How old is "Too Old" in a Young Adult Novel?

[Jo Zebedee]

It just occurs to me that if you're writing a series that might affect things. Does your character get older for instance. My trilogy has the first 35000 words that could be Young adult. Then I get a little excited and things happen (story of my writing life that) and the characters grow up and it's not conceivably ya at all anymore...

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Have more young characters and tell it from their perspective.
Jo in the Chalet School stories grows up and we then still meet her from POV of newer students. Chalet School covers nearly 45 years of "real time".
Jo in Little Women grows up and then we have the story of the the Little Men.
(There are those that suggest Elinor M Brent Dyer copied some of Lousia M Alcott's characters a little ... Not to mention some of the events! But then she did about 62 books and many short stories 1925 to 1969 and the setting was approximately "real time". Enid Blyton only did one school career of St Clare's and Mallory Towers, as did Anne Digby with Trebizon series. Angela Brazil, almost the inventor, simply didn't do series. Loads of them, but all different characters. P.G. Wodehouse did a few only, 1905 ish, then went on to write more "grown up" Blandings, Psmith (who starts in a School story), Jeeves &Wooster etc. ). OTH Enid Bylton's Famous Five have an infeasible number of holidays and don't age. The Hardy Boys started just before 1930s I think... written by many authors for Stratemeyer Syndicate. About 1950s they seemed to "reboot". But they never get much older. I think they are still being produced.

I think if the stories are attractive to target market, characters can age, the readers do. But they need to start not exactly adult, and for a series that is realistic time passing, the Elinor M Brent-Dyer tactic of new characters and keeping the "favourite" ones in the background (eventually as teachers, parents, grandparents!) seemed to work well for her. The books have almost no plots compared to Brazil, but the continuity of the series (more of the same?) and Characters made them popular. Certainly republished successfully in 1980s. The much better Angela Brazil books are hardly known today (though many of them are on Gutenberg). Anne Digby & Elinor M Brent-Dyer both fetching good SH prices on eBay and Amazon. There are 11 Drina books (maybe not as well known as Noel Stretfeld's "Shoe book"), she starts very young and it ends when she is adult, I think (I am missing the last two!) About 1957 to 1966, republished late 1980s and early 1990s (Jean Estoril is pen name). Definitely Fantasy! I have a bunch of Lorna Hill Sadler's Wells books (missing #5) up to #11, I haven't read them yet. Of course YA didn't exist in the past. Books either sold as "Children's" or Adult.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

characters grow up and it's not conceivably ya

But if THEY get excited then there NEW kids ...

 

[Jo Zebedee]

But if THEY get excited then there NEW kids ...

I have new kids in it, but the themes are those for adults because of the way the story went. I'll not go into here, but there's no doubt about it.

Of course, a YA series can be extended beyond the first characters growing old - I'm just pointing out that in series this isn't always the way and if the characters grow out of YA themes in later books it may not be useful to market the first as YA.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

It may not be so much a matter of whether a particular story should not be considered YA, as whether there is any particular reason why it should be. Young adult readers, the ones who read a lot of books, also read many books that are written for adults. That's when they are in the mood to read about more adult themes. But when they read about characters close to them in age, I think they are generally drawn to certain themes that are particularly relevant to them at that stage in their lives. They want to see how those young protagonists handle challenges that in some ways reflect their own. Those are the books that have the widest appeal for young adult readers, and therefore books that do well if marketed as YA. There is really nothing to be gained by trying to squeeze something that doesn't have that kind of appeal into that category.

A book doesn't have to follow some set of guidelines to the letter, it can vary here and there -- you can say, "This YA book does this" and "That YA book does that" -- but it's the sum of the parts that makes it YA or not. By the details you are providing Robert, it doesn't seem to add up to YA.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

Across the Nightingale Floor was YA when it first came out and then the characters grew up through the series. There is a precedent.

 

[tinkerdan]

I Come to bring controversy

While the reading audience for YA seems to be quite flexible. The characters in the story seem to want to target a more specific range.

Though socially we seem to put YA in the age range of 18 to 40 for a rating for books it might be more between 15 or 16 to 21 or 22 with characters that are somewhere within that age group. And I suspect that the starting age might creep down as far as 12 or 13

I say this because some people seem to put 8-12 as MG leaving 13-18 as YA as the target audiences.


Socially::
one definition of YA is

young adult
A young adult, according to Erik Erikson's stages of human development, is generally a person in the age range of 20 to 40, whereas an adolescent is a person aging from 13 to 19, although definitions and opinions vary. The young adult stage in human development precedes middle adulthood.

While another Is

We divided young adults into four groups:
1. 18-23 years of age:college/career
2. 24-35 years of age:single
3. 24-35 years of age:married without children
4. 24-35 years of age:married with children

That would make YA a range from 18 to 40 which might solve the problem.

