Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies Read online

  Joining a professional organization: What SCBWI should mean to you

  Anyone who’s serious about writing young adult fiction should belong to the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators. SCBWI’s website proclaims it the “largest children’s writing organization in the world,” and that’s no exaggeration. Founded in 1971, SCBWI’s worldwide membership reached 22,000 in 2010. It’s the only professional organization specifically for children’s book writers and illustrators.

  Each year, SCBWI sponsors two annual international conferences about writing and illustrating for children, along with dozens of regional conferences and events. The nonprofit organization acts as a voice for writers and illustrators regarding children’s literature, copyright legislation, and fair contract terms. It sponsors awards and grants, creates professional publications about the craft and business of children’s books, and offers support to its members in the form of online forums and critique exchanges.

  Agents and editors actively engage with SCBWI, respecting it as a place where new talents arise and are nurtured. These crucial pros join experienced authors and illustrators on the faculty of SCBWI-sponsored writer events. Some editors even give priority consideration to SCBWI member submissions and announce open manuscript calls through the SCBWI Bulletin.

  SCBWI exists online with forums, e-newsletters, and pages of resources about industry and craft. But you can take part in a deeper way in its more than 70 regional chapters, which meet regularly. Check out www.scbwi.org for current membership benefits and fees.

  Attending writers’ conferences

  Attending any writers’ conference can give you valuable craft skills and insight into the publishing industry. Some conferences are designed specifically with children’s book writers in mind, with a few conferences focusing solely on writing for young adults. Conferences offer the following:

  Craft tips to help you develop writing that engages young readers

  Opportunities to network with experienced writers who share your YA audience and marketplace

  Up-to-the-moment insight into the state of the children’s book industry from editors, agents, librarians, teachers, booksellers, and publicity pros who toil daily in the kid lit trenches

  One-on-one interaction with children’s book editors and agents

  Plus, attending a conference is a great way to feel part of a like-minded community. Sometimes the lift from a conference is what you need to finish your work-in-progress.

  The primary children’s book writers’ conference is SCBWI’s Annual Summer Conference in Los Angeles (www.scbwi.org). The group also holds a winter conference every December in New York, the hub of U.S. children’s book publishing. Other children’s book conferences include the annual Oregon Coast Children’s Book Writers Workshop (www.occbww.com) and the Big Sur Writing Workshops (www.henrymiller.org/workshops.html). Table 3-1 gives a breakdown of the kinds of conferences out there.

  Table 3-1 Types of Writing Conferences

  Conference Type

  Size/Duration

  Offerings

  National conferences

  Large annual gatherings like SCBWI’s Summer Conference, which well over 1,000 writers and dozens of speakers attend over the course of four days

  National conference offerings are many and wide in scope, often with separate fiction and picture book tracks. Paid critique opportunities are among the offerings.

  Regional conferences

  Smaller, usually two- or three-day events; attendance may be in the dozens or hundreds

  Editors and agents join authors in offering craft- and industry-related sessions. Paid critiques are standard.

  Local writers’ group or SCBWI chapter retreats

  Smaller events such as one- or two-day weekend writing retreats or writing intensives; the attendance is significantly smaller, somewhere between 20 and 30 attendees

  The general approach has at least one published author and an agent and/or editor facilitating the retreat’s various classes and revision blocks. Paid critiques may or may not be available.

  Local writer’s group or SCBWI chapter meetings

  Several-hour meetings; local chapter memberships vary in size from a few writers to several dozen or even a hundred-plus; specific meeting attendance depends on scheduled speakers and topics

  One or several speakers (published authors, agents, or editors) present craft- or industry-related material. Paid critiques aren’t usually part of this kind of event.

  Children’s book writers also gather at industry trade shows, teacher/librarian conferences, and book festivals. You won’t learn craft there, though. These are your places if you’re a speaker, panelist, or scheduled book signer promoting your latest work as a sponsored guest of your publisher or the host organization. Primary events include Book Expo America (BEA), where publishers engage in selling rights and doing general book business; the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting and its Annual Conference in early summer; the Texas Library Association (TLA) Annual Conference, the largest statewide librarians’ conference in the country, where librarians gather to talk books and library business; and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and the San Francisco Book Festival, which are designed for the general public.

  Budget and proximity are factors in your conference selection. If a general conference for writers in all categories is the most feasible choice for you, study its course offerings for YA sessions and YA-knowledgeable faculty before you make your final decision. Some general conferences make a point of representing the children’s book world. Fill out your conference schedule with classes that tackle craft skills for all fiction regardless of audience, such as exploiting setting and plotting with tension.

  When you go to a conference, be prepared and professional no matter what your role. Editors and agents go to conferences not because they have nothing better to do but because they’re looking for at least one good project at each conference. Sometimes they get more, and sometimes they don’t get any. Represent yourself and your work well while you’re there. See Chapter 18 for tips on getting the most from conferences of any size.

