Chapter Forty-Six

Know Your Young Audience

How to Write for Middle-Grade and Young Adult Readers

Mary Kole

To write riveting fiction for middle-grade (MG) or young adult (YA) readers, you must be willing to take a long, thoughtful hike in their shoes. What issues and plots will resonate with middle-graders? What themes and characters will keep teens glued to your pages? What genres are particularly popular, and what pitfalls should you avoid? To make your story authentic and relatable, you’ll need to figure out what makes your readers tick: what they think, how they feel, and what they consider most important. 

INSIDE THE MIND OF YOUR MG READER

When you’re an MG reader (age eight to twelve), you live in a world of contrasts:

• You want to be loyal to your family, but you also start to crave independence from them.
• You want to define yourself as an individual, but you also want to fit in with friends and social groups at school.
• You feel that pull to go—grow up, make big choices, be unique—but also the pull to stay—be a kid, be safe, have things decided for you when the going gets tough.

When you’re this age, you’re finding a place in the world without straying too far from the comforts of childhood. Then puberty hits, and the boys and girls who used to have “cooties” in elementary school are suddenly alluring. Your body betrays you by growing up and changing. Not only are your emotions and hormones a mess, but everything else seems to slide into confusion, too. During this time, you start to make tough choices and wrong choices, and to pay the consequences of your actions and decisions.

Friendships that were forged over a mutual love of applesauce in kindergarten start to get complicated. Parents and heroes you’ve trusted unconditionally turn out to be imperfect. Things you thought about yourself, others, and the world turn out to be different or untrue.

Remember that tweens are focused on themselves, but they’re also thinking about how others perceive them. Gone is the innocent freedom of being a kid. In its place is the awkward feeling that they’re being watched and judged and doing everything wrong. (Middle-graders also start giving their parents this kind of close scrutiny and become perpetually embarrassed.) But on the positive side, they’re discovering a lot of new aspects to life.

Use this information, for example, by having your descriptions reflect the freshness of tween-age existence. How does your character interact sensorially with the world? How does she smell, taste, touch, and hear things? Come middle school, kids have a lot of new experiences for the first time. How does this change your story’s voice?

Checking for “Content”

Things get complex at this point in a child’s life, but MG is not nearly as edgy as YA, nor should you feel the pressure to make it edgy at all. There can be some edgy material (what I like to call “content”), though you should avoid strong language and sex.

The edgier you make your MG, the more resistance you will meet, especially in more conservative households and school districts. An editor might warn you away from content, too, because he’s thinking about your overall sales potential and marketability.

If you really want to explore a darker shade with your MG story, give the edgiest issue to a secondary character. For example, in a YA book, your main character might be an alcoholic or involved in a violent relationship. In MG, you can still cover these things, but you’ll usually use the lens of a secondary character, such as a distant mother or an abusive uncle.

If a romance figures prominently in your story, it should be tender and innocent, such as the ones in Jenny Han’s Shug or Eva Ibbotson’s The Dragonfly Pool. Romance is, at this point, becoming more of a preoccupation for your readers (it will almost completely overtake them by the time they reach young adulthood), but there is typically no room for something sexually graphic or gratuitous in MG.

For examples of how crushes are handled in the MG realm, let’s look at a small excerpt from Newbery Medal–winning When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Here, Miranda’s crush, Colin, decides to kiss her:

The kiss is mentioned after this, but Stead does not go into detail.

In Danette Haworth’s Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning, Violet simply notices a neighborhood boy in a new way. There’s an awkward Truth or Dare kiss in another scene, but this is about the extent of the romance:

While it’s important to acknowledge budding romantic feelings and urges in your MG audience, it’s best not to get too explicit.

Using Your Insights

Understanding the reader allows you to play with theme and give your stories larger resonance. In the examples we mentioned earlier, the authors incorporate age-appropriate concerns into their stories. These characters’ experiences and emotional turning points directly speak to the MG experience. Such revelations, when incorporated organically and subtly into the manuscript, will really strike a chord.

To go back to Haworth’s Violet from Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning, we see her contemplating old mementos in a quieter moment:

This moment perfectly captures the in-between feeling of being a preteen, that time when childhood is still fresh and tangible in the mind.

Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer is a gripping MG mystery. Calder, one of the three protagonists, is thinking about the importance of a priceless Vermeer painting that has gone missing:

This directly reflects the newness of life for preteens.

Finally, there’s a reason that the MG category is sometimes called “coming of age.” Nobody in my library captures that feeling more than Mississippi Beaumont (or Mibs, for short), the protagonist of Ingrid Law’s MG smash hit Savvy. The book is about a family of quirky characters, each with a special magical power, or “savvy.” When she gets her savvy, Mibs considers the bigger picture:

There’s also:

I love arming writers with these ideas about the MG mind-set because, I hope, they will inspire you to create something thematically rich that speaks directly and urgently to your audience.

INSIDE THE MIND OF YOUR YA READER

There’s something crucial that I want you to remember about YA (age thirteen to eighteen), and that’s the all-consuming nature of being a teenager. It’s that sense of possibility. That feeling of your heart welling so big it could explode. It used to happen for me when I was driving around my hometown, late at night, in my wizard-purple Ford Taurus (before the hip redesign, thank you very much) and the perfect song would come on the radio. Everything felt so big and so important in that moment, like all the parts of the universe had finally—yet fleetingly—clicked into place.

