Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  Keeping your promise

  Here’s one of those rare indisputable fiction laws: You must keep the promise you make to your readers in Chapter One (see the earlier section “Making promises” for details). Failure to do so leaves your readers dissatisfied, if not completely ticked off. I mean, they’ve read an entire novel in hopes of seeing you resolve a specific conflict for a character they’ve grown to love, and then you don’t? Liar! You have a duty to deliver. You must complete the character arc you set into motion with that very first catalyst, and you must tie up the loose ends of the subplots that supported Mr. Teen Lead’s journey. How you do that is up to you and your creativity. Just do it.

  Delivering a twist

  Predictable is a very bad word in fiction. It’s a complete bummer to read through a whole novel, investing yourself emotionally in a character and his tribulations, only to reach the end and have the story play out exactly as you would’ve guessed. That’s an “Oh. Yeah.” ending. Nobody wants that. Readers want an “Oh yeah!” ending. You can dish that out in the form of a twist that simultaneously fulfills and defies readers’ expectations.

  An ending that has nothing to do with any of the elements preceding it isn’t convincing. A good twist has a certain logic because it evolves from the events in the story. Readers can actually go back and point to elements that subtly foreshadow the unexpected ending. When you foreshadow, you plant veiled hints about what’s ahead. The hints seem innocuous and may be repeated throughout the story, but the foreshadowed item suddenly becomes a story-changing element upon which the resolution hinges. Because the ending isn’t the one you led your readers to expect, they’re also surprised.

  Say you have a story about a kid who fixes up old cars in his garage. This kid meets a girl who also likes cars, only she likes shiny modern ones. A parade is coming up, and the budding couple must decide which car to enter into the parade. You could write their love story in a way that pits his classic style against her modern one, with the reader expecting one of the young lovers to give in so that they can ride off into the sunset together in one of the cars. When the ending comes, they do ride off into the sunset together, but they’re not in either car; they’re on his cousin’s moped, which has appeared many times in the story but never in a way that called much attention to itself. That twist both fulfills and defies reader expectations.

  Louis Sachar’s Holes, winner of both the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal, delivers a truly whopper twist. I won’t reveal that twist here because a spoiled ending is a bigger bummer than a predictable one. But I will say that the ending gives new meaning to old events, which is a very powerful way to say “so long” to your readers.

  Another way you can get both the familiar and the unexpected in the same ending is to bring your story full circle. Write your character as he is at the end of the story into a scenario that mirrors the opening scene of the book. For example, if your character finds a wallet in Chapter One and keeps the cash inside, then that character could find a valuable necklace in the final chapter and choose to return it, demonstrating her hard-won maturity.

  It’s hard to beat the thrill of hearing a reader say of your ending, “Whoa, I never saw that coming.” As the writer, you’re the master manipulator right down to the last word. Wield that power mercilessly.

  Chapter 8

  Setting Is More than Somewhere to Be

  In This Chapter

  Knowing the importance of time and place

  Manipulating characters with setting

  Advancing your plot with place

  Triggering the five senses

  Using tricks for teen-friendly setting

  It’s one thing to look at a photo of a forest. It’s another thing entirely to be in that forest with the muted crinkle of damp leaves under your sneakers, the gentle breeze fluffing your hair, and gnats dodging up your nostrils and flitting at your eyeballs and inciting you to spastic fits of air-slapping until finally you smack your own cheek. There’s looking at it, and then there’s living it.

  Teens want to live it. Bring on the damp crinkle and the caressing breeze and the stinging slap in their fiction. Bring on the setting.

  Too often in YA fiction, writers shortchange setting as they focus their energy on creating fast-paced plots with tight dialogue, strong characters, and no-muss sentence structure. They drop their characters in a location — a room, a park, wherever — and then it’s “Onward, ho!” to the action and the dialogue. Where’s the sense of place? Where’s the feeling that this scene could happen nowhere else but here? Where’s the full reading experience? Reading such manuscripts is like watching a movie for which the special effects crew has forgotten to generate the blue screen’s background, leaving the characters walking and talking in front of a vast blue nothingness. That’d be a pretty big boo-boo in a feature film, wouldn’t it? So, too, in a novel.

  Setting is a powerful tool that enhances your characters and plot, making your entire story more meaningful and satisfying. It’s not enough to simply put characters in a room with a view — or in a forest with trees, for that matter. You must give environmental details that engage readers’ senses and that characters can react to or manipulate. Your readers deserve the sensory engagement that comes from hearing the crunch of frosty grass under a character’s bare feet or feeling the sudden whispery kiss of a spider’s web that dangles from the eaves. Without setting, you’d just have a girl walking across a lawn and an old house.

  In this chapter, you lob setting into play, using place, time, social context, and setting props to deepen your characterization, advance your plot, and make readers feel like they’re inside the story rather than just watching it. And you do it in a way that tickles teens as surely as those gnats just tickled your nose hairs.

