The more I work with middle schoolers, the more I like my audience. I don’t appreciate the occasional rudeness (sometimes often), and I slowly burn inside when I ask a student to stop doing something and he/she does the same thing five minutes later. But the beauty of this group lies in their only predictable behavior…

UNPREDICTABILITY

I value this as a writer because it is much more fun to make irrational, sometimes crazy, characters in my stories. That is what this readership expects. Not neat and perfect characters, but people who have outbursts, sarcasm, evil thoughts, and an underlying sense of invincibility. Come and visit a middle school classroom and you’ll know what I mean. Write on.