Are you writing a YA (Young Adult) Novel or a Novel for Adults? How to tell the difference (Part 1).
Plus: “blow jobs on p. 2,” Sally Rooney as YA novelist(?!), and a secret about my first adult novel, THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO.
(***Note: this was only going to be one article, but then it got soooo long I decided to break it into two, so stay tuned for next week’s Part 2 installment!)
As someone who has written a dozen-ish YA novels, and who has also taught YA writers for years at a range of MFA programs, I have often gotten the following questions:
Why is one novel considered YA and not another?
What makes a novel YA?
And likewise, what makes a novel not YA?
My question to you, right now, is also this:
Do you know for sure if the novel you are writing is for adults or not?
Have any of your readers wondered whether you were writing YA, when you thought you were actually writing for adults?
Have you gone on submission with agents and gotten this feedback?
Have you believed you were writing YA, and then been told that actually no, you are not, you are actually writing an adult novel?
Have you been confused by the whys in any of these instances?
Or even as a reader, do you sometimes wonder why one novel is YA and another isn’t? Like, how do these classifications work anyway?
Plus there is also the related circumstance, which is this:
You want to write a YA novel, and want to make absolutely sure that you do this.
Or, you want to write a novel for adults, and you want to make absolutely sure there is no question that the novel you write is actually for adults.
Okay, readers: let’s discuss!
***
I’ve been thinking about this distinction a lot lately, because a novel I’ve been working on over the last year, which spans five decades in my protagonists’ lives—but dwells for quite a while in their childhood and teenage years—sparked this question (was it really YA and not adult?) in certain readers (even the accusation that it might be YA, dare I say).
Each time this issue came up, I thought to myself: If you actually think this is YA, then clearly you’ve never read YA. I felt that anyone with any familiarity with YA, would know immediately, upon picking my novel up and reading, that it is decidedly a novel for adults.
Yet, it’s also true that—a lot of people haven’t read much (or any) YA and don’t really know what distinguishes the genre, or makes YA, well, YA. And some people see any part of a novel that’s from a child or teenager’s perspective (or even just includes one for a whilel) and just decide, Welp, this must be YA because this person is young!
So here is my personal criteria—and how I answer those questions above—when people ask.
What makes a novel YA (and not adult):
1. The Age of the Protagonist. Of course—this is the simplest, most obvious criteria. One of the defining features of YA. The protagonist should be a teenager, generally at least 15, more likely 16, 17, even 18. If they are 14, or 13, you’d likely be in the Middle Grade category actually.
BUT, this age category is also a tricky one, and can deceive people unfamiliar with YA. Because, it’s not only their AGE that makes a novel YA.
2. The THOUGHTS of that Protagonist must be the Thoughts of a TEENAGER. Let’s say you have a 16-year-old protagonist, but she’s got the experience—and the thinking that goes with this experience—of a 50 year old person. She thinks like a middle aged woman—with the hindsight of having been divorced, of a career, of motherhood.
If so: you are NOT writing YA. You are writing an adult novel that features a teenager, who’s describing her youth with the benefit of the hindsight a middle aged person has.
A YA protagonist has the thoughts of a teenager. Period. They need to think like a teenager. The only hindsight they have allows them to maybe talk about mistakes they made in middle school. Their experiences—and all the internal monologue that goes with these—are limited by this youth. They don’t know what it’s like to be a mother or father unless they are a teenaged parent, and then their motherly, fatherly thoughts would be those of a teenaged parent, not a 45-year-old one. Their only knowledge of divorce would come if they’ve lived their parents’ divorce, and their perspectives would match this accordingly.
3. YA is Plotty, it’s Voice-y, and it MOVES. Now we’re getting into murkier territory, but: YA novels are often driven by plot and voice. They’re often “high concept.” (Think: THE HUNGER GAMES.) YA novels are often very voice-y (See: THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, and FEED, two of my favorite voice-y novels. Also, especially, E. Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver books, God I love those. What a hilarious voice!)
But YA dumps you into the action—even if that action is: girl meet boy, girl meets girl, boy meets boy, two potential romantic partners bump into each other in the school hallway—but we know, it’s clear, something is afoot! (See anything Jenny Han for swoony romance. Morgan Matson. Sarah Dessen!) But if you think of THE HUNGER GAMES, the Reaping, where Katniss is conscripted into these horrible games, happens the moment the novel begins. It doesn’t happen in Chapter 20. It happens right away.
The idea in YA—and with all children’s books or that matter—is that it needs to move, we need to keep people turning pages, we are dealing with people with shorter attention spans, hence: plot, plot, plot! Action, action, action! High emotion! Intensity! Vividness! (Which can come from voice—and YA often, though not always, is first-person POV.)
On this note, I’d argue that adults also have short attention spans, especially these days, and it’s not a bad practice to take a nod from children’s book writers who work so hard on making their novels MOVE, and to keep you turning pages. We all need to be kept turning pages. We all love voices that are so vivid and immediate they just LEAP into our heads and we can hear them! We all love plot too, no matter what age, I think.
