I've been reading a fantasy novel recently by a certain author who, out of courtesy as I think the book is bad, shall remain nameless. However, it's called to mind a question which I feel a little too old to answer.

Reading the book, which was very Mary Sue, I found myself continually muttering 'keep it in the maths book' - or math book, I suppose, for my American friends. Now, I know what I meant by that. I said it to my boyfriend, who's the same age as me and also knew what I meant by it. (Mind you, he's used to my ramblings.) I'd guess that it would be possible for someone my age to work out if they'd heard my complaints about the book. But would it make sense to a Teen of Today?

When I was in my early teens, y'see, the Internet hadn't quite kicked in. It was there, but you had to be very techie to know about it; it only caught on when I was at the end of my teens and into my twenties. In any case, there was a recurring figure in schools that I think many people would recognise: the kid who sat quietly in class writing what was usually a fantasy novel in a spare math(s) notebook when they were supposed to be paying attention to the teacher. I wasn't one of them, but I remember reading over shoulders and hearing them discussed. Now, given that these were early attempts at writing, naturally they weren't as polished in style as the work of an experienced forty-year-old pro would be, and they tended to have a fair bit of wish-fulfillment in them. The bad fantasy book I was reading felt wishful and rather immature for a book by an adult writer, hence my complaint that the author should have kept it in the maths book. (I would have been bloody impressed if I'd seen a thirteen-year-old with a book of that standard in their maths book, mark you. Writing like a thirteen-year-old is fine when you're thirteen.)

But does that idea mean anything any more, or has the Net outmoded it? What I'm really wondering is whether tomorrow, teenagers who feel the urge to write fantasy stories for their own amusement will do what we did and scam a spare notebook from the store cupboard, using it as cover during their least-favourite class, or whether they'll simply go off to the computer room at school or go back home and type up stories under the pretence of doing their homework, and then stick them on the Internet. Has the Net killed the notebook? What's going on? I feel a little old and out of touch, so if anybody feels like enlightening me I'd be most grateful.

Come to that, I'd also be interested to hear where the maths-book novels led. The stories I got to see in my school were written by people who are now of the doctors-and-lawyers persuasion, rather than writers. I, on the other hand, am the one who's just jacked in a perfectly sensible job to be a full-time writer - but my maths book contained nothing but badly-done mathematics. I wrote when English teachers set writing assignments, and I read everything I could get my hands on, but my first novel was begun in my early twenties, not my early teens, and certainly not begun quietly at the back of the classroom. I don't think it would have worked, for one thing - I tend to zone out when I write, on a time-ratio of pretty much exactly three to one. If I think I've been writing for ten minutes, half an hour has passed; if I think I've been writing for half an hour, then it's an hour and a half; it's gotten to the stage where I automatically correct my estimate, saying 'I just need another five - excuse me, another fifteen minutes.' With this time frame, I generally need more time than I'd think; there was a point when I had a commute that lasted an hour and three quarters in each direction to my job, and I was trying to write on the train - but the train journey was only half an hour, and everything I wrote was rubbish: it just wasn't enough time to work up the concentration. I suspect attempts to write during a half-hour class, while keeping one eye on the teacher, would have been subject to similar laws, in my case at least. But then again, other writers have entirely different concentration patterns, and maybe that train setting would have been perfect for them.

So where are those maths-book stories now? How many professional writers started with notebooks tucked between a science book and a Bunsen burner? How many classroom novelists decided to call it a day once they left school and no longer needed to make their own entertainment during dull classes? And if you're thirteen years old in 2006 and have a yen to write your own story, where do you go to write it? I intend to conduct an informal survey (just because I wasn't writing fiction during science classes doesn't mean I was any good at them, so a formal survey is a bit beyond me), and I'd love to hear from anyone who has an opinion. I'm going to keep asking this question at intervals, I think . . .