A warm, humorous talk on writing for the Young Adult (YA) market. Equally of interest if you’re writing Adult fiction and want to include a teenage perspective.

YA is defined as the 14+ age group, but be warned – this includes 9-year-olds, avid for information! Similarly, 14-year-olds also read Adult fiction (defined as the 20+ age group) to find out about university, first jobs, etc. As a teenager, Adèle herself learned all she needed to know from reading Peyton Place!

Like us, teenagers want to read about love, emotions and conflict – it’s just the context that’s different. Typical situations involve parents, Romeo-and-Juliet-style feuds or culture clashes, or self-inflicted angst and insecurities. Adèle’s latest YA book, Dido, concerns a young servant, Elissa, torn between her love for Aeneas and her loyalty to his wife, Dido.

It’s ironic that teenagers have so much knowledge at their disposal via the internet and TV, but still need romantic fiction. As we all know, however, there’s a huge gap between the world of romance and everyday reality and they want to know how to handle it.

General guidelines:
  • Make your hero/heroine the same age as your target audience, or slightly older, and someone that your readers can identify with. Boys want the main protagonist to be male, girls don’t mind which gender.
  • Include strong, raw emotional content and make sure perfection gets its true comeuppance.
  • Airbrush out most actual teenage language – swearing and the dreaded ‘like’. Just give a flavour!
  • Put the story first, before the romance. If including sex (there are no holds barred any more), focus on feelings more than actions.
  • Get the voice and tense right – teenagers love the ‘TV voiceover’ approach, e.g. ‘I’m walking down the street, when I see …’.
  • Avoid talking down to your target audience!

As with publishing generally, the YA market is currently very tough. Sales of standalone hardbacks are down, mainly due to library cutbacks. Some pointers:
  • Series are ‘in’, so pitch your work as having the potential to be a series.
  • Vampires.are lingering on … and on … and on.
  • Sci-fi and thrillers are good, because they have ‘cross-over’ appeal, i.e. may be successful in the Adult market. And humour’s even better – remember Adrian Mole!
  • The standard word count used to be 40k, but post-Harry Potter size matters. Any length will do – although the more fantasy in a book, the fatter it must be.
  • There’s a glut of boy-friendly books, so the time may be right for more girls as the main protagonists.
  • An agent will steer you to the right publisher, although in theory they’re not needed for children’s books.

There’s no longer much coverage of YA in the national papers. Useful websites are:
http://www.booksforkeeps.co.uk
http://sites.google.com/site/armadillomagazine
http://www.carouselguide.co.uk

Written by Juliet Archer