Writing About Family Members in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
by Mary Kole | Former literary agent, now a freelance editor, writing teacher, and IP/story developer for major publishers and creators.
Writing about family members in fiction can be tough. We all have such fraught and complex family relationships that it’s hard to translate those into a fictional scenario. Sometimes family characters end up seeming over the top, like caricatures, and writers wonder whether they’ve done the family members of their protagonists justice.
Last week, a Good Story Learning member posed a thought-provoking question about writing realistic fiction featuring a traditional nuclear family in middle grade and young adult novels:
Can a manuscript be successful if the main character has two loving parents and a supportive home? Does writing about family members always need to involve trauma? I’ve noticed that most books feature a single parent home, be it due to abandonment, incarceration, or death—even the supposedly humorous stories. As a single adoptive mom, I have no issue with a single parent dynamic. But can a traditional family really be the centerpiece of a book, or does today’s fiction expect writing about family members to take a tragic turn?
Writing About Family Members for Your Protagonist
I often joke that parents in middle-grade or young adult novels have the highest mortality rate in all of fiction. Judging from the way family is portrayed in children’s novels today, it almost seems that, more often than not, moms and dads are either dead, missing, in prison, neglectful, or otherwise highly dysfunctional. It's a trope that's become all too common. So are we writing about absent or tragic family members for the sake of conflict and tension? Is it because we believe that this accurately reflects reality? Are we doing it for convenience? Or just because?
To echo the question above, I do sometimes wonder whether children’s novels especially could benefit from depicting more "normal" family units, while still keeping the potential story full of tension and conflict. One of the main reasons to put a parent in prison or the hospital or six feet under is so that a twelve-year-old can join a secret spy agency and be gone for months at a time, after all. Writing about family members who are always home gets to be logistically problematic for middle grade literature that have a big premise.
However, this can be taken to extremes, and has been. When writing about family members in a novel, you don't have to resort to dark or tragic elements. You can portray a loving, close-knit family dynamic without anyone dying, doing drugs, or committing murder. It’s just that, when you’re writing about family members who all get along and are largely wonderful, you still need to get your story tension from somewhere. It can’t all be puppies and rainbows. But maybe that tension doesn’t come from the family, is all.
Writing About Family Members In a Balanced Way
It's common for families to experience turbulence during the middle grade and young adult years because the teenagers are busy differentiating themselves from their families of origin and becoming individuals. This might also be when they come to realize that their parents are far from perfect—not the superheroes they appeared to be through the rose-colored glasses of childhood.
At this stage, kids start to see their parents as real human beings, opening up a new window of getting to know them on a deeper level. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to inject screaming fights into your writing about family members, you can still push some hot emotional buttons. After all, especially if those early childhood years were idyllic, any friction now will seem high stakes to the character—and the reader.
Family relationships often have the potential to be especially dramatic—these are our closest and most fraught bonds. When you’re writing about family members, remember that the family is a big part of a kid’s life and resembles a microcosm of the larger world.
To create a successful novel manuscript, writers must be sure to incorporate two sources of conflict: internal and external. Internal conflict explores the characters' struggles with themselves, like feeling alone, being a “loser,” lacking friends, or wanting something very badly (but being met with obstacles). External conflict, meanwhile, is the tension created by the characters' relationships with their environment or by the situations they find themselves in. (Divorce, betrayal, a friendship breaking up, etc.)
When you’re writing about family members in an intergenerational story, you can have the chance to represent both internal and external conflict at once because those family members know the protagonist inside and out—even if the protagonist feels they’re changing. This mix of old and new is fertile ground for story tension.
Conflict in a story doesn't exclusively have to come from a disordered family. In fact, in this market, writing about family members who actually like one another might make your story stand out, so long as there is adequate tension and the stakes are sufficiently high elsewhere in the narrative.
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