To be honest, I think for part of my late teens my character didn't really develop very much. I was in a state of cold storage.
My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.
'Maze Runner' is about a group of teens that live inside this giant maze. And outside the maze are these creatures that come out at night. The centerpiece of the maze where we stay is called the Glades, and we call ourselves the Gladers.
For a long time I wanted to be a comic strip artist but when I started doing them in my teens they were getting really elaborate with tons of poses and a lot of information.
I didn't really blossom until my mid teens, and by that time I had to work on my personality to make people like me. I found it easy to make people laugh and I was always pretty popular.
I walk fast. I have an aversion to wasting time. My sense of constant motion is one of the reasons that my eldest daughter, Amy, nicknamed me 'the Tasmanian Devil' when she was in her teens.
That's important, apologizing, listening, you know, I think the teens I speak with, most of them don't feel understood. They feel like they're being lectured to all the time.
I've always gravitated towards those ultimate lines in songs, the line you grab on to. That line in 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' 'Here we are now/Entertain us' - the irony, the antagonism; that's always stuck with me.
Every Teen Challenge ministry is responsible for raising its own finances, but we assist these works with finances, prayer and counseling, especially overseas in areas such as Siberia, Africa, South America.
I really liked 'Starter For Ten' because I grew up watching 1980s teen films like 'St. Elmo's Fire' and 'The Breakfast Club' and I've always wanted to play the underdog lead hero in a 1980s-inspired film.
I saw myself as an outsider as a teen. I was home-schooled and got my G.E.D. when I was 16; I wasn't interested in high school at all and figured that college might be more entertaining.
I started wearing all black around the time I got into Nirvana. I first heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' when I was about 12, and I remember jumping on my bed, so excited about it.
If you were an alien who came to our bookstores - or browsed our teen magazines - you'd think that only Earth girls who look like Mila Kunis ever got any action.
I played teen roles until high definition came out, and I could never understand it. I would go in for adult roles and be older than many of the people auditioning, but they'd cast the girl without a line on her face.
When I was a freshman, I didn't have that much time for extra-curriculars, so I didn't do any theater stuff. Actually, I didn't do it with my school. I did theater with this thing called Teen Source.
I'm not a teen anymore, but growing up, some of my favorite things were, like, 'Twin Peaks,' which wasn't even really my time, and this is one of the things, like a weird, quirky, small town mystery.
I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.
I didn't want to be the typical teen idol. I didn't want to be Leif Garrett. I didn't want to be Shaun Cassidy, David Cassidy or Parker Stevenson. I wanted to do my own thing.
Well, I actually first got into music as a small child, and as I became a teen, I sought out making money from music, weather that was singing lounge gigs, backup in studios, or weddings.
And at some point I would like to talk my publisher into doing an anthology of my poetry alongside some teen readers' poetry. It would be fun, and really wonderful to get their stuff out there.
The Teen Challenge Training Center on Pennsylvania farmland houses over 200 men in rehab. Other farms and centers have been birthed out of this ministry all over the world.
