Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  When writing a gender you are not, start with this understanding: You aren’t writing a Girl or a Boy; you’re writing a Person. If you approach your character with this attitude, you’re not as likely to step right into gender stereotype. That said, it’s true that boys and girls are different, especially during puberty when kids’ bodies are suddenly manifesting those differences in drastic, hormonally charged ways. This is YA fiction, and you need to address gender differences in your characterizations.

  I’m going to tread the fine line of stereotype here, but when it comes to boy characters and emotion, less is usually more. Too much emotion, and they sound sappy or girlish. When it comes to emotions in teen/tween girls, less is usually not enough. Don’t make them hysterical, but do understand that girls tend to be more demonstratively emotional.

  Here are a few other gender differences that may help your characterizations:

  Girls tend toward multitasking. Boys work on one, maybe two tasks at a time.

  Boys learn by doing. Kinetic and tactile, they’re stimulated by taste, touch, and smell. Girls use their eyes and ears to learn.

  Boys tend to be more active, and girls are more verbal.

  Boys tend to be more outwardly aggressive, and girls practice mental and emotional aggression.

  Hide the safety net. Don’t let your teen cower in her room the whole book. Shove her out the door and then lock it behind her. Choose settings that make her uncomfortable and force her hand. Make her uncomfortable by making yourself uncomfortable. Setting interactions deepen characterization. (Find more on setting in Chapter 8.)

  Writing Believable Baddies

  An empowered teen protagonist is nothing without someone to struggle against, and that someone is called the antagonist. An antagonist may be a rival or evil nemesis, or a faceless institution, or even a friend or family member who talks your main character out of doing something or in some way acts against your character for his own reasons. An antagonist opposes the protagonist in some way for some reason. An example of antagonists from the Classics shelf would be the fake duke and dauphin in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This conman team feigns friendship with Huck and escaped slave Jim only to exploit both of them, throwing up serious barriers in their quest for freedom, right down to selling Jim to a farmer. A contemporary issue-story may pit a teen against one or both parents. A teen romance may have a rival for the cute boy’s love, and a crime novel may have a criminal villain.

  You should know your antagonist as soon as you know your protagonist, designing goals, flaws, and strengths that will certainly clash. Without those, you may as well just go to the bad-guys store and buy yourself a blow-up villain. (I hear the Evil Cheerleader is on sale.)

  Giving the villains goals and dreams

  Antagonists must be as deeply drawn as your main character if they’re going to be distinctive and memorable. You don’t want a cardboard cutout villain in a novel you’ve worked so hard to populate with rich, youthful characters.

  The best antagonists are those who hinder not because they’re stereotypes with jobs to do but because they’re pursuing their own dreams and struggling with their own inner conflicts. Or maybe they’re doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons. Good antagonists are layered, unpredictable, and even sympathetic characters.

  It’s entirely possible for an antagonist to do terrible things without seeing himself as a villain. People have different moral philosophies, after all. Maybe he thinks harming one person is okay because he’s acting for the greater good. Or maybe he just has a permissive value system and doesn’t see what he’s doing as wrong. A bad guy who doesn’t think he’s bad can come in many different forms — all of which enrich your antagonist and thus the entire story.

  The main conflict of your book will most likely stem from the clash of the antagonist and the main character. Make sure you can articulate each one’s goal and why those goals can’t happily coexist. Ultimately, the antagonist won’t achieve his goal because his strength can’t overcome his flaw, with both getting trumped by the hero’s core strength.

  Seeing the good in the bad

  You give your young audience a richer reading experience if you can generate at least a little sympathy for your bad guy, even the super baddies. After all, the Evil Overlord was once a wee sweet baby, too. Something happened to corrupt him. Look at Gollum in The Hobbit. As evil as that creature is, your heart also feels bad about his psychotic subjugation to the One Ring. He was once a hobbit called Sméagol, flawed and therefore primed to succumb to the power of the ring. Gollum was victimized at one point and there’s sympathy there, helping to make him one of the all-time memorable antagonists. In his case, wicked won out . . . and readers do, too.

  A good bad guy needn’t be despicable; he may simply have conflicting or intrusive goals that pit him against your protagonist. A well-meaning dad, for example, may want his son to join the safe, financially rewarding family business, whereas the son wants to be a rock star. Such antagonists can be suave as they go about their business, blatantly confrontational, or clueless to their antagonistic ways.

  A moral center makes for a sympathetic character. When possible, have your antagonists act from places of kindness, as with the dad who thinks his son’s rock ’n’ roll dreams are financially unsafe and thus foils them. Readers will understand the motives even if they don’t agree with them. That gives kids something to chew over when the book is done.

