Happy Sunday!

Yes, it's true, I have resurrected from the never-ending blogging hiatus once again. Perhaps I'll disappear into the abyss once more; perhaps not. Regardless, we're here now!

Today I'm doing something slightly different on the blog: a collaboration! A few weeks ago, the wonderful R. M. Archer (whom I met at Realm Makers this year!) reached out to me with a blog series idea. While at Realm Makers, she'd heard Shannon Dittemore talk about YA writers and whether they "graduate" from writing YA when they get older. So R. M. gathered a few writers to talk about this idea and how it applies to their own writing journeys on their blogs, and I'm honored to be one of those writers!

For as long as I can remember, I've always been interested in writing about kids in their tweens and teens. Even when I was writing about six- or seven-year-old kids, they were mentally eleven or twelve XD. Most of the stories I read growing up were about eleven- or twelve-year-olds, so I naturally gravitated to writing stories about those age groups.

Now you might be thinking, "But Nicole, YA is usually about teenagers. Why are you talking about eleven-year-olds?"

Because when I was sixteen and started writing The Inhumans (my first serious novel), the characters in that story were about thirteen. I hadn't read much YA at that time, besides the Lunar Chronicles and a few other fantasy novels. My brain was very stuck in the MG age range. So of course the Inhumans would be a MG series, right?

. . . No.

When I revisited the first draft of book one, I realized, Wow, this subject matter is kinda dark for a MG audience. I'm not against dark MG books, but I didn't feel comfortable with a younger audience reading about some of the things in that story. So I aged up the characters and made the series YA. 

From that point on, my stories were firmly in the YA category. They made sense to be in YA, too, since I was writing about teenagers (fifteen and sixteen year olds), using classic YA tropes, and incorporating darker elements that I didn't feel comfortable writing about for a MG audience. It all fit together! It was great! Most of the stories I've talked about on this blog (like The Silver Sword and Anomaly) were written during this time of YA focus. 

I was reading more YA at that time, too. I was gaining a working knowledge of popular tropes and the types of stories that YA liked to tell. For the most part, I enjoyed these books quite a bit!

And then.

And then I hit college, and then I had about three writing crises a year, and then I didn't know what I was writing anymore, if I was writing at all. And my relationship with both writing and reading YA grew more complicated.

For one, I didn't enjoy reading most popular YA anymore. (I say popular YA because there's so much variety in the YA genre if you dig into indie releases and expand past the trending BookTok books. YA is an audience, not a genre, at least in my opinion.) I'd often leave the YA section in bookstores unsatisfied—everything on display seemed written for the use of tropes and not for a unique, thought-provoking story. When I did read popular YA, it felt like I was reading the same book, but in different fonts, if that makes sense XD.

It also grew harder to find clean YA. I can't tell you how many books I started and stopped because evil was glorified where it shouldn't be, or because there was explicit content that I wasn't comfortable reading. And I wasn't even a teenager anymore!

This change in tastes hurt, because I love reading coming-of-age stories. I love reading books about teenagers coming into their own and stepping out into the world. In particular, there's a special combination of charm and grit in YA books that you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. But I just wasn't finding anything that I enjoyed reading.

And this complicated relationship with YA bled into my writing. I looked back at my old YA manuscripts and could only see the shallowness of my writing (which, to be fair, was not because of the target audience, but because of my lack of skill XD). I looked ahead to YA story ideas I was mulling over and wondered if they had a place in the market, if they were too dark or not dark enough, if they were worth writing in the first place. 

But have I actually outgrown it?

Spoiler alert: not really, but it's complicated. 

On the one hand, I'm not writing YA at the moment. My current WIP is an adult superhero novel (which younger me would be shocked by), and I don't see the target audience for that story changing anytime soon. 

I'm also not reading much YA, aside from perhaps one or two books a month. Manga, webtoons, classics, adult novels, and MG stories take up most of my TBR these days.

And yet.

I still have that passion to write for tweens and teenagers. I know that I don't want to write adult fiction for the rest of my life. I have ideas that I'm excited about circling through my head, and I know they're meant for a YA audience.

I think in many ways, I've "graduated" YA only in the sense that I don't want to write YA stories like the ones in the popular market. I'm not interested in, for instance, writing an enemies-to-lovers romance for the sake of writing that trope, nor am I interested in trying to conform to a specific mold of story. Many of those novels, while fun in the moment, don't interest me much in the long run.

I want to write stories that are angsty but clean, powerful but entertaining, dark but uplifting. And most of the YA novels I read don't find that balance—they're either too disturbing and mature, or they entertain through shallow, copy-and-paste plots and characters. 

I guess it's just that my standards for books have risen over the years, and most YA books I've read don't make that cut. 

I still want to write for YA, but I don't want to be controlled by the industry. At the end of the day, I want to write good stories for teens. In that sense, I don't think I ever will fully graduate from YA, no matter how old I get. And that's okay. 

But everyone's journey is different! My journey with YA will not look like yours. Yours may look more similar to one of the other writers participating in this collab (whom you should definitely check out, as their posts are fabulous):

JD Wolfwrath (posted August 19)

R.M. Archer (posted August 20)

Maegan M. Simpson (posted August 21)

M. C. Kennedy (posted August 24)

And with that, this post draws to a close. I hope you have a peaceful, restful day whenever you're reading this. With luck, I'll talk to you again soon. <3

-Nicole <3