I used to wonder if it would get weird when I started getting significantly older than my characters. Especially when it comes to the Firmament series. Because the eighteen books, while they take place over a period of maybe five to six years, will probably take pretty close to eighteen years for me to get written and published. Needless to say, I will have aged much more than Andi will have, at that point.

When I started writing the series, I was only twenty. I made Andi twenty-one. Since then, she’s advanced to twenty-two, while I, thanks to my birthday last week, have advanced to twenty-eight. Emily, from October, was only seventeen. A full ten years younger than I was at the time. Will it be strange, I wondered, to keep getting older while so many of my characters stay frozen in their teenage years or early twenties?

It hasn’t been, though. In fact, I’ve hardly given it a second thought. I just write the characters as they are. And when I did stop to think about it recently, I realized that I’m far from the only adult who writes younger characters. J. K. Rowling, John Green, and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snickett) come to mind, just as a start. Adults writing for and about a much younger crowd is a very common phenomenon.

And when I thought about it even more, it occurred to me that the opposite is very rarely true. It’s not often that young authors write books about older adults. This probably shouldn’t have surprised me–after all, it’s easier to look back and draw from your past life experience than it is to look forward and try to imagine a world you have yet to join. The whole “write what you know,” thing and all. If anything, distance from a previous age can bring a perspective that helps add richness to the characters and meaning to their situations.

What struck me as odd, is that this is the opposite of the way we generally consume. As a rule, people like to read about people in their life stage or older. Children like books about teenagers, teenagers like books about young adults, young adults like books about adults. And adults like books about–well, adults also. But even then, we often like to read about people who’ve done things we haven’t done. After all, reading about yourself would be pretty boring. So is there an opposite adage for readers–“read what you don’t know yet”?

I guess that is the point of it all, at the end of the day. When you write–or really create any art–you’re passing on something of yours to someone who doesn’t have it. An experience, a thought, some wisdom, a particular form of imagination. And the more you age, the more of those things you have to share.

So no, I shouldn’t feel weird about writing younger characters at the ripe old age of twenty-eight. In essence, I’m repackaging my youth to sell to others, with a little extra experience added on for seasoning. And that gives it more value, not less.