Play by the Rules?
by Regina Brooks, founder and President of Serendipity Literary Agency
In a recent issue of Publishers Weekly, it was reported that while adult sales are falling, juvenile and young adult sales are expected to increase 5.1% (according to the PW/IPR Book Sales Index). It’s a good time to be writing children’s and YA! Many writers are recognizing that, and the submissions for potential YA novels have spiked over the past few months. As an agent, I’ve learned to hone the ability to sift through submissions quickly, separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff. It’s easy to see which writers are new to YA, and which have given the genre the time and consideration it deserves. If one thing is true of young adult: it is not adult fiction dumbed down! YA fiction is a world unto itself, and writers must respect that.
In my new book, Writing Great Books For Young Adults, I put forth a few rules for engaging readers of YA fiction. While there is lots of buzz about adult crossover sales with YA, at the end of the day, if your book doesn’t appeal to teens, it’s not going anywhere. Some of the rules I list are considerations that must be applied to the manuscript as a whole, or things that should be taken into account before you even start writing. A couple of the rules are often apparent from the query letter itself— and violations of those rules get that query letter labeled as ‘chaff’ instead of wheat. Let’s take a look at those two rules here.
YA Fiction Rule #4: Silence your worries about commercial considerations.
I see countless submissions that try to cash in on perceived trends, or writers that compare themselves to already established authors. You can’t look to other people’s books to write your own: your book should be yours. And the fact of the matter is, if you’re writing a book to a trend that’s hot now, that trend will probably be on its way out by the time your book makes it into an editor’s or agent’s hands. The best and most obvious example can be encapsulated by the flood of vampire books following the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. The market is inundated with vampires—all vampires! Sexy vampires, funny vampires, scary vampires. If you were to start writing a book about vampires today, it would likely be two years from now before the book is actually published. By then the vampire train will have come and gone and another trend will be in fashion.
Instead of trying to put your finger on the elusive and ever-changing pulse of YA fiction, concentrate instead on telling your story. Not a story that the reading public seems to be clamoring for or a story that you think readers of a certain author will really love. Your story. In fact, you shouldn’t even worry too much about your audience, after all you’re not a DJ playing music at a club! While it helps to keep a general idea of your readership in mind, if you get too caught up in fretting about who may or may not relate to your book and whether or not it will sell to as many people as possible, you risk compromising your story.
By the time you’re ready to start querying agents like me, if you’ve stayed true to yourself and true to your story, it shows! A writer coming from an honest place who truly believes in the worth of his or her book on its own merits and not necessarily ones the market dictates is a writer whose query letter makes agents pay attention. And that, of course, is a step in the right direction.
YA Fiction Rule #5: In your new world of YA fiction, erect no concrete barriers, wire fences, or one-way signs. Instead, forge new paths.
Looking for commercial success will only limit your creativity, and ultimately be a block on your road to completing a successful YA novel. When it comes to YA fiction, limiting your creativity is the last thing you want to do! If you come in to YA with an open mind and a fresh perspective, you could be starting a trend. As I go through submissions, I look for books that are coming from a place that hasn’t been well-tread before, for stories that give voice to people and situations that haven’t been covered many times over.
All of the books on my list have something of this quality: they are stories that haven’t been told before. This can be quite literal, as in the story of Seneca Village, where author Marilyn Nelson tells the real life story of an African village of freedmen and women that was destroyed to build what we now know as Central Park. Or, it can be a new spin on an old story: for example, in The Other Half of My Heart (on sale in June 2010), Sundee T. Frazier tells the story of twin sisters. There are many books about twin sisters out there, but Sundee’s characters are genetically unique, Minerva is white, but Keira is black. This is a new twist on the twin trope, and one that opens up readers to the richness of the experience of having a biracial family.
Of course, there are many, many ways to get creative with YA fiction. It doesn’t just have to come from the story itself: young adult and juvenile fiction lends itself incredibly well to nontraditional formats. Think of Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series: a new spin on the epistolary novel, chronicling the story of three best friends entirely in Instant Message logs. Other books have been written by two, or even three authors. Still others embrace the social networking phenomenon, have internet tie-ins or combine gaming and card collecting such as the popular series 39 Clues. The possibilities are endless, and if you have an idea that can seamlessly incorporate something outside the traditional norm for a book, go for it! Just keep in mind the caveat about commercial worries: you don’t want to come off as gimmicky.
While there’s a lot more to take into consideration when you’re writing YA fiction, these two rules can help get you in the right mindset when you’re embarking on your writing journey. If you stay true to your own creativity and your story, by the time you’ve completed your novel and are ready to start looking for an agent, you’ll be in a good place. A lot can be gleaned from a query letter, and unfortunately for many writers, the process stops there. But if agents get the sense that this is your own fresh story, chances are they’ll give your story a chance. I know I will!
