Why do you write YA/children's lit?

People kind-of got into this on the college students thread, so I thought I would start its own topic.

Why do you write YA and/or children's lit?

For me, I've always known I would write about kids or teens. I just love all the stuff that happens when you are growing up and learning who you are, and I love that both genres empower kid and teen characters - just because they are young doesn't mean they can't make a difference somehow. I find that kids' and teens' viewpoints on the world are really interesting.

My novel this year covers a long time period in my main character's life, from teen to adult. The adult parts are interesting to me because I don't usually write about adults and their problems, but I've noticed they still have the same bent. She's in college/grad school for most of that part and to me that encompasses the same coming-of-age theme... she's not totally on her own yet (and then the rest is residency... again, she's still in more of a student environment than independent).

It may sound really simple, but I write for children and teens because I LOVE it. I always have. Even when I was a teen I knew I wanted to be a children's writer, and I started studying it after graduating at 17. (Walking into my first writing class and having one of the other students say "My story has swearing in it, do you want me to censor it for you?" was my lovely introduction to being a young writer. My writing teacher fixed him up real good, and after a while they started treating me like an equal). BUT ANYWAYS.

Children's literature is just magical for me. In the past few years I've been keeping a journal of all the books I read, and I've read about 200 novels and 300 picture books for "research", and I've only not enjoyed about 10 of them. I never get bored of reading children's or YA. Ever. And I hope I never will. (Can't see it happening). I have about 50 books and many more short stories in the works, and I know this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I'm willing to be patient until it happens. Cecil Castellucci said one time that when you decide you want to write, add ten years to your waiting time until you get published and start becoming successful. So I am willing to get more life experience, work hard, and just be persistent until it happens.

I think literature is really important for the younger generations - after all, hooking them on reading at this age is what drives the book industry for adults, so it's important to make sure the best quality books are getting into their hands!

I also love how diverse the age group is. There are a few billion kids in the world, and they are all different - I love that there are so many different types of books out there for this age :)

And writing for kids is the funnest thing ever! Plus the people you meet who are also writing for kids are awesome; and really supportive of each other, I've found.

I had a lot of reasons, sorry!

Like the two above: it is what I love to read. I had a tough time as a pre-teen/ teen and books were my escape. At almost 30, I still read a ton of books and middle grade is a genre I just never grew out of. Kids that age learn that parents have faults, people can be cruel and that there is grey between black and white. There is so much material to work with that mg rarely feels like a formula like romance or mystery books. Sure there are cliches but the cliches are somewhat closer to the truth: bullies, distant adults, red headed best friends...

I love reading middle grade. YA never held my attention and anything written for adults is just too dark for me to enjoy. I'm sixteen and still love to read stuff written for eleven-year-olds. Most of my friends (who are all determined to be as 'adult' and 'mature' as possible) think I'm immature, but there is so much depth to middle grade fiction that nobody seems to notice. And besides. Why bother being (or writing about) an adult? Kids have more fun.

Apologies if I repeat a lot of what's been said. I agree with everyone so far. It's really important to me that young people read. I don't care what, just get them to pick up a book and start reading.

I've heard plenty of really young teens and kids say that they don't like reading. I've heard plenty of PARENTS say that their kids just don't like reading. I want to take those parents by the shoulders, shake them and yell, 'Wrong! They just haven't found a book that interests them yet!'. So your 13 year old son doesn't like the mandatory Shakespeare and Salinger that his English teacher gave him? BIG surprise. Get that boy a book about awesome space adventures, complete with a bunch of explosions and bad guys getting their skulls crushed or whatever. He'll steam through that stuff like his life depends on it. And while he's reading, he's learning. Expanding his vocabulary. Becoming more intelligent. Becoming more worldly. All without having moved beyond his bedroom door.

Young Adult books are, by necessity, stripped of pretense. Young readers will sniff your literary indulgences and flourishes from a mile off and will be six hours into a videogame before the book has had a chance to get across a single paragraph. If you want to hold the attention of a young reader you need to get to the point. You need to tantalise them and keep them wondering what happens next. It's an exciting kind of fiction to read, and a challenging kind to write.

I write for young people because I never want to hear a young person say they don't like reading. If I'm ever lucky enough to get published one day, I'll be the guy who's there to give those kids their explosions and skull-crushy goodness.