  A bonus with the sympathetic antagonist is that he can be convincingly reformed. If it’s natural to your story, consider letting him see the error of his ways thanks to the hero’s good example. This can be a rewarding ending for your reader. Don’t force it, though. Sometimes reform just isn’t realistic. Teens are usually barely capable of saving themselves, so saving someone else may be expecting a lot. A contrived happy ending is a disappointing one.

  Of course, some stories call for bad guys who are wicked through and through, from start to finish, and there’s just no way around it. If you’re creating a sinister villain, make him worth fighting against. Make him smart and unpredictable and always forcing the hero’s hand. Or make him deceptively charming, allowing him to rise to power and to lure people in. He may be operating from an evil center, but he’s intriguingly coy in how he pulls off his villainy.

  A great ploy is to give your villain a reluctant hand in the story’s positive resolution. It’s Gollum, after all, who leads the hobbits to Mount Doom, where he accidentally destroys the Ring and himself along with it.

  Making an example of an antagonist

  If you can create as rich an antagonist as you do a protagonist, your young readers will come away from the book learning as much from him as they do from the star. An antagonist usually embodies traits that teens struggle with themselves, showing them what would happen if they were to give in to bad impulses and emotions. The antagonist helps them see the badness that lurks within them, judge it, and then vanquish it. Teens need to feel validated in their refusal to give in, strengthened by their virtue. When the teen lead conquers or outwits the antagonist, teen readers conquer, too.

  Exercise: Write a character profile for your antagonist

  Create a character profile for your antagonist (see the earlier section “Exercise: Create a full character profile”). Include elements such as his biggest heartbreak, his formative events, his modus operandi, his capabilities and expertise, his motivation and personal rage. This character didn’t just materialize out of nowhere; he has a history, too. Find out how he came to be who he is in this adventure, and see whether you can’t work up some sympathy in your hardened author heart for him. If you can, that sympathy will come through for readers. Fallen heroes make wonderful villains.

  Chapter 6

  Building the Perfect Plot

  In This Chapter

  Getting pushy with your plottin
g

  Cranking up the tension and the pace

  Constructing the perfect plot

  Handling subplots, prologues, flashbacks, and epilogues

  Writers who plot successfully have this in common: They’re a pushy bunch. And hurrah for that. They understand that well-crafted plots push their story forward — or more specifically, push their main characters forward — and in the process push the readers through the pages of the book. It’s a win-win deal, with readers getting the riveting read they want and the main character (usually) attaining the goal or transformation she wants — albeit with a few bumps and bruises along the way.

  In this chapter, I use both p words, plot and pushiness. You can’t have one without the other. Here you craft an effective plot in seven steps that push the main character through a series of escalating challenges toward the final resolution of her main conflict. If you’re an outliner, you can use these seven steps as the headings for your outline. If you prefer to let the story unfold as you write it, then these steps give you an essential understanding of how your plot should fall into place as it flows from your pen. Also in this chapter, I cover the role of pacing and tension in plotting; the distinction between character-driven stories and plot-driven ones and why you should care; and the pros and cons of prologues, flashbacks, and epilogues, three popular but perilous plotting tricks.

  Choosing the Approach to Your Plot

  Every young adult novel, no matter what its target audience is, delivers a sequence of events that are all tied to one main conflict, with the lead character progressing through those events toward a resolution of that conflict. That’s your plot, also called a storyline. Characters (and readers) gain new insight from the struggle. In teen fiction, that insight generally involves maturing and understanding the world a little better, and it always empowers the teen lead with the solution. How the plot pushes your character forward is up to you. Your story may be plot-driven or character-driven, depending on where you want to place your emphasis (more on that in this section). Your story also needs solid pacing to keep readers turning the pages.

  All this pushing business may sound violent, but you can’t be namby-pamby in your plotting. Change is hard for people, teens in particular. Change is thrust upon them every day, and it’s uncomfortable. Your job is to inflict that discomfort on your character to elicit the transformation or to push him through the action when it would be much easier for him to simply duck and cover under the nearest desk.

  A character’s emotional, psychological, and social growth through the course of a story is called his character arc. You can’t have a strong and complete character arc without strong plotting. Plot and character development are complementary, not separate elements. Because of this interrelationship, many of the points I bring up in this chapter are also explored in Chapter 5, which is about creating teen-friendly characters.

  Acting on events: Plot-driven stories

  Plot-driven stories put the action first. They typically have an episodic feel to them as the characters move from event to event, with those events generally happening thanks to outside forces. Think armies attacking or plagues striking or little green men swooping in from Mars. These stories don’t dwell much on how characters feel about events, but they do contain a lot of reacting, strategizing, and preempting. In fact, plot-driven stories tend to be very goal-oriented. The focus on action can move the story forward at a quick pace, and who doesn’t love that? “It’s a real page turner” is the kind of praise that great plot-driven stories elicit.