And then for purpose of the author a definition of content from goodreads.

Young-adult fiction (often abbreviated as YA) is fiction written for, published for, or marketed to adolescents and young adults, roughly ages 13 to 21.

Young-adult fiction, whether in the form of novels or short stories, has distinct attributes that distinguish it from the other age categories of fiction. The vast majority of YA stories portray an adolescent as the protagonist, rather than an adult or a child. The subject matter and story lines are typically consistent with the age and experience of the main character, but beyond that YA stories span the entire spectrum of fiction genres. The settings of YA stories are limited only by the imagination and skill of the author.

Themes in YA stories often focus on the challenges of youth, so much so that the entire age category is sometimes referred to as problem novels or coming of age novel. Writing styles of YA stories range widely, from the richness of literary style to the clarity and speed of the unobtrusive. Despite its unique characteristics, YA shares the fundamental elements of fiction with other stories: character, plot, setting, theme, and style.

 

[Robert E. Parkin]

In my experience, the more recent works published don't have main protagonists pushing 40. I would be quite interested to see a work these days that could get YA readers to follow such a character. As mentioned before, YA readers tend to enjoy or even prefer without noticing reading about characters that are close to their age, and are dealing with issues that they may have in their lives. All these stories are fiction, and some go beyond the world we know and deal with advanced worlds, demons, angels, etc where other stories focus on a more "slice of life" story. I think saying YA can range from 18-40 is stretching it quite a bit. True they can "act" the part I suppose but I don't see where it would be a sound idea to go with. Maybe its just me.

Love how this topic is generating great conversation. ^^

 

[Jo Zebedee]

YA book ranges do not target 40 year olds. Whether there are definitions of old young adults, they're not the terms used in the publishing industry. (Which doesn't mean adults don't read YA just that they're not the primary target market.) if you sub a book for eg 30 year olds to a Young adult agent you will not get it anymore than a cursory look. A social definition is different from a publisher.

MG is c. 8-12 years
YA is c 12 years up to about 18 (depends if you want to consider New Adult, if not this might extend up to 20)
New adult c 18-22 but it's not just about age grouping but also theme and, I'm afraid, sex often features.

 

[Robert E. Parkin]

If a YA novel doesn't have sex in it, does that mean a publisher won't consider it? For me there is catering to the audience to some effect, but then there is just selling out I feel. Sex in books walks a very fine line in my opinion and often times I find it utterly useless in just about every story I see it in, simply put their for the sake of m***********, and brings nothing worth noting to the plot. I would be hard pressed to read any book where sex is portrayed in the genre of YA and actually be a key aspect to the actual plot/conflict. In just about every case, it can be written out. I guess this is one of my biggest struggles with YA as I can't stand seeing it in books.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Not at all. Like I say, I have a YA book with no sex in it, and I'm agented for it. Many,many YA books don't have sex in them. On the other hand,teenagers do think about sex so to consciously avoid it if you're writing a teen pov is also challenging! (So my two male protagonists are faced with a sexy female lawyer - you can imagine the comments they make to each other....)

But a New Adult book, for a slightly older age range, often has sex in it. (Not always, but it's more prevalent.)

 

[tinkerdan]

I think that there is still enough flexibility in definition that one might have to research respective publishers to establish where their markers are.

One early writer to recognize young adults as a distinct group was Sarah Trimmer, who, in 1802, described "young adulthood" as lasting from ages 14 to 21

More from Wikipedia

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) of the American Library Association (ALA) defines a young adult as someone between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Authors and readers of young adult (YA) novels often define the genre as literature as traditionally written for ages ranging from sixteen years up to the age of twenty-five, while Teen Fiction is written for the ages of ten to fifteen. The terms young-adult novel, juvenile novel, young-adult book, etc. refer to the works in the YA category.

The subject matter and story lines of YA literature are typically consistent with the age and experience of the main character, but YA literature spans the spectrum of fiction genres. YA stories that focus on the specific challenges of youth are sometimes referred to as problem novels or coming-of-age novels

New-adult fiction (also known as post-adolescent literature) is a recent genre of fiction aimed towards post-adolescents and young-adults ages 18 to 30. The term is believed to have been first coined by St. Martin's Press in 2009. The genre tends to focus on issues prevalent in the young adult genre as well as focusing on issues experienced by individuals between the area of childhood and adulthood, such as leaving home for university and getting a job

There is somewhere[I have yet to re-find the reference]where one group used the age group 13-30 for their teen to young adult target.[I wish I could find it just for a reference to when it was mentioned because a lot of current YA thought has developed since 2009.]

