Why I Read YA

Lately--lately, in this instance, meaning always--there are some opinion pieces making the rounds comparing YA books to
adult
literary
reeeeeal
books.

Sometimes my dad tells me that he likes my books and he thinks I have real talent, and he thinks I really could write a real book. He asks me when I'm going to write the
great
American
nooooovel.

I'm currently a senior year English major. You have no idea how many people I know whose big goal is to write the great American novel. In class, I read great piece of literature after great piece of literature and I really, genuinely like some of them. I do. But when it's time for me to curl up with something I'm actually looking forward to? When stretched out on a towel on the beach or balled up crying on my bed and I need that book, it's Melina Marchetta or Amy Reed or Steve Brezenoff or David Levithan or Jaclyn Moriarty, to name a few. It's YA.

People used to ask me if I would write
reeeeeal
books
when I grew up.

I am twenty-one-and-one-half as of last Friday. I'm not saying I'm ancient (I'll leave that to my infant girlfriend) but I'm unquestionably outside of the YA age group. I know I'm far from the only adult reading YA, and I don't know if it's my on-the-cusp age or my body of work or my major that has people so fucking confused by the fact that I care a lot more about stories about girls by their lockers than about men who want to fuck their sisters (what up, Faulkner, write a different book why don't you).

And see, that there is part of it. When my dad asks me why I haven't written that great American novel, I have totally told him, "Because I'm a Jewish girl."

There are some fucking fantastic literary ('what the fuck is literary anyway?' is a topic for a different post and a better writer) adult books written by women, but, um...where are they? Ohhh that's right, they're being ignored and shoved aside by literary purists just like YA books are! Come sit with us, ladies, our table is ever-expanding.

I've mentioned this before, I think, but I had a teacher in high school who once said to me, after Break sold, "I just feel like there's a level of depth missing in YA books, you know?" in this thoughtful voice like she expected me to agree.

Well, you know what? No, I don't fucking know.

There is a reason adults come back to these high school stories, and it isn't a reason I can figure out how to articulate. But it's the same reason people who very much aren't teenagers love Glee and Friday Night Lights. There is something enduring and universal about these stories.

And there is something twisted and weird and personal and so, so not monolithic. And while we're still working on the diversity-of-characters thing (and trust me I am giving myself a get-out-of-fucking-nothing-free card, I have written waaay too many books about white boys to get off scot-free--I mean, I love my books, but write a fucking Asian girl, hannah) we have a ever-changing, ever-evolving body of authors. 

And I get that literary canon moves a lot slower. I get that.

But maybe it means literary canon needs to shut the fuck up a little bit. Because this isn't 1950 and writers aren't (just?) impotent men with typewriters and dark rooms and alcoholism and complexes. Writers are moms and teenagers and gay boys and black women and Jewish girls trying to tap out a blog post while the aforementioned infant girl watches RuPaul's Drag Race. 

Maybe it doesn't have to be such a fucking art all the time. Maybe I shouldn't be getting a degree in this shit. Maybe I just don't get it.

Maybe I should go back to just reading my little YA books on the beach or balled up in my bed.

God, what a fucking waste that would be!

When I was a sophomore, a creative writing teacher told me that after he finished his

great

American

novel

he wanted to write some really commercial book about zombies. What a fucking joke, right! A real writer deigning to write about zombies!

Last month I ran into a girl from that class who has him again this semester. I asked if he'd finished his great American novel yet.

He has not.

My zombie book came out ten months ago.

(I love the taste of brains in the autumn. Tastes like legitimacy.)

Getting Your NaNo On

So! National Novel Writing Month is coming up. I'm sure most of you know the gist already: 30 days, 1 book, 50,000 words. Details are here, and if you decide you're interested, you should hurry up and sign up! We're starting in 5 days!

This will be my 3rd year doing NaNo. For me, the challenge isn't writing quickly; it's getting a 50,000 word first draft. This is really, really long for me. A lot of my finished books clock it at around 50,000, and my first drafts are usually significantly shorter, somewhere in the 25-30,000 range. So even though people assume NaNo is easy for me because I'm a fast writer, it's actually a significant challenge for me as well. I won in both 2008 and 2009 (though in 2009 I cheated by adding 50K to an existing project. shhhh. But 2008 was legit).

If you're interested in NaNo but nervous about the idea of 50K in 30 days, here are some tips that you can take or leave as they suit you.

--Take a risk. I like to do something weird for NaNo. My planned project for this year is a ghost story, and hopefully (hopefully!) the first of a trilogy I have mapped out.

This is so astronomically far from anything I've ever done, but the good news is, I can't give up. I am absolutely positive that I'm going to start panicking and trying to jump ship 10,000 words in. And any other time, I probably would. But not for NaNo. For NaNo, you have to keep going. Or you LOSE. I don't like losing.

--Nail down the beginning. Choose your first line NOW. You don't want to be staring at a blank page. You can change it later, whatever, but give yourself a springboard. I have my first chapter all written up in my head. Then God knows what happens.

--Don't pace yourself. It doesn't work that way, at least not for me. Start strong. Write as many words a day as you can. Aim for 5K a day. Power through for as long as you can.

There will come a day where this gets absolutely impossible. You'll be lucky to get 1K out. And that's okay. Because you have a few days of writing 5K behind you, and you're already ahead of the game.

It will get harder to write as you get to the middle of your book. You will start doubting yourself and pulling out your hair, and the lack of sleep will catch up with you. Keep pushing as hard as you can, but give yourself permission to have some days when you're barely trickling out words. It happens. But don't try to slow down the part where you're buzzing and exciting because your book is shiny and new in hopes of saving your energy for later. It doesn't work.

--Get a support group. Physical ones work really well for some people; ask around and see if there are meetups in your area. You might be surprised!

If you're a hermit like me, there's always, thank God, the internet. You can find friends on the NaNo forums, or you can bully some of your existing friends into participating with you.

It's very, very helpful to have people to bitch to. If the Musers didn't do NaNo, I can't imagine I would. Most of the fun of this month comes from suffering together. It breaks up the loneliness we all feel sometimes, when it's just us and our laptops and our boyfriends complaining they never see us.

--Welcome help. Once you sign up, you'll get pep talk emails. Read them! Love them! They really DO help, if you let them. (And you might just find a quote from someone you know in there. I mean, maybe. You know a lot of people, right? I'm just saying it's possible. Stop looking at me like that. I don't know anything...)

People will reassure you. People who haven't read a word of your novel will tell you that it's brilliant and you can finish and you can do it. Believe them! Don't be a sourpuss. Sourpusses don't finish novels. I won't say what they do. This is a family-friendly blog. (Stop looking at me like that.)

So. If you decide to sign up, make sure to look me up. I'm right here. You can read a description of what I'll be working on, if you like. I'll put up an excerpt once the month has started. Add me as a buddy if you want to see how I'm doing, and leave links to your profiles in the comments so I can friend you back! And good luck!

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.