[Wow! December 1 already! If you’re in the market for stocking-stuffers and/or gifts for your reading friends (and yourself), don’t forget books. Print is a wee bit too big for the stocking, but an Amazon gift card for ebook purchases fits nicely there. Reading is the most exciting and educational entertainment you can do. No computer game or movie lets you get inside the minds of characters–that’s mind-blowing!]

When I thought about writing my first YA novel, The Secret Lab, I perused many YA novels and read many words of advice, sometimes contradictory, about how to write one. Now that I’m in the midst of writing another, I’m reconsidering what I learned or didn’t learn, factoring in some observed behavior from readers, past and potential reviewers, recent books, and our changing times.

First, let’s consider the traditional definition of YA (young adult) literature. These books were designed for tweens and teens 12-18 with plots, characters, and settings appropriate for that age group as well as their parents who wanted to shelter those kids from questionable content that might damage young minds. Yeah, that definition is intentionally snarky; moreover, it’s completely wrong now, if it ever was right. You might say the first books of the Harry Potter series are YA fantasy and satisfy that definition, but the last aren’t YA at all, just dark fantasy. In our present cultural morass where kids have to deal with sexual identity and bullying and worry about perverts and school shootings, kids, starting with the millennials, have had to and do grow up fast and face challenges previous generations didn’t have to worry about until they were in the workforce. Parents might still want to protect their children, but their children might be exposed to many things they can’t even imagine. How else can you explain two girls trying to sacrifice a friend in order to please some internet fictional character?

Today YA has to consider rather adult themes. Kids are exposed to many of them. A ten-year-old probably knows more about sex and reproduction than a twenty-year-old in the seventies. A ten-year-old might be marching for or against Trump. A ten-year-old can be bullied; he could take a gun to school. He can be raped by a priest or star in porn movies. They can decide they’re a member of the LGBT community, or feel angst that they have sexual desires. Most of all, they can get upset when parents try to shelter them from all that’s going on. Kids need to be educated about an indifferent and often violent world and coaxed to make it better.

Perhaps it’s still true that young readers don’t have a mature reader’s extensive active vocabulary, but I’ve seen many cases where teachers, who are failing in many other areas, still manage to teach at least the brightest students good reading skills and develop an enriched vocabulary. That’s encouraging on one hand but frustrating on the other as young people turn away from books. I don’t think dumbing down the vocabulary will bring them back to reading, though.

The best tactic right now? An author can still call his book YA but should write the story for all ages. Let the plots, characters, and settings be important for young adults, but don’t dumb anything down. Sex and sexual identity? I read Fanny Hill when I was thirteen. Violence and criminal perversion? I was reading crime stories even earlier. Can such “adult reading” do any more damage than computer games? Or the last Harry Potter books? I doubt it. And at least the kids are reading.

The Secret Lab considered many themes associated with teen angst—mature boys and girls having sexual desire and struggling with their sexual identity; boys and girls feeling desire for older men and women; and violence and betrayal. All that’s present in this story that’s still a lot of fun to read. It probably explains why its readers aren’t just young adults but so-called young-at-heart adults who remember their own struggles with these issues.

Reviewers take note. The Secret Lab had one who was probably well intentioned when she mentioned that my sentences weren’t long enough. I was just writing in my usual minimalist style I use in all my novels, but I thought the comment was churlish: it was a YA sci-fi mystery, after all, and the advice at the time was to use an age-appropriate vocabulary (I aimed at the higher end of that YA range, on purpose) and short sentences (mine were short, again on purpose, because of that minimalist style). Given that a book is a well-written story that grabs the reader, the only just complaint a reviewer of YA books has nowadays is when a book that claims to be YA is only about old men and women doing adult things with nary a young adult anywhere.

In that sense, after careful consideration, my new YA sci-fi mystery, The Secret of the Urns, will generally be like the first—an interesting story about a precocious girl growing up on a strange planet to study and befriend some friendly ETs. I can predict that people from a precocious ten on up will enjoy it. Or, maybe not—some people just don’t like sci-fi no matter what the story is!

***

Aristocrats and Assassins. Detective Castilblanco and his wife go on vacation. They both see a wee bit too much of Europe, including a few royals who are kidnapped. Written before the Paris, Brussels, and Nice attacks, I don’t think anyone would say now that this is impossible. Maybe European security agencies should consider it a warning?

In libris libertas!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2016 at 4:00 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.