Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies Read online

  Your series arc: What’s your common theme or plot thread through the series? Each book must have a satisfying reach on its own, even as it fits into the overall series arc. Set up a series bible to keep track of the details in your fictional world: Allot a page for each character; draw maps to keep track of places; create calendars to keep track of timelines, dates, and major events — whatever you need.

  Your point of view: The narrator you choose distinguishes your series. If you choose a different narrator for each book in the series, be aware that you risk forcing young readers to connect with a new narrator each time.

  The first book: Write the first book before you try to pitch your series to agents and editors. They want to see that you can write a novel that’ll win over enough readers to justify multiple books. You can’t sell a series on an idea alone unless you’re an established, marketable author.

  The proposal: A series needs a proposal that presents the series hook, positions the series in the marketplace, and offers the entire first book along with synopses of two or three other adventures to come. If your series has a main thread to be resolved over its course, describe how you’ll address, sustain, and resolve that thread. And remember, being able to articulate how your series fits into the marketplace is vital. You must convince publishers that your project is distinct and salable. See Chapter 13 for more on writing a proposal.

  Using Your Hook to Shape Your Story

  Your hook is your story’s foundation, and you’re about to build a raging megalopolis on top of it. Characters and motivations, actions and consequences, obstacles and triumphs, settings and senses, dialogue and narrative voices — a novel is complex. You have a lot of details to figure out. Let your hook be the springboard into that figuring process by probing your hook with a series of questions. Your answers will shape your story.

  The first question to ask with your hook in hand is “What if?” As in, what if the character you name in your hook were to encounter the conflict you present in the hook? What would he feel, how would he respond, and how would that response make matters worse? For example, using the hook for Lord of the Flies, you’d ask, “What if a group of English schoolboys crash-landed on a remote island with no surviving adult?” They’d be scared, probably. And then they’d get organized. Then they’d work together for rescue, and then argue, and then form alliances, and then fight, and then, well, the ball would be rolling. Ideas about plot and cast and every element of the story bubble up for your consideration. Applying what-if to your hook kick-starts your brainstorming.

  But shaping a story takes more than a single question and answer. Here are some other things to ask yourself as you develop your idea into a young adult novel chock-full of conflict, growth, and entertainment:

  What problems does your character encounter?

  Why does your character persevere instead of giving up?

  What are the risks and the benefits of sticking it out?

  What’s the point of your character’s journey?

  What message (if any) do you want young readers to walk away with?

  Who helps your main character? Are those people willing assistants? What do they get in return?

  The more answers you generate, the more specific your questions become.

  Getting great ideas for YA fiction

  Every story starts with an idea. Here are some places to get great ideas for stories that appeal to young readers:

  News and current events: Watch or listen to newscasts and read newspapers and news magazines. In addition to headlines, read personal interest stories, news of the weird, best-of lists, and so on. Clip, print out, or otherwise save stories of interest. They may not spark specific ideas now, but they could be just the inspiration you need later on.

  Real-life teens: Listen to young people. What events do your teens share at the dinner table? What are their interests? Who and what do they complain about, and what do they do about it? Don’t know any teens personally? Then go where teens go and eavesdrop. Got a mall near you? Teens are there. Fast food joints? Buy yourself a soda and have a seat, because they’re there, too. Same with coffee shops near high schools.

  The Internet: Does eavesdropping on the neighborhood teens make you feel like a stalker? No problem! Plenty of sites on the Internet focus on teen interests. You can eavesdrop from your own house.

  TV, film, music, and teen magazines: This research you’re doing is your chance to watch TV and swear to your spouse that you’re working. See what’s popular in teen programming, watch their movies, and listen to their songs. Read teen magazines, which cover the things their readers care about. Remember as you do this that coolness is a fleeting thing. What’s cool one day is seriously dorky the next, so by the time your book comes out, that cool thing likely won’t be cool anymore. Also, be aware that entertainment reflects current teen interest; it doesn’t represent what actual teens are saying and doing.

  Your own teen years: What did you worry about most when you were young? What do you remember most? When you laugh with your friends about your teen years, what story do you tell? When you regret your teen years, what incident comes to mind? How and what did you learn from the events that stand out? If you kept a journal or diary back in the good old days, now’s the time to read it.

  Answer your questions with pen or pencil in hand or with your fingers on a keyboard. Q&A is part of the writing process, too. When you record your answers, don’t stop with just one, and certainly don’t stop with the most expected or logical answer. Come up with wild answers — lots of them. Unexpected answers can lead to wonderful directions to explore in your story.

  Chapter 5

  Creating Teen-Friendly Characters

  In This Chapter

  Giving young characters youthful traits

  Empowering teen heroes and heroines

  Revealing personality through action

  Tying character arc to plot development

  Writing good villains

  Ask any teen or tween about the novel he’s reading, and chances are he’ll start with the words, “It’s about this kid who. . . .” For young readers, the main character is everything.

