Locating Your Inner Monster

Agent Molly Jaffa is doing a guest speaker spot on Backspace this week and she gave the most fun, not to mention easiest to understand, definition of the difference between external and internal conflict I've seen.

Doesn't matter that it was actually given as an explanation to the difference between middle grade and young adult fiction (beyond the protagonist's age).

Her point was that middle grade fiction tends to be more about external conflict, or:

There's a monster outside!!!

Whereas young adult fiction tends to be about internal conflict, or:

There's a monster inside me!!!

Awesome, right?Except that it made me realize a possible problem with my upcoming fairy tale adaptations.

The original publisher for these books wanted them to appeal to readers as young as nine... so, although I wasn't exactly thinking about them as middle grade, and I admit I'd never thought about the difference in focus until I read this great insight of Molly Jaffa's... I must have instinctively known this, because I kind of wrote them like middle grades. But, the new publisher is marketing them as YA.

I think both are very: There's a monster outside!!! (A scary stepmother who's also an evil wizard in Cinderella and a scary vampire queen and her minions in Sleeping Beauty...)

I fear that young adult readers will miss the: There's a monster inside me!! aspect.

Ah, well. C'est la vie.