I will give you a topic, discuss amongst yourselves

[megwrites]

Actually, this is something I've been wondering for a while now.

Are YA books actually intended solely for young adults anymore? Because it seems like a lot of YA bestsellers are becoming more and more popular with the decidedly not-so-young adult set, and I'm wondering if authors have started keeping older audiences in mind when they set out to write books in the YA genre.

I can't say I read very much YA myself, nor do I imagine that I'll be writing it any time soon. Which is not an insult to the genre. I can see why readers outside the advertised age bracket are attracted to some of the books coming out in the genre. Many of them are better written, less cliche, and all around more exciting that some of the so-called "adult" fare.

However, I guess the genre boundaries interest me, as well as what attracts adult readers to some of the works in the genre and what factors into the minds of those who write it. How does writing a book for a younger audience change what you do, or does it?

For that matter, how does one differentiate between a book that's "YA" and a "children's book" or a "middle grade" book - and where did the term "Young Adult" originate from?

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

In fantasy (perhaps science fiction to a lesser extent) the boundaries between adult and YA are very ambiguous, I think, because adult science fiction and fantasy novels don't usually touch on the topics that are likely to alienate teenage readers (middle-aged angst, adultery and divorce, the problems of marriage and parenthood) and often have teenage protagonists. Adult fantasy books have always had a large teenage readership -- the folks at my high school reading endless Dragonlance books -- but the genre has been getting way self-conscious lately about adolescent wish-fulfillment stuff and pulpy writing. So, where do you put a book that's a little more wish-fulfilly, a little more id-vortexy, a little pulpier? In YA so that the people who originally ate those books up will still find them. (See for example Libba Bray's trilogy, which has a lot of teen fans and a lot of adult fans and is a perfectly great series (at least until the last volume) but has a teenage breathlessness that's perhaps best suited to YA.)

In contemporary realistic fiction, I think we're starting to see a niche for books that are a little less heavy and bleak than adult literary fiction, and more plot-heavy, while still being well-written. I think that niche is going to break out soon from the land of YA, but it's still there at the moment.

And in both genre fiction and realistic fiction, the perception of YA as a "hot" marketing category means that books that weren't originally written as YA, or originally marketed as YA, get slotted in there. (See: Peter Cameron's "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You," the Firebird reprints of older fantasy novels.)

A "middle-grade" book is one that's written for around the grade 4-5 level. Harry Potter is middle grade (though the later books are arguably YA). "Children's," I would say, encompasses everything up to YA. But the age boundaries are kind of blurry -- you have to take into consideration not just the problems of literacy, but the problems of emotional readiness as well.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts, and I'm going to have to chew on them for a while.

On the one hand, I see what you mean. Being sort of pulpy and straight-from-the-id does seem to be a hallmark of YA and some of the fantasy books that were really popular with teens and what not. Especially in the YA Fantasy subgenre (I find it weird that we haven't had any mega bestselling YA Sci-fi yet, but fantasy seems to be like a runaway train as far as popularity goes).

On the other hand? A lot of fantasy (and particular urban fantasy) are as id-y and wish-fullfilling/author-inserting as any YA novel could dream of, and yet I don't think anyone is going to try to remarket the Anita Blake books as YA any time soon. I could trot out more examples.

So I'm wondering, do you think there are other things that make publishers/writers categorize things as YA?

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

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!)

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

I think I like your definition of YA. If only because it not only suits literature, but suits real life.

I was just thinking that "dealing with the inadequacy of rulesets" is something that you have to go through several times in life, especially when anything big happens to you.

you might have to come into your own as an adult half a dozen times!

Truer words were never spoken. There's no such thing, I think, as "reaching adulthood". You pick up pieces of it along the way and maybe, by the time you die, you put them together and get a complete picture.