YAY for YA

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Raise your hand if you read YA. Yes, right? Everyone. (Almost, okay, maybe not everyone, but you get my point.) Okay, now, authors. Raise your hand if you’ve thought about writing a YA? Yes, right?  (I am trying to type and raise my hand at the same time.)

We know good YA when we read it, of course—does Edward Eager count? My FAVE--but what is it that makes it special?

Okay, read this:

A solar powered girl. A ballerina vigilante. A boy with an alien living inside his brain. A werewolf with confidence issues. A girl with a black hole for a heart. Five teenagers, each with their own unique abilities, are gathered by veteran hero Doc Silence to become their generation’s super-team.

Well, I’m sold. Instantly. This is from the debut novel of Matthew Phillion. (Who I’d certainly get to sit by if  life was alphabetical.) (And, who, see bio below, is pretty darn fabulous).

What does the author of THE INDESTRUCTIBLES  think is the key to YA? It’s—well, let him tell us.

YA and Crossover Appeal

    By Matthew Phillion

I’ve been asked a few times to describe the thought process of writing a YA book. The word I keep coming back to is “sophisticated.”

I don’t know if younger readers are more sophisticated now than they were twenty years ago. But they feel more worldly, and they feel more aware, and I knew the one thing I had to do was make sure I didn’t insult their intelligence with this story.

So I set rules for myself. Don’t insult their intelligence. Don’t play into gender stereotypes. Try not to swear. (I used that one a lot. I have a tendency toward blue language in my daily life, and it was a struggle to not let my young characters drop a curse word once in a while. Had a yellow Post-It over my desk to remind me.)

 YA fiction has always been, or the best of it has been, unafraid to dig into hard issues. Love and loss, political allegory, the sense of being a pawn in the bigger picture. They all share the same sense of wonder and the need to find one’s self, but the older I get, the more I think that finding one’s self isn’t just the purview of YA readers.

And that brings me to my other struggle as a YA writer—we no longer write for just that younger audience. Again, I can’t tell if it’s a sign of the times and that YA literature has needed to become more sophisticated and thus it’s become more attractive to older readers, or if some other factor is at play. I was chatting with another writer a few weeks back, a fellow occasional filmmaker, and he was pleading with the universe for pop culture to get off its superhero kick.

“This can’t go on forever, can it?” he asked.

Selfishly, I wouldn’t mind if it did go on forever. I’m a superhero writer, after all. But even before I put words on the page for The Indestructibles, I’d had a theory about this—the prevalence of adult audiences gravitating to YA novels like Harry Potter and Hunger Games, grown men and women lining up to see the X-Men and Captain America save the world.

I think our YA readers are more sophisticated, and our adult readers are drawn to the relative simplicity of YA fiction, in both cases due to the fact that we are living in such challenging times. I don’t have any hard evidence to back it up. But it is hard out there, and people are frustrated and scared and lonely. And for the young, these stories give them escapism and hope. For older readers, they are a window, if not into an easier time, then into a world where the challenges are still great but the solutions can be found in heroism and courage.

We face love and loss, we face political reality, we face villains on the evening news, and there are steps we can take to make things better… but in those quiet moments curled up with a good book, isn’t it more comforting to think these things could be fixed with a magic spell, or the power of flight, or simply having the courage to take up arms against a sea of trouble and make the world a better place?

I can see a time when YA fiction may not be so prevalent, or where adults might not seek solace so much in stories of adventure. I hope when we get there, it means we live in a place where we don’t need quite so many ways to escape.

Until then, well, up, up and away.

Is YA fiction on your radar as a reader? Do you find it has a different feel now than it did when you were a young reader?

HANK: And what are your favorite YA books? (What's the age of YA, anyway?) 

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A solar powered girl. A ballerina vigilante. A boy with an alien living inside his brain. A werewolf with confidence issues. A girl with a black hole for a heart. Five teenagers, each with their own unique abilities, are gathered by veteran hero Doc Silence to become their generation’s super-team.

But when they find out someone else is building their own monsters to change the world, will the Indestructibles be ready in time? Or will their inexperience be their downfall?

Matthew Phillion is a writer, actor, and film director based in Salem, Massachusetts.  He has also appeared in feature films including the sci-fi romance Harvest Moon and the independent horror flick Livestock, and his screenwriting and directing debut, the romantic comedy Certainly Never, premiered in 2013 at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, where it was nominated for five awards including best screenplay and best New England film. An active freelance writer, Phillion continues to write about both local issues and the medical industry. The Indestructibles is his first novel  (Ed. note: And he has a dog named Watson.)

http://www.theindestructiblesbook.com/