The other evening, a good friend introduced me thus: ‘She used to write proper grown up books, but now she’s writing for young adults.’
‘I didn’t mean that!” she shrieked a few moments later, when she realized what she’d said. And she didn’t, because she’s one of the most voracious readers I know, delighting in children’s books, and books for young adults as much as books aimed at readers aged 18 and above. It was a slip of the tongue. But it was an interesting slip of the tongue.
When I sent my book ‘Carnaby’ to my agent, and she told me it was a Young Adult book, I was a bit taken aback. I thought I’d written a ‘proper grown-up book’, like the four crime novels I’d published previously. But why on earth did I think that? ‘Carnaby’ wouldn’t even have existed if it hadn’t been for a school librarian, and a school creative writing project.
Once upon a time…. the librarian at my children’s secondary school asked me to write the beginning of a story for the Write Path competition. That beginning of a story was then to be passed around the school, with children of different ages adding to the story bit by bit until it was complete. She told me the competition was dragon themed, so I should include at least one dragon.
I nearly forgot to write the story at all. Just before the deadline I sat down, without planning, but knowing this was to be a story for secondary school students to complete. I scribbled a few paragraphs. When I looked up twenty minutes later, I had created a teenage girl called Sarah Carnaby who lived on a tough estate in South London, and whose family was in great difficulty. I had forgotten all about the dragons.
Sarah Carnaby was properly dispatched to my children’s school, where her story was completed by students, and dragons were inserted into the story line to great effect. But I couldn’t get Sarah Carnaby out of my mind, and I started to write her story myself. By the time I had finished, there were still no dragons, but there was murder, and there were drugs, and there was teenage pregnancy and despair. It was written in the first person, and in the present tense, because I felt that was how teenagers see the world, painfully and sometimes ecstatically aware of their own body and their emotions, and every minute lived with great intensity. I didn’t want to tell Sarah’s story from the safety of some future, more mature, moment, or through the eyes of a narrator who didn’t know how she felt.
Still, when the book was finished, it was edgy enough that I thought it would have to be read by adults, who were surely more able to take the pain. So I’d written it trying to be true to the experience of a young adult but, strangely, I was thinking it would be best read by those whose experience was something else entirely. What was I thinking?
Since then, I’ve been on a steep learning curve. I’ve done my homework, and find that many young adult books are more challenging than books for adults. Anorexia, suicide, self harm, terminal cancer, alcohol and drug addiction, sex and sexual abuse (up to a point) are all here. There are two strange things that I’ve discovered: first, that the word ‘fuck’ seems to be off limits, which seems a little over-protective given the subject matters that aren’t off limits. Second, that young adult books are featured in publisher’s children’s catalogues, a few pages after brightly-coloured picture books for kindergarten children. In some bookshops, young adult books sit right next to books for children. Frankly, that can’t be great for sales – what young adult wants to go and stand in the children’s section to choose his books?
It poses another conundrum. Parents of capable young readers always want to push their children to read books for older children, hoping it will expand their vocabulary. I hope they understand that Young Adult fiction will expand more than their vocabulary. Better, perhaps, to give a twelve year old who wants to read crime fiction some Agatha Christie, or Father Brown, or PD James, than to face them with subject matter that could be well outside their comfort zone.
But if Young Adult fiction is still finding its place on the bookshelves, I think there is no doubt that for young adults, these are ‘proper’ books in which many authors deal unflinchingly with the experiences of young people in an honest an uncondescending way. In my experience, young people don’t want to be treated like children, and if fiction is censored, it will seem childish in contrast to the stories that they see on television, and on film, and perhaps most starkly in contrast with the news. Emerging from childhood and adolescence, they are looking outwards, and they are not blind. They see images of women gathered around a murdered soldier on a London street, or Syrian rebels foaming at the mouth after a chemical attack, and read transcripts of appalling abuse of vulnerable girls in their own cities. If fiction can’t try to explore some of these issues, then young people will lose faith in fiction.
I have just finished writing what will be my second book for young adults, and in my experience, writing for young adults is no easier than writing for adults. Perhaps the opposite is true. Young adults have no patience with a story that allows them not to care, or one with complications in the plot that are there simply for the purpose of complication. I’ve read some ‘proper’ crime novels for adults that fall into both these categories (it’s not that adults enjoy them, either, but perhaps they are more tolerant). So the bar is high, and there is no excuse for scrimping on emotion or characterization. Young people are used to slickly-produced television drama in which plot and character are equally developed, and they can spot laziness in the blink of an eye.
As a writer, one of the greatest pleasures is to spend some time in the shoes of a character who is very different from me. As a reader, I’m deeply, deeply relieved to spend some time reading books that are not about people like me. I have abandoned too many ‘proper grown up’ books because I could not endure the tedium of weary middle-aged lives in which, often, too little happened. It does us all good to remember the experience of youth, to see the world with fresh eyes, to be outraged by the things that are wrong, mystified by the things that are strange, excited by love, and to try to establish our place in that world.