Choose Your Fighter: YA versus Adult

I've started writing adult books now, but what does that even mean?

I have an adult novel coming out next year.

It’s called THE LISTENERS and it’s about an uncanny West Virginia hotel forced to take in Nazi diplomats just after Pearl Harbor. It took me ages to write and I’m very proud of it, and I think it has things to say about ambition, patriotism, and how both war and class dehumanize and simplify individuals blah blah BUT that’s not what most people have been asking me about.

They’ve been asking me if there is any difference between writing a YA book and an adult book.

Fair question: for fifteen years, I’ve been publishing YA novels. Why change?

Fraught question: for fifteen years, charged debates have swirled around YA, its detractors declaring it brain-rotting id-candy dragging down all of literature, its defenders declaring it life-saving, genre-bending work every bit as nourishing as adult literature.

Fickle question: YA is a new and changeable category. I know even as I write this post that the landscape will look wildly different in a few years.

But let’s give it a whirl anyway.

A BRIEF, SIMPLIFIED HISTORY OF YA

YA = Young Adult. It has its own section now, but that’s a fairly recent phenomenon. When I was a teen, bookstores had Children’s and adult, which was further split into Fiction, Horror, Romance, and Mystery/Thriller. Libraries sometimes had a Teen section, but only for contemporary novels covering thorny issues. They were Good For The Kids.

By the time I entered the scene (2008), though, stylized story-telling had begun its intrusion into Teen, creating an crunchy, hybrid category where foster children sometimes did battle with actual demons, teens with alcoholic parents sometimes spent time cavorting with the fey, and teens who said the word ‘condom’ sometimes had a romcomesque whirlwind adventures in New York City. It was a place for stories a little too gnarly to belong in Children’s, but too story-driven and teen-focused to belong in adult genre.* The stakes were low, and the community was small. Back then, it was still possible to easily keep up with every new release in the YA category.

* Genre = Horror, Romance, Thriller/ Mystery. As opposed to Literature = General Fiction.

For the longest time, teen books were released in paperback (like my debut!) because that was what teens could afford, but by the time my next YA was published (Shiver, ‘09)(which is currently filming in Vancouver, a decade and a half later, how bizarre is that?), things were a’changing for the odd genre-benders. Adult fantasy and romance readers were flocking to YA, drawn to both the shared online spaces and a category that, like theirs, was no stranger to taboo or identity. And as LGBTQ+ politics came of age, those looking for novels that tackled heady issues of identity found a whole shelf devoted to it . . . now, with magic. No more sorting through endless titles looking for a book that matched both your social values and your story-telling priorities. These stories now had a label, and it was YA. Good for You, fun to read. YA was becoming a chimera of Tough Issues, Teen Protagonists, Character-Driven, Speculative Content, Progressive Ideals, Genre-Bending Content, Optimistic, Forward-Looking, Queer-Coded, Romance-Friendly. Teens were reading it, but a generation of adults who had been starved for story-forward, speculative work were reading it too. TV/film was catching up to these trends, too, realizing that we were entering a Time of Magic. And heavily-online YA was deeply in touch with these visual media. YA fandom bled into television fandoms like Supernatural and Buffy, on top of that, folded in fandoms from web series like Homestuck and Japanese media like Attack on Titan.

*speculative = science fiction/ fantasy/ magical elements.

Montage time: Harry Potter became a smash success that saw many adults crossing the aisle to read children’s books. Twilight became a smash success that saw many adults crossing the aisle to read teen books. YA authors and genre fandom moved into the same places online, ensuring quick, expensive adaptations of crossover hits like HUNGER GAMES. The chimera added another tendency—Camera-Ready—and suddenly the genre became something else:

Rich.

By 2012, more than half of YA novels were being purchased by adults, most between the ages of 30-44. Publishers welcomed it, because adult money meant that YA books could be released in hardcover, recouping publisher expenses more quickly. Authors welcomed it*, because they were often between the ages of 30-44 themselves, which meant they didn’t have to ask themselves “What do teens want to read?” Heck! They could just write what they wanted to read. YA had grown up.

