August 20, 2010

What makes a book YA fiction?

After I posted about boys and girls as readers and characters I got some very interesting responses. One comment in particular stuck with me though; this one from Dom who wrote: “Good YA books are, from my perspective, misshelved adult books.”. I replied: “Are good YA books misshelved adult books? I don’t think so. Good YA can be read and enjoyed by adults but I don’t think that makes it adult fiction. Not unless adult is a synonym for quality.”

I had my Writer’s Polygon on Wednesday and we started talking about this. The other people present are very original and creative writers, to the extent that although they are writing YA their works don’t fall into any conventional sub genre. Frances Hardinge has described her work as ‘whimsical’. Ralph Lovegrove is a not-yet-published writer whose work is rich and full of resonance. In comparison I think my work is much more typical of YA and my backgrounds are much less fantastical. I tend to start in the ‘real world’ and then move sideways.

So, inspired by this evolving discussion I began a web hunt on “what makes a book YA fiction” and was instantly presented with this article from suite101.com, containing the following list of what makes a book YA:

Books for teens are almost always written in the first person and usually have:
* a teenage protagonist
* adults characters as marginal and barely visible characters
* a brief time span (the story spans a few weeks, yes, a summer, maybe, a year, no)
* a limited number of characters
* a universal and familiar setting
* current teenage language, expressions, and slang
* detailed descriptions of other teenagers’ appearances, mannerisms, and dress
* a positive resolution to the crisis at hand (though it may be subtle and never in-your-face moralistic)
* few, if any, subplots
* about 125-250 pages in length (although many of the newer YA books are much longer)
* a focus on the experiences and growth of just one main character
* a main character whose choices and actions and concerns drive the story (as opposed to outside forces)
* problems specific to adolescents and their crossing the threshold between childhood and adulthood

Some of that is fairly reasonable, although reducing anything to a list makes it seem flat and uninspired. I think the list would have worked better for me if it were introduced as qualities YA books may possess. ‘Teenage protagonist’ is fair, almost all good YA in my opinion does have a teenager character. But there are successful and popular YA books with older characters e.g. Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockheart series. ‘Marginal and barely visible adult characters’ is often true of the YA fantasy quest novel but less so in contemporary fiction, the YA fiction of Margaret Mahy never brushes off the adults as unimportant although the teenagers are driving the narrative. ‘A brief time span’, is true of most fiction. Epic speculative may deal with the sweep of decades but in the main books include only a couple of weeks of elapsed time. ‘Limited number of characters’ is certainly not my experience or true of my fiction – and somewhere Frances Hardinge just burst out laughing and doesn’t know why. ‘Universal and familiar setting’ isn’t always the case, especially when no setting is universally familiar to every child. If a book deals with gangs in New York does that count as familiar because we have heard of New York and of gangs? Or are books set in schools automatically familiar because many children attend schools – regardless of the type of school or it’s location? Tricky.

Continuing boldly on, the ‘teenage slang’ isn’t all that common. Partly because writers often only remember their own now-outdated slang and don’t feel comfortable using a more modern but less familiar idiom. Also publishers will cut swearing and that accounts for a lot of slang. ‘Detailed descriptions of other teenagers’ appearances, mannerisms, and dress’ does occur in mainstream YA fiction but once outside that mainstream is less common. Even in the mainstream it’s more true of the younger end of the YA pool. ‘A positive resolution to the crisis at hand’ is most fiction again. Adult fiction certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on dark, Patrick Ness anyone?

‘Few, if any, subplots’ – oh dear, I’m definitely doing it wrong if that’s true! ’125-250 pages in length’, I never think in numbers of pages so I’ll have to do a sum. Wikianswers tell me there’s 300 words to a page so that’s 37,000-75,000 words. That’s a wide range. I’d say most current YA is between 70,000 and 100,000 words and the popular Harry Potter books have been significantly longer.

‘A focus on the experiences and growth of just one main character’, in my experience YA fiction more often involves a close knit group of characters. ‘A main character whose choices and actions and concerns drive the story’, eh, again that’s most fiction not specifically YA. But ‘problems specific to adolescents and their crossing the threshold between childhood and adulthood’ is one I do agree with and a central element of my fiction.

I’ve spent a long time on this one list but that’s because most of the other links my search produced were booklists and recommendations: a ‘I can’t describe it but I know it when I read it’ approach to the question. John Scalzi has a blog post form a couple of years ago about the placing of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother on the YA shelves in which he says YA Sf sells better than adult SF but adult SF readers seem blind to YA titles. This reminds me of Philip Pullman who’s been saying for years that he finds YA more exciting and imaginative than adult fiction. I also found a blogger writing about engaging with teens through their choice of fiction who says: “[YA books] can talk about really controversial stuff, actually, in a way which is interesting and true and informative and not just included for shock value.”

So, now I’m throwing the question open to the blogosphere. What do you think makes YA fiction? How does it differ from adult fiction? Are you an adult reader of YA or a YA reader of adult fiction – what informs those choices?

January 20, 2010

Middle child syndrome in trilogies

In yesterday’s Guardian books blog Imogen Russell Williams explains that while she has warmed to trilogies (as long as each book stands alone) she feels the middle book of a trilogy is often the weakest.

After praising Inkheart, His Dark Materials, Peter Dickinson’s Changes, and Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus she says:

Hex: Shadows

Hex: Shadows

I was also a tad disappointed by the second book in Rhiannon Lassiter’s Hex trilogy. The eponymous first volume, written at the precocious age of 17, has a fascinatingly dislikeable anti-heroine, Raven, and a gripping future world in which people are literally stratified by wealth – the rich in the Heights, the gangs in the shadowy ground-level slums – and citizens with the Hex mutation are proscribed and executed. While the third book, Ghosts, feeds the reader’s yen for revolutionary action as the genocidal elite get overthrown by Hexes, the middle volume feels as though it’s marking time – Raven is captured by the security forces, but not a lot happens and not much is learnt.

