Young Adult writing
4 March 2022 02:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThinking about the phenomenon of Young Adult books, plus the angsty I-want-to-see-my-social-problems-represented fiction I've seen so much of among amateur writers of that generation recently... I can't help wondering, when did this need start?
Because when I was their age, the *last* thing I wanted was to see squirmy adolescent behaviour in the books I was reading. I had absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in identifying whole-heartedly with the heroes of my favourite adventures, none of whom had much in common with me -- and 'children's authors' like Rosemary Sutcliff had no qualms about depicting protagonists who were functioning adults.
(I came across an attempt to rebrand "The Eagle of the North" as 'Young Adult fiction'; it really isn't. And as for the disastrous attempt to market Marcus Sedgwick's brilliant Blood Red, Snow White to the Americans as 'teens and young adult romance', which it manifestly is *not* (apparently the category of 'serious historical novel for children' no longer exists in US book selling)... it backfired horribly, judging by the disgruntled Goodreads reviews left by teenagers who assumed they were being offered a sexed-up fantasy retelling of "Snow White" and discovered they were getting a historical novel about the real-life adventures of a married man with a small child, and moreover one that starts off in a pitch-perfect channelling of the style of Ransome's own "Old Peter's Russian Tales". They didn't know if they were being condescended to or if all the complex moral issues were just booooring.)
I think the issue is that when I was an adolescent I was reading to escape from the world of my (boringly sex-and-body-obsessed) contemporaries, and had zero interest in seeing my day-to-day problems injected into my fictional worlds of choice. In fact, looking back, I don't think I was reading *any* books set in contemporary suburbia, although presumably they did exist; the nearest thing I can remember coming across was school stories, and those tended to bite a little too close to the bone. I didn't want to read about other people getting bullied or humiliated, even when it was the teachers who were being made fools of and the protagonists were being gleeful about it -- the misadventures of Jennings were never quite as funny to me as they were presumably expected to be, for example, because I spent too much time wincing in advance.
What I wanted from my stories was heroism (generally of the quiet kind, because blowing one's own trumpet was depicted as bad form), conflicts of loyalty, humour, magical wonder and excitement -- things that would lift me out of myself and thrill my spirits. I liked reading about last-minute rescues and underdogs who unexpectedly triumphed against the odds; I didn't particularly care for angsty endings and I was annoyed by enemies-to-lovers tropes, especially when two characters fight throughout the entire plot and then suddenly decide that they love each other in the final chapter. (But then I didn't discover sex until I was nineteen, and didn't have a lot of time for romance as anything other than a background plot lever.)
I didn't want to see myself 'represented'; I wanted the opportunity to be completely different people in a different place, whether that was the impoverished Ruggles family of One End Street, or Allan Quatermain frantically reloading his rifle, or Vanessa March with a long-lost Lipizzaner in Central Europe, or Professor Aronnax marvelling at the underseas wonders into which he and his companions are initiated. And my adolescent self did not want to read long scenes in which two protagonists spout self-healing mantras to bring their wounded souls into accordance with the beliefs of the reader's peers about what people 'should' feel and how they 'should' talk about it -- in fact I should have hated it.
(And yet, looking back at the fan-fiction that people --mainly young females-- were writing in the 1980s, there was a lot precisely of this navel-gazing stuff; so it's not all *that* much of a novelty in amateur writing... Youthful poetry has always tended to dramatic angst, too, probably back into the 18th century at least.)
I know I had my emotional wallow-points. They were just... different ones from those of current teenagers (and very probably from those of my contemporaries; we weren't exactly on speaking terms about that sort of thing). But I do know that I actively didn't want to see the sort of things that made me unhappy being depicted in the fiction that I read, because I read it in order to escape to places where people weren't made unhappy -- or, at least, not in that sort of dreary common-place way, but only by Grand Emotions and noble self-sacrifice. (Though I was never very keen on the ending of "the Prisoner of Zenda", for instance, apart from the fact that it was better in retrospect than the ret-con done in the sequel!)
