Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  When you’re planning your story, spend a few moments reading your protagonist’s mind. Your goal as you poke around in there is to find out what he wants more than anything. Maybe he wants a family or the independence that a car represents or to cast the One Ring to Rule Them All into the Cracks of Doom to end the Dark Lord’s siege once and for all.

  Whatever the desire is, it must matter to your main character, big time, to the point that the fear (or the consequences) of failing to get that want is as powerful as the want itself. Whether the story is character- or plot-driven doesn’t matter; when you know what your character really, really, really wants, you have his number. Hint at or flat-out reveal this want in some manner at the beginning of your novel, right there in Chapter One. Then spin every event in the plot to somehow play into this want, pushing your character further into fear and desperation.

  While you’re in your character’s head, find out his strengths and weaknesses. Every lead character should have at least one core strength and one big weakness (flaw) to make him believable. Knowing his core strength and flaw helps you plot a story that pushes the character to grow in a meaningful way. Spend some time understanding the basics of your character (a process I discuss in Chapter 5) before you put that character through his paces.

  Step 2: Compute the problem

  Time for some math: want + circumstances = problem. Circumstances are the obstacles that hinder your character’s attainment of his Big Want. The obstacles can come in any form — you can set constraints on your character or impose social pressures or set loose some evil white-bearded overlords who lust after rings with super whammy powers. When you figure out what or who you want your character to work through in order to reach his goal, you have your problem, or conflict, which must be resolved in the ending.

  Reveal your conflict in the beginning of your story, preferably in Chapter One or by Chapter Two at the latest. Withholding your conflict from your readers only makes them wonder why the heck they’re reading about that protagonist. Offer the reason up front and get them vested in the character’s efforts to overcome his problem.

  You can use circumstances to cause problems for characters by dangling temptation in front of a teen who’s clearly flustered with his status quo, by putting Joe Normal through something extreme, or by putting Joe Abnormal through something truly center-of-the-road and seeing how he deals with that.

  Step 3: Flip the switch

  It’s time for the event that sets everything in motion: the catalyst. This is a major plot moment, one big enough to put the ball in play and to give your main character a good kick in the pants. Perhaps your teen is sitting in the audience at his mom’s wedding and decides to sabotage his new stepdad. Or maybe the class bully gives your protagonist a monster wedgie in front of the entire cafeteria. Or maybe the butler kills the maid in the study with the candlestick, and your character is the only witness to the crime . . . and the bloody butler knows it. Don’t dillydally; unleash your catalyst within the first chapter or two of your book.

  Step 4: Dog pile on the protagonist

  This step is where your character takes action that only worsens his problem, over and over and over. In other words, you put the poor kid through the wringer. When he gets knocked down, he’ll struggle back up only to get knocked down again and then smothered by a bunch of goons. Dog pile!

  Standard plot structure calls for three knockdowns, progressively more painful and harder to recover from. Think, when it rains, it pours. Don’t be wishy-washy about plotting. If you don’t keep the pressure on and the stakes high, you may end up with a sagging middle — which is as sluggish as it sounds. As your character struggles to solve his problem but only exacerbates it, intensify his desperation to overcome each obstacle in his path, and make the consequences of failure even more undesirable. This strategy cranks up the tension and pushes readers to turn the pages with gleeful anticipation. No sagging in sight. After the third pummeling, your character faces his ultimate test: to get up and remain standing once and for all.

  Place these obstacles in your character’s path throughout the bulk of the story — that is, throughout the story’s official middle.

  Step 5: Epiphany!

  In the epiphany, the character’s flaw is exposed to or realized by your character (see Chapter 5 for details on flaws). This step is the tail end of the story’s middle, happening at the verge of the climax and leading to the story’s resolution.

  Step 6: Final push

  This is it — the official climax, the resolution of the conflict, the attainment of the goal, the final battle for the character’s almighty Want. Your character figures out how to overcome his flaw and his story problem and then makes one final effort, using that core inner strength of his (see Chapter 5) to overcome the biggest obstacle. This climax is the highest point of interest, when the conflict is most intense and the consequences of the character’s actions become inevitable.

  Note that I didn’t say, “Your character asks a grown-up to solve his problems for him.” In teen fiction, you empower the teen with the ability to fix things. Your teen readers are attracted to the hero because they want to see that fixing their own broken stuff is possible. Remember, teens are reading not only for entertainment but also to experience the tough stuff of life from the safety of their own cozy reading nooks.

  Step 7: Triumph

  Your character succeeds in his final effort and reaps the rewards. Huzzah! Balance is restored and order reigns once again. It’s entirely possible, of course, that your ending is bittersweet, with no victory laps in sight. Nobody said endings have to be happy, but they do need to offer a point of satisfaction for your readers, a sense that a journey has been completed. The triumph in that situation may be a new understanding and a new way to move forward in life. The resolution must be emotionally satisfying. The character’s arc, started in Chapter One, should be complete.

