Young Adult...New Adult...Why Can't You Just Be an Adult?

The last question in the title I won't even bother responding to beyond this. I am an adult. I'm just not a grown-up. The end.

As for the rest (I'm about to show just how much of an adult I am, by the way)...

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as young adult. Yep, that long ago. I think the Sweet Valley High books were just coming into popularity (maybe), but by the time you're in high school I'm not sure those really cut it for reading material anymore. The point of this is kids jumped from reading kids' books to reading adult books. Age-appopriate had no meaning because the best a teenage reader could do was sift through the books and hope to find characters somewhere near their age. (Either that or so foreign that age didn't matter--I think this is one reason so many of us gravitated to sic-fi/fantasy early on.) Truly, the only book I can recall reading that would still fall under the YA heading today is The Outsiders. 

I'm sure when someone first suggested YA there was some industry backlash. Where will we shelve them? Teens don't have money for books. All sorts of reasons to fight against it. 

Then somewhere, some brave publisher decided to give it a try. And the books sold. Maybe not like hotcakes, but they sold. Over time this led to Harry Potter madness, Twilight insanity, and a few other huge sellers. YA wasn't some void--it was big money! (I can't find hard numbers, but I believe I've seen where YA as a genre is second only to romance in sales.)

There's a simple reason for this. YA is about firsts. First kiss, first love, first time, first car (er...firsts not in any particular order). A lot of things happen for the first time during those high school years. (Yes, some happen earlier or later, but on average, it's high school.) There were very few books that addressed those things. Things teenagers generally don't want to talk to their parents about too much. Teens needed YA fiction. 

And the crazy part? 

Adults needed to go back. Adult sales account for a very large portion of the YA market. Yes, part of it is well-written characters and blah blah blah, but the bigger part is wanting to "re-live" that time in our lives. For some of us (I'm probably in the minority) who loved high school, reading YA brings back a lot of good memories about the crazy shit we did. For others (who weren't so fond of the time), reading YA gives them a different (perhaps better) experience than what they lived through. It's very similar to the way a lot of women will return to romance novels after a bad break up. It's a reminder that there's good stuff out there somewhere.

Now New Adult is going through that same question phase that YA did. Do we need it? Who will it sell to? Is it just erotica for teens? Do we really want that?

The questions make me want to bash my head through a wall. Remember how I talked about the way teens used to jump from kids' books straight to adult? The advent of YA solved that...but there's still a hole. People (generally) don't go straight from high school graduation to a career or marriage and kids. There's college or first jobs or struggling as you move out of your parents' house. From eighteen to about twenty-five, there's a gaping chasm in fiction. Sure, you can sometimes find protagonists in the age bracket, but they aren't that common and there's no definitive place to look for them and even having characters of the right age doesn't guarantee a book that deals with those issues that plague "new adults."

Let me say it up front: New Adult is not erotica with teenagers. Period. Full stop. Books that are erotica with teenagers are erotica. Period. Full stop. It would be a very rare plot that is both erotica and deals with those new adult issues. (I can think of one that does, but it's a sub-plot in an adult book, so it doesn't really apply.)

So what is New Adult?

Young Adult is about firsts, but New Adult is about leaving. It's about exiting childhood, leaving that safety net as well as the one represented by parents. It's also about self-discovery. Those years after you leave home are when most people start to figure out who they really are without the rules of school or the rules of their family home. It's about responsibility on a level they may never have had to deal with before. In short, they're about becoming an adult in everything except age. 

Does that include sex? Maybe. Probably. So does life though. And it is different than teen sex and different than married (or almost-married) sex. Self-discovery, remember? So yes, New Adult books will likely be sexier than their YA counterparts. That does not, however, make them erotica or even erotic romance. It just means sexier. Sort of like the girls in the 60s movies who go to school in their proper below-the-knee skirts just to roll them up once they get there and show a little leg. Sex in YA is (usually) fade-to-black or minimal details. Sex in New Adult is going to be more open--it's going to show a little more leg as it were.

Every time New Adult comes up on Twitter, I see people saying "we don't need it." Sure. We didn't need YA either. Generations of readers got by without it. That doesn't mean readers (and publishing) aren't better off for having it. It's taken self-published New Adult hits for publishers to sit up and take notice. People, readers, want new adult. They want to build a bridge over that gaping hole between YA and adult so they don't have to try to catapult across it. 

And here's a crazy thought. Maybe, just maybe reading about the pitfalls of that time in life will help a few people from making the same mistakes the previous generation (or two) did. I know. Books don't ever teach people anything. Right? 

Sex in YA... Again

I've talked about sex in YA before. As an author who writes both sexy adult stuff and YA, I see a definite difference in how I personally approach things. I don't believe in shying away from sex in young adult fiction, but I write it differently than I do in my adult work.

