Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  Successful “surprise” settings must also be believable. Have valid reasons for putting the characters in that setting so it supports and enhances the story rather than distracts from it. Always ask yourself what makes this the best setting for the events at hand.

  Here are some things to mull over when you’re working out the setting, either for a scene or for the whole story:

  Time: If you don’t want to deal with a school setting, have your story take place during the summer. If you let it happen during the school year, you must account for the fact that a large portion of your teen characters’ awake time is spent in school.

  Familiarity of the place: Maybe the school setting itself isn’t what’s ailing you. It could be that you’re just bored by the familiarity of that setting and need to freshen it up. Or maybe you’re choosing the wrong place in the school. Is math class really the most dynamic choice for your scene? How about ducking your characters into the janitor’s closet, or putting them in the nurse’s office, or having them fetch something from the teacher’s lounge? Or hey, how about working in the cafeteria? There’s major teen angst in forced hairnet wearing. These are ways to let a character go to school without boring yourself — and your readers. If you really do need a classroom setting, Home Ec. provides great props and gets students more engaged in activities than does an English Lit. lecture. Or try a science room, where a lab session can be far more dynamic than a seated review of the periodic table.

  Characters: Do you know your main character well enough yet to predict how he’ll react to your setting decisions? Test his mindset and personality. Put him in a setting that’s loud and see whether he likes the ruckus or whether he cringes, wanting to flee. Knowledge is power: If he cringes, then you know that you can ratchet up his angst at your whim by simply adding more sensory stimuli or moving him to a crowded location — and vice versa, of course. You’ve got his number now.

  Audience: Setting can manipulate your audience along with your characters. Exploit that. For example, if you want the readers to feel anxious and flip through the pages quickly, you may try risky, scary settings. Just make sure they’re appropriate settings for your age group. Twelve-year-olds probably don’t need to be reading about raunchy rave parties, as tantalizingly risky as that may be to them.

  Your story driver: Is your story plot- or character-driven? Plot-driven stories focus on the action, with events taking priority; character-driven stories give primary consideration to your protagonist’s thoughts, decisions, and emotional journey. If your story is character-driven, tease and expose the character by choosing settings that push his buttons. If it’s plot-driven, the setting variety should reflect the ins and outs of the storyline. But even plot-driven stories need strong characters, so keep your characters growing through interactions with the setting.

  Plot: How big of a role do you want the setting to play in your story? Maybe you just want the setting to pull the readers in for a richer reading experience. That’s okay for some stories — you don’t have to go all-out all the time. Decide up front just how big of a job you want to assign to your setting.

  Consider your genre. If you’re writing a historical novel, you’ll probably need to give the social context serious attention and convey the time and era thoroughly by touching on it in every scene and having your characters interacting with props unique to that era. If you have an action-adventure tale in the works, give special thought to how the setting can advance your plot.

  Story structure and narrative voice: Your target age group determines your narrative voice and sentence style (see Chapter 9 for more on that), so your audience’s narrative voice needs to influence your handling of setting. Maybe you want short, declarative statements instead of a more formal voice and thus want shortcut settings, places kids are familiar with so you don’t have to explain them. That may well send you to the bedroom or the classroom; just be sure you freshen up those settings with interesting prop manipulations and unusual details (see the later section “Freshening up common settings” for tips). You’re going for familiar, after all, not generic.

  Above all, mix it up. Use multiple settings if you can, avoiding monotony by moving your characters around. And don’t just move them from building to building; try moving them outside when they’ve been inside, and see how they react to that change. Imagine a teen girl and her mom always bickering inside, and then move them outside for some forced gardening together. How would that setting change affect their dynamic? Would it push them to the edge (with sharp pruners in hand!), or would their enmity diffuse as the fresh air and physical distraction worked their magic? Contrasting settings can underscore characterization and be a factor in adding a moment of drama to a story.

  Making the Setting Come Alive

  You chose your setting for a reason — mine it so readers can experience that sense of place for themselves. Give them the sounds and smells, the textures, temperatures, and sensations that distinguish that location by having your character hear them, smell them, and feel them.

  In this section, I explain how to put all five senses to work in your writing, and then I give you an example to show how it’s done.

  Engaging the five senses

  When revealing setting, don’t rely solely on sight; doing so can lead you to long descriptions, which can function like off switches for young readers. Strong, effective settings engage all the senses.

  Show, don’t tell is the general writing rule that says not to tell readers something when you can show it through action instead. Showing is dynamic storytelling that delivers a richer reading experience for your audience.

  Here are three ways to engage the five senses in your fiction:

  Battle the elements. Every location has physical characteristics, such as lighting, temperature, and noise level. Have a character react to those elements in ways that convey to readers how the elements make him feel.

  Don’t just write that it’s cold in the snowy field; have your teen protagonist hunching his chin into his jacket, or blowing warm breath into his cupped hands, or poking his nose with a mittened finger to see whether it’s totally numb or if maybe he can still incite a sharp jolt of pain. You want the sensations of that place, and having your characters react to the elements is one way to convey that.

