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

[Hex]

I don't know. I think there is arguably a place for a proper description of sex in YA literature. It's not like sex is -- or should be -- a complete mystery to most teenagers. You'd hope, since there's a lot of it about for them to see. A nice clear description might be quite useful. I just haven't read anything with it. Oh, unless Twilight was YA, and I wouldn't like my kids to read about that sex and assume it was normal. Urgh.

There's sex in His Dark Materials? Cool. Where?!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I think it's more implicit, sadly, Hex.

Forever by Judy Blume uses a sexual relationship well. Disappointing lack of aliens or anything vaguely genre, though. I always think every story could do with a good alien side-arc. But not neccessarily in the sex-element of the story.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

My final thoughts, not just on Sex, but Real Life and Adult Themes in YA, which really for books means Children and Teenagers.
http://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/549775/page-2#post-1867797
In fact though many things portrayed in Fiction, and esp. YA Fiction are done by teenagers, they are not always either normal, sensible or acceptable. It's IMO wrong if a book does create the impression that <insert behaviour here> is normal, sensible or acceptable when actually the reverse is the case.

Children and Teenagers are NOT Young Adults today, even though they probably were 400 years ago. Freedom of Action without any sense of responsibility is a modern destructive myth.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

every story could do with a good alien side-arc. But not neccessarily in the sex-element of the story

Absolutely
Besides with "proper" Aliens, neither side may be entirely clear on the actual sex (if any) of the other, and either sides conversational and action taboos (whether they actually make sense or not in reality).

 

[Hex]

I dunno. I just know that Forever (I think) did the rounds at school (and later, some Jilly Coopers). I don't think it warped anyone or persuaded them to go out and have sex, but I think it educated people.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I don't know either. I only have suspicions. I'm not a "Trick Cyclist" following behaviour of large numbers various carefully chosen kids from age 7 to 18 in various cultures. But disparity of teen pregnancies vs time period and developed country certainly suggests something is wrong somewhere. Certainly education here concentrates too much on facts and not enough on how to think, consequences of behaviour and also there is too much about "freedom of expression" without a corresponding understanding of inter-personal, family, social and civic responsibilities.
It's perhaps unfortunate and encourages selfishness, the phrase in the US Constitution about "Pursuit of Happiness", even if such a thing is correct as a constitutional right, the Founding Fathers certainly didn't mean a "right to happiness at the expense of everyone else", which is the attitude that seems to be promoted since maybe 1960s.

On general crime and violence one oddity is that it seems unconnected to violent films and computer games but correlates to Lead in the environment, mostly due to petrol. No causation has been proved, other than of course the lead dose would have been higher in inner cities and lead (and many heavy metals, e.g. mercury) does have bad cognitive effects. It seems unconnected to policing or prison policies.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Anyway, my conclusions are (from READING, also what my children read and now what my Grandchildren read)
1) There is no hard rule about age of characters, if the book is otherwise attractive to target audience.
2) YA in publishing is a euphemism for Teenagers.
3) The readers of YA might be as young as 8 and often younger than teenagers. My youngest simply skipped all the younger books and read the same as the eldest kids. Maybe when he is 25 to 30, he will be old enough to read the ones he skipped! My seven year old grandchild read all the Enid Blyton older books when he was five and six. He'll probably exhaust pre-teen stuff in a few months time. I have the more grown up books on the higher shelves in my library.
Two of my 2 year old Grandchildren haven't quite figured reading yet. One knows a few English and German words.
4) In households where the adults read LOTS the children are reading before they start school. In larger families were they all read, the younger ones are even more rapid and advance in reading age to crazy extent. They usually don't bother asking the parents what word means.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

But the whole point of Forever was to make the reader think about consequeces. The good ya books - the Outsiders comes to mind, too - should do that.

 

[tinkerdan]

After following the link to the link to the article I was under the impression that they were saying that recently the number of teen pregnancies were on the decline from previous and we must be doing something right.[even though the numbers are still high]

My final thoughts, not just on Sex, but Real Life and Adult Themes in YA, which really for books means Children and Teenagers.
http://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/549775/page-2#post-1867797
In fact though many things portrayed in Fiction, and esp. YA Fiction are done by teenagers, they are not always either normal, sensible or acceptable. It's IMO wrong if a book does create the impression that <insert behaviour here> is normal, sensible or acceptable when actually the reverse is the case.

Children and Teenagers are NOT Young Adults today, even though they probably were 400 years ago. Freedom of Action without any sense of responsibility is a modern destructive myth.

So maybe the YA books are helping.
Or not[at this point in my life I have way too much lead in me to think straight.]

 

[Ray McCarthy]

"YA books" covers a myriad of things! Also they are not generally written nowadays as "improvement manuals" but as entertainment (even in ages when they were, the purely entertaining texts were more popular and some Victorian Authors appear to only pay lipservice to "acceptable" themes / content to get published).

I think indeed the main aim is to tell a story, entertain, not to "preach" or push a particular "world view", I'd hope that teenagers today would see through that.

 

[Robert E. Parkin]

I think most do see through such things. YA is a medium that often times has a nice way of telling a good "coming of age" tale. It is only frustrating to me when a YA series grows in popularity and readers start to look to the protagonists as "role models", when those characters are nothing to look up to. I'm sure the vast majority see through the fiction, but sometimes I worry. Regardless, while YA aims to tell a story and entertain readers, there is no harm in making them flex their gray matter. Its wonderful that the younger generation is interested in reading, but at the same time, they should balance their diet hopefully with some healthy greens in their YA along with the sweet candy.

