> > Sometimes I think my story plots are too childish. The problems aren't big enough, and the solutions are too easy. What's more, they read like episodes of a TV show.
> I think the only thing I can do to make my stories more mature is to wait until I'm an adult. No matter how mentally mature I am now, there's no way I can write like an adult until I AM an adult. Writing like an 8 year old will be easy, because I've been there. But I can't write about being 45, married, and with four kids, because I'm only 15 and I've never had a romantic relationship.

One thing which maybe you're not taking into account is your level of reading experience. If all your plots read like episodes of a TV show, is this because your mental input comes mostly from watching TV shows? What sort of books do you read? You can't improve your writing by just writing and writing until you magically start writing good plots, but reading good plots by other people can help a lot. Expose yourself to nothing but pulp and that's what you'll write.

Everybody's writing matures as they get older, but this is no reason for you to stop writing now. Kiki writes far better poetry than anything I could hope to write in my wildest dreams and she's more than ten years younger than me. And life experience is overrated. I read Kim Stanley Robinson's brilliant Mars trilogy recently and I sort of doubt he's ever colonised Mars personally. If authors were only allowed to write about things they've personally experienced, literature would be pretty darn boring.

My advice is to spend a lot of time reading the classics of literature in a huge range of genres and your own writing can only be improved by it.

Brunnen-"it isn't the size of the character's problem that matters, it's what you do with it"G