  Keeping up with the biz: YA-specific journals

  You don’t have to go to a conference to keep up with the state of children’s book publishing. You should be studying the industry from home, regularly and as early in your writing career as possible. Here are the three biggest resources you should be reading:

  Publishers Weekly: This is the primary trade journal for the publishing industry. PW provides news and articles on publishing trends and reviews of new books for adults and children. Twice a year (February and July), it publishes a special edition highlighting the spring and fall seasons for children’s books. (Some publishers have a third selling season, offering a new list of books every spring, fall, and winter.) Alas, a PW subscription isn’t cheap. If budget is an issue, sign up for PW’s free e-newsletters: PW Daily and the children’s book–focused Children’s Bookshelf. Website: www.publishersweekly.com

  School Library Journal: This is a primary reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children and teens, with articles about timely topics of interest for school library media specialists. SLJ reviews thousands of new books for children and teens each year. Sign up for their free e-newsletters, SLJ Teen (for librarians, teachers, and consumers with teen-interest books and other media) and Curriculum Connections, which ties children’s and teen books into curriculum for classroom and library use. Website: www.schoollibraryjournal.com

  SCBWI Bulletin: This is the
bimonthly publication of the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators. Available to members only, it includes a calendar of events, regional information, articles about craft and the industry, updates about publishers and agencies, and news about awards and contests. Website: www.scbwi.org

  Checking out the online community

  You can follow the industry and talk craft with your colleagues in online writers’ forums. In addition to helping you stay abreast of the hottest industry happenings, these forums are great places to meet potential critique group members. (Jump to the next section for the benefits of critique groups.)

  Verla Kay’s Message Board for Children’s Writers & Illustrators (www.verla kay.com/boards) is one of the most popular forums for children’s book writers, as is SCBWI’s members-only online community. You may expand your reading list by adding forums specific to your genre, such as SFFWorld’s science-fiction and fantasy Discussion Forum (www.sffworld.com/forums). Choose the right forum for you by first sitting back and reading others’ posts to get a feel for the community, its rules and etiquette, its information and know-how, and the genres most discussed there.

  Joining a critique group

  After your muse has started pumping out those pages, you need some feedback to know when you’re on track and when you need to revise. You’re just too close to the writing to judge it objectively. A productive critique group tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear, and the members do so constructively.

  These people also form your immediate support group, something every writer needs. Writing a manuscript is a solitary act, and sharing the ups, downs, challenges, and excitement with others who share your passion can be a big boost. I remember pushing and shoving one new YA writer into a conference, only to have him call me a few hours into it to declare, “I have found my people.”

  Gather a core group of those people and work with them to make your YA fiction (and theirs) as great as it can be. Chapter 11 goes into the nitty-gritty of joining or forming a critique group and giving and getting critiques.

  Don’t ask your sweetie to be your critiquer. That’s fraught with perils. Sweetie may be afraid of hurting your feelings and so won’t give honest feedback. Or Sweetie may in fact be quite fine with risking your feelings for the sake of honesty — but you won’t much care for getting criticism from Sweetie. That’s just too close to the bone. Most importantly, Sweetie probably isn’t as in tune with teen fiction as you are. You need to hear from people who can be objective, whose criticism isn’t loaded with other baggage, and who know how to write teen fiction.

  Part II

  Writing Riveting Young Adult Fiction

  In this part . . .

  Ladies and gentleman, it’s time to get funky. Here, you get to plot, twist things around, rile up your characters, talk funny, and force your readers to turn the pages. This is the fun part. This is the part where you get to write!

  Using the hook as your foundation, find out how to build a story from concept to final book, making all the pieces teen-friendly along the way. Discover how to tell the story, who should tell it, who should be in it, where it’ll take place, and how the events will play out. In this part, I discuss five elements of storytelling, offering techniques, tricks, potential snags, and solutions to help you hone these elements in a YA-friendly manner.

  Chapter 4

  Writing the Almighty Hook

  In This Chapter

  Developing ideas into strong story premises

  Writing the hook for your book

  Writing isn’t all ideas and execution. It’s decision-making, too. To be published in today’s competitive marketplace, your decisions from initial idea onward must culminate in a novel that can find a place in the market even as it stands out as something intriguingly different and well written.

  In this chapter, I show you how to develop a teen-friendly idea into a market-friendly premise for a young adult novel, and I explain how to express that premise as a one-sentence hook that distinguishes your novel for editors, agents, and readers and becomes your touchstone throughout the writing process.

