Wrestling with the YA genre

Despite thinking I’m writing adult fantasy, I have to acknowledge I’m wrestling with the YA genre.

Recognisable today in series like The Hunger Games, Divergent and Twilight, traditional publishing caught on to Young Adult (YA) as a marketable product back in the 2000’s. You can argue that YA is much older; 1960’s, 1940’s, and even earlier. But today there exists a collection of genre tropes that fill many shelves in bookshops. YA has expanded up and down the age groups, spilling into Middle Grade and Adult.

At one time, YA aimed at twelve to eighteen year-old readers. But then adults sneaked onto trains with copies of Middle-Grade Harry Potter disguised in other dust jackets. Then Harry Potter grew up with the audience and adults dropped the disguises. Then YA stories themselves went darker and smuttier.

Is that because teen readers are more mature? That we live in a darker and less innocent time? Or have the literary themes changed?

That’s where my problem starts. Who am I writing for? How do I market it?

Age Appropriate?

Where Middle-Grade fiction might hint at romance or a first crush, YA fiction includes more mature physical or emotional relationships. YA content includes more graphic violence, profanity, and sex – previously fade-to-black, but now getting more descriptive. So where’s the boundary between YA and Adult?

The easy-to-read 50-75,000 word YA novel now sprawls over 100,000 words or more. So that’s not it. The reading age for prose in Adult fiction is often as low as Middle Grade, so that’s not it, either.

There’s one constant: the protagonist in YA is almost always a teenager, their story told from a teenage perspective and point-of-view. There’s no wisdom-of-hindsight storytelling as in some vintage literary classics. YA tells the story in the here and now, teenage naivete and all.

YA is not a Genre

While YA is not a genre of itself, you can find it in romance, fantasy, historical, sci-fi (especially dystopian) and contemporary fiction. You’ll get every subject from illness, poverty, violence, mental health, domestic abuse, grooming, social rejection, suicide and racism. It seems nothing is off-limits. Same-sex and trans-gender relationships are in as much as traditional hetero-centric ones. No hard rules to guide me there.

Recurring Themes

YA does have common themes such as:

• coming of age
• first love
• self-discovery
• life and death
• individuality
• relationships

Tie those to a teenage protagonist, point of view and lived experience and we get closer to YA.

Back to You

Which brings me back to my problem.

In my fantasy series, Jovanka is eighteen. Despite the fact that her second-sight grants her access to the future, she’s not as worldly as she believes. She is socially awkward, blunt and more than a little self-centred. She has layers of trauma most adults struggle to deal with, a devastated and disrupted childhood, a damaged sense of self-worth, and anger-management issues. Jovanka also carries a teenage crush on a man she’s never met, some raging hormones, and justifiable attachment disorders.

She can be impulsive and makes rash, teenage mistakes. Her mood swings take her from Sunshine to Grumpy all on her own. I sometimes worry she’s too whiny and petulant. She’s on her own in her age group, surrounded by proper grown-ups, without a peer-group to engage. This is a major omission in any YA novel.

While the story is a fantasy adventure with some plausible but not overly graphic violence and brief fade-to-black sex, it doesn’t dip below the line of the Adult Grimdark genre.

My teenage protagonist hits all those listed themes: coming of age, first love, self-discovery, life and death, individuality, relationships.

The obvious marketing angle is YA; a still-growing market with plenty of comparable titles. And an audience I don’t specifically write for. If I market it as YA, will I miss a whole adult audience?

And where do I place it among comparable titles? YA isn’t what I typically read. I am the author fish-out-of-water. I’d call it a conundrum; but that’s a word you’ll never read in a YA manuscript.

The editing is drawing to a close; and I’m still wrestling with the YA genre.