  Don’t rely on adjectives to convey your sensory details. Build the quality of those details into your other words. Adjectives such as “cold” and “snowy” become unnecessary when you bring in mitten-and-jacket-related action to convey the sensory details.

  Be creative with your sensory details, and work several together for greater effect. Sweat trickling down a boy’s back as he trudges through a cornfield may evoke the feeling of heat, but it’s generic. Go deeper. Work several elements together to get more bang for your buck: A boy trudging through a cornfield is so preoccupied with holding a jacket over his head to shield his scalp from the sun that he trips on a dirt clod and falls into the stalks, getting scratched and muddy. Now, not only is he hot, he’s having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day to boot. Imagine the words that would put in his mouth.

  Manhandle the props. Props offer your characters opportunities for tactile interaction with the setting — which means major opportunities for sensory details. Splintery chopsticks can be flung in frustration, pianos need their keys plunked, flowers must be sniffed, guest towels must be squeezed for softness. Every interaction with a prop is an opportunity to pull the readers deeper into your story by making them feel there.

  Write scenes about the setting. Your story is about a character and how he overcomes a challenge, yes — but it’s also about the circumstances that define that character. Remember, his perception of the setting illuminates his mindset and influences his personality. You can get sensory with your storytelling by writing scenes that seem to be about the setting even though they’re really delivering information
about the characters and plot. Think of this as a legal bait-and-switch, one that makes for fun storytelling.

  Don’t worry that in pumping up the setting in your story you’re sacrificing action. All three of these sensory engagement methods call for boatloads of action. If you use these methods instead of just reporting the action to your readers, you’re putting them in it. That’s a great way to hook and keep teen readers.

  Get a feel for sensory details. Describe a room in your house without naming the room (living room, bedroom, and so on). Without your directly stating it, how will your readers know the following?

  The temperature in your room

  The room’s age

  The time of day or year

  What and/or whose room it is

  What’s beyond the room’s walls

  Engage as many senses as you can, using the three sensory engagement methods I describe earlier. Remember to work several setting details together for richer effect.

  Sample scene: Two girls on a bus

  Here’s a scene that applies three sensory engagement techniques: battling the elements, manhandling the props, and writing scenes that appear to be about the setting but really aren’t. In this scene, two teen girls ride a city bus home from their after-school jobs. The girls’ dialogue is interrupted by the vibrations of the bus, the sounds of its doors and the traffic around it, and props inside and outside of the vehicle, with the characters reacting to those elements. One girl is talking to the other while an old lady sits nearby, with the bus hitting potholes:

  The old woman’s grocery bag jiggled on the seat next to her. A carton of eggs was visible through the translucent plastic.

  “He said that?” Rachel shook her head slowly at the news of my job offer. “That boy needs to get real.”

  “I know, seriously,” I said. The bus rumbled through an intersection, with the egg bag jiggling forward as if on tiny legs. “I told him no way.”

  “But you need that job.”

  “Like a hole in the head, I do.” A big pothole and the bag jumped. I shoved my Fedora back, away from my eyes. It was stupid, buying a too-big hat. So what if it was half price? “I’d rather babysit the Miller Monsters every day than clean some rich boy’s bathroom once a week. If I was meant to be a maid, I’da been born with a feather duster instead of a hand.”

  Rachel snorted then grabbed at the pole in front of her as the bus swerved. A red Mercedes ripped by us, its horn blaring. Rachel jumped up and stuck her face out the window. “Look where you’re going, idiot!” she screamed. “Where’d you buy your license, Wal-Mart?” She sat back down. “Stupid jocks with daddy’s cars.”

  The old woman’s wrinkles deepened. Rachel flashed her most angelic smile. The egg bag teetered at the edge of the seat.

  “I’d take the job,” Rachel said. “Babysitting sucks rocks.”

  Can you see where that bag is going? Another pothole, and those eggs are scrambled. The point of the conversation is to show how poor these girls are, how one has some pride peeking through while the other lets it all hang out. But I’ve written the scene about a public bus. That setting serves up a great opportunity to show that their life is uncomfortable. Readers get shaking and harsh horns and screams and wrinkly scowls. The action in this scene revolves around the bus and the characters’ reactions to it, but readers discover a ton about the characters’ personalities and their lots in life.

  Researching your setting

  It’s important to know enough about your setting to be able to render it realistically. Of course, the easiest way to know your setting is to choose one that you’ve experienced personally. But this isn’t always possible — you can’t very well have firsthand knowledge of life as a page boy in the court of King Edward VI. If the all-important sensory details aren’t coming to you from personal experience, then research is a must:

  For physical locations: Consult maps and read resources that describe the area and its physical traits. Push yourself beyond the topographical details, seeking out the area’s typical architecture, the region’s birds (and their birdsong), its insects and wildlife, and so on.

