What do we mean by YA fiction?

I live in Sydney, and we are just about into after-party mode from the SWF, the Sydney Writers' Festival. My knee has been inoperative for the best part of three weeks, and the sessions I tried to get to last Friday just weren't on. Without my knee strapped, I figured I was going to do it serious damage before I got to the venue and back: no buses, a nice walk, but not for me.. So I stopped at the Museum of Contemporary Art, then ferried my way to Manly and limped home.

Saturday, the knee was strapped (it's a cartilage thing), the venue was more or less on a bus route, so I made it to a workshop on YA writing with Mal Peet. (Whom I will meet at a social function tomorrow night, as a takeover of one of my publishers means I shelter under the eaves of the stable he is in.)

The venue: the State Library of NSW. We began by wanting to know what YA was, because this workshop was about YA, ot Young Adult fiction.

We basically agreed that YA is undefinable, but that good YA will, in some way, offer reassurance and insights to younger readers, and ideally, some level of hope. It can do this in the guise of a ripping yarn or almost anything else, but there should be some clues, some enrichment that can slip through, unnoticed by adult readers, but not jarring with them.

Most books set in dystopias seem to fail this test. On the other hand, Philip Pulman, Anne McCaffrey and Cory Doctorow (I have only read 'Little Brother') seem to offer this extra value.

It may not be a universal truth or essential, but it gives me a guiding star for 'Cornish Boy', which is what I was seeking.

Another key feature was what I dubbed "plumbing", being aware that Peet was once a plumber. In his 'Life, an Exploded Diagram', I noted that in the inevitable (given the plot and premise) sex scene, while the girl's knickers were mentioned once, there was no ripping of thin silk from heaving bosoms. OK, funny place to wear your knickers, but to return to our moutons, in the action as described, they never came off, but by implication and they must have done. This blemish of coninuity, this hitch lin the logical flow was no narrative loss, but the emotional plumbing gained from it.

It was a small group of five writers, which must have been disappointing for Mal, but we all gained from it. Three of us are looking at the need to write sex scenes, and we will now approach these with more confidence and finesse. And confidently engaging in more understatement, without feeling it looks as though we are prudes.

And I knew as I left that I need to go through and eliminate a lot of the mechanics of the action. That's like plumbing only not related to sex.

The last two days have seen an orgy of shredding, hacking and gouging, and I am just about there with the first book.

But what do you think YA is??

peter

I don't know how I would write for YA. I've never written for a particular audience although I think that is a good thing. In your post, the problem with your knee concerns me. I can't imagine not being able to walk freely without pain. My knees created some problems going up steps, but then I got some medication that eliminated the pain and enables me to continue doing the things I want to do without undue concern. At our age, we can expect things like this. The cartilage in my shoulder seems to have worn out and that I received therapy for it. I don't wantt Cortisone shots. With recommended exercises and anti-inflamation tablets, the shoulder problem is no longer a pain thing. As long as my fingers work, I can write.
I took a walk on Saturday with my good friend, Hermann Frech. The book, "Hermann Frech - On the Way to Siberia" was developed during our walks together. He is 84. I only hope I am as fit as he when/if I reach that age. A 10 Kilometer hike through the forest was pleasant. We will do it again soon. There are many trails with interesting things to see.

Very interesting discussion, Peter. It raises the question: does YA fiction need sex scenes? Would the story hold up without any?

Abe, I always saw myself as a writer for adults. And of non-fiction! That said, when I write for younger people, I pick up plaudits, probably because I don't "dumb down" for them. Some years ago, I was asked to add some dialogue vignettes to a school-age history, and I am doing more of that at the moment. It works pretty well, but I have never done total fiction.

The YA fiction I am now working on weaves through the serious themes I have explored for adults (among them, rockets, gold rushes, steam, the emergence of evolution, Australian exploration and natural history collection), introducing the ideas in small palatable bits that I hope will encourage some readers to look further. It's hard, bloody hard: when Martin Amis infamously suggested that he would perhaps write for children if he were brain-damaged, he displayed ignorance and arrogance in equal portions.

On knees, my knee has descended from agony to pain to ache, but walking long distances is out for now. It has been bad since May 1, so that's three weeks. My physiotherapist says it's "anodomyny" (more easily understood as "anno domini", alias age). I will not go gentle into that good night: this time last year, we were about to tackle 120 km of the Camino in Spain, and I have many more places still to walk. The year before, we were walking all over Hadrian's wall, climbing mountains outside Florence in 38C heat and scooting around Rome on foot. So today or tomorrow, I will line up a knee specialist.