YA. Dirtier than Salinger, Bloodier than Shakespeare.

Because I like it, and I'm good at it. Last year for NaNo I was going to write adult fiction, but I had to come up with a YA plot at the last minute because I missed the world of teenagers and high school so much.

The Fun Factor.

What's the Fun Factor? Well, I can't define it in concrete terms, but it's about how fun a story is to read, and how fun it was to write.

A lot of YA books are dark, and in comparison to the adult ones I read (which are not extruded-thrillers that are put out once a month by career writers), it's like authors for teens think the world is a dreary place. This may be your reality, but it's defintiely not mine, because mine is a more fun and happy place, even if bad things happen in it.

There's more opportunity for imagination and play in the kid world because there haven't been nearly as many blinders put on. I like adventures and colorful places. And since I was raised with the mentality of "big kid" (not miniature adult, but kid with more abilities), I like to see kids going to great places and doing things they never thought possible. That's the sort of thing that makes it fun.

Because I could never quite find the books I really, really wanted to find when I was 14. So I'm going to write them, for the next 14-year-old like me who goes looking for them.

Uh . . . that's probably not the great answer everyone else is giving, but it's definitely true for me.

Loki, that's probably closest to mine.

I write YA because it's more interesting. Adults, you're expected to do things. As a kid or a teen, everything and anything is set up to stop you, And this is wonderful, because that means you're just THAT MUCH MORE CAPABLE when you do anything.

Also? There's no BS. Every adult book I've read has had at least a chapter or two where I yawn. I'm often told 'you have to give it 50 pages before it gets interesting'. Guess what? I don't. And I won't. If that's expected, or even average, for some adult books, count me out. Kids books, you get straight to the point. You can still do foreshadowing, but everything has to be interesting, has to at least SEEM to make sense at the time, and there's no forgiveness.

Also, YA is what I read. I was reading it in elementary school; I preordered a YA book last week (it's coming out the 26th) and I'm a college senior. I don't see that changing.

Write what you want to read. Write what you LOVE to read. It's that simple.

Hmm, because I'm still in that age group? I think it might be it, because as I get older, my characters get older. Although, I'm sure of another reason:

I'm not as sociable and amazing as the characters create. In a way, I'm missing my years of doing radical, crazy things like my characters have been doing, even now. But the thing is, I'm not sad about it (alright, maybe sometimes but it's my own fault). In a way, I'm living through my characters. I find their stories far more interesting than my own. I get to do things by writing about them.

Such a loner writer thing to say, but it's the truth. :]

I can't help myself if I'm honest. When I was younger I LOVED the Enid Blyton books (one example) and many others as well and I was sad when I wasn't able to read any more (as I can't have children I don't even have the excuse to buy them again, although I'm determined to buy the whole set of the Famous Five series!)

The books did have a certain charm and I find myself automatically going back to that point - there's a lot of that charm missing in the adult books. It's hard to explain. Also I have problems because when I've written adult books I've been told that I HAVE to insert a sex scene or three! Ridiculous - as I pointed out ot one publisher, everyone knows what goes on behind closed doors but he wouldn't have it and I felt it owuld spoil the story so ... we parted company. That's something you rarely (if ever) have to worry about in children's books.

Also, I have a lot of dealings with children so I listen to them and write the stories they say they want to write - I'm terribly nosey but I always ask! :-) I love poking around the children's sections and I'll often buy some of the books to see what I'm up against (I was so proud when one publisher said I wrote like Jacqueline Wilson! The children I told said this was a great compliment). I keep being told I'm stupid to write children's stories but i refuse to give up. My book, The Wishing Tree would never have been sent out if it had not been for a little girl who read it while I was busy helping someone else. I have several notebooks and I panicked, wondering which book I'd accidentally brought to work on during my break ... luckily it was The Wishing Tree (which I'd given up on - I'd have been gutted if I'd realised I'd brought that during my break because I had 3 others I had to write but it must have been fate because she told me it was brilliant and wanted to buy it. I got it out that same night and, apart from some howlers, I realised it wasn't that bad a story and the only editing it needed was spell check and a little bit of pruning - not a bad job after all. That same book is now being made into a film!

