The Accidental Writer: Writing for YA Audiences
I love YA books. There’s something about a well written YA novel that inspires me. In addition to having great characters, interesting prose, and a well developed plot, it’s important to pay attention to the other elements that dominate the genre.
Some people believe that YA books are simply adult books with young characters. This is disasterous. If you close your eyes, you can almost picture the train wreck in your mind’s eye. It’s important to know the genre you are writing in. Don’t create a few young characters and hope for the best. It won’t work.
First, you should always know your audience. Girls buy more books than boys. Young people aged twelve to seventeen are the primary audience for YA novels. That’s a wide gap. You might want to focus on either end of that spectrum. Still, many books like Divergent or Hunger Games successfully pull from that entire age group. Parents make up the secondary audience. You ignore them at your own peril. For example, don’t write in a bunch of curse words because teenagers curse a lot. A few might work to make a point, but generally clean it up and find another way to make it authentic.
The “voice” of your novel should always be a teenager. Adult voices won’t work. Teenagers want to hear from other teenagers. Just ask any parent. So channel your inner teenager and use that voice. When you were a teenager you probably viewed the world very differently from how you see it as an adult. You took risks you would never take now, and you cared about things that would probably never even register with you today. That’s the voice your novel needs—find it!
Good YA novels also speak to issues that teenagers care about. That’s why romance is a main element of so many of these books. Loyalty, adulthood, and finding one’s place in the world are all themes that resonate particularly well with young adults.
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