YA Gets All Growed Up

If you happen to read Publisher's Weekly on a regular basis, then you would have caught this article about YA coming of age and how it's morphed from something that was barely a blip on the radar to an overwhelming presence in the marketplace. While I'm all for YA blowing up, because it needs to, I'm wondering what's being sacrificed in the process.

Trends emerge quite readily in the YA world. HARRY POTTER brought about the fantasy, TWILIGHT gave rise to paranormal romance and THE HUNGER GAMES paved the way for dystopians. But in each of those wakes washed up a slew of wannabes. Of course the wannabe isn't exclusive to the YA realm but YA has to work ten times harder than those other categories because people don't take it seriously. It doesn't hold the same merit to many people as"adult" titles so I believe the wannabes have a larger ability to hurt the integrity of the category more than they help it. A flood of good YA is one thing but a flood of mediocre knock-offs is something else entirely.

I wouldn't call myself a book snob. I'm not asking much from my reading. But when I come across title after title of lazy writing, I can't help but wonder why the book community as a whole is enabling such obviously craptastic fakes. And it's because of those titles, despite their small numbers, are what people remember of the category.

That's not to say wannabes can't be good. They most certainly can. But even the good ones blend in with the crowd after a while. With a category like YA, where the publishers want to keep cashing in on the waves, what they keep punching out, at times, can be a bit insulting, if I'm to be honest (why wouldn't I be?). It appears that they're making the assumption that if we liked this first huge book, then we're sure to like the slew of similar books they're pushing out, irrespective of quality because we'll be so hungry for something similar to that original book. I'm sure you can see where this thinking can spiral to, where YA readers are of a lower caring level with what they read and so on. Basically it looks like quantity over quality right now in the YA world and it's a bit disheartening.

I love YA. I wouldn't be doing this is I didn't. And I want to see it grow even more and for people to finally start taking it seriously, like it deserves. But right now, YA has to struggle for every reputation point it gets. Shit gets published all the time, regardless of category. It's inevitable. But when it happens in YA, it makes that much bigger of a mark because people are constantly looking for an excuse to invalidate YA and keep it simply "kids' books." We need to stop making the category look like a shameless shill for dollars and more like the rest of the book store or library where quality takes a slightly higher precedence than riding the wave.

Publishing is a business and businesses need to make money. That doesn't mean quality needs to be sacrificed in order to do so. Plus it's insulting when mediocre shit is published and we're expected to like it because it's kind of like this other title. YA readers need to be treated like the rest of the reading world. We know good and bad writing when we see it. We know when we're being sold to. We know when yet another "insert genre here" book is being shoved onto the wave. It's really obvious. Let's keep YA growing, but let's do it with quality over quantity. I don't know about you but I'd much rather see far fewer books with phenomenal characters, amazing world building and a story to die for than a shit-ton of lazily written books with cardboard characters, barely existent plots and insubstantial worldbuilding all in the name of a dollar. Let's ride the waves, but not everyone needs to have the same cheap surfboard.

Last Five Things.

I think this is a pretty insightful article on the reading habits of teens (like I need to read articles on it when I'm neck deep in the YA book blogging world, right?) What I got out of it? Teen reading is just as diverse, if not more so, than any adult that says all teens read are crap. What's the very first book on the very first list from a sixteen-year-old? The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, one of my favorite books. I actually remember seeing this on summer reading shelves last year and was a little surprised. It's a pretty intense book and I didn't read it until college. I'd love to see how English teachers are teaching that one.

So what were the last five things you read? I won't bother listing mine since all you have to do is scroll down to see my answers. I would list the last five things I wrote but since my brain's been molested my insurance inundation the last month, I haven't written anything (whichis changing tonight, dammit). How about the last five things I thought of about my writing that I hope one day people will be able to read? Does that work? See the link there? That's like, three degrees of Kevin Bacon.

1. Layla from a series I'm writing about a psychic who owns a shop in Coney Island, lives with her husband and her two guinea pigs and has the cesspool of the supernatural world constantly on her ass. I'm changing the character to make it more YA friendly - instead of in her 30s, she'll be 18. Instead of living with her husband, she'll be living with her boyfriend. The cesspool and the guinea pigs stay.

2. My fanfiction. I just opened a companion site so I can dig into the characters more outside of the stories they're in, complete with pictures and crazy insane babbling.

3. How my first ever novel, while being an immense help in the writing department, will ultimately end up in the trunk. Well, at least not subbed. I'm considering releasing it on the internet when I'm done editing it.

4. My second novel and how it's much better written and gives me a better fighting chance of getting an agent's attention.

5. Deciding which novel I'm going to write next, as the ideas just keep piling up.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King

Second edition first published in 2004.

Hundreds of books have been written on the art of writing. Here at last is a book by two professional editors to teach writers the techniques of the editing trade that turn promising manuscripts into published novels and short stories.

