Recently, book twitter’s panties knotted up yet again with one of its favorite brouhahas. The pile-on centered on the oft bandied questions:
What are the defining characteristics of YA fiction?
Are all novels centered around a teen protagonist considered YA?
Does the central character have to be a teenager in order to be considered YA?
Is it simply marketing?
As an author who writes in both YA and adult categories, I’ve thought a lot about this. To the point of eye-glazing-over nerd-dom, to be honest. My obsession goes beyond categorizing demographics. Before I studied writing, I wanted to be a cultural anthropologist specializing in adolescent psychology, so shit like this—the linguistic details specifically—interest me beyond measure. True story, whenever I have an idea I want to kick around, and am on the fence about who best to tell a story, I schedule a hair appointment with the stylist I’ve had for thirty-plus years, and try the concept out on him. If he pauses whilst patting my tresses with highlight goo, I know I’m in the ballpark. Highly scientific, right? Anyway, that’s just a starting point. From there, I try out voices, concepts, plotlines, and write a few chapters. In fact, my current WIP has two versions. The YA one and the adult one. At this writing, YA is winning.
Want to know what I’m basing this idea of manuscript-with-legs versus a-story-abandoned-on-my-hard-drive on? Are you still with me? Ready to nerd out? Okay, trot off and fill your mug with caffeine. Grab your reading glasses and neck pillow. Go ahead. I’ll wait. This is a long one.
Ready? Here goes. There are, in my mind, three main areas beyond “marketing” that determine whether a book with a teenaged narrator falls on the adult or the YA shelf, so without further “a doo doo” as my kids used to say, here they are:
Tense, language and syntactical choices: Compare this paragraph, in Jandy Nelson’s THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE:
This is what happens when Joe Fontaine has his debut trumpet solo in band practice: I’m the first to go, swooning into Rachel, who topples into Cassidy Rosenthal, who tumbles onto Zachary Quittner, who collapses onto Sarah, who reels into Luke Jacobus—until every kid in band is on the floor in a bedazzled heap. Then the roof flies off, the walls collapse, and when I look outside I see that the nearby stand of redwoods has uprooted and is making its way up the quad to our classroom, a gang of giant wooden men clapping their branches together. Lastly, the Rain River overflows its banks and detours left and right until it finds its way to Clover High music room where it sweeps us all away—he is that good.
To this passage in Karen Russell’s SWAMPLANDIA:
Incredibly, Mom stayed dead but the sky changed. Rains fell. Alligators dug and tenanted new lakes. It became (how?) early April. We were doing four or five shows a week, at most, for pitiful numbers of people. Some audiences were in the single digits. I read my comics and memorized the speech bubbles of heroes. I dusted our Seth clock, a gruesome and fantastic timepiece the Chief had made: just an ordinary dishlike kitchen clock set inside a real alligator’s pale stomach. The clock hung from a hook next to the blackboard menu in our Swamp Café. TIME TO EAT! Somebody—probably Grandpa—had scratched into the boards above it. Water overflowed the sloughs and combed the black mudflats. Mangroves hugged soil and vegetation into pond-lily islands; gales tore the infant matter apart along the Gulf. Our swamp got blown to green bits and reassembled, daily, hourly. The wet season was a series of land-versus-water skirmishes: marl turned to chowder and shunted the baby-green cocoplums into the sea; tides maniacally revised the coastlines. Whole islands caught fire from lightning strikes, and you could sometimes watch deer and marsh rabbits leaping into the sea of saw grass on gasps of smoke.
The narrator in TSIE, a popular young adult contemporary novel, is seventeen. The narrator in SWAMPLANDIA, a novel marketed to adults, is thirteen. And yet, the former book is clearly filtered through an adolescent gaze; the latter, not so much.
Note that Nelson’s book is written in present tense—a narrative choice many YA authors make. There is an immediacy to the prose. A frenetic, high-octane tempo: The roof flies off, the walls collapse. The raw, unprocessed tone pulls the reader along at the same pace as the protagonist. The tension the character feels is transferred to the audience—which is presumed to be key to engaging teen readers. The goal is to blur the edges of the character with that of the reader. Also, note how Nelson ties up the paragraph with a concluding assessment. Also, a YA trait.
Russell’s prose, conversely, is denser, more convoluted and less yoked to the narrator’s present condition. The “I” is submerged and a magical landscape takes center stage: marl turned to chowder and shunted the baby-green cocoplums into the sea… clearly, the reader is asked to suspend disbelief that a 13-year-old would present such a world view. And yet, thirteen-year-old Ava’s story is, indeed, a coming-of-age tale.