  The winding down of events after the conflict’s resolution is called the denouement. This is where you tie up all the loose ends, or at least the ones you’re interested in tying up. (You may want to leave something open to interpretation, and that’s okay as long as you tie up all the subplots that figure directly into the main conflict. More on that later.) All that magnificent tension you worked your readers into has been released, and now relaxation settles in. At the risk of taking a how-to book about writing for teens to a place where only adults are allowed, think of the denouement as that cliché B-movie cigarette-in-the-bedroom moment. Yeah, you know what I mean. Ahem. That’s denouement.

  Want to do something unexpected with your ending? Have your character fail to attain his goal but make that failure a good thing. Or have him succeed in achieving his goal only to discover that success wasn’t actually the best thing for him. People don’t always want what’s good for them, after all, and young people need to be exposed to that reality, too.

  Exercise: Plot your trigger points

  Use this exercise to plan your plot. If you usually steer clear of outlining, start this exercise but stop after stating your catalyst (Step 3). Even non-outliners need to know their protagonist’s want/goal, his flaw, and his strength, and they need to know what catalyst sets the story in motion even if the rest of the story remains open to the character’s development.

  1. Want/goal and flaw: What does your character want more than anything? What personal quality/habit/mindset must your character overcome to get his want or goal?

  2. Conflict: What is the problem throughout the novel, the conflict that the character struggles through?

  3. Catalyst: What gets your character up that tree? What event sets everything in motion?

  4. Obstacles:

  Obstacle 1: Name the first obstacle to overcome.

  Obstacle 2: Name the second obstacle to overcome, with higher stakes.

  Obstacle 3: Name the third obsta
cle to overcome, the do-or-die moment.

  5. Epiphany: State your character’s core strength. What event or situation makes him realize he has this strength?

  6. Climax: How does your character’s strength get him over that last hill?

  7. Triumph: Has your character achieved his want? State how he will have grown as a result of his success or failure.

  Tackling Pacing and Tension

  Some teens savor character-driven stories; others prefer plot-driven ones. But ultimately, both groups want the same thing: for you to push them through the pages. They long for riveting reads they can’t put down. You know what I’m talking about. Just when you think, “Okay, it’s time to go to sleep. I’d better put down my book” — Bam! A new thing happens in the plot, and you absolutely, positively must know how it plays out. That’s what keeps readers up all night. That’s strong forward momentum — strong pacing.

  A story’s pace is the speed at which it moves forward. That speed is influenced by how quickly the plot events unfold and the rhythm that your chapter and sentence structures create. For example, a plot that unfolds in many short chapters, each filled with several short scenes, has a quicker pace than a plot that plays out through long, uninterrupted chapters. You may slow things down with longer text blocks or speed them up with short text blocks and more dialogue. You can even throw in a dramatic punch with a chapter that’s just a single line all by itself. Heck, you can cut it all the way down to a single phrase if you’re feeling bold:

  Chapter 10

  Sarah’s dead.

  Now that would be a real pace tweaker.

  When all is said and done, regardless of whether you’re writing a plot-driven or character-driven story, a well-paced plot must continually reengage readers, luring them deeper and deeper into the story.

  Pace is a rather abstract element of storytelling, and managing it effectively requires balancing many different elements. But it’s really worth the effort. The more you play with these elements, the more variety your pace will have and the richer your story will be. I show you how to change up the pace in this section. I also talk about tension, a close relative of pacing.

  Picking up the pace

  When you want to speed up the pace, you can spring an event on a character and write his reaction in a staccato succession of short statements, as in the following:

  Clark froze with the blow to his stomach. It was surprise more than anything. This wasn’t right. This pain, it shouldn’t be like this. Hot. Sharp. And the blood.

  Blood?

  Clark fell to his knees, clutching his stomach. Red seeped between his fingers as his attacker fled into the tunnel. Clark should’ve known they’d have knives.

  He should’ve known.

  He should’ve been ready.

  You can also speed up the pacing by running a sequence of events together:

  A car pulled up in the driveway. Oh no. Mom!

  Chris grabbed the trash bag and tossed it through the open window and then bolted into the kitchen, where he shoved the bottles under the sink and swiped the counter with the sponge and yanked open the good-china drawer and shoved in the bottle caps and then slammed it shut and leaned against the fridge. When Mom walked in, his arms were crossed over his chest, and he was whistling.

  “How’d it go, baby?” she asked.

  “Eh. Typical sick day. Totally boring.” He shrugged and then shuffled off to his room. Home free.

  Other methods for increasing the pace include using more dialogue (see Chapter 10) and skipping over mundane activities like putting on one’s socks and then one’s shoes and then tying those shoes before going out the door. Just walk out the door!

  Slowing the pace

  Although you want to keep your story moving forward, it needn’t always zoom at Mach 10 — not even in action-driven novels. A nonstop rush is hard to write and utterly exhausting to read. Sometimes you need to slow things down to give readers a break from the intensity.

