 Devoured fairy tales, folk tales and ghost stories since before she could read  Did, in fact, marry an alien  My Tween/YA books:

 Geared towards readers  Tween (11-13 Bridges child and adolescent)  Teen (14-18 Adolescent)  New Adult (18+ Bridges adolescent and adult)

 Boom in YA since 2002  The first clearly YA book was Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”…in 1868.

 A memoir of your middle/high school days

 Yeah…no

 YA protagonist  Subject that is interesting/appropriate for experience levels  Conflict with wider world  Uses young adult vocabulary and language.

 An overt “Teaching Moment”  Preach at your own peril - adolescents want to make up their own minds, not be told what to think. That being said…

 Character has to solve a problem  Sometimes there is a disruption, and the problem is returning things to normal.

 Sometimes “normal” is the problem.

 Why so many dystopian YA novels?  Remember that conflict with the wider world is one of the elements of YA?  Dystopian YA literature is a metaphor for taking the world that adults have screwed up and reclaiming it for the next generation.  What are adolescent problems?  Who am I?  How do I fit in?  What do I want to be?  And…

 Physical changes – body parts are suddenly different sizes and shapes.  The boy that had cooties in elementary school is suddenly hot. On Tuesday. But by Thursday, no way. Ewww.  Want experiences to compare.  What happens if you wait?  What if you don’t?

 Can’t have any interesting story without conflict  Adolescents ask different questions than adults  They feel things more strongly  How do they grab the baton and make the race theirs?  How do they cope in an unfair world?  Which brings us to…

 The world’s most famous orphan is  Teen years are about learning to be independent of parents  Literary parents don’t have to be physically dead, but they must be unavailable for some reason  The teen and his or her peers must solve the problem without adult intervention  If adults interfere, their “help” usually makes the problem worse

 Usually told in first person, but not always  Must be authentic. Small children and adults may let you get away with little flubs and slip-ups, but teens will not.  Check your worldly wisdom at the door. Channel your teen self. What did you know? What did you think you knew? What did you wish you knew?

 If you lack a pre-adult cultural attaché (i.e., a household adolescent)  For tweens and younger teens – Disney Channel has an array of shows targeted at this demographic  For older teens – MTV has a variety of shows, like Teen Mom  Wattpad – fanfic, etc, most by teens  READ YA BOOKS

 Preaching/teaching  Adults solving the problems  Writing down to teens – they may be inexperienced, but they aren’t stupid  Inauthentic voice  Book should be a story, which may contain an issue, not an issue pretending to be a story  Slow pacing  Not reading lots of YA literature

 If you want to write YA, READ YA  Write an exciting story  Create relatable, memorable characters  If you want to write YA, READ YA  Put characters on emotional roller coasters  Remember that parents buy books for kids – don’t make it overly objectionable  Did I mention that if you want to write YA, you should really READ YA

 Inside a Dog  David Beagley La Trobe University, Fiction for Young Adults (20 hrs) young-adults/id ?ign-mpt=uo%3D8 young-adults/id ?ign-mpt=uo%3D8  Cynthia Leitich Smith – Cynsations  hive/2013/10/the-8-habits-of-highly-successful- young-adult-fiction-authors/280722/ hive/2013/10/the-8-habits-of-highly-successful- young-adult-fiction-authors/280722/  Open Culture

 The Beautiful Ashes, Jeaniene Frost  The Book Thief, Markus Zusak  Chains, Laurie Halse Anderson  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Young Adult Fiction, Deborah Perlberg  Crank, Ellen Hopkins  The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon  Divergent, Veronica Roth  The Diviners, Libba Bray  A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

 The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins  Little Women, Louisa May Alcott  The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold  A Series of Unfortunate Events #1 A Bad Beginning, Lemony Snickett  The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ann Brashares  Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson  Twilight, Stephanie Meyer  Uglies, Scott Westerfeld  Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr