So you’re writing a YA novel. Good to hear. Let me ask you this: are you a young adult?
If so, I’m impressed. Good on you. You’re doing way more with your life than I was at your age. Go for it.
If you aren’t a young adult, the good news is you’re in the majority of YA authors. The bad news is it’s very hard to write for a group you aren’t a part of.
Let me rephrase that. It’s easy to write for them, just hard to do it well. The first issue you have is working out who your audience actually is, which I delve into here. The second issue is how you write something that’s going to appeal to them.
What makes a good Young Adult novel?
YA traverses nearly all other genres, so don’t stress over that part too much. There’s a place for another relationship, crime, sci-fi, fantasy (or pretty much whatever else you’re thinking of) story in the category, if it’s good enough.
The difficult bit is writing that story in way that’s going to resonate with an audience of readers who are somewhere along their journey from childhood to adulthood. I can’t tell you the secret ingredient that will propel your story to instant success but I can tell you something that can help your story avoid becoming an abject failure:
Your protagonist should be searching for their identity. But don’t take my word for it.
Tip: Your protagonist should be searching for their identity.
I’m not the only person who thinks a search for identity is a defining feature of YA. Critic and author, Patty Campbell (2000) agrees, suggesting that the resolution of the external conflict of a YA story is linked to ‘a realisation for the protagonist that helps shape an adult identity’ (Donelson and Nielsen, 2009: 4).
Jessica Kokesh and Miglena Sternadori, writing in the Atlantic Journal of Communication, describe it as ‘a journey toward identity discovery and separation from adults’. Professor Thomas Bean and Associate Professor Karen Moni state in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy that of all the problems teens identify with in YA, the most central are ‘questions of character identity and values’ (2003: 638).
The list goes on, and it’s not just academics who think this. Other experts in the field of YA agree.
The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) is also on board with the idea. The 2020 Judges’ Report for the CBCA: Older Readers category states that it included ‘narratives that vividly illustrate the challenges currently faced by young people globally’ and reflect that ‘teenage readers are experiencing a transformative time of growth, both physically and emotionally’ (CBCA online).
The above excerpt from the CBCA judges’ report assumes the search for identity is an experience that most if not all young adults are undergoing and implies that stories for this readership must at least acknowledge this aspect in order for the readers to relate to them.
The judges of the 2020 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (US), identified similar concepts in its winning novel, King and the Dragonflies (Scholastic Publishing, 2020), stating the voice of the protagonist ‘rings true’ when encountering themes of ‘toxic masculinity, racism, and self-discovery’ (National Book Foundation, 2020).
What Makes a Good Young Adult Novel? Tip: Your protagonist should be searching for their identity. Click To TweetNow that you know this tip, look out for words like ‘identity’ and ‘self’ in descriptions of YA novels. You’ll see them everywhere.
But don’t all protagonists answer questions about their identities regardless of whether they’re YA or not?
This is a good question. Aren’t we always told that a well-developed protagonist must learn and grow over the course of their story? And we’ve all read books with protagonists who solve identity issues in stories that are definitely not YA.
The key is the way in which the protagonist searches for their identity. A YA protagonist searches for their identity in a particular way that is relatively consistent but, importantly, not common in books outside YA. A simple example is the idea of that YA novels are coming-of-age stories, which they aren’t, as I explain here. But there’s a lot more to it.
For now, let’s defer to the words of English professors, Ken Donelson and Alleen Nilsen, who I think phrase it the best:
True YA is about finding the answer to the question Who am I and what am I going to do about it?
Ken Donelson and Alleen Nilsen, English Professors
The bad news is it’s very hard to write for a group you aren’t a part of.
Defining precisely what constitutes YA is not that easy; however, marketing, publishing, literary and educational spheres agree that the genre does, or at least should, reflect the transitional nature of life as experienced by adolescents and young people. The belief that the majority of YA includes a search for identity and, by extension, locates this search around the period of adolescence, reflects the consensus within psychology.
In my next article, I discuss what exactly young adult fiction is. It’s not a genre, but what is it? I explain.
Cite This Article:
Gibson, T. (2023). What Makes a Good Young Adult Novel? – Tom Gibson Creative. [online] Available at: https://tomgibsoncreative.com/what-makes-a-good-young-adult-novel/
