Marcus Sedgwick on writing for teens vs. writing teen fiction.

From Writing Teen Novels:

What I’m going to say next might sound arrogant, but I promise it isn’t: I don’t write for anyone else, I write for me. Why isn’t that arrogant? Because I believe that precisely the reverse is true – the arrogant thing would be for me, a 44 year old to assume that I know what a modern British 14 year old boy wants to read, or how an Australian 12 year girl thinks, or a German teen or a Brazilian or… You get the point. How could I possibly know those things? And this is really part of a much broader point – whenever anyone writes anything at all, teen, adult, horror, romance, sci-fi, they should be writing it for themselves, because to assume that any of us know what is desired in another’s head is an act of extreme arrogance.

[ETA: I'm a big Sedgwick fan, but... my "arrogant" alarm went off towards the end, when he says "whenever anyone writes anything at all ... they should". I rather think it would be hard for any statement that begins like that to not come off as arrogant. Unless I'm misunderstanding it, of course. Then again, I have a hard time with the sweeping generalizations thing. Except, of course, for the one I just made.]