It's Easy? Who's Easy?
Writing a Young Adult (YA) novel is easier than writing a so-called "regular" novel? Who honestly swallows that tripe? Jen Hendren's got a great post on the mysterious tendency of some people to believe that writing for a younger audience means that somehow the process of writing is much simpler. Ha!
The only difference between a novel and a young adult novel is that the main character is generally a young person and that ten-year-olds can be expected to read the book with the same ease as, for example, fifty-year olds. But the latter is plain old marketing - it has nothing to do with how the books are written. Nothing at all.
I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was 10. Not a single young character in there anywhere (Pippin, the youngest, is 29 years old (I think)). I read 1984 and Animal Farm at 13, at which age I also read The Fountainhead, Gone With the Wind and White Nights (Dostoyevsky) for the first time. I also reread some of my beloved so-called YA books, The Root Cellar (Janet Lunn), The Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, From Anna (Jean Little), etc. All this to point out that good books have no age and that youth is the best time for devouring all good books.
So why would any good book be easy to write, and why should the fact that it's marketed as YA have anything to do with the matter? Not to mention that all writing is easy! It's the editing that takes time and deication :-)
The only difference between a novel and a young adult novel is that the main character is generally a young person and that ten-year-olds can be expected to read the book with the same ease as, for example, fifty-year olds. But the latter is plain old marketing - it has nothing to do with how the books are written. Nothing at all.
I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was 10. Not a single young character in there anywhere (Pippin, the youngest, is 29 years old (I think)). I read 1984 and Animal Farm at 13, at which age I also read The Fountainhead, Gone With the Wind and White Nights (Dostoyevsky) for the first time. I also reread some of my beloved so-called YA books, The Root Cellar (Janet Lunn), The Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, From Anna (Jean Little), etc. All this to point out that good books have no age and that youth is the best time for devouring all good books.
So why would any good book be easy to write, and why should the fact that it's marketed as YA have anything to do with the matter? Not to mention that all writing is easy! It's the editing that takes time and deication :-)
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