YAF - Writing Young Adult Fiction

A friend just sent me her digest of a conference on Young Adult Fiction (YFA) run by the Creative Writing Department of Notiingham's Trent University. A few things struck me. I was surprised to find David Belbin (the convener and author of 'Denial') saying �the least economically significant sector of children�s books, one where it is hard for a writer to earn a living, because the audience predominantly borrows rather than buys its books.� I suppose few writers have their books bought as class sets.

In a 'Writers� Handbook' of some years ago, a then relatively unknown Philip Pullman wrote an essay on the freedom granted to writers of children�s books. Children (in which he presumably includes teenagers) are happy to cross boundaries, aren�t restricted by genre, are prepared to surf the larger waves of a writer�s imagination. I worry that if books are borrowed rather than bought, you need to appeal to a librarian�s sense of what teenagers want rather than the teenagers themselves � so that self-censorship sets in to meet the perceived censoring that the librarians will do in choosing what to buy, and the publishers in choosing what to publish.

And increasingly I am accepting that such worries of mine are neurotic rubbish. Just write, bring up what�s deep inside there, work on clarifying it, ignore �what people might think�. Who knows, it might even connect. Librarians aren�t a prurient bunch. �His Dark Materials� became much wilder in the final volume. Mark Haddon�s �The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night� is a hard book from which to select suitable passages for reading in schools, yet it has most nominations from international librarians for the big Irish Impac literary prize.

I wanted my first novel, �On Bended Knees�, to be about a boy who slowly becomes a rabbit and in burrowing under the Berlin Wall brings abut a union of East and West. However, responding to agents� criticism that my writing was �too remarkable� I deliberately steered the book toward being published. Anything �too remarkable� was nipped in the bud. Shadows of that more fantastic novel still ghost the published one. My strategy worked � the book was published and lauded. But part of me regrets the novel that got away.

I have written novels since then � but getting them into the market becomes ever harder. I have �reined them in�, in my way, but what interests me, what is supremely real to me, is in fact very remarkable to others. I�ve been able to get my non-fiction books through the system, �remarkable� books that I have shaped with the structure of novels, because they can be marketed as �Mind Body Spirit�. Publishers don�t necessarily believe in these books: on first meeting Eileen Campbell, then heading the Thorsons MBS imprint of Harper Collins in London, she told of publishers� horror that �The Celestine Prophecy� was heading the sales charts, a horror and incomprehension she seemed to share. But they think they can see some dollars on the bottom line.

Personally I believe publishers underestimate readers, a huge potential exists for more �fantastic� literature. Boredom is driving readers to other media such as films and games. An agent wrote to me the other day a reminder �that editors have to get their sales, marketing and publicity directors' nod to take on writers now, as well as that of their MD and senior editorial colleagues. It's a very committee-based industry in 2004.� That is becoming more true but it has always been my experience. It�s been puzzling to sit in a room filled with editors waxing lyrical over my work, to go back and meet enthusiastic designers, then later to get a call that someone in marketing has pulled the plug. Bypassing such �committees�, I�m drawing ever closer to setting up my own imprint to feed some of what I find exciting into the world.

And increasingly I am looking to shift my own fiction towards Young Adult Fiction. Pivotal characters in all my novels are teenagers � somehow a remnant of myself has got caught in that age and the rest of me joins in to explore it. The novel I�m finishing now , �Ectopia�, wasn�t written as young adult fiction but that is what it is. It�s a novel written by a boy on that 16 / 17 cusp. He�s the younger twin of the last girl born on Earth. I looked for an inoffensive piece to read in a secondary school writing workshop I led the other day, and it was hard to do so. The boy is forging his own language and has shaken loose of all decorum. He�s also gay. I vowed in writing it not to apply self-censorship at all, wrote a passage involving sexual abuse within the family, then subsequently took it out. Probably because it frightened me. I�m working to put it back in. Am I kidding myself that this book is suitable for the YAF market? Probably. Who cares. There�s some comfort in Susan�s telling of the marketability of the �shock factor�, the very fact that such books are marketed at teenagers.

I�ve read Chuck Palahniuk to kids who have been shocked by but loved the abrasive style. I like the style myself and have learned from it, though I soon weary at the negativity. In �Ectopia� my main character does not just mouth-off or react, he isn�t a victim flashing back, he just stays ever more determined to find his own positive and alternative course.

I pause at a comment from Melvin Burgess�s keynote speech at the conference, that the actual audience for teenage novels is 11+. I�ve kept an old-fashioned notion of what 11+ readers should read. Some part of me wants to help them to see the beauty that surrounds them rather than shock them with glimpses of a savage world. I�ve started a new novel, �Badger Boy�, which probably picks up on my earlier rabbit theme. It�s bold, but is the first piece I am consciously writing for the young adult (ie older children�s) market. It has the different child / bad parents theme, and won�t use profane language. I was impressed recently, by the way, by Haruki Murakami�s �Kafka on the Shore�, due out in January 2005. This is an �adult� novel, without profane language, of real imaginative vigour, one which kids could really enjoy.