An Australian author living in Norway
When an author says, “I write children’s books”, the reaction is often one of approval and respect. After all, what more noble pursuit in literature could there be than creating the foundation for future generations of life-long readers?
But when a writer says, “I write young adult books” the reaction can be, sadly, quite different. And the more I talk to other writers of young adult fiction, the more I discover how many of us are still having to defend our choice to write it.
I was recently tagged in a game of “blog tag” by author Nola Sarina, who writes paranormal, fantasy and science fiction. The idea is to answer a series of questions about my current work in progress, so here goes:
Sweet Alyssum; it is part of ‘The Eidolon Cycle‘ series.
If I’m to use acknowledged literary genres, Sweet Alyssum and the series it is part of is New Adult Paranormal Fiction. However, as I’ve said before, this series is something of a genre-buster. I believe it has wider appeal as far as age is concerned, and the paranormal element, while important, is not the most important part; rather it is a backdrop for what are essentially stories about individual young women facing very human challenges and conflicts.
Nicky Bailey witnessed her parents kill each other when she was only seven years old. Now, eleven years later, the imaginary friends she invented to help her through her trauma have reemerged and are insisting they are real. And dead. Nicky has never believed herself to be normal, but now she thinks she’s having a complete mental breakdown. It’s only when she finds an old photograph of one of these eidolons, as they call themselves, in a history book – a man who died in the 1920s – she has no choice but to accept their story, and her own family’s history.
When the eidolons tell her that she and what’s left of her family are in danger of attack from a woman Nicky only truly remembers from her nightmares, she must decide whether to stand strong and face her deepest fears, or run. But she soon discovers that her childhood home, her mother’s last words, and an old book of fairy tales may hold the secret to her strange visions, and maybe the key to her family’s survival.
Originally, this was to be a sequel to Amaranth. But when I began to explore the life of Nicky Bailey, who was eight years old in Amaranth, there was so much more going on that had nothing to do with Eva Hamilton (Amaranth’s protagonist). So I decided to write it as a standalone story which would incorporate elements and characters from the eidolon world, but would serve to enrich the cycle, rather than be part of the same storyline.
Part of the story is based on plans I originally had for Amaranth, but had to leave out as the book took on a life of its own, and the rest is inspired by Nicky herself. She’s a wonderful character to write, and I hope she is as lovable in her own story as she was as a small child in Amaranth.
Many writers build imaginary Hollywood casts from their characters, but this has never been something I’ve been very willing to do. The characters are so clear in my mind, putting someone else’s face, voice or mannerisms to them is almost impossible. I suppose I could see Nicky as a young Sandra Bullock, and Bridget, her therapist, something like a cross between Diane Weist and Julie Andrews. As for Andrew… perhaps Chris Hemsworth? Though that might have more to do with Joss Whedon’s cheeky writing for him in The Avengers than anything.
To continue with the game, I’m tagging Sammy H.K Smith, Paige Daniels, Chelsea Ranger, Gisèle Le Chevallier and Audrey Camp. Over to you, ladies!
As long as there has been literature, there has been a desire and need to group it into categories. There is no officially agreed set of literary genres, and the more I become involved in the publishing industry, the more I realise that these days genre is as much about target audience and marketing strategy as it is about stylistic categorisation or plot type.
It seems that many publishing houses and literary agents are increasingly focused on categorising books by what they believe a given demographic will buy and read, rather than the contents of the books themselves. This makes it incredibly difficult for writers whose work crosses age, gender or racial boundaries and has potential appeal to a wider audience. You’d think wider appeal would mean a more saleable book, right? Not according to the experts.
Let’s take the genre currently known as Young Adult, for example. (Note: to me this has always been a ridiculous name for the age-group spanning the years between 12 and 18: since when is a twelve-year-old ANY kind of adult? But that’s a rant for another day.) The basic requirement for a Young Adult novel is that its protagonist is between the ages of 12 and 18 years (though 13 to 17 seems to be the best bet), and deals with the sorts of issues kids in this age range are interested in and go through themselves (or, if we’re going to be totally cynical, what older people think kids in this age range are interested in). While I believe there’s a very appropriate safety-net involved in this categorisation, (you can at least be fairly confident they’re not going to contain a lot of gratuitous sex, swearing or violence), to suggest that all people this age like the same kind of books is ludicrous. Do all people between 30 and 50 like the same books? So then a sub-genre system is employed; we have YA Contemporary, YA Fantasy, YA Sci Fi… and so on.