Because when I was their age, the *last* thing I wanted was to see squirmy adolescent behaviour in the books I was reading. I had absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in identifying whole-heartedly with the heroes of my favourite adventures, none of whom had much in common with me -- and 'children's authors' like Rosemary Sutcliff had no qualms about depicting protagonists who were functioning adults.
(I came across an attempt to rebrand "The Eagle of the North" as 'Young Adult fiction'; it really isn't. And as for the disastrous attempt to market Marcus Sedgwick's brilliant Blood Red, Snow White to the Americans as 'teens and young adult romance', which it manifestly is *not* (apparently the category of 'serious historical novel for children' no longer exists in US book selling)... it backfired horribly, judging by the disgruntled Goodreads reviews left by teenagers who assumed they were being offered a sexed-up fantasy retelling of "Snow White" and discovered they were getting a historical novel about the real-life adventures of a married man with a small child, and moreover one that starts off in a pitch-perfect channelling of the style of Ransome's own "Old Peter's Russian Tales". They didn't know if they were being condescended to or if all the complex moral issues were just booooring.)
I think the issue is that when I was an adolescent I was reading to escape from the world of my (boringly sex-and-body-obsessed) contemporaries, and had zero interest in seeing my day-to-day problems injected into my fictional worlds of choice. In fact, looking back, I don't think I was reading *any* books set in contemporary suburbia, although presumably they did exist; the nearest thing I can remember coming across was school stories, and those tended to bite a little too close to the bone. I didn't want to read about other people getting bullied or humiliated, even when it was the teachers who were being made fools of and the protagonists were being gleeful about it -- the misadventures of Jennings were never quite as funny to me as they were presumably expected to be, for example, because I spent too much time wincing in advance.
What I wanted from my stories was heroism (generally of the quiet kind, because blowing one's own trumpet was depicted as bad form), conflicts of loyalty, humour, magical wonder and excitement -- things that would lift me out of myself and thrill my spirits. I liked reading about last-minute rescues and underdogs who unexpectedly triumphed against the odds; I didn't particularly care for angsty endings and I was annoyed by enemies-to-lovers tropes, especially when two characters fight throughout the entire plot and then suddenly decide that they love each other in the final chapter. (But then I didn't discover sex until I was nineteen, and didn't have a lot of time for romance as anything other than a background plot lever.)
I didn't want to see myself 'represented'; I wanted the opportunity to be completely different people in a different place, whether that was the impoverished Ruggles family of One End Street, or Allan Quatermain frantically reloading his rifle, or Vanessa March with a long-lost Lipizzaner in Central Europe, or Professor Aronnax marvelling at the underseas wonders into which he and his companions are initiated. And my adolescent self did not want to read long scenes in which two protagonists spout self-healing mantras to bring their wounded souls into accordance with the beliefs of the reader's peers about what people 'should' feel and how they 'should' talk about it -- in fact I should have hated it.
(And yet, looking back at the fan-fiction that people --mainly young females-- were writing in the 1980s, there was a lot precisely of this navel-gazing stuff; so it's not all *that* much of a novelty in amateur writing... Youthful poetry has always tended to dramatic angst, too, probably back into the 18th century at least.)
I know I had my emotional wallow-points. They were just... different ones from those of current teenagers (and very probably from those of my contemporaries; we weren't exactly on speaking terms about that sort of thing). But I do know that I actively didn't want to see the sort of things that made me unhappy being depicted in the fiction that I read, because I read it in order to escape to places where people weren't made unhappy -- or, at least, not in that sort of dreary common-place way, but only by Grand Emotions and noble self-sacrifice. (Though I was never very keen on the ending of "the Prisoner of Zenda", for instance, apart from the fact that it was better in retrospect than the ret-con done in the sequel!)
no subject
Date: 2022-03-04 08:56 pm (UTC)Maybe the appeal lies in being reassured that you're not alone and other people have the same problems you do, even if those people are fictional characters? Not that I understand it; I related a lot more to Lucy Pevensie as a kid than the vast majority of YA characters as a teen.
