A Further Examination of the Topic

The discussion is going strong over on the Knight Agency Blog, but rather than open my big trap over there, I’m going to do it here, where I have free reign to be as long-winded and argumentative as I’d like. 😉

An anonymous poster asked Deidre about what age constituted YA, and she responded with:

…age cut off is variable right now. When I shopped out Diana Peterfreund’s new book and series, we had offers on it as both adult and YA. Her main protagonist is a junior in college. I think there’s a real “middle zone” right now, and it depends somewhat on tone and material of the work.

Tone, material, and market. Everyone knows that children read up. The market for, say, Seventeen magazine is 12-14 year olds. Dorchester’s Smooch line features books with kids who are 15 and 16, but is read mostly by kids who are 10-12. Berkley’s Jam line is supposed to be aimed a little older, maybe for 13 and 14 year olds? (Marianne?) Nephele was right earlier when she said that YA is categorized more by the age of the characters than the age of the readers. 10 year olds are what the industry calls “middle grade.” there’s a guy in my RWA chapter who writes historical middle-grade novels for boys. These are the books you read in 4,5 and 6th grade. It’s the difference between the Lois Lowrys and the Caroline B. Cooneys.

I did get offers from both young adult and adult houses, but I’m very glad things panned out in the way they did. The YA houses had more questions about the tone and material of my work. The characters are very free in their “sex talk” — more like adult characters would be than children. But that’s who they are. Juniors and seniors in college. They don’t live with their parents anymore, they have their own apartments, they’re legal to drink, and though sex is still a really big deal to them (like it was to me at 21), most of them have already been around the block a few times, sexually speaking. At that age, many of the issues that populate YA books: underage drinking and sex, parental relations, sibling rivalry, first love, are not something that my characters are concerned about.

But college years are a transitional time, so many other adolescent issues do come to the forefront, though in a slightly different way. The characters still think about cliques, of course, and popularity, though there’s less of a sense of there being a “popular” crowd, and more of a sense of their being various social circles with little interaction between them, much like the adult world. The issue of parental control has a big part in the book, though it is more a question of, “Should my parents be controlling my choices any longer?” Again, these are not minors who are living at home, and the only hold their parents have on them is financial — their only means of control is to pull the plug on tuition. Of course, the biggest question in the book is about finding one’s identity, which is huge in YA, and huge in every other kind of fiction as well. Chick lit is all about the female search for self. So I don’t think that question is necessarily a YA one — you can find yourself at 50, too.

So I guess the final answer is that my books are truly about young adults making that last transitional step from adolescence to adulthood.

Even before I started shopping the book, a friend who writes YA told me that she didn’t know if it was really YA — a very astute observation. One house initially asked us if we would consider changing the characters to be freshmen in college.

(By the way, the answer to a question like that is always, “That’s a possibility,” even if what you want to say is, “Hell no! You get tapped into a secret society your senior year, after they see what you can do! That would change the verisimilitude of the whole project!”)

But mostly we were questioned about “the sex talk” which surprised me, since I wrote the book in the voice of a 21 year old, taking into account the way a 21 year old would talk about sex. And I’ve read Judy Blume. I’ve read Gossip Girls. I didn’t think I was getting out of line. But apparently, 18 year olds talking about sex as something salacious and shocking and most of all, new is something entirely different than 21 year olds using the exact same words to describe something they’ve been doing for three years. It’s an interesting distinction, and one that bears further examination down the line (as in, when I’m out from under the humid atmospheric pressure of my current deadlines).

Bantam was one of the houses that liked the story exactly how I wrote it. In fact, from my first conversation with my fabulous WiseEditor ™ Kerri Buckley, I knew that she understood my story and my heroine on an elemental level, knew without being told that it wasn’t about teens, and it wasn’t about grown ups, but it was about that difficult moment in college when you’re neither and both, and unsure which you want, anyway.