fun and I do look back fondly on those days. I didn't just play games on the computer; I did all kinds of things. I wrote programs in various programming languages, tinkered with hardware, made servers, did graphic design, modded games and so much more I couldn't possibly remember off the top of my head. It was a learning journey and now that I'm doing a Computer Science degree, all the knowledge that I gathered actually helps a lot. I know a lot of people will look down on a "teen life" like that, and I do know that it wasn't healthy, but it was all I had. I've looked back on it with plenty of negativity too but it did have positives to it. I did have fun and I did learn a lot of things. Would I do things differently if I had the chance to go back in time? Yes! I would do a lot differently. But you can't go back in time. That's impossible. You can only look back on your early days and make something positive out of them that you can relate to the present and even the future. That said, I did do some crazy stuff with my best friend. We rarely saw each other because of circumstances involving distance but we were both nerds and when we did see each other, we had plenty of country-side wilderness as our playground. We... Made flying Coca Cola bottles Exploded gas tanks (and got into a lot of trouble because of it) Made smoke bombs Made exploding bottles out of hydrochloric acid and aluminium Exploded a lot of firecrackers. And I do mean a lot. Lit up bottles of gasoline into fire We did all of this far away from people to ensure that nobody would get hurt. But it was still dangerous for us, so to any teens that could possibly be reading this... DON'T DO ANY OF THIS.
Teenage versions of those are weirder than any other groups' versions of them. Right now I might go to the pub with friends after work, drink too much, walk home the long way round. Wake up in the morning and go to work. Boring, or at least not weird. When I was, say, 16 or 17, I would go to the pub after work with friends, drink too much, have a 'mock' fight in the car park with a friend, walk home the long way round, which would include scrambling up a bank into a forest, where my imagination and the alcohol would tip me into a trip and I'd genuinely be running through the forest in dream as someone else, maybe being chased or living out some story. Practically having an episode. Then I'd get home somehow without remembering how. Wake up in the morning covered in blood and mud and this unreal memory of what happened, get up and go to sixth form. And that was just booze. And I was one of the quiet ones who spent more time on his own playing videogames or reading books. Alcohol and drugs have a very weird effect on the young mind. Mind you, I have always been a bit of an odd drinker. That seems very likely, yes. Other things: Finding places, like for example just a nook you can sit on behind an estate agents which is kind of dead space, and claiming it. That's yours and/or your friends. Just like that it becomes a special place, not really a secret necessarily, just private. Adults don't do that. Usually. Deliberately cultivating long running narrative gags and scenarios with your friends. In jokes and so on. None of this letting them naturally emerge like adults will do. I suppose its the tail end of the imaginary world building we do as un-self-conscious children. Being really aware of where in a group you are standing. Literally I mean. Are you near the centre or on the outside? Are people facing towards you or away from you? Are you near or far from the person who you want to be able to speak to? Its not all insecurity either, its competitive jostling. Maybe that's why writers are always telling each other to "write what you know"; its masochism, because most of us suspect that we should have lived out a lot more than we did, one way or another, back in the day, and can't help remind ourselves of it.
I think part of your problem--aside from asking a bunch of writing nerds for normal experiences--is that what a teenager is likely to do is going to vary wildly on where your setting is. If it is rural, it might be an unused barn where you can sneak off to drink a warm keystone lite and smoke a cigarette and think you're cool. If you are semi-urban an abandoned tire factory might be the spot. Urban it might be the mall. And then the question is going to be, what are the circle of your protagonist's friends like? Are they all girly girls or are they country girls who don't mind some tire soot on their hands? There are so many variables in your question there is no real answer.
That's because I'm not asking about what to do with my characters. I'm asking about other people's experiences. This is the research forum, and I'm interested in hearing what other people have gone through for informational purposes, hoping it's different from my own. The real answer is whatever your life is about. Maybe I should ask instead, what did the popular kids do in your guys' schools?