  The teen lead in your YA fiction must be interesting enough to capture other kids’ attention. Then he must be sympathetic enough to make readers start caring about him, then conflicted enough for readers to worry about him and then cheer him on. Above all, your teen lead must be the one to change his life and make everything all better. Teen readers want a teen hero.

  In this chapter, you discover how to create sympathetic, believable YA characters by mastering teen traits, channeling their views of the world, blending their flaws with budding heroic qualities, and putting them in charge of their own fates. In your story, Mommy won’t be coming to the rescue.

  Casting Characters Teens Care About

  Young adult fiction, by definition, involves young adults. The main character is a young adult, the secondary characters are predominantly young adults, and the target readers are young adults. This section helps you create youthful characters that young readers can believe in and care about.

  Calling all heroes

  Your goal with your main character (or protagonist) is to move the plot forward and in the process transform that character into something better or wiser, thereby giving life to the story’s themes. The reader, too, should be better off for having read this character’s tale. To accomplish this, all protagonists, regardless of their age or the genre, have to share three attributes:

  A need or want strong enough to make the hero struggle onward, no matter what obstacles frustrate his quest to achieve it: This need or want is the character’s goal. In teen novels, the need/want must be something other teens can relate to. After all, shattering the glass ceiling at the office has no meaning for readers whose career arc is sti
ll in the squeezing-lemons-at-Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick phase — if they’re even old enough for a work permit. Examples of teen-friendly needs/wants are parental or peer approval, salvation of other characters in physical or emotional peril, or winning a competition against other teens.

  Within this need/want attribute is its opposite: the fear of failing to attain that Big Want. This is an important factor because the more undesirable you make the consequences of failure, the greater your hero’s fear will be, increasing the tension in your story. Tension makes readers turn pages. I talk about raising the stakes to heighten tension in Chapter 6.

  A key flaw: The protagonist’s flaw is that undesirable trait he keeps tripping over as he tries to attain his goal. Another way to look at his flaw is as his vulnerability. Maybe he’s afraid of heights, or painfully shy, or too self-centered. Achieving success is darned hard when you’re in your own way. Hard . . . but not impossible, thanks to the character’s core strength.

  A core strength: This is the personality trait that will overcome the key flaw. The core strength must be evidenced in the character in one form or another throughout the entire story. Simply pulling it out of your hat for the climax feels contrived. Maybe your characters didn’t notice this strength or it was just budding, but it was there. For example, if you want to set up a character’s extreme act of compassion, the hero may rescue an abandoned animal early in the story and nurse it to health, or he may stop his bike so as not to run over an insect hobbled by a broken wing, or he may surreptitiously give a favorite toy to a needy kid he meets at the park. Small moments like these set the stage for the core strength to blossom at the end of the story.

  Perhaps your hero’s want is to be popular, his flaw is glory-hogging on the basketball court (earning him not admiration but further alienation), and his strength is a moving compassion for underdogs like himself. In this scenario, his compassion for someone else finally overcomes his need to set a point record when he passes the ball to a teammate with even more at stake for the game-winning basket. Both characters become school heroes, and your main character has made a key transformation. That’s an example of a successful character arc, which I focus on later in this chapter.

  Having your characters act like the teens they are

  As you’d expect, teens have their own way of doing things. That rebelliousness, or perhaps naiveté, derives from their age and the fact that they’re still grown-ups-in-the-making. Your story is part of their journey into adulthood. Here are traits you must build into your teen lead so he’s convincingly youthful as he goes about his business of transforming:

  He must think like a kid. Your young hero should do things that real kids do or would do if they could (like eat a whole box of Pop-Tarts for breakfast) and demonstrate an age-appropriate outlook and sophistication level (like complain of Nazi-esque persecution when his mom says, “What are you doing eating a whole box of Pop-Tarts for breakfast? That’s what I bought the cantaloupe for.”).

  Teens are complex and truly fascinating individuals with their general lack of worldliness; their competing loyalties to family, friends, school, and self; and their almost palpable self-consciousness caused by the physical changes they’re undergoing. Teens may exaggerate their emotions and seem to have grandiose notions of self. They may overdramatize things, judging themselves and others harshly, erroneously, and quickly. Worse, they may act on faulty judgments, totally thrashing the situation. Young people can pay a high price for not stopping to analyze themselves or the situation — or perhaps for being unable to do so. Luckily, a key part of growing up is maturing, and a big part of that is developing sympathy and empathy for others. Your teen lead should mature in some tangible way by the end of your novel, moving one step closer to thinking like a grown-up. I talk more about teen mindset and sophistication levels in Chapter 9.

  He must dream like a kid. Your protagonist’s dreams and needs should be in line with those of a person his age. Chapter 2 covers themes and issues important to each age group in tween/teendom. Be sure readers can identify your character’s Big Want by the first chapter.

  The want or dream should be

  • Simple enough for your character to imagine

  • Important enough for him to strive for

  • As achievable as it is difficult

  He must be the age of a kid. Young readers want to see themselves in their books. They want to experience conflict and overcome it vicariously, finding out how to navigate life from the safety of their reading nooks. So your protagonist must be the age of your target audience or slightly older, because kids are happy to read up. They aren’t so keen to read about someone younger than they are.

  Make your character’s age clear right away, preferably on the first page. How else will readers be able to picture your character performing the action that opens the book? If it feels awkward to state his age directly, work the age reference into the character’s circumstances, such as sitting for his senior portrait, or talking about his learner’s permit or driver’s license, or being banished from a sophomore-only lunch table for talking to a freshman. Or you can compare his age to someone else’s age, such as his one-year-older brother, the high school senior prom king. Don’t deliver age as a dry fact. Where’s the fun in that?

  He must be a hero-in-the-making. The teen star must be capable of resolving the key conflict of the story; grown-ups can’t do it for him. Young readers want their young heroes to save the day because it makes them feel empowered, too.

  For a teen character to be a convincing hero in the resolution of the story, he must exhibit heroic qualities early on. That means providing small moments where he demonstrates his core strength in some way. Readers must get the feeling that this kid, when push comes to shove, can step up to the plate and hit a dinger.

  He must be a good kid at heart. To be sympathetic despite his flaws, your teen lead must relate to others from a moral center of good intentions, basic respect, and some empathy for others. He must show heart. Yes, I know these are teens and their centers are still pretty mushy, but that’s good! Their flux is useful as you set up the character arc and push your main character to establish, recognize, identify, and accept his core flaw and strength. Don’t worry if your main character has a rough edge — as long as you give the kid a good heart, his flaws will make him believable, and his mistakes will prove him relatable. Have him show all the emotions that would wrack a real person who struggles and triumphs.

  He must be willing to risk it all. When you manage your tension right, you have something serious at stake — something your protagonist can’t bear to lose. Yet at some point, he’ll knuckle down and risk that very loss to overcome the final, biggest obstacle of the story and attain his goal. Suppose your fame-hungry freshman b-baller gives up his last chance to set that first-year point record by giving the game-winning shot to a senior during the final game of the season. Your hero makes a personal sacrifice to let a senior with no hopes of college ball get one last chance at his own basketball glory. In your version of the story, does the teammate make the shot?

  Exercise: Create your main-character thumbnail

  A character thumbnail is the foundation for your main character. Use it to establish your protagonist’s core attributes. The more concise you can be as you fill in the attributes, the more clear and attainable these attributes are likely to be for you. Create a thumbnail for all your key cast members, not just your star.

  Name and age: ______________________________

  Need/want: ______________________________

  Consequences of failure: ______________________________

  Key flaw: ______________________________

  Core strength: ______________________________

  As you move through this chapter, you’ll flesh out this thumbnail into a full character profile.

  Selecting a jury of peers

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nbsp; Friends and love interests are central to a teen’s life. In fiction, they’re called your secondary characters. Yes, Mommy and Daddy may score juicy secondary roles in some YA plots, and the hottie history teacher may make a cameo or two, but this is teen fiction, so the bulk of the action and interaction should be about and among teens. Even in a fantasy story where your young hero vanquishes immortal bad guys alongside grown-up soldiers, the characters he turns to for camaraderie and romance are typically folks his own age.

  Note that I’m talking about the supporting cast here, not the villains or other creeps who make the hero’s life miserable. They get their own title (antagonists), have their own considerations, and thus warrant their own section later in this chapter. See “Writing Believable Baddies” for details.

  Fleshing out your secondary characters

  Like your main character, secondary characters should have driving needs or wants, key flaws, and core strengths. Don’t slack off with this crew. Flat stereotypes like the Fat-but-Witty BFF may slip into place easily, but they can’t perform the full duties of an effective secondary character. Those duties are to

  Provide place and plot context

  Provide factual information

  Offer opportunities for revealing the main character’s emotions

  Underline or deliberately undermine the main character

  Provide character contrast or confirmation

  Add depth and texture to the story, enriching the reading experience

  Using the supporting cast to reveal the main character

  Secondary characters are great tools for showing instead of telling. They give the main character opportunities to reveal things that would otherwise have to be worked into the narrative.

  Consider this scenario: A tenth-grade girl and her friend are out running Sunday morning, training for the state cross-country finals. The main character trips on sidewalk cracks in the predawn shadows but keeps going. Her buddy offers to buy her a crash helmet because she can never stay on her feet. The main character replies that she just has to avoid breaking her skull for three more weeks. She’s going to end this season with a trophy if it kills her. The buddy shoots a sidelong glance at her friend and says, “Too bad. Tristan Hot-Dude-That-You’re-Obsessed-With will be working at the sports store today, and, well, you know, last night when I was closing the store with him, he told me he’s seen us running every morning and wants to join us. In fact, there he is right now. Hi, Tristan!” The main character then trips mightily and lands face-first in a bush.