  For time and social context: Consult news stories or historical accounts about the era or culture. The more primary sources (journals, diaries, memoirs, personal correspondence) that you can consult, the better. Be sure to keep young people’s perspective in mind as you note the details. What were young people’s lives like in that time and place? How were they different from your readers’ lives? Get the full rundown on using primary and secondary sources to research YA fiction in Chapter 3.

  Allot a section of your writing notebook to setting and write down details you discover during your research. Taking notes reinforces the details for you, rendering them a part of your creative process as you write. Plot and characterization ideas will almost certainly pop up. This section of your notebook can also be a great reminder for you during later drafts, which may come months or even years after your initial setting research. (Chapter 11 explains the process of building a story through multiple drafts.)

  Be a character in your own setting so you can later imagine your characters there. Close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting at a window in a house during that time and in that location (preferably use the house your character will live in). Look out the window. Imagine that view in the different lights of day and all four seasons. Now move to the other side of the window. How does each of those seasons feel now? How do they smell? How do they sound? Now leave the house in whatever transportation is available. If it’s a vehicle, take a window seat and peer out along the way. See the buildings you pass, the plants, the animals, and people. When you get to town, go window-shopping. Shopping or trade is an essential part of life for everyone, in every age and era, from markets to malls. Which shops do you encounter? What do they look like? Which shops have the most foot traffic? Go into the shop doors and ask the salespeople for help. Enhance this exercise by firing up music of the area, age, and culture. You’ll find plenty on the Internet that you can sample or stream.

  Author Jennifer Donnelly: Finding stories in places

  I don’t much like the word setting. It sounds theatrical, contrived, showy. I like the word place a lot better.

  Place is incredibly important. It isn’t just something you drop in behind your characters, like a stagehand lowering some fake scenery. Place is a character in its own right. The place where your protagonist grew up, the places she runs to or from — these places all work upon her as surely as her mother, her best friend, or her boyfriend does. These places shape her, define her, save her, or doom her. And just like your flesh-and-blood characters, place needs to come alive in your pages. It needs to speak to the readers. It needs to help explain why.

  To capture the feeling of a place, you have to be relentless in your pursuit of it.

  When I researched Paris, past and present, for my novel Revolution, I smelled, touched, listened, watched, and tasted my way through the city. I inhaled deeply in crypts and graveyards, taking in the scent of minerals, rain, and loss. I listened to market people coaxing and heckling and flirting, to mothers scolding their children. I touched old stones and old bones and heard them whisper. I walked for hours, watching the faces of the people I passed, watching the light. I forced myself down into the catacombs, though I suffer miserably from claustrophobia.

  Eventually, I knew how it felt to my character to stumble around in the catacombs, terrified. To see the guillotine at work in the Place du Tr/>ne. To light up the black 18th-century Parisian sky with fireworks. To fall in love at Sacre Coeur.

  I didn’t get everything I wanted. I never do. But I got what I needed, I think — a magpie’s cache of sights, sounds, and smells that allowed me to take my readers out of a subway car in Queens, a Starbucks in St. Paul, a beach chair in Miami. Out of the 21st century. Out of themselves and into the Pari
s that filled my heart — and broke it, too.

  Jennifer Donnelly is the author of several award-winning novels for adults and young readers, including the Carnegie Medal Winner and Michael L. Printz Honor Book A Northern Light and the genre-melding historical drama Revolution. For more about Jennifer, go to www.jenniferdonnelly.com.

  Weaving the Setting into Your Narrative

  All fiction writers strive to craft fast-paced plots, engaging characters, and believable dialogue, each delivered in an entertaining way. But YA fiction writers have the added task of crafting sentence structures and a narrative style that are accessible to young readers, and you have to fit your setting descriptions into the style you’ve chosen. Chapter 9 gets down and dirty with the process of synching sentence structure and narrative style to target audience, but here are five strategies aimed specifically at wielding setting with teen accessibility in mind.

  Keep in mind the Rule of Three: Try to trigger three senses per chapter. For readers, a rich setting is the difference between watching characters and being there with them, so if you can engage many senses with your writing, you’re golden. Scenes are more meaningful and satisfying that way.

  Sprinkling versus splashing

  Stopping your story to splash setting onto the page can be hazardous in teen fiction. Splashes can stop young readers cold. Sometimes, yes, you may need to pause your plot work for some setting details — a little descriptive moment — either because it fits the overall style of your narrative voice or because, simply, it’s time for a breather. But in general, splashing means stopping, and stopping is rarely what writers want. Instead, sprinkle.

  Work in the setting here and there, as if flicking wet fingers at your pages instead of pouring water on them straight from a spout. Even teens who aren’t intimidated by a few lines of description are likely to skip over big splashes in search of the story thread. Providing details about time and place as you go keeps settings accessible and interesting to teen readers.