Why I read (and write) young adult fiction

I waited for a long time to see when I would stop enjoying young adult fiction books.  As a teenager in college, I was very aware of my young adult status and was eager to be rid of it.  I was already enjoying adult books, but I was waiting for them to be the only thing that I enjoyed: to pass once and for all that hidden barrier between adulthood and childhood.

The thing is, it never came.

Not only have I never stopped reading young adult fiction, I’ve started writing my own.

Don’t get me wrong, there is some seriously awful young adult fiction out there.  Seriously awful.  But there’s awful writing in every genre.  Trashy romance novels don’t stop us from reading epic love stories anymore than Twilight should stop us from reading Ender’s Game.

When I was first learning how to write, my teachers told me to write like the reader was from a different planet.  Be so clear and descriptive that someone (or thing) who had never seen what is part of my daily existence would understand.  As I grew older and became a writing tutor in college, I started to tell people that if you really know what you’re talking about you should be able to explain it to a five year old.  Be it astrophysics or the color wheel, if a five year old couldn’t understand you than you don’t really get it.

(Don’t be nit-picky with me here, I know that five year olds won’t be able to do calculus, but they can follow the gist of the reasoning if you explain it right).

And that, my friends, is the beauty of young adult fiction: it allows us to look at the world with the clarifying simplicity of a child.

The best young adult fiction authors can capture love, death, adventure, discovery, and the whole gambit of human experience through a lens no less rich but far more accessible than adult writers.   And sometimes it is just escapism, as Ruth Graham argues in her recent anti-YA article.  But that escape is often an attempt to try and remember what it was like when life was that clear, when love meant shouting promises to the sky and adventure meant scrambling up trees and looking for clues.

At this point, I have given up on growing out of young adult fiction.  In fact, I hope I never do.  I hope I continue to straddle the worlds of adulthood and childhood, to keep the childish wonder that let’s me curl up with Harry Potter and giggle over the antics of Rowling’s wonderfully developed characters after a long day of boring office work.  I hope I continue to see the truth in the impassioned struggles of young adults trying to figure out who they are, whether those struggles are set in the spaceships of Ender’s Game or the harsh reality of It’s Kind of a Funny Story.