Middle Grade vs Young Adult
What's the difference between MG vs YA? Let's look at the key differences, including character age, wordcount, theme, and style.
Story Mastermind isn’t just a lecture, a book, a handout, a one-time workshop weekend, an online class, or a conference presentation. There’s nothing exactly like this, which is why we created it. Get a FREE taste of the expert instruction and one-on-one critique you can expect from Story Mastermind.
MG Vs YA Video Transcript
Hello. This is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Welcome to the YouTube channel. If you're a new viewer or an old hand at our videos, I like to talk about perennial topics of interest to writers in all categories. Today, we happen to be talking about my personal favorite category...well, I don't know about favorite, but my specialty and where I really cut my teeth in the industry, and that is children's books, specifically the question of middle grade versus young adult or to use the lingo, MG versus YA.
So this is a question that I hear all the time. Somebody brings to me a manuscript of indeterminate length that's sort of maybe 40,000, 50,000 words, and that's an in-betweener length between middle grade and YA. And they're like, "I don't know what I've written here. I think it's middle grade but I don't know. Can you shed some light?"
In my book Writing Irresistible Kidlit I have a chapter that outlines, kind of, the main broad-strokes differences between middle grade and YA. But not everybody has read the book, not everybody has the time, so I'm going to synopsize, best as I can, in this video, the key differences, and maybe that will shed some light on your manuscript, if you have kind of an in-betweener manuscript.
So children's publishing is very segmented into various categories because we have to account for not only different ages, different developmental stages, different reading abilities, in our readership in a way that adult publishing does not. So that means we have a 9-year-old reader, and we have a 16-year-old reader, and they are completely different on many, many metrics. You would think that the difference there is only 7 years, but for a 9-year-old, that's most of their lifetime, and for a 16-year-old too. And so those differences cannot be understated.
Now, middle grade specifically deals with readers who are about 9 to 12 years old, and characters who probably are 11 to 13, the reason being is readers like to read up, and experience characters who are seen as a little more sophisticated, have a little bit more potential for independent adventure. A 9-year-old is probably not gonna be able to run around and defeat bad guys in the neighborhood. A 13-year-old might be able to get away with it. So we write slightly older characters than we intend our readers to read.
In YA, our characters tend to be 15 at the very earliest and above, mostly 16, 17, and 18. The reason I'm avoiding 14 and mostly 15 is that it's kind of a gray area in between. It's kind of like a freshman in high school, you're not really necessarily entrenched in high school yet, but you're totally over middle school already, and that's just kind of a difficult area to catch readerships, because remember, if they're reading up, your readers, a 14-year-old, might still be in middle school, they won't have the frame of reference of high school, so usually for YA, we kick in junior year, senior year, or the summer after senior year, for our character ages.
Word count varies widely. For middle grade, especially younger middle grade, you do have to account for reluctant readers who are not as strong in their independent reading skills just yet, and so on the lower end, you can have manuscripts that are like 25,000 words. it used to be the 30,000, 35,000 words was a recommendation for middle of the road middle grade, that has sort of crept up, especially if you're writing fantasy. You can go up to 65,000 words, even higher. I would personally try to keep it as tight as possible, because you want to be showing tight, unbloated manuscripts when you're out on submission. But fantasy, because there's a lot more world building, a lot more plot expectation on a fantasy, paranormal, science fiction kind of manuscript, you have a little bit more runway in terms of word count.
For YA, 45,000 words would be a bare minimum, and a lot of agents will not look at a manuscript at that length necessarily, especially if it's a fantasy, paranormal, or any other kind of science fiction, historical. Historical also has a lot of detail and world building you need to get in there. So I would say 60,000 is a little bit more comfortable for contemporary young adult. You're getting up into 75,000, 80,000, and then fantasy can go up from there. Whatever you write, I would keep it under 100,000 words because for a debut, that's a little long and people's eyebrows will start to go up a little bit.
