Writing and Selling the YA Novel Read online

Think about this: Have you ever watched a performer standing on stage belting out songs to a huge audience and thought that you wouldn't have the courage and composure to do the same? Have you then found out the performer was just fifteen or sixteen years old? Teens are capable of amazing accomplishments, yet they are also just beginning to experiment with adult roles. They're constantly shaping their identities and redefining how they interact with the ever-changing world around them.

  This is the deep well from which YA literature draws. Our audience is astute, demanding, inquisitive, and always in flux. Their openness to diversity of form and content allows the YA writer a nearly limitless canvas. As author Bruce Brooks says in Marc Aron-son's Exploding the Myths: The Truth About Teens and Reading, "Someone who does not share the fundamental conviction that these [teens] are people of profound integrity, intelligence, and feeling ought to be a writer, editor, publisher, critic, librarian, or bookseller for someone else. Young adults deserve our best regard and our best literature."

  I believe they are getting it.

  Young adult writers today are constantly exploring the teenage world, giving it the layers and complexity it deserves. Understanding what other authors have created and analyzing how they've accomplished it can be an important learning experience and may even remind you of a few things from your own past that you think you've forgotten. It will certainly help you determine whether this is the market you are best suited to write for.

  Writing for teens isn't easy. It's a balancing act—weighing what's relevant with what's timeless—but if you can do this, you can succeed in any genre.

  DEFINING YOUNG ADULT_

  Maybe you're thinking all this sounds great but wondering how you'll know when the book you're reading or working on is a YA novel. Maybe what you're writing is really a middle-grade novel, or perhaps it's more suited to adults. Sure, teen novels are exciting and challenging, but what exactly are they?

  This question isn't as easy to answer as you might think.

  With almost every genre of literature you can create a list of definable characteristics, and while there will always be exceptions, the exceptions aren't the rule. Writing for young adults defies this description. You'll find books like Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girl series sharing a bookshelf with M.T. Anderson's acclaimed literary novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Do such diverse books have anything in common? Is YA literature even a genre?

  In 2,006 there was a heated debate on author Malcolm Gladwell's blog about this very subject. In the course of an entry about plagiarism, Gladwell made the following comment: "This is teen literature.

  It's genre fiction. These are novels based upon novels based upon novels ...

  Needless to say, his opinion sparked much controversy and quite a few scathing responses. Numerous people pointed out that Gladwell's statement reflected his own ignorance of the scope and quality of books available for teens today, and that teen literature, in fact, encompasses all genres. Which is true. You'll find romance, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, literary fiction, nonaction, horror ...

  According to the The New Oxford American Dictionary, the word genre means "a particular kind or style of art or literature." Does teen literature fit this definition? If it's not a genre, what's the glue that holds it together as a category?

  The one defining characteristic of YA literature is its audience. Young adult books are written for or marketed to teens.

  That's it.

  Take almost any other element and try to use it to define the whole and you will find it falls short. Do YA books always feature teen protagonists? Most of the time, but when you look at books like Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, you'll find lead characters of all ages. How about style? Aren't books for teens shorter, with fewer descriptive passages than adult books? Not always. Just look at Stephenie Meyer's rich and haunting Twilight series. How about modern-day relevance? Don't books for teens need to reflect their world? Many of them do, but there are also plenty of books written for young adults that qualify as historical fiction or take place in fantastical lands with no relationship to our own world whatsoever.

  Even the definition of YA literature as "books written for teens" can be questioned. It's becoming increasingly common for books to be published for the adult audience in one country and marketed for the teen audience in another. If the author's intention was to write a book for adults, can we still classify it as YA literature if it gets marketed that way?

  Young adult books are often referred to as coming-of-age literature, and many novels that are now regarded as YA classics, such as Robert Cormier's terrific novel The Chocolate War, actually began as adult novels that publishers couldn't find a niche for in the adult marketplace.

  It's my belief that the only way to define YA literature is to continually go back to its audience and to allow for exceptions to every rule. Teens read books of all kinds, and that's a great thing. But YA literature is a category of books that deliberately appeals to the twelve-through eighteen-year-old age group. Do eleven-year-olds read teen novels? Of course. How about thirty-three-year-olds? You bet. But these are secondary audiences rather than the primary audience, and when a writer decides to write a YA novel, these are not the audiences that will shape the choices he makes.

  Still confused?

  If you really want to see how YA literature is defined, visit your local bookstore or spend time in the teen section at your library. Which books are included? If you were a teenager today, what would you find on the shelves? Take out as many books as you have time to read and see what they're like. Pay attention to every detail, from formatting and page count to characters and plot. What do they have in common? How are they different?

  The very best way to understand literature of any kind is to read broadly. In fact, this is my number one, most important piece of advice for all writers. If you want to succeed, read!

