Camp Wordsmith is a weekly venture in which Angel of Mermaid Vision Books, Christa of Hooked on Books, and I post about our work in writing over the past week. We’ll also discuss various issues to do with craft. The goals here are simple. We want to write, so we’re making a public effort before all of our followers and readers to do so. And by the end? We hope to make it a little closer to our dreams of being published.
Week 2
Stage: First draft and planning
Word Count: 1, 137
Posts that helped or motivated me this week: Laini Taylor on Making the Story Happen
Welcome to week 2 of Camp Wordsmith!
When Angel, Christa, and I chatted earlier this week, we discovered that we were all writing YA novels. This probably isn’t all that shocking. We all run book blogs that look at a great deal of Young Adult fiction. But we thought we’d talk about what drew us to the genre as writers this week.
For me, there are a few simple reasons.
An easy one is that I am a young adult. At 23, I am the literal definition of one.
The overarching reason, though, is the most obvious one. I read mostly Young Adult fiction. When I read mostly chick lit, it was a chick lit novel that I was working on. I gravitate to the genres that I love to read because when writing that’s a major question for me: “Would I want to read this?”
Another reason: often the ages of the characters in YA leads to other older characters thinking that they can control them simply due to their young age. It even works for a little while sometimes. Personally, I love reading and writing about a character that grows throughout the work. Who takes charge and in that span of a few hundred pages grows up and goes from simply a teenager to a young adult that I could admire. A character who learns to stand up for themselves. To think for themselves. To demand answers.
Dire stakes, in YA, seem even more dire to me. Perhaps it’s because a great deal of YA protagonists have the ability to keenly feel. Forget the phrase “It’s not personal.” Things are personal– at least the way that I tend to see them.
And finally I love the idea that YA Saves. In so many very different ways. Because yes, as we all know, a lot of adults read what is supposed to be marketed to teens. But high school can be hard. It can be a scary, scary place. You only have to turn on the news to see another horrible story that proves it. I’ll be honest, my experience wasn’t that bad. Not great. Not terrible. Medium, if you will. But when they felt terrible, books never stopped being an escape for me. I would love to be able to provide an escape for someone else.
