Older Folks in YA

Industrywide, your MC will be a couple of years older than your readers. Children's books feature middle schoolers (Percy Jackson), YA features high school/early college. Get too old and your readers won't identify.

Instead, you can get some very well-realized, important characters through the eyes of the protagonist. Conversations, observations, mentorship.

But dumbledore isn't the protagonist.

Every character should be essential to the story. But if you want to write an adult protag, write adult fiction.

The goal of having a "strong, believable" characters extends to every character you write. My adults are just as well fleshed out as my teenagers, but they are always secondary or minor characters and I never use their POV.

wyndmaker said:

I look at YA and wonder if there is any strong adult characters that are believable. I am working on a couple of books right now that have strong adult characters and are very germaine to the story, without them there would be no story.

Strong secondary characters are great. But the focus of a YA should generally be on the adolescent characters.

Question is, how important is it that every MC be a kid or Young Adlut? Can there be a protagonist that is in his 60's, and still be relevant to kids?

In general, you aren't going to see many main POV characters that are not adolescents. Can it happen? Sure. Is it common? Hell no. Will it possibly make the book a harder sell as a debut YA? Probably, especially for a debut.

I thnk of Harry Potter, and how he would have failed had he not had the wise counceling of Dumbeldor.

As said above, Dumbeldore is not one of the Main Characters. And, frankly, HP started as MG and it's a little more common to have the sage guiding adult in MG and in fantasy.

I am anxious to see what you that have been writing YA and MC have to say on the matter.

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For it to work as YA, the POVs should usually be teens, and those teen character should be active in the plot of the story. If you have an adult solving the teen's problems, or even providing too much assistance, you may run into trouble when it comes to is it YA.

Frankly, it sounds like you might be writing adult fiction. Are you sure what you are writing is YA? You don't have to decide that now - you can write the story, and then see what you have.

~suki

Let's face it, especially in YA books, teens have a wee bit more knowledge than most (not all) teens. But that's where you have the older adult (60 yrs old, 25 yrs, or 91) come in and dispense knowledge/info but not in a didactic way. But you must, no matter what age, not let authorial voice intrude. I hate when I can clearly tell that the beliefs/desires of the author have bled out onto the page.

Reminds me of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Sounds cute.

Adult YA characters

Howdy!

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I wrote a YA book not realizing that an adult POV was a no-no. But after some research, I realized it's not an immediate death sentence for a novel (though, I'm guessing it will probably make it harder to sell). Here are a couple of YA novels I found with an adult POV:

All of Charlie Price's books. An interesting interview about his books: http://sleuthsspiesandalibis.blogspot.com/2011/12/interrogation-room-suspect-6-charlie.html

And E.L. Konisberg wrote The View from Saturday with an adult POV.

Anybody know of more?

Having an adult voice in the YA novel is not essential but it does allow the MC (s) (MC's squared?) to play off of. As someone said, having the older adult(s) around for friendship, mentorship, or watching how they do things and learning what to say or how to say it though interaction and observation is probably the best way to bring them across to the reader.

What someone already mentioned and what another writer friend said to me is true: Never let the adult character become to preachy or self-righteous. (Not a good idea for the MC unless it's part of the story). That's generally the kiss of death and young readers hate that. I hated that when I was young (ah, the days of youth, gone...) and I imagine all the other young adults on this forum hate it as well.

You can get your point across without beating the horse to deathdeadhorse) either with humor or a dramatic situation. If an adult is present in the novel, he/she/they should be there to show there is a choice in certain matters, or give counsel on such and said MC will either go with it or disregard said advice.

Sorry, long post, rambling along now....

I think that in YA adults are better played out as secondary characters. They can have influence and still be relevant to the story without being at the forefront of the novel and taking away from you YA MC's.

An example I thought of for this would be Cassandra Clare's extremely popular Mortal Instruments series. I know people have their gripes about it, and not everyone loves it but...she did do a good job of making the adults part of the plot while still keeping focus on the YA MC's.