Five Tips for Writing YA

The media we engage with when we’re young can stick with us throughout our lives and impact a lot about our life experiences going forward. We don’t tend to think about it that much, but a lot of our formative experiences are based around the books we read (or had read to us), the movies we watched and the games we played. Even the music we grow up on shapes us.

I’m no psychologist, so this is largely anecdotal, but I think it probably isn’t that hard to take a look at the fiction we experienced as kids and draw a pipeline to our taste in stories as adults. It isn’t just our media preferences either; the stories we grow up on shape everything from our professional interests and hobbies to our ethics, politics and morality.

Given that our formative experiences with fiction have such a sizable impact on our lives, I think that it’s important for there to be as wide a selection of quality fiction for young people out there as possible. That being said though, writing for young people isn’t always easy. I’ve talked a little about writing picture books for little kids before here, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. 

With that in mind, I want to share a couple of quick tips for writing for young people - mostly focusing on older kids into young adulthood. This is by no means comprehensive, but it’s a good starting point.

Know Your Audience

Young adult fiction is in kind of a weird place right now - and arguably has been for a while. I have seen a not-insignificant amount of discourse about this, I’ve had this come up in conversations with people and it even popped up in a recent Stories Across Borders recording session.

Simply put, roughly half of the people reading YA fiction (if not more) are actually well into adulthood. That means that there is a temptation to start making those books more and more aimed at those readers. Personally, I don’t think that we’re about to hit some crisis point where true YA is going to disappear and leave teenagers with nothing to read. But I do think it is worth considering who you are actually writing for.

There’s nothing wrong with mass appeal. In fact, even though a lot of my writing deals with pretty dark themes, I go out of my way to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible. But if your story is being marketed as YA, then it needs to be written with the idea that it is teens and young adults who are going to be the primary readers. If the book is good, adults will probably still read it regardless. You don’t need to force your story to be more “grown-up” or “spicy”.

In all honesty, I advocate for not deciding to market a story as YA, adult fiction or children’s literature (or whatever other demographic it is going to be marketed at) until you actually have the story figured out and know how you’re going to be writing it. Then you can write the story you want to write and figure out who will get the most out of it after the fact.

Don’t Be Condescending

Bear with me, this one might sound a little bit contradictory at first. It’s true that kids can be kind of dumb. But that doesn’t mean they are. Young people are often a lot smarter and emotionally mature than we want to give them credit for. The stories we give them to enjoy should reflect that.

I know I literally just talked about how we don’t need to go out of our way to make stories aimed at young people more “grown-up”. But that doesn’t mean we should be dumbing their fiction down either. Young people are exposed to all the same complexities and difficulties in the world as we are and they are in the process of forming their own opinions about it. They are going to seek out stories that resonate with them and those stories are going to inform how their thoughts and feelings about those issues develop. 

Stories aimed at even fairly young kids can - and arguably should - explore emotionally, morally and socially complex plots and themes. You just have to approach those topics in a way that is suitable for your audience. Again though, this doesn’t mean talking down to them, abandoning all subtlety and assuming they are incapable of appreciating any nuance. It just means that the scope and language should be adjusted accordingly.

Be Universal, Not Current

I’m not talking about the time period you set your works in with this one or how the plot and themes of your story tie into that setting. I’m talking about the trends you elect to follow and the language you use in your story.

Trends, slang and all that fun stuff have always moved quickly. But there’s a whole universe of difference between the speed at which things went in and out of fashion in the eighties or nineties compared to now. Thanks to the shift of culture to a more online landscape, the wealth of bite-sized content out there and the speed at which news and information travels; it’s just not comparable. Think about how long it actually takes to write a book. By the time you’re doing your final editing pass; all of the memes, slang and trends that your target audience were engaging with at the time will be basically ancient history.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include any references to the pop-culture of the time your story is set in or anything. It just means that you should stick to more universal language, keep your references to the culture relatively broad and don’t go referencing a bunch of internet memes that nobody will remember by the time your book is released. 

Don’t write your kids in the 2020s like forty-five-year-old insurance salesmen from 1976, but don’t lean too hard into trying to use “current” languages and references because chances are high they won’t be current anymore by the time anyone is reading your story and it will just sound cringey instead. You know, like the “hello fellow kids” meme. Remember that?

Representation Is In

We are well past the days where stories were expected only to cater to the largest common denominator. These days, diversity in our stories isn’t just encouraged, it is expected to be the norm (and it should be). 

Young people are at a time in their lives where they are exploring their identity and trying to build an understanding of the world. They will look for stories that they can relate to and see themselves in. Furthermore though, the fiction kids engage with will help shape their understandings of other people and influence how they empathise with them. That means it is important that the stories young people are experiencing include a diverse array of people within them.

However, that doesn’t mean trying to fit some sort of arbitrary diversity quota or trying to shoehorn in one-dimensional token characters. It does mean avoiding stereotypes and doing your best to be informed about the experiences and history of the people you are including in your stories. It does mean being conscious about your own trends and biases.

By educating ourselves, we can make sure we are comfortable in including people in our stories who aren’t necessarily like us. That way diversity will naturally find its way into our stories without feeling forced and when we do write characters outside of our own demographic, it doesn’t feel disingenuous.

That being said though, we should also still be making a point of making space in the industry for people in marginalized groups to tell their own stories too.

Avoid Overwriting

This one is an issue that feels particularly prevalent in the science fiction and fantasy side of things, but it still warrants a little discussion. To me, it seems like a lot of writers are extremely focused on their wordcounts. In particular, a lot of writers seem hung up on high wordcounts. Whether it’s a matter of pride, obsession or some industry trend I’m not aware of, I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that I don’t think this is the right way to go about telling a compelling story. I definitely don’t think this is the way to go about writing for young people.

I think that, as a general rule, readers don’t care about high wordcounts nearly as much as writers do. In my opinion, the average reader would much rather read through a tightly written and well-paced story than a long, meandering epic. So, with attention spans getting shorter, how do you think most young people - who are used to being bombarded with fast-paced, bite-sized chunks of bingeable media - are likely to feel about reading the next Iliad?

I don’t think attention spans shrivelling up like a dry sponge is a good thing, even as someone who spends most of my time online these days. So I’m not exactly encouraging the trend further. But, if we want young people to read our stories, we should probably keep this trend in mind. Keeping stories at a manageable size with a well-written and carefully paced plot seems to be a healthy middle ground here to me. Focus on writing a good story instead of going out of your way to write a long one. It’s fine if a story ends up long naturally, I just don’t think it’s a great idea to force it.