Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies Read online

  Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies®

  Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/writingyoungadultfiction to view this book's cheat sheet.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  About This Book

  Conventions Used in This Book

  What You’re Not to Read

  Foolish Assumptions

  How This Book Is Organized

  Part I: Getting Ready to Write Young Adult Fiction

  Part II: Writing Riveting Young Adult Fiction

  Part III: Editing, Revising, and Formatting Your Manuscript

  Part IV: Getting Published

  Part V: The Part of Tens

  Icons Used in This Book

  Where to Go from Here

  Part I: Getting Ready to Write Young Adult Fiction

  Chapter 1: The Lowdown on YA Fiction

  Introducing YA and Its Readers

  Knowing what makes a YA a YA

  Understanding why YA fiction is for kids

  Looking at why it’s not just for kids

  Maneuvering through the Challenges

  Reaching reluctant readers

  Pacifying gatekeepers

  Enjoying the Perks of Writing for Young Adults

  Getting new waves of readers: Long live the renewable audience!

  Gaining a following: The young and the quenchless

  Breaking the rules

  Chapter 2: Targeting Teen Readers

  Identifying Your Teen or Tween Audience

  Choosing your age range

  Targeting gender

  Exercise: Name your category

  Knowing Your Genre

  Exploring genres of YA fiction

  Writing cross-genre novels

  Thinking through the Theme

  Looking at universal teen themes

  Making timeless themes relevant today

  Exercise: Choose your theme

  Making or Chasing Trends

  Chapter 3: Managing Your Muse

  Setting Yourself Up to Write

  Carving out your writing space

  Protecting your writing time

  Setting Your Muse Loose

  Capturing ideas

  Getting the words to flow

  Bulldozing your way through writer’s block

  Outlining the Right Way (for You)

  Outlining the whole story

  Planning portions

  Tossing out the outline

  Doing Research, YA-Style

  Taking notes and keeping records

  Following general research guidelines

  Finding reliable online resources

  Doing field research to make the teen realm yours

  Putting the brakes on research

  Revealing what you know

  Finding Your People: The YA Community

  Joining a professional organization: What SCBWI should mean to you

  Attending writers’ conferences

  Keeping up with the biz: YA-specific journals

  Checking out the online community

  Joining a critique group

  Part II: Writing Riveting Young Adult Fiction

  Chapter 4: Writing the Almighty Hook

  Understanding the Importance of a Hook

  Calling your shot for others

  Calling your shot for yourself

  Writing a Great Hook in Four Easy Steps

  Step 1: Introduce your character

  Step 2: State your theme

  Step 3: Assert your core plot conflict or goal

  Step 4: Add context

  Exercise: Write your hook

  Using Your Hook to Shape Your Story

  Chapter 5: Creating Teen-Friendly Characters

  Casting Characters Teens Care About

  Calling all heroes

  Selecting a jury of peers

  Offing the old people

  Bringing Your Characters to Life

  Revealing character through action

  Revealing character through dialogue

  Getting physical

  The beauty of flaws: Creating a not-so-perfect character

  Backstory: Knowing the secret past

  Exercise: Create a full character profile

  Putting Your Characters to Work

  Making the introductions

  Using character arc to drive your plot

  Granting independence to teen characters

  Writing Believable Baddies

  Giving the villains goals and dreams

  Seeing the good in the bad

  Making an example of an antagonist

  Exercise: Write a character profile for your antagonist

  Chapter 6: Building the Perfect Plot

  Choosing the Approach to Your Plot

  Acting on events: Plot-driven stories

  Focusing on feelings: Character-driven stories

  Seven Steps to the Perfect Plot

  Step 1: Engage your ESP

  Step 2: Compute the problem

  Step 3: Flip the switch

  Step 4: Dog pile on the protagonist

  Step 5: Epiphany!

