Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  A narrative beat (see Chapter 10) is that bit of narrative material that separates two lines of dialogue. More than just “he said/she said,” a narrative beat gives readers a breather in an exchange of dialogue. You can sprinkle the setting into a beat as action. In the following example, the beats are the parts not enclosed in quotation marks:

  “I can’t do this!” I flung my math book at the trash can but missed and dented the wall. Great. Now I’d have to fix that, too. Stupid metal mobile homes. “I quit!”

  “Quit what, school?”

  “Yeah, school. I quit!”

  Dad shrugged. “Okay. Pass the salt.”

  Karen Cushman’s Newbery Medal–winning middle grade novel The Midwife’s Apprentice demonstrates the power of sprinkling in its opening chapter, which is just four and a half pages long. That chapter opens with a short passage about an orphaned girl who crawls into a rotting, “moiling” dung heap for warmth. That chapter ends with that same warm dung heap. In between, sprinkled references to the heap’s foul safety transform this setting detail from sewage to sanctuary, helping readers see past the girl’s filth to her savvy survival skills. The character is established via the setting, without any disruption to Cushman’s direct narrative style. And frankly, a dung heap off the beaten path is a far more striking way to open a story about a homeless girl than simply having her begging in the streets. The readers, the character, and the story all win because of Cushman’s setting choice.

  Stacking the sensory details

  A concise way to work in setting is to stack sensory details upon each other. That way, you can tag several senses at once, quickly and effectively, without disrupting a youthful, direct sentence structure. This isn’t a matter of describing several details outright, one after another, but rather of using props and actions that imply multiple sensations simultaneously.

  Linda Urban’s A Crooked Kind of Perfect uses direct sentences in a first-person narrative of a 10-year-old girl. The story is told in mostly action and dialogue, and sometimes her chapters are just a few sentences long. The text is concise, with little room for flowery setting material. Yet Urban still works in several senses by stacking the references upon each other, as in this sentence: “Miss Person puts her glass of ginger ale to her forehead, like she’s trying to soothe a headache.” Readers feel the pain of the woman’s head and the coolness of the glass — two senses in one shot, without a lot of hoo-ha. That’s effective stacking.

  Keeping it young

  When possible, wield your setting in a way that conveys youthfulness, even if you’re writing in a formal, more traditional style. Do this by

  Having young characters handle props in youthful ways, such as touching what they shouldn’t

  Behaving inappropriately for the location, as in playing hide-and-seek in a church

  Reacting to sensory stimuli in immature ways, such as bouncing around and rubbing furiously at goose bumps while waiting in the cold

  There’s often irreverence, lack of consideration, lack of self-consciousness, or plain unbridled curiosity in the way young characters interact with the environment around them. With maturity comes more measured behavior.

  Phillip Pullman employs youthful prop manipulation in the opening paragraphs of The Golden Compass. There, 11-year-old Lyra moves around the scholars’ retiring room examining a massive table set with meticulously polished place settings. Whereas an adult might tuck her hands behind her back so as not to break or in some other way disrespect anything, young Lyra reaches forward and flicks a wine goblet to make it ring. With that one brief, child-like gesture, readers see that this girl is not going to be intimidated by grown-ups and their airs. She is practical and curious and a girl of action; when she wants to know something, she acts to find out. This is a great quality for a budding heroine, and it’s conveyed by giving the setting and prop an active twist of youth.

  Giving the setting a job

  Some writers treat setting as a character, with moods and tasks to accomplish and failings and, in some sense, a will. This is a great way to get teen readers to connect with the setting, as if it’s another member of the cast.

  In Ysabeau S. Wilce’s fantasy Flora Segunda, Flora’s house is a full-fledged active entity, with 11,000 rooms that shift location at random, although it stops short of having a conscious will. When she steps through a doorway or into the elevator, Flora emerges wherever the house puts her. Non-fantasy stories may not be able to go that far, but they can sure take a similar path. In my novel Honk If You Hate Me, the town seems to rest above a mysterious heat source, in effect sizzling like a hamburger patty on a grill, and the characters act accordingly. When the protagonist accomplishes her goal, the town stops simmering. In Louis Sachar’s Holes, the desolate wasteland in which the juvenile delinquents are sentenced to dig is not personified, but it still has a very definite job: to punish the boys.

  Even if you want to stay far away from personification, consider giving your setting a job in your story. Make it act up in a specific way that forces your protagonist to respond as if to a member of the cast, as if he feels the setting is actively out to manipulate the situation. Because it is! With you pulling its strings, of course.

  Now, although you should avoid stopping for long passages of description, that doesn’t mean you should never stop for description. There will always be exceptions to writing rules, because writers are always creating stories that break molds, and setting sometimes calls for its own time in the spotlight. Kathi Appelt’s National Book Award Finalist The Underneath is one of those mold-breakers. Poetic and flourishing, that novel spends a huge amount of time on setting. But even then, Appelt doesn’t just put on the brakes for big setting splashes. Her passages show the setting in action: ancient trees imprison an immortal snake within their roots, the river keeps cat siblings apart, and the raised porch that creates “the Underneath” space hides the animals, keeping them safe as if a force field separates them from the evil beyond the hidden space. In this novel, the descriptive passages present the setting elements as characters with specific jobs.

