Chapter 16

Ten Common Pitfalls in Writing YA Fiction

In This Chapter

Keeping your YA fiction relevant

Empowering young readers instead of preaching or condescending

Sounding like a kid

Keeping it fresh

Writers of young adult fiction face a litmus test not applied to writers in other categories: What you write must hook, convince, and entertain teenagers. And you’re in a position to do a lot of influencing. Could you pick a more daunting job? This chapter covers ten common missteps in crafting stories for those impressionable, judgmental, and very important young people.

Dating a Book

Although going out with hotties is certainly a crucial topic of teendom, I don’t mean that kind of dating here. I’m talking about the kind of dating that tells readers, “This book is old. This book is out of touch. This book is not for hip, in-the-now you, and there’s no way you’ll relate to it.” At least, that’s how teens react when they read about passé music groups and technologies older than they are.

Unless your story takes place in a certain historical era and you’re creating a sense of place by sprinkling cultural details throughout, do not mention musicians, movie stars, politicians, or any other such famous folks by name. Be vague instead. Refer to “the president” instead of naming the sitting commander in chief. Refer to the “killer concert” instead of the “awesome Justin Bieber gig.” Have the character “crank up the bass” or “zone out to some generic rom-com.” If you must name names, make up your celebrities, groups, and movies. Or pick references that never fade away or suddenly go geek, such as the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. With tried-and-true references like that, you can enrich your character’s personality and the overall story with cultural references without torpedoing them in the process.

See Chapter 8 for more on creating atmosphere and believability with props and setting details.

Slinging Slang

Slang, or the talk of a particular cultural group at a particular time in history, is fun stuff — but that doesn’t mean it belongs in your teen novel. It’s very hard for a grown-up to sound anything but lame when slinging teen slang. Lame is never good when you’re trying to impress young people. On top of flirting with lameness, there’s the dating issue I talk about in the preceding section: Slang is usually limited to its user group, and when teens age out of your target audience, the incoming audience is likely to roll their eyes at the dated lingo.

Of course, you wouldn’t be writing teen fiction if you weren’t fearless. There are instances where slang can call a teen novel home. M. T. Anderson’s National Book Award Finalist novel Feed swims in slang. It’s a first-person point of view story told by a teenage boy who narrates exactly how he’d talk — slang and all. Things “suck” and characters “go all gaga” over things. This kind of narration is highly stylized, meaning it doesn’t follow convention but rather defines itself. In fact, Anderson positions the entire book as a satire, a style of writing that seeks to call attention to the details and devices within. What’s most important to note, though, is that Anderson uses freewheeling grammar more than slang, and that’s what really gives the narration its youth and personality. More than anything, loose grammar is the key to making slang work in a teen novel without sounding lame or dating your story.

You can certainly try your hand at a stylized narration laced with slang and creative grammar. Such crafting is what Chapter 9 is all about, so flip back there and brush up. If you nail the narration, your readers will sink into the tale, and the style will stop being a “device” and just feel right. If you don’t pull readers into the story, though, they’ll never get past the device.

If you decide to attempt slang-slinging, make sure you really know how to talk the talk. Do lots of eavesdropping on teens, do lots of conversing with teens, and even consider asking teens to read your manuscript out loud to you, stopping when they get to something weird so they can tell you how they’d really say it. Above all, make sure your storytelling craft is up to the task of pulling readers into your world. Render the slang a part of your story for teens, not a hindrance to it.

S-E-X

Can you think of a more controversial topic for a teen novel than sex? Can you think of a topic teens are more interested in?

You, fearless writer of teen fiction, get to tiptoe the fine line of handling teens’ top topic without blowing gatekeepers’ tops. Oh, it’s easy to vilify gatekeepers when you’re talking about the need for sexuality, sex-related issues, and sexual activity in teen novels. Parents, librarians, teachers, and booksellers are going to bring to bear their preferences when judging a book’s appropriateness for the young readers under their literary care. The thing is, that’s something all adults do, and can you really fault people for trying to look out for their kids? Too often people complain that parents aren’t monitoring kids’ cultural intake. The task is subjective, though, and jurisdictions can get controversial.

Including graphic sex in a teen novel will prevent that novel from reaching some teens. It may assure your book lands in other teens’ hands, of course. You must decide whether you’re willing to forgo some readers for the sake of keeping it real.

Look for ways around the graphic stuff. You can have the sexy stuff happen offstage. You can be vague about it if it’s happening onstage. You can avoid the graphic stuff altogether and stick to a PG-rated version of young love. Sex isn’t always about the physical act.