  Step 6: Final push

  Step 7: Triumph

  Exercise: Plot your trigger points

  Tackling Pacing and Tension

  Picking up the pace

  Slowing the pace

  Creating tension

  Managing Your Subplots

  Pulling Off Prologues, Flashbacks, and Epilogues

  Prologues

  Flashbacks

  Epilogues

  Chapter 7: Creating Teen-Driven Action

  Grabbing Teens’ Attention

  Opening with action

  Tell ’em how it is: Giving key info

  Making promises

  Pushing Readers’ Buttons with Scenes and Chapters

  Knowing a scene from a chapter

  Mastering transitions

  Leaving Teens Satisfied

  Empowering your teen lead

  Keeping it real

  Keeping your promise

  Delivering a twist

  Chapter 8: Setting Is More than Somewhere to Be

  How the Where and When Affect the Who, What, and Why

  Place

  Time

  Social context

  Setting Up Your Characters

  Manipulating their minds

  Putting words in their mouths

  Kicking characters in the pants

  Tying Your Plot to Your Place

  Choosing the Best Setting for Your Teen Novel

  Making the Setting Come Alive

  Engaging the five senses

  Sample scene: Two girls on a bus

  Researching your setting

  Weaving the Setting into Your Narrative

  Sprinkling versus splashing

  Stacking the sensory details

  Keeping it young

  Giving the setting a job

  Freshening up common settings

  Chapter 9: Crafting a Narrative Voice Teens Will Listen To . . . and Love

  I’m Not Talking Dialogue Here: The True Meaning of Narrative Voice

  Getting a feel for narrative voice

  Seeing what goes into narrative voice

  Pinning Down Your Narrator and Point of View

  First-person POV

  Second-person POV

  Third-person limited POV

  Third-person omniscient POV

  The unreliable narrator

  Exercise: Developing your narrative POV

  Making Sense of Teen Sensibility

  Self-awareness and the teen psyche

  Embrace your inner drama queen

 
Word Choice: It Pays to Be Picky

  Say what? Using appropriate words for your audience

  Getting fresh with your phraseology

  Exercise: Creating a word bank

  Showing a little style

  Syncing Your Delivery to Your Audience

  Sizing up sentence structure and paragraphing

  Putting punctuation in its place

  Show It, Don’t Tell It

  Chapter 10: Talking Like a Teen

  Telling Your Story through Dialogue

  Character and mood: Letting your teens talk about themselves

  Delivering information: Loose lips reveal plot and backstory

  Choosing the setting: Their “where” determines their words

  Even Old People Can Sound Young

  Rediscovering your immaturity

  Relaxing the grammar

  Ditching the fake teen accent

  Cussing with caution

  What the Best Dialogue Doesn’t Say

  Censoring the babble

  Dodging the question

  Avoiding info dumps

  Getting the Balance Right: Dialogue and Narrative

  Taking breathers with beats

  Making the action count

  He said, she said: Doling out dialogue tags

  Welcoming teens with white space

  Weighing your balance of dialogue and narrative

  Doing a Little Mind Reading: Direct Thoughts

  Part III: Editing, Revising, and Formatting Your Manuscript

  Chapter 11: Editing and Revising with Confidence

  Self-Editing, Where Every Revision Begins

  The read-through: Shifting your mindset from writing to editing

  Self-editing checklist

  Calling in the Posse: The Give and Take of Critiquing

  Participating in a critique group

  Hiring a freelance editor

  Getting input from teens and tweens

  Revising with Confidence

  Starting big and finishing small

  Taking chances with your changes

  Knowing the final draft when you see it

  Chapter 12: The Finishing Touches: Formatting and Finalizing

  Paying Attention to Nitty-Gritty Details

  Patrolling punctuation

  Avoiding basic blunders with easily confused words

  Running spell-check

  Making Passes: Professionals Proofread (Twice)

  Formatting the Standard YA Manuscript

  Page setup and such: Tackling the technical stuff

  Putting the right stuff on the first page

  Protecting What’s Yours and Getting Permission

  Copyrighting your manuscript

  Understanding plagiarism, permission, and perfectly fair use

  Asking for the okay

  Crediting your sources

  Part IV: Getting Published

  Chapter 13: Strategizing and Packaging Your Submissions

  Creating Your Submission Strategy

  Compiling your submission list

  Identifying the right editor for you

  Deciding to work with an agent

  Query Letters, Your Number-One Selling Tool

  Why queries feel like the be all, end all . . . and are

  Writing a successful query letter

  Writing an Effective Synopsis

  Drafting the synopsis

  Tweaking the tone and tense

  Formatting a synopsis

  Packaging Your Submission

  What to include

  What not to include

  The skinny on sample chapters

  Keeping Your Fingers Crossed

  Enduring the wait for a response

  Receiving the long-awaited news

  Turning “No” into “Yes!”

  Using rejection to strengthen your story (and maybe resubmit it!)

  Reading between the rejection-letter lines

  Keeping your ego (and feelings) out of it

  Chapter 14: Self-Publishing: Is It for You?

  What’s So Different about Self-Publishing?

  Eyeing the benefits

  Realizing the drawbacks

  Understanding Your Publishing Options

  Traditional publishing

  Print-on-demand (POD)

  Digital publishing

  Knowing the Players

  Author services companies

  Publisher services companies

  Distributors

  Wholesalers

  Booksellers

  Weighing Self-Publishing for Your YA Fiction

  Common scenarios for self-publishers

  Balancing your goals, your guts, and your wallet

  Chapter 15: Mastering Marketing

  Laying the Foundation

  Working with a Marketing Team

  Understanding the marketing department’s role

  Calling in reinforcements: Freelance publicists

  Marketing Yourself: I Write; Therefore, I Promote

  Creating and maintaining a platform

  Gathering your marketing materials

  Garnering book reviews

  Part V: The Part of Tens

  Chapter 16: Ten Common Pitfalls in Writing YA Fiction

  Dating a Book

  Slinging Slang

  S-E-X

  Writing Cliché Characters and Situations

  Preaching

  Dumbing It Down

  Writing for 18+

  Putting Adults at the Helm

  The Waving Author

  Writing to Trends

  Chapter 17: Ten Facts about Book Contracts

  Does the Publisher Own the Copyright to My Book?

  What Does “Buy All Rights” Mean?

  What are Subsidiary Rights?

  What’s the Deal with Electronic Rights?

  What Does “Advance Against Royalties” Mean?

  What’s the Difference between Royalties on “Net” and “Gross”?

  Why Do My Royalties Go to My Agent?

  What’s a Boilerplate?

  Am I Protected from Libel Suits?

  What’s an Option, and Why Would I Grant It?

  Chapter 18: Ten Ways to Make the Most of a Conference

  Set Reasonable Goals and Make a Plan to Achieve Them

  Research the Faculty

  Pay for One-on-One Critiques

  Perfect Your Pitch

  Prepare Your Manuscript

  Create a Conference Notebook

  Bring Bookmarks or Business Cards

  Make Notes on the Business Cards You Receive

  Save Conference Expense Receipts for Tax Records

  Set Aside a Post-Conference Recovery Phase

  Cheat Sheet

  Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies®

  by Deborah Halverson

  Award-winning author and editor

  Foreword by M. T. Anderson

  National Book Award Winner

  Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies®

  Published by

  Wiley Publishing, Inc.

  111 River St.

  Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774

  www.wiley.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

  Published simultaneously in Canada

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