Author: Karen

Last month one of the agents at the Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency posted a thoughtful insight into the future of young adult novels.

Have you noticed … that the books propping up the industry (Twilight, Harry Potter, etc.) are YA crossovers? Not only do young readers read them, but adults do as well. Editors are now desperate to find … books they can market initially as YA that will attract the adult audience. Given that the last five years have brought about a trend toward more mature YA with older protagonists, what does that say?

Good-bye YA? by Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency

The author goes on to say that young adult literature hasn’t been around all that long. I would agree with that. I was born on the tail-end of the Baby Boomers and when I was a child the age group for children’s books went up to 9-14 and then you moved straight on to adult books.

According to the lecturer in children’s writing at Sherylyn’s writing classes, young adult books now go up to around 26 years of age.

Sherylyn says I often write young adult novels. Roland in Shared Memories, for example, is 19 years of age. Tanner in Mathi’s Story—the novel I am currently working on—is 16. The writing style is suited to young people as well. Our writing ends up with a reading grade of 6 or 7.

And yet … the other protagonists in both Shared Memories and Mathi’s Story are older. Kym, the other point-of-view character in Shared Memories, is the head of the local army. Jee Lim and Yashua, in Mathi’s Story, are both adults.

People have also commented on how suitable Not So Simple After All is for its young adult audience. The point-of-view characters in the story are a retired mercenary and a renowned sorcerer. Do they fit the young adult demographic?

All of these stories were written for an adult audience, not for a young adult audience.

Many would agree that young adults themselves find tagging a book as ‘young adult’ an automatic turn-off, and that if they know a book is a young adult novel they will not read it. I From my own experience I have found that the main group who purchase young adult books are my own peers—either for themselves to read, or as gifts for young adults.

If editors are seeking more and more crossover books that appeal to adults as well as young adults, then the logical conclusion is that the young adult novel is doomed, because if there is no dividing line then surely the novel is just a novel and, by default, an adult novel anyway.

I don’t think the young adult novel is doomed, but I do wonder if the trend is publishing is swinging back the other way.

We used to include a tag line in our queries for Not So Simple After All:

For those who like their traditional fantasy tinged with light-hearted fun.

It never got us anywhere, and early on we realised that mentioning the word ‘tradtional’ in our fantasy query was akin to a kiss of death. Nobody wanted ‘traditional’ fantasy. Traditional fantasy was Tolkien and Eddings and Jordan. Traditional fantasy was epic fantasy. Medieval worlds with sword and sworcery, where the fate of a kingdom is at stake, if not the fate of the whole world.

Like most fantasy readers I love traditional fantasy, but I’m also over it. That may sound contradictory but you have to give me something special to make me read it now. A different story or some truly special characters. And I’m not talking boy wizards here. I’m talking characters like Robin Hobb’s Fitz and Fool, or even her latest heroine, Thymara.

I spent today checking out the latest batch of manuscripts in my online critique group. Almost without exception, all the fantasy novels were urban fantasy. There was nothing so old hat as vampires or werewolves—although there was one zombie—but the stories were set in our world, with iPods and mobile phones and the internet. The protagonists drove cars or caught planes when they wanted to go places.

The circle has completely turned.

I don’t know how long this trend will last. Many urban fantasy lovers who grew up reading about vampires and werewolves are starting to feel about them the way I feel about traditional fantasy. Yes, they love them, but they are so over them too.

I wonder how long it will be before traditional fantasy returns, in some form or another.

And yes, we still intend to sell Not So Simple After All, only we’re realistic enough to realise it probably won’t be in the next year or two.

Over on Nathan Bransford’s blog he posed the question do you own your characters or do your characters own you? He says:

I … find it curious to hear authors so completely in thrall to their worlds and characters, and I start wondering, “Wait a second, who’s in charge here?”

Nathan Bransford – Do You Own Your Characters or Do Your Characters Own You?

The commenters on the post could be divided into two camps. One camp is authors who seem to write their story based around plot, while the other (larger) camp writes character-based stories. Plot-based authors definitely control what their characters do and keep them on track if they stray. Character-based authors give their characters some degree of control.

As many of the commenters to the post said, if a character refuses to follow the storyline it is often a sign that something is wrong with the story.

I am very much a character-based person myself. Story always come second to character, particularly in the first draft. My characters do and say things I could never have envisaged when I start of the story.

It’s nice to know that so many people out there work the same way.

In a previous article, Developing the science fiction reading skillset, I talked about an article written by Jo Walton over at Tor.com. The article was on SF reading protocols and how science fiction readers develop a skillset to read science fiction.

In the same article Jo also covered the opposite of this. The mindset (or skillset if you like) that literary readers bring to their reading. The expectation that if it’s written it must have some form of metaphor associated with it.

