28 October, 2020

Writing About Millennials as a Millennial (And Reflection)

Earlier this week, I received an invitation to Writing Millennials by IWWG (The International Women's Writing Guild). The event was supposed to share insights on how to write about Millennials. I thought this was useful until realizing I am a Millennial. This event was for October 27th, and so I decided not to register for it. I posted about this topic before (here and here), but I've been seeing a lot of these "insightful" things for writing with Millennial characters. People have even wanted me to fill out surveys for them so they can learn how Millennials think. 

There's a lot of negativity towards young writers as I've addressed before. I think it stems from the stereotypes about how many assume we're lazy, feel entitled, and we're clueless. Most older people misunderstand. Being a CNA, I did learn the older you get, the sparks fade. You no longer feel the same way about a lot of things, and your senses get duller. Perhaps this is why people forget what it was like being young. It can be the reason why writers need to learn how to write about us. 

Even though Millennials get negative comments when we write, it does have its benefits. For one, those sparks haven't faded... yet. This means, we know how each other pretty much think and behave. For me personally, it's easy to write about Teens and Millennials. I don't feel the need to do much research or any at all when it comes to this. Since also, I'm at the college stage, or learning stage, I find this studying habit crossing over to my writing. I'm always trying to learn something related to my projects. In a way, I think Millennials are at this career or life defining stage. This stage is when you're trying to find out who you are, and trying to find out where you fit in the world. We are getting degrees, hopefully to set us up for our life. Perhaps. 

A bit of notes: Millennials are misunderstood. The reason is because we're not exactly "lazy", but we're a different generation. We try to find new and simpler ways of doing things, eliminating obsolete routines. Millennials are still in that Teenage stage, where we're in between kid and adult. Even though people treat us like we're so young, we don't feel that young. I mean, I feel sort of like an 80 year old. I still don't understand how others treat me. I am a 90's kid. I'm taught as soon as you start saying, "When I was younger", you're old. I kind of say that a lot. I'm just stuck in the 90's decade; so much, I often get inspiration for my fashion sketches. It's also the reason why I love kawaii fashion so much. It takes a lot of inspiration from 90's (and 80's) nostalgia. 

I find my writing as energized as we're supposed to be. It's often adventurous, thrilling and exciting. Where I'm physically limited, my writing helps me to be free of those limits. What beneficial about our energy, is that we can put a lot of it in our writing if others are serious about it. 

I hope a gap can be bridged between young and new writers, and older, experienced writers. I can have a pretty hard time with older writers who feel the need to school younger writers. We are outcasted a lot; so we have to build our own communities and groups. More young writers should be encouraged, not discouraged to write. It's never too early to start writing I feel. I just would like to end this segregation between writers. Many writers write about us, but assume we're too young to write ourselves. We're all writers, despite age.

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