 

[Hex]

There's a lot -- I think -- in YA more worrying than mentions of sex (which, as above, aren't explicit, mostly, and almost always have consequences). There's the focus on attractive bad boys (in some cases, boys who are trying to kill you), for example, which is more likely to be damaging. However, kids are pretty smart and I don't think it's my responsibility, or any other YA writer's, to tell them what to do or say or think. The older ones will be reading GRRM, and equivalent, after all.

 

[Robert E. Parkin]

As writers in general, our only responsibility is to tell a compelling and entertaining narrative. As for YA, it is best not to preach, but at the same time it is very important for us to engage our readers and get them thinking. We are not teachers, but I like to think that when someone reads a story of mine, I'm at least getting them to think in a subtle way "what if..." and that's all I could ever ask for.

On a side note, those attractive bad boys are quite troublesome indeed.

 

[Deep Space Nina]

Usually some sort of advice often given to authors that minor readers usually want to have a protagonist that is two or three years older that (s)he is. Because that is cool and such young guys and girls usually want to be a little older. It also depends on what you want your protagonist to do, if it is in the real world. 18 is a very good age in fact, because it is on the gateway of childhood and being an adult.
Usually already 30 years of age are considered "very old" for teenagers. (Please consider that readers very often desire a relationship with the protagonist. Making him or her "too old" may destroy their day-dreams. ;-) )
But not everyone is in fact like you´d expect the main target group to be. So if you want to write anything in a different way, then simply do so. A good story should find readers, even if not everything is 100% mainstream.

 

[Drift Dean]

For example, my character in my story is 18. Is this too old? I've seen much younger, and not much older than 18 for it to be considered "Young Adult" so I was curious.

Any takers?

I started my protagonists out at 16 and the story progressed them into their early 20's. It seemed to go over fine with readers who still classified it as a YA read to them.

Not sure if that helps.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

In households where the adults read LOTS the children are reading before they start school.

I have to disagree that where adults are avid readers the children will inevitably be reading before they start school.

Children are individuals, and they do not always follow their parents example, in reading or anything else. Two of my children became avid readers, two almost never read at all. They are now all of them adults, who grew up with parents who rarely let a day at home pass without spending a few hours of it reading. I read to them a great deal before they went to school. They knew that for their parents reading was among the greatest delights in life. Still, they decided it was not for them.

When my son was seven, he decided he wanted to join Little League. I thought, "Baseball? Why would any child of mine want to play sports? He should be home reading a book." But he didn't enjoy reading, although he did it very well. So I thought about the fact that there were children whose parents loved sports and thought reading was a waste of a boy's time. I decided I didn't want to be like those parents, imposing my own tastes on my child. (And I hoped I was putting it out into the universe that somewhere, to balance it out, a child whose parents wanted him to play sports would give in and let him spend his days with his nose in a book instead.)

______

But as to the question of the age of YA protagonists. Young people who read a great deal will read books about adults written for adults. They have no problem with that. So there is no point writing a book with an older protagonist and calling it YA. If they want an older protagonist they will find one elsewhere. They probably read about characters of all ages, and are perfectly happy doing so. But readers who are specifically looking for books about protagonists roughly their same age facing roughly the same kind of problems they encounter or expect to be encountering soon are not going to be interested in reading about adult characters (18 and up) facing adult problems. These days, whether to be sexually active is one of those problems kids face. Not so much in my day.

Write the book. Write it as the story needs to be written. Don't try to fit it into a category where it doesn't fit, and don't try to justify calling it something it is not.

If you truly want to write YA, familiarize yourself with the genre. (And by that, I mean read a great deal of it.) You may discover that it is not for you. If it is, then stories and characters that fit within the broad outlines of YA will occur to you. If it isn't, why worry about it? Write the books you want to write. Figure out later where they fit.

 

[Hex]

Yes. What Teresa said. I read almost constantly, and so do the other adults in the house, we read the kids stories every night and have read to them since they were born. They love stories (we're reading The Rangers Apprentice series right now, which is brilliant YA with lots of tension and violence and almost no romance) but my just-eight year old won't read anything himself. He wasn't even close to reading before he went to school. It's not about how much you read; if it were, he'd be top of his class.

I also agree about reading a lot of YA. I don't really understand why anyone doesn't read in a genre would want to write in it.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I agree except for the figure it out later where it fits. The hinterland between YA and adult is murky and can make it very hard to sell. At some point you will need to make a decision which market you want to aim for. It might not be at first draft, but having a mish-mash might be either isn't ideal.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Most people don't write as quickly as you do, springs. By the time they've finished the book, there is no telling what the market may be. Writing the best book we can in the way that best suits the story is the only thing we can control.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

Unschooled children (no curriculum/no formal education/child-led education etc) usually start reading and writing between 8 and 9. (some are younger and some are older). They tend to go from not reading and writing to chapter books overnight. My older two were both eight and my younger one at six looks like he maybe a little earlier. I read lots but it takes my daughter a month to read one book - she does read a chapter or two every night but she prefers making movies. My middle one only reads comics and non fiction books.

I grew up in the same house as my brother with average/normal readers. At 2 I started to read and write and devoured everything in sight. My brother was normal and waited until he started school -- I think he's read two whole books in his entire life.