What Is the Difference Between Young Adult and Just Adult Lit?

I found out about this article in the Wall Street Journal from Michelle Davidson Argyle when she responded to it on The Literary Lab.

I recently read a book by our one and only Scott G.F. Bailey, and I was shocked at the darkness in it. I wrote to Scott and said, wow, this is really dark. He said, yeah, I know. It’s an adult novel, and it disturbed me not with the subject matter, but the tones of the novel. Honestly, I have never read a YA book with such dark tones. Usually, even in YA novels that deal with darker subjects, the tones seem to be handled on a lighter level. Maybe, though, Miss Gurdon is really talking about tone in her article, not subject matter. Maybe there are YA books out there that I haven’t read that are really, really dark in tone. Teens can handle subject matter. Adults can handle subject matter. I think it’s tone that can really make the difference. I appreciated Scott’s book. It was amazingly well done. I appreciated the darkness he portrayed because it contrasted the world in a way that helped me appreciate what he was really saying in that book – and I think he did it through tone. I wouldn’t have seen those things otherwise.

I agree with Michelle, that there is absolutely a difference between tone and subject matter. I recently finished Speak a young adult novel (from about 10 year ago) that is about a girl who was raped just before she started highschool. So, the subject is dark, I suppose. Yet, I personally wouldn’t call it a dark novel.

You can have all sorts of horrible things happen in a novel: rape, torture, murder, the end of the world, etc. Yet it can still be an upbeat, heroic novel if the heroes win out in the end. Although, I should add that tragedy and melodrama can also appeal to young adults, anything with a grand gesture. What is not appealing are stories which are more ambiguous, and neither victory nor victorious martyrdom are achieved.

For instance, the young adult novel Unwind and the adult novel Never Let Me Go deal with the same subject, but in completely different ways. The characters are the same age. Yet the tone of the books are completely different. Unwind is all about the need to fight an unjust authority, and Never Let Me Go is about the impossibility of fighting an unjust authority. Unwind is about winning; Never Let Me Go is about losing.

What is likely to be darker — a grandiose dystopia, where robots tear the arms off of people and crowds cheer until a cyborg gladiator overthrows the master computer and liberates everyone? Or a story about a real estate agent who gradually realizes her cheating husband doesn’t love her anymore but is only staying with her because she’s dying of cancer? The first story would probably be gory and lurid and appallingly violent. The second could be tender and bittersweet and realistic, but it could also be much darker and more mature in a way that the cyborg gladiator story is unlikely to be. It depends on the writing, of course, and these are just hypotheticals. But just on that one line synopsis is it hard to guess which storyline is more likely to appeal to teens?

Of course, maybe more adults would be interested in the gladiator as well, and that’s the real problem with “Young Adult” these days. Its more a mood than a demographic. Plenty of adults read YA. Some adults exclusively read YA. So writers are basically forced to write YA even if they didn’t intend to, and often bring to it an alien mood. Do I have an example? You bet. Gifts, the first in a so-called Young Adult trilogy by Ursula Le Guin. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Ursula Le Guin, and Gifts was a lovely book. But I’ll be stuffed and dressed and roasted like a Thanksgiving turkey if this was a Young Adult novel. IT WAS NOT. It was about a young adult, which is not the same thing. I think it’s sad that these days publisher can’t seem to tell the difference. There was nothing gory or violent or profane about Gifts, and I doubt any parents would object to their kids reading it. But it struck me as a reflective, resigned book, not a victorious epic, and not something I would have enjoyed at all when I was a teen. I already bought the other two books in the series, but I’m not sure I’m ready to read them yet.

Why didn’t the publisher market Gifts as adult fantasy? I think it’s pretty obvious from a promotion perspective. I’ve been searching for book reviewers, for instance, and for every reviewer of mainstream, epic or adult fantasy, I’ve found two dozen YA reviewers. Maybe the numbers are even more skewed, even a hundred to one. So I decided my epic fantasy, The Unfinished Song, is YA. Since my protagonist is fourteen, I can get away with this, although the cagey reviewers have noted that the series is really epic fantasy. On some level I must agree with Gurdon, because I’ve found myself toning down some scenes that originally would have been a bit more, ahem, explicit. I just feel weird having things too explicit in a YA series. But I can only change so much without imperiling the integrity of the story, which I won’t do.

