Teen Culture and YA Books

At a rcent children's writng conference, I did several critiques. I noticed that while many published children’s books have characters that curse and have sex and know people who engage in destructive behavior, many unpublished manuscripts have naive characters that look like they stepped out of the 1960s.

What Are Teens Like Today?

It’s not enough to give characters computers and video games. Children today look and sound different from children of the past. They are street wise. They see sex and violence on the TV every night. They’ve experienced the pain of divorce either in their immediate family or their extended families. They have gay friends and relatives. They don’t have the luxury of being naive.

I’ve long said that teens today want the same things that teens have always wanted: They want to love and be loved. They are sure they can do better than their hypocritical parents did, they're idealistic.

But today’s teens are also different from teens of the past. For one thing, the causes they champion are different. What kids consider to be unjust today is different. Today, the majority of young people in the world see pollution and bullying as terrible sins and they see homosexuality and abortion as good things.

What Kind of World Do They Live In?

·       Abortion is acceptable even during and after birth

·       Assisted suicide is legal and/or widely accepted

·       Homosexuals and transgendered people are considered normal

·       Alcoholism is seen as a disease

·       Creationism is taught as fairy tale, while evolution is taught as proven fact

·       Teachers cheat by changing test scores

·       Teachers have affairs with students

·       Gunmen, or students, go on shooting rampages

·       Bombers blow up building and buses full of people

·       Communication is immediate—no time to think before you speak

·       Movies are available on the phones kids have in their pockets

·       Video game addiction is a concern for their parents

·       Teens are expected to be sexually active

·       Porn is available from a very young age

·       Billboards and the TV shows are full of sexual images

I’m not remarking on the rightness or wrongness of any of the things above. I’m not arguing that evolution is an unproven theory or that alcoholism is more sin than disease. I have my opinions on these things but they aren’t what this post is about.

This post is about the shift in worldviews that has occurred in the last three to five decades.

When I was a child all sex was kept in the closet, regardless of whether it was heterosexual or homosexual in nature. Even married folks, like Rob and Laura Petrie, had twin beds on TV.

True story: When I was eight or nine there was an ultra brite toothpaste commercial in which a pretty young woman blew a kiss at a handsome young man. Then a woman sang, “Ultra brite gives your mouth sex appeal.” I asked my dad what “sex appeal” meant and he said, “It’s a dirty word.” That same man, once a conservative, Bible-believing minister, went on to speak out in favor of homosexual rights. He came to believe the Old Testament and most of Paul’s epistles were bogus.

This is how much some people’s views changed in three short decades.

How Does This Shift Affect YA Books?

More and more we see kick-ass heroines and heroes out for revenge. We see assassin heroes—loveable hit men and wise-guys. We empathize with killers. No one wanted Katniss to lay down her life—to refuse to fight and kill. We believed she had to kill. She had no choice. Well…yeah, she did have a choice. She could have died instead, which would have been seen as the truly heroic thing, once upon a time.

Today we live in a world with more than fifty shades of gray. Everything is a shade of gray. No black and white. No absolutes. The god whom the people of the world believe in, is a god who just wants everyone to have a good time.

So how do we engage children and teens today?  Can we give them a Katniss who leads a revolution without killing innocents? Can we give them street-smart characters that do the right thing? What do you think?

 photo credit: Shavar Ross via photopin cc

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The ABC couplet contest brought in several stellar entries. It had to go a tie-breaking judge. The final decision was a hard one but in the end...

Marti Pieper,

                  come

                            on

                                  down! 

Facebook or email me, and I'll get you your prize.

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Sally Apokedak is an associate agent with the Leslie H. Stobbe Literary Agency. She's in the process of building a dynamite list of authors. She is also active in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the American Christian Fiction Writers, and Toastmasters International.

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Go Teen Writers!

Stephanie Morrill is a twenty-something living in Overland Park, Kansas with her husband and two kids. Her only talents are reading, writing, and drinking coffee, so career options were somewhat limited. Fortunately, she discovered a passion for young adult novels and has been writing them ever since. Stephanie is the author of The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series and is currently working on other young adult projects. She enjoys encouraing teen writers and do so on her blog Go Teen Writers. To connect with Stephanie and read samples of her books, check out Stephanie Morrill books.