Let’s get even more granular in our analysis. Note Nelson’s fancy adjective, bedazzled. Compare that with Russell’s the verbs: tenanted and revised. Both language choices are particular and unusual, but often YA authors invest their syntactical trump cards in modifiers rather than action words. It’s a way to bring more eye candy to the page. Young readers respond to visual cues. To concrete description that paints a vivid picture. Adults respond to concrete description also, but in order to earn the attention of a person who’s spent decades reading, authors might heed the words of Emily Dickinson and, “tell it slant.” Another way to say this is, Tom Spanbauer’s burnt tongue. Surprising the reader by using a word differently, or shaking up a sentence by reversing the usual order of speech. In Spanbauer’s FARAWAY PLACES, for instance, thirteen-year-old Jacob Joseph Weber, the protagonist, begins: The moon was full and it was the February that it didn’t snow.
Simple, concrete, declarative sentence. The burnt tongue here is the departure from a more common way of opening. Something more like: That February, it didn’t snow at all, and on the night of the full moon blah, blah, blah… Instead, Spanbauer begins with a certain night, embedded in an outlier month. Gets right to heart of the particularity in his set up. This alone wouldn’t be enough to cast this book into the realm of adult fiction as opposed to YA, but hang on, because my second factor in differentiating the two categories is this:
Messiness. In Spanbauer’s coming-of-age novel, as well as Lidia Yuknavitch’s DORA: A HEADCASE, the teenaged narrators navigate some of the darker and more traditionally adult areas of drugs, sexuality and queerness. To be sure, plenty of books deemed YA explore similar topics, but in the ones shelved in adult lit tend to double down on existential chaos while addressing universal truths. In DORA, Yuknavitch’s seventeen-year-old narrator has her own brand of burnt tongue, bending language into corporeal utterings like “throatsong” and “droopfaced.” Yuknavitch, Spanbauer and others who write adult fiction in the voices of non-adult narrators, resist the “happy for now” endings that the YA market insists upon. The narratives tend to ask more questions than they answer, and often, their endings are open-ended and thought-provoking rather than safe and settled.
That’s not to say YA novels don’t tackle hard subjects or occasionally kill off a main character (looking at you THE FAULT IN OUR STARS), but typically, in denouncement, the reader is left with a sense of order and completion. Not necessarily so in a coming-of-age novel marketed to adults, such as Sally Rooney’s NORMAL PEOPLE, where readers’ “shipping” expectations are ultimately thwarted, resisting at all costs the happy for now trope.
Ironic distance: This, of the three, is the hardest one to define. It tends to fall into the category of “I know it when I see it,” but here’s a wee bit of clarity: in YA, the lens is typically filtered through a “first” without the nostalgic layer. Returning to Jandy Nelson’s TSIE, narrator Lennie navigates grief while falling in love for the first time. Self-discovery is the pay-off, as it is in many young adult stories. The novel also relies on epistolary snippets that act as emotional guideposts to supplement Lennie’s interior life. YA, I posit, welcomes these add-ons as shortcuts to interiority.
Compare that approach with Jessica Anya Blau’s MARY JANE, an adult “coming of age” novel focused on a life-changing summer for the central protagonist and titular narrator. Blau’s book is set in the ‘70’s so nostalgia is baked in, and an audience of a certain age (aka old folks like me) will get all the references to, say, Gilligan’s Island, and the band Earth, Wind and Fire. Even though Mary Jane’s voice is firmly unironic—is, in fact, overly sincere—part of the novel’s charm is that the reader is invited to fill in the gap between Mary Jane’s evolving world view and their own connected memories of that time and some of the glaring ideological clashes that defined the late middle-century. There are no shoehorned notes written on lollipop wrappers in MARY JANE. No psychological props as supplement.
No contemporary discussion of YA versus adult category ingredients is complete without mention of the freak bestseller WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING. Despite a universally acknowledged fucked up ending, WTCS remains an anomaly. For its glacially-paced murder mystery, its relentless back-and-forth timeline, its quietly inarticulate protagonist—that it shattered records for occupying the #1 position on the NYT bestseller list for fiction is truly miraculous. One thing is clear though—this book would never have made it if marketed to a teen audience. Or maybe I’m full of shit. After all, some analysts report that 70% of YA book-buyers are adults.
In conclusion, given the reasoning I’ve just outlined, it’s strange that I’m on team YA for my latest WIP, isn’t it? I’m basically committing to spending the next year with two teenagers who are immersed in their teenager-ness without a nod to the sexy, existential overlays I admittedly adore. But here’s the caveat. My book is set in the future. I’m trading all the delicious sturm und drang of adult spec fic for the hope and salvation of youth. And that, my friends, is another topic for another day.
(Note: this month I’ve published all my newsletters to be viewed by all readers. In October, I will pub two exclusive newsletters for paid subscribers only. And, warning, they will be nerdy.)
I love that breakdown of Spanbauer's opening line. Thank you for the great blog!