MG vs. YA

I've written YA for a long time, and I've only seriously been writing MG for about six months. In a lot of ways, I'm still learning the ropes.

But MGs are my favorites to read. They have been ever since I was very, very young. Even while I was still reading picture books or early chapter books on my own, my mom was reading my sister and me MG books before we went to sleep. I know a lot of voracious readers who grew up reading the classics. They read Huck Finn and Jane Eyre when they were five. I didn't do that. (Hell, I still haven't read Huck Finn). I grew up with middle grade books.

By the time I was eleven, I'd switched mainly to YA, and that's still the bulk of what I read. And don't get me wrong. I love YA. Some of my favorite books are YA. But a lot of my very, very favorites are MG, which is why writing it has been this pretty amazing experience.

People have asked me lately what the differences are between writing YA and writing MG. Some of them are easy. But before I start...

I'M INVOKING THE EXCEPTION RULE: YES. THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS. FROM HERE ON OUT, EXPECT EXCEPTIONS. COOL? COOL.

--In MG, your main character's probably going to be 8-14 years old. In YA, you're looking at 15-18.

--Sex, drugs, cursing, those things that some people still think you can't do in YA? Well, you can't do them in MG.

--MG is probably shorter. This is way more relevant in contemporary (as is probably everything I'm going to say) than in fantasy. And if you're like me, they'll probably end up being about the same size anyway, because all my books are fairly short. BREAK (YA) is 43,000 words, INVINCIBLE SUMMER (YA) is 53,000, ZOMBIE TAG (MG) is 44,000. Not a huge amount of variation there.

There are other differences I've noticed that are harder to define, but that I think are really noteworthy and interesting.

--THEMES.

MG books tend to be very focused on the main character's place in his community, whatever that may be. The MG protag wants to fit in. That doesn't have to be as literal as "I want the popular kids to like me!" though it certainly can be. You'll see a lot of "I want to be the son my father wants me to be," "I want to make the baseball team," "I want everyone to stop treating me like I'm a freak because I have cerebral palsy," or "I want my community to trust me despite this mistake I made a while ago." From there, conflict happens and things can get very confusing (though they can also stay focused on that initial motivation) but when the book starts out, very often the main character's primary goal is to find his place and slip into it.

I know it isn't a book (and I haven't even read the books. I suck) but I use the movie How To Train Your Dragon all the time when people ask me what a MG book is, because it's such a perfect example in my head. At the beginning of the movie, all Hiccup wants is to be a big strong dragon hunter like the other men in the village.

The themes in YA, on the other hand, tend to be focused on the individual alone or on her relationship with a very select group of people. "I want to get over my father's death." "I want to get into a healthy relationship. "I want to stop doing drugs." "I want to start doing drugs." "I want to get into a good college." "I want everyone to leave me alone."

Unlike MGs, which typically start wide (Hiccup's whole village) and later narrow somewhat (Hiccup's friendship with Toothless--though please keep in mind that the wider issue does not get left behind), a YA sometimes starts wide but almost always ends up very narrowly focused.

I can't use a book example for YA when I'm not using one for MG, so let's use My So-Called Life. Angela Chase wants a new life. She has all these people and they're all new and exciting. That's the first episode. By the middle of the first season, her conflicts aren't with the whole world around her anymore. They're with whether she's going to let Jordan Catalano keep copying her homework. The other people are still there, and she can still interact with them, but the individual bits of conflict tend to be on a very very tight basis. And the main conflict is definitely not how the whole school thinks of Angela, as it is for Hiccup and his village.

And before I go on--you guys know that "fitting in" or "getting a boyfriend" or "romance" or "killing dragons"...you guys know those things aren't themes, right? I saw a writer misuse the word "theme" the other day, and it broke my heart. Those are "thematic elements"--stuff the themes are concerned with--but they aren't the themes themselves. "Fitting in is impossible without altering who you are," or "Getting a boyfriend requires more persistence than most people are willing to put in," those are themes. Really depressing ones, but themes nonetheless.

Let me know if I should do a post on stuff like themes and motifs and the differences between them. I'm an English major. I can bring it if you want it.

Anyway.

--SCOPE.

The easiest way to define this is--in MG, you get to save the world. In YA, you don't.

And this is related to the last point. A typical plot arc in MG starts with the kind of conflict mentioned above and turns into something like...

MAIN CHARACTER wants X. Through doing X, he learns that he has to save the world from CONSEQUENCES OF X.

By trying to accomplish his initial goal, the protagonist might learn something or do something or figure out something that will cause him to have to save the universe, or whatever his version of the universe might be (His town, his school, his family, an actual universe).

How to Train Your Dragon:

HICCUP wants TO KILL A DRAGON. Through TRYING TO KILL A DRAGON, he learns that he has to save the world from KILLING ALL THE DRAGONS BECAUSE THEY ARE ACTUALLY NOT BAD.

Zombie Tag:

WIL wants TO BRING HIS BROTHER BACK TO LIFE. Through BRINGING HIS BROTHER BACK TO LIFE, he learns that he has to save the world from ALL THE OTHER PEOPLE HE BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE.

In YA? Not so much. The climax is way more likely to be between the main character and her boyfriend, or the main character and her best friend, than it is to be between the forces of good and evil.

Are these set in stone? Nope. A YA fantasy is way more likely to have a world-saving element than a quiet, meandering MG. But these two rules *are* the reason I'm staunchly on the "They're all MG" side of the Harry Potter debate. Harry grows up, but the themes and scope don't. It's not like we're reading thousands of pages to see if he and Ginny are going to get it on, and it's not like we wanted the final showdown in Book 7 to be Ron and Harry fighting over Hermione. The rules are looser in fantasy, but I still think the Harry Potter themes stick them all into the MG camp. A lot of the fantasy we have in YA right now is paranormal romance. Not a genre I'm well-versed in, but even though there's that element of a bigger threat, most of the conflict is still interpersonal, right?

--DEPTH AND BREADTH.

I've been giving YA sort of a bad rap in this post, which...sucks, because it's not at all what I intended. I love YA. And maybe this point will help illustrate why.

Generally, word for word, page for page, not as much happens in a YA. You get to linger. You get to really sink into a main character's voice. The fact that you're focused on two or three important relationships and not the fate of the whole world is such a blessing because it lets you go into everything very, very deeply. You can have fantastically complicated relationships in YA--think about Angela and Rayanne's in My So-Called Life. You have time to really delve into them and explore them and do whatever the fuck you want with them. And that's the thing, if you ask me, that makes YA so damn cool. I think again, measuring proportionally, word for word, YA books do more for character development and exploration than any other genre. (Go ahead, kill me for that. I don't care.)

In an MG book, usually more happens. You have a lot more action and movement and excitement. You cover a lot of ground. You don't have as much time to pause and dive into things. Is there time? Of course, and an MG that doesn't give itself time to build strong relationships between the characters is going to fall completely flat. Even if you're drawn to a book because of a cool plot--and at this age, most of the readers are--you're going to stay because you love the characters. But MG does sometimes need to leave more to the imagination than a YA, simply because there isn't time to explore all the nuances of the characters' relationships.

I mean, you have to go save the world.