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Difficulty writing adult characters

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BethS

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In a great many ways, an adult is just a twelve year old with responsibilities.

That may explain why some adults still act like children...

I think there is a little something to what you say, in that we never really feel inside as old as we are, but there is such a thing as emotional and mental maturity, which a 12-yr-old would be lacking but which one would hopefully find, in its early stages at least, in anyone older than 25 (the age at which the brain finally leaves childhood behind). I'm a lot more mature than I was at 20 or 25 or 30 or 35...I am certainly more patient and less impulsive. I have my temper under far better control. Life experience and gained knowledge have drastically changed the way I think and the way I approach life. So, no, in many ways we're not still the same person we were at 15 or 18 or even 22. Thank goodness. Human beings are a work in progress from the moment they're conceived to the moment they die.
 

Re-modernist

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I myself see in...my self...all the major layers of my personal bio--the toddler is still inside, the kid, the teen, the young adult--and while when I was younger I automatically suppressed and ...divorced...each prior layer in order to move on to the next one, today I try to keep each layer watered and fed and patted on the head. And frankly, the emotional leanings in adventure entertainment today are the ones I had when 12/13. Gone is Vonnegut, gone are Clancy and Ludlum, back with a vengeance are Robert E Howard and Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss and Sir Walter Scott. The actual adult inside gets to read Discipline and Punish and King Lear, but the 12 year old is very pampered too.
Gone are the pseudo-adult mashups in the soap melodrama and techno manliness and wishy washy symblolisms continuum... Same way gone is the prog rock and the various Stings and Bowies and crap; the adult gets classical music and jazz, the kid gets speed metal and techno. When I became an 'actual' adult, the teen tastes got their comeback, while the more quasi sophisticated ones kind of dissolved.
(Which does not stop me from being a quasi sophistication peddler in my writing, because sometimes there's a gap between what you consume and what you produce. I am able neither to write human condition real lit, nor the bombastic linear pulps, only the aforementioned pseudo-adult mashups. But I think they're totally great when it's ME doing them:D).
 
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