My main problem with YA novels is that I've read only a few where all the protagonist's problems weren't solved by finding the right romantic partner. My other problem is preaching (see here: https://betweensunandmoon.dreamwidth.org/43904.html). I want to feel excited when I'm reading, not depressed.
I don't talk about my love for old books and old movies because experience has taught me I'll inevitably catch hell for not reading or watching something more "serious" and less "problematic." You can't enjoy anything that doesn't deal with "real-world issues" these days without tacking on a bunch of disclaimers. I hate that.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-06 07:49 pm (UTC)(I even got as far as 'escape' multiple times and yet failed to think of it ;-)
It's interesting, according to modern theories of relatability, that C.S.Lewis -- a man aiming for a readership of mixed boys and girls -- chose to make Lucy, the youngest girl, his main viewpoint character for the first three novels instead of, say, Peter (who is the one who actually fights battles, etc.) And then he does the same thing with Jill Pole in "The Silver Chair". They are not 'strong female characters' in the Young Adult paradigm (note that Arthur Ransome picks Titty as the main protagonist in "Swallows and Amazons" over Captain Nancy, who definitely fits the female action hero type), but they make for imaginative and sensitive protagonists with whom the author and hence the reader clearly identifies.
A modern author would, I suspect, get told 'no, you need to write Percy Jackson/Artemis Fowl/Alex Rider or the boys won't read the book'...
I hate that. It's just so... contemptuous towards the reader, reductive of the characters, and damaging to any sense of actually being transported to a different society. I've probably mentioned this before, but one of the things I value about Mary Renault's historical novels is her ability to put the reader in the mind of people who *don't* share the contemporary mindset. (It's also a reason why those books haven't aged out of all readability in the course of seventy years or so of social change, whereas I assume that any aggressively 'up-to-date' YA fiction will be as viciously attacked in its own future as self-consciously enlightened novels like "Uncle Tom's Cabin".)
For example, one of the most memorable moments, for me, in her novel about the childhood of Alexander the Great, was the one where she puts us in the viewpoint of a character who takes it for granted (along with all his contemporaries) that *of course* one has to torture slaves in order to use their evidence in a court of law. Instead of showing how Evil this makes him and how enlightened we, the readers, are, she simply gives us the common-sense rationale that a slave has to be more afraid of the law than of his master, or else he will naturally lie to protect himself from his master's punishment. I don't know if that is actually taken from the legal debate of the period (given the depths of Renault's research, it's entirely possible) or whether it was her own extrapolation, but for me it was a light-bulb moment where the reader is suddenly given a glimpse into an alien mindset, and the world *makes sense* from a totally different angle.
(Another memorable moment is when the young Alexander has his first encounter with men *wearing trousers*, and we see these garments for a moment through his eyes as totally weird and awkward and barbarous... and then we realise with a backflash of adjustment that of course none of the characters previously described have been wearing trousers at all, and that for him this is utterly and perfectly normal!)
How are people ever going to learn to empathise with other cultures if the only acceptable world-view that can be depicted is that of their own carefully-vetted contemporaries? It's the echo-chamber effect par excellence.
You can't have anything that *does* deal with real-world issues without tacking on a bunch of disclaimers nowadays... although that has been the case for a long time (see all the endless "Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental" protective labels, even in the case where the selling point is precisely that the film *was* based on true life events! I was astonished to come across a novel entitled When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow which is a not-even-thinly-disguised piece of Real Person Fiction -- can you really now get away with writing a novel starring a caricatured celebrity under his real name?)
I think we're currently living in an era of New Puritanism (see, for example, the attitude of the early 19th century to the late 18th century); they tend to go in cycles, with a generation of moral permissiveness being followed by an outraged generation of indignation and probity, with each one believing that it alone is the ultimate arbiter of all correct belief. What changes is what people are inclined to be puritanical *about*, e.g. the current horror at smoking; how dare people depict it as sexually liberating or aesthetically glamorous? Personally, I detest it as a habit, but I'm perfectly prepared to accept it as a historical normality, along with men wearing make-up (late 18th century again) and coloured high heels (17th century).