Meet Stephanie Morrill. She's a gifted novelist who also shares her amazing skills through her writing blog--Go Teen Writers.

Stephanie, how long have you been writing?


Since first grade, when my class had special writing time every day. When we finished writing our stories, the school printed and bound them. I loved every part of the process except the illustrating. I've always been a horrible artist...

When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

Even back in the first grade when I was writing stories inspired by my stuffed animals, I thought this was what I wanted to do. I really caught the writing bug in high school when I took a creative writing class and started completing full manuscripts. I even submitted a few to publishing houses. I was crushed by rejections, but my English teacher--a wonderful but intimidating woman--told the whole class she knew I would be published someday. I really didn't want her to be wrong!

Tell us about your new site. How did you get the idea?

I've always naturally written for teens. It's just the voice God gave me. After my first book came out, Me, Just Different, I started receiving emails from girls saying they loved the book, and asking if I had any tips for young writers because they wanted to be writers too. Plus I was doing school visits and seeing all these teens who were taking writing seriously, doing NaNo. I was answering the same questions over and over, and thought, there must be more teens like this out there.

What drew you to want to help writers get started?

Because I knew no one and nothing--what's a genre? what's a literary agent? what's an SASE?--when I started down my journey. Everything I learned, I learned the hard way. I thought I would enjoy passing along what I'd gleaned.

Can you give us any statistics on how your blog is doing?

At first, the blog wasn't doing much. The people who were hanging out there really loved it, but after a year of blogging, the site had received only 4,000 hits and had 40 followers.

But I loved it too much to scrap it, and all the grown had been organic (none of the followers were friends or family) so I decided to start blogging more frequently, to offer contests, and to write about the novel writing process from the germ of an idea to the final polish. I started doing that about ten months ago. The site has received over 60,000 hits now and has over 240 followers.

Part of the growth is due to the changes I made, but I know a lot of it came from finally praying about it. I always viewed the idea as being inspired by God, but it's embarassing since I'm supposedly a mature Christ follower. I really didn't pray much about the blog until earlier this year.

How do you come up with your blog writing prompts?

Usually, they're opening lines that come to me, but without a story attached. Sometimes I'll think, that would be an intriguing opening line to a novel, but I have no idea what would happen next. The teens come up with wonderfully creative stories though!

Do you have a missions purpose with offering to share your writing skills?

When I first started Go Teen Writers, I honestly didn't think of it as a ministry. Just me passing along what I had learned to the next generation. There was nothing hard about that, in my mind, and I had this horrible mindset that ministry needed to be hard and that it needed to be run through the church.

But then I started hearing from girls about how much they loved Go Teen Writers, and how it was the only place they could come and be encouraged in their writing. And then they started connected with each other on the blog, responding to each others' comments. Now we have Christian teens and teens who are far from God. It's only been in the last few months that I've realized it's a ministry, and that's the reason it doesn't feel hard--because God designed me to do this.

Are you discovering some talent blooming among your young writers?

I'm regularly blown away by the creativity of that group. We did a free-write contest where everyone was allowed to submit the first 150 words of their manuscript. With a bunch of those entries I wanted to say, "Can I read the rest? This is so good!"

What I've also discovered is how polite and respectful and appreciative teenagers are. Or at least the teens hanging around Go Teen Writers. It took me a long time to convince them it was okay to call me Stephanie rather than Mrs. Morrill. And they regularly thank me for running contests and advising them and bringing guest authors on. Which is great, but I get all the thanks I need from just hanging out with them.

Interview conducted by Julie Garmon.

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A Living, Breathing Main Character ~ Stephanie Morrill

Stephanie Morrill is a twenty-something living in Overland Park, Kansas with her husband and two kids. Stephanie is the author of The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series and is currently working on other young adult projects. To check out her blog and read samples of her books, check out http://www.stephaniemorrillbooks.com/ and
www.GoTeenWriters.com .