So word count, age range. Thematically and stylistically, there are differences in middle grade and young adult as well. So if we have... I run a small group workshop program called Story Mastermind, and we have a couple of students in this cohort, I just met with them yesterday, so it's very much top of mind, that are maybe on a couple of the metrics, middle grade, but the writing itself is young adult, and that can be a really, really difficult place to be, because it's less concrete.
You know, word count is a word count. You can kind of slot it one way or the other, but when I say something like, "Well, this feels YA," you know, it's really hard to ascertain in your own writing. I can do it pretty well because I have seen hundreds of thousands of manuscripts over the course of over a decade in publishing, but the metrics that I use when I'm evaluating this MG versus YA question come down to voice. Voice is one of those loosey-goosey terms already. What I mean by voice is the level of formality, the level of sophistication. That's not to say you can't have a smart and sophisticated middle grade-age kid, but a lot of writers, kind of, use that as an excuse to write overly formal adult and dry prose and dialog, which doesn't really fit an 11-year-old. I'm not saying slang it up, because that could date your manuscript and it, kind of, comes across as a little bit cringy.
But that being said, shorter sentences, a little bit more energetic, word choice, word choice that's consistent with the age group, saying car versus vehicle, for example, that really, really affects the overall impression of character age. Same with level of sophistication. If we are using these sort of long syntactical sentences with a lot of different clauses, it may not necessarily be as reflective of the middle grade character or the middle grade reader. Remember, those kids are still getting tuned up on their independent reading abilities. As for YA, you can be more sophisticated. I'm not saying that readers of either category are not capable of complex thought and understanding complex ideas, but it's the sort of complex language, complex verbiage, complex vocabulary that can really make sort of a difference between middle grade and YA consideration.
So we also that word choice that I talked about, whether it's consistent with the age group. And we also have other kind of soft markers that are like, for example, the level of darkness and what you talk about in your plot. For example, in middle grade, if you want to deal with addiction, you can actually deal with a serious topic like addiction for both age groups, but usually, in middle grade, it is a secondary character, a parent, somebody that's kind of maybe off-screen a little bit more that's dealing with the issue of addiction. In young adult, it can be the character themselves that's dealing with addiction, sexual abuse, racism, any other kind of very serious issue.
And usually, in middle grade, again, it's sort of secondary to, "You know, my father is coming out as gay," or "My mother is transsexual," versus in young adult, it's, you know, "I need to come out as gay. I've realized that I am trans, how do I deal with this?" So there is that sort of thematic element when it comes to some of these more serious issues that you may want to tackle. I think the issues are good to tackle, depending on how you do it, depending on what your intensions are because there are tons of kids that are dealing with serious things in their lives. But you have to understand something very important about middle grade is that your reader is not necessarily the purchaser of the book. You still get those parents, those teachers, those religious leaders, those librarians, those other parental figures that are going to be sort of screening what your reader is reading, more so than in YA. YA, you're gonna get people who are buying their own books more often, choosing what they wanna read, sort of applying their personal taste and their personal situations to what they're choosing. In middle grade, you may run into more gatekeeper resistance. That extends to swearing, that extends to how dark a book gets, how deeply felt a book gets. I still, still want to plant the idea that these readers are capable of appreciating intense complexity, intense emotion subject matter. It's just how it's handled that is, sort of, really makes the decision between middle grade and young adult. So you have to see how directly you're sort of staring into the void in your manuscript. That might give you an answer on middle grade versus young adult.
This is obviously a very comprehensive topic, what I could speak to for hours. I will spare you that, but hopefully, this has been a really good introduction for you in terms of thinking where you might land on the MG versus YA spectrum. I would say you do have to pick one because a middle grade-young adult hybrid, if you go to a bookstore, remember stores and actually going into them, there's gonna be a middle grade shelf, there's gonna be a young adult shelf. Nobody's gonna build you a shelf in the middle just for your hybrid. So I would say, of all of the things you've learned today, the one to really take away is that you do need to decide. But hopefully, this has made that decision easier.
My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here's to a good MG versus YA story.
Story Mastermind is our craft and industry focused small group writing intensive workshops from the comfort of home. Learn from our faculty and get a free preview to see if it’s the right fit for you. This article contains affiliate links.
