YA vs. Adult: Do you have the voice?

Previous articles in this series:

YA vs. Adult: Crossover Appeal

YA vs. Adult: Adult Romance Writer Disease

Not everyone can write for young adults.

My mentor, USA Today and NYT bestselling author Lori Wilde, sees many adult romance authors trying to crossover into YA. When I asked her about the “Gold Rush” push toward YA, she said:

YA gives authors a lot of freedom that they don’t have in adult fiction. Writers are attracted to the Wild West feel of the current YA market and many who really don’t have a YA voice are trying to write for this genre.

Nearly all the YA manuscripts that crossed my desk as an acquisitions editor were penned by authors who started out writing adult romance and either couldn’t break in, or were lured to the YA side of things by the promise of huge debut advances and a broader readership than ever before. And it shows. While I’m sure these authors have fantastic intentions, most suffer from ARWD and try to pitch their novels as “YA with crossover appeal.”

During an #askagent chat on Twitter in January, someone asked:

Should you bother mentioning in a query that you hope your book can be classified as a crossover, appearing in both YA and Adult?

The always brilliant author and MG/YA agent Mandy Hubbard answered:

Meh, the people that usually say crossover tend to end up not hitting EITHER audience quite right.

I addressed the crossover appeal phenomenon in the previous post in this series, and Mandy is exactly right. Crossover appeal happens organically when a book’s themes, stakes, and conflict speak to a broader audience. There’s a reason action packed paranormal series have crossover appeal in spades while contemporary high school sagas appeal mainly to the teenage audience—the stakes are higher in paranormal novels.

If you set out to write in a voice you believe will appeal to a crossover audience, you’re focusing on the wrong aspect of your book. And if you have to think about it, chances are you’re missing the mark. Harsh? Yes. Truth? Most definitely.

So why is the teen voice so hard to master? Reading a lot of YA doesn’t necessarily translate into a strong YA voice of your own, as evidenced by all the manuscripts I read and reject, so what does?

Lori says:

In order to be successful at YA, you really have to be prepared to return full throttle to your high school days. You have to become a teen again and that’s a tough act to pull off. How many adults can (or want to) eat, drink, sleep teenage angst?

There’s a reason YA authors hang out together. No one judges us when our inner teens come out to play, nor do we blow each other’s books off as less of a literary accomplishment than an adult book. Giddiness, Capital Letters, and text-speak abounds. We get our audience—we have to, or they’ll see right through us. Authentic teen voice stems naturally from this.

Here are some things to ask yourself:

Can you still channel the innocence most adults lose when life first gives us the shaft? What about the self-absorbed urgency with which teens approach everything from where they’ll sit at lunch to which college they’ll get into? Do you remember thinking everyone’s eyes were on you when they weren’t, the sting of petty betrayal, and the need to belong at any cost? How about unrequited love and all the pain that comes with it?

More importantly, are you ready to live through all of that again?

If the answer is no, maybe writing YA isn’t for you.

YA vs. Adult: Adult Romance Writer Disease

Other articles in this series:

YA vs. Adult: Crossover Appeal

YA vs. Adult: Do you have the voice?

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If you’re an aspiring YA author who started out writing for the adult market, there is a chance you suffer from what I call “Adult Romance Writer Disease,” or ARWD for short. The YA market is hot, and writers everywhere are flocking to the genre, but do they have what it takes to pull off an authentic teen story?

Do you?

Let’s examine some of the symptoms:

• Your characters spend a lot of time making out/having sex instead of focusing on the story’s plot.
• You devote considerable pages to said making out/sexual relations, describing each interlude in great detail.
• Your teenage heroine notices every detail of the hero’s outfit, down to the fabric of his jeans rasping against her bare thighs and how his thin cotton t-shirt feels against her palms as she skims them over his well-muscled chest.
• Your teenage hero has a well-muscled chest in the first place. Unless he’s a wrestler or football player or something. Or your book is about steroid abuse. Whatever the case, your hero has one and there’s not a good reason for it.
• Your teenage hero smells like musk/spice/exotic foods/the outdoors, despite having spent his day getting sweaty and dirty like boys have a habit of doing.
• Your teenage hero is well schooled in the arts of intimacy and seduction, and oozes sexuality.
• Marriage is a distinct possibility by book’s end.

Any of that sound familiar?

I recently had a great conversation with one of my critique partners who was griping about the lack of “romance” in a popular new YA romance novel she’d read, in which a boy brushing hands with the heroine was apparently a Really Big Deal.

I, on the other hand, was frustrated with her YA characters, who spent a big chunk of their book making out or thinking about making out, despite having just met. There was none of the glorious angst most teens experience before their earth-shattering first kiss, none of the oh-so-important steps leading up to it, or the awkwardness that inevitably follows. Where was the buildup? The unbearable tension? Kissing is a pretty big deal for most teenagers, so why did her characters’ first kiss feel anticlimactic?

It all comes back to the brush of the hand.