In this completely revised and updated edition, Renni Browne and Dave King teach you, the writer, how to apply the editing techniques they have developed to your own work. Chapters on dialogue, exposition, point of view, interior monologue, and other techniques take you through the same processes an expert editor would go through to perfect your manuscript. Each point is illustrated with examples, many drawn from the hundreds of books Browne and King have edited.

If you’re even considering the thought of editing your own work, whether it’s a full length novel, novella, short story, flash or whatever other piece of fiction you have, go out and buy this book now. Read it cover to cover. Take notes. Read it again. Do the exercises. Relate it to your own work. Read it again. And again. And again.

This book highlights what really are some of the most obvious fallacies a writer can make and it does it in the most poignant of ways. Everything they say is in the simplest terms. No bushes are being beaten and they don’t cut any writer any slack. Chances are, your manuscript has at least three of the fatal errors outlined in this book. At the very least. More likely, it has nearly all of them. I’m unashamed to say that the latter is me, to one extent or another.

Probably one of the greatest things to come out of this book is the acronym R.U.E., Resist the Urge to Explain. This carries over in multiple chapters, from reiterating explanation in dialogue to redundant points being made and back again. I found that a common theme in many of the editing points they make boils down to over-explaining. Writers want to press the point so badly, and make sure the reader understands exactly what they’re saying that that they’ll flog the dead horse explaining it. Often the author, usually subconsciously, doesn’t trust the reader to get it so important points are reiterated at the expense of the reader’s intelligence.

As I write my fanfiction (yes, I write fanfiction) I'm more conscious of writing mistakes that I knew I shouldn’t be making but it's something I need to re-reference in the book. For example, using dialogue tags such as “she said as she twirled her hair around her finger” are markedly amateurish. This is actually one of the points in the book I have the hardest time with. I get it but if the action is relevant, I don't see how it can weaken the writing. Here's a little further explanation on this from a comment I made on the original post--

. . . Chapter 11, Sophistication. According to the authors, “Both the 'as' construction and the '-ing construction' as used above are grammatically correct and express the action clearly and unambiguously. But notice that both of these constructions take a bit of action (”She pulled off her gloves”) and tuck it away into a dependent clause (”Pulling off her gloves . . .”). This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant. If you use these constructions often, you weaken your writing.

The two examples they gave are, “Pulling off her gloves, she turned to face him” and “As she pulled off her gloves, she turned to face him.”

They then go on to say–”We’re not suggesting that you avoid these phrases altogether. There are going to be times when you want to write about two actions that are actually simultaneous and/or genuinely incidental–actions that deserve more than a dependent clause. And given the choice between an 'as' or '-ing' construction and a belabored, artificial alternative, you’re well advised to use the 'as' or '-ing.' But be aware that hacks have long ago run these useful constructions into the ground. Learn to spot them in your own writing and, if you see more than one or two a page, start hunting around for alternatives.”

This is the second to last chapter so most of the points made in this one and the following are more about fine-tuning the work after all the other stuff has been fleshed out. The authors are crazy adamant about eliminating hacks (I can’t count how many times they repeat the word) so any style common in hack writing, they’ve pounced on. So it’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just more of an easy, lazy way out. And I know I’m guilty a hundred times over, at least.

I still have the most trouble with that one and I'm more inclined to think they've just seen that technique used so much in writing that they want to see alternatives. Too much of anything is bad technique but I think this is the only borderline point they made.

I also see flaws in works that I read, ones that I didn’t see before, especially in web serials, because of this book. I bite my tongue, of course, because I’m not these people’s editor and it’s much more than just an improperly punctuated sentence but this book has made me so much more aware of others’ flaws as well as my own weaknesses.

For instance, I’m getting better at spotting redundant text in writing but that’s still very hard for me. My eyes see someone making a point, not beating me over the head with it. That’s another chapter I need to read again (as if I’m not going to read all of them again, right?) because I want to soak in all the information, make sure I’m getting it right and apply it to my own work. I want to recognize the redundancies, not just on a small scale but a much larger one in order to make my book better.

It comes with learning to be a better editor that the ability to look at works more for fun kind of starts to fade. It becomes harder and harder to turn that editor off and just read, especially after reading a book like this. I just have to keep telling myself to shut up and read because I like the story. But I think that’s a small price to pay in order to make my work that much better. I can chain the inner editor up when I’m not using her, even though I might be able to hear her screams but I’d rather have that than no inner editor and novels that should never see the light of day.

So if you want to edit, you want to do it well, do it right and make your manuscript as good as it can be, pick up this book. I’ve even made it super easy for you. You don’t even need to leave your seat. Just go to my Amazon widget to the right and click until you find the book and buy it. I promise you, you won’t regret it.

Really, there’s a reason why every writer I’ve met, both in person and over the internet, recommends this book to edit their novels. Just remember, these are not hard and fast rules. Keeping to them too strictly will just result in sterile writing and you don't want that. Listen to your own judgment and make the call based on that.