  WRITING WITH YOUR AUDIENCE IN MIND

  So does all this confusion mean we can't write books for teens with any guidelines or principles in mind? Of course not. Even though books for teenagers vary widely, there are certain things they're not. For example, a toddler's picture book is clearly not intended as YA literature. An early chapter book with simple phrases that takes place in an elementary school is not meant to be YA literature. A book written for adults with long-winded passages about marriage and raising children is also not YA literature, although some young adults might choose to read any of these choices.

  Young adult literature keeps its audience in mind, which means the books are generally (but not always) shorter than most adult books and longer than most books for elementary-age readers. Although manga (Japanese comics) and graphic novels are becoming very popular, most YA books don't have pictures to accompany the

  text. Language is usually sharp, and many people comment that the pace of YA books is quick, reflecting the pace of life for so many teens. Of course, there are always exceptions, but generally you want to keep your teen reader turning the pages before she gets distracted by the hundreds of things competing for her attention.

  One way to do this is to feature a teen protagonist. "While there are certainly YA novels that choose not to for one reason or another, the vast majority of teen literature shares this feature. Creating a teen protagonist allows your reader to relate to the character, perhaps even sharing certain characteristics or life experiences in common with him. The character can explore the world from a teenager's perspective.

  Keeping this perspective in mind, you'll want to make choices about what material to present to your audience. Sometimes this might seem clear-cut, like not choosing life experiences your teen protagonist wouldn't have had yet; but other times it's not so clear-cut or might be defined by the novel itself. For example, parenthood might be a life experience you would relegate to adult novels, but Angela Johnson writes beautifully about teen fatherhood in her award-winning novel The First Part Last
. Standing trial might seem like another subject best left for adults, but "Walter Dean Myers's powerful novel Monster uses the trial of the main character to question the reader's understanding of legal vs. moral responsibility.

  The world of YA literature is wide open to explore almost any subject as long as that exploration is consistent with the character you create and the circumstances that character finds herself in. Later on in Shop Class we'll discuss whether certain topics or words ought to be off-limits, but for the most part, writing for teens is about examining the world we live in, the choices we make as human beings, and the consequences of our actions.

  I'll confess, I've never been a history buff. For years I found history dull and could never retain the names and dates I'd memorized once the test was taken. It was as if my brain categorized that information as unnecessary and discarded it. It wasn't until I discovered biographies that history came alive. Finally, I could read about real people with fascinating lives, and the dates took on meaning. Armed with a form of history I loved to explore, I began to see how the past shaped the world we live in, and how it points to the future.

  As you uncover the history of YA literature you'll begin to see how the stories you create have been influenced by the books published in t he past decades and how the experiences of the authors, publishers, librarians, and booksellers who have promoted literature for young adults have paved the way for the books that are emerging today. You'll also get a fascinating glimpse into the ever-changing history of young

  people in the world, and maybe even some inkling as to what the future of books for teens might hold.

  So, when exactly did YA literature begin?

  Would you be surprised if I said the answer is unclear? Probably not. I imagine that, by now, you're gaining a sense of this art form being as transitory and difficult to pin down as its audience. If I asked you to guess what the first YA book was, you might think of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders or J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Maybe one of Judy Blume's novels would come to mind. Or perhaps you'd go back even further to classics like Alexander Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo or William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

  These would all be excellent guesses.

  The truth is, the history of literature written for young adults has a murky beginning that's complicated by the various definitions of terms like "adolescents," "teenagers," and "young adults," all of which have been used interchangeably at some points in history and been considered vastly different at other points.

  According to The New Oxford American Dictionary; these words have the following meanings:

  adolescent (adj.): between childhood and maturity (n.) an adolescent person

  teenager (n.): a person in his or her teens

  teens (n.): the years of a person's age from thirteen to nineteen

  Psychologist Erik Erikson, known for his research into the development of identity, defined a young adult as a person who is between the ages of nineteen and forty (Childhood and Society, 1950), but in literature we use this term to define books written for those between the ages of twelve and eighteen. With so much confusion over what exactly a young adult is, it's no wonder YA literature is hard to define!

  The roles youth have played in the world, and the lines between childhood and adulthood, have shifted greatly over the centuries. Although our society tends to think of teenagers as being closer to children, this has not always been the prevailing attitude. People in their teens have been pharaohs, Roman emperors, kings, queens, sports champions, musicians, poets, best-selling authors, soldiers, parents, bohemians, and martyrs. At different times in the past, the period between youth and adulthood was nonexistent. People went directly from being children to taking on adult roles. Many times, these adult roles intruded into childhood, forcing children to work demanding and dangerous jobs.

  In the past, many cultures held (and some still hold) coming-of-age ceremonies where the line between youth and adulthood is definitively marked for all to see, but in our society, the path to adulthood is not usually as clear. When exactly is a person grown up? For Americans, the idea of adolescence has evolved over the years.