Think about it. Most teens spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing how their crushes look at them, even if the “look” was more like a glance that may or may not have actually been directed at someone else. If said crush were to say something/acknowledge their existence/accidentally or purposely touch them, a teen would lose all sensibilities. Text messages would fly. The world would stop turning.

What your character notices—the details he or she considers swoon-worthy and intimate—is the #1 difference between adult and YA romance.

I’ll never forget my shock when one of my uber talented critique partners went through a YA manuscript I’d written with her virtual red pen and cut all of the strong verbs and adjectives in my intimate scenes (“straddle” and “stroke,” for example). I’d chosen those words so carefully! Why would I want to replace them with something less evocative? Teenagers don’t think like that, she told me, so deciding to trust her brilliance, I cut them.

Good thing I did.

Enter Agent of Awesome. If she’d seen the original version of that manuscript, I have no doubt she would’ve passed. As it was, during our final edit before going on submission, she asked me to tone down the intimacy of the book even more. It felt like the characters were spending more scenes kissing than bonding, she said. There wasn’t enough build up.

What?!

I did what she asked, grumbling to myself about the injustice of it all, but then a funny thing happened—I re-read the book and the important elements I wanted in those scenes were still there. The only difference was the feel. Instead of sounding like a bodice-ripper, those sections read like true YA love scenes. Slightly awkward, but entirely heartfelt.

Imagine that.

So how the heck do you avoid making the same mistake?

Let’s hop in our handy-dandy mental time machines and try to remember what it was like when we were teens.

Do you remember crushing on a guy so hard you’d have paid all your allowance just to hear him say your name? What about hanging out with a group of girls you didn’t particularly like just because one of them happened to be his sister? Or, worse, agreeing to wear your school’s horrid Bulldog mascot costume to a basketball game just to be the one he high-fived after he scored?

That last one was totally worth it, by the way.

When you were a teen, how did you describe a boy’s scent? I lived with a pack of guy friends when I was a teenager, and can’t begin to count how many times I slept in their clothes or borrowed their sweatshirts. Some of them smelled so freaking good, while others… yeah, not so much. My ability to define said smell, however, was lacking. I couldn’t have told you what “musk” meant (I suggest you look it up–nasty stuff, musk), nor would I have thought to use words like spicy, woodsy, or fiery. Dryer sheets, maybe. Or campfires if he was the outdoorsy type. I usually just attributed it to cologne. Or deodorant.

I wouldn’t be me if we didn’t pause for a simplified psychological explanation. If you’re not interested in the wonders of the human mind, feel free to skip the italicized bit below.

Jean Piaget, one of the founding fathers of child psychology, introduced the concept of assimilation vs. accommodation. In a nutshell, a child takes new experiences and/or sensations and thinks of them in terms of pre-existing knowledge. Thus, dryer sheets. Or campfires. Or nasty boy sweat.  It’s only when a child is presented with something that just doesn’t add up that they accommodate the information by creating a new schema. For instance, when I realized my future husband’s scent couldn’t be attributed to anything other than him because he doesn’t wear cologne and neither deodorant or fabric softener where in play at that particular moment. Voilà. New schema, “Yummy Boy Scent,” created!

For those of you who didn’t skip ahead, you’re feeling smarter now, right? I thought so. Now, back to your mental time machines, writer friends!

Think back to your first kiss with a new boyfriend. Awkward, right? You might have worried about whether he was enjoying it, how you looked in your busty bff’s shirt, whether your breath smelled like the ranch dressing you just ate, or what you should do with your hands. Little blips of, “I want to do this all day,” or even, “Ugh, this is totally disgusting,” might have popped into your brain, too, but mostly? You were probably a little freaked out by the whole thing.

YA romance is about the circling, circling, circling thing teens do when they like someone, and the shock and awe that follows the first time they actually do something about it. It’s about the blissful self-absorption that’s part of growing up. It’s about making the choice to do something very adult when a big part of them is still scared to take that leap. It’s the giddiness that accompanies each step they must take toward the edge of innocence, and then the rush of flinging themselves off the cliff.

Comparatively speaking, adult romance is about what happens after you’ve flung yourself from the cliff and are now lying in a heap of broken bones at its base. Gone is the angst of being a teen. There’s no time for self-absorption in the real world. Adult romance is about exploring repressed sexuality. It’s about losing the spurned lover baggage, thinking beyond yourself, and learning to open your heart fully to someone. Adult romance is, quite simply, about being an adult.

One last question. Cute, sophisticated college boys aside, do you remember how old and stuffy everyone over twenty looked through your teenage-self’s eyes?

I do. So why would we write our teen characters that way?

Again with yesterday’s caveat that this is not an end-all explanation, merely the opinion of a reformed YA and adult romance author who used to have a terminal case of Adult Romance Writer Disease. Hopefully I’ve helped some of you see what needs fixing in your own manuscripts the same way my CPs and agent helped me fix mine.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll talk about YA voice and why not everyone can master it. My mentor, USA Today and NYT bestselling author Lori Wilde, will chime in as well! Until then…

YA vs. Adult: Crossover Appeal?