That’s why this one gets murky in terms of YA vs. Adult.
But adult novels will sometimes have, well, no plot whatsoever. They’ll even pride themselves on no plot! They’ll just be comprised of sentences. Or only have the loosest of plots, barely visible. Or they’ll take 100 pages to get off the ground, and spend that 100 pages ruminating on the characters’ pasts and not having anything much happen other than these ruminations.
This would not fly in YA people. No way.
4. Mood / Emotion. This one is murkier still. But I’m taking it on anyway. (And see my thoughts on Sally Rooney as (pseudo) YA novelist coming soon in Part 2.) I’ll just say, that YA often has “all the feels.” It’s high emotion, the emotion is CLOSE. We are SWOONING. We are WEEPING. We are TERRIFIED. It’s like, well, walking through a high school hallway where HORMONES and ENERGY is zapping and zipping all over and if you’re not careful you’ll get swept up into it!
And again—this distinction is pretty murky but—novels for adults may have much greater emotional distance. They may be solemn all the way through. The characters might be (emotionally) held at arm’s length from the reader. You may be admiring the sentences on an individual basis, you may feel like an observer of the story even.
But YA grabs you by the shoulders, looks you in the face and says, “COME ON! WE ARE DOING THIS! And then yanks you alone.
This brings me to one of my favorite YA teachings and topics which expands on the plot/pacing business above, which is:
BLOW JOBS on Page 2.
Um . . . I know, I know: WHAT??!! What in the world?
So, while in a novel for adults, nothing major may happen for quite a long time, in the YA version of that novel (or Middle Grade), something major happens, like, in Chapter 1. Like, really fast. Like within the first few pages. We get dropped in rather mercilessly, or wonderfully, and excitingly.
And my favorite example of this over the years when I’ve been teaching YA—and which I learned myself before I’d ever published a novel—came from the late, great, kindhearted and so very generous, Ellen Wittlinger. I had the fortune of meeting Ellen because for many years, I attended Kindling Words, which is a writing retreat for children’s book authors and editors (that’s also where I met so many of my writer friends, actually, that are still in my life today, going on two decades now).
And here comes the blow job . . .
In one of Ellen’s many, award-winning YA novels, SANDPIPER, by p. 2, her protagonist is (quite literally) giving this boy a blow job. Like, Ellen drops us right in to the action, and that action is: a blow job. Whew! Um . . . Obviously, this novel is dealing with sex, and also reputations girls get for having sex, how boys treat girls on this topic, among many other important, things.
But yeah, it’s pretty much: Hello, welcome to my novel, and CUE THE BLOW JOB!
Here are screenshots of the first two pages of SANDPIPER so you can see for yourself:
Yup, so there it is folks! In graphic detail on p. 2 of this novel. Ellen was never one to mince words in her novels.
The benefit of such a writerly decision? Well, I know I’m in after that. I’m going to keep turning pages. I mean, it’s difficult not to. I mean, well . . . right??!
To be clear: I am not advocating that everybody put sex on p. 2 (though it’s never a bad idea!). But what I am saying is: in YA (and Middle Grade too), the action happens fast. We are dropped right in. Which hooks us.
Because—to recap—YA is hooky. It’s plotty. It moves.
The example from the adult world I usually use to compare to Ellen’s novel, is actually THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt (I love Donna Tartt, and not just because she and I share a name and she is very good at dropping us into action right away). So, THE GOLDFINCH has a big, plotty hook right at the beginning—a bomb goes off in a major art museum. I mean, HELLO, wow! You’ve got me. I’m in.
But: the bomb does not go off on p. 2. In YA, that bomb would be exploding, like, on p. 2, 3, definitely by p. 4, certainly very very soon. In THE GOLDFINCH, that bomb goes off on p. 31 (at least of the hardcover edition), and those are seriously long, dense, hefty pages. In YA time, that bomb going off, is like, taking forever.
All this to say: there are lots of things that distinguish YA from adult, but the difference between p. 2 and p. 31 as far as major plot points go, is one of those things to consider.
Action—where it happens, how, WHEN: these are all levels you can push and pull in the novel that you are writing. And sometimes, depending on how you push and pull them, it might steer your novel toward YA—or away from it.
***
Okay, even my Part 1 has gotten very long so I’ll stop here for now. Stay tuned for my next installment on the difference between YA and Adult, which will include the benefits of learning to write like a YA novelist even if you’re writing novels for adults, a confession about my own first adult novel, THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO, plus my secret beliefs about Sally Rooney’s popularity, and why some very literary people are so much like the academics of my Ph.D.’d past.
So bye for now!
xo Donna
(And, please consider pre-ordering STEFI AND THE SPANISH PRINCE my forthcoming rom-com, and/or WISHFUL THINKING, my very recent memoir!)
YA vs adult—a question I often have when reading client/peer manuscripts involving young protagonists but with heavy themes and adult insights. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing. 🤩