Why I No Longer Write YA Fiction

I started to consider retiring my pen name Bre Faucheux for the purpose of writing books long before DiversityGate, and long before I started making political content. Today I made the decision to unpublish the last of the books I had published under that name. I’m still very proud of the books I wrote under it, particularly Violet Blake (even though I should have picked a better title) because they were how I learned to write good novels. I ventured into writing adult books back in 2015 and left my Bre Faucheux pen name behind. I had great success with the other pen names, and never even considered looking back.

But the core reason why I decided to stop writing YA started back in fall of 2015. I noticed a pattern with all the books I read from that particular genre. They were the same story told in different ways over and over and over again. And most of them weren’t even that good. In fact, they were less than mediocre. Of course, I was starting to get wise of the far leftist narratives that lurk in them by this time. But truthfully, I found the genre boring. I would pick up a new book and it read similar if not identical to the previous one. Strong heroine. Hunky guy. A hint of danger.  And don’t get me wrong, sometimes that makes for a good novel. Even so, I was bored. I knew that if I wanted to succeed in that market, I would have to write things that were opposite to my changing values. Not to mention that writing on my other pen names was so much more fun. 

Artists used to make large monuments, erect buildings, and paint paintings to make their dreary world beautiful. To make life worth living. To add a bit of aesthetic pleasure to a sad world where the average life span was less than fifty years. But now, artists create art to please their individual desires, wants and needs. Which are often rushed and quite ugly. I’m not saying I want to write literary masterpieces. I hate literary novels and always have. But the essence of writing things that are unique and beautiful has been lost to the YA world. They want something that fits a particular market and that can be hounded on for as long as possible before the craze dies out. 

Now, I have nothing against authors who write to market or particular niches. I’ve done a little of that over the years. But I do have an issue with the same concepts being pushed so hard that every book sounds the same, reads the same, and is the same. Last week I ventured into the YA section of Barnes & Noble for the first time in years. I stopped reading the genre ages ago and decided I would pick up a recently published work to see if the publishers had by some miracle, taken a chance and done something different. Which I thought was a possibility given the very enticing and unique blurb on the back of this particular book. 

Nope. No such luck.

It was the same story line yet again by page 40. And the fact that it was set in the 1800s but the characters had problems stemming from modern day social issues certainly didn’t help. A shame given that the concept was actually quite unique and had potential.

I’m not saying that I want each and every book to be unique. It’s been said that there are no unique ideas. Just the same stories told in different ways. But the thing is, I don’t want to know that I’m being told the same story. Make me think it’s different. If you’re going to write about vampires, make me think it’s unlike the stories I’ve already read. 

The YA world (or rather the traditional publishing world in general) has an agenda and a world view that I already don’t find compatible with my beliefs. But the truth is, I don’t know why anyone would want to be traditionally published these days. When someone tells me that they want that, all I can think is that perhaps they need social approval or they think they’ll be apart of some elite club that barely makes any money from their books but has a blue check mark on Twitter. Self publishing, if done right, can make you ten times more money than 90% of traditionally published authors. I read the Twitter feeds of certain authors on a regular basis only to find that they’re constantly complaining about their publisher nixing this idea or that one. How getting published doesn’t mean you get to do what you want. That alone is revealing. It tells us that traditional publishers know that they want a very particular thing that they think will sell. They also dump the vast majority of their debut authors without proper marketing if they think the book won’t sell like they hoped. Meaning they’re not willing to take chances and they throw most of their money toward authors who have proven they can sell not even their books… but often times their internet personality.

Writing under Bre Faucheux was fun. It helped me to learn a lot. I started by learning how to take criticism by receiving bad reviews. Then I learned how to round out and conclude a story arc. I learned that I can’t be my own editor. I need help. And I learned the discipline required to complete a novel, then buckle down and write another one. To this day, I’ve written over 50 books over four pen names and I’m considering starting a new one. But not in YA. Never again.