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If you haven’t figured out by now, I’m loving this series. Shan has an amazing ability to keep emotions and actions in his young characters real and true to life.
In the third book in the series, Darren’s been a half vampire for over a year and we’ve seen him grow, figuratively speaking, over the course of these books. While he still can be a petulant child (mainly because he still kind of is one), he’s grown into his vampire assistant role and matured beyond what anyone his age would simply because, a lot of the times, he’s on his own. Not many children live with a band of traveling freaks nor have to force themselves through the unpleasantness of having to drink human blood in order to survive. He spent nearly all of the first two books fighting it. Now he’s at peace with it and does it out of want more so than need.
The ending threw me for a major loop and I was very afraid that Darren was going to take a departure from his personality and character for the sake of the plot. Boy was I wrong and boy is Shan sneaky! He utilized an excellent first person device that worked wholly to his advantage and shows just how much Darren has matured. Two books ago, to be perfectly frank, Darren wouldn’t have had the balls. Now he’s a faster thinker and knows what he needs to do in order to stay alive. And does it and Shan isn’t afraid to show that.
Before focusing on the novels of MT Anderson, this article makes a very valid point about teen reading. Don’t underestimate it.
Now, the title to my blog post is slightly skewed as what Anderson is pointing out is the intelligence of teenagers and how they don’t need separate books whereas I’m saying don’t underestimate the genre. But I think the two go hand in hand, you think?
Do not underestimate teens. I think that’s the crux of the argument and the rest is just details. No, they haven’t lived as long as you and no, they don’t have the worldly experiences you do but that doesn’t mean they need their works stripped down to simplicity to understand. Do I think teens need their own book category just for them? No. I read Interview with the Vampire (please don’t sue me) when I was 11. I also knew how to mummify a corpse when I was ten. So no, it’s not necessary.
But not every teen is an advanced reader and if we didn’t have that middle ground between middle grade and adult, kids would be going from Goosebumps to Stephen King. Some do not have that kind of reading capacity. Others do. That’s also not to say YA is for the slower readers. Bite me if you think that. The majority of my TBR pile is YA. It fits my patience level. But it provides a stepping stone. For those that run screaming from a novel that’s 600 pages in an 8 point font with a 3 millimeter margin (me), there’s the equally stimulating but much fat-trimmed YA.
So, I ask again, do teens in general need their own category of books? No. But the pre-teens do. As do the teens that just don’t want to read mainstream adult fiction. Or the adults with the short attention spans that enjoy reading without the pomp and meandering. It’s like taking a stair or two out of your staircase. It’s still manageable walking up and I’m sure a lot of people could do it, but there are those that can’t, or those that simply don’t want to. YA is a stepping stone. While all teens don’t read it, many (and many younger readers, and older) do so I don’t think it’s an obsolete category.
NaNo Update–I’m roughly 4,000 words behind. You know, it’s bad enough when I hit lulls in my work that I have to trudge through. It’s even worse when I’m on a word and time deadline. So I’m hoping I can crank out about 7,000 words over the rest of the weekend so I can at least somewhat catch up. I’m thanking the Thanksgiving god that I only have a two and a half day work week this week. But it does make me feel a little better that out of the people on my buddy list on NaNo, I still have the highest word count. That’s not going to write anything for me but at least I’m not alone.
I’d say maybe this time last year, I would have considered myself pretty ageist. I don’t know where the thought came from but for whatever reason, I felt that because I was older, I knew more than the teenagers still in high school. Stupid, I know, but I thought it. What could they possibly know that I don’t? I’m older. I’ve experienced more. I’ve traveled more. I’m more worldly and wiser. Little peons.
Thankfully I’ve grown and humbled. I came to realize that I didn’t give them enough credit. Not nearly enough. When it comes to writing, there are kids still high school school that are further along in their careers than I am now. There are kids that know as much as I do about the publishing world, if not more. Hell, what I’ve learned I’ve just acquired within the past year. Then again my focus has been scattered for many years prior to that.
My point it, if you can smell the asses of birds, it’s time to give your neck a rest. No, teens don’t know everything. But neither do I. I’ve learned a lot about writing YA straight from teens, teens that are in the same writing position as me and teens that are in positions I hope to be in some day. Am I jealous? I won’t lie. A little bit but I don’t have time to dwell because I have my own work to do. So I hope nothing but good comes of their work and their careers and set back to work getting mine to that place. A year ago I probably would have thought ‘what they hell did they do that I didn’t?’ Instead now I think ‘good for them.’ Then again, it helps to spin what you can into a positive. I’m only human, after all. It doesn’t always work but wishing ill on someone, or harping on their success, will get you nowhere but even more steps back.
