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DeepDive Sneak Preview #5: Juliet Escoria
DeepDive instructor and acclaimed author Juliet Escoria on the delicate art of writing authentic teenage characters.
Brad Listi
April 16, 2025
Hi there,
Hope all’s well.
Here’s the latest from DeepDive headquarters:
We’ve officially reached the halfway point in the post-production process for our debut course, How to Write a Novel!
Assembling a course this robust is an enormous labor, and we are thrilled with how it’s all coming together. And we can’t wait to share it with you later this year.
In essence, How to Write a Novel is the ultimate audio craft book, a course that, in terms of scale, is actually commensurate with the challenge of writing a great novel.
This is an audio course for writers who are committed to their work, who are determined to defy the odds and see their novels through to publication.
In this week’s newsletter, a sneak preview of a conversation with Juliet Escoria, author of the acclaimed debut novel Juliet the Maniac and a superb story collection called You Are the Snake.
In Juliet the Maniac, Juliet does a masterful job of capturing the realities of adolescence on the page and rendering teenage characters who feel palpably, painfully real.
In How to Write a Novel, I speak with Juliet about the challenge of writing authentic adolescent characters. Here’s a preview of our dialogue:
Juliet Escoria.
DeepDive: You do a really beautiful job of rendering adolescence with a lot of authenticity and humanity. Can you talk about the challenges of writing really good teenage characters?
Juliet Escoria: I think you have to ask yourself if you want your teenage character to be likable or if you want her to be realistic. And I think that's a genuine question, because some writers are going to want a likable, relatable protagonist. In popular contemporary fiction, you often have a precocious protagonist who's very likable and inspiring. And that's not what I personally care about.
I wanted to create a more realistic adolescent character, which is to say a character who says and does things that aren’t at all admirable. When you’re a teenager, you don't know who you are, and you're trying to figure out who you are by measuring yourself against other people. And that's likely going to result in some ugly, embarrassing, insecure behaviors. I think insecurity is a principle driver of miserable human behavior, and it feels important to me to allow for that, to allow for the pettiness of adolescence.
Juliet is one of the finest young writers working today, and her ability to render the complicated realities of adolescence—fearlessly and without compromise—is truly remarkable. We’re so excited to have her onboard as an instructor, and we know you’re going to benefit from her insights.
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Okay. That’s it for this week.
Thanks so much for reading. More soon.
Be sure to follow DeepDive on Instagram and BlueSky. And if you have thoughts or questions, you can always email us here.
All the best,
Brad
Brad Listi
Founder | DeepDive
www.deepdive.audio
Quote of the day:
Sylvia Plath
The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.