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T A B L E_T A L K

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A judge of the Seventeen magazine fiction contest recalls what was endearing about the writers of the 400 stories she read -- even the really bad ones.

BY CURTIS SITTENFELD | Like everyone else, I have no idea what women want (and I, despite my name, actually am a woman). But I do know what adolescent girls care about. How? Last spring, I served as one of five judges in Seventeen magazine's annual fiction contest, an institution whose former winners include Sylvia Plath, Lorrie Moore and the dread Joyce Maynard. Among the 400-plus pieces I read, I ended up picking both the first- and third-place winners. I also ended up being highly entertained and unexpectedly charmed by all the stories that the teenage writers chose to tell.

I'll be honest: I didn't enter into being a judge anticipating that I'd learn much. For one thing, at the age of 23, I am myself not that far removed from adolescence. And for another, I had won this same contest six years earlier. When I won, in 1992, it was the summer before my senior year in high school, and the judge who selected me as the winner (I submitted eight stories -- you know, just to be safe) was Jennifer Egan, who went on to write the novel "The Invisible Circus" and the story collection "Emerald City." In the years since then, I have had both fiction and nonfiction in Seventeen several times, and I've been receiving what seems to be a lifetime subscription to the magazine -- its appearance first in my college dorms and now in my apartment is a source of both confusion and amusement to visitors. They're even more surprised when I tell them that I actually read it.

This is all just to say that before serving as a judge, I already believed I had more than a passing familiarity with the world of girls. But there was something about hearing (or reading) so many of their voices -- in the aggregate, unedited, as they chose to present themselves instead of as someone else, like Time magazine or the WB, chose to present them -- that was both surprising and endearing. The stories came from nearly every state in the country -- Arvada, Colo., and Niceville, Fla., and Ypsilanti, Miss. -- as well as India, France and the Philippines. Their authors were named Brandi and Aimee, LaKeisha and Prudence, Willow, Meredith, Denise, Desiree, Abby and Melissa. Often, the handwriting in the notes that accompanied stories was big and bubbly. "I spilled my guts out for you and I hope you enjoy it," wrote one girl. Another signed her letter "your eternal reader" (addressed, obviously, to Seventeen and not to me). Several authors included class pictures, which I simultaneously had no idea what to do with and felt unable to throw away.

As for the stories themselves, a few showed a great deal of talent,including the excellent winning story, "Farewell, Angelina," by 17-year-oldSusannah Rutherglen, which is out now in the March Seventeen. Susannah's writing is clean and understated, her characters seem real and her details are just right. All of this was pretty obvious within the first fewparagraphs. Most of the other stories, meanwhile, were abysmally bad. Maybe that sounds mean, but I would argue that the same great-abysmal ratio applies to any batch of writing produced by people who are not, by profession, writers; that is, it had nothing to do with the fact that the writers were an average of about 15 years old. One summer during college, Iwas an intern at the Atlantic Monthly, and our primary responsibility wasreading unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Unfortunately, the experience helped me understand why instead of featuring so-called fresh voices, magazines choose to print stories by John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates overand over again.

There was, however, one significant difference in the submissions I read for Seventeen: In the writers' awkward phrasing or corny descriptions, you could imagine all the ways they might improve if they stuck with it. And that was precisely because they were 15 years old.

N E X T_ P A G E: Popularity, cute boys and death