Just over a week ago, Entertainment Weekly posted NCAA bracket-style match-ups of young adult fiction on their website for its readers to vote on. The pairings elicited from me an unexpected wave of emotion, stemming both from my anger at certain books being set up to fail ("Harry Potter" versus "Holes"—really?) and my embarrassment at the number of them that I hadn't read. I was also surprised at the wide range of books labeled as "young adult." From a sample stretching from "Twilight"—a book I’m proud to have kept a promise to my sixth grade self not to read—to "The Princess Bride," I was curious about what really constituted the genre of YA fiction. After much thought, speculation and baseless conclusion-drawing, I have discerned four simple rules for young adult fiction.
1) Three is never enough.
One sequel is lazy, and a trilogy is too conventional. Therefore, the young adult writer’s only choice is to push as many books as possible out to their voracious readers. Teens and tweens don’t give up nearly as quickly as adults do. They commit. There’s a reason I read the rest of Madeleine L’Engle’s little-known Kairos series, and it’s not because I understood it. What I understood was that the books were meant to (kind of) logically follow “A Wrinkle in Time,” a novel with an opening paragraph that swept me up with its purple prose and the novelty of a character possessing my name.
Though perhaps I should look to more read and more anticipated sequels, like those to “Twilight,” the “Harry Potter” series or the “Inheritance Cycle." Whether seemingly endless sequels are a money-making scheme or based on a desire to keep a story going, it’s doubtful whether Hogwarts really needed to mold wizards for seven years or that Bella and Edward couldn’t have wrapped up their romance sooner. Regardless, people—especially young people—will keep reading. I’m equally guilty. If there’s even a hint of more story to tell, I’ll eagerly await it. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be told.
2) Girl probz R 4 girls.
Sex. Dating. Friendships lost. Mother-child relationships. In the young adult world, these are problems that obviously affect only women, and they must be described for women, by women. Just ask Judy Blume. I admit that I studied these types of books like the gospel. OK, maybe Judy Blume wasn’t really my speed, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve read “Little Women” or sung the praises of Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." But I also can’t ignore that there seem to be definitive “girl books” and “boy books” in the young adult world, and the former outnumber the latter. If a book is centered around a boy, there’s rarely any stigma about it being a “boy book.” However, if you write a book with a female main character, you run the risk of alienating half your audience. It’s a rare gem like “To Kill a Mockingbird” that avoids the curse of girlishness. Many books have been ignored or cut from middle and high school reading lists for fear of alienating their male readers, perpetuating the idea that novels like “I Capture the Castle” and “Anne of Green Gables,” among hundreds of others, have little to provide or relate to their male readership.
3) Outcasts have more street cred.
They may not be “cool” in the novel, but at the very least they’re “cool” to their readers. In young adult fiction, outcasts are generally portrayed as one of two distinct archetypes: the tortured soul or the misunderstood free spirit. The former is best understood using the model of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Young readers connect with the protagonist and empathize. “Wow, he feels like I feel sometimes,” they lament. But he gets friends, proving that the shy, “damaged” kid really can fit in, in some group that lives outside the realm of traditional cool. Then you have the eponymous heroine of “Stargirl,” the epitome of the manic pixie dream girl. She’s so different, unique, quirky. She lives outside the norm. She meditates. She has a rat. She doesn’t need friends. I confess, I wanted to be her.
4) Create a dystopian world. Bonus points for child labor.
Admittedly, dystopias are not solely a trope of the young adult genre. But a specific facet of YA dystopia is the abuse or excessive reliance on young people from an early age. You have a novel like “The Hunger Games,” which depends on children both to provide murder-fueled entertainment and to support their families. Then there are novels like “The Giver,” in which children are assigned critical societal roles before they even reach their teens. Even “Harry Potter” follows this model to some extent. The expectation that 17-year-olds (or younger) should be held responsible for saving an entire way of life seems unfathomable outside of a literary context. I’m almost twenty and I can barely imagine preparing my own meals, let alone taking down systemic evil infiltrating a government. Are authors perpetuating a sick fascination with child exploitation? Or is putting such responsibility on young characters in novels helping illustrate the burden young people bear in changing a society?
Based on my own rules, I would probably write the most cliché YA series of all time: five books about a 14-year-old boy with no friends on a future earth governed by a tyrannical dictator. So trust me, they are no guarantee of success.
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