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As some of you know, I’m currently working on the second draft of the first novel of my Axis Chronicles series. As I am working through it, I have had a recurring thought: does the fact that my primary protagonist is 13 years old make my series “Young Adult”?
This is a real concern. I know the general wisdom says “just write what you want to write, don’t worry about genre”, but that’s bullshit. Each genre has certain expectations, tropes, and structures that the fans of that genre expect and want to see. I have always considered my fiction work to be firmly entrenched in speculative fiction…horror, fantasy, and science fiction. They’re what I like to read, for the most part, and they are what I am generally inspired to write. While I was back in the writing program in college, I ran into some issues because of my choice…most of the people in those classes were aspiring writers of “literary fiction”, a label which people claim means something, though I can’t understand how the works of Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Chuck Palahniuk, and William Burroughs are all categorized together. My teachers didn’t know what to do with the three of us who wanted to write what was (often derisively) called “genre fiction”, and our work was mostly ignored in the endless stream of middle-aged women writing stories about making cookies with their daughters. It was easy, back then, to feel like I had a firm grasp on genre.
However, over the last few years we have seen new genres come into being that don’t make much sense to me. We have what would have once been called “horror novels”…books about vampires, werewolves, demons, etc…except these novels are romances. And I don’t mean the classical literary meaning of a romance, such as the old adventure tales, I mean love stories. We have tales of young wizards, clearly fantasy novels, but they are called “Young Adult”. In fact, somehow it seems that a vast number of different kinds of stories seem to be falling under the category of YA, but I don’t understand what people seem to mean by that, other than the idea that the primary protagonists are teenagers or children.
Now, the Axis Chronicles are my magnum opus. I have been working on the universe they take place in for years. And their primary protagonist is a teenager, Beatrice Gold. But the other protagonists are adults, and have adult relationships and interactions, including a romance between two people in their 30s…real people in their 30s, not people who are said to be in their 30s but who have the emotional maturity of teenagers. There is a lot of violence. There are philosophical issues raised. Indeed, the primary premise is metaphysical…in a godless multiverse created through the interactions of chance and physics, a young girl is destined to bring purpose and meaning to the universe, to become a goddess, while another, darker agent tries to steal that destiny to bring his own sense of justice to the universe. These are not the normal themes of young adulthood in any but the most abstract sense. However, the fact that the main protagonist is a young girl, unique but still mostly human, means that these metaphysical issues are seen through the eyes of a teenager.
Now, of course it is true that this metaphysical journey is symbolic of the rise into autonomous adulthood. Beatrice is doing what we all do, developing a sense of meaning in the complex experience called life. It’s just happening on a much larger level that goes far beyond just her own life. In this sense, I can see how the novels could indeed be seen as YA fiction. I also deal with sexuality with a soft touch…sex is not nearly as important as emotional intimacy in my work, and I work to develop those themes rather than write erotica. I don’t have anything against the erotic, and my favorite authors such as Clive Barker often focus on sexuality. I just feel that in our era, real love and intimacy is more transgressive and threatening than even the most outlandish sexuality. There is sex in my work, but I’m not trying to titillate and it shows.
So in several ways, I think that the Axis Chronicles can fit in the genre of Young Adult, but I’m not sure…once I would have just called in “Dark Fantasy”, but YA is a such a booming genre that I know that publishers and agents want to push the label on anything even remotely featuring children or teenagers. I am going to have to deal with the question, so I want to address it now, and I want to ask my fans and readers…do the Axis Chronicles fall under YA because of their primary protagonist, or does the fact that many of the other characters are adults and many of the issues dealt with adult issues exclude it from that genre?
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: phatjmo
January 17, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Agents are going to cram your book into whatever genre they think will sell the most books. It’s all marketing. There are very obvious categories, but the dollars make the final decision. I don’t think the age of the particular protagonist has as much to do with the genre as the audience it is geared towards, and of course content. I mean, “It” dealt mainly with a group of tweens but I’d hardly call it YA. I think it also depends on how explicit your violence and sex is, even if there is little of it. There is also the matter of language. If the harshest profanity used in your book is “Effin’” and the most explicit act of intimacy described as “snogging”, then it’s a pretty safe bet that YA is in your future. Also, if reading the book requires at least a college level vocabulary, then the book won’t likely be marketed four younger age groups.
I guess the best test for your concerns would be to put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to sell your book to a potential reader. Would you, or rather, could you, sell this to the 11-15 year old market in general? If you were to draft a synopsis for the back of your book as a selling point, perhaps one directed towards a younger audience and one directed to an older audience, which once seems more natural, and which one would seem misleading once the story was read?
“His Dark Materials” is sold as YA, so the book doesn’t necessarily have to be dim witted and without nuance to be sold to that age group. I suppose what you really need to be prepared for is the fact that once you sell the book, unless you’ve got a damned good agent and control over the contract, the book is going to be sold in whatever way they think it will make the most money. If YA is the hot seller and your book can fit that category, regardless of the real genre, then that’s how they are going to sell it. I would just write the book for the audience you wish to write it for, and if successful, that is where they will market it. If you apply your editing knife with the intention of avoiding a particular genre, you might corrupt the story and end up with some awkward scenes. I can think of some worse things than having a successful YA novel.
Justin Zimmer recently posted..The Burzynski Clinic: Bullying teenage boys and using impotent legal threats to defend against criticism
Twitter: NealJansons
January 18, 2012 at 2:50 am
Thanks, Justin. As always, you present some good thoughts. Have I told you how much I appreciate you before? When I address my posts to “Faithful Reader”, I always think of you.
