Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

“Stop!” The voice was getting closer.

  I broke into a run.

  That’s when I heard the click of the gun.

  Adding variety to the narrative beats gives the second passage great rhythm and opens up opportunities for creating tension and generating emotion (more on those points in the next two sections). The result feels more like a fleshed out scene than simply a verbal exchange between an escapee and his pursuer.

  Making the action count

  Narrative beats offer wonderful opportunities to enhance the dialogue and the overall story, yet too often writers fill them with dud action. Characters brush hair from their eyes, for example, or they turn to look at the other speaker. Sure, technically that’s action, but it’s innocuous. You want action that takes its job seriously, revealing, illuminating, deliberately undermining, and pushing characters into action.

  The action in a beat can add information to the scene, as in the preceding example of the prisoner fleeing down the dark corridor. Or it can tell readers what inflection to give a line of dialogue, taking the pressure off the dialogue to provide all the emotional context. Check out this example:

  Beth looked at him. “I want to go, too.”

  You don’t know how to read this, do you? Is Beth whiny? Is she desperate? Is she resigned or hostile? There aren’t any clues in the action I’ve tucked into that narrative beat. You may be tempted to solve this by using italics to add emotion, as in the following version, but that’s melodramatic and wholly unnatural. It puts all the pressure on the dialogue to convey the girl’s desperation.

  Beth looked at him. “I really want to go.”

  This next version incorporates revealing physical action into the narrative beat, taking the pressure off the dialogue and giving readers insight into Beth’s determination:

  Beth darted ahead of him and blocked the doorway. “You’re not leaving without me.”

  Let the word look be a red flag for you. It’s a legitimate verb, yes, but using it can easily become a habit in narrative beats, causing you to miss opportunities to contribute to the plot or the characterization. You’d be surprised how often characters are looking or staring or smiling or frowning in manuscripts submitted to publishers.

  The Stop Looking Test calls out action words you should not be using in your narrative beats and reveals a tendency toward generic actions in your beats. You apply the test by counting the number of times you use specific words. You can use a text counting program (found online) to do a merciless word count and see what tops your list besides the and that, or you can pick some of the common baddies and search for them in your manuscript with your word-processing program’s find-and-replace feature. Here’s a list of generic verbs that crop up in narrative beats with surprising frequency:

  Or perhaps you have pet nouns and phrases, such as “fresh breeze” in a story involving sailing. A word-counting program can reveal those pets.

  Skeptical that a word count can reveal anything useful about something as subjective as dialogue? Let me tell you about a writer friend of mine, whom I’ll call Stewy (hey, I like the name). I had Stewy put the first draft of his YA manuscript to the Stop Looking Test — which revealed that he’d used the word look 398 times. His manuscript was only 352 pages. Stewy also found that he’d used the word face 121 times, glance 118 times, smile 83 times, nodded 82 times, turned to 82 times, scowl 32 times, frown 17 times, and, because he was writing an epic fantasy in a formal voice, visage and countenance 5 times each. Clearly, Stewy was trying to add action and narrative beats to the characters’ conversations, but as this test reveals, he needed to learn that conversations are about more than the expressions on the participants’ faces. He also had a tendency to nudge the dialogue along by having characters repeat or rephrase what others just said, as in, “Wait. What do you mean, evil? How is he evil?” The Stop Looking Test revealed that he used the phrase What do you mean? 12 times, What are you saying? 3 times, and wait 9 times. That’s heavy-handed information delivery, a no-no I address earlier in this chapter.

  This test was a major turning point for Stewy. Addressing nothing else but his dialogue and its supporting beats in his revision, he took the next draft of his manuscript to an entirely new level. In fact, I’m proud to say that a signed copy of that fantasy, Stewy’s publishing debut, occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf.

  He said, she said: Doling out dialogue tags

  Dialogue tags, also called attributives, are signposts that tell your readers which character is speaking during a conversation. Strong dialogue wields its tags in a low-key manner, with the effect of pointing its finger instead of smacking readers upside the head. That means, most of the time, sticking to the old standby “said”: He said . . . she said . . . Tommy said . . . the scary man in the double-knit cardigan said. “Said” has earned its keep in fiction, being a soft word that readers’ eyes can slide over, letting them register the speaker’s identity without being distracted from the dialogue itself.

  You may be tempted to declare “said” boring and go for more active attributives, such as uttered or bemoaned. Indeed, those are active verbs, but they’re also distracting. Leave information about mood or the manner of delivery to the exposition in the narrative beat or to the dialogue itself.

  Here are a few other tips for choosing your tags:

  Be judicious. You don’t have to ban all non-said attributives, but if you do stray from the old standby, do so only occasionally. Replied and asked are common, slidable words, as are cried and shouted, but don’t go crazy. Keep the list minimal.

  Use speaking verbs. You can’t smile a line of dialogue. Nor can you laugh it. You certainly can’t guffaw it. And there’s no way to hiss dialogue that contains no s’s. If you’re going to use tags other than said, stay in the realm of the possible.

