Growing up, I heard my generation described by a number of different labels: New Boomers, Generation Y, and Generation Wired, just to name a few. Now that we’ve stumbled our way into our twenties and thirties, we finally seem to have settled on one label: Millennial.
I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what it meant to be a millennial myself until I started writing Every Last Minute, my current work in progress. The main characters, Will and Mara, are about one or two years older than I am. Like me, they were in their twenties during the three years in which their story takes place: 2011, 2006, and 2015.
Do all these similarities mean that I can skip the research and write Will and Mara’s story based off my own experience? Of course not. I’m far too Type A for that. :) Part of the pre-writing for this story meant researching what it meant for Will and Mara to grow up in the Millennial generation.
My preliminary research did not inspire a lot of confidence. At first glance, it seemed that millennials had a pretty bad reputation. Here’s the gist:
Millennials are lazy.
We’re entitled.
We’re obsessed with ourselves, our social media, and our tech gadgets.
