Elsewhere (i.e., Twitter) I have recently said that I consider myself to be retired as a novelist — that is, I’m no longer trying to write for a living, but just as a hobby. I have no intention of not writing, I’m just not going to worry anymore about whether my work is commercial.<\/p>\n
This prompted a phone call from a friend who made several suggestions about how I might be able to resurrect my professional career and once again establish myself with a New York publisher. He did not ask whether I wanted<\/i> to re-establish myself — a question I can’t really answer, as my emotions on that subject are very mixed.<\/p>\n
He also kept making suggestions that involved writing YA — “young adult” — novels. This is not new. People, including my agent and a few editors, have been telling me for about twenty years now that I should write YA, since that’s a huge market and several of my novels would fit comfortably in that niche. They have not asked me whether I want<\/i> to write YA. That<\/i> question is much easier to answer. I don’t.<\/p>\n
It’s taken me a long time to realize this, but I’m pretty sure now. I don’t.<\/p>\n
I never read much YA as a kid. I started reading Heinlein when I was seven, but I didn’t read any of his juveniles until ten years later — I started off with The Green Hills of Earth<\/i>. I never read any of Andre Norton’s at all — still haven’t. Missed the Winston series entirely, never saw The Runaway Robot<\/i> or Revolt on Alpha C<\/i> or any of the others that SF fans usually point to as their gateway drugs. From age seven on, I read adult SF and fantasy; the house was full of the stuff, since both my parents were SF readers.<\/p>\n
As for other genres, I mostly missed those, too. I started reading mysteries with Rex Stout, adventure with Edgar Rice Burroughs and C.S. Forester, etc., all in grade school. The stories I read that were<\/i> aimed at younger readers were mostly either 19th century, British, or both, and stuff like The Princess and the Goblin<\/i> or Bushranger’s Gold<\/i> did not provide a grounding in what’s meant by “YA” nowadays.<\/p>\n
About the only exception was the Tom Swift Jr. series, which I discovered when I was ten or eleven — after<\/i> reading stuff like The Door into Summer<\/i> and Something Wicked This Way Comes<\/i>. Oh, and do the Oz books count?<\/p>\n
Anyway. People started telling me back in the ’90s, maybe even in the ’80s, that I should try writing YA. I did not really have a firm grasp on what they meant. Fact is, I still don’t. But once Tor dumped me in 2009, I figured I had nothing to lose by trying.<\/p>\n
So I tried. I started several novels that I thought were YA. Most of them fizzled out; I just wasn’t that interested in any of them. A couple reached the point of being proposals I sent to my agent; he rejected most of them, for various reasons.<\/p>\n
One proposal became Relics of War<\/i>, which isn’t YA, it’s just another Ethshar novel.<\/p>\n
I finished one novel on spec — Tom Derringer and the Aluminum Airship<\/i><\/a>. My agent couldn’t sell it, as YA or otherwise, and pointed out that it was unmarketable as YA because it’s written in the style of the 1880s.<\/p>\n Well, yeah — it’s set<\/i> in the 1880s, told in first person, so of course I wrote it that way. But I am informed that modern YA readers won’t tolerate such old-fashioned prose. I don’t know why not, really — when I was a kid I read plenty of stuff written in the 19th century, florid and prolix as it was, without any problem.<\/p>\n And then there’s Graveyard Girl<\/i>. This was one I actually got moderately enthusiastic about, and which my agent was very<\/i> enthusiastic about, from the proposal. I wrote it, delivered it — and was told that it wasn’t a YA novel. It didn’t have enough in it about relationships, or personal growth, or the other stuff that YA apparently needs to be about.<\/p>\n And at this point I realized that I really don’t care about YA, and I don’t want to write it. It’s not anything I ever<\/i> cared about.<\/p>\n So I’m going to write what I please, and if any of it turns out to be YA, that’s cool — but I am not going to aim at that target anymore. I don’t grok YA, I never have, and at age sixty I doubt I ever will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elsewhere (i.e., Twitter) I have recently said that I consider myself to be retired as a novelist — that is, I’m no longer trying to write for a living, but just as a hobby. I have no intention of not writing, I’m just not going to worry anymore about whether my work is commercial. This… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":676,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433\/revisions\/676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}