It’s when I see comments from high school students like Agent Kristin’s intern about the publishing industry that make me realize how wrong I was before. What she knows now, at sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, I just found out at twenty-four and twenty-five. Pieces of it anyway. Maybe I’d be closer to my goal if I had known that information at that age and if I’d been as steadfast about achieving it then as I am now.
NaNo Update: I’m a chapter behind. Blast. I blame the election coverage. And my characters are swearing more than I’d like them to. Their potty mouths are dirtier than I wanted them to be.
From questions that weren’t asked. Ally Carter tackles unasked questions that really should be asked in her blog and it’s definitely worth a read to anyone that writes, or thinks they write, in the YA field. The thing is, what better place to acquire such answers than from the mouth of an already-published YA author? She does a lot of comparisons between writing for teens and for adults, which is one of the main points of the post. She’s thoroughly qualified to do it too since she writes for both markets.
I’m not in a place to comment on most of the questions she asks simply because I’m still in the learning mode of writing and publishing and I’m not yet published. I don’t have the kind of experience needed yet to offer bonafide advice on such topics. There are a couple of things I’d like to touch on though that don’t really go too deeply into the publishing world and instead simmer right on top next to speculation.
Word of mouth will always carry a book. I don’t need to be published to know that one. All the advertising and promotion in the world won’t make people read a book. Only other people can do that. Sure, promotion will get your book noticed but so does running naked down Fifth Avenue during rush hour. You need that someone to notice you and recommend you to others in order not to fall by the wayside (or end up in jail).
Adults read teen books Teens read teen books. I don’t think, if you’re a YA writer, that you’ll need to worry about your fans growing up. If they like the book enough, they’ll keep it by their side. And like Ally said, the turn over for fans in YA is pretty often considering there’s always someone turning into a teenager somewhere. It’s not like they’ll ever skip those years.
Finally, when it comes to YA being a genre, I go by how it’s shelved in the bookstore. Sci/fantasy has it’s own section. So does romance. And mystery/thriller. And non-fiction. And young adult. I think it serves as both a genre and category. The category tells us the age range of the reader while the genre tells us where it’s shelved. The way I see it, the type of book (horror, fantasy, whatever) is the sub-genre, if you’re going by way of the shelves. There’s no YA fantasy section or YA thriller section. It’s just YA with everything all mixed in together. Also, I think it’s grown to a point where it’s big enough to be it’s own genre.
Teen readers aren’t just for teens anymore. And more and more writers are getting over the stigma of writing YA (one of the “lesser” genres, depending on who you ask) to write it. Not to mention people are saying screw it to the “embarrassment” of shopping in the teen section. No one look at me funny when I bring a toppling pile of YA novels to the register.
Ally Carter is a YA author that’s represented by Kristin Nelson. One of her books, I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have To Kill You, is sitting in my to-be-read pile. It’s not something I would normally get excited about reading but with the way Agent Kristin raves about the book (she sold it, why shouldn’t she?), the fact it’s doing quite well and it screams ‘teen,’ it nagged at me enough to pick up. Mainly because I’m trying to read as many teen voices as possible, across all genres of YA, to get a better feel for it. But don’t hold your breath that I’ll be buying a Gossip Girls novel any time soon. I just can’t bring myself to do it.
This post, though, it about asking the right questions when you have the opportunity to do so. Why reiterate the same old thing over and over again when you can present yourself as being up to speed on the genre and in-tuned to what agents and editors are looking for? Makes sense, right?
Ally fairly recently (the post it from the cusp of beginning to mid-September) went to a writers’ conference and realized that she’s in a different place than many of the writers there and fairly so. She’s an author with a few published books under her belt. I think it’s safe to say she has a little more knowledge about her than many of the fledgling writers that attend those conferences.
While she was there she took notes while biting her tongue and has highlighted on her blog the wrong questions being asked and what to ask instead (because she couldn’t do it there). They’re fairly simple questions, just worded differently and skewed slightly to the side so you better yourself wholly instead of superficially. I’ll highlight the questions and give my two cents but be sure to read Ally’s post in full. There’s a lot to be learned from an already published author. I know I learned a great deal just from reading her post.
