Four things every YA author needs to know about teens

From Jane Friedman’s blog: Four things every YA author needs to know about teens.

My first reaction: skeptical. I think the first thing every YA author needs to know about teens is that teenagers are just as diverse in their characteristics as non-teenagers.

Every single YA panelist at every single SFF convention who has ever said: The thing about teenagers is they’re so angsty! They’re so emotional! Everything is life and death! I am looking directly at you. I hated angst just as much when I was fifteen or seventeen as I do now. Maybe more. Hated it in fiction, hated it in real life, I do not crave emotional upset in any form, thank you, but NO.

This is especially not what I want to see given that a lot of modern fantasy has moved toward the YA pattern: short, fast paced, high angst. I don’t mean everything, but that’s kind of a tendency, or I think it has been for the past twenty years. At least.

Let me just see what this post says …

A) Teens are easily bored

B) Teens are curious

C) Oh, here it is: Teens are highly emotional.

D) Teens push boundaries

I don’t see a single word about teens aren’t all the same, teenagers are a diverse group. Instead, it’s all teenagers have low dopamine levels and I’m like sure, if you say so, I guess it’s a puzzle that teenagers can actually get lost for hours in a specific book, videogame, binge watch a tv series, spend hours fishing or in a deer blind, fiddle with model cars or real cars for ages … you know what, maybe teenagers aren’t all, as a group, easily bored? Maybe the levels of dopamine are high enough in lots of teens to sustain prolonged interest in whatever? Just a suggestion.

But we can certainly say Oh, teens are easily bored, you need to grab a teen reader fast, and then, bonus, we can generalize from teenagers to people and push all books to start with explosions and THEN say Wow, people today have such low attention spans, when in fact if you offer readers long books and/or quiet openings that are engaging, then those books still work fine. It just has to be a good opening rather than a boring opening.

Last I checked, many people, teens included, still love TLotR and other really, really long books, such as, I don’t know, The Hands of the Emperor has a thousand ratings on Amazon. [You know, just saying, but Tasmakat only has 163. If you haven’t ever dropped over to Amazon to rate it, how about now? Preferably with five stars, but whatever, it seems pretty stable at an average of 4.8, so I’m not very concerned about its average star rating.]

I’m just going to note that not only are TLotR and The Hands of the Emperor both really, really long, but both also start quietly, and the quietness continues for a good long time. Yet they are hooky, and plenty of people stay up late reading them.

Raise your hand if you disliked high-angst novels as a teen, and especially if you disliked high levels of angst in romance in novels. Everybody? Of course not. Lots of readers? Yes, for sure. And why are different people raising their hands for different kinds of books? Because readers are a diverse group, no matter their age or, sigh, their dopamine levels.

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