So what’s wrong with that? you ask. Nothing. Except that it pigeonholes both the books and the people who might read them. If you categorise books by life-stage, you’re saying that once you’ve completed a life-stage, you no longer have any interest in it, even for nostalgia’s sake. Or if you haven’t reached a certain life-stage, you can’t be interested in it yet.
Have you ever felt embarrassed because you enjoyed a Young Adult title, even though you’re in your twenties, thirties or older? I know plenty of people who were embarrassed to admit they’d read and loved The Hunger Games trilogy simply because it was classified YA. And yet, had the protagonist been just a couple of years older, it would have been marketed as Adult Dystopian, and those people would have been able to proudly proclaim how much they enjoyed it.
Then there is the lost genre, dubbed ‘New Adult’ by St. Martin’s Press in 2011. A ‘New Adult’ is someone in the approximate age range of 18-25, dealing with the pressures of becoming responsible for his or her own life for the first time. It’s a period in anyone’s life fraught with change, stress, excitement, adventure… all the ingredients for a great story. And yet, this genre is a black-hole according to a vast number of agents and publishers. Why? Because apparently 18-25 year olds don’t read.
I’ve just begun work on a sequel to Amaranth, and although I won’t share too much about the actual story just yet, I can tell you how it came about. Originally, Amaranth was quite a different story; it was still based on a girl who committed suicide, but I had a completely different story planned for her than the one she ended up with. I had planned for Amaranth to have two very distinct parts, the first where Eva discovers her new existence and meets young Nicky and Elliot, the second would take place around ten years later when Nicky was eighteen and Elliot into his twenties. By the time I was halfway through the plan for what Amaranth eventually became, I realised I was never going to fit all of it into one book, especially since there are quite strict word limits for first-time authors as a rule. I’d also had real trouble with how to manage such a significant time jump without having to spend a long time describing what had happened in the interim and boring readers to sleep.
The best way I could think to tackle this problem was to further develop what I had in mind for Amaranth and split the whole idea into two books. But then the book took on a life of its own, and Timothy asserted himself into a main character in a way I hadn’t intended. He became key to the whole story and made it so that the second book could never really be about Eva.
The result is that though Book Two will essentially have the same plot I’d always intended, it won’t be a linear follow-on to Eva’s story. There will be new characters, and the ones we already met in Amaranth will have ten more years under their belts and will have changed in ways even I hadn’t anticipated.
In ancient Greece the peerless beauty, Amaranth, walks into the Alcyonian Lake and drowns, becoming the first immortal eidolon, cursed to forever wander amongst the living, unseen and unheard. Thousands of years later in the modern-day city of Lennox, nineteen-year-old Eva Hamilton throws herself off a cliff and awakens unharmed on the rocks below. With no memory of why she jumped and unaware she is bound by an ancient curse, she must find a way to either accept or escape her fate.
Back in 2009 I awoke one morning from a dream that I had started writing a novel about a girl called Eva. The name of the book in the dream is way too embarrassing to share with you, but it did plant the seed of an idea in my mind.
When I was a child, I used to write little books, complete with (terrible) illustrations, staple them together and give them away as gifts. Even back then I would brag about how I was going to be an author when I grew up.
The problem was that I never had any truly good ideas. Even when I decided to study professional writing in my 20s, I had a horrible time coming up with ideas to complete the assignments. I’m fairly sure most of what I wrote was complete rubbish. Don’t get me wrong, the writing itself was quite sound, at least if my grades were anything to go by, but it was the fact that it was based on almost nothing that brought it down.
So anyway, after I had the Eva dream I started to think about writing again for the first time in years. Walking home from work one day I looked around at the other people going about their business and thought to myself, “I really don’t pay attention to any of these people. They could be the walking dead, and I would never know.” And the idea for Amaranth was born.
Once I made a start, the ideas, for once, came thick and fast. I just sat down one evening and started to write, and the more I wrote, the more the story formed in my mind. I badgered my partner constantly about whether he thought this or that idea was good and, though he would claim otherwise, he helped me shape the idea into something I could apply a story to.
Not long afterwards, I fell pregnant with my daughter and the whole project was more or less shelved. I did write bits and pieces while I was traveling for work in Japan and the US, but there was something about the plot-line I had in mind that just didn’t sit right. I decided to leave it alone for a while and concentrate 100% on motherhood.
Throughout my daughter’s first year, Amaranth would pop up and swim about in my head now and then, the idea would morph and change, and then slink back into my subconscious. It wasn’t until she started in kindergarten and I had a few moments to myself that I felt ready to think about it seriously again. I cringed as I took out what I had written nearly two years before, ready to throw out the lot and start again.
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