You’re right, of course. Ultimately, I know that the agent and publishers will make the final decision, and I’m not slanting anything towards any particular genre (other than the fantastic, of course…I have little interest in writing novels about how hard it is to write novels, which seems to be the primary preoccupation of so-called “literary fiction”). However, as you may or may not know, a marketing synopsis is expected along with any query nowadays. I’m expected to present my book in terms of what audiences it will appeal to in that marketing brief, and that’s where I have to make my decision as to how to present the book.
Originally my marketing proposal was along the lines of “this series will appeal to fans of Clive Barker and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series”. However, Barker’s work focuses far more on sexuality than my own (I admit it…as a teenager I often took my “private pleasures” while reading the sex scenes in Imajica and Cabal), and stylistically we couldn’t differ more. He writes lushly, with some of his prose bordering on the purple, while I strive to be the Hemingway of speculative fiction…no unnecessary words, no sentimentalist imagery. I come from the John Gardner school of prose writing, and his “Art of Fiction” is a holy text to me.
And honestly, nowadays I would feel more embarrassment than anything else if I were compared with Stephen King. Of course we all want his kind of sales…but in my opinion his work started becoming trite, predictable, and worst of all, cliche, roughly around the time he started writing with a word processor. I pushed myself through the rest of the Dark Tower series and Black House, but (again, in my opinion) from Gerald’s Game on, Stevie has lost the faith and started phoning it in. His work after the 90s reminds me of Tori Amos’s music after she got married and happy…it lost its soul (though “Night of Hunters”, her newest album, is brilliant…and notably was borne of her heartbreak at the collapse of her relationship).
So now I find myself writing and worry that, because it’s neither fish nor fowl, my work will end up marginalized through lack of a clear marketing niche. I know…such thoughts are beneath the artist I strive to be. But the fact of the matter is that this is my job, too. I have a wife who has as many health issues as I do, making it impossible for either of us to have a “day job”, and neither of us are getting any younger. If I ever get the opportunity to “sell out” and start writing Star Wars (or whatever) novels on contract, I will take it.
So really, the question isn’t so much an artistic worry but a practical one…I need to pigeonhole my series for the marketing proposal that will go with my query.
I think that no matter what you do you’re going to be dealing with the tendency have your work tossed in the Young Adult classification simply because of the main characters – but a lot also has to do with the story arc and how the character grows and what kinds of issues he or she has to deal with.
Take “Ender’s Game”, for example – in these stories the protagonist is arguably a young adult, but he’s dealing with some rather mature “everything you know is wrong” issues on top of the usual coming-of-age stuff that every teenager goes through. Despite the age of the protagonist, it’s not exactly what I’d call young adult fare.
So much depends on the tone your stories take, and the emotional context within which your stories are framed. Would Harry Potter be “young adult”? Arguably, yes. But it didn’t stop half the damn planet from grabbing it up and embracing it.
Gene Turnbow recently posted..SOPA and PIPA Could End the Internet
Twitter: NealJansons
January 18, 2012 at 3:13 am
Thank you, Gene. That’s helpful. I think Ender’s Game could be considered YA, but the series can’t…from Speaker for the Dead on, the stories become drastically adult.
Minor digression: I love Orson Scott Card and have read most of his work over the years, but I find myself so angry at his recent homophobic and fundamentalist Mormon statements that I can’t continue to read him. Normally I separate the writer from the work as best I can, but in his case I can’t even go back and reread old favorites without feeling so angry that I put it down after a few pages. His recent “re-imagining” of Hamlet, which essentially a hate-filled literary abomination where Hamlet’s father was really a child-molester who turned all the major characters gay by molesting them and lied to Hamlet to get him to murder his uncle and damn him so that he can then molest Hamlet for eternity in Hell. Seriously…he took the Bard himself and turned it into a homophobic polemic. It’s really hard to want to support him, either financially or socially, anymore.
I think that, if we are going from tone and emotional context, my series can’t be considered YA unless teenagers have become concerned with very different issues since I was their age. In the end, though, it will be up to my publishers.
Again, thank you for taking the time to comment and for reading. I do appreciate it.
Great post. There is a pervasive problem in genre literature, where we’ve drilled down normal genres into so many types of subgenres that we’ve lost all semblance of cohesion. You say (correctly) where there was once “Horror” there then became “Horror” and a more broad “Paranormal”, and now we’ve blown that to pieces and now we have genres like “soft erotic horror” and “romantic paranormal” and we’re going even further to distinguish specific genres relating to monsters, i.e. vampire books, werewolf books, zombie books in all of those subgenres. It’s all a bit much.
On the one hand, this can be infuriating because instead of trying to define a marketplace for a book, writers simply make up a new one and say “tada! I just wrote a YA, light horror, romantic werewolf book!” And tell their agents (if they have them) to try and sell to that demographic, which was just created.
On the other hand, it’s good for some writers, and perhaps this is the case with your novel, because readers no longer expect the traditional tropes of YA when they read a YA book. Nor are they surprised when YA lit takes a darker turn. They also aren’t surprised when supposedly “adult” genre fiction takes a lighter turn.
In short, all bets are off.
Fantastic blog! Do you have any tips and hints for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you suggest starting with a free platform like Wordpress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there that I’m completely confused .. Any recommendations? Bless you!
Twitter: NealJansons
January 31, 2012 at 10:38 am
I would definitely buy your name as a domain name and run a self-hosted Wordpress install.
Please let me know if you’re looking for a author for your site. You have some really great posts and I think I would be a good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d absolutely love to write some content for your blog in exchange for a link back to mine. Please blast me an email if interested. Thanks!
Twitter: NealJansons
January 31, 2012 at 11:13 pm
Umm…this is the personal site of an author (me). I don’t think my readers would appreciate the site very much if I wasn’t the one writing my own blog. But thanks for the offer.