Before YA’s coming of age, Romance was the largest category (over half of all trade paperbacks sold in 2006 was romance). Between 2008-2017, YA subsumed many of them, just as it had lured in many a fantasy reader (and, in ‘18-20, many a thriller reader). But as YA became older as a category, it developed conventions of its own, a new chimera that came from everything it had taken on as it grew. It was now often synonymous for first-person, action-rich, romance-heavy, character-driven, politically progressive, trope-aware, intimate in scope . . . with a beautiful cover. It had become a genre, not a category.

This led to tough uneasy discourse. What about the Good For The Kids Mandate? A complicated several years of marketing 17 Year Old #BookBoyfriends to All Ages ensued, the product of trying to create a genre both for teens and also for the adult YA buyers. No wonder folks looked in from the outside and wondered what YA was up to. My publisher would promote my tour schedules on an account called ThisIsTeen, and then I’d hit the road and sign thousands of books for rooms of people over thirty.

Because of this and because of over-purchasing new titles, YA began to falter, like a muffin with too much baking powder (like chick lit or streaming services)s. Teen readers grew up and went elsewhere; readers who were already grown up followed YA authors into other adult categories, embracing whatever part of the chimera they’d liked the best. Adult fantasy, romance, thrillers. Fourth Wing’s smashing success? Would have belonged to YA eight years ago. YA had done its amazing, transformative work and helped changed all of genre fiction for good. Those values that made YA great no longer were exclusive to its shelves, so readers were free to leave.

I was free to leave.

BUT THAT’S NOT WHY I LEFT

Here’s why I left.

Reason one, less important: I left because, by 2018, I realized that I was mostly writing for adults, and so, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t be writing about adults.

Reason two, more important: I left because, by 2018, I wasn’t reading much YA. The category had changed, the world had changed, I had changed. My reader priorities were different. Although I do enjoy the game of writing for audiences who are not-me (see: all my middle grade titles), I prefer the selfish work of writing books I’d be pulling off the shelf if I weren’t, you know, the person who wrote them. Maggie Stiefvater’s favorite author? Maggie Stiefvater.

But unlike many YA authors, who flowed fairly seamlessly into adult Romance, Fantasy, and Horror, I wanted to move into the category I was now reading: General Fiction. Ye olde Literature. Otherwise known as the category that has most often thumbed its nose at YA, and been thumbed back at. Not a lot of YA authors make that move, and for obvious reasons; adult genre shares a lot of DNA with YA. Adult Fiction mostly stayed out of the evolutionary pool.

This is where the conversation often gets unpleasant; in some circles, it’s considered gauche to imply there is any difference between YA and general adult fiction. YA Detractors have so thoroughly dismissed it as unimportant trash that YA Defenders must make much of its literary merit and equality with adult literature. Generally, I find it a flat conversation that erases the best part of both categories, as well as ignoring YA’s chimera status: there are YA novels that are the prose equivalent of Buffy and YA novels the prose equivalent of Interstellar, works with different priorities that would never otherwise find themselves lumped together.

But lump them together I shall, because there is a difference, and it remains strong enough that readers are generally faithful to one or the other. More than ever, the YA label still curates a specific reading experience. Something adult Fiction is not, and vice versa.

I set out to study this difference in earnest after making the decision to shift to adult Fiction—a several year process. I began by dutifully reading my way down lists of the top bestselling novels of the last fifty years, removing those that had only made it big after a film adaptation or other non-literary cultural influence. I outlined other people’s novels. I picked apart paragraphs word for word. I looked at structure—who used it, who didn’t. I was looking for what these disparate titles had in common. I was looking for what they did that YA did not.

Volume, for starters. Not just in titles, although that was true: YA is such a young genre that there are many, many more adult fiction books to study. But also in sheer sales numbers. The adult fiction pool is a much bigger ocean to swim in, and its tentpole titles sell at numbers that most YA can’t imagine. With those numbers come a commitment to broad accessibility, which looked far different than I imagined it would. All of it looked much different than I’d imagined when put under the microscope, actually. After spending years on the bestseller list, I was delighted to discover that there was so much about writing that I had yet to learn. I was a newbie once more. Exciting. Terrifying. Wonderful.

SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

Commitment to Specificity:

When I told one of my writer friends that I was moving to adult, she told me the difference between adult and YA fiction was that adult readers were reading to learn something. I don’t think this is true of all adult readers, but I do think it touches on a broad truth of general fiction, which is that it must be as true as possible. As correct in the observed details as possible. Not that YA is untrue. Only that adult fiction seems to generally signal of a density of specificity. It is not that adult readers are there to learn something; it’s that they expect you to know a lot about the people and settings and topics you’re presenting. There’s an expectation of being shown the unfamiliar about the familiar and the familiar about the unfamiliar. The people are drawn portraits of real people. The settings are real places, full of rich, unique detail. Every gesture is unusual and delicately observed. There is no faux history; the carriages really work, here, because you know so much about them. Because YA and genre fiction is story-forward, this kind of specificity can not only often take a backseat, but has to take a back seat. Too much specificity blankets the plot beats and makes the book feel “not YA” or “unlike your usual mystery.” Why is Tana French considered a non-genre mystery writer? Because of her commitment to specificity. It’s a trade-off; reality and story are opposites.

Tell, Don’t Show

“Show, don’t tell,” is one of the most enduring writing adages. It’s meant to help keep the story immersive, to make certain the reader experiences the characters’ feelings with as much immediacy as possible. These are huge priorities in YA and genre fiction; this is why these categories share so many story-conventions with film. Often, the actual writing is meant to disappear entirely so that we can inhabit the main character and forget the hand of the author entirely. In general fiction, I discovered less of a preference for this immediate storytelling. Instead, these novels emphasized the guiding hand of the author. Vast swathes of stylish telling-not-showing help tie together seemingly disparate events and far-flung timelines, unifying all the components into a single, thematic, intentional volume.

This difference between the categories is sharp enough that my editor and my agent, without consulting the other, both flagged an early chapter as out of place. It was a charming, intimate chapter that followed the characters faithfully from minute to minute, demonstrating plenty of action, making sure you felt exactly what they felt. The chapter had no room for the commitment to specificity, because show, don’t tell, is an inefficient storytelling mechanism, best suited to intimately-scaled stories. My immersive YA pedigree shining through!

The chapter was so out of place beside its more structured neighbors that I had to entirely rewrite it. I believe I kept a sentence.

Meaning, Magic, & Metaphor

And finally, I discovered that general fiction often uses one thing to talk about another thing. If the author is thinking about how dreadful his experience playing baseball was, he might write about bankers. If the author is a banker, she might write about baseball. There’s something alluring about metaphor; like myth, it allows us to make specific experiences universal. The stories become bigger on the inside; here is a story that looks like it is about a boy in a boat with a tiger, but it’s about so much more than that. General fiction doesn’t always have something to say, but it tries.

Thank goodness, too, because otherwise, there would be no room for magic in this category.

This was the most daunting aspect of moving to general fiction, as opposed to adult fantasy. Because of the category’s commitment to specificity and truth, there’s not generally much place for wizards and ghosts and demon babies, because most people don’t have lives actually filled with wizards and ghosts and demon babies. Even when general fiction is dramatic, it is starting with aspects of real life; it’s just amplifying them. It’s why general fiction usually only gets a ghost or two. Maybe a miracle. Most people have a ghost story or a miracle to hand. We’ll accept one of those in general fiction. Everything else, though, sort of breaks the category’s other rules.

But. But. BUT. Because of general Fiction’s affection for metaphor, some speculative elements can sneak in. They must mean something else, and they must feel true, and they must follow rules that feel like they belong to the real world. They must feel more like myth than magic. You really must be saying something with the speculative elements to get away with them. Your magic system must be firmly anchored to real world analogs—the more the magic breaks the rules of our world, the more likely you are to slide into Fantasy.

Fifteen years in, I debut

I find it amusing but apt that THE LISTENERS is called my adult ‘debut.’ How pleasant and strange to be stepping onto the stage afresh at age (*checks Wikipedia*) 43. But that debut represents nearly as much work as my original debut, so I’ll take it. Years of asking myself how much of my old writing could I bring forward and still signal adult fiction?

The answer was both more and less than I thought. THE LISTENERS is an intensely Stiefvatery book that took me every bit of two and a half years to draft. That commitment to specificity is a monster! A beautiful monster, but a monster nonetheless. That’s a metaphor, by the way. There’s no actual monster.

So there you have it: what is the difference between adult and YA? The monsters.

(note: you can pre-order a signed, personalized copy of this monster from One More Page).