Sherylyn, my writing partner, is part-way through a writing course. Last year she completed a subject called Myths and Symbols. One thing her lecturer kept telling the class was that ‘all stories have hidden symbolism’. I disagreed with this because I know that when I write—and I think Sherylyn would probably say the same about her writing—I am definitely not trying for symbols. I am telling a story, and it’s not usually a story fraught with symbolism, it’s a story about a person or persons and what happens to them. But … according to the lecturer, symbology is always there, even if you, the author, don’t know that you are writing it in.

While I agree that themes do creep into some stories—and sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes it’s subconscious—I do not, consciously or sub-consciously, lace my stories with the type of symbolism the lecturer was talking about. If my main character wears a red dress it does not mean she is a slut or a sinful woman, which is one of the commonly accepted symbologies associated with a red dress. Nor does it automatically mean she that she is strong and fiery, another commonly accepted symbol. If I say, in my book that she liked the colour, or that she wore it because her (now-deceased) husband said it suited her then that’s why she’s wearing it.

Jo has some good points to make about how literary readers expect a story to have symbolism and metaphors; that they go looking for them, even when they are not there.

Over at Tor.com Jo Walton has an interesting article on SF reading protocols and how regular readers of science fiction know how to read without getting hung up on the detail that’s not important. She uses the example of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and how you don’t need to know what a tachyon drive is to enjoy the novel, you just need to know that it allows you to travel faster than light and what impact that has for the story.

One of the things that I find when non-SF readers read any of our stories is that they always want more detail. They always want to know more back story.

I used to think that maybe we do jump into a story too quickly sometimes. In Not So Simple After All (aka Potion), for example, we start the story when our adventurers start their journey together, not when they first meet their prospective boss. We had quite a few people say they would like to see how the characters are offered the job and how they decide to take the work. We tried to write earlier chapters showing Blade bored and unhappy at his school for fighters and River coming to the school to offer him the job, but it was boring and didn’t add anything to the story except that the reader had to read at least two more chapters before they got into the story proper. So we cut them again.

I think now that what these people—many of them non-regular SFF readers—really wanted was for us to make a world that they understood at the start, rather than have that world unfold for them as they read.

I have always been a reader who is happy to learn things as the book goes on. Myself, I call it a willing suspension of disbelief. Provided the author is telling a good tale and has empathetic characters I’m happy to go along with his/her story and let the facts settle in throughout the story. I don’t need to understand everything straight away.

Jo Walton calls this the SF reading skillset.

In my latest story my character has a noise inside his head. It’s continual, and he doesn’t know what it is.

I know exactly what it sounds like. It’s the noise that you get when you sit next to someone who has their iPod up too loud and you are swamped with a white noise that’s half static, half beat, beat, beat.

I can describe it well enough using today’s terms, but my character lives in a pre-technological society. He’s never heard of static. He’s never heard of iPods. I have to describe it in natural terms.

I’d been stumped for days, but then I started writing this post and suddenly, for no reason at all, natural analogies just popped up.

For the underlying noise I might start with the sound of a seashell when you hold it up to your ear, or the wind whistling around the shutters on a stormy night. Or even the sea itself.

For the static, add the crackling of resinous logs on the fire.

And the beat? It’s a rhythm like the drums of the distant watchers, or the seasoned pounding of the butcher chopping up meat on his slab.

I’m sure I can come up with more.

The thing is, once I stopped trying to describe it and let it percolate in the background, my subconscious came up with a whole stack of ideas.

Well, we did it. NaNoWriMo.

50,000 words (in Sherylyn’s case, 60,000) of two novels that have some promise.

Both of us did it easier than we expected. It was mostly a case of bums-on-seats and don’t talk to anyone until we had finished our allocated words. Due to other commitments on the first weekend we both got behind. Sherylyn took a little over a week to catch up, and I took most of the month but, even so, it wasn’t too hard. If we were writing full-time we figure we could both manage 50,000 words a month on a first draft without any stress.

This is the first time we have ever done any real writing together that wasn’t on the same manuscript. Our writing styles turn out to be quite similar in that neither of us do much planning, we let the story take us where we want to go and let our subconscious work on it when we’re not at the keyboard. (Although I have to say my consciousness was not as sub as Sherylyn’s. I did envision scenarios more rather than just let the whole story percolate the way she did.)

Sherylyn turned out to be a much faster writer than me, which surprised both of us. I don’t know why, but we both expected me to be the one to waltz through the process with ease. It physically takes me longer to write the same amount of words.

I got one story out of it which I like a lot, although it’s nowhere near finished at 50,000 words. Sherylyn got a story which she’s busy revising now, plus she also got an idea for a second story (which I love) which she’s writing in between polishing bits of her NaNo novel.

All up, it’s been fun and tremendously productive.