To illustrate this, I have a niece who is thirteen. I let her read any and all of my YA manuscripts, and I know she regularly reads published YA with sex in it. A while back, she asked if she could read one of my adult stories, and I said no. Even without finding out whether or not my sister would throw a fit, I was uncomfortable with her reading a specific scene in that story because I didn't feel my niece had the necessary experience to understand what was going on in the heroine's mind (and it was kind of... violent sex). Anyway, this isn't a slam on my niece. A lot of adult readers hate that scene--in my mind because they don't understand the character. That's okay, but I'm not going to willingly hand it over to an unprepared 13 year old.

Turns out, my sister would have indeed been upset. My niece and I were talking book recommendations over the weekend and I asked my sister if anything was "off-limits" as far as content. She basically said "sex", at which point I had to clarify that she meant descriptive sex as opposed to "knowing it happened without seeing it." (I think she'd prefer her daughter read only books about virginal heroines who have no intention of ever being anything else, but whatever...)

The funny thing is, I'm reading a YA right now that is very sexually charged. None of the characters have had sex in it yet, but it's a major topic and a plot driver and very much viewed with want. I'm kind of torn because while it's a very realistic portrayal of how a lot of teens think about sex, it's... a lot. And it got me thinking: where exactly is the line between "okay for YA" and "too much for primetime?"

And yes, that's pretty much how I view things. If it can be on network TV before 10pm, it's probably okay for YA. After 10 or on cable? Odds are it's too much.

But the written word is different. You don't see body parts, they're described. The want is described rather than being viewed through the actions of the actors. So, can you get away with more description, where the viewing equivalent would push it to cable? When does written sex push from PG-13 to R?

I'm really not sure. There's a scene snippet in a manuscript I have on sub right now that I feel is very borderline, and that's with it described through the filter of a character who doesn't want to see it and wants absolutely nothing to do with anything to do with sex. (That virginal heroine? Yeah, her. She's just surrounded by non-virgins.) Another manuscript I have out has a sex scene or two, but they are very fade-to-black in nature.

I'm sure the line is different for every reader, but I'm curious. Where do you draw yours?

Uh-Oh... Advice Gone Bad

One of the things writers are often told is "write what you know." It's right up there with using active verbs and BICHOK (butt in chair, hands on keyboard).  But... is it always good advice? What if you know doesn't resonate with your readers. One of the hardest things about writing YA is staying true to the characters while also staying true to the readers... all while often being (*cough* several *cough*) years out of high school. Sure some things are fairly consistent, but a lot changes over time.

And what about those things that were unique to your high school experience? What the hell do you do with those? (Personal example first...) I went to a high school that wasn't stereotypically clique-y. The cheerleaders hung out with the band people who hung out with the sports teams who hung out with the nerds who hung out with the choir people--and any combination you can think in there. (For example, I earned letters in band, choir, sports, and academics--and it was a pretty big high school, graduating class of 600+.) Now, I know a lot of schools aren't like that, but in some ways (in others it totally wasn't), I saw it as kind of an ideal situation, so I do use it in my work because I think a lot of people want that, especially if they don't have it. Sure, in the PRT stories, there are still jerks, but they aren't cliques of jerks--they're individuals.

(Now for a not-me example.)

One of my crit partners recently read a YA novel that gave her absolute fits. Mind you, she's in her early 20s, so not all that far removed from her high school years, and she loved the author's previous book. So what was the problem with this book? It dealt with sex... pretty much the book is about sex. Now, my crit partner doesn't have any problems with sex or sex in YA. But the way the female characters in the book acted and talked about sex was the complete opposite of her high school years, and I have to say...mine too.

(Details. I have not read the book, so I'm getting all of this from my crit partner...)

1. The plot of the book pushes these girls to actually talking to each other about sex. Okay, I don't know about you, but at my school, I knew by the next day when my friends had lost their virginity. It wasn't some closely guarded secret. We talked about sex, a lot, and not in worried whispers in the locker room. It was normal conversation fodder (which is not so different from the way my friends and I act now.)
2. Said girls are disturbed by the idea that they like sex. They think liking sex makes them sluts. First off... I have never in my life heard this as even a partial definition for slut. Certainly not when I was in high school. You know who got the "slut" label most often? Virgins with boyfriends. And the only people other girls called sluts were the ones who were known to sleep with anyone... and we knew this because of point #1. They were mainly labeled in a "keep your boyfriend away from ______, she's a slut." This wasn't even slut-shaming, because we didn't care that she had a lot of sex, we only cared that she didn't have it with our boyfriends while we were dating them.
3. Does doing various sex acts (or liking it) make them weird? Again, see point #1. Unless all your friends were virgins (and therefore you were the only one talking about sex in more than theory), this stuff comes out. Sometimes girls would be all "Really?" when someone said they liked something, but it was never honestly thought of as weird. 

Society didn't rule our conversations at school, so what society thought never entered our conversations. What we though mattered. Now maybe the author when to a different kind of school. Hell, it may be the way things are at most high schools, but when there's a decade and a half (along with half a country) separating my crit partner and I, one would think the situations in the book would have resonated with one of us at least a little. I'm not saying the author should have written the book differently, but as a reader, I would wonder if she forced the school and the characters into that box just to suit the plot. And that would bother me.