Writing Cliché Characters and Situations

Teens have been at the storytelling game long enough to know a stock character when they see one. It’s hard to get excited about yet another nerd, another jock, and another bimbo blonde cheerleader. Editors and agents are just as hard on cliché characters and situations. Offer more. Think creatively. Move these characters out of the standard settings, and aim to surprise yourself as much as anyone with how they react in unexpected scenarios.

See Chapter 5 for info on kicking clichés out of your teen fiction.

Preaching

Teens and tweens get enough lecturing in a day; they don’t want it in their leisure reading. As much as you want your moral or your message to come across to your readers, resist the urge to state it directly. Show actions and consequences in your story; let readers see lessons learned and maturity evolve. Your readers will get it. They may be young, but they’re sharp.

Check out themes in Chapter 2, and read up on the technique of showing instead of telling and the ins-and-outs of the teen mindset in Chapter 9.

Dumbing It Down

Readers who come to teen fiction as grown-ups are often surprised by how sophisticated, daring, and masterful the writing is. Great writers for young readers generally respect their audience’s ability to think independently and critically.

Make sure you don’t dumb down your content out of fear that young readers won’t get something. They will. If you need convincing of that, just read some teen-authored reviews like those on www.teenink.com or in the comments sections of online bookstore listings. And when your fan e-mail starts rolling in, you’ll be convinced of it. YA writers are nurturing future adult readers and exposing young people to the ways of the world beyond their immediate experience; serve up things they can really sink their teeth into.

Writing for 18+

YA fiction with protagonists who are post high-school or in their early twenties can be hard sells, and you’re severely limiting your submission prospects if you aim for that demographic. These novels fall in the gap between YA’s traditional age-18 cutoff and books for adults. A gap is rarely a good place to sell things. No one really knows where to shelve such books or how to market them. Teens like to read about kids their age or just ahead of them, and when you’re 18 or 19, you’re more likely to jump to the adult fiction section of the bookstore than scour the YA section for the few YAs that still speak to you.

That said, publishers are joining the rest of the entertainment and advertising industries in venturing into the upper teen/early twenties demographic. It’s still a tenuous place for books, but that doesn’t mean it’ll always be so. If you choose to push the upper boundaries of YA, do your darnedest to position your book for a solid, identifiable niche — preferably one with adult crossover appeal.

Putting Adults at the Helm

A hallmark of teen fiction is the empowerment of the teen protagonist, so don’t let the adults in your novel come to the rescue. That’s a surefire way to get a rejection letter from an agent or editor.

Tweens and teens are at a point in their lives when they desperately want to be able to fix their own problems, which means they want to read about other kids solving their problems. That makes readers feel empowered, which makes them feel satisfied upon finishing a novel. Keep the reins of your story in your teen lead’s hands.

The Waving Author

No one wants to be reminded that there’s an author behind the story they’re reading, especially not teens. When this happens, you’ve done something to jolt readers out of the world you’ve created. Or worse, you never let readers sink into it in the first place.

In teen fiction, readers can feel the adult author’s presence if the author doesn’t fully disguise himself with a youthful mindset. The narration in such a book is usually too sophisticated in language or sentiment to let readers forget that this is a grown-up’s interpretation of a kid going through kid stuff with a kid way of viewing the world. Get out of your readers’ way. Let Chapter 9 be your guide.

Writing to Trends

Teens are a notoriously trendy bunch, and it’s hard to think of writing books for them without considering that tendency. Everyone’s seen the wizard books and vampire books and teen-clique horror books fill bookstore shelves only to fly off as quickly as they landed. What writer doesn’t want a piece of such high-profile bookselling action? The problem is that getting in on a trend is almost impossible if you don’t already have a novel in development or completely done when a teen trend hits its stride. Writing a manuscript takes time, submitting the manuscript to agents and editors takes time, and revising, producing, and promoting the book takes time. By then, trend over! Or market glutted.

Now, if you can predict the next teen fiction trend, then you’re in like Flynn. Marketers and sales reps are as interested in the hottest topics, genres, and categories as you are, but alas, no one has yet unearthed a crystal ball for teen trends. Your best bet is to be as aware as you can about teen interests and write about universal teen issues with a unique twist that makes your story stand out. Chapter 4 takes you through this as you develop a story that has both high teen and marketplace appeal — and that intrigues you enough that you stick with it through all the ups and downs of the creative process.