The line between young adult and adult fiction?

I don't know, but I'm fairly sure it's up to the publisher. Some of the Young Adult fiction I've read has been very mature. For instance, I was surprised to find the fantastic Mortal Engines series on the YA shelf.

Don't quote me on this, but I'm guessing YA would include teen MC's in a YA atmosphere, and no f-bombs. Other than that, I think pretty much anything goes. My daughter reads this series that gets pretty hard core, but it's tuned for the YA audience because the MC's are teens (15-17) with their problems in mind. Sex, love, growing up into an adult, parents, friends, etc.

The language is one issue. (Easier vocabulary and themes.) Teen characters are more likely to be YA, but that's not a given. Sex scenes, some drug use, would have to happen "off stage." And sometimes it's up to the whim of the publisher; I've heard that Twilight was originally intended as an adult novel but the publisher decided it would sell better as teen fiction.

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YA is a dynamic (i.e., ever-changing) category, and the question of "what is / is not YA?" gets tougher to answer every time I go to the bookstore and see the variety of books in that section.

I will say that the protagonist in a YA novel is always a teenager. Usually aged between 14 and 18. (Younger protagonists fall in the middle-grade category.) I've yet to see a recent YA novel with an adult protagonist (though certainly there are plenty of books read and liked by teens that feature adult protagonists. They're just not published by YA publishers). The book is written with an intended audience of teenagers, though lots of adults also read YA.

Are their guidelines for content in YA? Loosely, yes. Though going back as far as 1970, you'll find explicit sex in YA books (Judy Blume's Forever, published in 1970). As long as the sex scene doesn't veer toward the pornographic (which is, of course, a "you know it when you see it" sort of value judgment), it can fit into YA. It depends on the context. The explicit sex scene(s) worked for the Blume book, as they did in a recent YA book about a girl's loss of virginity, Anatomy of a Boyfriend, by Daria Snadowsky. Same thing with violence -- it depends on the context of the novel. There've been YA novels about murder and gang violence and school shootings and rape and incest.

There are plenty of "f-bombs" in YA. Check out the novel Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist -- lots of creative uses of "f---." The only thing I don't usually see in YA is sexual usage of swear words. Like, "I'm going to f--- her." If you're trying to publish a YA novel, write it the way you want it, and then, if it's acquired by a publishing house, the editor will guide you in terms of content. She might say, "We're aiming this toward older teens, so I think the sexual content is okay," or she might say, "I think our target audience is 13 through 15-year-olds, so can you take out all but 2 or 3 mild swear words?" You'll find a whole range of clean vs. edgy content on the YA shelves.

NaNo '06 - The Center of Gravity. 7 drafts since '06. Revising for editor!
NaNo '07 - Notes From Nowhere (YA novel, 50K)
NaNo '08 - Rob's Day Out! (YA caper)

http://weirdquietgirl.wordpress.com -life, writing, and YA lit

For YA, pretty much anything goes so long as the 'R' rated stuff is kept at minimum detail. For example, in YA, a sex scene might start with the 2 people kissing, then fast foreward to the morning after. In adult fiction, the whole thing can be described in detail.

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YA is very broad these days in terms of content. AFAIK, the major divider is the age of the protagonist.

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I've been wondering about this, myself. My characters are teenagers for most of the story, but the themes are quite mature, so I'm not sure it could really work as a YA novel. But would adults want to read about teenagers? I would, but I'm not everyone else.

I'm trying not to worry about it too much right now, because I just want to write the story. But it does worry be a little that I may be writing a genre that doesn't exist.

So then, would the basic bottom line mean that a (very clean) novel about MC's ages 18 or 19 (think first years of college etc.) be considered an adult novel? I'm in that age group myself, and it's a little hard for even me to tell where this falls. I've wondered time and again, so if anyone has an opinion, I would love to hear it.

One character focuses a lot on college, the other on his tiny income from the pathetic job he has.

Laura

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As some of the people have said earlier, the line between YA and adult fiction is a thin one and often chosen as the descretion of the editors. I interned this summer for the YA portion of the American Library Association and it's a problem they tussle with constantly, especially in recent years because the boundaries have been shifting and expanding so much. To be honest, from what I can tell and what I learned at the internship, there isn't a definite boundary of any kind. The protagonists tend to be late teens, but that's about all of the line as far as I could tell.