  Freshening up common settings

  Teens spend the bulk of their waking time at school or in their rooms-cum-sanctuaries, so YA fiction writers inevitably set scenes in one or both locations. There’s a certain shortcut in that maneuver, because all teen readers will be familiar with those settings. Problem is, familiarity easily translates into b-o-o-ring. There are other go-to settings in YA, such as the coffee shop or the library or the kitchen.

  Challenge yourself to choose less-expected locations or to freshen up the common ones, giving them a spin or adding details that make them exceptional and interesting. Make them earn their place in your book. Here are three ways to go about freshening:

  Do the unexpected. Make a teen’s room sterile and spotless instead of messy, which would reveal qualities about the character. Or give it unexpected furniture, such as blow-up chairs. Focus on unlikely details in your common locations, like an unusual picture in a living room or a banana placed front-and-center on a desk during a class whose teacher requires spotless desks (true story, by the way, from my college days; just wish I’d been brave enough to use a pineapple).

  If you have a car, make it smell like, say, strawberries, or something else out of the ordinary. Or inflict a crack across the floorboard of the car, right behind the front seats, where the backseat passengers’ feet will rest. (That’s another true story — me riding in a car with a crack across its middle. I was in junior high, getting a lift home from a softball game with my friend and her mom. I could see the road passing underneath my feet! I imagined the crack splitting wide, dropping me onto the freeway as the theme from Rocky blared on the radio, staticky but still triumphant. My friend and her mom acted for all the world as if the crack didn’t exist.) Young readers will take note of unexpected setting details — especially ones that play off
each other like the Rocky theme and that gaping maw at my feet — and they’ll remember.

  Sometimes the most memorable setting details come from your own experiences. Think about a room or other location from your childhood that still gives you a warm fuzzy when you recall it. What made it so exceptional? Consider the furniture in the room, the smells and textures, the noises you could (or notably could not) hear in there. Now think of a place that made you uncomfortable and that gives you the willies even now. What details prevented you from feeling at ease? Develop the habit of looking for out-of-the ordinary items in locations that are particularly meaningful to you and consider working them into your stories. The details that stick with you are likely to make an impression on your characters and your readers, too.

  Act against stereotype. You can freshen up common YA settings by going against location stereotypes. A library where people talk and shout, for example, can make a rule-following character uncomfortable. Or how about a bedroom that the character’s mom decorated in, say, old lady wicker furniture or something else very non-teen-friendly, robbing it of its sanctuary status? You can do the same with social context and time, finding ways to defy stereotypes about them. Settings that defy stereotypes help keep your story dynamic for young readers.

  Use running prop gags. Have some long-term fun with setting details and props, such as a stereo dial that keeps falling off, or neighbor kids who are always at their window across the alley from the protagonist’s bedroom, or an oddly deep well on a pioneer farm that requires the characters to crank and crank and crank and crank the handle to lift up the water bucket. The gag doesn’t have to be funny, just distracting enough to get your characters’ attention. Young readers will love watching how the gag perturbs your characters — or doesn’t. Sometimes no response is just as useful as an extreme one.

  The most effective prop gags are those that reveal something about your characters or their situations, thus earning their places in the story. Throwing something in purely for laughs can score some giggles, but generally a novel filled with things that don’t further the story feel scattered or random.

  Freshening up common YA settings is fairly easy in quirky novels. In my novel Big Mouth, I had the school be sponsored by a ketchup company that insisted that the entire campus — walls, lunch tables, and all — be painted red. This affected the plot, setting up a student rebellion called the Mustard Revolution. Edward Bloor gives school a similar tweak in his novel Story Time. He turns the school into a test-taking lab, with characters attached to treadmills and drinking brain-enhancing smoothies to prep them for standardized tests. But historical novels and contemporary dramas can use these tricks, too. These techniques work for all genres of teen and tween fiction, and they do so in a manner that can fit even the most spare and direct narrative style.

  Chapter 9

  Crafting a Narrative Voice Teens Will Listen To . . . and Love

  In This Chapter

  Injecting personality into your writing

  Getting off your soapbox and into teens’ heads

  Synchronizing your language with your audience’s maturity level

  Showing instead of telling in your narrative

  Narrative voice is a defining feature of young adult fiction. The perfect YA voice doesn’t just project a distinct personality; it also instantly connects with an intensely opinionated group of humans who exist in a constant state of angst thanks to raging hormones and the strain of navigating social minefields on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond basis. Phew! The mere thought of attempting such a connection may send shivers down the spines of parents of teens, but it needn’t give you the willies.