  Would it surprise you to know that in 1900 only 6 percent of seventeen-year-olds earned high school diplomas? (Teenagers: An American History, Grace Palladino, pg. xv) Back then, attending high school was not something young people took for granted. Most adolescents were responsible for helping their families on farms or in skilled trades. It wasn't until the Great Depression forced so many young people out of work and, consequently, out of their homes, that the government stepped in to make a high school education accessible to more than just the wealthy elite.

  This shift away from disparate jobs to mass education allowed adolescents to take on an identity as a group, and people began to look at them differently. Young people now had more opportunity to relate to each other, and they gradually began to define themselves through their music, fashion, and beliefs. Often their definitions conflicted directly with adult attempts to impose more traditional values on them.

  The tension between adult values and those of adolescents was certainly not a new thing in terms of world history—one need look no further than nineteenth-century France when so many of the impoverished artists included in the Bohemian subculture were young people who lived their nontraditional lifestyles in sharp opposition to their parents' wishes. But in America, this growing group would gain added attention and power as marketers slowly realized the economic value of reaching out to them. In fact, it was marketers who first used the term teenagers, beginning as "teeners," then "teensters," and finally becoming "teenagers" in 1941 (Palladino, pg. 5?). Targeting adolescents with advertising was not new, but defining them as teenagers and viewing them as more than potential adults waiting to fill prescribed roles took some getting used to.

  Teens and adults clashed about their choice of music and dress as the swing-loving bobby-soxers of the 1930s turned into the soldiers and V-girls of the 1940s, the rebellious rock-and-roll fanatics of the 1950s, and the long-haired hippies of the 1960s. As high school educations moved from being elite to commonplace, one thing was becoming quite clear: Young people were a powerful group who didn't intend to mimic their elders.

  As teenagers took on their own group definitions, literature meant to address their specific needs and desires had a chance to catch on. Examples of books being written for young people can be found as early as the 1800s with books like Thomas Hughes's Tom Browns School Days and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island gaining enormous success, but it wasn't until the 1940s that novels like Maureen Daly's Seventeenth Summer— often cited as the first book written in an authentic first-person teenage voice—and Betty Cavanna's Going on Sixteen paved the way for what would become YA literature. Even then, it wasn't until the 1950s that publishers and librarians first began to take this literature seriously.

  You can see this evolution in the history of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). According to its Web site (www. ala.org/yalsa), the Young Adult Services Division, as it was originally known, was formally established in June of 1957. This marked a splitting of the Association of Young People's Librarians, which was established in 1941, into the Children's Library Association and the Young Adult Services Division. Their mission was to "advocate, promote, and strengthen service to young adults as part of the continuum of total library service."

  One of the functions the Young Adult Services Division retained from the original Association of Young People's Librarians was the compiling of the annual Best Books for Young Adults list, which began in 195? and was known throughout the years as "Interesting Books" and "Significant Adult Books for Teens" before finally ending up as the list we know today.

  I mention these changes and the dates associated with them as a reflection of the way literature for teens has grown over the years. What began as a market where adult books might find popularity among teenagers has gradually developed into something much more delibe
rate.

  This burgeoning interest in literature for teenagers took a giant leap forward when government money became available to libraries in the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson's presidency. Johnson saw education as a central part of fostering the American Dream, and libraries used this funding, in part, to create YA sections and buy the books that would populate these shelves. Not coincidentally, it was around this same time period that groundbreaking books like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders and Paul Zindel's The Pigman burst onto the scene and expanded the boundaries of what could be included in teen fiction.

  As the teens of the 1980s, 1940s, and 1950s grew up, they began to write books about their own experiences as teenagers. Rather than reflecting the view of teenagers as mini-adults, waiting to obediently take on their roles as homemakers and workers, they brought to the literature they created the same openness and honesty they'd fought hard for over the decades. By the 1970s books for teens had taken on a new realism that reflected the social issues of the time. Books like Go Ask Alice, which dealt with teen pregnancy, Judy Blume's Forever, which spoke frankly about sex and birth control, and John Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, which deals with homosexuality, didn't pull any punches in their portrayal of teenagers and the tough choices they face as they mature.

  This tendency to focus on harsh realities was both a blessing and a curse for YA literature. The books from this time period broke down boundaries of acceptable subject matter and language, and they gave teens a voice of their own, but many of them also gave rise to the stigma of teen books as "problem novels"—underdeveloped stories, didactic in nature, that focused on issues rather than literary merit. Despite how varied literature for teens is today, the perception remains among many people that YA literature is somehow subpar.

  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

  If the pendulum swung too far toward didacticism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it was probably because there were so many barriers to break down—barriers that didn't exist to the same degree in adult literature. Teenagers as a group had only just begun to define themselves, and this sense of shifting identity is evident in the books written for and by them. Multiculturalism and acceptance of other sexual orientations also were just beginning to gain a foothold in our country; the irony is that the same teens who historically have been so instrumental in bringing about change in these areas are also the very same group that adults often try hardest to shelter.