Things like swearing, sex, rape, violence, drug use, and all those other tough and potentially dangerous topics are filtering into YA lit more and more often, sometimes in very graphic ways. YA has become more and more 'late teen' in recent years as it starts to grapple with issues that late teens actually face on a daily basis. I wouldn't say that YA novels have the f-word every other word, but neither do adult fiction books, and other than that, there isn't much that is 'out of bound' in the area of YA any more.

If I remember, I'll e-mail the head of YALSA and see if they have a more concrete definition of YA lit.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as 'too mature' for YA lit. any more...

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2006 : Won, Adventure of Epic Proportions
2004: Won, Treading the Right Path
2003: Lost

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I think this is the area where drawing the line between YA and adult literature becomes the trickiest. There just isn't much of a place in the bookstore for fiction about college-age-people, and aimed at those same people as readers. I go to several children's / YA writing conferences every year, and one thing the editors and agents always point out is that YA about college-age protagonists just doesn't sell very well, and no one really knows why. Could be that college students don't have much time to read, and much money with which to buy books... but on the other hand, we're constantly told that YA readers "read up" in terms of age (as in, 13-year-olds like to read about 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds instead of kids their own age), so you'd think that high schoolers might have an interest in reading about college students. Still, the few books that come out in YA every year that are about college students never seem to do very well, and so the YA publishers acquire fewer and fewer of them for their lists. I've known writers who were advised to "age down" their college-age protagonists so that their manuscripts could sell as YA.

But what do you do if you really want to write (and sell) a college novel? You might try submitting to agents across different genres. Try a few agents who represent YA fiction, and a couple who represent mainstream adult, and see what comes of it. Count me as someone who'd really *like* to read more novels about college-age people (and who'd like to write a novel like that someday), so I hope the publishers can find a good place for them, eventually.

--
NaNo '06 - The Center of Gravity. 7 drafts since '06. Not dead yet.
NaNo '07 - Notes From Nowhere (YA novel, 50K)
NaNo '08 - In Other Words, I'm Anarchy (YA short story cycle)

http://weirdquietgirl.wordpress.com -thoughts on life, writing, and YA lit

NaNo '06 - The Center of Gravity. 7 drafts since '06. Revising for editor!
NaNo '07 - Notes From Nowhere (YA novel, 50K)
NaNo '08 - Rob's Day Out! (YA caper)

http://weirdquietgirl.wordpress.com -life, writing, and YA lit

An internship with YALSA? I think that's my version of heaven. ;)

And I completely agree with you about the YA category expanding to include pretty much everything, content-wise. Pretty much anytime someone says, "But you can't DO that in YA!", I can usually provide a list of several published YA books that do just that. It's tough for the casual reader to keep up with just how "edgy" YA is these days. But it really is.

--
NaNo '06 - The Center of Gravity. 7 drafts since '06. Not dead yet.
NaNo '07 - Notes From Nowhere (YA novel, 50K)
NaNo '08 - In Other Words, I'm Anarchy (YA short story cycle)

http://weirdquietgirl.wordpress.com -thoughts on life, writing, and YA lit

NaNo '06 - The Center of Gravity. 7 drafts since '06. Revising for editor!
NaNo '07 - Notes From Nowhere (YA novel, 50K)
NaNo '08 - Rob's Day Out! (YA caper)

http://weirdquietgirl.wordpress.com -life, writing, and YA lit

That's tough. I'm currently writing something that could be considered YA, but I don't want it to be. It would go over the YA mind set. Not intellectually, but just theme wise. It isn't meant to be YA, but two (out of six) of the MC's are high schoolers. Sometimes publishers make me mad.

The internship was amazing! I spent a week in Chicago helping them out (I have stuff that I did up on their wiki as well as on the official wikipedia page (I spent the time doing all of the winners for most of the awards)). Unfortunately, it was only a week, but I've kept in passing touch with them =)

It is extremely edgy.

BookHead: I guess I don't understand the issue - how is it thematically over the head of YA yet involving that age?

2007: Won, Choices
2006 : Won, Adventure of Epic Proportions
2004: Won, Treading the Right Path
2003: Lost

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Mod of Writing 101, This is Going Better... & Virtual Worlds