Genre conventions in YA?

Well, YA isn't a genre. It's a market. Meaning, quite simply, that the books categorized as YA are often written for and (more importantly) marketed to teenagers. Otherwise, you will find every genre you'd find in adult literature (except, perhaps, erotica) published under the YA banner.

Beyond that, opinions vary. Wildly. There are several sticky threads that try to tackle the issue and pin down the conventions. What Should You Remember When Writing YA? What Constitutes YA Fiction? And Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult - How Do You Categorize Your Novel?

And beyond that, trends have a tendency to change. The YA of today looks nothing at all like the YA from 15 years ago or before.

The best way, however, to get a feel for current YA and the direction it's headed is to read all you can get your hands on. Trite and boring answer - and a little daunting since YA exploded over the last decade to be the market bear it is. But it's the honest to goodness truth.

Now my personal opinion is this: YA needs to be about the teen experience. Not in so far as first loves, or high school or acne. Just touch on those universal themes that pretty much every teen can relate to. Love, friendship, family, freedom, etc. Good YA will tap into what it means to be a teenager even in the wildest of genre settings.

You know, I'm not so sure I'd rush to the conclusion that that book you mentioned is automatically YA because your MC is a teen, you're describing situations which could be considered literary or adult fiction as well. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult and We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver all have teenage MCs (well, in Kevin's case, it could be argued that the mom's the MC, or that they share MC status but anyway...) and none of them are considered YA books.

As KateSmash said, my opinion of what constitutes YA has very much to do with the intention and tone. YA is written from the teenage/youthful experience because it is written with that age group in mind. Something written from a more adult, distanced-from-teen-years standpoint isn't quite going to fit.

That's the general answer. Beyond that, it *is* pretty much a free-for-all, and YA is constantly growing and pushing boundaries. That said, there are a few general "guidelines" for YA novels. Overall, the tend to feature protagonists aged 15-18 and a high-school aged experience. The characters may not actually be in high school (in speculative fiction and alternate worlds, they often aren't), but it's that sort of growing-and-learning-and-discovering-who-you-are mindset. There's often a lot of internal growth and introspection. Romantic elements are often heavily featured due to the themes of budding sexuality and first love, but are not a requirement. Generally speaking, YA writing tends to be pacey and punchy, rather than heavily literary and flowy. HOWEVER, there are plenty of literary/lyrical YA novels and "pacey/punchy" does not necessarily mean "simply written."

I hope this is helpful! I definitely echo the recommendation to read a variety of recent YA to get a feel for the flow of the narratives and their style.

Secondary school, then

What's the YA scene like in Sweden? Is there one, or is it mostly translated foreign books with only a handful of local writers? I don't mean to derail, I'm just curious.

Oh no, it's not marketed as YA here. It's considered a book for grown-ups. It's a shame that you guys don't have YA over there though. I kind of figured because a lot of countries don't seem to. I try searching for foreign language YA books sometimes and mostly I end up finding translations of English language books.

Maxinquaye said:

ETA:
Childrens lit writers here include the giant, Astrid Lindgren. Every Swede has basically grown up on her stories, and continue to read them well into adulthood, and then read them to their children.

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Astrid Lindgren is hands-down my favorite author from my childhood. Looooooooove her. I'm counting the minutes until my daughter is old enough to read those books with me.

Also, what maybegenius said: It doesn't have to be high school, per se, just somebody experiencing life through the POV of a teen.

And I'm curious, if they don't have YA, how do they market books like The Hunger Games over there? (I'm assuming it was translated into Swedish.)

lolchemist said:

You know, I'm not so sure I'd rush to the conclusion that that book you mentioned is automatically YA because your MC is a teen, you're describing situations which could be considered literary or adult fiction as well.

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Just pointing out, since it wasn't clear in the wording, there's also literary YA. And YA that doesn't fit into genres.

One of the nice things about YA is that it doesn't need to fit perfectly into a genre to mass market the way adult often does. So you get a lot of cross genres stuff that touches on a lot of things but stays true to the needs and desires of your presumed teenage audience.

Niiicola said:

Astrid Lindgren is hands-down my favorite author from my childhood. Looooooooove her.

