Young adults

My agent’s recent blog post and the ensuing discussion (especially by Shannon) prompted me to come out with a post that’s been marinating in the back of my mind for some time now. “Young Adult” has been a big buzzword in the market recently. It seems like every romance writer I know has been jumping on the bandwagon. Another agent at my agency, Nephele Tempest, believes the explosion of popular YA fiction is due to the Hollywood market explosion of the 18-24 demographic. Everyone’s watching Buffy and The O.C.. Everyone loves Hillary Duff and Lindsay Lohan.

Is this new? Not a bit. I was a sophomore in college when Mandy Moore, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson were the biggest names in the music business. The WB was making its name solely on the reputation of its high-school shows like Dawson’s Creek, Roswell, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And the audience for those shows were DEFINITELY not just the young. To this day, the single biggest fan of Roswell I know is, um, over 29. 😉 The obsession with youth is not new. Maybe it took this long for the publishing industry to jump on the bandwagon? After all, the TV rights to Roswell were sold before the book package got a deal.

Shannon writes about her daughter:

She felt cheated she’d “missed out on” so much back then. 🙂 …

Anyway, enough rambling. Just wanted to point out the opinion of a teen, who wishes she’d had more to read back then, and point out that the growth of YA should be well-received by the young readers, and it’s about time the publishers realized it!!

I do think these things are cyclical, though. I don’t know how old Shannon is, but if her daughter’s 16, I assume she’s over 29 as well. I fall right in the center, and I think that during my young adult years, there was an enormous amount for me to read — and I read it all, too. Never much of one for those “Sweet Valley” books, but I devoured anything by Caroline B. Cooney (dramas like Face on the Milk Carton, or Twenty Pageants After where I got my first taste of Yale), Lois Duncan (super-creepy gothics), Lois Lowry (her amazing Newberry Award winner The Giver as well as the more “middle grade” Anastasia comedies long after I should have been “too old for them”) and Christopher Pike (to this day, my fave horror novelist). And yes, when all my friends in high school wouldn’t be caught dead in a young adult section, I was there, reading these books with no more embarrassment than we’d show at getting caught picking up the latest Harry Potter. The Avon historical romances with their “ripped bodice” covers, I hid. The young adult, I read in the open.

Nephele said:

I think the key to great YA is not talking down to your audience. Most good YA is simply categorized as such because the characters are in that age bracket.

Apparently, I had that figured out, even then. Lois Lowry was my hero. She could write something as funny and smart as Anastasia Ask Your Analyst, then turn around and worldbuild the incredible future dystopia of The Giver.

In You’ve Got Mail Meg Ryan’s children’s-bookstore-owner character (named Kate, because it must be written into her contract somewhere that her characters must always be named Kate, or perhaps Maggie) says, “When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.”

Is that not a truism? I remember the books I got lost in as a child, and every other reader I know does too. Stand in a group of grown women who read and say “Anne of Green Gables” to them and watch them get misty-eyed. These books I read, the Pikes and the Lowrys and the Cooneys and everything else became part of who I was. And I thought that writers for children had the greatest responsibility of all to write something true and lasting and big.

I’m hearing some disturbing rumblings in response to this YA explosion. Some writers who want to break in because it’s “easier to write for kids” — as if kids don’t expect the same in pacing, in characterization, in plots, or hope to use their YA experience “to break into real books.” Boy, do they have it backwards. If anything, kids are even pickier when it comes to wanting something that blows their socks off, even more sensitive to lazy writers. And if it’s not good enough, you might turn them off of reading altogether. There’s responsibility for you. And as for “real books” — these are the same people who would tear your heads off if you dared say that romance wasn’t “real.” I dare anyone to tell J.K Rowling that she’s not writing real books.

Good writing is good writing, no matter what genre your story is, no matter what audience you’ve written it for. So to all you YA hopefuls out there, I want to issue you a challenge. Write a YA that you want adults to read. Write a YA that appeals to readers from 8 to 82. When you write an adult book, you’ve only got to write it for a limited age bracket of readers. When you write a book for children, it needs to resonate for everyone born in the last century.