In the case of Young Adult books specifically, I think there is a feeling that authors are influencing vulnerable malleable minds, and that the input should therefore be heavily scrutinised to make sure it is depicting the right message. I'm not sure I like to admit it, but that is probably arguably true; the fact that I grew up on an unquestioning diet of novels that taught me that honour, constancy, chastity, self-sacrifice and sublimated suffering were the proper approach to the world probably didn't do me -- or my self-esteem -- any favours when it came to dealing with a society that regarded a lot of those things as encumbrances and increasingly as manifest oppressive evils...
To what degree these things are influenced by natural inclination -- I don't think I would *ever* have been an outgoing confessional sex-positive hedonist -- and to what degree they are contributed to by nurture, I'm not sure. But if you give your young a diet of novels depicting your desired moral stance, and police their social interactions accordingly, it's probably a good way to ensure that it sticks.
(Although there's a precedent with the muscular Christianity of 19th-century children's literature, and I'm not sure how effective that actually was in practice?)
no subject
Date: 2022-03-07 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-05 02:38 pm (UTC)Inevitably, as I grew up, I found friends with similar tastes -so it's not surprising that most of my friends on DW probably veer the same way.
I like the unknown - the plausible unknown. The unknown that has roots in our ancient myths or our latest science.
Romance - unless superbly written - eg. Bujold's 'Shards of Honour' - has clichés that are predictable and make me annoyed as real sensible people simply don't act that way, and most of the men are too perfect to be believable.
Have you read Bujold? 'Shards' is a wonderful story of two people who accept that they are attracted to each other, also respect each other, and also have to accept that they are on opposite sides of a war. They are true to their personal beliefs and respect that the other can be true to their beliefs and culture.
In fact, that respect for the other's honour is what drives the entire novel.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-06 09:50 pm (UTC)I *love* Bujold; "The Warrior's Apprentice" was the first one I came across, but "Shards of Honour" was the one I went out and bought a copy of brand-new (in the days when you had to order books trans-Atlantic from America and wait six weeks). I even gave it subsequently to my psychotherapist, who completely failed to appreciate or understand it... also, she may not have appreciated the section in which Cordelia takes direct action against an overly-intrusive therapist :-p
But then she didn't get "Gaudy Night" either, zooming in instead on the single marked passage in the book, which as it happened had nothing whatsoever to do with me (it was a second-hand copy, and I *never* mark my books).
I actually borrowed and used in a story of my own Bujold's line about the difference between selling your honour and paying a price for losing it.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-07 09:23 am (UTC)Sayers is virtually the only writer who can get me to enjoy detective stories.
And I'm sure you already know that Harriet Vane was an influence on Mile's courtship.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-09 01:25 am (UTC)I'm not sure I did, though I can see it now; it's the dedication to "Georgette" that I remember, and that was the giveaway!
(Ironically I don't actually get on with Georgette Heyer's detective stories, although novels such as "The Reluctant Widow", "The Talisman Ring" or "The Toll-Gate" among her 'historical romances' effectively *are* detective/mystery plots -- they just seem very much more vivid and enjoyable than her rather cardboard contemporary mysteries. Oddly enough the only one of the latter that held any real power for me was the much-excoriated "Penhallow", which is effectively Georgette Heyer doing a Barbara Vine.)
no subject
Date: 2022-03-09 11:10 am (UTC)Yes, the list of dedications (including Georgette) gives us several key elements in Mile's romance.
Ekaterin has been in an abusive relationship where her sense of self-worth was badly damaged.
She has no desire to marry again and she turns Miles down when he asks in spite of the fact that he is rich and she likes him.
It's critical for her to have her self-respect. She needs to regain herself before she can enter marriage with the confidence that she will be an equal partner and be able to contribute as much as she gains.
I'm sure you can see Harriet Vane in all that.
Both Miles and Peter propose too soon.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-10 09:17 pm (UTC)(In fact, in the last year I've been consciously trying *not* to echo Hertha and Raoul's relationship with Adam and Jenny's marriage in "A Civil Contract"...)
As I said, I can definitely see the parallels with Harriet Vane now -- not least in the idea that she has to get to risk her life as much as he does if it is to be an equal relationship.