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I loooove Nils Holgersson!! It took me a million years to find a copy back when I was a kid! Now that there's the internet, it's so easy!

Sorry for the derail!

missesdash said:

Just pointing out, since it wasn't clear in the wording, there's also literary YA. And YA that doesn't fit into genres.

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Oh yeah, that's a great point! I was so busy going 'Don't let them shove your book into the YA category just because blah blah blah!' that I completely forgot about that aspect of it! I guess another question is, which audience was the OP writing for? Adults, teens or both?

So your target audience= everyone!

(And anyway, don't pigeonhole yourself! All of this 'target audience' stuff comes from the industry who always needs to categorize our works into neat tidy little boxes so that they can sell them more easily.)

Maxinquaye said:

Hah, I honestly don't think like that. I just write the books. But about half the people that have read the manuscripts say 'This is YA'. The other half haven't voiced an opinion.

I don't think about a target audience, and certainly don't mold my language to fit a particular preconception of a target audience. I know 14-year olds that read Dostoyevskij and Proust and Salinger. I also know adults that would never touch those books, and who prefer Twilight and 50 Shades and Dan Brown.

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I don't write for an "audience" purposefully. Rather I think of one individual, real or just someone I conjure up, that I'm writing for.

But marketing, really requires us to make a lot of generalizations and ignore exceptions to the rule. Well not "us" if you're going for traditional publishing. I initially write what I want and then let my agent or editors tell me what I need to change in order to actually sell it.

Then I weigh my options. It does, in a way, seem to come down to how much of a sell out you'd like to be haha. It's a constant give and take where at each point, I need to consider whether this change or meeting this convention is worth being published at this specific house.

This was a little rambling. But I consider it often, who I'm writing for, what they require of me and how that conflicts for what I'd be writing if I only wrote for myself.

Maxinquaye said:

Hah, I honestly don't think like that. I just write the books. But about half the people that have read the manuscripts say 'This is YA'. The other half haven't voiced an opinion.

I don't think about a target audience, and certainly don't mold my language to fit a particular preconception of a target audience. I know 14-year olds that read Dostoyevskij and Proust and Salinger. I also know adults that would never touch those books, and who prefer Twilight and 50 Shades and Dan Brown.

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I think I'm a similar age to you (I'm 47) and over the years I've written eight novels and around sixty-five pieces of short fiction (from short-short to novella length), selling so far none of the novels and 41 of the shorts. Although most of those weren't written specifically for a YA readership and none of the published shorts were published in YA markets, a great many of them have protagonists of sixth-form and university age. The two novels that so far have had agent/publisher attention (though neither of them sold) have in one case two protagonists aged seventeen (both girls) and in the other two major POV characters who are an 18-19-year-old girl and her father (plus four other minor POV characters, one of which is another teenage girl, and the adult characters get flashbacks to their own University years and/or twenties).

So I guess it is a time of life that I'm drawn to, roughly the ages 16-21 or so, and as I sold my first story in 1990, I'm now old enough to be the parent of a YA protagonist. It's certainly possible that I have unresolved issues around that age. But those are the ideas that come to me - if I had one for a MG story, or for that matter one involving exclusively characters in their thirties and forties, I'd write it, but I don't.

When that first novel got taken by an agent, I was surprised to hear it was a teenage novel, despite the ages of the protagonists. I'd assumed it couldn't be that because it had sex and strong language in it - very naive of me. However, having returned to novels mid-decade after a fifteen year gap in which I completed none and wrote almost entirely shorts, I've been more conscious that I am writing YA. While I always used to read some YA as an adult - beginning with the Earthsea trilogy (repackaged for adult readers in 1980) and Alan Garner's Red Shift and The Owl Service in my later teens - I've done so more systematically in the last five years or so.

Whether this has caused a difference in my writing I cannot say yet, as both YA WIPs are not yet ready to send out, and only one has been beta-read. I don't know if there is a change, as I don't want to write down to my potential 14-year-old readers, as that's a cardinal sin when writing for both children and YAs. On the other hand, I'm conscious that I've always been character-led rather than plot-led as a writer and since I'm a short-fiction writer relearning how to write novels, I tend towards the minimalist in description, which is one reason for the short wordcounts.