Anyway, there are so many reasons I write for children but those are the main ones. Hope nobody minds me putting my twopennorth in!

Mel

I write it because I was always looking for a fantasy novel that had a well-written and developed romance subplot and never really found what I was looking for. I could only ever find books where romance was a driving force of the plot or where it was so incidental it seemed like the author was just up and saying "oh, by the way, she's going to marry the boy from the market that she met the first day she came into town." I wanted to see relationships being forged between characters and the gradual realizations that something more than friendship might be possible, but I didn't want there to be nothing but the relationship. If you take the romance out, does the plot still go? I hated it when the answer to that question was no.

So I guess I write YA fiction because I'm still looking for that book I never got to read.

Because I'm a sucker for coming of age stories, and they usually fall under YA.

Simple as that. ;)

Alice, I've read tons of those books. In fact, I'm a bit sick of it.

Know what I've never seen? A YA book where there isn't a crush in there. Whether it's the MC or a friend, an outright relationship or just a crush, boy or girl, if the characters are over 12 or so and there's someone of hte opposite gender there will be romance. Or romance mentioned. Or implied. Younger ages, there are still dozens of crushes and mentions of it or cooties or blaugh.

I am 21 years old and I've had one kiss, which I didn't enjoy. I have never actually wanted to be in a relationship, straight or non. I know there are others out there; I've talked to them. At the same time, I recognize dozens of kids out there, teens, who are being told-- as I was-- 'If you're 13 and not interested in making out, this is a problem with you. Everyone is. See? Even in the books you escape to.' And while others out there grow into it late, that's not the point; at thirteen, I can name 10 of my friends who (now) admit they weren't interested in that age. TV, movies, books, and peer pressure all say that EVERYONE is interested in that age, and not even having a crush or a boyfriend or whatever is abnormal.

When I write, there aren't always relationships. If there are, they're not a big deal. And it IS still possible for boys and girls to be friends without sexual attraction playing into it, even in the teen years.

...um.

*steps off her soap box*

I never set out to specifically write YA at first, it's just that everything I write I get told 'Hey, that's perfect for the YA market' or something along those lines. I guess my writing style and preferences are just geared towards writing for that particular age group. But then, all of my favourite books are either YA or children's lit. I always prefer reading books aimed at those people, so maybe that's why I write for it as well?

I love reading about why you all love writing YA/Children's literature :) It makes me excited.

Writing about teenagers just has more appeal for me (at least in original fiction; I write fanfiction for fandoms where the characters are adults so of course it can't be avoided there). It's an emotional part of people's lives, and despite the fact that most people realize high school means a lot less than you thought it did at the time as they grow older, people can still sympathize with the plights of teenagers. And of course you can make a lot more interesting things happen than just who's-crushing-on-who etc :P

In all honesty, it's probably because I'm still quite young (I'm 20.) I write what I know, and what I know is high school, coming of age stuff. So that's what I write. I'd like to say it's because of something a bit better, but it's not. I just don't know enough about the adult world to accurately write adult, and I'm not really a fantasy sort of girl. So YA it is.

I don't necessarily write genres--I write books. I have four completed first drafts of novels and several WIPs, and they span a number of genres. I wrote them all for different reasons. My mainstream fiction book, Laugh, Kookaburra, Laugh, I chose to write because I was a sophomore in college and I wanted to immortalize my friends. May Day, a collection of interconnected short stories, I wrote because I wanted to honor my aunt's memory (she'd just died of breast cancer). I wrote Painted Wings and Giants' Rings, my YA low fantasy work, because it was a story I'd been looking for as a child and never found. I wrote To Slight the Jacket Blue largely for fun.

This year I happen to be writing a YA novel. The reason for this is twofold. One, I promised a pair of boys I used to teach, four years ago, that I would write a novel for their age group and dedicate it to them; this is going to be that book. But the main reason I'm writing it is one that several people have, unintentionally, pointed out in the "Would You Read This?" thread: most of my target audience (11-17) was too young to remember the events of September 11, 2001. They've grown up in an age of terror. My plan is to show, from the perspective of a boy about their age, the effects that a single day had on the nation, and on individual lives.

Because I write what I know. I'm still in high school so it would be hard not to write a character who deals with those problems.