Intensity

If there’s anything all YA books have in common, it’s that the writing is intense. When you’re in the headspace of a teenager, your hormones and emotions are racing, and that adds an extra weight to the events of the story. Every moment feels like it has this endless sense of possibility where anything could happen. As a YA writer, it’s your job to capture those feelings and write about them in a genuine way.

Romance

Even in a non-romance book, YA readers want some element of romance to be present. If your YA book isn’t strictly in the romance genre, then this element will be in the background of the story as the plot and character development unfolds around it. But just because it’s happening in the background doesn’t mean you can get away with a generic or stereotypical romance. Even if this isn’t the reason readers are picking up your book, YA readers live for those ‘swoon-worthy’ moments where your character’s love interest brushes against her arm or touches her cheek. Make sure you’re creating two specific characters and giving them unique moments to fall in love.

Escapism

Since YA books have both a young adult and adult following, you have to write in a way that satisfies both age groups. And one thing that applies to both groups? They go to YA novels for an escape. Adult readers enjoy escaping into YA books because it’s such a vastly different, and arguably simpler, lifestyle than the one they currently lead. No bills or student loans or job applications; the largest problems in YA novels are emotion-based ones. And young adults themselves like to escape from their own lives and into the life of someone they can relate to and learn from. It’s like they’re going to a new school and reinventing themselves, if only for an hour a night.

Mature Characters

We can’t stress this enough: no one wants to read a book about a whiny teenage stereotype. Both the YA and adult audience of young adult books finds these characters annoying and offensive. Emotions should be heightened in YA books, but young adults themselves have mature feelings about real problems. Adult readers want to be able to empathize with the protagonist’s struggles, even though they may be more self-contained than their own. And teens want to read about a character they can relate to, empathize with, look up to, and learn from.

Diversity

Modern YA books are some of the most diverse reads, so make sure when you’re going into writing your YA books you include diverse characters. Even if your book isn’t about the issues or plights of diverse characters, make sure you’re still making a place for them in your book. Take the series To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before: the protagonist of the series is an Asian-American teen. The series has very little to do with being Asian American, it’s primarily about a teenage girl. Though it’s not about racism, it’s still such a positive source of diversity in YA books because it normalizes the teenage experience for Asian American girls.

Complex Themes

Again, since a wide range of ages reads YA books, you don’t want to dumb down your content or themes. YA readers want complex and relatable themes that they can learn from, regardless of their current age. They want to see themes like self-discovery, family conflict, coming of age, morality–themes that you’d often find in adult lit, just in a more self-contained environment with young adult triggers. So, for example, maybe your character comes home every day and has to overhear her parents fighting. This is the trigger that leads him/her to examine what they want in a relationship and what they think their parents are doing wrong it theirs.

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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]’.

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