When I think back to what I read as a teen, I have to say it puts the whole brouhaha in perspective. I never read young adult novels. I started reading adult novels in second grade. I read books with rape, torture, death, concentration camps, fascism, adultery, murder, military coups, incest and infanticide. I preferred novels with happy endings. (Still true.) But I didn’t mind a rocky road on the way to that happy ending.

So, has YA literature become more explicit and violent? Probably. Are twelve year olds of today reading anything more explicit that what I read when I was twelve? Keep in mind my ninth grade reading list included The Gulug Archipelago, Slavegirl of Gor,  Clarissa, 1984, Patty Hearst Her Story, Lolita,  and a lot of other books, both trashy and classic, that were not aimed at fourteen year olds.

Just think. If Nabakov were writing Lolita today, he’d be told it’s YA because Lolita is twelve.

Some people are defending the content of YA novels because this reflects the darkness that invades the lives of teenagers. I question that theory. I didn’t read those books because they reflected my own personal reality, or situations I was likely to encounter. Fortunately, I was never sent to a gulag, kidnapped by terrorists, seduced by a sadist, or sent to a BDSM planet. I loved Clan of the Cave Bear, I hated Catcher in the Rye. Guess which one involved a character being raped by a Neanderthal? (Another teen experience I inexplicably missed out on.) I don’t think teens read for different reasons than adults. They read to find out about what it’s like to be human, to find out more about themselves, but also about people who are not themselves.

What is “Formula Fiction”?

“Formula” is an ambiguous term, and I should define how I mean it. I will give a basic example, found across genres such as jokes and Three Act plays. It has three steps.

Step One: Protagonist does something wrong.
Step Two: Protagonist does something wrong again.
Step Three: Protagonist finally gets it right.

General enough? TOO general to be useful? This definition of formula can be just another word for story structure. All stories have it, with the possible exception of some experimental works that go out of their way not to, in the same way some modern art goes out of the way to eschew beauty. This is not to say that there is no difference between formulaic fiction and quality fiction, however. In formulaic fiction, the formula is all there is to the story, whereas beautiful literature transcends the form. In one case, the formula is all there is in the end, in the other, it is merely the starting point, a vessel to hold something else.

Maybe a stricter use of formula would be helpful. Here’s another example of some formulas, formula as trope, as predictable plot:

The Protagonist is given a chance to re-live some period of his life as if he’d made a major life decision differently.

Step One: Protagonist is wrenched from present life into alternate reality life
Step Two: Protagonist tries repeatedly to re-establish old life
Step Three: Protagonist finally learns to value alternative life.

I trust we all know and abhor the danger of predictable plots and trite tropes. We also know that certain genres require a certain degree of formula, the HEA in Romances, the dead body and list of suspects for Mystery, etc. Though I am curious to see what Scott F. Bailey does to the detective story.

What interests me, however, and the reason I began with such a general definition of a formula, is why we gravitate toward formulas at all. Because I think this scratches at the surface of an even deeper question, which is why do we even write fiction? We human beings are great liars, but it still boggles the rational alien as why we would not just lie to someone we want to sell used cars to but that we would pay money to read long elaborate lies. Why don’t we read only true stories, lists of facts, figures? Why, when we read fiction, does that fiction almost always follow regular rules of production, formulae? And if we try to eschew formula fiction, what are we left with? Are there still rules of good writing, narrative structure and plot arcs that we need to follow?

What is “Formula Fiction”?

I promised to indulge in some Profound Thoughts inspired by The Wild Grass and Other Stories. Maybe it was more a threat than a promise. Either way, you’ve been warned. Deep mojo.

Davin told me he would be curious to know my reaction to his stories since I do not regularly read literary fiction. It’s true; I don’t. I’ve even been known to dismiss literary fiction rather contemptuously as pretension and snobbery. But I’ve come to reconsider that position.

