Mundane secrets of the YA-YA authorhood

[prog]

Here is a troll for my kid-lit friends: What defines a young-adult (or even childrens') novel? I mean, what makes a given work of fiction YA versus, er, "grown-up"? Is it just a matter of PG-13-or-lower content with (usually) young central characters?

Comments

[ex-colorwhe.livejournal.com]

Yep, I'd go with 11-18, but yeah. But I don't quite agree with some of the things in that link. "Not predictable" is a characteristic of type of lit, not age of intended readers. If a story (YA or adult) is archetypal, for example, predictability is not a problem. (Hmm, some readers/editors might use predictability as a quality marker, too, but again this wouldn't be related to YA-v.-adult.) And when too much concern is paid to keeping YA lit shorter than adult lit or keeping its language/diction/syntax "parallel" with what YA's use, you lose the potential of literature to push readers farther than they have yet gone.
I suppose if you used this parallel language business to guess whether a book in front of you was YA or not, you'd have good odds; I just hate to see authors limiting language and length in advance.

By the way, in case it sounds like I'm anti-slang, I'm not at all. I love slang used well. I just don't like when vocab and complication of syntax gets cut off due to assumed-to-be-low YA interest and skills.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Some of the most wonderful YA books pay no attention to those length/language general indicators. Joan Aiken's books have a huge range of words most kids won't have run into before, but frankly, that's how you learn new words. And Mildred Taylor's books (to choose just one author) are not short at all, and rightfully so.

Somehow, when I read those guidelines, they seemed to be more describing the writing-mill series books (Nancy Drew to Babysitter's Club to Animorphs, etc) than anything else. My favorites seem to break at least one of those rules each...