  To slow the pacing, you can take your time with the rhythm of your sentences and transition into the next moment of action. Or you can pause on a detail, perhaps a prop, as in this example:

  When he got attacked that day in the subway, he hadn’t expected the old man to be carrying a hunting knife. Old men carried canes, he knew that much, or umbrellas, to block out the sun on hot days. They carried newspapers, too, usually tucked under their arms and slightly smudged from their fingers. And hats, always they had hats. But knives? Never. Old men never carried knives. It was just wrong.

  Just when your pace has settled into its breather, come in hard and fast with something new and even more intense. A well-paced story doesn’t let story breathers turn into naptime.

  Other methods for slowing the pace include interrupting the action with a flashback (see “Flashbacks” later in the chapter) and adding more and longer narrative blocks, being careful not to lapse into long descriptions or summaries that fall under the heading of Telling Instead of Showing. After all, even your pauses should be dynamic in their own right. You can also pause the grander action to spend time on a small detail, such as the loving washing of a young sibling’s hair or the meticulous pruning of a prized plant.

  Creating tension

  Pacing is tied to tension, that feeling of absolutely having to know what happens on the next page. The more tension your story has, the stronger its pacing will be and the harder it’ll be to put down. Tension isn’t in the actions so much as in the fear of the consequences, so tension can be just as high in character-driven stories as plot-driven ones.

  Author Kathi Appelt talks tension: Raise the stakes, honey!

  I have been a writer my whole life, from writing on walls as a toddler to writing professionally as an adult. In that lifelong career, I have written articles, picture books, nonfiction, poetry, essays, short stories, a memoir, and even a song or two. But for years and years, the novel was a form that absolutely eluded me.

  For a long time, I told myself that I didn’t need to write a novel. After all, I had plenty of published work to stand on, and I had plenty of ideas for new works. But I was kidding myself, because in my heart of hearts, it was a novel that I wanted to write. But I couldn’t crack the form. I had drawer after drawer, boxes stacked upon boxes of half-finished novels. It seemed like I could create wonderful characters, interesting landscapes, and great, colorful details, but my characters, despite their goals, just didn’t seem to make much progress. I’d get about halfway through and then my story would lose steam and whimper into oblivion.

  Turns out the essential element missing from my work was tension. In order for a reader to care about your story, the stakes have to be raised. You can have a character overcome incredible odds and obstacles, but if there’s nothing at stake, then there’s no reason to pull for that character.

  Consider this example. Say we have a great guy named Phillip who is a cross-country racer and whose goal is to win the regional track meet. We’ll put Phillip at the starting line and pull the trigger on the starting pistol. Kapow! Off he goes. If we use a basic plot, with three obstacles of increasing difficulty, we can first have Phillip develop an annoying blister on his heel. But because Phillip is tough, he runs through the pain. Next, it starts to snow. Now Phillip is having trouble seeing the track because of the snow, and his blister is getting worse, so the odds against his winning are increasing. Finally, he stumbles and turns his ankle. The entire pack is well ahead of him, and Phillip is trailing badly.

  I’ll leave it there. Whether Phillip wins doesn’t really matter. But what’s missing from this story is the why of it. Why is it so important that Phillip win this race? You see, there’s nothing wrong with this plot, nothing wrong with the obstacles, nothing wrong with the character. But we have no idea what the stakes are and why it matters so much to Phillip to win that race. Is a colleg
e scholarship at stake? Is he racing to prove something to his family, something about honor, about perseverance, about stamina? Is he racing to win enough money to buy medicine for his little daughter? What will be irrevocably lost if he doesn’t win? Why is it so important to Phillip?

  And that’s the key word — important. The stakes have to be so important to the main character that if he doesn’t achieve, acquire, or overcome his goal, we the reader will care. If not, then it’s just a race.

  Winning or losing doesn’t matter unless the stakes are high. Raise ’em, honey. Otherwise, nobody will care.

  Kathi Appelt is a National Book Award finalist for her middle-grade novel The Underneath and the author of more than 20 award-winning books for kids and teens. She serves on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Children’s Writing program. Check out her website at www.kathiappelt.com.

  Here are three ways to increase tension:

  Increase the pressure. You create tension in a story by making the consequences of failure too unbearable for your protagonist to even contemplate. Your main character must have something very important and intensely personal at stake. When you have a lot to lose, the fear of losing trumps the fear of not getting what you want.

  Force the issue. Tension also comes from the nature of your conflict. Your character battles internal conflict as the plot pushes him out of his comfort zone. He battles external conflict as people or circumstances get between him and his goal. Don’t be nice to your characters; make the obstacles bigger. Put the characters through their paces and make them earn their goal. Exploit their fears, their angst, and their dreams.

  Strain the circumstances. Regardless of genre and theme, young adult fiction is a matter of circumstances. For serious tension, put normal kids in extreme or abnormal circumstances and see how they react and how others react to them. Or put extreme or abnormal kids in normal circumstances. Teens love to see normal juxtaposed with abnormal as they deal with their dueling desires to both fit in and stand out. From discomfort comes tension.