About 7 years ago, I was stuck in a writing rut and began leafing through old projects of mine. I had a handful of complete manuscripts, but most had been discarded halfway through the writing process. There was something wrong about them—all of them. Something I couldn’t put my finger on for awhile. And then one day, I saw it clearly:
I was my main character.
In every one.
She might not look like me, but she thought like me, talked like me, and got herself into the same kinds of scrapes I did.
The problem with my books was me.
So I opened a blank document on my computer and tried something new.
I’d always been a quiet, behind-the-scenes kind of teenager, so I made my new main character the center of attention. I was a goody-goody, so she was a bad girl. I was raised in a stable home, so her home life was tumultuous. My looks were ordinary, so she was exotic. I was passive aggressive, so she sought out conflict.
I named her Skylar and wrestled her onto the page.
Writing Skylar was freeing. Being in her skin felt like living in a fantasy world. She said things I wanted to say to people but never did. She took chances I was scared to, and yet she was afraid of things that felt ordinary to me.
I submitted the manuscript to a contest. The story felt bigger than anything I’d ever written, and surely the judges would be able to tell. I knew I was guaranteed to final.
So when the list came out, I was flummoxed as to why my name wasn’t on it. Clearly I’d been given a raw deal. My judges must have been having bad days when they read my manuscript. How could they not appreciate Skylar?
But that was the one thing all three judges agreed on—Skylar was annoying. They were not only indifferent to her problems, they felt she deserved them.
Not. Good.
For awhile I resisted dealing with the judges’ comments. Then I forced myself to sit down with my contest entry and read with fresh eyes. That’s when I realized I didn’t like Skylar either. I agreed with those judges. Skylar was rude, self-centered, and had her priorities all backward. She did deserve her problems.
After deciding the judges weren’t complete morons, I changed my opening scene. In my original manuscript, we met Skylar in her element. She was snarky and completely in-control. And completely unlikeable. I reworked it so our first glimpse of Skylar comes the morning after the worst night of her life. For the first time ever, she’s vulnerable and unsure of herself. She knows she needs to make changes, but she doesn’t know how, and there’s no one in her life to mentor her the way she needs to be mentored.
While making Skylar different from me broke me out of a writing rut, I had to find something for us to have in common—an emotion, a circumstance. How could I expect a reader to love and root for her when I didn’t?
It took four years and three drastically different drafts before Me, Just Different was polished enough to sell. Fortunately those years not only produced a sellable manuscript, but lessons for building main characters:

1.Your mom is right—it’s what’s on the inside that counts
Even though I crafted my story in first person, I somehow managed to leave out Skylar’s feelings. We knew every detail about her outfit that day, but we had no idea how she felt about the conversation she’d just had. If a scene is reading flat to you, look to see if you only developed the external story and not the internal. To your reader, your character’s thought life matters far more than his or her eye color.

2.Challenge their world view
The first couple times I wrote Me, Just Different, I made it clear that Skylar was exotically beautiful. It didn’t occur to me that Skylar might not view herself this way. Or, if she did, that it might affect her relationships with others. Basically, I’d forgotten to give Skylar a world view. And the story grew far more interesting when I developed Skylar’s perception of her looks rather than making it as simple as saying she was beautiful.
We all view the world differently, and your characters should too. It’s when their world views clash that you get some of the best conflict.

3.Where’s the motivation?
My original idea of Skylar was that she felt superior to everyone around her, and I left it at that. It wasn’t until later that I realized her frame of mind begged me to answer the question, what had happened in Skylar’s life that left her feeling like she could behave the way she did?
Maybe your main character can’t forgive him or herself for something. Why? Maybe your main character is a womanizer. Why? Don’t just say a character is this or that. Give them a reason, and you’ll develop a rich back story.

The four years I invested in Skylar have paid off. When I receive e-mails from readers, almost all say how Skylar spoke to them. Some have even said they feel they “are Skylar.” How grateful I am to those judges who didn’t let me settle for a sub-par character. Thanks to them, I was forced to dig until I’d crafted a character of complexity. One the reader can love in spite of her flaws. One that lives and breathes apart from me.

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