New young writers popular, but still have homework to do

Eva C. Komandjaja, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The rising numbers of young writers smitten by teen lit fever is encouraging say education experts and literary critics, but these writers need to further develop their talents in order to become mature writers.

Arief Rahman, an education expert, told The Jakarta Post that he thought it excellent that teenagers nowadays were able to write books and publish and sell them in bookstores.

"It means their works have been accepted by the public and they are receiving recognition as writers at a young age," Arief said.

He added that these young writers needed tutoring so that they would be able to further develop their talent and increase the quality of their writings.

"A good book should be written using good language, have a moral message to deliver, good logical thinking and an original story idea. If a young writer can meet these four criteria, he or she could become a good writer," Arief said.

According to Arief, school is the best place for youngsters to develop their writing skills. Schools should offer writing classes so that Indonesia can produce more young writers.

Maneke Budiman, a literary critic from the University of Indonesia, said that the current teen lit phenomenon in Indonesia proved that many youngsters are quite talented writers. This is despite the common perception that Indonesians did not have particularly good reading habits.

However, Maneke said that most teen lit writers ignored grammatical rules and thus made their books difficult to read for many people, particularly those unfamiliar with teen worlds.

"The sentences are sometimes illogical. They also use slang only understood by Jakartan youngsters," he told The Post.

Maneke pointed out that in most writing competitions, the use of good Indonesian was always the first priority when scoring.

"We hope that youngsters will be willing learn to use good Indonesian so that they could better develop their ideas and finally end up as mature writers who can write anything and not just teen lit topics," Maneke said.

Maneke added that current teen lit writers would grow older and start writing on non-teen issues. Yet, the teen lit phenomenon would continue as new writers would come to replace them.

He did not think that teen lit novels were boring despite the fact that they mostly referred to teen issues, such as dating and friendships.

"There are many teen lit novels that are a little bit different right now. They talk about teen issues from, for instance, a religious point of view. The topics are still the same, about love and relationships, but they write about them from different perspectives," Maneke said.