“I try to pick things people will recognize four to five years from now,” Rowell says. “I don’t think it hurts to add those. It adds to our cultural literacy. It adds to what we know about ourselves.” Technology and Internet culture, however, change even quicker than our pop-culture lexicons, so Rowell says she avoided references to Tumblr, Fanfiction.net, and some of the fanfiction community’s terminology—like shipping and slash fiction—out of concern that too many brand names or esoteric details would trip up unfamiliar readers.

Green, on the other hand, is confident America’s Next Top Model will be a timeless reference: “Even if you haven’t heard of the show in some beautiful utopia 30 years from now, the entire show is encapsulated in its title,” he says. “You know everything you need to know from the four words used to describe the show.”

Get Input From Real Teenagers

New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult has written close to two dozen novels, many of which—like My Sister’s Keeper and Nineteen Minutes—focus on memorable teenage characters. But it wasn’t until last year that she wrote a book specifically for young-adult readers, Between the Lines, which she co-wrote with her teenage daughter, Samantha van Leer.

“Having a co-writer who was a teenager was like having a built-in B.S. meter sitting next to me,” Picoult says. “Every now and then, Sammy would say something out loud that was such an apt metaphor. It wasn’t something I would have thought of, but it was something she was living every day because she was in high school when she was writing this book. The example I always think about is a group of popular girls in the book who are described as being like a bunch of grapes because, honestly, do you ever see just one of them alone? I thought it was hilarious because it was so true.”

It’s not the first time Picoult used a real-life teenager to make her writing more accurate. When she was writing The Pact, a 1998 novel about a teenage suicide pact, she picked up some pizza and soda, called up her babysitter, and interviewed her and her friends. “I just listened to them talk to each other and tried to hone in on where their minds were about that topic,” Picoult says. “I think if you’re a writer, you do your research and do your due diligence. It sounds funny to listen to teenagers as research.”

Not every writer takes this approach—Rowell didn’t need to investigate online fan communities when crafting the characters of Fangirl. “I’m addicted to Tumblr, so when I was writing, I had read so much fan fiction and spend so much time in fandom places on the Internet, a lot of it I had internalized,” says Rowell, a former newspaper columnist. (Fangirl, unsurprisingly, was the first pick for Tumblr’s official book club).

But Rowell did draw on those communities when she needed feedback. “I had friends in fandom who I would say to, every once in awhile, ‘Tell me how you feel about this, does this ring true to you, talk to me,’” she says. “I write from what I know, and if I write something I don’t know, I’ll go out and talk to them. It doesn’t feel like an expedition to find out what the teens are doing. Because I was a reporter for so long, it makes sense to me.”