Other articles in this series:

YA vs. Adult: Adult Romance Writer Disease

YA vs. Adult: Do you have the voice?

Agents and editors love it when a good YA manuscript with crossover appeal pops up in their inbox. A book that speaks to adults as well as teens will reach a much wider audience, which usually translates to more copies sold.

So why aren’t our inboxes flooded with crossover novels?

I have a theory.

Now that the press I work for accepts YA submissions, I’m seeing more and more novels pitched as YA when, really, they’re just adult novels with teenage protagonists. The authors I’ve rejected have all said the same thing:

“I was going for crossover appeal.”

Let me make one thing very, very clear. Adding adult content does not give your novel crossover appeal. Your teen characters should still be teenagers, facing typical teen issues. Romantically speaking, they should circle each other like typical teens do, delighting in the “blush of first love” (my crit partner AE Rought‘s YA tagline), not fall madly in love on the 3rd page and spend the rest of the book partaking in a very adult relationship that culminates—or threatens to culminate—in marriage.

Am I saying your YA characters can’t have sex or be serious about each other? No, I am not. The difference is entirely in the details. I’ll go over said details in my next post, but for now, let’s focus on what gives a YA novel its crossover appeal.

We’ve established it’s not the level of intimacy, though when handled right, that helps (the PERFECT CHEMISTRY series, for example). Adding marriage and other adult content isn’t it, either. So what can you add to give your novel multi-generational appeal?

If you want your novel to crossover, look no further than the plot. In what context are you presenting your typical teen issues? Are we observing your characters in their school/home/job setting? Or are we observing them doing something bigger, say, saving the world?

Also, take a hard look at your stakes. Do they pertain only to a teenage audience? Or do they speak to a larger problem, relating to things even adults have to overcome?

Take a look at these two examples…

Example #1: A contemporary YA novel set in suburbia, in which the main character spends a bulk of her time trying to overcome her stuttering problem and win the heart of the new boy in school, whilst outwitting the evil captain of the cheerleading squad who has been harassing her since 3rd grade. If she fails to channel the strength she learned from her single mother, she’ll continue stuttering, won’t have a date to the prom, and will give her cheerleader nemesis even more to tease her about. If she wins, well, the opposite will happen. And, if she’s coordinated, maybe she’ll make the cheerleading team to boot.

Stakes like the ones in this story signal the impending apocalypse for many teenagers, but adults know there are more important things to worry about. The context is also very narrow—high school drama with characters that don’t think beyond their current situation.

Will this book get crossover readers? Not many. Unless an adult is looking to relive their own teenage angst, the odds of this book ever seeing the top of a TBR pile are low.

Example #2: A contemporary YA novel set in a small town, in which the main character spends the bulk of her summer vacation working at her parents’ restaurant because she “owes” them, running to stave off leukemia, and partying like there’s no tomorrow. After she meets a 19yo cop the night she gets caught partying on a forbidden bridge, she must overcome her fear of leukemia, forgive her parents for what happened when she was sick last, and learn to trust both the cop and in her own future. If she fails, she’ll continue throwing her life away, will never be able to form goals, and will never allow herself to fall in love.

Now here’s something an adult can get interested in!  It’s also the premise of Jennifer Echols’ GOING TOO FAR. Teens relate to the main character’s snarky attitude, her parent woes, being trapped in a life she doesn’t want, and her crush on the gorgeous cop who she’s shocked to find out just graduated the year before. Adults relate to the trapped feeling, the seriousness of the main character’s condition, the lust-turned-love subplot, and the nostalgia of lost opportunities. The context is also much broader than the previous example, drawing the reader beyond the character’s high school haunts and into the real world of crime and death, even if the main character isn’t quite part of that world yet. Because of this, GOING TOO FAR has crossover appeal in spades.

Oh, and the characters never have sex.

Yeah, you heard me. They have a near miss, which teens and adults can both relate to, but this book isn’t a torrid affair from start to finish like much of the “YA” in my slushpile. Meg and Johnafter spend more time arguing than kissing.

Which is very YA.

Back to stakes and context for a second. Maybe this is why so many paranormal YA books—even the ones set primarily in high school—have crossover appeal. Paranormal worlds are more complex, which organically leads to higher stakes and a broader context. We’ve got to try a little harder in contemporary, but the potential is there.

Here’s what it looks like in a nifty little formula:

(YA issues + YA characters) x (high stakes + broad context) = Strength of Crossover Appeal

The higher your stakes and context, the more crossover appeal you’ll have.

This is not an end-all explanation, as agents and editors all have their own takes on the issue, but hopefully I’ve helped illuminate some of the mystery. Watch for my next post in this series, in which I’ll address what I affectionately call Adult Romance Writer Disease (ARWD). Do you have it?