  Lay off the adverbs. Adverbs such as quickly, angrily, and the like tend to hang out with attributives. Those adverbs — words that describe how a line of dialogue is delivered — defeat the purpose of all your hard work in crafting emotive dialogue and action in the narrative beat. Adverbs are “telling,” and as such, they’re functional but not engaging.

  Purge unnecessary tags. A manuscript crammed with “he said/she said” can feel choppy, so purge some. The rhythm will get a boost when you omit some dialogue tags entirely and replace them with narrative beats that clarify who’s speaking. Check this out:

  Hector stopped his ascent when his hands reached the top rung. The ladder swayed but didn’t slip. His eyes were just above the roofline. “You’re not going to watch from up here, are you?” he said.

  “Best view in the house,” Constance replied. “C’mon. It’s like you’re right there in the sky with the fireworks.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hector said.

  “Not everything is life and death, you know,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” he said. “But I’m going to live long enough to tell you which things are. Come get me when the fireworks are over. I’ll be under my bed.” Then he climbed down, slowly, rung by excruciating rung.

  Now here it is with some of the tags replaced by narrative beats:

  Hector stopped his ascent when his hands reached the top rung. The ladder swayed but didn’t slip. His eyes were just above the roofline. “You’re not going to watch from up here, are you?” he said.

  “Best view in the house.” Constance patted the roof shingle next to her. “C’mon. It’s like being right there in the sky with the fireworks.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Ay dios mio, Hector. Not everything is life and death.”

  “Maybe not.” He chanced a look at the loose gravel below the ladder. “But I’m going to live long enough to tell you which things are. Come get me when the fireworks are over. I’ll be under my bed.” Then he climbed down, slowly, rung by excruc
iating rung.

  The result is a smoother telling that uses body language and prop manipulation to let readers know who’s speaking. This enriches the characters and overall storytelling. To aid in identifying the speakers during the tagless back-and-forth in the middle, I’ve added Hector’s name to Constance’s dialogue. This kind of name-calling is a useful trick, but go easy on it. Using character names within dialogue is okay now and then, but it can sound stilted when you do it too often.

  Don’t tack on phrases all the time. Consider the following:

  “I’m gonna catch you,” he said, running to his left.

  “No you won’t,” she cried, jumping over a rock.

  “Watch me,” he shouted, dodging behind a tree.

  “Yuck!” your readers will say. (No, that one they’ll bemoan. Most definitely.)

  Welcoming teens with white space

  You can enhance dialogue by what you don’t surround it with. White space is that empty space surrounding the letters, words, paragraphs, and images on a page, and it’s important to YA writers because kids regard this visual elbow room with a sense of relief. Pages with long text blocks and minimal white space can intimidate the heck out of young readers, but you can welcome teens in with plenty of white space.

  Teenagers (and adults for that matter) are known to make book purchases based on a quick thumbing of the book in the store. They’re gauging the amount of white space and dialogue in the book.

  Publishers are conscious of the white-space factor and so design young adult fiction with wide margins and large, roomy fonts whenever possible. You can do your part by using more and shorter passages of dialogue to increase white space. Or when you’re feeling especially manipulative, you can increase your paragraphing (that is, the frequency with which you cut away from one paragraph to start another) to create shorter blocks of text, more empty indents at the beginning of paragraphs, and more empty blips where paragraphs end before reaching the right-side margin.

  You have more freedom with paragraphing than you probably think. The only “rule” is that you should break to a new paragraph when you move on to another idea, but that’s only applicable for nonfiction books, anyway. In fiction, where you’re telling a story rather than organizing facts, the paragraphing is an element of the storytelling, and you can do whatever the heck you want to do with it.

  You can cut away for dramatic impact, for instance.

  Or to make a point.

  Or to increase the pace.

  Or, heck, for the simple rhythmic joy of it.

  Paragraphing is a storytelling tool that goes far beyond white-space manipulation. Here are some tips for paragraphing your YA fiction, with the needs of young readers front and center:

  White space is very welcoming to kids, so start a new paragraph when the one you’re writing seems long. Older teens are more tolerant of long paragraphs, but don’t get carried away. Even grown-ups like their white space.

  To increase your pace, use a succession of short paragraphs.

  Want to shift your point of view from one character to another? Start a new paragraph.

  Start a new paragraph when you move on to a new action, incident, phase in the scene, or featured character.

  Give every new speaker in a conversation a new paragraph.

  Sometimes authors allow characters a long turn to talk. Perhaps the character is telling a story and the other characters are listening with rapt attention and zero interest in interrupting the flow. If you try this, consider chopping up the long hunk of dialogue into several small paragraphs to make it more welcoming to youngsters. When the speaker doesn’t change, each new paragraph of dialogue has opening quotes, but the line preceding it doesn’t have closing quotes. Save the closing quotes for the absolute end of that speaking turn. I must warn you, though, that a long speaking turn isn’t kid-friendly. Consider cutting away from a long speech for a narrative moment — such as action, or setting observations, or dialogue from another character that encourages the long talker to go on. Then go back to him and give him the rest of his turn.

