As anyone who has talked to me or seen my facebook updates recently knows, I'm in the process of revising my second book for Delacorte Press (which is a loose sequel to The Forest of Hands and Teeth and will be coming out Spring 2010).
Thankfully, with the help of this article in The New Yorker, I know what I was doing wrong with the first draft. I was trying to be complicated. I was trying to be challenging and have complex themes. I wasn't stuffing it full of morals (hard to fit in a "no drinking and driving" message when there aren't cars and driving, but now I know I must find a way.) It's a shame I'm just learning these things now because it's too late to fix all of this in FHT!
But honestly, the greatest relief came when I read this line:
Surely we demand of "adult" writers (or perhaps what I really mean is "great" writers) higher moral and philosophical stakes?
The relief comes in knowing that I can lower my expectations for myself and my book. I'm not an adult writer, therefore I don't have to strive for higher stakes. Whew! Talk about a load off!
Of course, my hope is that Mishan said "adult writers" and then realized that this was too narrow of a category and decided to broaden her description to mean "great writers." However, I think this phrase can also be read to mean "adult writers = great writers." Take your pick of interpretations (and notice that some prominent YA authors gave their own thoughts in the comments to the article).
What's interesting is that my friend Diana Peterfreund sent me the link to this article because this is something we've been discussing and is something that she's blogged about recently. I'd mentioned to her that sometimes when I talk to people about my book I won't call it a YA but might call it a crossover instead. I've seen way too many times that people will perk up when they find out I have a book coming out only to go "oh," and have their faces fall when I mention it's young adult. Maybe they're expecting sparkleponies or something and don't understand what YA has become today.
Even my mom admitted feeling a little weird the first time she ventured into the YA section of the bookstore. I told her to get over it since that's where my book would be (and trust me, come March 10 I have a feeling she'll be setting up a tent in the YA section and shoving FHT into every hand that passes by... actually, she'll prob just take over the loud speaker and say "My baby wrote a book!"). In fact, I think most of my family were a little taken aback when they read my book because I don't think they know what YA has become and so they didn't know what to expect.
And maybe that's part of what's going on. Maybe that's why you have Caitlin Flanagan saying "I hate YA novels; they bore me" in a review that says two paragraphs later "Twilight is fantastic." I couldn't tell from the article what YA she's read recently. Can she really say that The Hunger Games bored her? Graceling? Uglies? The Book Thief? Skin Hunger? The House of the Scorpion? Little Brother? And if it's vampire romances she finds fantastic, what about the Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead that's been hitting the NYT list?
When someone says something so qualitative as "I hate YA novels; they bore me," I just have to wonder what YA novels they've been reading. Because honestly, I think YA novels these days are the best they've ever been! To me YA novels are incredibly complex and dynamic and daring. I feel like I see YA authors take more risks than adult authors.
I don't have as much of a problem with someone hating YA novels or calling YA books "facile" or "having uncomplicated themes and morals" or "boring" or merely "light and fun reads" and having lower moral and philosophical stakes if they'd actually read enough YA to form an opinion. Of course, perhaps the people in the article *have* read tons of YA and legitimately feel that way and perhaps I should give them that benefit of the doubt.
And yet, I cannot honestly believe that anyone could read Hunger Games or Looking for Alaska or The House of the Scorpion or any other number of YA novels out today and think that YA is facile, uncomplicated, light and having low stakes. Instead, I think most of the opinions expressed in that article are born out of ignorance, of hazy memories of what they read back in high school and what they *think* YA is like today based on a few ads for Gossip Girl on the CW.
I feel as though some people feel the need to denigrate all of YA as somehow being "lesser than." And yet at the same time, if you ask these same people to distinguish between YA and adult, they rarely can. Just look at the abovementioned article to see how difficult it is for them to decide what makes something YA. Take for example this distinction: "I assume that anything branded 'young adult' needs... to be not too long or challenging"
Really? Really? Really? I'm just agog at this one because at the very least you don't have to read any YA but just glance at a YA shelf or two to realize that length is not the dividing line between YA and adult. Or remember that teens are reading Faulkner and Shakespeare (and Faulkner ranks up there in the challenging spectrum).
You know what divides YA and adult? Which shelf someone decided to put it on. And you know how they probably made that decision? They put it on whichever shelf will help them sell more copies. There are lots of books being published as YA today that would have been published as adult books 10 years ago because YA is doing well and sales have increased while adult sales have decreased.
I wear my YA badge with pride. But I also know that some people are going to write me and my book off the minute they hear it's YA. I'm fine if they write me and FHT off, I'd just rather they do it after they've read my book rather than jumping to conclusions based on a marketing label or where it's shelved.
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Comments
I do know we generally go through a much more in-depth editorial revision process, though.
And I can't WAIT to read your book!!
I totally agree with everything you said. I just read a section of a writing book last night which tried to tell me anything I wrote for YA should be short, have an uncomplicated plot and few big words, while anything I wrote for teens should be melodramatic.
*headdesk*
I stopped reading a lot of "Adult" fiction when it all started to feel the same to me. But I don't go around blasting the general literature section of B&N just because much of it isn't my personal preference. There might be certain YA books and series I don't enjoy, but by and large, for my reading time, I would chose YA above just about anything else. And if other people don't, that's fine. I just hate it when people blast the entire genre because they aren't fond of one or two titles they may have read and/or skimmed through and decided they didn't like.
And honestly? The "morals" I've found in books written for an adult audience tend to be much more wishy-washy than the ones I see in a lot of YA (not all- but most).
As for the writing advice in that book -- please forget it! Ack! I think if anything, teens are MORE used to being challenged in their reading than adults. Just look at what they're reading for school!!