  Connecting with teen readers is actually quite easy when you know the tricks of the trade. That’s what this chapter is for. Here, you discover how to create a distinct, teen-friendly voice by mixing and matching the elements that make up narrative voice — point of view, word choice, and how you string those words together — all with a twist of teen psychology.

  I’m Not Talking Dialogue Here: The True Meaning of Narrative Voice

  The term voice can be misleading thanks to its knee-jerk association with dialogue. But narrative voice isn’t dialogue. Dialogue is what your characters say, and I’ve set aside Chapter 10 for that. Narrative voice is what the narrator says. Most importantly, narrative voice is how that narrator says what he says.

  Author Jane Yolen: The distinct voice

  Editors and writing teachers always talk about writers finding their voice, as if it is lost somewhere. But they are talking about three things when they say this: the author’s voice, a character’s voice, and the narrative voice.

  The author’s voice is about the chosen words, how we report the various senses, how the world we have invented becomes real. The character’s voice should be different enough so that even without a tag (George said, Mary shouted) the reader knows who has spoken. And the narrative voice . . . well, that’s how the story rolls out.

  But in each case, what makes that voice distinctive is word choice, the lyrical line, the emphatic beat, the rhythm and rollick of the sentences.

  Here are three tries at the same story, each done with a distinctive voice:

  Example 1

  Once upon a time, in a New England village, there were three men who loved the same woman. One was a carpenter whose outside was as hard as bark, though inside he was soft as the pith of a tree. One was a baker whose mind and heart were pliable as dough. And the third was the minister whose soul was open to God and closed to man.

  Example 2

  The village of Seven Oaks had a single road running through its heart. Houses leaned over the road like gossips at the fire. Most of the gossip concerned the three men who loved Maggie Mars: the carpenter, the baker, and the minster. No one in Seven Oaks knew who had the inside track. Not even Mistress Mars.

  Example 3

  Maggie Mars leaned over the bowl in which an apple peel floated, waiting till the peel settled to the bottom.

  “Peel away the future’s mask.

  “Show me the name of my true love at last.”

  She watched as the peel curled into the letter O.

  Not Nick Tree, the carpenter, then. Nor the baker, Peter Breed. Nor even Lemuel Pearl, the minister. She tossed the water out the door and chewed on the peel, wondering who might be her true love. The only man in the village whose name began with an O was Otis, the pigkeeper. She shuddered. Surely not.

  Read them aloud and you will immediately hear the differences. One is not better than the other, but each brings the reader to a different and distinct place. That’s the power of voice.

  Jane Yolen has been called the Hans Christian Andersen of America and the Aesop of the 20th Century. She is the author of more than 300 books for young readers and adults, including fantasy and science fiction novels, historical novels, poetry, and children’s books. Her books and stories have won the Caldecott Medal, two Nebula Awards, two Christopher Medals, the World Fantasy Award, three Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, the Golden Kite Award, the Jewish Book Award, the World Fantasy Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Award, among many others. Visit www.janeyolen.com.

  The narrator is the entity telling the story. That entity can be all-knowing and unnamed — called an omniscient narrator — or it can be a character in the story, called the point of view character because the story is told from his or her point of view.

  In this section, I explain the importance of narrative voice and then reveal the elements that go into creating an engaging narrative voice.

  Getting a feel for narrative voice

  You often don’t know people’s personalities until they open their mouths and say something. At that point, you can judge their word choice and the way they deliver those words. Perhaps they use words incorrectly, suggesting a
lack of education or a low socioeconomic background. Maybe their delivery is overly earnest and loud, with more guffaws than necessary, making you feel like they want not just your attention but the whole darn party’s. They could be run-on talkers, or spare talkers, or those startling people who somehow manage to talk in exclamation points! Or perhaps what they say and how they say it reveals imminent mental breakdown.

  Narrative voice in fiction works in the same fashion. You may make some guesses about a story based on its cover, sure, but to really know a story’s personality, you must open the book and judge what the narrative says and how it says it. Here are examples of two very different but distinct teen-friendly voices:

  Example 1

  We were so bored, it wasn’t even funny. I was all, “Guys, come on, let’s go do something already,” but they just kept looking at me like, “Yeah, right,” as if I was some, like, I don’t know, some kind of freak or something.

  Example 2

  Dallin eased open the misshapen door, a sliver of moonlight slicing the darkness beyond it. Breathing. A light rustle. The peace of sleep. He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the coarse wood. He could easily slip in. He could leave the rebellion behind, lock it out for good this time and creep back to his pallet like nothing had ever happened. His brothers wouldn’t question it, finding him there in the morning, nor would his mother. Family. Safety. The temptation was strong.

  Seeing what goes into narrative voice

  Several elements come into play as you create your YA narrative voice, and every author mixes and matches them differently. Here they are:

  Point of view: Obviously, a 16-year-old girl would narrate her story differently than a 13-year-old boy would. Whether you choose first person, third person, or omniscient, your point of view influences every other aspect of your narrative voice.