The popular kids were just the most visible kids on campus, and not necessarily the ones everyone liked the best or wanted to emulate. Sports players and cheer leaders were generally the socialites, but there were also the journalists, the band kids, the drama kids, the forensics kids, the science club kids, the social activists, the misfits, the loners, etc.. Most were pretty content in their spheres, though there was crossover here and there. I didn't find this particularly true, either as a teen and or as a mother of teens. Kids are pretty much like the rest of us, having to learn the skills (or not learn the skills) to go along with new experiences and hormones. During teen years, feelings may be more intense, and teens often don't have the perspective to step back and look at them objectively. What's happening in any given moment feels like it is going to last forever. A bad choice feels like permanent damage from which one's life will never recover. This can lead to tragedy. The state where I live has a stunning number of suicides. Between the time my son was in ninth grade and graduation, five friends committed suicide, including his best friend.
Yeah, most of the popular kids I could see felt like empty shirts, not so much living an authentic life as stuck playing a social role, and terrified of stepping outside of it. Never able to reveal anything real about themselves. I'm sure that's not true for all of them, but most of the more real kids weren't in the popular groups. Of course a lot of unpopular kids were incredibly socially awkward or maladusted in various ways. But the ones who seemed to have it together weren't really the 'popular' ones. In fact the socialites seemed to all come from well-to-do families where they were forced to be like their parents (empty stuffed shirts living a fake life for popularity's sake). What a false life, to have to always do whatever the in crowd is doing and never have the courage to do what you know is right. A handful of teens seemed to have it together (doesn't mean they really did), but most of them flailed and made stupid choices and hadn't yet learned any more adult coping mechanisms yet (including yours truly). But one major difference between the popular kids and the cooler ones was that most of the popular ones weren't nice to unpopular ones, or if they ever were it either didn't feel real or they only did it in secret and couldn't let it be known.
Lol, in fact one of my older friends, just before I went to high school in the mid 70s, told me I was gonna have to decide if I was gonna be a sosh (socialite) or a freak (stoner). To him that's all there were. I saw a much broader spectrum, and wasn't at all sure where I fit in it, but I never worried about it. Somehow I was spared of the desire to be popular, and I think my youth had taught me early on not to try to fit into any particular group. That said (and this sounds like a huge contradiction, but somehow both are true) I was one heckofa people pleaser too. But I'd say that was in one-on-one situations, I never tried to please something as vague as a group. And also I always had a sense that I was OK underneath it all, even when I displeased somebody. That's something it seemed like the popular kids couldn't afford or just didn't have. To them it was only about social status.
The popular kids were all extroverts. Some had good attitudes, some had bad attitudes, but they were always visible for some reason or another (2 of the popular kids i went to high school: one is now in prison on drug possession charges... the other is an attorney at a big firm). Also... i was one of the sports kids, but i wasnt popular. I had a friend on the football team who was literally larger than life and bigger than most of the football players. but he was a big teddy bear and often got picked on by literally everyone else. Basically..... if you stood out, you got noticed (depending on what caused you to stand out, you were either popular or picked on) If you didnt stand out, you skated through high school without being bothered.
i had no desire to be popular... but i also had no desire to be the opposite of that. I would have been fine just existing as is.
This seems highly relevant here, and just went up today: Why Solitude Promotes Greatness - The Benefits of Being Alone I've spent by far the greater part of my time alone (but rarely lonely), whether it be in the house, walking the streets thinking, or out in the woods. Being alone is the only time you can really think—otherwise you're stuck talking to people, which can often be pretty inane (though it can also be very stimulating, even when the subject is dull. It's an exchange of energy and warmth when done right).
Yes, and the Western world, especially America I think, is a very extraverted society. We're all taught that extraversion is the 'right'way to be, that if you're introverted there's something wrong with you, something embarrassing about it. But it's the introverts who often end up successful at things later*—the studious ones who got made fun of for being nerds, or the ones who practiced at some skill (drama club, singing, playing an instrument, whatever). I'll never forget hearing that the great bands like Van Halen, Rush etc (and Juice Newton was involved in this thing—not a great one, but still successful in a small way) said they got picked on all the time in school for being unsociable, but years later, when they hit it big, all those kids who picked on them now say "Oh, I hung out with him in school." It's largely that kids just don't understand what's important yet and are too easily manipulated by shallow social pressure (same is true for a lot of adults). * Not all, and of course many extraverts also become highly famous/successful. Often that's the lead singer of a band, while the drummer and bass player or guitarist were intros).
