There's the traditional rules, of course -- a LOT less is out of bounds than there used to be, and on writing forums you still get people asking "Can you say 'fuck' in a YA book?" (yes) and "I have a gay character in my YA book, is that okay? He doesn't actually have sex" (yes). I've seen fade-to-black sex and alluded sex and fully explicit brief interrupted sex. You're not going to see a gratuitous sex scene but you can get away with a lot if it's relevant to the story. This is all for contemporary realistic YA, though, which is hard to market as anything else; I think YA fantasy is still expected to be a little tamer. A LOT of ten-year-olds read YA fantasy.
Must have a teen protagonist -- there are YA books with adult protagonists (Tamar, by Mal Peet) but I could count them on the fingers of one hand.
Must be written at a level teens can understand -- Margo Lanagan has some of the loveliest and densest writing in the entire fantasy genre, but I don't think YA has anyone as experimental and difficult as Greer Gilman or Samuel Delany, to say nothing of James Joyce. The "typical" YA voice tends towards breezy and a little sarcastic, and you won't see as many fantasy authors going with language that's deliberately archaic.
The best definition I've arrived at for a YA novel is that it's about a young person coming out of the world she has always known and into a new world that's more dangerous and more free, more autonomous, where she's forced to make her own rules and cope with the inadequacy of the rulesets she's been given, and eventually comes into her own as an adult. (Even if she happens to be 14 or 15 and still has a lot of growing up to do -- you might have to come into your own as an adult half a dozen times!)
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Date: 2009-07-15 11:57 am (UTC)Must have a teen protagonist -- there are YA books with adult protagonists (Tamar, by Mal Peet) but I could count them on the fingers of one hand.
Must be written at a level teens can understand -- Margo Lanagan has some of the loveliest and densest writing in the entire fantasy genre, but I don't think YA has anyone as experimental and difficult as Greer Gilman or Samuel Delany, to say nothing of James Joyce. The "typical" YA voice tends towards breezy and a little sarcastic, and you won't see as many fantasy authors going with language that's deliberately archaic.
The best definition I've arrived at for a YA novel is that it's about a young person coming out of the world she has always known and into a new world that's more dangerous and more free, more autonomous, where she's forced to make her own rules and cope with the inadequacy of the rulesets she's been given, and eventually comes into her own as an adult. (Even if she happens to be 14 or 15 and still has a lot of growing up to do -- you might have to come into your own as an adult half a dozen times!)