Since Imogen mentioned the Hex trilogy I’m going to respond to those comments. Firstly, I should say how pleased I am that the Hex books have stayed in her mind, over ten years since they were published. There are thousands of trilogies she could have used as an example so simply being remembered ten years after the fact is a triumph of sorts.

I also am inclined to agree that middle books of trilogies can be the weakest since theirs is the toughest job. The first book begins with a bang and takes the reader into a new world. The last book ends with another bang, concluding a story that has taken three books to tell. The work that falls to the middle book is to broaden and deepen the story, to add another dimension to the characters and the world. This is difficult to pull off in an action adventure where the plot must wind its way through a valley in the shadow of two obvious peaks. No wonder that middle books, as is sometimes said of middle children, are the least loved.

If Hex: Shadows didn’t work for Imogen, that’s a fair comment. There’s no rule that everyone has to like all my books – although what a boost to sales such a rule would be! But looking back on it I recall a fair few things happening in that book. (Spoilers ahead: so if you haven’t read the Hex trilogy you might want to skip the next part of this post.) In the first book of the trilogy Raven and her brother Wraith comb the streets of a high-rise London for their missing younger sister Rachel, adopted away from their family and at risk from a totalitarian government. Making contacts in the underworld they eventually track Rachel down to a secret government laboratory where she is the victim of sadistic experiments at the hands of the evil Dr Kalden. Hundreds of other similarly brutalised children perish and Rachel and two others are the only ones to be rescued by our heroes. Here endeth the first book.

In book two, I could have marked time until the inevitable conflict with Kalden in book three. But instead I chose to take the novel into what felt like darker territory. In Hex: Shadows the security forces strike back… perhaps an unconscious homage to the incredibly bleak middle episode of the original Star Wars trilogy. Hex: Shadows begins with a betrayal. A new recruit to the team reports Raven’s whereabouts to the government. After all that effort to rescue Rachel in book one, in book two Rachel is trapped with the heroine Raven and her sidekick Kez while the security forces close in from all sides. Rachel dies and Kez and Raven are captured. Raven’s Hex abilities are now put to the test as she becomes the experimental subject in the latest round of Kalden’s quasi-scientific sadism. Without access to any of her resources from book one, Raven must break through the devices being used to torture her to get a message to her confederates on the outside. As the book moves towards the conclusion the characters must put their faith in the person who betrayed them – while Raven transcends the torture and kills the sinister Dr Kalden herself. There surely can’t be many middle books of trilogies in which the hero kills the villain! My editors at the time must have wondered what would be left for book three.

The action of Hex: Shadows allowed me to take the story forward so that I could explore bigger and more radical ideas in book three. In Hex: Ghosts Kalden returns as a ghost-in-the-machine, far more deadly as a computer virus than he was as a man. And Raven is no longer a casual adjunct to the core group, the skilled consultant who doesn’t care about the main mission. By book three the cause of the Hexes has become personal and her closest friend is the person who betrayed her to the government in book two. What’s more, Kalden’s experiments have had an unexpected result: since not only has Kalden escaped into the computer network, Raven has set foot on the path that leads to true transcendance of the physical world. Everything that happens in Shadows is necessary for Ghosts.

The middle book might have as much action as books one and three – although there’s a pretty kickass firefight where I fly a flitter into a building and down a corridor with inches to spare. But action’s not the only thing that takes a plot forward. The changes in Raven are internal and emotional, the changes in the rest of a group a response to that shift. I do regret an editorial change which de-emphasised Raven’s cold decision to rid the world of Kalen. Macmillan felt that cold-blooded murder, even of a torturer, was too strong for a YA novel in the 1990s. Other than that, I’ve content with what I achieved in Shadows and I’d encourage Imogen to re-read the trilogy: not only as an action-adventure but as a coming-of-age story in a bleak and shadowy world.

But then I’ve always had a special love of middle books. At 10 years old I dressed myself in black and told my family to call me Arha: The Eaten One, after falling in love with the middle book of the Earthsea trilogy: the magnificent Tombs of Atuan. And then there’s Ann Halam’s (Gwyneth Jones) Daymaker trilogy. The middle book, Transformations, is the darkest and the most disturbing of the three. Among my friends and professional colleagues Pullman’s middle book The Subtle Knife is often cited as the favourite. Critics have also admired Rowling’s Prisoner of Azkaban: the third of seven and to me the darkest of the Harry Potter books. (The novel won the 1999 Whitbread Book Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the 2000 Locus Award, and was short-listed for other awards, including the Hugo.)

In the Guardian blog Imogen comments: “I’m all for dark and uncompromising children’s literature, but upping the ante… after [a] first volume’s gentle, PG-rated antics is baffling to me… A good rule of thumb, in fact, is probably to avoid dedicating book two to the protagonist’s capture and imprisonment.” But I suspect the darkness at the heart of a series is best found in the middle book. George Lucas knew what he was doing in The Empire Strikes Back. A series in which the heroes win, win and win again lacks the drama of one in which they win, lose, and have to win decisively and permanently against not just the representatives but the whole political system. The middle book is a story of failure, of hopes blighted and trust betrayed. It’s a book in which the characters first feel a sense of the magnitude of their mission, the promises they have to keep and miles to go before they sleep.

Middle books may be the hardest to write and perhaps the hardest to read. But they’re the pivotal ones. So when you praise the oldest sibing and pet the youngest of three: spare a thought for those middle children of trilogies, working as hard or harder to prove themselves and stand out on their own.

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