Writing Blog Number 2

20240306 Writing Young Adult Fiction

Writing Young Adult Fiction

Okay... This is awkward. In Australia and the UK, Young Adult is 14-21 years old. In the USA it is 12-18 years old. This does mean that the YA works in the USA skew towards a younger, less sophisticated audience than elsewhere.

However, thanks to several releases in the early 2000s, some of the publishers in the USA have expanded the YA umbrella to be more akin to the UK and Australia. The USA tends to use the phrase New Adult for those aged 18-25, but we don't use that term, though it can be seen at times. We also use Middle Grade for 10-14 year olds, though some of these works are sold as Young Adult in the US.

Confusing? Yes. But that is the way it is.

Anyway, I will be looking at this from an Australian perspective. (As an aside, I have had one book sold as Young Adult, and that came from an Australian publisher.)

In the 1980s, and possibly earlier, Young Adult was considered a separate genre, or was derided as a marketing ploy. However, what is has become is a rating. It is like a movie rating system, indicating the best age a work is suited for, but the work is not restricted to that age group. Many adults enjoy what is considered Young Adult fiction. Young adult can be horror (R.L. Stine), fantasy (J.K. Rowling), historical (Morris Gleitzmann), comedy (Dav Pilkey), paranormal romance (Stephenie Meyer), action (Suzanne Collins) or any other genre you can think of.

Before I became a teacher I used to think Young Adult involved simplistic story-telling and basic ideas. When I started to teach and read a lot of YA works, I realised the story-telling is as complex as that in adult novels and the characters just as fully realised. What sets YA apart from adult works are:
* the age of the protagonists, being the same age as, or a couple of years older than, that of the readers,
* the issues they are dealing with being more to do with "coming of age" or "self-awareness" or a myriad of other things that adults have already been through,
* a stronger concept of relationships as friendships and love as platonic instead of everything leading to sex.

Young Adult uses the same sort of language as adult works, though there are often less metaphors and allusions. The writing has a high level of literacy; YA writers do not write down to an audience. The readers do pick up on this, and react badly. Write as if for an adult with less life experience. That was the advice we received from Morris Gleitzmann at a writers panel I attended.

The length of a YA novel nowadays can be the same length as adult, maybe a little shorter. Many publishers who work in the market do like it to be about 80% of an adult novel's length, however. Thirty years ago, it would have been 50% to 75% of an adult novel’s length maximum, but that is no longer the case.

Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, when it comes to writing YA it is vital to have a person of that age as one of your beta readers (my daughter is mine... she is brutal) and, if you can, get a teacher or librarian involved with that age group to beta read as well.

This is brief, but there is not much to say that is not covered by all other styles of writing.