In the 1950s, shortly before the advent of modern young-adult publishing surrounding the teen romance market, two influential novels drew the attention of adolescent readers: The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Lord of the Flies (1954). Unlike later fiction classified as YA, these novels were written with an adult audience in mind and were not initially marketed to adolescents.

The modern classification of young-adult fiction originated during the 1950s and 1960s, especially after the publication of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967). The novel featured a truer, darker side of adolescent life that was not often represented in works of fiction of the time. Written during high school and published when Hinton was only 17, The Outsiders also lacked the nostalgic tone common in books about adolescents written by adults. The Outsiders remains one of the best-selling young-adult novels of all time, and S.E. Hinton is often considered to be one of the founders of the genre.

Young Adult Literature uses a wide array of themes in order to appeal to a wide variety of adolescent readers. Some of these themes include: identity, sexuality, science fiction, depression, suicide, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, familial struggles, bullying, and numerous others. Some issues discussed in Young Adult Literature include: friendship, love, race, money, divorce, relationships within families.--In a paper written by April Dawn Wells, she discovers seventeen common traits of young adult novels. These include: "friendship, getting into trouble, interest in the opposite sex, money, divorce, single parents, remarriage, problems with parents, grandparents, younger siblings, concern over grades/school, popularity, puberty, race, death, neighborhood, and job/working".

If you look back far enough there are some big shoes to fill. But as with everything, with great power comes greater responsibility.

What I mean by that is that in some ways sex being presented to teens and up might look to some as though it's gratuitous while it in fact is representative of one of the focus of that age group. There might be a sliding scale on how much you want to place in the novel but it should be balanced with some real thought about consequences that go along with experimentation if the author is going to delve into that area of exploitation. The same holds true of Drug and alcohol abuse and bullying, depression and suicide. Even identity. These things need a relevant context with demonstrated consequences rather than to be thrown into the story because they are YA hot-buttons.

I have seen these hot-buttons pushed for no good reason and being left with mostly ambiguity and no clear definable consequences and no sense of a moral compass to anchor the reader and that seems more Exploitation than anything else. So what you can do because the publishers might allow might not always line up with what you should do for your own conscience and sense of responsibility as an author.

 

[Robert E. Parkin]

I couldn't agree more in what you said regarding "Hot Buttons". That is exactly how I feel. So many books I read make it seem like it is just thrown in for the sake of the "sex sells" or "sell out" factors that make the element have little to no appeal or effect to what is going on in the story. I wish those you did use such elements such as sex would actually take the time to make it serve as a fundamental point in the work. The aspect of bullying, drugs, etc can be used to great effect in that regard, sex however, I would still be shocked if it actually served as an anchor in the story.

 

[Hex]

Do you encounter many examples of sex in YA? Especially in sff I've encountered it as implied rather than explicit -- e.g. there's a sex scene in Holly Black's Curseworkers but it's not remotely explicit; there's a more explicit one in Valiant, but again, I don't think it's there to push a button (it's a cold and nasty scene, not remotely titillating). So far in Cassandra Clare, it's just kissing; I think I read a Sarah Rees Brennan where someone put her hand under a boy's t-shirt... I think I may have encountered more in contemporary YA, which I don't read as much, but again, nothing more than enough information to tell you what's happening.

There's a lot of kissing in the YA I read (though I can't remember any in the YA Mouse listed above, which was probably one of the reasons they were in my head as books for younger children).

Clearly I'm missing out...

 

[HareBrain]

There's a lot of kissing in the YA I read (though I can't remember any in the YA Mouse listed above, which was probably one of the reasons they were in my head as books for younger children).

A lot more than kissing is implied in His Dark Materials (though it's so implied, I missed it and had to have it pointed out).

 

[Robert E. Parkin]

True, a lot of it is implied. I don't read enough or as much as I used to, so perhaps my judgment is unwarranted as I haven't taken a look at some of the newest YA works that have been published within the last 3-9 months. Personally, I'm not against the idea of "implied sex" but its really the full disclosed "sex scene" written out for the reader that I find has no place in YA. Upon doing some quick fact checking, not many YA do write it out, but I'm against them ever doing so. That stuff is saved for erotica.

 

[Mouse]

There's a sex scene in Trudi Canavan's um... I think they're the Black Magician books.

 

[SloppyJoe]

147

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Trudi Canavan's um... I think they're the Black Magician books

I'd not have thought those were YA though. Deffo not Harry Potter level wizardry. Also Characters mainly adult.
Certainly there are jarring scenes in her books I didn't expect. But is it the Black Magician Trilogy (I have all 3) or the Traitor Spy Trilogy (Only have 1 &2)?

 

[Ray McCarthy]

implied in His Dark Materials

I gave up 1/3rd through 1st Philip Pullman and resolved to read no more of his propaganda.