  Not surprisingly, these often action-packed stories tend to appeal to boys big time (more on boys and books in Chapter 2). Adventures, fantasies, and mysteries/crime stories/thrillers are often plot-driven. Historical fiction may be plot-driven as well, when the heart of the story is a historical event.

  The danger of chasing a quick pace is that it’s easy to fall back on stereotypical characters while you tend to the action. Not good. Stories with rich, unpredictable characters are far more satisfying to read than those with rank-and-file stereotypes who behave exactly as you expect them to. Don’t shrug off your character work, even if action is yo’ daddy. Chapter 5 shows you how to spot stereotypes in your manuscript and give them the old heave-ho should they dare show their one-dimensional faces.

  Focusing on feelings: Character-driven stories

  Character-driven stories spotlight your main character’s emotions and psychological development over the events in the plot. In these stories, what happens isn’t as important as how the character reacts emotionally to what happens. Contemporary-issue books, chick lit, and multicultural stories tend to be character-driven. Often, character-driven stories fall under the coming-of-age theme.

  Because of their emphasis on emotions and internal growth, character-driven stories easily fall prey to telling. The writing maxim show, don’t tell means to let your readers interpret actions and motivations based on their own observations of what characters do and say. Don’t tell your readers how everybody feels; that’s boring. You may as well tell your readers to close the book and take a nap.

  Don’t be afraid of action! Embrace it as a very un-boring way to illuminate your characters’ thoughts, moods, and emotions. Plot events are great characterization tools. They give characters opportunities for powerful “Aha!” moments, they push characters to do things they normally wouldn’t do in a million years, and they definitely qualify as showing, not telling. Chapter 9 has more info on showing instead of telling.

  Keeping the events flowing in a character-driven story also prevents your character from falling into a morass of emotional wallowing and self-analysis, which slows down the pace . . . and frankly annoys the heck out of most people. Stories should compel readers to turn the page, making them itch to find out how the character will react to each new development.

  Seven Steps to the Perfect Plot

  You can break every story into three parts:

  The beginning, which presents the conflict and the goal

  The middle, where the story plays out to a climax, with the stakes and the tension rising along the way

  The ending, where the conflict is resolved and the goal is usually attained

  But here’s where math takes a back seat to art: The three parts of a story play themselves out in seven distinct steps. Doesn’t add up? Just watch. These seven steps take you through the entire plotting process, from identifying the character’s goal straight through to an effective, satisfying resolution of that goal. It’s a perfect plot in seven steps.

  Author Jean Ferris’s pointers for powerful plots

  When I first started trying to write for publication, people gave me all sorts of advice. “Write what you know,” for instance. That would have been good advice if I’d actually known much about anything. Or, “Write about your father.” My father had quite a dramatic life, but his story wasn’t mine to tell. Or, “Write about your mother,” and later, “Write about your mother’s Alzheimer’s.” I’d lived that. I didn’t want to live it again through writing.

  Finally, I was given two pieces of advice I could use. The first (and best) piece of advice: “Get your main character up in a tree and then throw rocks at her. That’s how you plot.”

  Huh?

  But then I got it. The essential requirement of a plot is conflict. The primary character has to encounter an initial impediment to getting what she wants (the tree) and then obstacle after obstacle (the rocks) that continue to thwart her. The story must contain suspense regarding whether she’ll achieve her objective. Readers must have doubts that she’ll dodge the rocks and get herself down from the tree at all. The higher the tree and the bigger the rocks (and the more of them!), the better. That equals more suspense and more doubts, which means more page-turning by your readers.

  The problem for the writer, of course, is how to get the character out of th
at tree and how to get her to avoid the rocks — or to survive their impact — without making any of it seem too easy, too predictable, or too improbable. But that comes later. You have to get her feet off the ground first.

  That second piece of advice? “Write about something important to you. It’ll keep you interested long enough to write a whole book.” This has turned out to be true. The best results seem to come from the subjects I feel most passionate about. I’ve carried that advice in my hip pocket all these years. Right next to a rock. A passionate writer should always have one of those at the ready.

  Jean Ferris has written more than a dozen acclaimed novels for teens, including Love among the Walnuts, Once Upon a Marigold, and Eight Seconds. Find out more about Jean at www.jeanferris.com.

  If you’re an outliner, this list of steps may be right up your alley. If you’re not, it can still serve as a general guide as you draft your story page by page. Are you the kind of writer who wants to map out the structure of the plot first and fill in the details later? Or do you like to fly by the seat of your pants, letting your characters tell you what’s what as they figure it out for themselves? Flip to Chapter 3 to see which way your pen leans.

  After you master these steps, you can start tweaking and massaging them to suit your personal style. That’s more than okay; it’s what’s supposed to happen. That’s how people write surprising new novels. These seven steps are your road map to the perfect plot, but the vehicle you drive down that road is entirely up to you.

  Step 1: Engage your ESP