I was doing the chapter recaps for Mutual Benefits this week and one of the biggest things I felt about the story was a pang of disappointment. I’ve come to develop a pet peeve about high school coming of age stories recently, and unfortunately, Mutual Benefits is definitely not perfect in this way.

It annoys me when older writers who are well beyond high school age overcompensate by writing high schoolers that are always acutely aware of being in high school. They’ll point out their own maturity and age, they’ll note how high school isn’t like the real world or whatever, and they’ll keep saying, “Well, that’s high school for you!” or something.

It’s good for the themes and morals of a coming-of-age story, but the more I experience it, the more I’m agitated by it. I recently watched Thirteen Reasons Why and it was absolutely abysmal. Not because of the controversy involving its more disturbing themes (though I do want to emphasize, they did a terrible job with that too), but instead because of its dialogue.

I think there was a line in episode two that made me actually say “Oh, come on” out loud to the screen. The line was something like, “You want a hot chocolate? That’s odd, as it is warm outside.” The interesting thing about this complaint is that the line doesn’t appear poorly written until it’s spoken instead of read. You may have read that line and not thought of it as particularly bad – it’s about your average line said by a character, right?

Now, a challenge: Say the line out loud. Right now. “You want a hot chocolate? That’s odd, as it is warm outside.” Did that sound natural? Does it sound like something a human being would say?

Of course not. And if you can’t pull it off, God knows a teen actor (At least Thirteen Reasons got young adults to play teenagers and not people in their thirties) couldn’t either. It was abysmal. This series is filled with weirdly written awkward lines, a lot of them needlessly going, “Well, we are teenagers after all.” Teenagers don’t say that. People in their thirties putting in the minimum possible effort to get into a teenage mindset do that. Writing dialogue is a bit of a three-rule game – you need to write dialogue that flows decently on the page and conveys information to the audience, but the third rule is to make it convincing. My rule of thumb is to say dialogue out loud if I’m unsure if it works. Imagine saying that exact sentence, word for word. Does it sound natural? It’s a helpful tactic.

So I was quite disappointed to see Mutual Benefits was rife with dialogue representing high school. It wasn’t entirely without merit – the plot of the first six-ish chapters is basically Quinn learning how drama works and Taylor teaching him how to survive in a high school landscape, so it kind of made sense she kept referencing high school; she was essentially teaching an alien visitor to our planet how high school worked. At the same time, a lot of it feels contrived. I don’t plan to edit it out any time soon – maybe someday – but for now, it still bothers me.

I feel like a lot of us can fool ourselves into thinking we aren’t as bad as we think we are, as long as we believe we’re self-aware. I see this all the time, and odds are, so do you: the most annoying and self-righteous person you know probably thinks they’re very self-aware. Maybe they even were at some point, but they let their guard down because they were so self-aware and over time, they didn’t feel the need to critically assess themselves because they already knew how self-aware they were. In this same way, I constantly think about bad tropes in high school dramas, so I didn’t think one would exist to this extent in my stories, and yet, here we are.

This is actually a great thing. It’ll help me improve in the future. Despite getting older, I don’t plan to stop writing high school stories anytime soon. I love them. The energy of teenagers, their incomplete maturity allowing for drama, the institution that practically forces them all to be in the same place without fail so they can continue to develop throughout the story; it’s the perfect backdrop for longform stories. It does mean I need to walk a tightrope of making a sexy story without fetishizing teenagerhood itself, which I do try to do. As I age, I’m more and more put off by stories that go, “her fresh young teenage pussy…” etc etc. When I was 18, it didn’t bother me, go figure, but now it kind of does, especially knowing these stories are understood to be read by older people in general. I think there are better ways to relive teenage hormones and nostalgia than by going, “let’s fetishize the youth itself.” In a weird way, it parallels my talking points here. Just as I don’t want to fetishize teenagerhood, I also don’t want to explicitly go, “Wow, we sure are in high school right now!” Both are lazy and can get boring (and the former can get quite problematic). Something to work on in the future. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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