  Understanding the Importance of a Hook

  If you want a publisher of young adult fiction to sign your novel, you must be astute not only in how you craft your book but also in how you position it for the marketplace. Writing a moving novel about young love and clueless parents isn’t enough; oodles of those are already out there. You must put your young lovers and lame parents in uncommon circumstances and use your great writing to march them through an original plot. That’s what makes a book stand out from all the others crowding bookstore shelves. Your hook is your place to proclaim that difference.

  A hook is a one-sentence description of your story that tells people the following as succinctly as possible:

  What your story’s about

  Where your story fits into the current market

  Why your story is a fresh approach to its subject matter

  Who your audience is

  Above all, the hook leaves readers wanting to know more. An effective hook accomplishes these goals in fewer than 50 words, preferably closer to half that. Anything longer is unruly and risks that readers of that hook (typically editors and agents) will lose sight of the most important points.

  Note that the hook implies your story’s fresh approach, marketability, and audience; those points are not made explicitly. The hook does not literally say, “The audience for this book is older teens” or the like. Also note that a hook is not a mini story summary. You craft one of those for the second paragraph of your query letter, the cover letter that accompanies your sample chapters when you submit your story to editors and agents (see Chapter 13).

  Here are examples of strong hooks using three well-known YA stories:

  Convicted sneaker thief Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the desert where prisoners dig holes all day, every day, and where bumbling Stanley finds a treasure, his first real friend, and a new sense of self. (Holes by Louis Sachar; 40 words)

  A group of World War II-era English schoolboys crash-lands on a deserted island with no surviving adult and wages an epic battle between civility and savagery. (Lord of the Flies by William Golding; 26 words)

  Seventeen-year-old Bella moves from sunny Phoenix to dreary Forks, Washington, where she falls for a stunningly beautiful boy who turns out to be a vampire with epic enemies. (Twilight by Stephenie Meyer; 28 words)

  Another term for hook is elevator pitch, a nod to the idea that if you’re on an elevator with an agent or editor, you have until the car reaches the ground floor — about one minute — to pitch your story. Hence the brevity. Some writers call hooks tag lines, although in-house publishing staff use that term to refer to the tiny bits of text that run on the front of a novel or a marketing piece, such as “They came in peace. They left in pieces.” The tag is a selling tool that’s tacked on like, well, a tag. Don’t confuse hook with premise, which refers to your story idea and doesn’t deal with marketplace positioning. Your premise (what your story is about) is one element of your hook.

  This section discusses the importance of crafting a hook early in the writing process. In the same way a pool player calls the ball and pocket prior to taking his shot, you should call your story and audience for editors and agents (and for yourself) before you start writing your novel. That way, you can write your novel with confidence that what you’re writing is not only well-crafted but also fresh and thus marketable.

  Agent Erin Murphy: Making quiet books loud

  “Too quiet” — it’s a rejection phrase that seems impenetrable and impossible. What does it mean? How do you fix it? Your story is about characters more than plot and has a conflict that’s more emotional than external; you can’t describe it in one hooky sentence. Is there hope for it?

 
There is hope, indeed. If you take those characters of yours and put them on a larger stage, you may have a story about relationships and emotional truth that also has a girl whose mother is running for president (The President’s Daughter, by Ellen Emerson White) or who has just found out that she’s the princess of a small European nation (The Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot). If you set a quiet story in an accessible setting with teen appeal, you may have Heather Hepler’s The Cupcake Queen or Kristina Springer’s The Espressologist, the latter of which also adds a dash of Jane Austen for good measure. Take a school-based romance and set it in a swanky French boarding school, and you have Anna and the French Kiss, by Stephanie Perkins. All these story choices provide quick, appealing descriptions, interesting titles, and opportunities for eye-catching covers. They stand out from the crowd.

  Sometimes you may need to up the stakes. A girl examining her sense of self, her relationships with her parents and friends, and her hopes for the future becomes something much more profound when she’s trying to decide whether to live or die (If I Stay, by Gail Forman). The Sky Is Everywhere gets extra oomph from the love triangle; if author Jandy Nelson had simply written about a girl named Lennie grieving over her recently deceased sister and falling in love at the same time — well, it would have been terrific in Jandy’s hands, but the tension of having two boys in Lennie’s life, and the profound mistake that she makes because of it, knocks this gorgeous but quiet novel over the top. The bits of poetry Lennie leaves behind like bread crumbs add to the book’s appeal and give the marketing team something extra to work with, and yet they also resonate with meaning. Perfect.

  If you tend to write quiet stories, it’s okay to find your story and voice first. But then push yourself to make them noisy. Raise the stakes. Put them on a larger scale. Give readers more to worry about, more to hope for, and more to imagine and relate to. Great voices find their audience no matter what. If we didn’t believe that, we’d all go crazy. If you can make your quiet story just a little bit louder and give it a leg up in the process, why wouldn’t you?