YA Mythbusters
One of the things we get asked the most is how to define YA. What makes a novel YA and not adult?
So we tried to come up with some of the factors via our editor’s Twitter stream as to what drives the term YA. Since a few people commented that it was a useful resource, we present it here, in list form.
- YA is NOT a genre.
- YA is NOT published just because of cynical marketing types.
- YA is NOT just paranormal romance.
- YA IS written deliberately by MANY authors – they are not shoehorned into it.
- YA IS an attempt to document the issues that face many teens – from skin colour to bullying to sexuality to conformity.
- YA doesn’t HAVE to have teen protagonists, but it is the NORM.
- YA is ENGAGING with teen readers who have different issues and feelings from adult readers.
- YA can and does feature MANY genres – sci fi, fantasy, horror, contemporary, historical, thriller.
- YA has an emotional INTENSITY that differs from adult fiction.
- YA fiction – often through settings -shows a world in flux. It uses settings as a metaphor for the journey and exploration that a teen faces
- YA asks questions like ‘Who am I?’ ‘Who do I want to become?’ ‘Where do I fit in?’
- The true YA protagonist will often have a blinkered view of the world. A naivety. A freshness.
- Young characters in adult novels often have a more knowing approach – an adult’s ability to reason and suppose.
- YA novels are not a NEW concept-think of Treasure Island, Black Beauty, Alice in Wonderland. If these were published today, they would be YA
- In YA novels the culture that surrounds and absorbs young adults plays a huge role in their lives.
- YA novels’ issues and characters are treated in a way that does not invalidate, minimize, or devalue them. They are deemed important.
- YA literature can be advantageous to reluctant student readers by addressing their needs
- YA fiction portrays teens confronting situations and social issues that push the edge of acceptable content and boundaries.
- A YA novel will generally be 70k-90k words – the slighter format ensures the narrative is pacier and punchier.
- This might be controversial, but YA novels have more simplistic language – the plot and characters are more important than complex words.
- YA is not easy to generalise. YA is not easy to compartmentalise.
- One of the BEST things about YA fiction is that it is so INCLUSIVE. When I say inclusive, I think I need to define it better. It shows outsiders, sure, but also implies through hope that being an outsider is acceptable. It shows that you can be gay, POC, transgender, into fantasy etc and that’s okay.
Those were our immediate thoughts – we would LOVE you to debate these and suggest your own!
Comments
“YA IS an attempt to document the issues that face many teens – from skin colour to bullying to sexuality to conformity.”
I think it is a very good thing that there are books in the genre that deal with these things, but I wouldn’t want it to be a defining characteristic of YA as a genre. It goes without saying that we all hope each reader takes something away from each of books, but isn’t it just as important we entertain without so obviously trying to ‘educate’?
There are too many broad statements and sweeping generalizations in this list for me to really agree. No YA book HAS all—or even nearly all—of these attributes. There are ALMOST ALWAYS caveats and exceptions to the items listed.
But it is good to start the conversation. I just hope writers reading this realize that they don’t have to follow each and every “rule,” though they should understand why these elements are important.
This might go hand-in-hand with the emotional intensity and “the true YA protagonist will often have a blinkered view of the world. A naivety. A freshness,” but I think I would add that the voice also differs in YA. Aussie author Kirsty Eagar recently commented about this here , ” Where is the line between Young Adult and Adult fiction? At the time I mumbled something about looking for answers, and I might have mentioned the word ‘hope’. I can’t remember really. It wasn’t a great answer, and it’s been bugging me ever since. Now, I wish I’d said: ‘Voice’. I think that’s the main difference, but even then the lines are smudgy.”
Categories define our expectations. Even with reviews, books will commonly be grouped according to the category in which they’re marketed. I think it is blinkered to suggest that a large part of defining what is and what isn’t YA does not come down to the publisher and the marketeer. I also don’t view this as a problem or a negative issue, just to be clear.
It has been suggested that YA is both purpose built and inclusive. Indeed, There has been talk of regrouping older books under YA, and of re-releasing/relabling others. One can hardly fault authors, bloggers, or the publishers themselves, if people do not fully understand what defines YA at the moment.
Can you have it both ways? Something new, with its own distinct authorial DNA, or a new way of categorizing the same sort of books that people have been writing for quite some time?
Viewing the suggestions made by Amanda, there is nothing here that can’t be found in many other books, some written and published before YA was conceived and others contemporary but marketed as plain “adult” fiction in their various genres. Putting aside the dictatorial tone inherent in ALL-CAPS sprinkled liberally throughout – I’m sure these are just possible YA attributes rather than any sort of qualifying dogma.
While dialogue is worthwhile on what makes YA tick – especially as I’ve heard conflicting answers from both authors and publishers asking themselves this same question – we can focus overly much on a list of traits.
Readers I suspect, will care less about this and more about the book in their hands. The categorization bun fights which erupt between literary, SFF, crime, romance, and horror, will no doubt include YA in the future – without deterring the vast majority of people who just like to read books. It won’t keep them from reading YA, no matter how it’s defined – if that’s what they want.
Conversely, if YA didn’t exist, authors would still be writing stories about teenagers coming of age, discovering themselves, exploring their emotions, and learning to speak in their own voices, with all that implies, and people of various ages would be eager to read them.
But books are not written (or published) in a vacuum. Whether or not an author intends to write YA or just ends up telling a YA story “by chance,” if they and their publisher are aware of YA, it will end up informing the product. If an author isn’t thinking about these things let’s hope their editor, agent or publishers are.
Again, it’s all part of writing a book, getting someone to agree to produce it, and hopefully for everyone, being able to scratch a living from it so if for nothing else, writers can go on writing books and publishers publishing them. That one needs the other, doesn’t diminish their unique contributions.
What’s YA? I’d venture it’s whatever writers and publishers say it is, from book to book. If they’re right most of the time then the category will gain strength and capture the loyalty of the buying public. If they don’t, then readers will likely ignore the label but still hopefully buy the book.
Could you give me an example of a YA book that doesn’t have a teen as the protagonist? Or an example of where it would be acceptable not to have a teen protagonist?
I think YA books are about finding our place in the world – the transition to independent being. Something that many adults are still looking to discover, which explains why so much YA is popular with adults.
This is a great list! :)
Whenever I think of lists like this one (which is very helpful as a frame of reference), I always remember something I read in a Philip Pullman interview about His Dark Materials. The interviewer asked him what audience he’d intended HDM for, and he said “precocious fifteen year olds.” That’s exactly the age that I read and fell in love with it (I tried The Golden Compass at 12 and didn’t like it at all), and yet HDM gets shelved everywhere, in adult SF/F, in the children’s section, in YA. It’s a novel featuring every kind of character but an out-and-out teenager, since Will and Lyra are on the brink of adolescence, and yet it’s a very grown-up book… that he wrote for teenagers.
The reason I throw this anecdote in is just to illustrate how an author can mean something to work for teenagers, and it will, even though it won’t necessarily get marketed for them. I’m sure everyone here knows this, but that’s why I find categories so hard to stick to. Everything is so mutable.