I just started working on an idea which strikes me as particularly suited to a YA audience. However, its been a while since I was reading YA books and when I picked up a couple recently things had changed...

Sex, violence, torture, homosexuality - none of it graphic, but definitely there. Perhaps I wasn't reading so closely as a teenager, but I doubt I would have missed it.

So here's my question - what makes a book YA? I'm happy with the idea that you write as much detail as you feel comfortable, don't condescend to your audience and even to take the approach - if I give it to my teenage nephew will my sister kill me?

But seriously - in terms of putting the thing together - is it YA because the lead character is of an age with the target audience or YA because of content? Or am I missing something here?

Write your story. If someone wants to publish it as YA and tells you that a couple of things need to be changed, then work it out. Ender's Game wasn't written as a YA novel, and neither were the Harry Potter books. The Lord of the Rings wasn't written as a trilogy.

[This message has been edited by Kickle (edited July 06, 2004).]

Write your story the way you see it. With the exception of vulgarities and profanity, I don't think you risk much problem there.

Even if it did turn away a few YA editors, I think it best to write the story the way it needs to be written and let it find it's proper market instead of manipulating your story to fit a particular market.

I don't know how many books I've picked up in the library with the YA label that WERE NOT YA fiction in any sense of the term.

I've come to mistrust the library's labeling, but where do they get the information for their labeling? Certainly it comes in with the publisher's information on the book when it is ordered? If this is true, then publishers are labeling books as YA simply to broaden their reading audience. That's damned irresponsible. If this is not true and it is entirely up to the library staff to decide how to label a book, then the library information cannot be trusted. There is no way librarians get around to reading every book they carry to help them rate the books Adult or YA or JF. So how do they decide? By author? Apparently not--I find Jane Yolen books in both JF and YA (often the same titles). I find Isaac Asimov in both YA and Adult (again, often the same titles). There is no information on the back of the title page to indicate the area to which the book should be assigned--unless it's in some code that I'm unaware of.

While I haven't come across any troubles with the JF group, I have come across some SERIOUS ones in the YA group. I picked up a book called "The Sky of Swords," by Dave Duncan. It was one of those search the shelves for something that looks interesting days--maybe something I can recommend to my kids. It was labeled YA, but contained some explicit sex scenes and some graphic, squeamy violence. So NOT YA. I complained to the library. They gave me the shrug the shoulders response and promised to review the book for reclassification. I have yet to check up on them. I really don't expect them to care much about the morality of our youth.

Trusting a YA label to mean a book will fit your definition of acceptable for young adults is not a safe thing. If your kids are still young enough to need a lot of guidance, you have to provide it yourself (with help from people you trust). I remember reading some YA fiction as young as age 7 (carefully chosen, of course--my parents paid attention to what I read). On the other hand, there's some I wouldn't want to read now as an adult!

Given the world we live in, and therefore the world young people deal with, I can't say YA fiction should ignore difficult issues. I do think it should handle them appropriately, though.

And I guess that's really where drawing lines gets to be difficult, from the standpoint of marketing your own writing. I'm struggling with the question of how to market the story I just finished this afternoon. From a plot perspective, YA seems like a good fit. The POV character is late teens, and he's dealing with questions that would be meaningful to a YA audience. However, I'm a little concerned about the tone. I don't want to change it, though, because I feel like that's where the story gets a lot of its power. The problem is, I'm not sure it will sell well in an adult market.

Dakota - I can sympathise both with you as a reader and with the librarians. I used to work in public libraries myself and to be honest, there was usually no way to tell when cataloguing a book other than reading it yourself, reading what the publishers had to say, or at the very least keeping yourself up to date with all the different markets - a pretty impossible task at the best of times. We even had books vandalised by people who thought they should dictate who was allowed to read what.

I think you can and should challenge a reader, even a young reader, but I think it can be done without offending or ostracising. Ideally, I'd like my books to appeal to young and not so young adults. That's the aim, I suppose.

I'm going to take a mixture of approaches and advice presented here in saying - I am writing the story I want to write, I will handle any difficult situation as arises if applicable to the story appropriately, and I will beware of annoying my sister if her son picks it up.