  And here are a couple of paragraph formatting tips (consider this a preview of my submission formatting advice in Chapter 13):

  Don’t add an extra line space between paragraphs in your manuscript. Those between-paragraph spaces may be the norm in blogs and Internet articles, but they’re not acceptable in fiction manuscripts. They drive editors nuts. (Yes, I know this very book uses extra line spaces between paragraphs. I can’t help that — the For Dummies designers are a stubborn lot. Something about “a consistent look for all the books in the series,” blah, blah, blah . . . I’ll justify the extra line space in this book by saying how-to books follow different rules than fiction, but you know the real reason.)

  While I’m talking formatting, indent the first line of every new paragraph. Five character spaces is the generally accepted depth of an indent — which is what you usually get when you hit the tab button on your keyboard. Adjust the tab settings in your word-processing program if it doesn’t do this automatically or if the spacing seems uncomfortably long or too short to be easily noted by scanning eyes.

  Weighing your balance of dialogue and narrative

  Satisfying teen fiction establishes a balance between the dialogue and narration. If you have too much dialogue, the burden of conveying emotion falls too heavily upon the spoken words. If you have too much narrative, you risk turning off those young readers who thumb through the books with an eye for white space and dialogue. Yet again, the YA author must walk the line between the story’s needs and the needs of young readers.

  Gauging the effectiveness of the balance

  Judging whether you’ve achieved a balance between dialogue and narrative isn’t a matter of counting the words between quotation marks; it’s a matter of weighing the effectiveness of dialogue and narration as a unit. As long as you engage your readers, it doesn’t matter if you have far more narrative than dialogue. Trouble lurks in blocks of overly descriptive narrative that lack tension and sit on the page like big lumps.

  Strong dialogue is as much about the exposition that surrounds it as it is about the talking, so even if your text includes a lot of narration, you may have more conversing going on than you thought at first glance. Here are two books that include a lot of narration to good effect:

  The Book Thief: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, targeted to ages 12 and up, is almost 600 pages, with probably two-thirds of each page being narration rather than dialogue. This setup may intimidate younger readers, who tend to feel comfortable seeing white space and dialogue on their pages. The thing is, The Book Thief has a lot of friendly white space thanks to frequent paragraphing, and its conversational narration makes even the narrative bits feel like dialogue, establishing a satisfying balance.

  The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is skewed even more heavily away from dialogue, which makes sense considering her teen lead spends much of that book avoiding people (a wholly understandable impulse since those other characters would rather stab her in the throat than chat about the weather). The paragraphing, abundant action, and tension make that book’s dialogue/narrative balance satisfying.

  The reverse, a book that’s two-thirds dialogue on each page, can feel balanced if the narrative that does appear offers dynamic and revealing actions that challenge readers — perhaps deliberately contradicting the spoken words or teasing about feelings that the speaking character is trying to hide. Narrative should somehow add subtext or additional tension to the story.

  Exercise: Start with Dialogue

  In this exercise, you build a scene from nothing but spoken words. Follow these steps:

  1. Write a conversation with just the dialogue, letting the words unfold naturally.

  Don’t try to inject emotion or tension into the words. Just let the characters
utter what needs to be uttered. Don’t even add dialogue tags. Consider this a stream-of-conscious writing moment.

  2. Add narrative.

  Go back and underscore the emotion with body language and physical actions, taking the setting and props into account to reveal mood (as I discuss in Chapter 8).

  3. Insert dialogue tags.

  Go back and insert dialogue tags where you feel like you need a narrative beat for rhythm or where you see more than three lines of back-and-forth dialogue that has no surrounding narrative. Readers need clarification regarding who is talking so they don’t lose track.

  Now you have a full scene that should be evenly balanced.

  Doing a Little Mind Reading: Direct Thoughts

  When you want to give young readers insight into your protagonist’s state of mind without revealing those details to other characters in a conversation, you write the protagonist’s thoughts as if he’s talking to himself. This is called a direct thought. It helps to think of direct thoughts (sometimes called interior monologue or internal dialogue) as those comments that sit on the tip of your character’s tongue without actually being uttered:

  I picked up the recipe and read the next ingredient: coconut. Over my dead body. I trashed the recipe and then stirred more vanilla into the batter. Coconut should’ve been outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

  The last line in this example isn’t italicized because although it’s an opinion that certainly reveals the character’s mindset, it isn’t internal dialogue that’s one lip shy of spoken. This is called an indirect thought because it doesn’t offer the direct wording of the thought.

  A direct thought is a form of dialogue (hence the internal dialogue moniker) that’s not surrounded by quotation marks. Those are saved for spoken dialogue. It’s totally your call whether you set direct thoughts in roman font or italics. That said, they’re usually italicized in YA fiction as a handy visual cue for young readers. You can omit the speaker attribution if you go with italics. Thus,

  Aslon hefted his sword. Too heavy, he thought. He laid it back down.