Remember the electricity of adolescence? You experience your first love, your first heartbreak, your first truly selfless act, your first betrayal, your first seriously bad decision, your first moment of profound pride, the first time you’re a hero. The milestones space out as we age, but when you’re a teenager, they all happen in very close proximity to one another.

The decisions you’re making during young adulthood can seem as if they will have ramifications forever. You feel by turns invincible and vulnerable, inconsequential and permanent. All of these experiences are happening for the very first time, and you’re packed into a group with hundreds of other teens who feel exactly the same way (though they hardly ever let on). So you’re also isolated and craving community, which is why you search for a book that feels like it’s written just for you.

It’s, in a word, intense.

I like to quote a YA-before-it-was-YA novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, which was published in 1999 for the adult market (my, how times have changed). In one scene, his teen characters go through a tunnel and emerge into a beautiful view of city lights. The narrator, Charlie, says:

Conveying Romance and Darkness

Teens feel everything very intensely, and two things in particular: an interest in romance and an attraction to darkness. If you’ve been in the teen section of a bookstore recently, you’ll know what I mean. It seems as if every cover greets you with the same combination of a pouting girl, a brooding boy, and the colors purple and black.

The paranormal and dystopian genres are such forces in the marketplace that I’m dedicating this entire section to explaining them. First, the discouraging fact: These genres are on the wane, so I wouldn’t dive into them right now if I were you. A lot of publishers aren’t signing many new projects in these veins.

A lot of readers and writers (and yes, editors and agents) are getting tired of these genres and wondering why they took off with such velocity in the first place. When I think about the teen reader mind-set, the reasons become clear.

Romantic relationships are a huge obsession for teens. Most teens, however, lack real-life romantic experience. Teen boys inviting you over to play Xbox and teen girls texting through dinner dates at The Cheesecake Factory must leave a lot to be desired. Since there aren’t many dashing Edward Cullens willing to die on the fangs of vampires for today’s teen girls, these hungry readers turn to fiction to flesh out their rich fantasy lives.

Teens also don’t often feel empowered. Their lives can seem like endless cycles of classes, test prep, sports, and volunteer work, and the message they hear is: If you get off this track, fail the SATs, or don’t get into the right college, then the rest of your life is in jeopardy. They feel trapped and helpless. Most want control, so the kick-butt aspect of paranormal (vampire slaying, zombie battles, etc.) is attractive.

Finally, teens are exploring the dark side of their personalities around the time they hit fourteen or fifteen. They get interested in suicide and serial killers and other darker shades of humanity. Death-related worlds and characters help them explore that through fiction. One of the biggest hits of the last decade is Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, a book about one girl’s suicide and the reasons behind it.

Some teens start to see the darker underbelly of life during high school—a friend starts cutting herself, someone gets pregnant, a classmate dies—and they use fiction to explore these issues in a safe way. The trend toward dystopian fiction is an extension of this and a way of dealing with the anxieties of living in a world full of economic depression, war, and social inequality.

When you think about your teen readers, keep the above in mind. Whether or not your romance is paranormal, know that your (mostly female, in most genres) audience craves stories about crushes and relationships. Even if your story doesn’t have a darker shade to it, acknowledge that your readers are dealing with a complex world where everything isn’t always unicorns and rainbows.

I would not counsel you to include stock paranormal elements in your manuscript—vampires, werewolves, fallen angels, demons, mermaids, Greek mythology, zombies—because of overcrowding on the shelves and general fatigue. If you simply have to do paranormal, find a unique twist or uncover an underutilized mythology or creature. For example, Laini Taylor’s The Daughter of Smoke and Bone offers a fantastic and fresh take on angels.

If you can, do try to include some kind of love interest. You don’t have to write an all-out romance, but you’ll be missing a huge potential selling point if you don’t acknowledge this part of your readers’ lives. The romantic element in your story can range from an unrequited crush to falling deeply in love.

Incorporating Themes and Big Ideas

When you understand the teen mind-set and can place yourself in your target readers’ experience, you’re that much more likely to write a book that resonates with them on a deeper thematic level.

Let’s go back to the shelves for a look at how YA writers have incorporated theme into their teen characters’ narratives. First up is McLean from blockbuster novelist Sarah Dessen’s What Happened to Goodbye. She moves around the country with her restaurant consultant father, trying on new names and personalities in each town. As she lands in a new spot, she contemplates her predicament:

Teens often feel as if their identities aren’t quite fixed yet, as if they could rip themselves up and start all over again if they wanted to. Honor that and see if you can incorporate it thematically.

Next up is master of the teen mind-set John Green and his book Paper Towns. In it, an earnest teen boy, Quentin, (Q for short), falls for a hipster named Margo Roth Spiegelman, a teen so disillusioned with her suburban life that she runs away. Being a stand-up (lovesick) guy, Q spends the rest of the book trying to save Margo from herself.

A lot of teens see the world or society and want to change it. Here, Margo speaks about her claustrophobic Florida town:

And here’s Q trying to put himself into Margo’s Converse All Stars a little later in the story:

These teens see the world and interpret it intensely. They feel deep longing and pain and love and searching. Understanding these qualities about adolescence will make your literature for these readers richer and deeper.

Mary Kole was a literary agent for six years with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency and Movable Type Management. She is the founder of kidlit.com and the author of Writing Irresistible Kidlit (Writer’s Digest Books). She offers freelance editing and consulting services to writers of all levels at marykole.com.