Interestingly, I’m gaining a new appreciation for literary fiction at a time when genre conventions are invading high literature. I think it should be noted that the appearance of a space ship or a vampire in a story doesn’t actually determine what kind of story it is. The formula, or narrative drive, to use a less value-laden term, determines that.

Is literary fiction superior to formula fiction? Or just different? Does it have a formula of its own? (Didn’t Virginia Woolf write a book about A Formula of One’s Own? and if Virginia Woolf said it, it must be true.)

Much modern and post-modern, self-consciously “literary” fiction rejects formulae but I think if you look at the classics, the formula is obvious. Or rather, it would be obvious if the formula were familiar to us; sometimes the alien quality of yesteryear’s cliches blind us to the fact that the writers of those areas dealt in tropes as much as contemporary authors. Indeed, I would argue, even more so. The characters in The Canterbury Tales are very much stock for their time. The brilliant innovation of The Canterbury Tales is not due to its lack of formula.

But what is “formula”? In my opinion, formula is just another word for story structure. All stories have it, with the possible exception of some experimental works that go out of their way not to, in the same way some modern art goes out of the way to eschew beauty. This is not to say that there is no difference between formulaic fiction and quality fiction, however. In formulaic fiction, the formula is all there is to the story, whereas beautiful literature transcends the form. In one case, the formula is all there is in the end, in the other, it is merely the starting point, a vessel to hold something else.

“Formula” is an ambiguous term, and I should define how I mean it. I will give a basic example, found across genres such as jokes and Three Act plays. It has three steps.

One: Protagonist does something wrong.
Two: Protagonist does something wrong again.
Three: Protagonist finally gets it right.

Review: The Wild Grass and Other Stories

I finished The Wild Grass and Other Stories by Davin Malasarn. I went in with VERY high expectations.

And they were all meet and then some.

This is a beautiful collection. Each story is exquisite and breathtaking, yet feels utterly simple and real. As if, you know, the author just happened to be spraying cyanide on a field of red rocks to mine for gold, and also happened to be an old woman waiting to die, and also happened to be a childless woman meeting up with her sister’s family for a photo shoot, or a child under a crocheted tablecloth during an exorcism…

I have a recurring fantasy about what it would be like to possess telepathy, to simply look at another person, say as I pass by them waiting at a bus stop, and for that moment, BECOME that person. Reading this book felt like possessing that power. Many of the stories are told in the first person, with an intimacy and ease that make it vivid and natural.

I’ve read a few of these stories before. Red Man, Blue Man is one of my all time favorite stories. I am so glad to finally have a paid copy of it.

Sadly, this review doesn’t do the stories justice. I am probably going to re-read the whole thing and try to think of something more profound to say. Also, hopefully I can convince Davin to do a guest post.

Reading this anthology left me thirsty for more, and I hope that Davin considers publishing one of his longer works soon. I kinda hope he self-publishes, for purely selfish reasons, because it means I can read it faster, and the kindle version will probably be less expensive. But if he prefers to go the traditional route, all I can say is, any agent or big-time publisher who reads this and doesn’t snap him up is an idiot. Just my personal opinion.

Reading and Revising

This is just a quick update to let you know I am deep in revisions on Sacrifice, which (fingers crossed) will be out next month.

I want it out as soon as possible, but not sooner. By that I mean that I made a pledge to myself not to simply slop out inferior, unfinished work. So I will polish as much as necessary to be sure I publish something I can be proud of.

While I am working on revisions, I am also catching up on reading. I have a long TBR list, including the novels of friends, books I have been looking forward to for a long time. The one I shall be savoring tonight is The Wild Grass and Other Stories by Davin Malasarn. He’s a marvelous writer. I expect I shall be quite jealous of his writing, but that’s okay, since I have already decided that he and his two co-conspirators at The Literary Lab are in a class far above mine. In a way, knowing that is liberating. I don’t have to worry about trying to be as good, I shall simply enjoy.