1. “Aren’t you a little old to be writing YA?”
2. “That sounds interesting, I’ll tell my niece/nephew about your work- they’re 13 so they might like it.”
3.  “Oh, like Twilight?” or
4. “You don’t seem like a YA writer…”

As YA writers, we experience countless misconceptions about the level of complexity and maturity that is present in our writing (and in ourselves, quite frankly). Please allow us to set the record straight…

We’re immature

As YA writers, we’re often stereotyped as being immature when, in fact, we’re actually quite the opposite. People who say this look down on teens with pessimism, remembering all of the sheer nonsense held within their own teenage years. These people think of teenagehood as a cocktail of hormones, bad hairstyles, unidentifiable anger, and tear-stained sweatshirts. Well, in order to write believable YA books, YA writers have to separate ourselves from that false ideation and remember that all of the emotions, thoughts, feelings, and decisions made by teenagers are real, logical, and meaningful. Having to put ourselves in a headspace completely differently than our own and handle it in a believable and respectful way? One we would argue that takes a lot of maturity.

Our friends are all younger

Just because we put ourselves into the minds of teens for our books doesn’t mean we’re hanging out with teen friends 24/7 in the name of research. Yes, we will occasionally ‘accidentally overhear’ a conversation between teens at our favorite coffee shop and sure, we may jot down a few sentences for later use, but that’s work. Our friends are typically around our age because how are we supposed to explain to a bunch of teenagers that we have to put the kids to bed at 7:30?

We exclusively watch reality TV and teen dramas

Though we may watch one or two… or more… this is by no means our exclusive area of television expertise. And a lot of the time, when we’re watching teen dramas on TV, it’s not just to find out what we should do in our own writing…it’s to find out what we shouldn’t do. We know they’re cheesy guilty pleasure shows, but they involve a cool combination of both good and bad plot/character writing that we learn a lot from. Also… they’re a tad addictive, sue us.

We’re disorganized & impulsive

Again, YA writers are stunted and they’re basically teens in adult bodies, right? So we must be sloppy, impulsive, and emotional just like our characters, right? Wrong. On so many levels. Though there may be cases where this stereotype holds up, we’d argue that more often than not YA writers are extremely organized. When you’re dealing with the inner turmoil of teenage life in your writing- which yes, can be messy- you want your personal life to contrast that and have a lot of structure. It’s like if you had a messy roommate- the living room will likely be a mess, so you want to keep your room clean. That way you have somewhere more organized to retreat if need be.

We’re all #bookstagrammers

Well OK, this stereotype pretty much holds up- as it should. Bookstagram (a community of book bloggers/authors on Instagram) is a great resource for writers to use to advertise their work and form relationships with other authors. It’s an especially helpful community for YA authors since the majority of teens use Instagram so you’re getting directly to potential fans and reviewers. So…. sorry we like making friends and promoting our books?

We’re unoriginal or ‘basic’

Although YA will typically have some tropes and similarities in plot basics, they also have some of the most creative plots out there. The Harry Potter Series, for example, is YA and they’re considered some of the most well-written books with some of the best world-building that literature has ever seen. And there are several writers such as Sarah J. Maas, Stephanie Garber, Leigh Bardugo, and Angie Thomas whose books continue to prove how creative and complex YA books can be. And our genre holds some of the most diverse books in literature with lots of different types of characters getting representation and complex cultural issues being handled masterfully.

Sending up the Mockingjay salute to all of our fellow YA authors who face the struggle of these stereotypes. May the odds be ever in our favor.

The post Setting the Record Straight: YA Authors appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Cycle

“The biggest piece of advice that I can give you is that if you’re going to be in any creative profession, you should turn all of the no’s that you’ll hear – and you’ll get a lot of them – into ‘not yet,’ instead… if you assume that those ‘no’s’ mean ‘not yet,’ that means you just have to try harder and look more impressive the next time…”

Being in any type of creative field can involve a lot of rejection. Our books are like our babies, so putting your baby out there into the world and having it rejected can be a truly depressing process. Stiefvater encourages writers to put a positive spin on the rejections they receive and to use them as learning opportunities instead of fuel for a weekend-long Netflix and ice cream binge.

Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song

“Just to be brave. I think the first thing you have to realize is that you have to put yourself out there, and rejection is part of the process and it’s kind of a part that you should embrace because it never goes away.”

Everything about novel writing is about putting yourself out there. Not only are you putting yourself out there in terms of representation, but any good novel is incredibly personal and close to home. Don’t let the fear of rejection keep you from digging deep when it comes to writing your book and, equally as important, don’t let the personal nature of your novel keep you from putting it out into the world.

Kiran Millwood-Hargrave, The Girl of Ink and Stars

“Just keep going, keep that initial inspiration that you had in your head, and just write until you get to the end— then make it better!”

As we’ve said before, one of the toughest things about writing is to push through and avoid critiquing yourself as you write. Millwood-Hargrave’s advice is to push through until the end and ignore that voice in your head telling you to make changes. Once you have it all down on paper, then go back and make the improvements your book needs.

E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“You know that old piece of advice: ‘Write what you know’? It doesn’t mean write about a young person who likes to write. It doesn’t mean write about your school, or your neighborhood, or your community. It means: write what you know is emotionally true. You can write about Mars. You can write about werewolves. You can write about medieval knights. You just have to understand the emotional truths of your story.”

As Lockhart states, the phrase ‘write what you know’ doesn’t mean you have to have gone through everything your protagonist is going through in order to write about it. Instead, it simply means you have to be able to understand how it would feel for someone like your protagonist to go through the events of your story.

Veronica Roth, Divergent

“I think everyone’s got a little teenager inside of them still, and you just have to work to help yourself access that teenager…Every now and then I find myself having a character make a decision that feels very adult without having them earn it, and I have to go back and make sure I’m letting the characters make mistakes they would in real life at that age, like a parent.”

As an adult writing YA literature, it can often be difficult to put yourself back into the mindset of being a teenager. As Roth suggests, you have to access your inner teen and allow your protagonist to be a teen- with all of the mistakes, emotional insecurity, and turmoil that comes with it.

David Levithan, Every Day

“The defining characteristic of YA literature is emotional truth…Even if we’re not the same as the characters we read, they are all dealing with things—issues of who they are, who they should be, what they should and shouldn’t do—that we all deal with, in their own ways. With The Hunger Games, even if we will never be in Katniss’s shoes, the decisions she makes make emotional sense to us—even when she makes the wrong ones.”

As with all literature, the backbone of YA lit is emotional truth. No one wants to read a book about teens that you’ve written as whiny and annoying- especially teens themselves. You need to be able to look back on the younger generation, their level of maturity, and give them believable emotional struggles that truly matter. Your reader should be looking at these characters thinking ‘that’s something I struggle with’ or ‘I remember when I struggled with that’ not ‘this character is stupid for worrying about [insert stereotypical problem here]’.

The post Writing Tips from Popular YA Authors appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.