  How the Where and When Affect the Who, What, and Why

  Setting establishes the time and place of your story’s action. But more than that, it involves the conditions of that time and place, the physical and social state of your where and when. Packaged together, these conditions can create a sense of place — a tangible ambiance or mood — that’s far more meaningful to young readers than a simple X on a map. Keep reading to find out how place, time, and social context work together to shape your setting.

  Place

  Place is the physical location of the action. It may be geographical, such as a Southern California beach, a farm in Iowa, or simply “on campus.” Or it may involve manmade structures such as a building, a bedroom, or the back seat of the prom king’s 1958 Chevy Impala. Place is anywhere characters can physically be. Physical details such as lighting, temperature, and weather are part of your location, as are fine sensual details like the slick leather of the Impala’s upholstery and the roiling thump of its 502 blower motor.

  Your location affects the plot and influences the mindset of your characters and your readers. Choosing a physical location that is wide and airy, for example, can inject a sense of freedom into a scene, slowing down the plot and relaxing the tension. By contrast, a tight, confined location can feel oppressive and make the character crave escape, setting up the plot for a burst of action and a change of pace. Strategic use of location can pay great dividends in your plotting, pacing, tension, and characterization.

  Time

  Every story has a calendar and a clock. Time of day, season, or year . . . past, present, or future — your choices with time influence what young characters do and how and why they do it. Consider your mood in the morning versus at night. Your energy level is different, and your ability — and desire — to interact with other people almost certainly changes. The same can be said of weekend versus weekday, summer versus winter, the beginning of the school year versus the last week of school.

  Characters’ behaviors and mindsets are heavily influenced by time, and you should use that to your advantage. If your young c
haracter needs time to process big news, crank the thumbscrews by launching her into a Monday with a whole week of classes, oral reports, tests, and homework ahead of her, giving her zero chance to process. If she needs separation from an abusive father, set the story in winter when she’s snowed in and there’s no hope of leaving, short of her best friend’s carjacking a snow plow to rescue her. Use time to force issues. Your readers will love it.

  Social context

  Every setting provides a social context that involves the people dynamics and what’s going on at your chosen place and time. Think male wigs here, curly powdered ones upon heads sporting wooden dentures and uniformed chests draped with muskets and other Revolutionary War accoutrements. Think hippie love beads and bellbottoms marching on the White House, or backyard keggers with all the cool kids and a single wide-eyed science nerd, or simply the dining room of a middle-class family in 2012 Tulsa, with Mom spooning mushed peas between a baby’s squinched lips on one side of the table and Uncle Joe and Teen Big Brother on the other side, their faces twisted in major gross-out.

  Your time choices may invoke concepts such as

  The culture of an era

  A community’s response to a historical event

  The rules of a social class or interaction between social classes

  The fickle subculture of a small group, such as a family, a school, or a circle of friends

  Your social context drives the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the characters and thereby turns your plot left, right, and — if you play your cards right — completely upside down.

  Info dump alert! Be stingy about sharing the history of your setting with young readers. History dumps put the skids on pace and can come across as lectures. Leave that to the high school history teachers. Generally, it’s more important that readers get a feel for the setting than the history behind it. When history is necessary because it advances your plot or illuminates your characters, keep it brief and sprinkle it around as much as possible. (I explain how to sprinkle later in the chapter.)

  Setting Up Your Characters

  Setting is a powerful tool for characterization. Used strategically, it can influence and illuminate a character’s thoughts, words, and actions.

  Manipulating their minds

  Setting offers juicy opportunities to expose a character’s thinking — and to manipulate it ruthlessly. Deliberately juxtapose settings to rattle your character and make him rethink what he thought he knew. Pull that kid out of his element for important emotional moments and then let him work out whether to scramble back to that comfort zone or formulate new understandings of his world. Or move him for good to a setting that’s clearly an ill fit and flat-out force him to confront his bugaboos. Setting manipulation can spark fantastic psychological fireworks. Consider a story that sends an orphaned Quaker boy to live with his slave-owning uncle in Antebellum Virginia. Psychological fireworks, indeed!

  Similarly, setting can reveal a character’s emotions. Where is he happiest? Where does he go when he’s in despair? Imagine a 15-year-old boy finding solace in the songs of mockingbirds on an isolated, flower-enshrouded mountaintop. Now imagine that same boy hunkered under a freeway overpass, enshrouded in the sounds of the traffic, the vibrations of the ground, and the fumes of a world too busy to notice him. One character, two very different ways of coping, with setting to thank for the difference.

  Setting can bear a character’s soft underbelly and force epiphanies. For the full ins and outs of characterization, check out Chapter 5.