YA has changed significantly since I was in high school/middle school, thousands of years ago.
Yes, looking at the rows of books in the store--a large percentage of which feature the torsos of provocatively dressed persons, sort of how a lot of UF covers involve leather-clad backsides--it might be easy to leap to a conclusion. Shame on any reviewer, however, that makes such leaps.
There are great YA writers (Kristopher Reisz is a personal favorite) who are literary, contemporary and accessible--which is something the staid and weathered "classics" of YA never were when I was a younger reader.
And I agree with you that it's a shame that any reviewer can classify an entire group of books based on covers, but it happens all the time, which is a shame.
P.S. My mom will be with yours in the bookstores.
Haha, once I saw John Green and Maureen Johnson respond, I knew they had it covered!
And yes, I believe it's gotten quite a few YA authors a little up in arms judging from the comments to it.
So when I mention the teenage narrator they say, "is it a book for kids?" (and yes, usually look disappointed and/or confused) and then I say, "It's for teens and adults. It's for everybody who is interested in the subject."
*shrug*
I loathe labels.
What strikes me forcibly is that this keeps happening, more and more regularly: there was the Stephen King on The Hunger Games brouhahaha quite recently. Seems like every time someone actually reads YA, they're wowed by it... and then for some reason they say 'but this is different.'
One can only be forced to wonder what YA books they're reading. I'd be prepared to lay a bet the YA book they found so fantastically different is one of the only recent ones and well, maybe they're judging by books they read as a teen, maybe they are sorrowing because YA's doing better.
A friend of mine said to me in puzzled tones 'Hey, everyone I tell about your book coming out seems to have a secret passion for YA, and I have to tell them your title!' This makes me happy for my genre: apparently, YA is what people are reading and enjoying - even those who are putting it down! I hope that once a hundred articles have turned up about a hundred brilliant and different YA books, someone will start doing the maths.
I'm not good with analogies... moving on. I'm glad that more people are enjoying YA because I believe that there is so much to enjoy there!
It's fine. There's an awful lot of crap published for adults, too. People like crap. That's fine, too. Not everything you read needs to be a Nobel Prize candidate.
But it gets under my skin somewhat when the response to these articles dismissing and disparaging YA includes a slam at the YA that came before. "The stuff I read in high school." Maybe the people saying these things were--like the people writing these articles--only reading the crap, the "Gossip Girls" of the seventies or eighties instead of the good stuff. Because it was there.
Robert Cormier's landmark The Chocolate War was published in 1974. Richard Peck was publishing groundbreaking YA work starting in 1972, as literary, compelling and complex as any Printz honored novel of the last ten years. Julian Thompson was writing the blackest of humor for teens in the early eighties. Jeanette Eyerly was playing with multiple viewpoints as early as 1978 with her novel See Dave Run, which told the story of a runaway teen with every chapter from the POV of a different person he met along the way. M. E. Kerr's wide range of work from the seventies on acknowledged the sophistication of her readers. K. M. Peyton wrote a series of historical YA novels in the sixties and seventies that were made into a wildly popular BBC miniseries that enthralled adults long before Twilight crossed borders. Heck, you know Susan Beth Pfeffer? Sure, she's a big star now with Life as We Knew It and The Dead and the Gone, but did you know she wrote a bunch of terrific YA novels in the eighties and nineties?
Yes, there is an awful lot of great YA being published today--more than ever, but there is in general more YA being published--with the burgeoning buying power of teens, so one would expect the number of quality books to rise, too. But that doesn't mean it wasn't there before. It just means that--same as today--an awful lot of people didn't notice, didn't care or simply didn't believe it.
And much of my adult love for YA is based on reading Margaret Mahy's The Changeover and The Tricksters as a teen.
Even when I see the faces falling after I tell people my book is young adult.
Sometimes, I think we'll have to wait until today's teens grow into tomorrow's reviewers for YA to be portrayed with understanding in the mass media. Because today's teens know what's up, and so many of today's (non-YA) reviewers seem not to.
ANDREA WALKER: I’ve always thought of Y.A. books as being simply books that are written with a Y.A. reader in mind, which would likely affect decisions you make as an author about language, plot, etc. Of course, there are books not written for Y.A. readers that will appeal to them, and Y.A. books that will appeal to adults, so in a certain sense the attempt to define the category isn’t that helpful—it’s most useful as a marketing tool, as Koja says in her interview, and to booksellers and librarians who want to know where to shelve things.
Agreed about the marketing aspect being the #1 definer of YA vs adult, but not agreed at what's implied here about dumbing down for teens -- I don't think there's any plot that YA as a genre wouldn't accept or explore.
And I'm glad you enjoyed FHT! Good point above about waiting for today's teens to grow up to be tomorrows reviewers (and quite a few of them have their own review blogs now!).
What's frustrating is that not only are critics insulting YA writers, they're insulting the young adults themselves. Kids between the ages of 13 and 18 are perfectly capable of understanding and even RELATING TO adults and adult themes. I was reading adult books at 12 and 13 - books with themes like death and grief; books with plot twists such as rape and drug use. Do they really think that just because kids are young, they must be stupid?
I didn't write a YA book because I didn't think my readers would UNDERSTAND if I wrote an adult fantasy; I wrote a YA book because being seventeen is TOUGH. There are things that happen to you during your teenage years that stay with you for the rest of your life. Heavy things. Painful things. Things that some adults, who were teenagers twenty years ago or thirty years ago, are shocked by today.
So, now that my rant is over lol, you go, Carrie!
And I am so going to buy Forest of Hands and Teeth when it comes out. :D
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/b
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/b