What Exactly Can I Get Away with in YA?

Write a novel, not hardcore porn, and you should be a good way on the right track.

Read Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire, which has been redone now as Thirst. You can get away with a lot. I don't recall him using the F-bomb in any of his YA books but I know he used GD a lot, and his books had some serious violence in them. With the Last Vampire movies, all of his fans are screaming for them to be rated R because if Hollywood pandered to a Pg-13 rating the MC, sita, would lose everything that we love about her.

I'm going to sign on with #NotAllParents. I am a 40yo mother of 5 and when a book is banned from a library, I usually read it and pass it on to my teens. In fact, I don't personally know any parents of teens who get up in arms about the YA their kids read. I advise a number of parents on books for their kids, and talk to a lot more parents who read YA along with me and share it with their teens. I think the squeaky wheel parents who flip because a kid masterbates in a YA book are the ones that give the rest of us a bad name. I'd bet there's a far smaller percentage of those parents burning books, than those of us who read it along with our kids. And we're all a smaller percentage of parents who don't even bother to know what their kid is reading.

Also signing on with not writing for the parents. I write the books I want to read, and I do think about my teen audience, though not in a pandering way. I guess I just write and hopefully someone will like it. Incidentally I have sex and swearing, the fear of rape, fear of torture, violence and death in my YA novel. I read a lot of YA, so I already know that it fits into the upper YA market, but doesn't push itself out because of too much of any of that. It's all in the context and how you write. Suzanne Collins wrote about Finnick being prostituted as a teenager, but she didn't go into detail and no one batted an eye. At least that I remember.