  Putting words in their mouths

  Choose your settings with an ear for adding zip and depth to dialogue. You can tell a lot about a person by the words that pass her lips — and nothing gets those words flowing better than a setting that challenges her. Tromping through biting snow drifts, stepping on a sticky wad of gum, walking through a screen door she didn’t see . . . any one of these setting-induced unpleasantries can put curses in the mouths of saints. An annoyed teen can really cut loose.

  Social context can be just as vocally inspiring, with your character reacting to changes in the dynamics of her social group or simply talking in jargon that reveals the community she grew up in.

  Character word choice isn’t limited to dialogue, of course. Characters who narrate their own stories fill their narratives with words that reflect their region, social context, and time period. The same goes for a protagonist’s internal thoughts, or interior monologue, in a third-person narration. Chapters 9 and 10 cover dialogue and narrative voice in detail, really digging into how a character’s where affects his words.

  Kicking characters in the pants

  Characters need a sense of place to know how to behave. Your setting’s social context influences your character’s value structure, helping him determine when something is acceptable and when things must change.

  If that awareness isn’t enough to make him act when you need him to, you can nudge him along with location changes and place-related props or give his social context a good tweak. For example, you can put a dingy, mud-caked window screen between him and a loud fight outside, forcing him to make a choice: Ignore the fight or leave the safety of his house to watch it — or maybe even put up his dukes and dive in. Whichever choice he makes, there will be consequences, and your plot will flow from there. Your manipulation of the setting can be the kick in the pants young characters need to move them into the next phase of the plot.

  Tying Your Plot to Your Place

  Setting’s job doesn’t have to stop with prodding your main character through the scenes. It can drive the whole darned plot. It can be a primary motive for the action, with you speeding up or slowing down the pacing and relaxing the tension by moving characters to different locations or changing the elements around them. Writers of action-adventure stories need to understand this, but setting changes can be an equally powerful tool to someone seeking high drama, say, in historical fiction, where the events and social context of a time period force characters to action. With such stories, your setting choices determine the very structure of the story.

  Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is a superb example of how you can bring all the elements of setting — time, location, and social context — to bear on the plot, using location changes to propel the action forward. In that book, setting offers a motive for the action, with the main character actively seeking a new physical environment. Part I of Pullman’s story has its star, 11-year-old Lyra, yearning to go to the icy North. The plot moves forward step by step with her physical progression Northward:

  Chapter 1: Lyra is inside a pompous, stuffy room in Jordan College, breaking rules in search of excitement.

  Chapter 2: Lyra hides in a cramped closet, stifled by the hanging scholar robes, overhearing stories of the North and forming her dream to go there.

  Chapter 3: Lyra moves up to the rooftops of Jordan College and gets a view of the world beyond the college’s walls, as characters from the North come to Jordan and kidnap children to take them Northward. Her friend is kidnapped, now turning her desire to go North into need.

  Chapter 4: Lyra gets the opportunity to travel North and she takes it, traveling for the first time in her life, from the college to the grand city of London.

  Chapter 5: Lyra gets stuck in London and feels caged by daily life inside stores and grown-up apartments and restaurants. She finally runs out into the night, escaping to go North.

  Chapter 6: Lyra meets up with the Gyptians and embraces their nomadic life aboard riverboats, completing her journey to the North over the next few chapters, taking readers to Part Two of the book, with Lyra in the North for the climax of the story — which is tied intricately to a physical phenomenon of the North called the aurora borealis.

  Whether you tie your plot and your setting to the same wagon or just use setting changes to push the story forward, you can cra
ft your time, location, and social context to directly affect your storyline.

  Not every story involves an epic journey through many locales. If your story demands just one or a very few locations, that’s okay. Just use the tips in this chapter to make those locations as rich and influential as they can be.

  Choosing the Best Setting for Your Teen Novel

  Where you choose to set your story determines much of what happens in it and how it happens. Set yourself (and your characters and plot) up for success by choosing the right setting from the get-go. That means always choosing a setting that advances your characterization and storyline and enriches the storytelling.

  Never settle for knee-jerk settings simply because they seem like the natural places for the characters to be. Don’t put your character in his bedroom for no other reason than you need a retreat for him, and don’t put him in a classroom because, well, a kid’s gotta go to school, doesn’t he? That’s settling for a knee-jerk setting. Instead of going with your knee, engage your brain. That is, brainstorm creative alternatives that offer juicy possibilities for sensory setting details and unexpected dialogue and action. Throw out that bedroom retreat idea and come up with other places a boy can go when he’s overwhelmed, like rock-skipping at the lake (look out, Guy in Boat!), a curb at the Gas ’n’ Go with some buddies and a Slurpee, under the back porch, in the tunnel slide at the park, or in the doghouse with beloved Ruffers at his side.

  Be provocative. Don’t drop your characters just anywhere and rely on the action and the dialogue to do the work. Put your characters in unexpected settings that provoke surprising dialogue and unpredictable action. That makes things exciting for your readers — and for you.