Shelagh, if one of the aims of YA fiction is to provide hope and reassurance to the young, at the very least, sexuality will need to be treated. From there, the question of what is discussed will depend on the plot line. Sex scenes may be necessary.

Slight spoiler alert

In Peet's case, Life: an exploded diagram is about a teen couple in love at the time of the Cuban missile crisis (a period I recall well, as I had just started university, but had a lot in common with the boy), and the process of "doing it" really needs to be there, but it was written without in any way resembling a sex manual or a work of gynaecological text.

In my own plans, I take a boy through his teens, into adult-hood and almost to being a father (that's the current plan). There is certainly a wife who is a rather feisty lady. So some degree of sexual activity needs to occur. Sex scenes? Maybe not. We'll see.

I started out fearing that subtlety would be seen as prudery, but now I think it is justified, if the physical mechanics are replaced by emotional mechanics. I hate it when people say "books are dead, you can get anything you want on the internet", but kids can get the physical mechanics of sex from the internet, any time they like. The emotional mechanics are a Whole Nother Thing.

Maybe I'm out of touch with today's youth, Peter. They seek out porn on the Internet the way that we collected cards in cereal, bubblegum and sweet packets when we were young. We knew next to nothing about sex unless we grew up on farms (and I lived next door to one, so I figured out what went on to produce babies).

In conversation about sex education in schools, a male friend said, "we knew nothing!" as young adults to prepare us for adulthood. He was stunned when I said that teenagers don't want to be educated; they want to be told that it's okay to have sex before marriage, in exactly the same way that we had been told it was not okay.

Another firend said that his seventeen-year-old son had asked if it was okay for him to sleep over at his girlfriend's house. He wanted his father to be responsible for his own irresponsible behaviour.

Only a couple of years ago, a school in the US had eighteen seventeen year-old girls all pregnant in the same class. They had a pact to see if they could all fall pregnant at the same time.

All of which begs the question: do children need to read about sex in works of fiction, or does the fact that they are allowed to, justify their desire to experience sex at a young age?

5/21/2012

I agree with Shelagh, when I grew up 50 years ago

sex wasn't discussed it was taboo! I think kids today

know too much from TV, Movies and friends. I 've seen

young people at the age of 16, 17 , 18 with two or three

kids, they have no idea what it takes to have kids, even

with sex education and all the contreceptives available they

still get pregnant, Oh I blame the boys as much as the girls.

I say no to sex in books....



Cheers..Joe...

I'll take those views on board. I think there will be less, rather than more, but I don't think none will be an option.

As a social climber, I hang out with librarians a lot, and we are having a sort of parallel discussion there. One of the British players posted a link to the 'Bad Sex Awards'.

Please don welding goggles before reading!

And note that this is precisely what I won't be doing. In my writing, orifices and dangly bits will not be mentioned, unlike this lot!

I think I am now able to post URLs, but just in case, I give it also in expanded and unclickable form.

http-colon-slash slash www dot literaryreview dot co dot uk slash badsexpassages dot html

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/badsexpassages.html

cheers

This is an interesting subject. Sex cannot be avoided in writing if one wants reality in the story. I only have to think about my feeling when I was young to understand what goes through the mind of a young man. Imagination may be a way to treat the subject. The young man or woman dreams/imagines what it is like or all about. Then slowly reality in introduced. Perhaps, as Shelagh mentioned, visiting or living near a farm is the first revelation. That happened to me. My father took me along when our cow was bred. No one had to say anything. The action spoke volumes.
If book is about sex where safe-sex is the theme, then everything becomes relevant. If it is about the normal feelings of young people, how they discover sex allows a wide range of examples, especially with animals. There is no denying that sex is a dominant subject. How to deal with it in a tasteful manner is not an easy task.

Sex in YA books... As a new author I just encountered this dilemma for the first time today. Abe, you're absolutely right about keeping things realistic. My characters are 18 years old but many of my readers are much younger. I don't plan my scenes ahead of time so when the scene unfolded the way that it did I found myself thinking of a way out of it. I'd like to think I handled the scene gently enough but not so much that it negatively impacts of the story.