Writing Young Adult Characters
Young adult characters are incredibly dynamic. Their worlds are bigger, larger than life. There's always something behind any big feelings in middle grade and young adult that fosters a relationship between the character and the audience. And that is super crucial in the young adult genre. I'm gonna get a little bit more deeply into that last idea over in Good Story Learning, which is our membership community.
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TRANSCRIPTION FOR WRITING YOUNG ADULT CHARACTERS
Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Thank you for checking out this video on writing young adult characters. All right. So, young adult characters are incredibly dynamic. They are enough to carry a book for teen readers, but there's a secondary faction of adult readers who really enjoy the fast pacing, the character development, the drama, and the high stakes of the young adult novel. So, you're also speaking to adults. This idea that we have a young adult character who just has an issue, whether it's their sexuality, something they're dealing with at home, something they're dealing with in a relationship, something they're dealing with at school, that is enough to make a young adult novel. That is an idea that died in the 90s and early 2000s. Our young adult characters are incredibly dynamic, some of them are even older. We're nosing into new adult, so we have 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds. I'm thinking of Legendborn where the character was a teenager, but they went to an early college program, so they got to run around quite a bit and get into a lot of trouble without parental supervision. So, some of the teens that we are really dealing with in today's young adult marketplace don't function as teens. They have a lot of autonomy, the parents are always dead. It's a joke that I like to make that the highest kill rate in books is in the middle grade and young adult parent category.
So, their worlds are bigger. Their worlds are larger than life, it's not just a school story, it's not just a family story. Something else happens. We are seeing a lot of opportunities for fantasy and magical realism, speculative fiction coming at the forefront so that we can make the worlds that these young adult characters are living in even larger than they would otherwise be. Romance is almost always a component of young adult, whether it is cis hetero romance. There's been a lot of queer fiction, which is great and a great way to roll in readers who don't otherwise see themselves represented on the page. So, that's something to keep in mind. Whether it is sexy romance, whether it is just emotional romance. I think that idea of longing, that emotion of just I'm not exactly where I wanna be is something that really drives young adult, new adult, as a category this idea of, "Oh, I'm not myself yet, I'm not where I wanna be yet, I'm not in the situation where I am yet, but I want to get there." And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But I think that longing, that emotional urgency is something very, very specific to the young adult category because when you look at a character in this category, they are in flux. That is the number one thing about them.
That is why I got into middle grade and young adult as an agent, as an editor in the first place. It's this electric time in somebody's life where you really just you want so much and you want so badly and the stakes seem so high. And that's developmentally appropriate. It's not that teens are a bunch of drama queens and kings, it's that they don't know any better. So, when a friendship breaks up, it does seem like the end of the world because they've never had a friendship breakup in a notable way. Maybe they've had the same friends since kindergarten and that's all they remember ever having. And when there's a rupture there, the stakes feel very high. Now, there is definitely a way to do it in which you're not also playing to some of these melodrama, stereotypes, and ideas. You want the emotions to come across as true. I think that is a huge consideration in the category of just authenticity and vulnerability. And when you can ground those high emotions with feelings and something small and vulnerable and authentic, then those feelings don't seem like they're overly dramatic or completely ungrounded.
There's always something behind any big feelings in middle grade and young adult, especially young adult when a character is heightened or they are feeling their high stakes of their story bringing it back to who they really are and how vulnerable it makes them feel and how destabilizing something is that's going wrong. That really fosters a relationship between the character and the audience. And that is super crucial in young adult. That relationship of that... most likely teenager maybe soccer mom, that teenager looking down at the page and seeing themselves on the page, that is going to be the crucial driving engine of any story in the young adult category. I'm gonna get a little bit more deeply into that last idea over in Good Story Learning, which is our membership community where we do teaching. All of our video classes are available. I do AMAs and I post in-depth videos, new content every month. So, I would love for you to join us. For now, I hope that was a lot to consider for writing your young adult character. My name is Mary Kole, and this has been a Good Story Company YouTube video. Here's to a good story.
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